( A repost from April 13, 2007 )

I was walking the downtown streets some days ago, feeling a little bit restless for reasons unknown to me specifically, at least to the one or those that I could not pinpoint to with reasonable certainty. Perhaps this is one sort of a malady that I have read about once before in some old decrepit medical book stacked in my mother-in-laws deteriorating wooden cabinets, those that were partly eaten by termites, looking so fragile that a simple disturbance on it would let spew a handful of mashed-up and grounded wooden particles---which I find to be so repulsive knowing that they were the end results of some crawlers’ eating frenzy.

This malady is sometimes called depression or anxiety problems (they go by many names depending on the author of the medical book I read) and once in a while I retreat into this state and like water, I just have to let go of it for I could not rein it in my hands---no matter what.

I passed by the new barbershop just in front of the old Ever theater—one that had seen better days---and I thought I might get my hair done. I stared at a glass partition from a nearby store and had an inkling that my hair wasn’t as disheveled as I thought it was. I even saw it to be fitting to me despite the general rugged look and I had thought then that moviestars have lengthy hairs even if they were males, having that blown away look. I was a little worried that if one sports a blown away and rugged crown of hair and at the same time not being a moviestar, one might be easily taken for a madman walking the streets at high noon. But that sidewalk mirror was good to me and I felt that my uncut hair would be fit for a star. Some mirrors are good to me ; mostly they are not---especially those in my bedroom.

So I passed with having a quick haircut that day and hoped that the blown away look would be fitting enough for me for quite a number of days more. I then strolled farther down the city sidewalks and came towards a crevice full of DVD stalls and I felt a little blown away after seeing so many titles available and on a dirt cheap prices at that, considering that for 80 bucks, one can get a DVD disc that contains 8 to 12 movies in it, and most of them were blockbusters and of very recent release. Some of them were not even shown yet here in local theaters. That’s how tempting it was for movie aficionados like me. I could not say now that I haven’t had scored myself some pirated items before (I had been smoking a brand of cigarette smuggled from Hongkong when I was in college) and of course, it would be unthinkable for me to not have seen a pirated movie before. I had of course.

But while I was glancing on stacks and stacks of DVD disks, my mind was swinging between the forthrightness of not buying a pirated item and having a devilish pleasure on filling my hunger for movies at throwaway prices. I could always remember that video clip that goes with every movie I rent from video stores and the loud, thundering reminder that says: “You Don’t Steal A Car! You Don’t Steal A House! You Don’t Steal A Movie!”, and somehow my inner conscience is disturbed by such that whenever that clip goes in every movie I rent, I wanted to shout at whoever that guy behind the thundering voice and belch, “Stop It! I Heard You. You Don’t Have To Remind Me That All The Time. You’re Not My Mother!”

My inner conscience had gotten the better of me that time so I just slowly walk away from stacks and stacks of salacious movies and guilty pleasures. I then remember that a new Video City branch had opened just a block away and I headed immediately towards it. The moment I had gazed through the available movie titles, I felt an immediate surge of gleefulness inside me since I hadn't expected that the new video store could offer such voluminous number of titles, especially of recent ones. The video store where I usually get my dose of movies is so miserably lacking in inventory that I guess I won’t be visiting it from now on, except perhaps in some momentary lapse of reason in the future.

I felt like a child lost in a sea of movie titles and I almost picked up every disk that had caught my eye, until I reached the “Drama” section and there in front of me was a copy of Wong Kar Wai’s “2046” and I was excited to high heavens. It had been much talked about in the net world about how good it was and for a long time, I was trying to get my hand on a copy of it, and for a while there I thought I wouldn’t be able to see it for it would be unthinkable that it'd be exhibited in local theaters considering that it was released about three years ago. And I haven’t had seen any trace of it in every video rental store I went before.

I had anticipated this movie ever since I have grown a special fondness for oriental art films, especially those of the legendary filmmaker Zhang Zimou, whose film “Farewell To My Concubine” was so wonderfully entertaining and had primarily introduced me to other notable movies from China or Hongkong. Before that, ever since I was in high school, I had been delighted by the magic of Akira Kurosawa’s masterpieces like “Ran” and “Dreams”.

And so “2046” was about a writer who had become so engrossed about his own written piece that he saw himself being dragged into it, and feeling the pains and longings of the characters he had made himself. “2046” was a work about a train that once in a while travels towards the year “2046” and no one who goes there ever came back, except for one, the male protagonists. It is said that those who journey towards this strange destination are those who are longing for love, perhaps a kind that could not be found here at present, for how come they have to travel towards a point of no return just looking for it? What love is there out there that some have risk even their own mortal existence just to gain it? It was written by the writer that nobody actually knows how long for one to get to “2046”, for some it would be faster, but sometimes, to those unlucky travelers, it might take so long that they would start to lose their senses and sanity while inside the rain, having nothing to do except sit down and wait for the arrival time, one that is not definite and without any sign of coming. The main male protagonist in the novel had such kind of journey, one that was so lenthgy and seemingly unending that he fell in love with an android, an artificial human being stewarding the train.

The writer had his own life in the movie “2046”, a life lived sometime in the 1960’s where according to him “he just found himself to be in”. He earn his meals by writing columns and kung-fu stories for local dailies and billeted himself in a room with a door number that states “2046”. That was where he had sourced the title for his novel, a number which in his own mind had taken his fancy and unusual interest.

Along the way, he met a wife of another man named Bai Ling, who had runned away from her husband for having another woman and had rented a room just across his own. They slowly fell for each other and started a torrid affair filled with nights of passion and unhindered bliss. Until one day the woman asked him if ever he wanted to stick it out with him. But the writer wouldn’t agree to be exclusive to one single woman and stressed that he was seeing other women while he was having an affair with her. Bai Ling was furious and ended their relationship with tears flooding from her eyes and agitation painted all over her face.

They both started seeing other people and whenever they passed each other in public gatherings, they both pretend not to know each other and according to the writer, it was difficult to pretend and not notice her. It was clear that it was more difficult for Bai Ling to pretend and it showed so much in the utter sadness that found harbor in her teary eyes.

Six years later, the writer was in a relationship with a woman that had a similar name to a woman he had an affair so many years ago. It wasn’t Bai Ling, but another one who had resembled Bai Ling's general appearance, a circumstance that had led me to ponder whether or not Bai Ling and Su Lizhen was one and the same person. The new woman eventually left the writer for some undeclared reason for she said, “she just have to go away”.

And inside a car---drunken and weary---the writer finally realized that he is starting to lose 'the meaning of life'. He was thinking to himself and thought that six years ago, he had a chance to find the meaning of life when the beautiful Bai Ling offered herself to be his long time partner. But he had other ideas and now regretted it.

He met Bai Ling for one more time but the feeling was never the same aagain and it had seemed that in the end, he had entirely lose grasp on what in his mind was “the meaning of life”.

The movie “2046” eventually ignited in me the question about life and its meaning. I try to see myself in the writer’s own predicaments and evaluate if I had what he call as “the meaning of life”. Have I lost it? Or I am living it? Or perhaps, the meaning is just not clear at all.

One way or another, we all are trapped within the world we now dwell, sometimes embroiled in raucous routine everyday conducts, sometimes just swaying to where the wind blows, and often forgetting that at the end of the day, we might not be able to entirely grasp the so-called “meaning of life”. What’s in store for me when I grow old? Where am I heading? Am I happy or am I miserable?

Am I that sort of individual who would jump into a train and head to “2046”?

These are just questions and I hope that this momentary bout with depression would vanish like thin air. And then I’ll have in my full grasp the so-called “meaning of life” by then. Whatever that means.

( A repost from May 19, 2007)

It’s both startling and astonishing how the weather behaves strangely nowadays. In the initial days of March, when summer was supposed to be ushered in gradually, the rains came pouring in, like an unexpected visitor whom one does not know exactly how to receive---had it came for a bountiful afternoon chatter over bristling cups of coffee or had just got to stop by due to a vital intent?

And now while May slowly loses its days to another month, the rains are hard to come by and the temperature rises even when night falls so deep into midnight, when it is supposed to be cool and breezy outside, and of course in the living room.

Strange weather, really.

So the ground are so dry nowadays that some afternoons ago I decided to weed out the backyard with unwanted growths, having no troubles whatsoever with muddy soil that get stuck in the slippers I wear. I had once popped the idea of landscaping the whole area with Bermuda grasses to my wife---about a week ago--- but even I had scoffed when she mentioned to me that it would cost nearly ten thousand bucks to have it done by gardeners from the plant store across the highway. What do you actually call these establishments that sells plants and flowers in pots. I actually have no idea as of this moment.

So for now, the bermudas or carabao grasses would have to wait and I’ve got to contend myself of laboring towards manually eliminating the weeds for now (which can actually grow towards knee level when left unattended for so long) and my oh my, it was so painstaking an activity that my muscles ache all night long after that, and when I woke up the next morning, I could barely walk.

When I was scything the weeds, I had discovered that frogs were ensconced tightly in some nooks and corners of the waterless ground. I noticed this sight immediately for it was certainly a bit of an aberration to see frogs while water is so absent in an area. Frogs means water or rain. And rain means tadpoles and croaking reverberations in the night.

I then wonder how these amphibians can keep up with the arid surroundings even when I know that usually they soak themselves in cool water almost all the time. To be sure, it must have meant that frogs have developed adaptation schemes to combat queer weather situation and atypical habitats. Now perhaps there comes the answer to the momentary query of where do frogs goes when the rains haven’t come for a long, long time. They hide themselves in darkened nooks and crevices in the ground, behind and under mossy stones and shady plants, over misty soil where sunrays could not dry up thoroughly.

This reminds me of an episode of one of my favorite television show when I was a kid, Life On Earth. One unforgettable discussion there was this very strange looking fresh-water fish who can survive for months and months to come even when the ground become so dry that the soil is caked all throughout, like in a span of desert that is so cruel to any shrubbery.

I remember how the host Mr. David Attenborough---he with the effervently musky voice--had dug about a couple of feet into the dry ground and grabbed a morsel of mud formation which he then dropped into a huge basin full of water. And then lo and behold, the pack of solidified mud started to move and slowly a funny looking fish swam away like it was just another day in the river.

It was so amazing how a water creature could survive for so long without water, breathing dry air and being stuck in cakes of mud like a frozen caveman; in order to wait for the rain to finally come and when the water rises again, the strange fish wiggles away into the world where it usually thrive on, and start another cycle in its life span.

Could you imagine a fish surviving out of the water for far too long, like half a year at a time? I couldn’t. But I remember that there was one fish that could actually do that. Therefore presenting an exception to that famous euphemism of being a “fish out of a water”, like I am so miserable now that I am like a fish out of the water.

Amazing survivability this fish has. And also those frogs in our backyard.

Frogs V.2

( A repost from May 28, 2007)

I have some thoughts that I haven’t had elaborated in my earlier post entitled “Frogs” and I can’t seem to get still without scratching this itch, these questions left in my mind. In that previous post, I have pondered on how frogs and other water-loving creatures survived when rains does not fall for a lengthy period of time; this upon observing that frogs actually deposit themselves in shady areas like spongy crevices underneath fairly size stones and behind leafy plants located in areas where the sun could not penetrate that much.

I see them frogs laying still and unmoving even if I make some hushing noise, apparently determined to hibernate as they read the climate so well---no rains, therefore we stand still. Amazing tenacity they have for to stand still is to perish where to us humans, we need to move to survive, we could not stand still or else we fail to survive. But frogs could stand still and still survive. In this manner, they could be a better specie---than we humans.

Now I kept thinking that the frogs I see on our backyard while the rains haven’t come are exactly of no use to me that despite the fact that they aren’t what we could consider as pest---like locusts ravaging the ricefields or mosquitoes rummaging on our blood---I had thought of getting rid of them completely, hauling them one by one from the shady places they hide themselves and throw them out of the fence.

Yet I felt that I could be completely unfair to them since they aren’t really a pest in the purest sense except that I do not like them leaping and creeping around the pathways when I am navigating the areas in the backyard. Their dark and slimy skin seems to be an odd sight to me.

I had pondered if in fact frogs are really of use to us human beings. They couldn’t be foodstuff except for some specie plying cleaner locations like ricefields and natural ponds. They can’t also be pets for only stranger individuals had kept frogs as pets; like the ones I saw on Ripley’s Believe It Or Not!

Although I know for a fact that they eat or lick mosquitoes in through their all-too-lengthy tongues and one can say they could help control or regulate widespread mosquito infestations in our environment. But why do we need them when we can just hie off to the nearby grocery store and buy Baygon insect spray or we can just light up a mosquito repellent that we can buy in the sari-sari store across the street. Maybe in the ancient days when the Germans hadn’t yet invented Baygon, that could have been the time that we needed lots of frogs in our surroundings.

But now, I wonder why they are here, croaking at rainy nights and serenading songs that we ain’t really pond of.

In our elementary days, we are given basic scientific lessons on the web of life. I remember that so well including those charts that exhibits different food groups that we need to consume in order to live a healthy and well-rounded lives; you know those rhythmic annotations that says “ang itlog ay pampabilog ng mukha”, “and gulay ay pampakinis ng kutis”, such and such thing.

And in the web of life, we are taught that every creature is of importance to nature and to earth’s existence, that trees could help strengthen the soil and thus prevent erosion, snakes could help minimize rat infestations in the fields, plants spew much-needed oxygen into the air, birds and butterflies can spread seeds for them to grow in a more widespread manner, anteaters help plow the ground in order that seeds could easily grow, fishes give food and nutrients to mankind, and mankind….and mankind….oh by the way, I forgot how mankind could be beneficial to nature; I hope someone could remind me.

And so that’s how the web of life goes; and intermingling process of creatures that could be helpful to each other and to nature in general; that could be conceptualized also in that lesson we are taught as “food chains”---frogs eating mosquitoes, snakes eating frogs, eagles eating snakes, man eating eagles…such and such thing. I wonder how eagles really taste. Must have been just like chicken.

Now let’s go back to frogs—despite that they could help minimize mosquito infestations, we all know by now that Baygon could be better regulators. Have frogs lost their importance in this world? Are they the vestiges of an old and obsolete web of life, that now we have a new form or web?

Snglguy had once stated that frogs are good barometers of our environment. But what if man could one day invent highly-advanced equipment that could monitor our environment with razor-sharp accuracy, like missile guided Tomahawks that George Bush have? Then, frogs would simply lose every bit of reason to be croaking ugly night songs when the rain comes. Maybe modernity have started to creep into the web of life as we know it, that machines and equipments is starting to dictate another form of system in this world we call Earth that just like in the movies we see, machines could one day rule the world.

It is a scary thought sometimes. But it is just a thought.

I am just about to do some refinements or introduce finishing touches on a research work that had kept me so busy these past couple of months, one that took me even towards places far away from downtown, snatching long bus rides and toddling into bangkas ang ferries, all these over and above my main duty of college instruction.

The premise of my study was simple and plain, yet I believe that to this day, scientific scholars have yet to fully took advantage of this approach, of clearly defining the socio-economic and political routines of rural population, especially on Muslim communities, as my work is specifically focused at right now.

How do they make their living there and what potentials that awaits them in their everyday economic endeavors? Are they involved in activities that becomes futile in the long run, trapping them in the notorious cycle of poverty, leading to the general lackluster movement of our national economic life? Or do they just need a little push on the back or some encouragement?

It is of so much irony to me that major aspects of my research involves information which could be – I am afraid – common knowledge and accessible through effortless means --- this is my worry. Yet, despite of this, I should be emphasizing that verification and confirmation on these matters, no matter how routine and prevalent they are, are ultimately necessary in order to take-off towards another important query of my research.

First is knowing the livelihood activities of my targeted respondents and then determining the manner of improving on such, inculcating progress and development, mostly economic in character.

Ironic as it may seem, we realize that rural economic activities partakes through the fertile soil and the abundant sea. If not farmers, then fishermen. Farmer, fisher.

Upon this precept, developmental strategies should be focused on inherent and practiced abilities of the rural populace, such as in the methods of increasing production and of course, exponentiation of income as an end-result. And not ever to introduce them alien concepts, unless when the foundation of their economics have been resolved fully.

These are the basic premise of my present research work. I hope it would have enough wind to fly.

I’ve been so busy with work-related activities that my blog is on a slowdown for the meantime. I wonder what issues are hugging global politics right now, or those within our midst. I wouldn’t be as informed as I am usually is due to my busy schedule nowadays.

Maybe I just put some morsel of thoughts once in a while just to keep things on and running. I'd be so busy till the middle of December.

Last night, after driving my wife and kids to a friend’s despedida party, I kinda still felt the tiresomeness that resulted from a most recent travel to Cagayan de Oro and other Mindanao cities that I went to bed so much earlier than expected.

And the bed was so soothing to my bodice and the night wind was comforting similarly.
And to top it all, National Geographic channel was exhibiting a series I’ve been anticipating greatly these recent days, Apocalypse: The Second World War, a six-part television program about the events and happenstances of World War II, captured by camera while the war was unfolding, with so many clips that were previously unpublished.

Truly, war is so atrocious and so evil. Yet reminding me that anecdote about how war sometimes becomes inevitable and necessary.

I think I’ve finished watching only 3 of the 6 segments. I hope I’d be able to catch up with the other three. I felt that among many documentaries I’ve seen before, I most enjoyed this one. Not that I am a fan of war, if ever there is a term like that, but it was such a mind-opening experience, about the horrors of war, and what form of evil can men actually commit and implement.