The Coach's Wife

And then Hemingway

2010-09-09T15:30:00.004+08:00

Sometime in March, Good Housekeeping asked me to submit an essay for the Mother's Day issue, just 700 words. I was a mom only a few weeks old. The long wait for a child—16 years—had led us to Anna, whom The Coach calls "God's Best." GH was hoping that maybe I had grand truths to share?

I wrestled with the essay, perhaps the hardest I ever had to write. Motherhood is too big to reduce to words. My heart had been reeling from tenderness, from bruising, from doubt.

The Wordsworth on my shoulder was no help: any spontaneous overflow of emotions, he said, had to be "recollected in tranquility." I shushed him: a mother is hardly tranquil.

By the third deadline, I still hadn't written much. The words sounded cheap, sentimental.

And then there was Hemingway: "All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know."

Writing is at once egotistic and humbling, a struggle between vanity and vulnerability. The truest sentence—my truest sentence—is the one I will tell my daughter.

A Mother's Heart

Dear Anna,

Two years ago, when my fertility workups seemed futile and our faith was flailing, your father and I attended Healing Room, a prayer-healing forum. The ministers praying for us weren’t told what was ailing us; they would rely on the Holy Spirit to reveal what healing was required.

When it was my turn to be prayed for, a woman minister—a stranger to me and unknowing of my petition—gently touched my womb and said, “God wants me to tell you that you have a mother’s heart.” I wept, bearing the burden of the barren years.

Last week, you finally came home to us, 10 months old and perfect. A gift from God and born from the heart. Though our infanticipation wasn’t coursed through my womb, how could we not burst out in praise, as Adam did, that you are flesh of our flesh, and blood of our blood? It was then I lived out what John Donne said in The Good Morrow: “If ever any beauty I did see,/ Which I desired, and got, ‘twas but a dream of thee.”

The second day we had you, I forgot to give you your vitamins, fed you two hours too late, and bathed in you in water too cold your lips started shivering even as you loved playing in the water. That night I cried in your father’s arms. “I’m a bad mommy,” I blubbered. What made me think I am able to nurture and care for another life?

In C. S. Lewis’s Prince Caspian, when Aslan asks Prince Caspian to rise to his leadership, the boy says, “I do not think I am ready.” And Aslan replies, “It is for that very reason that I think you are.” I’d like to own that truth in your father and me. It is humbling, overwhelming, to be your parents. The more we read on parenting, the more we realize how inadequate we are, how much we do not know. All we have is this certainty that you make us want to be better people. This time we aren’t just living for ourselves: we live for you.

A few nights ago while I was singing you to sleep in Mommy’s home, the light of a star filtered through the trees, and it hit me: the God who created Canis Majoris—the hypergiant star so immense it would take 7 quadrillion Earths to fill it—is the same God who breathed life into you with a Word, and when He did, He saw that you were very good. He will not fail you or me, dear Anna. All my inadequacies as a mother He will assuage; He will fill in the blanks.

I wish for you, Anna, to be awed by a world “charged with the grandeur of God,” that you would easily find joy even in a can of sardines as you would in Bach’s Air on the G String. There is a magic to this world, and it takes a special set of eyes to find the extraordinary in the ordinary.

Your Ninang Germaine once said that all we need is Jesus, family and ministry—everything else is a bonus. Revel in that bonus, dear Anna. When we realize that God’s grace operates in the everyday, that it is only by His tender mercies that I am able to write this and hear your breath as you sleep, that every day is God-breathed and God-allowed—only then will we have a heart that finds joy even in the direst of circumstances.

What a privilege it is to be your mother.

Love,
Mommy

Taking the good and the bad

2008-11-24T02:08:00.003+08:00

In safe company I sometimes kid my Papa that I can summarize my relationship with him and with Mama in a single sentence: All the bad in me I got from him; all the good in me I got from my mother.

Which is a massive misstatement, of course, but one laden with a few non-negotiable truths about the good and the bad that I inherited from Papa.

My love for words came from Papa. He is not averse to filching a book from his friends’ or children's shelves, reading and keeping it until you forget you ever had such a book. He is like a Rottweiler: he grabs a book and doesn’t let go even after gnashing of teeth. Before there were National bookstores or bookshops of previously owned books in Cebu, Papa already knew where to find those dumped by U.S. public libraries and middle schools.

Books were the priority. Our house, built in the ‘60s on Mama’s GSIS loan, had only two-and-a-half rooms for six growing kids. Space was limited, but my parents invested wholeheartedly in a library, on a mezzanine that overlooked the living room and the dining area. The library was bigger than my sister’s teeny-tiny half-of-a-room (I didn’t even have a room), with Britannica volumes that lined the shelves, Reader’s Digests since the ‘50s, and a huge atlas that was bigger than one of the windows. And books. Oh, the books. I know now that part of my almost manic stockpiling of (unread) books in my home is the need to recall the best part of my childhood. They are my one true link—sad, there is no other—to my father.

Papa thought and wrote in images; maybe that was why he could never find, even now, the words to tell us he loves us. (He gave me an awkward pat a few times.) When I needed assurance that he loved me, I should just have asked him to write me an image, instead of creating a card that began with If you truly loved me (I was only nine, and I never gave the card). He took great pleasure in language, and in my wedding, he took to the stage with much pleasure, piling on the audience the image of him and my mother riding into the sunset, and talking much about Will Durant. A philosopher.

In my junior year in law school, I wrote an impassioned plea for him to fund my extracurricular studies in French. Money was hard to come by—Papa worked for the local government, Mama was a public school teacher, one brother had just finished medicine, and yet another was finishing med proper—and he replied with the only letter I ever received from him, one I keep in my Happy Box. He wrote that if he were an outsider looking in on my life, he would give his eyeteeth to be my father.

He signed his letter not with his name or with Papa—he has lovely, elegant and extravagant penmanship, eruptions of his creativity—but with a drawing of his square glasses, the lines heavily etched onto the paper. I would often feel the ridges it had created on the other side. “I am old, decrepit,” he wrote.

He didn’t end his letter with the usual, familial complimentary close, Love or With love. He came from the old school where parents were strictly figures of authority. My eldest brother, Manoy Uriel, had told us, “Papa wants to be respected, not loved.” It was the same likeness I projected onto God—He was a Father, after all, and I used to cringe before Him, even in prayer. Jesus I can deal with, he was a brother, see; God, well, He had an iron hand. It took several years of patient loving from my uncle (my Papa Danny, my father’s younger brother) and from The Coach for me to accept that though all the power in the whole universe is God’s, still He has chosen to be tender. That though the Holy God should be the righteous judge of sin in me, He has chosen to love me, gently.

Oh, the gentleness I craved, for Papa had quicksilver moods, shifting always to his default mode: anger. I know how rage tastes. But I don’t know how it looks like: it has no color, not the red that angers the bull or the white heat that blinds. It has a burning that starts from between the shoulder blades that flares down in an instant to the palms, where it seeks release.

I’m now middle-aged, but there’s still this little girl in me who needs her father’s approval. Some years ago I sent Papa drafts of a few stories, needing the father-writer to affirm me at that crucial turn in my life when I spurned his and Mama's advice and took the road less traveled by. He never said anything.

Then I got an SMS from my sister, a year or so ago. Jan, she said, Papa wanted me to text you that he thinks your stories are good.

That almost beat the eyeteeth line.

I am now in my Mama’s house—we call it that even if they built it together, that’s another story—and I see my father struggle to remember if he already put sugar in his coffee. Sometimes he doesn’t know how to prepare instant-mix oatmeal anymore. He talks to me a lot, genuinely interested, and I wonder when I’ll have the guts to tell him I love him.

Overbooked

2008-11-24T00:45:00.002+08:00

My boy, the Polymath, and my girl, Sandra—writers that they are—married six months ago in a library. Tears, hugs, a botched kiss, laughter, a gangster hat, good wine, fantastic pesto, poetry from Vim Nadera, the word for the day from Neil Garcia (“vicissitudes,” and everybody had to use the word in his or her toast to the couple)—such a beautiful wedding.

With the union comes a merger of books: each one probably having about a thousand books each.

So they gave away books they have multiple copies of—good ones!—to the guests, with a special Paul & Sandra bookmark sandwiched in the pages. One book for every guest. But which to choose? There was Ondaatje, Calvino, Loorie Moore, David Foster Wallace, Hornby, Rushdie, Byatt, whew. You gotta make a decision, quick, because while the rest of the guests were lining up to get food, the writers were already circling the pile of books. As soon as it was considered, well, appropriate, we snatched the books we like. Paul gave me the blessing to get a lot, yeah, plus Paul and Sandra’s choice for me (Thomas Merton’s Seven Storey Mountain—which I still have to open, sorry, sweeties).

We, of course, knew that we hardly have the time to read our loot. “This is greed,” Butch Guerrero said, with his horde tucked safely away in a corner. We were shameless. (Now, six months later, I am merely midway into Midnight’s Children. Love it. Hate my schedule.)

For the godparents, Paul and Sandra gave a beautiful Parker pen.

Mine is engraved Ninang Janet.

You've been ninang-ed!

2008-05-22T00:25:00.002+08:00

I was just 35 when I was first slapped with a wedding ninang assignment. I thought, Yikes, me a godmother? Like those with the wildly poofy bouffant dyed the wrong shade of brown and in a one-size-fits-all suman gown made of piña? Me? (And here I thought I had sufficiently covered my wrinkles with night cream.)

Alas, I couldn't say no, can't even think it, not without my mother's doomsday prophecy that it is bad luck to reject a ninang invitation. I should've asked her who would earn the bad luck: me or the couple?

Besides, I love the couple, especially the groom, my nephew Jimi, who's now finishing his orthopedics residency, and there was no saying no. No.

So I lost weight and bought a stunning gown--too stunning, said my brother's friend, who chided me for wearing a dress more lavish that those of the entire entourage combined. Heck, I was determined to look "too young to be a ninang."

But something in me is probably ninang-like because since then I've had six ninang assignments in the last five years: three from Jo's side and three from mine.

I've manufactured enough equanimity to find the humor in all this, as well as gained the requisite weight and wrinkles for the job. (Yes, dear, that's why this blog post has no photographs.)

I'm changing my night cream.

Return of the Fellowship

2008-02-13T18:18:00.014+08:00

Months after we bonded at the UP National Writers Workshop in 2003, a bunch of the fellows met up at our house. I am their Mudra, designated mother goddess, which only means, really, that I am responsible for stocking enough food and drink on my table and cleaning up after their mess. (And, yeah, I am way older than they are.)

Jay Fernando, one of two beautiful writers who facilitated the workshop, had predicted that our post-workshop camaraderie would last only so long; we had been tight, true, but he said the fellowship would wane.

He was right, in a way. Some of us formed deeper attachments and some stalwarts could be counted on to attend get-togethers, but through the years it became harder to gather warm bodies. Our yahoogroups conversations have dwindled to a trickle.

I miss my kids. I read about them a lot, in their blogs and in others', where they and their work are praised. I am proud of them and their achievements and accolades, as if theirs were my own.

I'm thinking of mustering the brood again, just to catch up. I'm hoping this post on that Octoberfest at our house will help rekindle the fellowship.

That night we played Taboo 'til kingdom come—you know, that game where you're supposed to describe the word to your teammates but there are some terms that are taboo, words you cannot use. No gestures or actions allowed.

Here are snippets of our game:

K (trying to describe the word PLATINUM): This is better than gold!

R (shouting): Sex!

* * *

U: This is what I'll never find!

G: LOVE!!! [True enough, the word was LOVE!]

* * *

U (describing SADDLE to his teammates): Assholder!! Assholder!!

His teammates (confused, of course): Chair?

U (getting more incensed and raising his palms to cup the air): Assholder!! Assholder!!

* * *

U (describing FINGER): F**k you! F**k you!

G: Whaaat?

U: This is what you use when you F**k you! F**k you!

* * *

Me (describing POEM): This is what G writes!

E: Poetry?

Someone (I forgot who): Trash?

* * *

U (nagmamarunong, after G found it difficult to describe SALMON): Dapat sinabi mo, G, "Blank Rushdie."

S.O.H.O.

2008-02-12T16:49:00.000+08:00

Most of the time I work at S.O.H.O.—Small Office, Home Office.

I don't receive 13th month pay or health insurance or a sack of rice. I have no Kris Kringle during Christmas. I miss the jump-up-and-down joy over non-working holidays that suddenly sprout during the week. I buy my own stapler, envelopes and toner. I pick up stray paper clips because, hey, when you're paying for your office supplies those clips can dent the budget. I suffer the commute and long lines to file my income tax, get a cedula, claim registered mail, photocopy documents, pay my IBP dues. I'm my own janitor when the cup of coffee crashes to the floor.

Before I junked law for writing, I had my own secretary to spurn cold calls, make restaurant reservations, assign a messenger to pay my credit card bills, tally my expenses, or find a spare safety pin while I frantically hold on a skirt that unraveled. I had the entire office machinery and budget behind me, so smoothly run and accommodating that even golf lessons (over which I chose diving instead) or Japanese language lessons (Bengoshi desu!) came for free.

I should've had a harder time adjusting to going solo.

I didn't.

I love working from home.

I avoid office politics, run-ins with colleagues, and the obligatory participation in some ghastly Christmas party program. I am allowed to deduct certain expenses from my gross income and lower my taxes. I can drop anything I'm doing when The Coach needs me. And when I'm gnashing my teeth editing a particularly horrendous article, I take a break without guilt: TV, a story, a household chore, a trip to the grocery or the Starbucks hidden inside Cybergate.

I don't have to wake up too early (read: before noon). The most of traffic I encounter is when the sounds of altercating drivers below intrude into my reading or when the turtle pace of cars lining the Guadalupe Bridge catches my eye.

Tackling emails in my nightshirt, without having to brush my hair or teeth, is also pretty neat.

When I crave company, I log onto Twitter to check what my friends are doing. It's my version of the chatter around the water cooler: consultants decrying their clients, new music discovered, reading junkies finishing a book, a touchscreen eee PC being sold.

Every now and then, friends come over to the house and work—fellow freelancers who share a procrastination gene. The mood is relaxed, even with the doom of deadlines, and we put up our feet. It is like working with officemates you are fond of. (There is no such word in American English, but, yeah, I’m not about to edit that.)

Rest

2007-12-13T00:27:00.000+08:00

I'm on forced rest—a happy conspiracy between The Coach and my OB-gyne to ensure the success of our baby program, launched this month to mounting pressure from the family and the clamor of well-meaning friends (and a maternal instinct kicking waaay this late, Julia Roberts be darned). I am to avoid any possible stressor. I try not to bother with crumbs that fall from the table or remember a beloved niece’s unplanned pregnancy. I have license to laze.

But what the hey. Hotwired in my system is a happy-go-lucky stress lever. It activates even when I am happy or on a vacation. It takes a lot for me to keep still. (I, of course, prefer to call it ebullience.)

I hate working; ergo, in my mind, I am not a workaholic. So when my writer-friend Sandra sent me an email from Korea on how God desires me for me to rest, it jarred me, but only a bit. A workaholic, I thought, is one who enjoys working hard and long hours. I don’t. A workaholic is compulsive. I’m not.

But friends—the good ones—they don’t let us get away with specious arguments. Germaine staged an intervention in her apartment last year.

“You’re a workaholic,” she said.

“No, I’m not.” I said. “I just always have a lot of work.”

Silence. And then laughter: much of it incredulous, much of it from me.

The thing is I feel guilty when I rest. I feel guilty when I’m not productive. Mix that with unrelenting slothfulness and a massive dose of procrastination (perhaps arising from perfectionism?), and we’ve got a Janet waiting to explode.

I get my guilt from my mother, whose love language is service. She has borne much of the burden for the family, and there is never time for her, for us, much less for rest. Six children on a schoolteacher’s salary meant there was much to do, much to finish. Her busyness told me: if she stops, the house, our home, our family, will fall apart.

The laziness is all my own, a shortcoming that has hardened into an attitude because I was, growing up, pretty much left to my own devices. “Suma nimo,” my mother would say whenever I asked permission. It’s up to you—appealing to one’s maturity, one’s discretion—you decide. I guess I decided to be lazy, to not exert myself. It was easier, fun, that way. I was a child. I still am, that way.

The perfectionism—the fear of failing—I suffered from my father. Papa, a closet writer, has elegant, extravagant handwriting, with the curlicues and whorls of his letters all set in a flourish. Mama’s writing was neat and coordinated, like that of a schoolteacher who knew she was meant to be one. There was such a tenderness to her letters. I was ten when my father asked me to write in a card meant for my uncle in Marikina. My writing was still finding its place, my hand unsteady in its youth. He took one look at what I wrote, clucked, and said, “Kabati nimo’g agi!” Your handwriting is awful.

Three years ago I finally understood it was around that time I stopped writing the stories and poems I started when I was seven. I didn’t plan on stopping. I didn’t even realize I did. And I had forgotten that incident. It took me twenty-four years to return to that first love, to acknowledge it as such. I am glad I rediscovered writing, though now I still struggle to allow myself to fail. (I thank Joseph Chilton Pearce who said, “To live a creative life, we must lose our fear of being wrong.”)

The beauty of God’s love—which I discover in fresher, very real ways each day—is that it allows me to see myself the way He does, unsullied by my own unforgiving eyes or those of my parents. I don’t have to do anything to merit His grace. I give Him joy, just as I am, and there is nothing I can do to add to or take away from that incomprehensible, all-encompassing love. I do not need to perform for Him.

It is true, what Sandra sent my way last year, that God does want me to rest, not just from my labors, but also from my mixed-up conceptions of what I ought to be and what I ought to do. To cut the ties of a past that can torment the present, I pray in the Spirit to break the yoke of guilt, burden-bearing, laziness and perfectionism I find in myself. I forgive myself—are we not often tougher on ourselves than on others?—even for the ways I responded to negative things in my life, and those who allowed those things in my life.

And I will rest.

The lovely cartoon is by the talented and inspiring Inkygirl.

Just like that

2007-12-02T01:48:00.001+08:00

Writing here feels strange. I'm not the same person I was since my last post.

How to explain?

My closest friend in law school died on a Wednesday late September. Or a Thursday. We're still not sure when. I rushed to the hotel where she was discovered, but I couldn't go up to her room to help identify the body. I didn't want to remember her steeped in blood and in what looked like signs of struggle. Three days later, ABS-CBN would flash scenes of her and the lacerations, the tangled sheets, the knife, the cord, the cutter, the duct tape. And I couldn't look away. It had been a year since I saw her last, and in the mess of the moment, all I could think of was if her left shoulder was still higher than her right.

We shared the same name. We imposed the same acid test for our dates: their inner thighs must not rub against each other and they must know how to kiss. (Alas, The Coach had cornered me early in my life, so I never had the opportunity to try out the test.) We created our own vocabulary, like twins, and earmarked certain legal provisions (Article 25, Civil Code, on “thoughtless extravagance in expenses for pleasure”; Article 247, Revised Penal Code, on crimes of passion)—it was one of the ways to survive law school. In the summers between semesters, she in Manila and I in Cebu, we wrote each other 20-page letters, back when there was no email or easy access to computers. Then we started working, and this time we shared summers. Each January we'd bring out our Filofaxes, plot the holidays, save money, and on all long weekends we'd hie off somewhere, often to the beach where she’d swim and I’d dive. Even when I married we still kept to a few of our yearly jaunts.

We were easy with the term best friend, back when it didn't seem to require too much of each other. Somewhere along the way, the term sounded high-schoolish, uncertain, like a trend that didn’t catch up with the times. Our differences—did they multiply? were they there in the first place?—caught up with us: she couldn’t understand what she called my “extra long good faith,” and I couldn’t understand why she frowned, hard, when applying her makeup.

Her leaving was sudden—what leaving isn’t? But this, this was all for the wrong reasons, reasons I could’ve gauged had we been in each other’s lives the last year, extending our communication beyond texting and calls and gifts left with the lobby guards. Perhaps I wouldn’t have understood—I still don’t—but I would’ve at least been there.

I'm still saying goodbye, and haven't found the words for it.

Beyond the X's and the O's

2007-07-13T02:20:00.000+08:00

My shirt today read Marvelous Maroons, though my boys were anything but. They not only lacked Martin Reyes (downed by fever) and Magi Sison (downed by immaturity leading to a metacarpal fracture; heck, figure that out), they also were short on heft, height, composure, rebounding, and, it seems, the will to win.

They were missing lay-ups, three-pointers, and uncontested shots. They weren't passing the ball, their motion offense had no motion, and they weren't rebounding. Ateneo looked stellar in comparison, what with 30 rebounds more than UP had.

It should've been less of an uneven match: Even if UP is still rebuilding a team with its nine rookies, Ateneo also suffers the loss of three key players. To its credit, Ateneo does not play as if it were, as it is, handicapped, at least compared with other teams. Some say Ateneo might reach the Final Four, but would not be a serious contender. But don't tell that to the Ateneo: It wouldn't matter and they wouldn't care; those boys on the other side of Katipunan play with spirit and a big heart. I admire them for that.

It is true, what Coach Mark Jomalesa said to the boys yesterday, that when playing against the Ateneo, what matters more than the X's and the O's is energy and intensity—both of which were nowhere near the boys’ game today.

The Coach couldn't attend the game; he had an entire staff to run after his supervisor called in sick. He did his best, though; leaving his post, he went to the next-door sari-sari with a small TV set but no electricity. There was a generator, and The Coach, desperate, forked over money for someone to buy gasoline to power the generator. And so he was able to witness the massacre.

I write this at the Lavazza Caffe Espresso at The Fort, where the coaches have gone after dinner at Kaiseki to recover from the shocking 24-point loss.

This Sunday my boys will meet the powerhouse NU, with its formidable Asoro and Lingao-lingao. I'll be there with my Marvelous Maroons shirt, and hope it'll make a difference.

Half an hour

2007-07-12T14:28:00.000+08:00

Ralph Waldo Emerson once said, "What would be the use of immortality to a person who cannot use well a half an hour?"

I barely have time now, what with the demands of work and my rather imprudent decision to watch the game against Ateneo this afternoon at the oh-so-far Ninoy Aquino Stadium, but I choose to waste this half-hour to talk about my Maroons boys, never mind immortality.

We received quite a walloping last Saturday, the "luck" of the 777 having gone to the La Salle Archers, the best team money can buy. The DLSU boys were more efficient, clearly in command, hungry for the win after sitting out an entire year for conduct unbecoming of La Salle brothers—hence this year's UAAP motto: Honesty through sports.

My boys, rookies and sophomores, were overwhelmed by La Salle's patented full-court pressure. Migs de Asis wasn't defending, the boys weren't moving in offense, the rebounding was almost nil, and many were just feeling their way in the collegiate court.

Now with Magi Sison's untimely injury that'll sideline him for a month—he fractured his hand in a scuffle with a Team B player, dagnabbit—I wonder how my boys will fare against the Blue Eagles, particularly if Chris Tiu gets his 3-point groove back and Ford Arao is all warmed up, like diesel.

I'm anxious enough to not be satisfied with watching the game on TV and to brave the rains to see my boys, even while The Coach could not attend today's game, his Air 21 work getting in the way of what his heart truly desires.

Off to the stadium I go. I would like to sit near the UP alum whom I sat in front of last Saturday. Stinging from an impending loss, what could a UPian do but heckle? This man was purple and green in his prose. I was listening to his colorful commentary the entire game. He'd taunt the foreign-denominated La Salle team: "Pabiling isang Maienhoffer with cheese! With french fries, please!" And of course with a name like Atkins, a player would get a ribbing about his diet.

My half-hour's up.

My withness

2007-07-12T03:06:00.000+08:00

With his helter-skelter sched, The Coach hardly has time for TV, but these days he'd gladly lose sleep over Commander in Chief. Tonight, after the segment where Mac Allen's mother still mourned for a husband long gone, The Coach hugged me and asked, "Will you miss me if I die?" I would, definitely, infinitely, and sprung on him the same question, almost flippantly, wanting to see if he'd give me a proper eulogy.

But now as he sleeps and the night is moonless, I am unnerved. What is life without this beautiful man, one who is—to borrow from Kate Knapp Johnson's Meadow—"my withness, my here"?

In the first years of our marriage, I would sometimes wake in the darkness, and not hearing The Coach's breathing above the hum of the air conditioner—he is not one to snore unless exhausted—I would slide my head down from my pillow to catch the silhouette of his chest against the muted light that filters through the curtains. I would monitor the rise and fall of his breathing, and only when so assured could I go back to sleep.

Many years of everydays calmed me, lulled me to thinking that together is a forever word. Until tonight.

Otherwise
Jane Kenyon

I got out of bed
on two strong legs.
It might have been
otherwise. I ate
cereal, sweet
milk, ripe, flawless
peach. It might
have been otherwise.
I took the dog uphill
to the birch wood.
All morning I did
the work I love.

At noon I lay down
with my mate. It might
have been otherwise.
We ate dinner together
at a table with silver
candlesticks. It might
have been otherwise.
I slept in a bed
in a room with paintings
on the walls, and
planned another day
just like this day.
But one day, I know,
it will be otherwise.

from Otherwise, 1996
Graywolf Press, St. Paul, Minnesota

Fast and furious

2007-06-29T01:38:00.000+08:00

For fast fiction with a zing, check out Blagador's micro-fiction, which he arranged using black-and-white photos. The Polymath is one of my "kids"; I have an entire brood of writers who call me Mum, Mudra or Madder—a name I earned because I was, dagnabbit, the oldest among the fellows of two national workshops I attended. I'd like to think that I and my house are a safe haven to them; many of my kids have come or stayed over to chat, read, eat, borrow books, watch TV, or, yeah, even to iron a shirt.

I'm as proud as any mum.

A writer's writ

2007-06-29T01:21:00.001+08:00

My flights to and from Cebu last year were often delayed, once by as long as four hours. Sometimes I arrive a little after midnight.

I'm not too fazed by such delays or when I'm in a long-haul flight. Maybe it's because nowadays I'm rarely in a hurry to go somewhere—the wonderful trade-off when I junked my power suits and took up writing. I work at home, in my own space at my own time (which, alas, also means I shoulder my own health care, withhold my own taxes, and forgo 13th month pay).

The delays give me pockets of time to surf or write—I am rarely without Samwise, my usually dirty iBook—or to read (what's the use of scrimping on clothes to buy books if you don't carry one with you all the time?), or more recently to blog, using my trusty Tungsten, inherited from my dear friend Jon (the Tungsten looks bedraggled after five years, but still works beautifully).

I also love solitude (I didn't always, but have grown to love my own quiet times). And I don't mind being exiled to my own devices.

That's the beauty of writing. It's "work" we can do almost anywhere. A pen, paper, or, if one is lucky, a laptop with battery juiced to full.

Many of us writers are always writing: when we look at someone, we are more likely subconsciously storing in our mind how the neon lights play against his pallid skin, blue and pink against his forearm, or how the corners of her mouth twitch when she lies.

Perhaps writers look at life differently. Part of us often step back and catalog an event taking place. Our being “in the moment” is lived thrice: once, when it happens; twice, when remembered; thrice, when reduced to words.

Vignette

2007-06-22T03:24:00.000+08:00

That's it. Time to sleep now. After wasting precious time on HBO's Nanny McPhee, I finally have something that strings together the mandatory five words: shoes, discover, murder, subterranean, compatibility.

And what do you know—I actually had fun.

I was snug in my bed, dreaming of a world without clocks, when a call girl who lived down on the tenth floor was helping her American lover commit suicide before dawn. Not really sure if she’s a call girl or he was American; to my neighbors on whom I eavesdropped while we were crammed in the elevator, every Caucasian is an American and every American’s dark-skinned companion with a harsh accent is a prostitute. The roving security guard had discovered the American’s leather shoes littered behind the building, one shoe on the pavement, the other lounging atop a parked car’s hood. A resident had opened his window to throw out a cigarette butt, and saw the body sprawled on the roof of the next-door warehouse that was our only line of defense against the sight and stench of the Pasig. The woman had shown the police his suicide note. She said all she did was help push him through the narrow window. His heft could barely squeeze through the steel frame, and she had heaved and strained at the effort.

If we were still talking to each other, you’d tell me assisted suicide is nonetheless punishable, like homicide or murder. Seventeen years out of law school, and you still cannot get over your Juris Doctor. Esq. remains appended to your name, perhaps now more of a consolation when no man has given you his name to use.

So subterranean of the inamorata, you’d sniff. That is so you. You have to use words mangled beyond recognition when there are other terms more imaginative for those you do not wish to associate with: troglodytes, hoi polloi, the great unwashed. Once, you mispronounced Worcestershire to the waiter, and I wanted to correct you like I did when you confused unconscious with subconscious, but I didn’t, and suggested you get ketchup instead. It was then I knew for sure I was no longer your friend.

It wasn’t a question of compatibility. We share the same seamstress, the same distaste for the thin, pinched voice of CSI Miami’s Emily Procter, the same acid test for our dates. I am halfway deaf in my left ear and you in your right so when we couldn’t catch the dialogue on TV, we’d lean forward and demand in unison: What?!

The eleventh hour

2007-06-21T19:49:00.000+08:00

Oh, the weight of a million things to finish by the day's end.

In a week chock-full of chores, today was an exhibit of fraught multitasking: While keeping an eye out on the pasta sauce simmering to my right, I was washing dishes and studying Dean Alfar's The Dragon in the Bell published in this week's Philippines Free Press. My copy of Free Press was spreadeagled above the sink, two laundry clips pinning it away from the splash of dishwater. Dean's story is up for discussion in my fiction class tomorrow, for which I also need to read another story (gah, must breathe) and submit a vignette that should contain these words: discover, subterranean, shoes, compatibility, and murder. And, just so there's no pressure or anything, our venerable teacher Butch Dalisay requires that we write "fiction that matters."

So.

The food's all done and waiting for The Coach, the kitchen floor's mopped free of stray garlic peel and tomato sauce, and the house is being aired out of the smell of anchovies.

I'm closeted in our bedroom, the curtains swept to the side so I can look out to the skyline for those times when I need inspiration for the vignette. The TV's turned on so I won't feel like I'm missing out on today's Law and Order. My fingers are poised over the QWERTYs.

Several long gazes at the skyline later, I still don't have a clue how to string the five words together. (It's the subterranean that's killing me.)

What was it that Butch said last week? "Fiction: Do it well. Do it honestly."

Well, here I am, honest to the bone, and I remain bereft of a workable plot. So I blog. Particularly about what Janet Burroway said of the paradox of least wanting to do what we most want to do: "We are in love with words except when we have to face them."

This difficulty is my fault, of course. My writing muscles have stultified from disuse.

According to Burroway, "The habit of mind that produces stories is a habit and can be cultivated, so that the more and the longer you write, the less likely you are to run out of ideas." Writing, she says, is mind-farming: "You have to plow, plant, weed, and hope for growing weather. Why a seed turns into a plant is something you are never going to understand, and the only relevant response to it is gratitude. You may be proud, however, of having plowed."

Time, then, to dig through the dirt. I will remember the poet William Stafford's advice to his students to "write to their lowest standard."

Struck by lightning

2007-06-08T19:52:00.000+08:00

Much could be said about Jack's Ridge: how this resort and restaurant complex high up in Shrine Hills, Matina, was once a Japanese outpost in World War II; how it had been under water before the sea retreated and left clams on the mountaintops; how the coffee shop, they say, fails to produce brews as spectacular as the Ridge's view of the city and Davao Gulf.

But all that is overshadowed by what Jack's Ridge had given me.

I was taking photos of the moon "riding on ghostly skies" when lightning flashed low on the horizon as I pressed the shutter.

It gave me this:

Poetry, by hook or by crook

2007-06-03T18:30:00.000+08:00

I took to reading—and truly enjoying—poetry rather late in life. Away from the classroom.

To me there are three kinds of poems: those I can enjoy without creating another frown line; those I revel in for their sound, sense and sensuousness; and the many that make me think I should just stick to fiction.

(Of course there is the obligatory Rilke and Neruda*, every other yuppie's must-have poetry for brown nosing or bluff sophistication. The rule in cocktail conversations: When all else fails, bluff.)

I wonder if, when I struggle over poetry, I am one of those Billy Collins mourns over in his Introduction to Poetry:

But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it

They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means

I'm still scratching my head over some portions of Whitman's Song of Myself. Some time ago I downloaded his poetry into my iPod, and I probably looked funny frowning in concentration inside the crowded MRT coach, his words pouring into me, and I barely hanging on to the pole and my sanity.

* A lifetime ago, drowned in heretofores and Know All Men By These Presents, I thought Neruda was a friend of my cousin Aris when my cousin’s poetry referred to Neruda's Tonight I Can Write The Saddest Lines. Oh, the shame.

** Photo borrowed from someone else's site in one of my Net trawling trips. Can't remember whose, unfortunately.

Babel

2007-05-31T09:04:00.000+08:00

Sleepy little town—that’s how a Davaoeño describes Panabo. If you consider the staggering kindness of strangers (they carry your bag, ply you with food, offer their homes), how most businesses revolve around the marketplace, and how a hefty pork barbecue costs only P10, then perhaps, yes, Panabo is one sleepy little town, never mind its designation as a city of Davao del Norte.

Its noise, however, is another matter.

Here on my side of Panabo, at the Women’s Resource Center, I am in the middle of the market square. While many tricycles have abandoned the streets and most stalls have put up their boards, a videoke, a jukebox, and a set of oversized speakers on a pedicab all fight for airspace with the Bingo game set up in the quadrangle.

The videoke singer relentlessly scrambles after the lyrics of If You Tell Me You Love Me, but not with My Way; he knows his way around that tune. (Yeah, a videoke isn’t a videoke without the obligatory My Way). The pedicab speakers provide the bass: you cannot hear much else beyond it. And the jukebox, well, there must be a surfeit of coins in Panabo; the poor machine has no rest.

Yet nothing beats the Bingo man.

To fill up the wide-open space, the Bingo man doesn’t just call out the numbers. He cups the microphone with both hands—lest some of his words escape further amplification—and singsongs into it, stringing the syllables in a lilting chain, like the ShoeMart salesladies of yore: GEE FORty-seven-forty-seven-forty-seven-forty-seven-forty-seven (pause, wheeze), GEE forty-SEven-forty-seven-forty-seven-forty-seven (pause, wheeze), and then a final triumphant GEE FORty-SEHHHven! He pronounces G the Cebuano way: DJEE. As he jiggles the plastic genie bottle of tiles, he hoists it over his head and brings it down roundhouse in a wide turn—yet another art form—and he cracks jokes, makes some announcements, calls out to passersby. Still in the same singsong.

I am glad for the clamor. Makes me feel safe. In this trip to Panabo for a CIDA book project, I am alone in a nursery of a daycare facility. A lone metal bed has turned it into my makeshift sleeping quarters. I am surrounded by gargantuan comic-book and fairytale characters painted on the walls: Garfield (too orange), Snoopy (pretty good), and Tweety Bird (with a disproportionate, stretched torso).

The surrounding noise stops me from gazing too often at this creepy rendition of Snow White near the foot of my bed.

Windoze

2007-05-30T20:54:00.000+08:00

If you take an A320 plane, say, bound for Davao like I did yesterday, and you ask the Cebu Pacific guy behind the desk to give you a window seat—so you can get a better view of this fair city particularly if, like me, this is only your second visit there since 1991—and he assigns you to Seat 26F much too cheerfully, beware.

Not only is Seat 26F the last of the tail end, it also has no windows.

Hmpf.

I want. I need!

2007-05-29T02:36:00.000+08:00

Night person that I am, mornings can be excruciating, especially when my doctors have not allowed any coffee in my system since October 2003 (alas, I can no longer remember how my Americanos taste).

These babies from Bim Bam Banana are what I need.

Smother is mother with an attitude

2007-05-28T14:06:00.000+08:00

My mother—bless her—thinks that I, at 40, am still a baby who needs pampering. (I am.) She thinks I am too thin (I wish), and has someone buy me beef rice from Dimsum Break for early afternoon merienda: beef, peas and shrimp piled over rice and drowned in MSG-rich sauce. "Eat, eat," she urges, and waits as I chew. She prepares for my return to Cebu the only way she knows how: she feeds me.

One of the characters in a story I have yet to rework carries after my mother. Perhaps it is true, what they say, that all fiction is in some ways autobiographical:

"Mama at seventy-eight years has survived a war, eloping at eighteen, working through three miscarriages, selling tocino on the side to raise tuition for seven children, a stroke, a heart attack, kidney stones, diabetes, a recidivist philandering husband. From all these she was shielded by her crusade that nothing bad—nothing—will happen to her brood. She believes in the Family; there is little redemption outside it. The world can change governments, another Mexican soap opera would invade television, roads are given new names, but my mother would not know or care. She has the public schoolteacher’s simple convictions that are renewed every time she feeds us."

—from Home, a work in progress

Pls! Flash the bowl after using*

2007-05-27T15:31:00.000+08:00

Ahh, Cebu.

Home.

Where I can sleep for more than ten hours without a headache.

Where all bets are off when it comes to all things salty or fatty: danggit, real chicharon attached to tambok, and lechon that doesn't rely on Mang Tomas for flavor.

Where I don't have to rein in my accent, and I can speak BisDak: forcefully, loudly, in truncated syllables and hardened vowels.

Where our version of learning is to poke fun at our own grammatical errors.

* Comment posted by jued keigh at Himantayon.com
** Photo by jorg3, posted at Himantayon.com

Alone again, naturally

2007-05-24T23:32:00.001+08:00

From Rands in Repose by way of Inkygirl

Go, Blakey!

2007-05-23T18:20:00.000+08:00

With two more rounds of singing to go, I'm putting all my eggs in the Blake basket. This boy is an artist and a songwriter. He understands music and its nuances. He can fill a stadium electric. It's about time American Idol puts in a performer, one who fearlessly redesigns his songs and not just one who'd belt them out—those are a dime a dozen. Let's find those who'd leave a legacy of music, not just singing.

And such a gentleman. Given the chance to sing last, decidedly a better slot, he opts to let Jordin choose.

Even if he doesn't win, he'd have a good career.*

Team Villa is divided on the issue; The Coach leaves the room when Blake sings. He's a Melinda Doolittle fan, like I am. I tell him mixing is an art, and so is beatboxing. (And then he turns on the other TV.)

_________
*Postscript: Yeah, give the boy a ballad he can't sing, and let Jordin, who sang nothing but, run away with tears at the end. Don't get me wrong: I do like Jordin and she's fantastic, but I'm up to here (see me slash my neck) with mere singers.

Postscript ad nauseam: Oh man, that Chris Daughtry should win tonight, hands down. Love him.

Storm's a-brewin'

2007-05-23T00:25:00.000+08:00

Season 70 of the UAAP is yet to come, and already the drama is grinding, grinding, grinding. Much of the fireworks—that we're still hoping won't go off—will center around a ruling issued today by the governing body. A quick powwow with my beloved Coach Joe and The Coach a while ago did nothing to pacify me. Not that The Coach wants me calm: He knows I am at my most percipient and formidable in a fight.

Nobody messes with my boys. Nobody.

"Pure, unadulterated Cebuano"

2007-05-22T22:50:00.000+08:00

It hurts to laugh.

While most of my stitches are healing well, the hole on my right, through which a pipe drained blood and liquid for four days, still gapes and throbs. When I sneeze I anchor my tummy in with my hands, afraid that the force might hurl my insides through the gauze. Rising in the morning is a major production: I slowly maneuver to my left, slip an elbow underneath, secure my right palm on the bed, and lift myself up by degrees. It does not help that The Coach keeps our bedroom Siberia-cold (I have to burrow under three covers!); my joints are all stiff, and much of my body refuses to wake.

But.

I cannot help but check out Himantayon for my regular fix of laugh-out-loud Cebuano humor. The term himantayon means—geez, now how on earth do I translate that? (Me, with my clumsy Tagalog.) A pakialamero is more of a meddler and a busybody. A himantayon—from the word bantay—is more circumspect and subtle in his or her snooping, though no less heedful or alert or even catty, though never malevolent. A glamorous gossip, how 'bout that?

(Help, I am floundering. It's like explaining the mechanics of labyog and kumbayot.)

Anyway, this site, which I discovered through fellow Cebuano Isolde Amante's*, celebrates all things BisDak—that's Bisayang Dako or "Big Bisaya," literally, though that translation fails at capturing the self-jest that can be at times droll or comical or tongue-in-cheek or farcical or downright clownish.

I love it. It's home. And I'll read it if it kills me.

* If you crave good fiction, check out Isolde's Dance, deservedly a winner at the 2000 Palancas.

A Round Tuit

2007-05-21T00:51:00.000+08:00

One can never have too much rest. Or so I thought. After having been sidelined for more than five months, I'm unusually looking forward to work, family duties, and house chores, even. Yessir, hell has officially frozen over.

June is the magic month to return to the trenches: set up a piggy bank, work out at least 40 hours in 90 days, finish a story. I borrowed tickers from TickerFactory.com to monitor my progress.

For the procrastinator in me I simplified my desktop and got a Round Tuit.

Remember all the things we were supposed to do when we got around to it? Well, there ya go: I finally got a round tuit. Here are more round tuits from other sites.

Lights out

2007-05-19T18:05:00.000+08:00

Sunset at 6:05 PM

The art of solitude

2007-05-19T17:38:00.000+08:00

The world operates on noise. Too many of us who find some alone time keep the TV or music playing to ward off the quiet. What one perceives as silence could be an acquired deafness.

It is increasingly difficult to imagine life without our handhelds and entertainment equipment. We wouldn’t know what to do with ourselves without computers, TV, books or cell phones. There is rarely space reserved for elegant thought. I see so many in a commute or in a line send text messages or strap on iPods rather than pause for contemplation.

I faced this point squarely when typhoon Reming in October 2000 forced me to confront a brownout alone in the city. A few months prior, I had scheduled some alone-time in Sagada and Banaue, free from pagers, phones and the Internet. The escape didn’t happen, regrettably, but the point is I thought I was prepared for isolation.

I wasn't. The brownout bore down with a darkness broken only by distant emergency lights. No activity or panorama to deflect my solitude. It was unnerving. I was overwhelmed by my bare thoughts, and frantic for cable television or a book.

I did not know when it was when I was first sucked into a treadmill of activity. I just knew I had to simplify my life.

To enjoy a quiet time with myself, no typing into a keyboard, no writing, no reading.

To find pieces of myself in memorabilia and old photos, and laugh at the cuts and scrapes of my childhood.

To think about where I came from, the distance I’ve covered, and the path I will take.

To be mindful of my breathing, just feel the air in and out.

I remind myself of this now because after a forced five-month rest, I can feel the pull back into the busyness vortex, unable to write yesterday, for instance, without listening to music or to the television. A few weeks ago my friend Art asked me how long it has been since my last dive. Blank. I couldn’t remember. “Whoa,” he said. “Now I know you are busy.”

Germaine had been more direct last year. “You, my friend,” she announced, “are a workaholic.”

“No, I’m not,” I said. “I just have too much work.”

Perhaps I should start listening to myself.

Perfect love

2007-05-09T23:24:00.000+08:00

Off to the hospital in a few hours for tests to prep me for Friday's surgery, this time to have four holes bored into me in a laparoscopic cholicystectomy—terribly expensive medico-babble to remove my ailing gall bladder.

Dreading yet another round of needles and stitches, fasting, and sleep deprivation (the nurses' specialty, oh how they excel at it). It's the second in this year's medical drama, and, please God, the last.

The Coach has of late been working 18-hour days, juggling his job and my hospital preps and funding, but—bless him—he still takes time to soothe my fears. When we got wind this morning of the staggering costs that would again dent our budget, he was, in his words, "not worried, but..." And he paused, the mobile phone connection clear enough to relay his sigh, "...I am shaken." Then he gathered himself, becoming the tender warrior that he is, and said, "This is not a problem, Jan. As long as we're together, we're okay."

He sleeps now, bone-tired, and perhaps will only be a bit refreshed when he rises in just a few hours to put in some work before he brings me to the hospital.

Poor dear. How can I tell him I am not prepared for tomorrow when he himself has gone through as much emotional turmoil as I have? He will quote to me one of his favorite psalms, "Call upon Me in the day of trouble; I will deliver you, and you shall glorify Me." He will remind me of the Lord's faithfulness in all the good and bad years we've been together—twenty-one!—and tick off the many things we are grateful for, and then he will hug me, make me laugh and think of all the junk food and trans fats I can finally have in my post-op diet.

Tonight I choose to meditate on Paul's words to young Timothy, "For God has not given us a spirit of fear, but of power and of love and of a sound mind." The argument is easy to follow: The Lord loves me more than I can ever comprehend, He who knitted me carefully in my mother's womb; His Will for me is perfect, acceptable and pleasing; He is mighty to save; how He desires me to fare on Friday is all part of His purpose for me. There is no room for fear for perfect love—His, and what He shows through The Coach—casts out fear.

Thank you, Coach, for being the Lord's strongest tangible reminder of His love.

Moon and Stars

2007-05-08T02:53:00.000+08:00

Here in Manila I have an inordinate interest in the moon. I take hundreds of photos. A few days ago I took one of the moon lingering in the sky after daybreak. Tonight's Jeopardy! tells me this is called selenodolatry: moon worship.

But that's just because only a few stars can penetrate the smog. I love stars more. Sometimes the best part of our dive trips is the time we spend on the sand gazing up the night sky: with stars upon stars it feels like all 6,000 visible stars are on our side of the world. In Apo Island, the marine reserve off Dumaguete, the stars leap out of the sky when the island plunges into darkness after the power generators switch off around 10. Even the fireflies cannot compete. One night we counted 24 falling stars.

Naming the Stars
Joyce Sutphen

This present tragedy will eventually
turn into myth, and in the mist
of that later telling the bell tolling
now will be a symbol, or, at least,
a sign of something long since lost.

This will be another one of those
loose changes, the rearrangement of
hearts, just parts of old lives
patched together, gathered into
a dim constellation, small consolation.

Look, we will say, you can almost see
the outline there: her fingertips
touching his, the faint fusion
of two bodies breaking into light.

Name-dropping

2007-05-08T00:26:00.000+08:00

I think he's such a cutie.

Play by Play

2007-05-07T02:36:00.000+08:00

The Coach is child-mischievous. In church today, while everybody else applauded an all-male ensemble who had sang a cappella In That Great Getting Up Morning—in a delightful fusion of barbershop music and black gospel—The Coach leaned over and whispered, “I’m going to clap like Paula Abdul.” And he bent his hands back, fingers splayed, and slapped his palms together—Paula Abdul style.

That kind of playfulness serves him well on radio. For some time now The Coach moonlights as commentator at Radyo PBA (918 on the AM frequency).

Radio suits him more. When he was commentating on TV for the Metropolitan Basketball Association (MBA), he had to mind too many things: wear a tie, follow the camera, and mind his facial expressions. Radio, however, allows him to banter about, say, the players’ hair, or poke fun even at himself. “Whew!” he whistled, when Olsen Racela sank in a shot after The Coach had pronounced Olsen one of the league’s best free-throw players. “Buti na lang. Otherwise, mawawalan ako ng credibility.”

In another game, after The Coach had kept insisting the Welcoat players should pass the ball to Alex Compton, Alex delivered the fifth of his seven 3-point shots that game, and The Coach cheered, “Naku, gumwapo ako dun ah.”

Of the few games I've listened in on, my favorite would be the Air 21-Welcoat game last April. Air 21 was miles ahead in scoring, and Welcoat struggled to make a shot, as if—according to The Coach—there was a wall blocking their shots. “Eh, ano pang dapat gawin ng Welcoat kung may wall, eh 'di pinturahan,” he joshed.

Networking

2007-05-05T03:25:00.000+08:00

Absolutely brilliant.

Enter a word in Visuwords, an online graphical dictionary, and words that relate to your entry just pop, spring, ricochet and expand into a color-coordinated web of synonyms, opposites, hypernyms, and derivations.

When the words settle down into a fully-fleshed network, they gently throb and breathe, like the living things that they are. Such a delight.

And the dictionary is free.

(Discovered from "Write now is good.")

Writering

2007-05-04T04:42:00.000+08:00

In his Penman column for April 2, 2007, Butch Dalisay wrote that he and his colleagues—Charlson Ong, Jimmy Abad, Jing Hidalgo, and Ricky de Ungria—were, in the early years of their writing, “driven and fascinated by writing, not by being or becoming writers.”

I remember my “anxieties and apprehensions” (my professor’s words) when I started out, more of which centered on being a writer than by writing, though there was that, too. Perhaps it was because I came from a profession that overly—and mistakenly—valued titles. Except for SyCip Salazar law office, the first law firm I joined, there was never any Miss or Mister among us: it was the ATTY. that defined us. My classmates said that one earns one letter for every year in law school, from the A to the Y, and then get the period when he or she passes the Bar.

A few years ago I wrote this in my journal. I feel a certain sadness when I read this, even as I have gone past this spell:

I need to own to being a writer—a term I wear like clothes that are too snug on me. What do you do, people ask, and I say, Well, and I pause, Well, I am a writer. I shrug and tug my shoulders to bridge the moment.

It does not help that my mother and father—both of whom slaved to see me get my letters A to Y—think that writing is not a real job. You write when you’re happy or sad. You do not write to live.

I carry the term with some deprecation, like I should issue an apology—Yes, ma’am, I am trying to write and maybe someday I will create something good. And perhaps continue to create something good.

I know I can write—people tell me so, and there are instances in my scribbling when I know I have written something well, and I rejoice in the wordplay—but I am not certain I deserve to be called a writer. I write, perhaps, but I am not a writer.

Alice Munro’s character in The Office has her own version of writerly disquiet:

The solution to my life occurred to me one evening while I was ironing a shirt. It was simple but audacious. I went into the living room where my husband was watching television and I said, “I think I ought to have an office.”

It sounded fantastic, even to me. What do I want an office for? I have a house; it is pleasant and roomy and has a view of the sea; it provides appropriate places for eating and sleeping, and having baths and conversations with one's friends. Also I have a garden; there is no lack of space.

No. But here comes the disclosure which is not easy for me: I am a writer. That does not sound right. Too presumptuous; phony, or at least unconvincing. Try again. I write. Is that better? I try to write. That makes it worse. Hypocritical humility. Well then?

It doesn’t matter. However I put it, the words create their space of silence, the delicate moment of exposure. But people are kind, the silence is quickly absorbed by the solicitude of friendly voices, crying variously, how wonderful, and good for you, and well, that is intriguing. And what do you write, they inquire with spirit. Fiction, I reply, bearing my humiliation by this time with ease, even a suggestion of flippancy, which was not always mine, and again, again, the perceptible circles of dismay are smoothed out by such ready and tactful voices—which have however exhausted their stock of consolatory phrases, and can say only, “Ah!”

So this is what I want an office for (I said to my husband): to write in. I was at once aware that it sounded like a finicky requirement, a piece of rare self-indulgence. To write, as everyone knows, you need a typewriter, or at least a pencil, some paper, a table and chair; I have all these things in a corner of my bedroom. But now I want an office as well.

And I was not even sure that I was going to write in it, if we come down to that. Maybe I would sit and stare at the wall; even that prospect was not unpleasant to me. It was really the sound of the word “office” that I liked, its sound of dignity and peace. And purposefulness and importance. But I did not care to mention to this to my husband, so I launched instead into a high-flown explanation which went, as I remember, like this:

A house is all right for a man to work in. He brings his work into the house, a place is cleared for it; the house rearranges itself as best it can around him. Everybody recognizes that his work exists. He is not expected to answer the telephone, to find things that are lost, to see why the children are crying, or feed the cat. He can shut his door. Imagine (I said) a mother shutting her door, and the children knowing she is behind it; why, the very thought of it is outrageous to them. A woman who sits staring into space, into a country that is not her husband’s or her children’s is likewise known to be an offence against nature. So a house is not the same for a woman. She is not someone who walks into the house, to make use of it, and will walk out again. She is the house; there is no separation possible.

(And this is true, though as usual when arguing for something I am afraid I do not deserve, I put it in too emphatic and emotional terms. At certain times, perhaps on long spring evenings, still rainy and sad, with the cold bulbs in bloom and a light too mild for promise drifting over the sea, I have opened the windows and felt the house shrink back into wood and plaster and those humble elements of which is it made, and the life in it subside, leaving me exposed, empty-handed, but feeling a fierce and lawless quiver of freedom, of loneliness too harsh and perfect for me now to bear. Then I know how the rest of the time I am sheltered and encumbered, how insistently I am warmed and bound.)

Oh, joy, joy!

2007-05-03T03:21:00.001+08:00

My Closopen story does not really deal with food so it came somewhat as a surprise when editors Cecilia Mangerra Brainard and Marily Ysip Orosa included it in the A La Carte food anthology. I was ecstatic.

We read portions of our stories at the February 12 launching at the Podium. I was sandwiched* between two writers I highly respect, Butch Dalisay and Dean Alfar, whose Amnesty and Terminos are required reading in my literature pilot class.

This being a food and fiction book, Dean read of adobo, while Butch read about egg rolls.

I read about poop.

Because I have foot-in-mouth disease when I feel terribly inadequate—say, like reading about poop next to a table laden with food—I turned to Butch and said, "My poop can beat your egg rolls." To accommodate me, he laughed. He had also laughed when, in my first day of class under his tutelage, I mumbled something about his probably being ornery (I was nervous, see? And late for class). He was telling us to write to our highest standard, to write for those who are ornery, fussy and difficult to please. I blurted, "But that's almost the entire English department." And the dear man from the English Department (he was the dean, alas!) laughed as I swallowed my tongue, buried my head in the sand, and shot myself. Closopen was the first I wrote for his class, and the first that I submitted for an anthology.

Tonight I chanced upon the Passion for books article of the Sunday Inquirer Magazine, listing A la Carte as a must-read for summer and Closopen as a choice cut. Oh, the joy of being affirmed for what one does!

"A La Carte (Food & Fiction)"
Collected and edited by Cecilia Manguerra Brainard and Marily Ysip Orosa
Anvil Publishing

You'll need two vital ingredients before you start devouring this book: a full stomach and a comfortable seat some distance away from a working kitchen and a food court. Because definitely, a hungry reader will be torn between finishing the sumptuous stories and rushing off to try out the recipes offered as appetizer at the start of each chapter. The tasty morsels leave you convinced that food is more than just repast; it is also the stuff of national pride, childhood memory, romance, regret, rivalry, and even bloody murder. This book is one thick bubbling stew that satisfies one's hunger and imagination while whetting the appetite for more. Best cuts: "Wok Man" by Jose Dalisay, Jr.; "Closopen" by Janet Villa, "No Salt" by Nadine Sarreal, "Pedro and the Chickens" by Ian Rosales Casocot, "Kitchen Secrets" by Shirlie Mae Choe, and "Does It Matter What the Dead Think?" by Erwin Cabucos. (by Penny Azarcon-de la Cruz)

* Sandwiched, har har. Pun really not intended but, hey, still appreciated.

'Twas a dark and stormy night...

2007-05-02T00:34:00.000+08:00

Nyaaarrr.

The day after I submitted my Quentin the Question Mark (who, by the way, is renamed Quiting—not really an interesting story there, but could probably tell you next time), I take those la-la-la quizzes about ourselves—this is what we do when we, as the Polymath says, have no life—and I am told that Quentin, and apparently I, will sink into a mire.

And what are the odds: immediately after I watch tonight's episode of Jeopardy!, from which I learned that chicken fat is called shmaltz, I am told that all I really want to do is roll around in chicken fat.

The Polymath, of course, has recently assured me that the chicken is the sickest animal on the planet.

Yeehaa.

What horrible Edward Gorey Death will you die?

>

You will sink in a mire. You like to think you're normal, but deep down you really just want to strip off your clothes and roll around in chicken fat.
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Dead Lines

2007-04-30T03:31:00.000+08:00

3:10 AM

My friend, Alvin, calls me a little before midnight, pep-talking me into submitting a story, an essay, anything, to the Palancas. Today, of course, is the deadline.

There will be little sleep today for those who, like me, ride on the adrenaline rush to write after, say, needing to watch CSI, Criminal Minds and Medium. The story I wish I’d submit requires more than a few hours’ work, so this time I’ll dip into my hay naku, puede na folder and tweak a story. To add more complication, let's make it, hey, a children's story, knowing that I have no sensibility for such. As a final nouement, let's choose Quentin, whose story does not conform to the Palancas' requirement that the entry be "directed principally to promote appreciation of Filipino literature or culture."

I figure this foolhardiness fulfills two objectives: one, it lets me keep a new year’s resolution, and two, it serves me right for not coming up with something new.

From where I write I can see the moon, bigger than yesterday’s. Its beauty is of no help, for I keep staring at it, and my thoughts fly elsewhere, far.

I prefer to blog.

Serves me right.

5:10 AM

Day comes earlier in summer, and so does the deadline. I'm having the impossible time excoriating multi-syllable words from the story and catching into my language the rhythm of children laughing.

Serves me right.

Gumption

2007-04-29T02:20:00.000+08:00

It is 2 in the morning as I write this. Before me, this scene.

A gibbous moon, hanging low, gorged and almost full. Lights from a construction site from across the street that curves to my right. A few cars on the road. A gas station half-asleep. Most of the city in dreams. Silence.

I take a long time to write. It is hard to sort out the many thoughts roiling in my head. Even harder to find the words.

I can always make a convenient excuse: I’ve recently undergone anesthesia, as well as had a drug injected into my forearm to make me forget the indignities the medical staff did to prep me for surgery—a date-rape drug, the anesthesiologist told me. His name is Christian Doctor. Really. He is Doctor Doctor, my doctor. I met him right when they wheeled me into the O.R. Laid out flat on the gurney I felt an urge to create a limerick. When you’re about to face uncertainty and still feel like reaching for a pen and paper, that makes you, in my book, a writer.

In my first year in creative writing school, Butch Dalisay had told us, his timorous class, “Have the gumption to call yourself a writer.” Of course I didn’t believe him. Two years later, I did. I was watching an Ateneo-La Salle game from the referee’s table next to the Ateneo bench when a scuffle among the on-court players erupted into a free-for-all. Alums from both schools charged into the court. From the audience behind us, Rico Villanueva and someone else—maybe Rainier Sison?—vaulted over the railing, swinging. It was blue and green mayhem. I scrambled under the table, took out my Palm and tap-tapped about the chaos around me. That’s when I knew, for sure, that I was a writer, when the only way for me to make sense of things was to reduce them to words, when the words were almost, almost as meaningful as the event unfolding.

I regret abandoning this blog for such a long time. My life has, since October, been suspended by a court case, an operation last February, and yet another surgery this May. It is hard to make plans. But I can write about it, perhaps to help me find a way, some way, to navigate through my why’s.

The web that is wide as the world

2006-10-27T16:04:00.000+08:00

Seems almost strange to be blogging in the midst of a personal storm, like there's something absolutely capricious about this, when there are—what?—things more important or urgent, and there is no time, even.

But the act of writing this gives me a sense of normalcy, and I feel the need to connect to you, like Whitman's spider on the promontory, just throwing filament after filament after filament, and this comforts me somewhat, this attempt to connect to the "vacant vast surrounding," we who find ourselves in "measureless oceans of space."

And now I extend my leave—a blog break, they call it—perhaps for another week or so, so I can, as the psalmist says, be still and know that He is God, my Abba Father.

To be, to simply be, is awfully difficult for human beings who would rather be human doings.

Justice denied

2006-09-19T15:47:00.000+08:00

Time Magazine (August 28, 2006 issue) reported there are more Americans who can name off the bat two of Snow White's seven dwarfs than two Supreme Court justices.

I can believe that.

I probably know more of the cast of Ed or Gilmore Girls than of those who sit at the Kataas-taasang Hukuman ng Pilipinas. A scenario most likely not limited to me.

Which is a shame, for that reveals our lack of political will, a loss by default not to lead ourselves.

Starting tomorrow I will have to fly to Cebu several times to help protect my family against the consequences of such an apathy, this time from among city government employees. I will, literally, have to fight City Hall.

As a lawyer I know the courts will not listen to me unless I establish a clear legal right to get a temporary restraining order (TRO) against a private project protected by those in power. As a citizen I burn in anger because I should not be required to prove why my rights should not be overtaken so.

I ran into walls at City Hall just trying to explain that, yes, I am a part of those whom the government serves, and stand equal with my rich next-door neighbor, never mind her powerful political connections.

A gargantuan task, especially when my parents—a schoolteacher and a local government employee, both retired—can rely only on the family's collective wits and determination.

Among the fallout in this case that leave a bad taste in the mouth are three I detest the most: filing a case; parrying with the head honcho who, I have been thrice warned, is vindictive; and dealing with the media.

Oh, to be left in peace to just write.

The evils of the world are better seen in fictive light.

Face Value

2006-09-12T16:55:00.000+08:00

Warning: Terribly longish post about how a distorted view of beauty creates pain, but well worth, I think, the time to read, as well as the time I spent in ruminating, reading, and interviewing celebrities (the medical and non-medical kind). This work-in-progress is incomplete; I'm still struggling over certain areas. My perspective, of course, is Christian. I welcome yours.

Would Prince Charming have kissed Sleeping Beauty if she weren’t, well, a beauty? Would he have singled out Cinderella from across the ballroom if her waist-to-hip ratio weren’t 0.73?

Perhaps not. No matter how much we want it otherwise, beauty is not merely skin deep, particularly for those of us who frantically hop on the beauty treadmill, reconstructing what Mother Nature gave us, fighting to halt the ravages of time—sculpting, buffing, peeling, tattooing, lifting, augmenting, suctioning, plucking. The beauty industry that ranges from fashion to cosmetics, from diet plans to fitness studios, from salons to plastic surgery, grows and thrives on the mindset that physical beauty is the primary standard by which we consciously or unconsciously “categorize” a woman.

Television—the de facto, modern-day arbiter of taste and value—feeds on this need for female beauty. Advertisers capitalize on appearance: even commercials that do not sell or are not in any way related to beauty products portray the wiles and wares of a stunning woman. Cigarettes, beer, cellular phones, bathroom tiles, refrigerators—apparently these gain life and increase in sales only in the hands of a dazzling temptress. According to a U.S. study, more than 5,000 commercials with “attractiveness messages” hypnotize viewers each year. Much of the merchandise marketed exclusively on TV panders to the woman’s desire to look better by peddling near-miraculous beauty and makeover products: topical concoctions that shrink fat, enlarge the bust, and remove scars; Cleopatra foam-tipped springs that, when inserted into the nostril, literally lift the bridge for a perkier nose; and the Chinese growth balls that add inches to height when drank once in the morning and again before bedtime. What’s probably more remarkable is that sales are skyrocketing off the charts.

The public is partly to blame for this frenzy. While height is necessary for our flight attendants to reach overhead bins, we also unashamedly require them to be young and beautiful as they pour our coffee. We tend to listen more to good-looking salesladies, prompting companies to hire them primarily for their looks. Filipino TV viewers perpetuate the vicious cycle: we subconsciously but insidiously demand our performers and broadcasters to look physically appealing even before we determine their level of talent. Even worse, we excuse their lack of talent as long as they are attractive.

The beauty bias is rubbing off on non-celebrities. Plastic surgeons in the Philippines confirm that the openness of a few celebrities about their surgeries has drawn more “ordinary” folk to ask for procedures. They come to the clinic, bearing pictures of celebrities, wanting the nose of Nicole Kidman, desiring Barbie Doll proportions or those of Ethel Booba. (According to plastic surgeon Manny Calayan, the most commonly requested body in the country for the past two years is reportedly Ethel Booba’s—from her augmented breasts to her augmented behind, from the cheekbones etched on her face to the tweaked nose.)

There is no universally accepted ideal of female beauty, lending credence to the adage that beauty is in the eyes of the beholder. David Hume wrote in 1741 that “Beauty is not a quality in things themselves; it merely exists in the mind that contemplates them, and each mind perceives a different beauty.” Some cultures uninfluenced by media find the Rubenesque and Venus de Milo figures delightful, honoring the extra pounds as a sign of prosperity. Generally, however, most women are seduced by catwalk figures: at the height of Cindy Crawford and Claudia Schiffer’s popularity in the 1980s, the prevailing notion was of the robust, healthy woman. Then when the wispy Kate Moss and her scrawny posse crossed the threshold in the 1990s, they ushered in the trend of waif-like proportions (or the lack thereof). So far, this remains the vogue: women in fashion advertisements nowadays tend to be very thin, all the better to fit in the popular low-waist, hip-riding jeans. The average fashion model today reportedly weighs 23 percent less than the average female.

Sometimes women’s search for beauty is about desiring for what they are not or what they don’t have. This rather widespread attitude is further cultivated by media and manufacturers; the demand that is created—whether necessary or not—spurs sales. Caucasians, for instance, are persuaded to think brown skin exotic, and they spend much time under the sun and in tanning salons, or purchase tanning lotions to hide their pale skin. On the other hand, Filipinos and other Asians doggedly bow to the hegemony of Western media and yearn for fairer features, turning to papayas, citrus and chemicals to lighten their visage.

Perhaps the more scientific way of determining beauty is measuring the symmetry of a woman’s features or figure, the way that art is similarly studied for symmetry: there is harmony or beauty of form that results from balanced proportions. If, say, a woman’s face were to be folded in the middle and one side laid to rest on the other side, would the points of one part correspond with the other? If yes (as in the case of Jaclyn Smith or Paulina Poriskova), then there is symmetry, hence, beauty. If none, there is an imbalance that is considered unpleasant. This theory at its surface appears reasonable, but it hardly explains why many find Barbra Streisand beautiful despite her hooked nose, why Shannon Doherty used to land plum roles despite her noticeably uneven eyes, or why the distinctive gap between Lauren Hutton’s front teeth does not inordinately bother us so.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with wanting to be beautiful. To gaze at physical beauty gives us pleasure, in the same way that we find pleasure in the beauty of geometric shapes or colors or musical notes. However, to mindlessly clamber onto the beauty bandwagon, subjecting our bodies to immoderate demands, reveals a deeper need that begs to be assuaged.

For many women, physical beauty is more than eye candy: it is a key—to success, perhaps, however one defines success; or to fulfill a biological need; or maybe to obtain affirmation.

Time magazine in 2002 revealed a University of Texas discovery that “ugly people” (the description “ugly” referring to what is considered conventionally unpleasing to the eye) are paid ten percent less than employees with average looks. A similar study pointed out that, all things being equal, employers would hire taller people over those who are shorter.

Laboring under this collective demand for beauty, many celebrity wannabes get a head start on their cosmetic surgeries before they are launched into the world of entertainment. Dr. Vicky Belo reveals that actors are gradually accepting the fact that cosmetic surgery is an “investment in their career,” that their “face is part of [their] job.” Without knowing it, the good doctor echoes what Aristotle said about beauty being “a greater recommendation than any letter of introduction.”

The impact on the professional lives of the “redesigned” celebrities is immediate. Ella of Viva Hot Babes claims that after her bust augmentation, she received more offers to do shows. John Lapus says that after his chin sculpting and liposuction, he’s been receiving compliments from his friends, strangers and even enemies, and his career took off.

The case of World No. 3-ranked tennis star Maria Sharapova further proves that beauty can be a powerful determinant of success in business. Time magazine reported in 2005 that sponsors pay a premium for beauty in tennis and other women’s sports. Hence, Sharapova, with her blonde bombshell looks and trim 6-foot-2-inch frame, rakes in millions of dollars more in endorsements than her equally gifted female colleagues, notwithstanding that any one of these tennis phenoms can easily outplay her for any title.

Still others contend that the longing for beauty is much more primal than a business interest. Evolutionary scientists, including Charles Darwin, say that the dominant notion of beauty can be traced to our biologic need to procreate and is therefore “fundamental to the evolutionary process” of humans (as well as animals, apparently). According to biologists, there is a positive correlation between beauty, on the one hand, and fertility and good health on the other. Beauty acts as a “certification of biological quality,” which purportedly explains why, according to studies, men of diverse backgrounds prefer a low waist-to-hip ratio of 0.6 to 0.8 (meaning, the waist is 60% to 80% the size of the hips), regardless of the woman’s weight. Scientific experiments have apparently shown that a lower waist-to-hip ratio means a higher level of estrogen. More estrogen in the female body results in more reproductive fat on the hips and thighs. Ergo, men will be more attracted to women with an hourglass figure.

While this is an interesting aspect to the hubbub over beauty lust, it does not explain why women obsess about beauty. Childbearing is the farthest thing from the minds of those women who have their double chins removed, or those who permanently curl their eyelashes. The question is, why do we put so much weight on physical presentation?

It seems that we women latch on to beauty to affirm our sense of self; unfortunately, we equate our sense of self with the externals, which is why we rush to comb our fingers through our hair and lick our lips when someone insists on taking our picture (and why we keep only those pictures that show us in our best form), why we’d rather not tell our age, why we submit to the haunting truth in Janis Ian’s song: “I learned the truth at seventeen, that love was meant for beauty queens and high school girls with clear-skinned smiles.”

Many a woman cope with a bad experience by shopping, buying a new pair of shoes, or getting a haircut or a facial—addressing the pain inside mostly with feel-good instant makeovers. After a bad break-up or when a relationship falls apart, some women would get a bust augmentation. For many women, the aesthetic has become an anesthetic. Filipino poet Reuel Aguila recognizes this in his poem, Pagnanasa (Desire) 2: “From the botox of my face/ To the lipo of my tyan/ Nali-lift ang spirit/ Sa breast kong pina-enhance.” Women feel that physical beauty validates them. Even when women desire to be inconspicuous, there is still the dream of security and acceptance.

Theologians believe that the yearning for beauty finds its root in the curse that God put on the fallen Eve in Genesis 3:16: “Your desire will be for your husband, and he will rule over you.” Christian scholars argue that this desire will be inordinate, leading woman to find validation in man, seeking from him what he is not capable of. Andy Comiskey of the Living Waters Ministry argues that the curse upon Eve resulted in woman’s fallen tendency to find her identity in man, to seek completion in him, and mistakenly attempts to discover herself through him. Hence, many women mistakenly adopt men’s notions of female beauty as their guide. Her definition of beauty correlates to his: big breasts, small waist, thin thighs, oval face. Some studies confirm these assumptions. Anders Pape Moller, in his study Sexual Selection and the Biology of Beauty, presents human evolutionary psychological studies across cultures that reveal “how men rank female [physical] beauty the highest among a long list of attributes, while women rank male resources as the most important attribute of potential mates.” According to Bryn Mawr’s Savithri Ekanayake (The “Perfect” Female: an Analysis of the Biology of Beauty), studies from around the world found that “while both sexes value appearance, men place more stock in it than women.”

Regrettably, physical beauty is not the real beauty that is the essence of woman—what author Stasi Eldredge calls the “soulish” beauty— the kind that indwells in every woman and does not depend on her outward accoutrements. This kind of beauty takes its moorings from 1 Peter 3:3-4: “Your beauty should not come from outward adornment, such as braided hair and the wearing of gold jewelry and fine clothes. Instead, it should be that of your inner self, the unfading beauty of a gentle and quiet spirit.” Such beauty doesn’t translate to or require an introvert but a heart that is quieted by love and filled with peace, a heart that knows it already possesses beauty.

Eldredge submits that we women seek to unveil beauty within ourselves: deep inside, perhaps even deeper for those who have buried this essence in their hearts, women want to be seen, wanted, pursued and found beautiful and captivating, a beauty that is “core to who we truly are. We want beauty that can be seen; beauty that can be felt; beauty that affects others; a beauty all our own to unveil.”

Perhaps the antidote to the curse on the fallen Eve is to first recognize that woman’s beauty already resides in her from Day One. When God created man and woman, He said that what He had made was “very good.” (Genesis uses the superlative “very”—as in “very good”—only after He made man and woman; in all the other aspects of creation, He said they were “good.”) Creation celebrates woman as the bearer of God’s image, the Imago Dei. Eve was created because things were not right without her; she was not a mere afterthought. Something was not good, and “it [was] not good for the man to be alone.” God calls woman an ezer kenegdo, a Hebrew term that is difficult to translate: the term ezer is used only twenty other times in the Old Testament, and in these twenty times, ezer described God Himself, when He is needed desperately. And when God looked at her, He saw that she was “very good.”

Woman therefore is God’s piece de resistance. To paraphrase Eldredge: In the crescendo of creation, from formless void to perfection, woman is the beauty to which creation ascends. Only when woman accepts this—that she is the beauty that she already is—can she escape the beauty that ensnares.

Give 'em hell, Coach!

2006-09-07T22:21:00.000+08:00

At the dinner after UP’s exhilarating win against UE, everybody in the team was asked to say a few words—to say goodbye, reminisce about the season, share lessons learned, give thanks.

Head Coach Joe Lipa Jr., ever the mentor and tormentor, used more than a few words. To emphasize the import of his words, he would hark back to what he had already said, repeat it, this time accentuating his earnestness by chopping the air with his right hand and peppering his speech with OKs—as if to say, Are you listening to me, boys? OK?

On building character
(Number of times said: THREE)

“Boys,” Coach Joe said, in his gravelly, pongalangala voice. “So many people have taught you basketball: from your grade-school coaches to your high-school coaches. What we from the UP coaching staff really want to do is to teach you to be better men. To be good persons. Nothing is more important than that. OK?”

This is the essence of Coach Joe’s father heart, the kind that singles out character, and knows when victory is important or not important.

On hell
(Number of times said: FIVE)

The Coach, when it was his turn to speak, quoted from Coach Joe: “The road to success is always under construction.” I suspect this is where Coach Joe was coming from when he would, after already starting on another topic, suddenly remind the boys about training hell.

“Boys,” Coach Joe said, gripping the mike. “Starting next week, expect hell. OK?”

Variations of the same theme were minor:

“We are going to start training right away. Next week will be hell. OK?”
“Boys, expect hell! OK?”
“We are going to work hard, boys. OK? Expect hell next week!”

That is Coach Joe’s philosophy: Work hard. Give honest labor.

On making good coaches
(Number of times said: TWO)

Turning to the other side of the lanai, Coach Joe faced his other “boys” and said, “To my coaching staff, you know that I want you to become good coaches. You also know that I am not fond of reading.* But because I want you to become good coaches and become good men, I have read many books on this, including the books of John Maxwell, so I can help you.”

Coach Joe’s strong personality and stronger convictions arouse either severe alienation or deep affection. He is like tennis star Rafa Nadal: he doesn’t leave his emotions in the locker room. He is like his friend,** Coach Bobby Knight (Indiana University): on and off the court, Coach Joe is intense and will make no bones showing what he feels.

Either you love him or you hate him.

I love him. Very much. I have witnessed through the years how he has parented The Coach as a high-school player who would hang out at the gym to watch the UP MBT practices, as a college varsity player under Coach Joe's tutelage, as a young husband to a skittish wife, and then as a coach who would strike on his own.*** I have seen how, when Coach Joe makes a decision, he thinks of what legacy he can leave the boys: he thinks of consequences, not rewards. When facing any crossroads in his life, he doesn’t have to struggle over what is right and what is wrong: he always chooses what is right. What he does struggle over are the consequences that his right choices bring to his family. But because he is deeply loved, his family—especially dear Tita Ging with her sacrificial heart—walks with him through life’s many unfair twists and turns.

Just as we, whom he counts as friends, also gladly walk with him.

Coach Joe inspires loyalty. I have yet to meet another coach who, without trying, has maintained such love and fidelity from his former players. The Coach, Coach Ramil Cruz, Ateneo Basketball Director Ricky Dandan, Rey Madrid (now an architect, who at one time also got to coach the UP MBT), Coach Bogs Adornado, NU Coach Manny Dandan (whose association with Coach Joe comes through his being Coach Ricky’s brother), and even the coaching staff of Ateneo, Coaches Sandy Arespacochaga, Jamike Jarin and Gene Afable, among many, many others****—all swear by Coach Joe’s friendship, integrity and basketball acuity.

Thank you, Coach Joe. Perhaps it’s true what you said before, that you would not ever get rich, but let me join the many who know that you have made our lives richer.

__________
* The man who claims he doesn’t want to read has written two books on basketball: the iconic Brain and Brawn Basketball and A Basketball Coach’s Guide: Philosophies, Concepts, Strategies and Drills, two books that have helped and challenged many a young coach.

** Coach Joe considers the late Coach Sonny Paguia, longtime NU coach whom The Coach also loves, more his mentor and good friend.

*** I am possibly biased, for Coach Joe often advises The Coach, “Jo, love your wife. Love Janet.” (And though he is not Cebuano, Coach Joe says my name the Cebuano way, accenting the last syllable and adding a lilt to the end. No one else says my name like he does. Each time he meets The Coach, he asks, without fail, “Kumusta na si Janet?” Always. Gentleman that he is, at least to us coaches’ wives, he would apologize for how he or the game has taken our husbands away from us—this said with a slight, courtly bow and a kind pat on the shoulder.)

**** A young coach I met this year, wowed by Coach Joe, told me that he had felt his mind explode when Coach Joe re-introduced him to basketball, at the new things he was learning.

UP players don't die...

2006-09-05T15:26:00.000+08:00

…they just win big in their last game.

Two hours before UP’s game against powerhouse UE last Sunday, I was fixing The Coach’s UP uniform, the last time for this year. He had just come in from his Air 21 work—yes, on a Sunday, my dear hardworking hubby—to pick up his stuff before running off to coach St Stephen in its game against Jubilee at 2:30 P.M.* UP’s game started at 4 P.M., which meant The Coach would miss a chunk of the UAAP action. It didn’t seem like such a good start.

Yet everything else conspired for UP to win its last game for Season 69.

UP played well, save for a few errant, ano-ba-yan!?! passes that curdle the blood when there were only a few precious minutes left and barely three points in the margin.

But UP led all the way. No deadlocks allowed.

Latecomer Magi Sison was such a delight. He’s just a kid at heart, really, a beanpole in big basketball shoes. And he grins when he dumps a shot or gets a rebound. That is basketball—it’s supposed to be enjoyed, too.

Marvin’s brilliance lasted until the end game, thankfully. Nestor’s on-court spills (the most I’ve seen in his games this season, and I've missed a few) didn’t spoil his showmanship, and the crowd loved him for it. Woody Co—my other favorite among the boys—has been consistently stepping up in defense and offense, working both sides of the floor. Quiet and unassuming, but deadly and intense. I love this kid.

Even the referees helped; they were calling out fouls which they would’ve ignored in the previous games. Gee, the calls were close to favoring UP: not that I would’ve wanted it that way, but, boy, was it a welcome change from being on the other side of the uneven stick. I could’ve sworn the refs did not allow the margin to breach the three-point mark.

Though Binondo heaped a margin of +8 points on UP, it turns out many more bet on UP. Still scratching my head on that one, but I figure it was because it was a no-bearing game for UE.

Whattaheck, I think even UE played in favor of UP. Custodio was a dismal, almost half-hearted shade of himself. Borboran and that other UE kid, whatzisname, didn’t play well either, prompting Coach Dindo Pumaren to put in his second-stringers.

Like we did. In fact all our players were given the chance to rule the court, and I thought, hey, that’s how it should be, at least in our last game and under the circumstances.

Did the fact that it was a non-bearing game for UE play any factor in our win? Well, so what if it did? A win is a win is a win. And if you saw UP’s side of the stadium erupt in a blazon of arms in the air, posters big and small, people standing on their seats, then you’d know how much this victory is sweeter, better, longed for, and earned.

It was a good sendoff for the graduating boys—Galen, Ira and Nestor. I will miss Galen the most, because he was so committed to the game, even in what is probably the shortest stint ever in amateur basketball (barely eight months). Such a loss that we would not see him blossom further, as I know he still can.

At the post-game dinner, the host Jerry Esquivel summed it best when he said that the gathering that night was a beraka, a Hebrew word that means, loosely, a celebration—for any occasion and for any blessing. He said the Jews hold a beraka to celebrate life or a birth, as they would to celebrate death. And so it was only right that the Maroons celebrated both its victories and its defeats.

Until next year, Maroons!

* The Coach won his fourth game against Jubilee. St Stephen now leads the tourney with Chiang Kai Shek at 4-0.

From our shelf: Questions on life and death

2006-09-03T02:34:00.000+08:00

There are books you cannot put down, page-turners that keep you from finishing your work on time.

And then there are books you have to put down, like Thornton Wilder’s The Bridge of San Luis Rey—for you to catch your breath, for you to pump the air with your fist (quietly, of course, lest The Coach wakes from his slumber), for you to reflect on things beyond your ordinary grasp.

The proposition is provocative: a rope footbridge in Peru, known throughout, breaks in the year 1714, and five people plunge into the chasm below. Brother Juniper who was only a few steps away from crossing the bridge copes with his near-death by grappling with questions—his own brand of catechism: Why these five people? Why spare him? Is it destiny that dictates their deaths? He needs to make sense of the disaster, to find order behind the chaos. He investigates each of the five, chronicling the big and the small of their lives. He mulls: “Either we live by accident and die by accident, or we live by plan and die by plan.” Ironically, the bridge ultimately claims him as its sixth victim: he, with his work, is in the end burned alive for heresy.

Thornton raises questions on “acts of God,” a term I first encountered in law school, sounding to me then severely ominous, like the imprecatory slaying of thousands or the F5 twister. The term, as it is used in contracts, is synonymous to fortuitous events. I remember wondering how lawyers could consider God’s acts—He whom we Christians deem sovereign—as merely happenstance.

Brother Juniper’s commitment to his quest is fueled by his previous, systematic cataloging of fifteen Peruvians who survived and fifteen who died in an earlier pestilence in another town. Brother Juniper rated these thirty people from 1 to 10 on different criteria: each life or soul’s goodness, piety and usefulness. Such calculations were meant to support or counter theological assumptions: do the good really die young? Are the wicked spared from death?

Which, for me, begs another question: is God fair? Did God ordain life to be fair? Our neighbor, truly searching for guidance, accosted me with that question right after the tsunami hit Aceh. We ended up—six of us neighbors—bringing potluck and bibles to our house and discussing the issue further.

God and fair play: what a tricky issue to handle. Something, perhaps, for another day in this blog. Something I’d really like to think about in more depth, too.

I caught the latest film version of The Bridge of San Luis Rey on cable about two months ago but had to let go after some time. I couldn’t continue watching the film. I love Kathy Bates dearly and she is often magnificent in her roles, but in my mind she is not the Marquesa, no. Even Robert de Niro failed to move me. I couldn’t look past their accents and see the book’s Lima, Peru. I’m not sure if that was the film’s fault or mine. Perhaps it would be really difficult to adapt a story wrestling with deep philosophical issues.

UP Naming Mahal

2006-08-25T21:07:00.000+08:00

Something interesting from one of the forums that discuss Maroons basketball: After the recent clash of the Katipuneros, while UP students and alums sang the alma mater song, one Atenean asked another why the UP hymn was in Filipino when all other school hymns were in English.

One of the UP supporters flanking the two Ateneans—no doubt also piqued that many Ateneans had invaded the seats reserved for UP—snapped: "What's more puzzling is why seven out of eight universities in the UAAP sing their hymns in English!"

Actually, the song was first written in English and titled "UP Beloved." I don't know, though, when it was translated to Filipino.

For the Maroons who only mumble when singing our school hymn, here are the lyrics (as far as The Coach and I know them; please let us know if there are any inaccuracies).

May we all indeed become what we have been called—the hope of the nation:

UP NAMING MAHAL
by Nicanor Abelardo

UP naming mahal, pamantasang hirang.
Ang tinig namin sana’y inyong dinggin.
Malayong lupain amin mang mararating
‘Di rin magbabago ang damdamin.
‘Di rin magbabago ang damdamin.

Luntian at pula, sagisag magpakailanman.
Pagdiwang natin, bulwagan ng dangal
Humayo’t itanghal giting at tapang.
Mabuhay ang pag-asa ng bayan.
Mabuhay ang pag-asa ng bayan.

Thanks to Bitoy and Sir A for pointing out the inaccuracies! :)

PR runs the world

2006-08-24T00:41:00.000+08:00

In a CSI Miami episode, an elegant, coiffed woman who ran her own PR company blustered to the police about how her fifteen-year-old daughter was innocent and was merely driven to crime by the wiles of a criminal.

Duquesne, the blonde with the nasal voice that somehow manages to squeak, replied, “With all due respect, Ma’am, that’s just PR.”

“Yeah?” the woman retorted. “Well, the world runs on PR. Even trials.”

True?

I’m thinking: Maybe even basketball? And how we address issues affecting a team? And the league? And officiating? And, most importantly, raising support?

Hmmm.

Battle of the Katipuneros 2

2006-08-21T20:08:00.000+08:00

Seven things distracted me from enjoying yesterday's game of the Katipuneros, a game that highlighted the best and worst of UP’s gameplay.

The seven, in no particular order:

A jackhammer behind me, about 50 to 55 years old, with gray hair and a voice that drills into your skull. Whew, grandma, what big tonsils you have!

A mother of an Atenean, she was abusing anyone who dared even clap for UP, picking fights, shouting obscenities. I was kept busy pacifying the UP supporters, players’ girlfriends and parents around me who were determined to give her an eye for an eye: “Please,” I said, “just let her be.”

Her picture is purposely blurred, dear reader, to protect her identity, for I do not wish her ill. I learned later from my Ateneo friends that she is named B, a word that can mean infantile—apropos, yes? B harangued the players, wishing them bodily harm (really) and cursing with her hands. Had she vilified The Coach, this post would not be written here but in a counter-affidavit, explaining why I leapt over the railing and slugged her.

I was told much later that photos of B had been splashed recently on a website or blog run by a student of a rival school. In a series of frames that I still have to google for, B is seen praying, eyes closed and hands together; then she is seen screaming at the court, her face distorted in anger; then, in a final act of piety, she jabs the air with her hands, both her third fingers fully extended, in the unmistakable dirty sign.

“Ano?” an Atenean said when I recounted B's recent behavior. “'Di pa ba siya natuto?” Apparently not. But she did learn to be more observant of her surroundings just in case someone nefarious, like me, would again take her photos.

After the game, B scrambled to the empty chair beside me and asked politely if I took her picture. “Yes,” I said, unperturbed but startled at her sudden courtesy. “You wanna see?” She said she had seen me clapping for Ateneo and that I looked like a nice girl (meaning I would not write something like this in my blog). She said someone had taken my picture in case I would do anything bad with the ones I took of her—like show them to the rival school, perhaps? That’s when I told her that (i) my heart is with UP when it comes to basketball; (ii) I am an Ateneo alum, Batch ‘91 Law School, passed the bar, yes, therefore a lawyer and therefore no pushover, never mind that I usually sponge help off my lawyer-friends nowadays when it comes to actual lawyering—it works well with erring MMDA, too, you know, just as it works with mothers, like it did with B. When people ask me if I regret wasting fourteen years in law school and in practice before discovering fiction, I always tell them of the time an MMDA officer wrongfully accosted me for swerving. A valid I.D. issued by the Integrated Bar of the Philippines, plus tears, equals freedom from tyranny.

B smiled and said, “O.K. Thank you.” A true portrait of many a sports fan: rabid during the game, but nice afterwards. I wonder: which one is the more accurate? Perhaps both?

To be fair, there were many other UP and Ateneo fans who had been as—if not more—vituperative than B.* But since she was the one behind me, alas, she gets top billing.

Binondo (and, I was told, also Cebu, yet another fertile marketplace for game betting) pegged a +6 ½ margin on UP, which translated, of course, into wanton officiating. Sorry for this tired refrain, but, yes, drat it, the refereeing was brazenly lopsided. Fifty-one free throws given to Ateneo—the highest ever, even higher than the record 48 free throws in UP’s first game against Ateneo. Fifty-one against, what, a lousy 17 against UP! (Postscript: I know, I know. Our plays are often made away from the hoop and UP is not the most sterling in its defense, but, still, did you witness the officiating?)

We saw so many hand checks against UP, traveling by Blue Eagles, fouls by Salamat against Marvin Cruz, Ford Arao's charging (he lowered his shoulder; ergo, a charge) that was, horrors, called against Migs de Asis.

The cotton candy, which kept bobbing up and down at the end of a blue stick, was color blue. Isn’t cotton candy supposed to be pink? Yeegads, even the cotton candy girl was pro-Ateneo.

The UP walkout in the second quarter, caused by what I know is a single referee’s arrogance or stupidity. Your pick. I wanted the Maroons to just abandon the game, the sportsmanship of basketball having been sacrificed anyway to the bookies controlling the referees. But Coach Joe wanted the team to stay true to its calling, to return and play. That’s just the kind of guy he is.

Top to tip of me nervously rooting for The Coach and Coach Ramil Cruz, who, after Coach Joe had been sadly thrown out of the game, had to take up the coaching duties. I was so worried for them; it is my job to worry and get acid reflux. I was so proud of them (and so was Coach Joe; he pumped The Coach's hand later that night for "coaching well"), for they both led the team well. The Maroons ran neck and neck with the taller, stronger, older Ateneo veterans until the final quarter when, alas, Marvin became his colorless self. Marvin had played excruciatingly well in the first three quarters—he always does—which severely highlighted his lackluster** performance in the final stretch...sigh, he often does.*** I’m not assigning blame on Marvin (and this is my blog, not The Coach’s, therefore my own opinion, awright, dears? Because, yes, I have my own brain), particularly since UP was also playing against the referees (who were sloughing off our players one at a time), but had Marvin continued with his streak, it would’ve been a different ball game, in spite of.

Four intense Maroons supporters in front of me, who couldn’t help standing up despite their cushy P250 seats (P750 to P1,000 if you buy from the scalpers). They were nice girls, though, so I gave up after a while and started reading my…

…new books! Whee! Fresh from the sale at the nearby National Superstore (going on until September 17, folks), and particularly this one, Caroline See’s Making a Literary Life: Advice for Writers and Other Dreamers. It is, according to its author, for “older people who wanted to write in their youth and never got around to it.” Yowzah. That’s me, Caroline. It’s more Zen-like advice than craft, but that suits me fine. Enough to cause me to pray for more timeouts so I can read the first few chapters.

Gotta go before I ruffle more feathers. Ah, yes, the power of the written word. Matthew Broderick's character in one war movie (he was a diarist) said something like, "I learned something today. People believe in things I write. The minute I put my thoughts on paper, something magical happens. They figure if you put so much effort in writing it down, it must be true."****

* The Coach got a call sometime yesterday evening about a scuffle between UP and Ateneo supporters at the Dencio’s branch at the Araneta. I heard UP might have started it, and an Atenean might have been hurt. Sad. And sorry. For both schools, as well as the league.

** To clarify to the innumerable Marvin fans, lest they flash-mob me, I use the word lackluster to mean lacking in brilliance, which, given Marvin's extraordinariness, may mean he played only average. Which, to me, was sadly not enough.

*** Marvin is an incredible player. There is no one in today's league who can stop him. But his fourth-quarter play is killing his chances at the MVP plum. He reportedly said that he gets rattled at the end game, a condition—choking, it is called—not uncommon among, say, golfers and tennis players. He might want to work on that: it is also killing UP's chances this year. Perhaps it's unfair to foist that much responsibility on him, it's true, but the fact of the matter is that he's one of only three veterans in the team. Circumstances are such that he could either be a savior or an ordinary player.

**** A superfluous footnote--for the Polymath.

Excuse you

2006-08-20T00:19:00.000+08:00

The most ingenious excuse (so far) a student gave me for not turning in his paper: he swapped cars with his brother, and his paper was in the trunk of the car the brother was using.

The most recent excuses given by two of my students for not doing homework: (i) she doesn’t have time; (ii) his previous school didn’t give students homework.

The most irritating reason for decrying a project: the other teacher teaching the same subject to another section didn’t impose such a requirement. (This, coupled with a whine.)

The most horrific thing a student told me, loudly, before the entire class: for me to tell her in advance if I will dismiss the class early so she would know when not to use her color-coded car and instead use another one, because heaven forbid that she wait for another three hours before she can drive home.

The most perplexing reason given by a student for allowing cell phones on campus and in class: because she cannot keep going to her car every now and then to check if she has messages—that would be oh so tiring.

* * *

For the teachers among us, here's a poem celebrating the creativity of our students.

Excuses (for English 103)
by Bart Edelman

I tell my students, the first day,
To make them interesting, at least,
Be ingenious, for God’s sake;
After all, this is a creative writing class.
Let’s put the brakes on dead grandmothers,
Fender-benders in the parking lots,
Computer malfunctions at the 23rd hour,
A host of wisdom teeth removals,
And various court appearances,
Preventing the young scholars
From attending English 103.
Why not push the purple envelope,
As my colleagues like to say.

I give extra credit up the wazoo
For excuses that involve absences
Due to imbroglios with exotic animals;
Such as llamas, ocelots, wallabies,
And reptiles of any kind—
The scalier the better, in my grade book.
If I hear another aunt or uncle
Who suddenly needs to be fetched
At the Los Angeles Airport Terminal,
I’ll shoot myself in the medulla oblongata,
And mind you, that’s not a pretty sight.

Let’s reward the inventive pupils,
Capable enough to concoct tales
So worth the simple telling,
They don’t ever feel the need
To complete their assignments;
They can just orally dispense them
And lather up their classmates and me
With a plot or two along the way.

Think of all the possibilities:
Pole-vaulting bank robbers on the lam,
Imploding hotels in the basement,
Exploding motorboats under the overpass,
Ecumenical orgies behind the cafeteria,
And, yes, that gratuitous alligator in the grass.

Or forever keep your peace...

2006-08-18T02:03:00.000+08:00

The Coach and I have received a few nudges for me to continue posting about UP Men’s Basketball games. Apparently there are two forums* that provided links to this blog. I read in one discussion how my post was considered “evidence” to back up an allegation. One forum shut down a thread last Monday, and then suspended all remaining threads last Tuesday, to hose down incendiary comments and obiter dicta, hopefully not stoked further by my posts here.

Whew.

I just wanted to write about what The Coach and I look forward to each July since 1980 (for The Coach) and since 1986 (for me). Basketball is The Coach’s passion. For the game he would skip sleep. For the game he would spend time and money on training. The game has even cropped up in many a quarrel between us.

But what to write about? I hesitate to write not because UP has been losing its games, but because of the quality of those losses. Almost all of those losses should not have been, and the reasons are sad and…well, I will stop there. There’s not much I can say at this point without raising anyone’s hackles.

Still, there are other things I can share, including stuff I learned or remembered the last few days:

We UP alums and students love our school. We will even fight each other to prove that. Which is sad, in a funny kind of way.

At the stadium many of us fans cheer loudest when our team is leading, but predictably fall silent—perhaps in sympathetic dismay, anxiety or shock—when the team falls behind. Well, I say this is the moment our team needs our support the most. I say we should be noisier when our players are not doing as well as we hope. I say we support the team not because it’s winning, but because it’s our team.

Many fans, even the most loyal among us, don’t know enough about basketball. Yes, including me. We cheer, jeer and analyze, but very few know the technicals of the game. We criticize and second-guess from our accountability-free vantage point, but we know so little.

Sometimes the fan—or, yeegads, an occasional interfering parent or even a well-meaning university officer—who knows some about basketball is the more destructive. A little knowledge is a dangerous thing. Which leads me to my next point…

Coaches know best.

A coach’s job is highly political, perhaps more so for a UP coach. He has to contend with so much. More than the X’s and the O’s, he has to deal with different personalities with different perspectives and different agendas.**

Alumni support is more often than not a Catch-22 situation, with shades of Field of Dreams: you build it, they will come. Except that to build it—a good team—you need alumni support. Which usually doesn’t come unless the team wins games. How’s that for a Gordian knot? UP, in particular, needs our support because it cannot fund its own sports programs. Many times our fundraisers entice support by proving that ours could be a winning team. But why? Support is not a commercial transaction that requires a give-and-take. We support the team, regardless. We paid a measly P500-semestral tuition in the 1980s, dagnabbit, and we can’t give back?

A good college basketball program takes a few years to develop. We can never demand a strong finish in a coach’s early years unless the previous coach laid the foundation for a victory, and all the present coach has to do is take the pickings. There must be good recruiting beforehand, something that the Maroons, alas, will have to make up for since we didn’t do solid recruiting the last two years.

It’s a given: schools with strong alumni support are more likely to attract the better players. Alums are crucial to the basketball program. Like I told The Coach: half of the game is won outside the court and before the season.

The “university” portion in UAAP (University Athletic Association of the Philippines) is often overlooked and overshadowed by “athletic.” Sad.

And, on a haha-hee hee note: the UAAP games are rated PG: Parental Guidance required. Check it out below. I can offer many reasons why, but that would violate my self-imposed gag order.

* My sparring partner Jonski, lest you flinch, I checked first if it’s all right to use forums. Heh.
** Alas, Jonski, the intricacies of using Latinate forms. I’m junking agendum and treating agenda as singular.

Message

2006-08-15T17:52:00.000+08:00

My friend, Art, who won this year’s third prize in future fiction (Palanca) said he had initially plowed his way through his first drafts to plant a "message,” convinced then that a good story must contain a moral.

Should fiction contain a moral?

John Gardner in his essay, On Moral Fiction, argued that fiction is moral when it is true art. According to another writer's summary of this essay, Gardner attacks what he sees as contemporary literature's lack of moral content. In Gardner's view, moral fiction "attempts to test human values, not for the purpose of preaching or peddling a particular ideology, but in a truly honest and open-minded effort to find out which best promotes human fulfillment."

What I do not want any fiction to do is preach, such that the characters, plot and language become secondary to the writer's not-always-hidden agenda of imposing his or her particular convictions. What good fiction does is not to teach us lessons about life or about What Should Be, but to help us "weigh and consider." (Sir Francis Bacon once advised: "Read not to contradict and confute, not to believe and take for granted, nor to find talk and discourse, but to weigh and consider.")

In this sense, then, fiction will always be "moral" because it cannot help but make a statement, regardless of whether and especially if the writer was not conscious of doing so. Fiction always makes a stand: the characters, the narrator, the author, the reader—they will all have their own worldview. If the fiction is done well, then it will not sound like a sermon; neither will it present a contrived plot designed to showcase the moral lesson. The ideas in good fiction are added to our processing (which is more often than not unconscious) of what it is to be human, to belong to the human race.

I agree with Mary Gordon—a novelist and teacher—that we should look to fiction "for moral complexity, not moral certainty."

In spite of

2006-07-30T15:38:00.000+08:00

What does it profit a man if he gains the entire game, but suffers the loss of his soul to Binondo?

As I write this, the UP Fighting Maroons has just struggled, laboriously, from a 16-point deficit with the FEU Tamaraws, evening out at 63-63 in the beginning of the second half. TV commentator TJ Manotoc says that it was an "uphill climb" for this "undersize team."

I do not know how this game will end. But I know one thing: I am getting tired of two "in spite of's" that plague the team. Not its small size, for that cannot be helped and the boys fight as if this is of no matter. Not its youth and inexperience, for these too cannot be helped and in some ways can work for the team.

What really vex me are the inefficient, almost manipulative refereeing and the specter of Binondo eating away at college basketball.

There are way too many examples of appalling refereeing and sadly, whether by chance or choice, most of these against UP. I watched, aghast, when in the last seconds of the game against Ateneo, the referee suddenly called a technical on UP’s Marvin Cruz for delaying the game when he tapped the ball from Kramer, giving Ateneo two free throws and ball possession. Whaaa??? Marvin’s violation was his first, which meant he should get only a warning, not a technical. The other delay on UP was slapped on the bench, and hence cannot be counted on Marvin Cruz. The technical on him was heinous: it turned the tide in favor of the Blue Eagles, as did the other stupefying calls.

Worse, in the last 21 seconds of the UP-Adamson game last Sunday, with the Falcons a mere one point ahead of UP and the Maroons with the last ball possession, the referee suddenly called an atrocious backing violation against Marvin Cruz. Whaaa??? In the repeated replays we watched, The Coach and I saw how firmly Marvin settled his foot on the backcourt waaaay before the ball reached his hands. There was no mistaking it. Immediately after the game, The Coach went to the ABS-CBN OB-van with UAAP Deputy Commissioner Ato Badolato to show him the absurdity. The Coach knew the technicals of the sport inside out: he himself had been a Deputy Commissioner of the UAAP for three years and had personally trained referees. And Commissioner Ato Badolato agreed: it was clear—there was no such violation. No call should have been made. UP should have been given 21 seconds to shoot what was probably the last ball.

But what to do? Nothing more than to probably suspend the erring referee. No other remedy can be made—for in basketball, as in life, judgment calls, however bad, are part of the game.

That gruesome call likewise decided that game. With all of 21 seconds on the Falcons' side, it could waste the time and retain its one-point lead.

My only consolation is that the Binondo bookies put a +2 margin on UP against the Falcons. But since the Falcons won by only two points, then it meant that the many who bet against UP, given the favorable odds for the Falcons, lost. Nasunog is the streetspeak for it. Many of them, hopefully, burned to a crisp.

It is now the last quarter and the Tamaraws has recovered the game, putting a comfortable 12 points. The Maroons put in what the commentators call "impossible shots," narrowing the margin to 8.

I wonder what margin Binondo gave the Maroons in this game against the Tamaraws.

Funny how the margin—a word that can mean the periphery, or blank space, or outskirts—can dictate the outcome of a game. Put enough money on a team, and the referee’s vision dims, everything seen clearly only upon hindsight and frequent replays on the VHS, and probably shelved into the catch-all limbo termed “judgment calls.” Translation: you cannot do anything about it.

It is an affliction that sadly can reach players—professional or amateur—of all teams. Oftentimes players’ shots turn awry without warning, defenses crumble, and balls fly out of the court. Five years in the PBA and MBA trained The Coach’s eye to spot dead-on when any player fools around: The Coach can map out a player’s tendencies, whether he favors his left or his right, the best way to defend him, how he takes his first step and how quick it is, his release of the ball, and if he fakes before a lay-up. A player works his body into a routine, his limbs falling into its natural rhythms. It would be against the laws of his body to suddenly fumble, against his nature to change in mid-game the release of his ball. Years ago when I would sit with The Coach when he was breaking a game down to a player’s specifics, I would hear him mutter, “Mahirap magbobo-bobohan ang matalino.”

How has the long arm of Binondo reached the UAAP? When the Metropolitan Basketball Association (MBA) burst into the scene in the late 90s and even when it petered out years later, it ate into the PBA market, which, despite furious beefing up of its ranks by recruiting Fil-Ams and Fil-Shams, barely recovered. The entry of the NBA and the U.S. NCAA into our cable TV—with their flashier, better play—dug deep into the PBA’s Achilles heel. With the public’s dwindling interest in the PBA and a redirected televised attention to college basketball, Binondo turned its eye on the more profitable UAAP.

Remember the gambling scandal unearthed about two years ago in the universities? The papers reported the massive betting made by students, from grade school to college, resulting in bookies hustling after the young ones for lost and unpaid hundreds of thousands, interest compounding. This hasn’t abated, only hushed. My friend who has a grade schooler in Ateneo said some kids still pool their money together to buy the minimum P500 bet.

Executives of a Makati bank, of which I used to be a retained counsel, would bet even on teams of which they are not alums. They would place their bets on the phone, keeping an eye on a TV set turned surreptitiously to Studio 23, while the other sets rightfully monitored the stock market and the ANC channel.

The Coach himself, when he was a Deputy Commissioner, was not spared from the tentacles of betting. When he and the other commissioners chose the referees of every game, they had to resort to an almost cloak-and-dagger system: they would call in several referees to suit up, confine them to an undisclosed room, confiscate their cell phones, and in the last minutes before a game actually starts, conduct a raffle to determine which three referees will call the game. The three are kept closeted by the commissioners while The Coach would explain to them the plays of the competing schools, as well as players’ tendencies, so they would reduce any judgment calls. In this manner the Dark Force would be hard put to invest its money on any one referee. Still, some shady characters, as well as a few school or team officials, would attempt to penetrate the raffle. How distressing that the “play” part of college ball, the part which should celebrate the game and the university, is being infected, insidiously, by big business.

Sometime into the season when he was still a Deputy Commissioner, The Coach changed his cell phone number, the only time he did so, so he could avoid calls that would only cloud his judgment. He and I prayed for God’s grace to help him all throughout. It was not easy for him and the other commissioners: juggling complaints on one side, monitoring the refereeing and staving off Binondo, which at one time plunked over P150 million on an Ateneo-DLSU game.

There. The Tamaraws just won by 8 points over my boys. My heart sinks. The commentators say that the eight rookies of UP will spell a “scary team” in the years to come. It is of little comfort to me.

I wonder: as Coach Joe Lipa talks to his boys, how will he encourage them? How will he tell them to continue to fight a good fight, in spite of? They only want to play: this is a game they love, sometimes even beyond school.

I wish Binondo would just let them play.

Faith, love, time and my friend SN

2006-07-28T04:00:00.000+08:00

My friend SN was in a spiritual funk, a path I’ve been on several times. I’d like to share portions of what I wrote her, rewritten to suit this space.

Dear SN,

I'm sorry to hear you feel like you're "away" from God. Perhaps there are some things in your life you need to sort out. Our relationship with God is sometimes affected, strongly, by our relationship with our earth fathers and mothers. The father and mother wounds we have dictate how we see, appreciate and deal with God the Father.

Don't worry about not being "diligent." Our relationship with God is not a set of do's and don'ts—reading the Bible, praying, reaching out, etc.—no, never like that. Ours is really a relationship: dealing, talking, searching, hurting, processing, understanding. We deal with God out of the overflow of our hearts as to what He has done for such as unworthy as we.

Sometimes what we lack is awe, for a love as unfathomable as His.

And we lack reverential fear, at what He is and what He can do.

The world is too loud: it drowns out His still, small voice. But do not ever think that the God of the Old Testament has changed: He's still the same—powerful, majestic, holy. God of the OT flexes a muscle and the man holding the ark dies. He speaks, and a world is formed. This world that chooses to hurt Him so, He can wipe off the universe with a single word, a thought. But He chooses to love us gently, inspite of.

Reading His Word is just like wanting to hear a beloved's voice. Approach it that way. Know that the author wrote it for you, you whom He formed with such care, attention and love.

The Lord is a big guy. He can take all your ranting, and not blink. I've had numerous occasions to just rail at Him, to wrestle with Him, but He knows me so well, as He should—He made me, after all—and what I do doesn't surprise Him. But what I do can hurt Him, grieve Him.

When I run away from Him, it is not so much that He gets angry or wrathful and brings the heavens down on me (as He could, but doesn't), but it's more that He gets grieved at the willful rejection. Like we would, if we were to be rejected.

God is a loving Father and desires no more than to be yours. For us He made an entire world, and peopled it for us. What we do—fellowship, worship, quiet time, prayer—is really just our response to Him. It is not borne out of guilt or duty, but of love.

Ours is a heart-to-heart relationship, a spirit calling out to a Spirit. God always looks to the heart, not to the letter of the law. My prayer is that you would really hear Him speak to you, to encounter Him in fresh, new ways that will make your relationship with Him flower and just come alive, that you would be so sensitive to Him that you would hear Him, always, on the street, while you work, as you sleep.

Love,
J

From the Happy Box, #1

2006-07-25T02:25:00.000+08:00

I keep three Happy Boxes (and may need to set up one more), each storing whatnots that make me happy or remind me of happy times. Stuff like the sand dollar my friend/poet Jeneen found in Bais, Negros in our weekend break from the 2001 Dumaguete workshop, or the 1986 ticket to the UP-FEU championship game that UP won (The Coach bought that ticket for me in the heady first year of our romance), and my first passport issued in 1991.

Good for the soul. And for remembering how incredibly the Lord has blessed The Coach and me through the years, how faithful He has been.

I saw this strip in one of the Boxes. Yes, humor abounds even in the worst of a writer's times. Hee. Laughter is so good. I wish you a belly-aching laugh, at least once this week.

Over the rainbow

2006-07-23T20:41:00.000+08:00

My flight home to Cebu last June rocked. Literally. Turbulence shook the plane and rain spattered the windows.

But not before I caught a rainbow in living color.

If you'll look closely, you'll discover another rainbow to the left, a faint echo of its more vivid cousin, diffused by the clouds and rainshowers.

Glorious.

Left and Write

2006-07-23T01:39:00.000+08:00

Two nights ago The Coach grumbled as he tap-tapped on Samwise, our iBook. “Janet, where are the letters!?!” he reproached me, as if I was singularly responsible for the loss.

I am. Some of the letters, see, I have wiped off the keyboard in my earnestness, and The Coach—whose post-World Cup/NCAA relationship with Samwise is mostly limited to checking peyups.com or if Championship Productions slashed the prices of its coaching videos—needs the letters to navigate his way around the Web.

My experience with the keyboard was different. Like the many among you who spend dedicated time on the computer, I hardly look at the keyboard; my fingers fly over the QWERTYs as I write. Some time ago, whenever I needed to encode the phrase left and right, I ended up writing left and write. Thrice. Whoa. Samwise the Wise uprears: You, who want to be a writer, write!

Yessir.

As for The Coach’s woes, gee. Help? Are there letters I can buy and stick on the keyboard?

Will bug the trusty Adel Gabot, Mobile Philippines editor and certified MacMan, as soon as he comes back from his well-deserved honeymoon.

From our shelf: Borrowed Finery

2006-07-21T19:37:00.000+08:00

Do not read Borrowed Finery like I did: in spurts, while waiting for the elevator or lining up to file our tax return. This book needs to be savored and draw in, like clear morning sunshine or sea breeze. Not that Paula Fox’s memoir reveals a life free of wounds, for there are many of these, more than a young girl’s fair share, no matter how precocious she is.

Paula approaches her past with the same intelligence and sensitivity she employs in her writing. The almost disjointed telling highlights her life as a giveaway child, shuttled from one place to another, as far as Cuba, where there ''was no one who said [her] name for hours at a time.'' Her spare prose does not hold back; it pierces in its quietness, free of judgment or reservation, unabashed. I recoil at the emotional roulette she suffered in the hands of her parents-playing-at-being-parents, easing only when Paula’s humor cuts in, thankfully, as it frequently does.

I love her Uncle Elwood, a minister, the father many of us would wish we had, who took “thinking walks,” who read to her and surrounded her with books, who took her to the grave of Mark Twain, and to the house of Washington Irving to exorcise her fear of the headless horseman.

Though I was bewildered at the sudden fast-forward to the time Paula meets the daughter she put up for adoption, I was quieted by the shades of hope and healing in the memoir’s closing moments. More of that light, please, for Paula Fox, now 78 and discovered and celebrated anew by the literary community.

Some of the luminous lines I enjoyed. There are many more for you to unearth.

Time was long in those days, without measure. I marched through the mornings as if there was nothing behind me or in front of me, and all I carried, lightly, was the present, a moment without end.

...

After downing a few drinks, [my father] would fail in love with his own voice, theatrically honeyed, filled with significant whispers and pauses. He was in thrall to his voice; his thoughts stumbled behind.

...

Could you escape from a divorce the way you could from a marriage? Was it possible to get a divorce from a divorce?

...

I grasped consciously for an instant what had been implicit in every aspect of daily life with Uncle Elwood—that everything counted and that a word spoken as meant contained a mysterious energy that could awaken thought and feeling in both speaker and listener.

* Thank you, dear Polymath, for giving me this book. Your giving was unexpected, and all the more charming and precious for that.

Twilight, Shmilight

2006-07-21T00:11:00.000+08:00

My friend, Jon, an editor and a guitar artist now based in Davao, is my keeper when it comes to the English language. It is he who spars with me about words: how healthful—not healthy—should be used in describing options or food, why a rebel who returns to the fold is called a returnee, not a returner, and what is the impact of impact.

A few weeks ago I emailed him something about twilight, and, true to form, he asked if I was maybe referring to dusk, which question sent us both running to Wikipedia. And found us these:

Sunset, also called sundown in some American English dialects, is the time at which the Sun disappears below the horizon in the west. It should not be confused with dusk, which is the point at which darkness falls, some time after the beginning of twilight when the Sun itself sets.

Dusk should not be confused with sunset, which is the moment when the trailing edge of the Sun itself sinks below the horizon.

Twilight is the time before sunrise or after sunset when sunlight scattered in the upper atmosphere illuminates the lower atmosphere and the surface of the Earth.

So: it is sunset when the edge of the sun hits the horizon, dusk when the sun has gone below the horizon but before the sky becomes dark, and twilight is just after sunset or before dawn when the sun is below the horizon.

Coolness. Now that we got that straight, I can now say with all intellectual honesty and accuracy that I come alive at dusk: this kind of dusk that falls outside our window. Fiery. The reds go into my bloodstream and wake me up.

I’m like a vampire, a term Jon uses loosely around me. I agree, even when some of my diver friends tag me a “child of the sun.” What the heck: I am sleepy in the mornings and half-awake in the afternoons.

Good morning, folks. It’s midnight.

Happy spiritual birthday, Jon. The memory of that walk we three shared 23 years ago--you, me, the Lord--remains fresh, whole, beautiful. I love you,my dearest brother.

Morning has broken

2006-07-20T00:37:00.000+08:00

When I was told years ago that marriage would turn my life upside-down, I didn't think it would mean this: that we'd sleep at 6 in the morning every day and wake up at 2 in the afternoon.

That is our schedule these days, what with The Coach’s mandatory night shift at Air 21 so he can cope with his UP and St Stephen coaching duties in the afternoons.

And this is the view that greets us before we sleep in the wee hours.

Battle of the Katipuneros

2006-07-18T20:47:00.000+08:00

My two beloved alma maters slugged it out at the Ninoy Aquino stadium last Sunday. Either way I'd win. But when it comes to the hardcourt, I'm a Maroon. (I'm an Eagle only in the moot court.)

I should feel bad we lost. But it's hard to be morose because my boys fought well, as well as they could given the breaks of the game and terrible refereeing (and, no, I'm not just saying that; The Coach just finished splicing the videotapes of the game to ferret out the too many bad calls on UP).

Binondo bettors had given our boys an advantage +4 margin, underscoring yet again the stark 3-inch differential between the two teams. My classmate at the Ateneo nicknamed our team the UP Midgets. He’s an RTC judge: who am I to tell His Honor to get lost?

The refs gave our boys a hard time. We were losing players, fast. Coach Joe Lipa wrung his hands in frustration. “Jerry!” he barked, calling out to the Maroons support staff handing out towels to the players evicted from the game. "Ikaw na nga ang maglaro! Inubos na nila players natin!”

The refs gave Ateneo an all-time high 49 free throws and slammed on UP a record 8 or so calls on traveling. Three or so years ago, DLSU Coach Franz Pumaren stormed the UAAP Commissioner’s office because the refs gave the opposing team 39 free throws—almost statistically improbable. And now the refs gave the Eagles 49 free throws? It meant Ateneo had to work for only a measly 50 points to win.

UP edged out Ateneo in other areas—rebounding, assists, two- and three-pointers. The game, alas, was decided on the free throws.

The Coach is careful not to give in to the conspiracy theories floating about; he’d rather think the refs were simply not trained well, pointing out that there were also a few (only a few!) bad calls on Ateneo. Others, however, unabashedly made connections between the timing and quality of the calls to the +4 betting in Binondo.

The Peyups forum, as expected, is crammed with catcalls and cussing, in which I am tempted to join if not for The Coach’s equanimity about the loss. The Coach knows they still have to work out some of the Maroons’ bad decisions, like not boxing out, and acknowledges the team’s youth. But he is proud of his boys’ hustle, of Galen Cacha, who was just pulled out from the Intrams and started learning how to play only six months ago, yet became a rebounding force. (I think I heard The Coach or someone call him Cacha Gotcha. Never mind that Cacha missed 8 free throws.)

The past two-and-a-half days, The Coach wore down our VHS, playing and rewinding by the microsecond the UP-Ateneo game, checking for flaws in the refereeing, as well in the UP play. I told him my heart was breaking listening to the endless rewinding of our loss, and he said, “Why? We fought a good fight.”

Big hearts, big fight. What more could a fan want?

* Picture of the basketball hoop is not mine. Caught it in one of my trawling trips but, regrettably, can't remember from whose site I borrowed it.

Why work in a call center when you could be a...

2006-07-17T02:50:00.000+08:00

...score changer.

Maroon-ong

2006-07-10T03:16:00.000+08:00

The boys were not meant to win. Bookies and bet makers in Binondo heaped on them an advantage +8 points, which means those betting on them would win even if these boys lose the game with not more than an 8-point margin.

Only 4 of the twelve were returning players; the rest were rookies—bright-eyed, skittish, and alternating between excited and nervous. They were a small bunch. When they did the regulatory round robin, they looked puny compared with the UST beanpoles. “Maliit pala tayo, no?” mourned my seatmate, a UP alum. He was perturbed by the two- to three-inch differential between the two squads.

So was I. The UST Tigers were bigger and more athletic, enjoying a deeper bench of 10 veterans: in fact, they were able to substitute an entire platoon in the first half. But I have been a coach’s wife for twelve years to know that the biggest factor in any game is a good coach. And that the Fighting Maroons have: three coaches unafraid to lose their jobs to do what is right.

Under these coaches' care, the boys became steeped in the basics and technicals. They bled Maroon.

The boys suffered first two quarters of bad calls—so bad that in some instances the entire UP bench exploded to their feet, head coach Joe Lipa almost stormed the commissioners’ table, and The Coach stomped to the technical committee with his drill board. But no amount of hairline refereeing could have doused the fires out of the boys.

It was a cardiac game. The first half ended with UP leading by only two points: 45-43.

Which didn’t improve much by the end of the third quarter, with UP just one step ahead at 65-64.

The boys played like they weren’t rookies: Migs de Asis sunk in six triples, and Martin Reyes made four. At one point the UP team that ran the court was composed of four rookies and one sophomore.

The veterans did very well, too: Marvin Cruz—whose first step is quick and explosive—contributed 25 points (his highest in the amateurs, apparently), what with the plays designed for him in the mismatches.

Ira Buyco, my big bald baby, hustled well—which wasn’t limited to the usual rebounding and defending, but also included a stray [but legitimate] elbow here and there. In the game it was to Buyco that the young ones ran to to whine that so-and-so hit him, and Buyco would step up and give that so-and-so a piece of his, well, elbow. Tee hee.

It was pingpong basketball: the Maroons threw a 3-pointer, the Tigers responded. The Tigers sunk in a lay-up, and so did the Maroons. Yet another 3-pointer from the Tigers, and the Maroons followed suit: each side refusing to give in.

In the last two minutes, the score was skewed four points in favor of UP, partly due to the technical slapped on the UST head coach Pido Jarencio who barged into the court.

Which, alas, slipped to an even 92-92 in the final 12 seconds. The game was fast and furious, so much running and gunning. I couldn’t breathe anymore.

I wanted so much for UP to win its first game.

For Coach Joe Lipa, who is The Coach’s mentor, second father and ninong, from whom he inherited the reengineered swearword, “Pongalangala.” (There’s a story behind that. Tell you at another time.) These coaches love UP so much that they work even without pay. In the eight months that The Coach has dashed from his 9PM-5AM FedEx night shift to the 6AM UP practice before stopping for abbreviated sleep and then running to his 5PM St. Stephen basketball practice, UP paid him an allowance only thrice—a pittance not enough to cover his gasoline and food expenses.

But any one who is a purist about basketball knows coaching, like writing, isn’t about the money. It never was. The Coach is never happier than when he teaches college or high school kids who would dive for the ball. College ball is a coach’s game, where skills are taught and strategy pitted against strategy; professional basketball, on the other hand, is more of a players’ game. (Which is why The Coach wasn’t as happy when he did his PBA and MBA stints, though money was abundant. Then.)

Back to the game: UP had the ball in the last 12 seconds, and the score was even-Steven.

In the crucial huddle, Coach Joe directed the boys to spread the offense to give the best offensive player enough space to maneuver, the best being, of course, Marvin Cruz. Marvin dribbled a few precious seconds off the clock (to take the last shot and prevent UST from taking one), ran to the shaded area where three big men were waiting to pounce on him, leapt and shot the ball on a short jumper. It went in! The coliseum erupted in cheers, with less than one second remaining.

The Coach sang “UP Naming Mahal” like he always does—with conviction, even in the odd moments like when we’re in the car or in the house. He has never known another school except UP, he having been trained there since he was five years old.

Outside the Ninoy Aquino stadium, the moon joined the celebration, shining like a pearl.

Later, at the Zong resto at The Fort, the game gets even better in the retelling.

Mouse Potato Adventures # 1

2006-07-08T23:21:00.000+08:00

When you've got too much housework and so much to shake off from your mind, there's only one reasonable thing to do: reach for the mouse and hop from one site to the other, and you'd discover interesting stuff, like:

Niche is pronounced as nich or neesh.
Vincent van Gogh was a pastor's kid.
Magnatune delivers 60-minute, commercial-free podcasts of Rennaissance music.
Rubberneck is an intransitive verb that means "to look about, stare, or listen with exaggerated curiosity [e.g., 'Drivers passing the accident slowed down to rubberneck']."
Claire Messud is beautiful.
James Joyce's Araby is best read and heard.

Jejune

2006-07-08T19:21:00.000+08:00

Oy. Been busy. Massively. Small things, big things, things I should’ve done but didn’t, things I shouldn’t but did. Did invisible writing, read a lot, mostly to get away.

The house looks disheveled, even with the soft lights and dimmers I use to hide the disarray. I let music flood our house. Silence can be cruel; it underscores thoughts unwelcome. So many things happening the past weeks: mostly happy, but some immensely hurtful. And it’s bewildering how the world marches on, remorseless, and doesn’t wait for me to marshal my thoughts, for me to be whole before I, too, move on.

Can’t really bother The Coach right now. His baby, the UP Fighting Maroons, plays its first UAAP game tomorrow. He has other things to mind. Besides, other than listen, there’s not much he can do to help me with my, well, funk. Worse, he might be too cheerful, like he almost always is, with his attitude of gratitude, which I know is true and honest and noble and right—but I don’t want cheer right now. I want to feed this glumness.

A Father's Heart

2006-06-03T17:13:00.000+08:00

My college friend, V, a photographer and artist, was born a fish. Even when I had a few years’ head start on him, he still takes to diving better than I do. He is unfazed by the weight of the sea, unafraid to take risks even when his decisions violate NAUI safety guidelines, as well as all the laws of physics. I was his buddy when he first dived in Anilao, and he should’ve paid me for that service for he kept speeding after every fish he fancied, parting away from us, and I had to tear after him to lead him back to the pack—no easy feat for he had a UP swim team’s body, built for speed.

When we dived Kho Tao, Thailand, our entire team had to do an emergency ascent after a mere ten minutes: we lost V underwater. He had seen something interesting and tore after it. His lust for life and all its beauty proved far too irresistible.

V is able to bear pain and when he severely hurt his back in Bohol, he still managed to don his tank for one last dive in Balicasag, never mind that I had to tow him for, oh, about forty minutes.

V is creative, funny and gentle in adversity: when our friend, B, fell into the sea together with V’s camera—one of the first (and very expensive) digital cameras that came out then—V, without missing a beat, hugged the dripping B. He knew B needed more assurance of their friendship than he did over the state of his very wet camera. And when the hard rains lashed at us when we emerged from the Coron seas, with waves that turned white and foamy, and pitched the boat to and fro, V kept us singing for the hour’s trip back to the resort all the songs that contained the words “rain” and “ulan.” And we sang, punctuated by thunder and lightning.

Yet there is an aspect of his life where V is unsure of his footing: fathering. For many years now, V has struggled with his eldest son, who claws at life, at anybody. Several times V finds himself trapped between a rock and a hard place. Disciplining his son is such a sorrow: How can V protect his son from his own wrong decisions? Often V finds himself giving up.

But not last night.

Last night V wrote us from Hong Kong, where he and his family have lived for over ten years. The Coach and I read his letter in silence, touched by V's father heart. I asked V's permission to reprint his email here.

Mga kapatid,

Last Friday, my elder son decided to leave home. My wife and I are not in favor of his relationship with his girlfriend because it is detrimental to both of them. The girl is not allowed in the house. On that day I caught them in his room.

My elder son has been making wrong choices in life because of this relationship. He is out of school at the moment, and his violent tendencies have been apparent. He has not been following house rules and advice. He is a total rebel. When he left, I did not decline.

For one whole week, I tried to be strong in my decision to let him go. In fact I locked the gate of the house when I leave so he cannot enter when nobody is home. He cannot take a bath, he cannot eat the food at home. I was hoping that by doing that he will learn his lesson, that it is difficult to be away from your family, that it is difficult to succeed in life without proper education, that life is not easy. He doesn't have money so I assume he cannot be mobile and will probably starve eventually. I thought in my mind, "How long can his friends support him?" All through the week, I was hoping that this experience will teach him life's lesson.

This afternoon, just after office hours (I usually extend my working hours), I received a phone call from him. He said "Papa, why is it that nobody is home? I need to get something from my room." I almost did not hear the other words he said—just the word, "Papa." The word "Papa" melted my heart; it sounded so beautiful to my ears.

That was a spiritual moment. Now I have an idea how God feels when we call him Father. I haven't finished everything I needed to do, but I told him to wait for me because I am on my way home.

If it has been a difficult week for him, so it was for me. I suddenly realized where the pain and frustrations are coming from. What if my colleagues know my son does not live with me anymore? I am supposed to be a good manager, why can't I manage my own son? What if he cannot finish high school in time, or not at all? What about university? Other people's kids are doing well, what went wrong with my son? And the list of questions goes on.

When I heard my son say "Papa," I know deep in my heart that I love my son. I still love my son even if he is a total rebel. I love my son even if he doesn’t get into the university. I still love him even if he does not perform. Children are not trophies, sabi nga ni B. I felt a sense of freedom. Ngayon, alam ko na talaga ang meaning ng unconditional love. Our relationship with our Father God is the same. Even if we, His children, will go astray, it doesn't mean that He will cease to love us.

I will be patient. I will wait. My son is coming back. If I think this way towards my son, I wonder how God feels towards His children.

This night at home, I asked my son if he would like to eat out with me. He said he already had dinner. I told him to sleep in his room tonight: his mother will be arriving tomorrow from New York and his aunt has something for him. I know he was just waiting for the invitation. He went inside his room and sprayed some fragrance. He said he didn't like the smell. Then he asked for two hundred dollars. I gave him two hundred dollars. I felt like I gave him only two ten dollar bills. I wanted to give him some more. After putting the money in his pocket, he said he has to go but will be back. I asked him what time is he coming home. He said, before twelve.

I am not sure if my son has learned his lesson, but I'm quite sure I did.

V

Fishing

2006-05-29T21:46:00.000+08:00

Maybe I don’t pay The Coach enough compliments or maybe he feels guilty for only recently picking up on the chores he abandoned, or why else would he dance around me whenever I approach our bathroom, chortling, “Look how white the tiles are” or “Hmmm, ang bango ng banyo.”

I can’t blame him. I do my own share of fishing as well.

“Honey,” I asked one day when I felt bloated. “Am I beautiful?”

“Maganda ka naman,” he said. Stoutly.

“Naman?!?” I shrieked, piqued at the qualifier. “Why is there a naman?!?” The good man, never knowing what hit him, had to stop what he was doing to explain the ramifications of “naman.” Being Cebuana to the core, I didn’t believe him entirely. It would’ve been simpler if he had used the term “quite”—all I would’ve done was ask whether he was using the word in the American sense (somewhat) or the British sense (entirely).

But I never learn. Last night before we slept, I snuggled up to him and asked, “Honey, am I a good wife?”

“Of course you are, sweetie,” he said, readily but not too hastily or else I’d suspect it was a stock answer (I am impossible, am I not?).

“But I want to be a better wife,” I said.

“Okay,” he said, quick to the draw. “Then you wash the dishes.”

Remind me never to go fishing again.

True Colors

2006-05-26T16:18:00.000+08:00

The tests we take online--to find out what kind of movie we are, what our name would be in French, what our eating style is--they are indubitably fun, fun, fun, but no different from horoscopes and I-ching, methinks. Many of us desire to be told who and what we are. But in many instances it’s not a genuine search for self: sometimes we cheat in those tests, perhaps make our answers more palatable and manipulate the results. We have in our minds an ideal of what we are and could be, and wish, almost with despair, that we are right.

Janet, your true color is Red!

Your color is red, the color of racy sportscars, blushing cheeks, and luscious roses. Red symbolizes passion, romance, and love. So, since you're ruled by red, you probably trust your feelings more than your brain and tend to act spontaneously. If you see something you want, you go for it without thinking twice — impulsive is your middle name. You don't wait around for people to make decisions, either; you dive right in. Quite the romantic, you pay close attention to your emotions. In fact, if your heart isn't in what you're doing, you won't be satisfied. Of course, even when you do pour all your energy into the projects you tackle, your impetuous nature means your passions can shift as frequently as the wind. That's why some reds have trouble with commitment. Our advice? Next time you're feeling fickle, think before you act, if possible. You might be surprised at the results. Overall, though, it's great to be red. No one lives life more completely than you do.

Making time

2006-05-21T15:14:00.000+08:00

My friend, Winthrop, who doubles as our computer 911 guy, whooped when he learned I joined the blogosphere and wondered how much time I really have for blogging.

Very leeeeeettle time, but, yes, there is time. While defrosting the ref or waiting for the manang to pick up our laundry, and at the right moment when I am about to go berserk computing the budget or editing another—sigh—constipated magazine article, then it is time to blog or trawl the blogs. Calms the nerves. (Or I can just exercise, but, heck, why stand up? As the fantasonic Freddie Mercury sang, “Fat-bottomed girls, you make the rockin’ world go round”—by which definition, oh yes, I do rock!)

Which begs the question: if I have time to blog, then surely I have time to write fiction? Since 2003 I have written only one and a half stories. The half-story is promising, but only as an essay, while the lone story needs, oh, about 78 million revisions before it gains shape.

I have every other writer’s usual excuses for the lame output, the most popular being, “I don’t have the time.”

Which, as the other every other writer knows, is a lot of hoohah. There is always time. Even I, who straddle work and housework (The Coach and I are a tad allergic to having house help), have the time.

So here I go. I will find time to write. Starting today. I’m making the third of the 78 million revisions that the lone story needs and constructing the other half of the half-story. Before moving on to writing on an area I should probably mine: the world of lawyers.

Three people helped me in recents days to wake up from my stupor: one of them does not know me, the other knows me only in cyberspace, and the third I haven’t seen since 1983—all of them unaware of their impact.

There is Silliman University professor Ian Rosales Casocot, who makes no excuses, thankfully, or otherwise we wouldn’t have his beautiful Old Movies and The Hero of Snore Tango, as well as his portal to Philippine literature, which brings the writing community together. And there’s my high school classmate Giselle Doherty, more than 7,000 miles away in California, whose comment to one of my posts reminded me to properly steward my writing. And there is Dean Francis Alfar, who manages the “tension between words and work.” Like Dean, I will choose my attitude.

Thank you, guys. You rock!

From our shelf: Revenge of the Middle-Aged Woman

2006-05-19T01:30:00.000+08:00

I snatched Revenge of the Middle-Aged Woman by Elizabeth Buchan from the Booksale bin (P70.00) because of its title—as did its one million other readers, I suspect. I settled comfortably on my side of the bed and waited until The Coach fell asleep; it didn’t seem like good manners to brandish such a title in his face as his last memory for the day.

About six hours later, half of me was cheering on Rose—the book’s middle-aged heroine who lost her husband, job, and home to her own young, beautiful assistant—and the other half was sheepish because I had just finished a truly wonderful book by Paula Fox, and I felt I betrayed Fox somewhat by taking pleasure in what had been made into a TV movie, starring Christine Lahti.

Revenge will never be considered highbrow lit, and a few of its de rigueur confrontations with the husband and the other woman made me squirm: oh please, please don’t go melodramatic, and they almost did, teetering dangerously, dangerously so.

But humor abounds, even in the way Rose committed to break down:

If I was going to suffer—that is, more than I was at the moment, and there was no doubt that I would—I might as well do it properly and give myself up to grand and august pain.

Buchan writes intelligently, and by that I mean her writing can be insightful and, while uncertain and a tad overdone in some portions, her language can be beautiful.

Because I am on my way to being middle-aged, I needed to see Rose through her bewilderment and bawling, and on to her choice to live. Rose, who considered herself “the grit in the oyster,” read in her body the life she led:

What did I expect to see? The gleaming bronze of a fountain nymph, whose lines flowed untouched and unmarked? My body had swelled in gestation. It had been stretched, ripped, sewn up. It had carried children, cradled them and, when the time had come, pushed them gently away. It had learned to be endlessly busy, to snatch at repose, to guard its silences in the hot, crowded demands of the family. How could all this activity not be written into the flesh?

Yup, none of that You complete me hoohah. Some of Revenge’s other lines I like…

Poetry hovered on the weightless and was decorated with wide white margins.

...

As an organizational principle, love has flaws.

...

Supposedly the past is a foreign country of which we should beware. That was not true: it was oneself that was the foreign country, the unexplored, possibly dangerous side.

...

Life, wrote Virginia Woolf, was a luminous halo, a semitransparent envelope. Oh no, it was not. Not for some. Some of us lived in a plain brown envelope.

…as well as an old Spanish proverb for a great epigraph: Living well is the best revenge.

Why I am not a poet

2006-05-13T23:39:00.001+08:00

Because I stink at it, too.

I stink even at reading poetry. At a Baguio workshop in 2003, panelist/poet J. Neil Garcia (whom I adore just for being Neil), asked me to share what I thought of wunderkind Gelo Suarez's love poem. I looked at the lines on the page, black and white, and launched into a desperate exegesis about the beauty of love.

Neil, gracious as ever, peered at me and said quietly, “You do know this talks about incest, don't you?”

Of course I didn't.

Now, imagine my agony when I tried to combine children's writing and poetry.

I don’t know how well I relate to the young ones. If a child, for instance, were to ask me why the sky is blue, I would answer, “Because it does not look good in red.”

The Coach and I disallowed kids from our wedding, even my beloved nephews and nieces (I have fourteen who deplete my savings every time I go home to Cebu, plus two grandnieces, with another one on the way). No flower girls or ring bearers, no little feet trampling on my veil, no tugging at itchy hemlines.

In the first few years of our marriage, The Coach and I were intolerant of children's excesses. In one trip to Boracay, there was this rambunctious little imp who ran around our smallish banca, squealing and squalling, pitching all of us to and fro. Everyone and his brother was annoyed, but looked the other way. When the little volcano next passed us, The Coach, exasperated, stuck his knee forward and the tyke-tyrant tripped, then caught his footing, and, perhaps scared of his near-tumble, sniffed and ran to his mother, where he stayed quiet the rest of the journey. I could barely restrain a yippee.

(Ahem. Please note the use of the past, past tense. The Coach and I have since matured. Heh.)

I figured children needed a hero so my kiddie poetry often talked about someone saving another, prompting my then classmate and writer extraordinaire Migs Villanueva to say, "May messianic tendencies ka pala, Janet." Eeeps. Not. Just a limited mind, that’s all.

I started with a great title to the, uhm, collection: The Not-So-Ordinary Days of Jamie, but teetered dangerously from thereon. The collection traveled to the land under the stairs (my favorite hidey-hole when I was five), cooked up an alphabet soup that form its letters to warn children of danger, helped a cloud that lost its way, and revealed the magic of the forty winks.

They sound good in theory, perhaps, but the execution was less than desirable. I was hobbled by my myopia that children’s poetry should rhyme. I thought too much like an adult; my language was geared for adult readers. I can almost forgive my teacher for giving me a 2.0 in children's writing class—a failing grade, if you should know. Almost. But not yet.

Here are two of those poems that suck the least. You can bet that when the Lord finds it right to grant us the twins The Coach desires, I will definitely sic these poems on the poor kids. Heh.

Well, at least I know how to rhyme.

The Blues

When Jamie woke up one bright sunny morning
She saw the world in blue, all colors transforming.
The trees weren’t green,
They were clearly cerulean.
The flowers changed dresses—of that she was sure
Gone the rainbow tresses; they were entirely azure!

“Mom!” cried Jamie, “there’s been a big whammy!
All that I see is a completely blue scenery!”
Mom was so puzzled; she could barely understand it.
So they rushed to Doc Snorton for some handy little fix-it.

Poor Doc Snorton, he didn’t know what to do.
He poked her and checked her ‘til he almost turned blue.
“Ahem,” he’d say when there was nothing else to say.
“I see,” he’d say when there was nothing else to see.

“My dear,” he sighed finally, “this is all a mystery.
How you lost the other colors is really beyond me.”
“Oh no,” Mom said, “what are we to do?
Blue is your favorite but you can’t dump any other hue.”

“That’s it!” yelled Jamie, “that’s exactly what I did!
I adored blue above all, other colors I forbid.
I forgot that all colors make up a pretty rainbow
And only one-seventh is made up of indigo.”

“But how,” Doc asked, “can I put right your eyesight?
I have no treatment or remedy; we have only your insight.”
“I don’t know,” said Jamie, “but I do hope and pray
That my discovery will bring back other colors to stay.”

When Jamie awoke the next sunny morning
Gone were the blues, all the colors returning.
The trees became green
No longer cerulean.

“Hurray!” she rejoiced, “What a resounding relief!
I see red, I see yellow, and green on a leaf!
How wonderful to know that my favorite blue
Only looks better when paired with some other hue.”

The Angry Sink

Jamie was washing some dishes one evening
When a noise crashed into her pleasant daydreaming.
Growwwl, rowwwl, browwwl—went the terrible noise.
Shlurrrp, flurrrrp, blurrrrp—‘twas like no other voice.

“My goodness,” jumped Jamie, “what on earth could that be?
There’s nobody else in the kitchen but me.”
Brreee, greeee, dreeee—it went on and on.
Gurggle, murggle, plurggle—so forth and so on.

Poor Jamie stood shaking, so frightened was she
Of this roaring deep noise from where, she couldn¹t see.
Then all of a sudden, she saw the sink spouting
Some eggshells and clamshells, all stinking and rotting.

“Hogwash and balderdash,” the sink reared up and roared.
“How could I work in peace with all the rubbish you poured?
Hokum and bunkum, what a terrible mess!
The way you wash your dishes makes me really distressed!”

“I’m sorry,” quaked Jamie, “I didn’t realize
That my washing the dishes was the cause of your cries.
But, please, Sir Sink, you must tell me more.
How could I hurt you with an innocent chore?”

“Twaddle, dilly-daddle,” the sink sputtered and stuttered.
“The scraps you poured in me left me littered and cluttered.
Higgledy-piggledy, bits of broccoli and baloney
Are choking my windpipe, what a great big malarkey!”

“I’ll remove all that garbage,” offered Jamie to the sink.
“If you’ll give me a chance, I could be more than you think.
I promise never ever to burden you with garbage.
Ewww, all this rubbish I don’t ever want to rummage!”

So Jamie from then on first scraped away the scraps
To avoid the barrage of an angry sink’s claptraps.
And the sink? He was happy, so peaceful was his swishing
Saving our Jamie from an outburst so alarming.

Class Struggle 101

2006-05-08T23:09:00.000+08:00

This is my third summer teaching Business Writing and Presentation to incoming management seniors at a nearby university. I love teaching, except the part where I have to grade papers: I discovered that if I leave the papers stacked on top of each other, they breed overnight.

The Coach sometimes yields to my insistence that he help me check papers. But you cannot get the imp out of The Coach. In one exam, I asked my students to define the word stoke. One guy rather desperately, answered: Past tense of stick, he he he. Not to be outdone, The Coach wrote back in glorious red ink: You're wrong! He he he.

There are times when I get thoroughly stumped: what to do, for instance, when your student defines alternate as something like one, it's blue, two, it's white; three, it's blue, four, it's white; next, it's blue, then it's white--about six pairs of blue and white. The Coach, champion of the oppressed, pleaded on the boy's behalf, "Sige na, give him the point. He knows the answer naman."

One of my students this summer is wonderfully creative. The topic this afternoon was conciseness in writing. I encouraged them to omit needless words and to use verbs instead of nouns or adjectives for crisper, snappier language. How, for instance, can they shorten the phrase expressing yourself well by means of the written word?

"What's the one-word equivalent?" I asked them. "I'm looking for a verb."

"Expressing!" a guy in the middle row said.

I was actually looking for the verb writing. "Okay," I said. "But what's even shorter than that?"

"Express!" another student said.

"Shorter," I said.

Silence.

"One word, one verb that's shorter?" I prompted. "Anyone?"

And someone from the back answered, her voice clear but trailing towards the end. "Ex?" she said.

Siyanga naman.

Face/Off

2006-05-06T14:32:00.000+08:00

Sometime in March 2004, in the heat of the presidential elections, I interviewed Chiz Escudero, then spokesperson for candidate Fernando Poe Jr. While we talked over early breakfast at the Manila Peninsula, several thought balloons popped up in my mind, thoughts I could not include in my article. These are some of those thought balloons.

It’s a pity that those who woo us to hire them as public servants aren’t as public as they should be. I had long been anticipating my interview with FPJ, struggling through the maze of kingmakers and court jesters that form Da King’s cordon sanitaire, careful to protect him from himself.

But the man who sits before me, who begs for a minute to finish his phone interview with DZMM, speaks too fast and confidently into his mobile phone, far from the abbreviated and tentative rejoinders I was prepared for.

This morning I am asked to look beyond the youthful dynamism of Sorsogon Rep. Francis Escudero and pretend that he, as the newly designated official spokesperson, is Da King.

I am not supposed to mind the switch. After all, the congressman extended his hand first and introduced himself by his nickname. I am to be charmed by this. For this breakfast interview, I am Janet and he is Chiz. I think maybe I should have good reason to have a semi-crush on this man, never mind that The Coach and I think Chiz looks like a munggo with ears.

While he shoots rapid-fire reasons for FPJ’s mini-scuffle with a reporter late yesterday, Chiz waves at the waitress to give us a menu. Is he naturally solicitous? Or is this part of his job description? FPJ or the powers behind him choose Da King’s talking head well. Chiz makes me feel almost considerate to FPJ for in effect standing me up—not too bad considering that I still carry in my head Fr. Robert Reyes’s jab against FPJ. Sitting in his Project 4 office with his knapsack still strapped to his back, the priest who runs to steer attention to the country’s burning issues said, “It’s very clear: FPJ is not a bridge to the future. He is a bridge to Erap, who is a bridge to the Marcoses.”

Chiz finishes his phone interview on a high note. His account of how FPJ did not really swing his elbow against the journalist but was merely warding off the pressure of the teeming masses may not have justified FPJ’s much-maligned temper, but it sure did mollify the radio commentators.

Chiz clasps his hands together and smiles, “So how should we do this?”

I smile back. “I ask you questions, and you answer them.”

He laughs. We are off to a good start, especially since my breakfast bacon is crisp and the hot chocolate is like pure cacao concentrate. I hope he won’t mind my first question.

“How would FPJ protect himself from being manipulated by his advisers?” I ask.

And he rattles off, his mind moving faster than his mouth: “One advantage FPJ has is his popularity. He doesn’t need that much resources to win. People flock to him in droves just to hear him speak. That’s a good start. He will not be manipulated later on by vested interests since his winnability is not dependent upon money that a person or business unit will give him but rather on the outpouring of support from the people.”

My editor’s mind paused when he said “winnability,” but I will forgive him since he speaks for FPJ. And because I myself like to forge non-words like “lawyering” and “tanggalable.”

I clear my throat. The Honorable Chiz did not really answer my question. “Well, yes, that is true,” I say. “But many are worried about the people egging FPJ to run, the kingmakers who might take advantage of FPJ’s inexperience in government.”

“That question should also be asked of other candidates,” he shoots back. “All other candidates have kingmakers and backers behind him. For instance, GMA: who is behind her? Why is nobody asking that question? Or is the answer to that already too obvious? The same is true for presidential candidates Ping Lacson and Raul Roco. Who is spending for their campaigns?”

Feint, sidestep, and draw. This man sure knows how not to answer a question. Pretty much like the man he represents. When asked for his qualifications, Da King mentioned his 40 years in showbusiness: “Karanasan ko.” Pause. “My forty years bilang isang artista, kung saan-saan po ako nakarating—sa gubat, bundok at dagat.” Reacting to claims that he had no experience, FPJ said, “Wala daw akong experience. Pero ginampanan ko ang mga papel bilang Muslim, military officer, pulis, jeepney driver, taxi driver, kutsero. At nang minsan ginampanan ko po ang pari.”

How can I press my point further? Chiz is determined not to answer my question. His eyes retain the same level of stoic niceness as when he offered me coffee, unchanging even as he drags on his cigarette or as he launches into animated speech.

“Some candidates have lamented FPJ’s deficiencies in formal education. How will he work and decide on, say, trade agreements?” I ask.

His eyes stretch. What an amazing trick: to stretch the eyes like he is smiling, when he actually is not. “Do you think it’s GMA who’s actually going through the nitty-gritty of contracts or trade agreements?” he confronts me. “If at all Roco will become president, will he actually be going through the details of each transaction? No. One thing we have to rely on, one thing we have to accept, is to trust our civil servants and those in government that they will perform their job regardless of who is the sitting president. That lack of trust also probably explains the utter absence of continuity with respect to our government. People question FPJ’s lack of government experience, but it also means that he has not been tainted by politics. He has not been consumed by the system. There lies our hope for the country and the government.”

I choose to think that Chiz, armed with a law degree from the University of the Philippines, knows exactly what I was driving at, and knows exactly why he frantically needs to persuade me that political naiveté leads to “our hope for the country and the government.”

Sigh… This Artful Dodger has an entire arsenal of verbal maneuvers and sound bites for every question.

So I am not surprised that he can still deify Da King’s failure to list in his Certificate of Candidacy his illegitimate offspring, saying that FPJ’s readiness to admit his extramarital liaisons (after somebody else made the discovery, of course) underscores his honesty and transparency. “FPJ has talked to Ms. Roces about this years ago. That speaks of the character of the person: he’s not afraid of telling the truth, unlike others.”

I scratch my head. Does Chiz mean others like, say, himself?

Anyhow, Chiz continues, “That is another factor to consider. When you’re president, you will stand as father of the nation, and the lines of communication have to be open between the father and his children.” I wince, not only because I cannot imagine FPJ as the father of the nation, but also because there are, particularly now, definitely no lines of communication between me and the Honorable Chiz, spokesperson of FPJ, the father of the nation.

And when I ask him which presidential candidate FPJ would vote for should he withdraw from the presidential race, Chiz threw me a bone: “That’s a very good question.” Translation: I can answer that, without hedging, quibbling or dithering.

He smiles, and it almost reaches his eyes. “If you look at the platforms, there are similarities between him and Bro. Eddie Villanueva, about where they’re coming from. They both seek to inspire new hope in our people. They do not come from politics and have no bad record of unbroken promises. People can hold them to their word.”

Bravo. While Chiz did not actually talk of platforms but personalities, he has chosen the safest presidential bet, one in whose perceived morality and integrity FPJ can take refuge, particularly since Villanueva lags far behind FPJ in the polls. Contrast this with GMA’s curt email reply to the same question: “But I am running.” Or Lacson’s pointed comeback: “I will not vote for GMA.” Or Roco’s obsequiousness: “I’m sorry but I don’t engage in negative thinking. I learned in Journalism 101 not to engage in speculative thinking.” Or Villanueva’s caution: “I will have to carefully study their qualifications.”

But Chiz’s—and hence FPJ’s—crowning comeback is still to come. When I ask if FPJ had done any social or charitable work, he replies: “Only in his private capacity. He has chosen, and this is known in the movie industry, for his charitable acts to be kept private for the simple reason that as stated in the Good Book,”—and he grandly gestures to the Bible peeking through my backpack, caught up in his religiosity—“once a charitable act has been made public, then such charitable act is considered paid for and will no longer receive a grace. That’s why he’s admonished every person he helped to keep the kind act to themselves.” Translation: Whether or not FPJ did any charitable work, you have no means of verifying.

Right.

The waitress arrives with more coffee. That is all he takes with his cigarettes. “You are going to die early,” I say, glancing at his breakfast. Then I compose my face into a smile, so he will not think I made a threat.

“I know,” he says. He looks at his watch, and asks for my leave to attend another meeting. He stands, courtly: “I’ll just go to the restroom. Please wait for me. Let’s go out together.” Translation: If I am seen leaving with you and if I grace you with my presence, will you be nice when you write your article about me?

I motion for the waitress to bring the bill, but she politely says that “the congressman has paid for it.” Set, game, and match. There goes my budding journalistic integrity.

I look at the remains of my scrambled eggs hardening in the bacon fat, all the calories trapped in the cholesterol, and I think maybe I should join Fr. Robert in his next protest run.

On the way to the Palancas

2006-05-05T19:49:00.000+08:00

If I had a story worth the Palancas (and, sadly, I don't), this is the conversation I imagine I'd have with the other hopefuls once I get to its Makati office, right before midnight of April 30, of course--procrastinators rock!!

ME: Who else do you think is joining the Palancas?

KIBITZER: I hear Chari Lucero submitted an entry.

ME: Ooookaaay. That means the most I can hope for is second place.

KIBITZER: Migs Villanueva also joined, they say.

ME: [sighs] Third place, then.

KIBITZER: Ian Casocot, too...

ME: [gets desperate] Maybe tie for third place?

KIBITZER: ...as well as Luis Katigbak, Faye Ilogon and Yvette Tan.

ME: [stuffs entry into bag] Next year na lang.

Why I am not a children's writer

2006-04-18T22:24:00.000+08:00

Because I stink at it, that's why.

But, see, I didn't know that in 1999. So the very first story I wrote in my entire life was, dum-dee-dum, a story for children. I thought it was easier to write for minds still developing. Mistake. Big one.

It was about a question mark.

"A what?" my buddy Abet asked. We were waiting for our tapsilog with extra egg at Rodic’s, the UP institution of our dormitory life; sixteen years after we met in 1983, and we still couldn’t wean ourselves from Rodic’s.

"It's about a question mark," I repeated. I had not written the story yet. It was just in my head, prowling.

Abet smiled. It was so easy for me to be vulnerable to this friend. He too was a soul-seeker, restless in either of his two professions, engineering and lawyering. He and I connected: we had the same woes.

“His name is Quentin. Quentin the Question Mark. And he’s very sad because unlike the other punctuation marks, he was rarely used. And if he was, it was always with a quizzical note at the end, as if people were perplexed or doubtful. Like, ‘Where am I?’ or ‘Are you there?’”

I said it all in one mad rush so that Abet, with his genius IQ, would not have time to object.

Abet chuckled. I was getting a little desperate to prove to him that, hey, this could be a great story. “Quentin wasn’t like, say, the period, which was declarative, with such a stabilizing effect, so calm and dignified. He spoke with authority. And Quentin wasn’t like the exclamation point, which was sparkling and energetic, so vigorous. You use the exclamation point and you’re like jumping cartwheels, ‘What a life!’ or ‘Woohoo!’”

By this time, Abet was laughing, apparently also using a lot of exclamation points while he did.

“So on Quentin’s birthday, when no one in the Land of Grammar remembered that it was his day, he decided to leave, just like that.” I snapped my fingers, hoping the extra action would add, well, more action to the story. “At first no one in Grammar noticed he left. And when they did, they thought it was cool. The students had a blast because the teachers could no longer ask questions. No exams, no recitation.”

What the heck, by this time, I was laughing too. It did sound ludicrous, but I was on a roll. I didn’t know better.

“Slowly, things went berserk. The TV game show hosts could not ask questions. Jeopardy! was cancelled. People could not ask for the price of broccoli. Many who could not read or follow maps got lost.”

Abet was guffawing, like only he can, without restraint and with tears in his eyes—what, for me? We were seated at the table jammed next to the mirror, so there were four of us doubling up, having hysterics. It was a laugh party, and we had immense fun even before our beloved tapsilog arrived.

Maybe I should’ve taken that delightful dinner as a hint, but since I didn’t know better, I went ahead and finished the story in 2001 for a writers’ workshop in Dumaguete…

…where it did not necessarily fare better. I’m still puzzling over the effect, really, of Quentin. It was the third and last week of the workshop, and Quentin was, oh I don’t know, probably the last story to be critiqued, and everyone was most likely tired of objective-correlatives and données. Anyway, when it was Quentin’s turn to be workshopped, the entire panel of distinguished writers—lemme see, there was the poet DM Reyes, fictionist Susan Lara, and probably award-winners Ernie Yee, Bobby Villasis, and Sawie Aquino, too, and, oh I don’t really care to remember who else—they all looked at each other, conspiratorially. Then Susan Lara counted aloud, “One, and two, and three…” and the entire panel, mercy!, broke into song, putting their hands in the air and swinging them about, singing “Quentin the Question Mark” to the tune of (I think it was) Popeye the Sailorman.

What a sight.

I should probably have abandoned children’s writing right about then. But the Polymath, one of two child wonders at the workshop, piped in helpfully at my right. “Mudra, you can also write about Ulrich the Umlaut.” I laughed. Of course.

Germaine, to whom I told the story afterwards, was another big help. “You can write about Anna the Ampersand,” she said. And I said, “Yes, and let’s make her a matchmaker. She connects people to people, like Mark & Susan, John & Alice.” A series of children's books, why not?

Hah.

Getting along

2006-04-16T04:09:00.000+08:00

A while ago The Coach asked me to pray with him. He prayed for our friend M, whose marriage is a step-yes, step-no non-union; for her little son, A, who at six thinks that by hating his father he is loving his mother; for grace in fulfilling our calling—that is his term for his coaching and my writing, bless him; and for the child/children we desire (whenever he starts praying for twins, I silently add a little caveat: Lord, when in Your most gracious will, You answer his prayer, please grant the resources and the strength to raise—gulp—twins).

Then he prayed for us, for our relationship. “Panginoong Diyos,” he said, “we don’t have a perfect marriage. But…” and then he semi-laughed, so faint I could discern it only from the way his voice rose and fell in slight singsong, “…we get along.”

A few hours before, while he was trying to earn brownie points by washing the dishes he should’ve done waaaaaay earlier, he had mentioned how many of our laugh-out-loud times are fun only to us and don’t elicit as much amusement from others, when shared. I thought maybe he was referring to those fun times when he was praying, but now I think he was truly, honestly grateful, and perhaps a little surprised, that we get along—in spite of.

Getting along 24/7 is incredibly difficult, even when you love the other. The very things that you used to consider cute in the other could be the very same things that exasperate you no end. It takes enormous strength not to nag a spouse (The Coach) to please put the dirty clothes in the hamper, as well as enormous grace to forgive an erring but unrepentant partner (me) who still doesn’t know how to say sorry. Little things—like not jiggling the flush handle a couple of times to stop the water closet from continuously flushing water (me) or forgetting to water the plants (The Coach; his classic line: What? We have a plant?)—could start a war. It is unbelievably easy to fan a spark of irritation into an inferno simply by hurling grand generalizations that start with, “You never…” or “You always…” Dangerous ipse dixits that attack the person instead of the fault or omission can escalate, and before you know it, one will end up sleeping on the couch, while the other tosses and turns in bed, pretending she (all right, me) is justified in locking the door. (That’s why you gotta believe them truisms printed onto mugs. For a time I sported a drink holder that read: Marriage is the only war where you sleep with the enemy.)

Getting along takes the right combination of and timing for blindness and deafness, perhaps more so for The Coach, since I can be quite crabby, PMS or no, and veer annoyingly to the dramatic. If, say, he were to ask me where the key to our inadvertently locked bedroom is kept, I simply wouldn’t tell him where it is: I have to lean my head to my left, tap my fingers on my cheek, one after the other, look up to the ceiling and say not so nicely, “Hmmm. If I were to die, say, right now, then you’d have to break down the door to get your pants so you won’t be in your boxers when the guys from the morgue arrive to pick me up.” Oh, I can be so annoying, even to me.

But The Coach has learned to just snort at my affectations (as well as know what items are stored in the utility room), even before I learned not to carry over into our home any dramatizations that should remain in my writing. I just zip my lip. And somehow we get along.

Just out

2006-04-12T22:14:00.000+08:00

Phoem Barranda graces the April issue of mph, one of the mags I copyedit. (The inimitable Adel Gabot is the Big Chief.)

Check out the cover in this blog's sidebar.

He did it his way

2006-04-12T14:20:00.000+08:00

Boy, oh boy, you gotta check out this site and catch this French techie sing his entire CV.

He struggles with the English lyrics, his guttural Rs and the unforgiving IT terms getting in the way, and there are about only 4 or 5 discernible notes in the song. But we forgive him, for not only did he provide us subtitles, he also gave us a pretty good laugh--the good kind.

Anyhoo, Frenchie received 180 job offers. He now works for the Microsoft graphics team. Beat that, American Idol!

Writing and compassion

2006-04-10T16:00:00.000+08:00

The Polymath (i.e., my brainiac friend, P) thinks the strength and beauty of Alice Munro's fiction lies in her compassion for her characters. I agree. (That, and her richly connotative language.)

Author Crawford Kilian in his blog highlights the importance of the writer's attitude:

Some successful writers just transcribe what their inner authors dictate, and have no idea whether it's any good. Paul Theroux thinks about the act of the writing, and the attitude of the writer, and makes that an important part of his storytelling.

My lack of compassion for my characters and lack of attitude to my subject (what my teacher says is my story's lack of authorial voice, though the literary glossaries define authorial voice as something else, dagnabbit, getting so confused!)--these hinder the piece I am struggling over.

I don’t know what’s wrong with me, why it’s so hard for me to sit still, read and write. I have tons of books worth every other writer’s while, but only recently regained the spirit to open them. I have stories that boil in me, yet all I’ve drummed up in the past five months is wanting.

I have every possible tool: the (requisite?) Apple, journals, and fountain pens. I have my own nook carved from the walls. It is mine alone.

I have time, perhaps not that much, but there is time, nonetheless.

The Coach is giving and forgiving. He gives me space. He washes the dirty dishes I leave lying for days. He doesn’t mind the mess of a week. He overlooks the unmade bed, takes out the garbage, cleans the toilet, lets me oversleep in the morning, irons his own clothes, and orders takeout. He kisses me while I sleep, hugs me from behind as he passes me in our home's teeny hallways, drives me to school.

And I just sit here, bleeding.

Aye, I think I need to go back to the reasons why I write.

Freakbast

2006-04-08T19:07:00.000+08:00

Maybe each person has at least one talent that's utterly useless, one that won't change the world or earn him or her a cent--say, wriggling the ears one after the other, or tying a cherry stem into a knot with the tongue, or knowing which among the walnut, coconut or peanut is not a nut. (I still can't figure out how the non-nut will rock my world, but apparently law schools think it might generate good lawyers since I saw that question in one law entrance exam. Go figure.)

Mine is spelling words out loud and backwards, with hardly a pause. Give me a word, a second or two to visualize the word in my mind, and I can more or less spell it backwards without missing a beat. Jon, friend of my soul, thinks it's like thinking twice at same time: spelling it the right way and spelling it the wrong way, like juggling two balls at a time. He seems impressed. I will be, too, as soon as I branch out to spelling entire sentences backwards. Utterly useless.

My friend, Germaine, is dyslexic with words. She would inadvertently jumble her words, uttering phrases like "throwing pigs to pearls" or "putting your mouth in your foot," which, because of the riotous fun we've had over her unpremeditated bon mots, doesn't count as useless and is therefore disqualied from the enumeration.

Jon's specialty is mixing up his syllables, like, saying base to base casis instead of case to case basis. Useless and dangerous. What if he tells his wife You deviler instead of You deliver? Like I said. Dangerous.

We three freaks--spread out in the archipelago, and coming together a precious once or twice in a year--had laughter for freakbast at Bizu last Monday. Had our beloved Benjie been free to join us, it would've qualified for what Germaine considers the life of our time.

This severely-priced slop was my breakfast: two pieces of ham on bread, some greens, with two poached eggs smothered in goo. (The goo was quite good.) And I ordered a basket of bacon on the side. Yum.

In his eyes

2006-04-07T13:12:00.000+08:00

Twenty years ago last January 9, The Coach and I started dating: he was 19, I was 18, and the rest of the world in our eyes was fresh and wonderful and passionate and carefree.

The Coach, now 40, surprised me with an enormous bouquet of flowers, so many they filled three vases and took me an hour to fix (plus another half-hour to clean up after my mess). Silly me, I couldn’t help asking if they were expensive. (We are, after all, penny-pinching. Actually, he does the pinching; I do the inordinate buying of books which will take me, if I were to read a book a week, about, oh, ten years to finish.) His rebuke was so gentle I almost missed it until I thought about it afterwards. He just said, “A bit, but not for twenty years,” and smiled. Hours later he asked me if it was true that I was surprised by his present, since he always buys me flowers anyway, special occasion or no, like when he atones for sins imagined or real. And I said yes because I thought we were cost-cutting (D’oh! There I go again). And he harrumphed, properly, like an old gentleman aggrieved by the indignity of money: “Cost-cutting, cost-cutting. What's cost-cutting to twenty years?” And I just had to hug this man, this one whose masculine eyes and heart could not see that some of the flowers he bought in the huge bunch had probably withered earlier but were artfully hidden by the flower peddler to make a quick buck, the same eyes and heart who tell me day after day, truthfully, wonderingly, that I am more beautiful today than yesterday. I love eyes like those, because they know when to skip over unwashed faces and past flabby thighs, and even the occasional PMS that furrows the forehead. And it is true, what he said over a year ago, looking up at me while we were rummaging the fridge for leftovers: “Jan, would you agree with me? That we are happier now than we have ever been?”

Yes, honey, we truly are.

This is how a writer commits suicide

2006-04-07T02:02:00.000+08:00

I should be revising my stories. In about five hours I need to finish my papers for Chari's fiction class. Yet here I am, creating a blog.

Look, Ma, no hands.