The Bloody Brilliant Birthing Process, then broken into mobile status messages

23 June, the year of our Lord 2010. It's also the year of the Johannesburg World Cup (and having you felt like a golden goal). A few days after your birth, our country will inagurate our 15th President. In your coming-into-this-world we are compelled to believe not only in the hope of our country's progress, but in a grand gesture of hope, in a re-affirmation of life in general. Even if I grew up reading some Schopenhauer, a lot of people nowadays, myself included, are concentrating on what's workable and positive.

These are very interesting times, I.

Aside from the plethora of new technology, we've also empowered women, we've somehow quelled racism, and we've elevated our environmental consciousness. There's a lot of good music, good books, good places to go to and good goddamn beer. There's alot of posts: post-rock instrumental and postmodernism, post-colonialism, post-event parties, post-fight interviews, Facebook wall posts. There's always a new gadget here and there that has made the world a global village. Somehow we've also built these invisible bridges that allowed us to observe each other microscopically. We've created virtual spaces and a proximity that make us love one another just a little bit more intensely.

And there's a lot of nostalgia to come back to what once has been. Postcards, old architecture, revival music, bound pages yellowed with age, anything that would bring back or make us cling to that fine mesh of authenticity and a wonderful memory.

There's still a lot of povery to alleviate, and there's still lot of violence, hunger, ignorance, cruelty and basically just a lot of sick bastards out there.

But obviously, anak, when you were born your parents were on a high. Fortunately for you, unlike the hippies of the Sixties or Seventies we aren't drugged (anesthesia excluded) or hallucinating and giving you names like Dust, Dharma or Dream. Not that those names are bad.

We are lucid. When you first sniffed the air today, you've also opened a door to a new perception (to borrow from Jim Morrison).

From here on out, our lives are going to take a pivotal turn. And one day, (to borrow from your mother's favorite Chilean poet), you'll make your own way - deciphering that fire.

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Sunny, golden, luminous and enlightening as a good novel's ending. It's your last day in the womb. See you in a bit!
June 23 at 7:56am

Admitted to the birthing room and still all-smiles, but will not be too posh to push today.
June 23 at 9:56am

Labor's official. Dilated at 5cm.
June 23 at 10:30am

J. is wearing an oversized scrub suit and listening to the baby's heartbeat on the live monitor.
June 23 at 11:13am

It's going to be bloody brilliant!
June 23 at 11:29am

Still laboring. D.'s been managing powerful contractions so well. Man, I'm married to a very strong woman.
June 23 at 3:53pm

Very shortly now, a miracle's going to happen.
June 23 at 4:42pm

I., 7.87 lbs strong, arrived shortly before sunset on 23 June, 2010. Hello World.

Notes from the Call Center Piece I

Historical Background

It’s 11:15pm in the year 2001. I’m twenty years old and fresh out of a top and therefore overpriced University where I earned a Philosophy degree. I’m aboard a cab en route to the Valero Entrance of PhilAm Life Tower in Makati. The driver’s tuned in to an AM station. Other than AM and the mechanized hum of vehicles and rubber rolling on the asphalt, the streets turn tranquil. It’s a few minutes before midnight and I’m neat as a necktie-wearing 9am-5am office worker. Except that I don’t have to wear long sleeves and a tie. We’re probably the only office in the building who allows (if preferred) their employees to come dressed in shorts, beach sandals, hats, or in the most or least amount of clothing.

Like most obtrusive cabbies, this one asks, what’s my line of work? In 2001, nobody’s ever heard of a call center before. It was a pain to explain. Who would have thought that so much business from the land of milk and honey would come to Ayala corner Paseo through the thick undersea pipes and cables of broadband technology? So I try not to sound condescending and just say,

“Computer.”

With a brush of the familiar, the cabbie lets out a knowing “Ahhhhh.”

“This is only temporary.”

It’s 2010. I, for one, have been working in this billion-dollar “Sunshine Industry” for over nine years. More than being a thriving milking cow, the call-center lifestyle has been re-interpreted in music, literature, invented its own fashion, and even has its own college curriculum. Nowadays there are kids who dream of becoming call-center agents.

We were unknowingly creating a new sub-culture, my so-called wave-mates and I – newly grads who were all riding these cabs or driving their parent’s cars to Valero back in 2001.

Now the cabbies are all over where the call centers are, and I no longer need to explain what my line of work is. Now the conventions are sketched less vaguely.

As call center tunes play along, everyone still thinks this is only temporary.

I also once wrote, “In the trickle of time’s eternal hourglass, in this little existence of mine, something must have even a smidgen of significance; something else must be worth trying.” Oh, I’m going to be a philosopher, sure.

I’m part of an industry that sowed its beginnings in my own time and I often wish I didn’t have anything to do with it. Slowly, wearily, I’m scaling myself down and realizing that this is probably what I’m going to do for the rest of my life.

Nine grueling years. Like all the once wannabe-or-never-was-artists, writers, engineers, nurses, rockstars, architects, and all the ex-real estate agents, airline-reservationists, teachers, we are all literally going to endure the long, long night.

A Nice Manicure

Our country just progressively stepped into the digital age. We've got to give credit to everyone involved – the Commission on Elections, the creators of the PCOS machine, school teachers, the voting public, or even the current and the worst President this country had, for that matter.

The new electoral process is a first solid fix to one of the root causes of corruption and we just hurdled a huge hindrance to progress. Sooner or later we will choose the right leaders and do what we're really suposed to during elections.

It's probably indicative of a hope - that our children will have it better. We might not need to behead our leaders.

Surprise Left

“Surprise Left” is a literal translation of the operative term in Filipino when you’re supposed to drive a girl home but you suddenly take a turn to a motel. Now I know I’m really being a Daddy, because the masculine of our species are supposed to un-strategically understand this crap from their fathers, who want them to live their own lives but make them realize somehow that it’s not a gentlemanly way to go about girls. And that we are never good-looking enough to break girls’ hearts.

What I gathered thus far is that when you become a Daddy you also suddenly and un-reluctantly increase your tolerance levels for corny-ness. You can’t keep a better, self-deprecating sense of humor because you need to mold yourself into a role-model for your child. So your humor is favored to be corny than self-deprecating. This self-consciousness is beginning to come out like a scrambled slice of pathological narcissism. What the fuck is all this for anyway? I’m hoping at the right time, you will read this and that’s the only time it will stop from being just another tree falling soundlessly in the forest that is cyberspace. Now there’s another bad, forced-upon metaphor!

Let’s go back to the Surprise Left now, before I completely digress. It’s Saturday, and we are overcome with a liberating feeling that accompanies most Saturday mornings. It’s the beginning of the weekend. I pick up D. in Ortigas and we enjoy cheap but well-prepared tuna or chicken croissants, iced coffee and grape juice. Engaged in conversation, we naturally weed out our work-related worries. We while away all other uncertainties all-too-easily because the imposing presence in a mother’s belly induces the courage to dream a little more.

That’s probably what drove us to this Surprise Left. I didn’t drive the girl straight home. But we also didn’t go to a motel, especially not now that I already knocked her up. We took a Surprise Left towards the Ikea Store, to order the Sniglar cot, the tastefully inexpensive crib.

And we took home the Lerberg shelf unit. After spending a year on the boxes, the DVD collection is finally out. Like the books, and the music, we want our child to eventually be exposed to what we thought was good. Everything from Studio Ghibli to the Kieslowski’s The Color Trilogy to The Godfather, Amelie, Dead Poet’s Society, History Boys and so on.

One day.



Now don’t be reductive and dismiss that it’s a consumerism-based fulfillment. It’s the feeling of assembling a Lerberg or a Sniglar with on your own hands and how many experiences will flourish on what you assembled. It’s where the Surprise Lefts take you.

The Art of Excusing

Truly, we never run out of excuses to sit down and think rigorously. I can't write now. I can write now because I still have backlogs, or an early gig tomorrow, work later, running behind on chores and responsibilities, running behind on running.

Because of these and similar threads in our stories, our thought-processes are slowly being grinded into bite-sized pieces of new media such as tweets and status messages. It's no wonder how nowadays people can only afford a short attention span. It's also no surprise that nowadays people (or people like me) begin to think in bullets, instead of metaphors or figures of speech.

And for now, since I can't afford genuine thought, what I have are these generalizations and excuses. At least you can't fit this in a tweet.

Last Chance Dating as Husband & Wife

We’ve must’ve had hundreds of these fancy-restaurant lunches and dinners. But with a kid on the way, the last few dates taste more robust in our last-chance savouring. We happily realize that it might be a while before this again.

Of course a lot these dates has to happen in the morning, since we just spent Friday night working in our night shifts. Dates in the morning almost feel like a dream: nice post-work meals with high-noon cocktails (for the soon-to- be-daddy) in near-empty restaurants and no crowds to compete with. I even get to write and read.




This one’s a Japanese-inspired place with a catchy name: John and Yoko.

We started with a seaweed-filled miso soup, especially since seaweed should cover a lot of D.’s calcium requirements. No raw fish or wagyu beef, but definitely a lot of vodka cocktails for Daddy.

I’m comparing the cocktails I ordered and the lychee vodka is a whole world better than the lime vodka. It’s the balanced, fruity sweetness that seem to lick the taste clean without necessarily killing the alcohol. The waitresses who take the orders are wearing skirts that make their assess look shapely as 747 airplanes. The service water washed its hands with cucumber. The music’s very lounge-y, and it matches the cosmopolitan feel that the all-over pink and purple of this place is attempting.

Since we never go out dancing, and D. couldn’t drink, we explore different entertainments. Mommy turns the chopsticks-wrapper into an armband. Origami! And we had a few laughs.

Obviously, nobody reads me because I write for myself. And now, I write for you too, my child. Someday, you will understand, and maybe even appreciate.

After the meal, mommy decides to check out a nice maternity shop around Greenbelt 5. We are not very wealthy. Actually, we are not wealthy at all, but we want to give you the best we can afford.

While Mommy shops, Daddy stays on for another vodka cocktail while reading and writing. “Naked Lunch” by William Borroughs whizzes me away as I glue my eyes on the sick output that is the glorious work of Uncle Bill as a junky. It’s like reading through someone’s vomit, hysteria and delirium which complements the alcohol perfectly. In reading Naked Lunch, and seeing in that frozen moment, what’s at the end of every fork, I understand why some things are written so you never have to go through them yourself.

Like a lot of beat-generation literature, it's an adventurous expansion of experience, the "explosion of consciousness" and to put it in Burroughs' words, the "unlocking of the word hoard." It's going through that unexplored territory, and nearly writing everything as-is, rendering the metaphors and philosophical concepts pure.

Again, in Burroughs' words:

"Naked Lunch is a blueprint, a How-To Book... Black insect lusts open into vast other-planet landscapes... Abstract concepts, bare as algebra, narrow down to a black turd or a pair of aging cojones...

How-To extended levels of experience by opening the door at the end of a long hall... Doors that only open in Silence..."

Yes it's like how the editor, Davd Ulin, describes this read as "T.S. Eliot on heroin."

I barely would have understood any of it (if I did at all), if not for the afterword, editors’ notes, annexes and introductions that made up half this edition.

Between sips of vodka and these words swimming through my eyes I wandered in a dream logic.

But wow, in the sense that I’m doing my favorite things: reading, writing, dating D., this really is a dream.

Three or four rounds, I’m not even sure. There are no windows but I know its high noon and I’m slightly- drunk-silly now.

I look around. The place is no longer nearly-empty since and some brunch/lunch-going guests have settled on the tables. Across ours, there are four girlfriends on Saturday brunch. I manage to observe them discreetly. They’re in fashionable clothes from a summer collection: beautiful fabric, nice cuts, prints, and colors that make the complicated seem simple. Or perhaps it’s really just skimpy clothing or my slightly-drunk-silliness that makes me imagine they’re the Sex and the City bunch.

In my all-too-vivid-mind, I imagine that they’re talking about me. With hushed gasps of breath they’re saying “What a handsome man with a pa-intellectual effect writing in his little Moleskine notebook.” Now here comes the part of the movie when they all stare at me, the Sex-and-the-City bunch eyeing the hunk, only to see my beautiful, pregnant wife kiss me when she arrives. And they go on talking about why they aren’t married.

Daddy will sober up by the time we do the groceries at the Landmark across Greenbelt 5. (And maybe drink some more later tonight).