De Saussure

De Saussure. They were introducing a new Executive Director and the familiarity of the name struck me. We went through the motions of introducing a new executive. In the conference call, while the invisible handshakes were extended, I was hung up on the bell his last name rang. Ferdinand De Saussure: father of semiotics, or structural linguistics (I'm going to have Google). How often was this name mentioned in my readings in post-structuralism.

De Saussure. The name threw my mind spinning in a whirlwind of philosophical wanderlust. What else have I forgotten? What can I still remember? How did I corrupt my little knowledge of Philosophy and applied it to my daily functions of my supposedly quiet and boring but truly stressful and unfulfilling job?

There must be a valid parallelism and a sensible coherence between Philosophy and Business Process Outsourcing in the 21st century. But I'm obviously just getting fancy and humoring myself. Both the Continental and Analytical Philosophers must be shaking in their graves.

In truth, my comparisons aren't accurate depictions and would actually be more like scrambled versions of real philosophy. In another time of my life I would have said, 'I should have been a librarian, or I should have been a scholar or philosophy professor.' It's dawned on me, with a less dreamy maturity, that in order to make living possible I have to chase some numbers instead of actually chasing a dream. It would have been useless to regret and sulk.

I did not meet some of the expectations I set earlier in life, but I surprised myself with so many others I didn't even imagine achieving. Being a father and husband, along with the discovery of a humble, blissful selflessness is probably my profoundest accomplishment in life. And maybe later on, I'll keep chasing those other dreams. I couldn't lose in this solution. I could still be all that one day, while I won't mind if I won't be.

I recently came across an article in The Atlantic, "Why hundreds of Harvard students are studying ancient philosophy."

I'd like to think that my choices are a result of foundations grounded in philosophy along with what I continue to learn now. Along with being a father and husband, I imagine that this not a regretful but a joyful wisdom. It is not with the grand narratives or most pompous events, but with the little incidents do we understand ourselves and 'turn the world with the palm of our hands.

This One for the Books

There is no smell

The sense of smell is often the most neglected of the senses. You cannot let your nose dive into the pages of an ebook and recognize how new it is based on the fragrant crispness of the paper. You cannot smell how cherished it is by the hands that held it for hours, nor trace the lingering hint of a flowery soap, coffee, or cigarette smoke. The physical books develop their own character by being tucked between the shelves, maturing with a distinct moldy smell. 

Virtual bookstores are a bore

No matter how hard the think tanks, marketing miracle workers and spin doctors think it, there is no virtual equivalent of stepping inside a bookstore, visiting a library or seeing someone's collection in their homes. There are millions of books available online. But it's not about quantity. It's about the resulting circumstances that lead you to books by way of the bookstores. That's a story in itself. Someone bought a Kurt Vonnegut from a second-hand bookshop in Kuala Lumpur. He gave his extra copy of Salinger's Nine Stories. He gave his Nietzsche volume which he bought from his student-job salary, the same edition returning to him by way of his future wife. Compared to what the reviews of online bookstore recommend, there's also a healthy randomness in chancing upon whatever is in the bookstore or what your friends recommend. Your next read sparked from real conversations. It's a smaller, more familiar sphere of influence that's less inhibited by advertising analytics. 

Save a few Pennies

I compared prices on some of my most recent reads.

A Visit from the Goon Squad costs PHP465.90 online when I got a decent paperback for PHP300 excluding the 20% discount. Kobo also sells the locally-published Manila Noir for PHP465.90 and I got mine for PHP299 excluding the 5% discount.

Jumpa Lahiri's Interpreter of Maladies would sell PHP463.68 online when you can get it for PHP145 at BookSale. Italo Calvino's Marcovaldo is discounted online at PHP379.69 but I got mine for PHP125 at BookSale.

On top of that, you have to buy an ebook reader. A decent one is around PHP6,000. And you'll have to pay for shipping costs and customs taxes if you buy directly from Amazon.

Reliability, Sentimentality and the Long Run

At the turn of the century, I've downloaded several ebooks and kept the files. They're now stored in an obsolete and already dysfunctional 20GB iPod color. I saved copies of the files, of course, which are now in unrecoverable, fried hard discs. Those turn-of-the-century ebooks are all burned, dead cells now.

On the other hand, the J.D. Salingers and Irvine Welshes, Douglas Couplands and F. Sionil Jose's books are standing the test of time and has moved from one hand to another, one shelf to another after having been taken to restaurants, the beach, parking lots, airports or wherever else. They contain very same words that glued my gaze. A lot has changed now, along with the ideas I concentrate on, but upon seeing these things and re-reading the words, I attribute to them - who I am now.

A few days ago, the news feed on my social media app told me that the last telegram in the country was sent.

Time is such a goon. To everything.

But it gets even more interesting. The last couple of months a major ebook brand partnered with the country's biggest Bookstore chain and I concede that it caught my fancy. It's affordable, it's convenient, and the technology is slick. The printed books, I feel, are also coming to their end. I thought I should accept that, move forward and adapt. So I tried to justify with a rather unbridled enthusiasm that I saw in what I wrote now.

What truly convinced me to stay with my books was just holding it, looking at the cover, or any other reason that's more profoundly sentimental than it is practical.

I'm an old man who sticks to his old chair, thinking Lazy Boys and massage chairs just can't hit the spot.

Alone with Chickens in Bacolod

The locals ate their Inasal with their hands, breaking the chicken into bite-sized pieces, beautifully drenched in orange oil. The man on the grill looks like he's been doing this for most of his life. The chairs are nothing fancy and the menu has no nonsense. The place is open-air and old, and there's an air-con area for an additional 10% But who needs air-con when you get cold pale Pilsen for 37 bucks.

Chicken Bacolod has a subtle crispness and the meat is injected with a lovingly colorful flavor. The treatment doesn't feel rushed and processed. It puts the fast-food restaurants claiming the Inasal name, to shame. Out here, it's a sincere craft, as though they weren't just in it for the dough.

I've only been in Bacolod for less than two hours, arriving on a ferry from Iloilo. I was sick of work and hotels, missing my wife and child, so I jumped to the streets and launched the Around Me app for directions. I found myself here, made older and wiser by a few days travel, as if I was being consoled by fate. 

A Summer Afternoon Sigh

A comforting breeze 

sleepy summer sets in

and you sigh deeply

All the King's Horses

You might have been two years old or so when I told you, "I love Humpty Dumpty, anak. It's a tragedy." 

Oh how you were wowed. This was one of the first songs you took to memory and took to heart. Daddy and I.'s favorite song, you called it. This was your first experience of aesthetic contemplation, and the reason why you don't eat eggs. 

Conversations with a Three Year Old

We read The Grouchy Ladybug by Eric Carle. You insisted that your toys, Cat in the Hat and Astroboy, read with us. Best I can, I explained the still-abstract concepts of humility and sharing. Grasping it amidst leaves and bugs and aphids and skunks and boa constrictors and lobsters and whales and fireflies dancing around the moon all boxed in the notion of time, you declared, "I'll sleep now, Dad."