Today is a present

“Yesterday is history, tomorrow is mystery, today is a gift – that’s why it is called present.” –from Kung Fu Panda

This isn’t a film review or something of that sort. And no, I’m not a fan of Kung Fu Panda, and it has really nothing to do with the animated film. I just like the line – worth a thought to ponder on. To a grammar guru it’s mediocre, but anyone who reads between the lines understands me very well.

I am a person who is so stuck with my past at the same time so worried about my future. There are just so many things in my past I’ve been dying to undo, and wrongs I’ve been wanting to right. I’ve been so wishful of could-have-been’s and should-have-been’s if things weren’t the same. And I’ve been so crazy about being able to glimpse at the uncertain future. What I was and what I will become I just can’t seem to reconcile.

I don’t have a happy childhood. Those youthful years I had spent with my mouth gagged, afraid to commit an unforgivable crime of speaking up – of just speaking up. Speaking up is as taboo an issue in our family as sex education usually is. No wonder this lack of self-expression has created a timid, bashful person that I am today. I’m struggling; yet I’m overcoming.

I’m hopeful of my future, yet there are certain areas of it that I’m just too scared to face head-on. Getting to the details is too early for me to do. Leave it to my thoughts at the back of my mind. What matters, I’m struggling, but I’m overcoming.

Yet at times I regress when confronted with thick clouds of burden from my past and uncertainties of my future. I carry on my back the cumbersome weight of both of these, wishful to shrink back to being a kid and remain to be one for the rest of my life. Unhealthy as I sound, but I do.

Then I realize I’m too busy trying to undo things of the past which can’t be undone and plan things ahead which are out of my hands that I have overlooked how I am doing at the present. How am I at the moment? Struggling, but overcoming.

That’s what matters. Today – my present – matters. It‘s the one that reconciles my yesterday and my tomorrow – the one that paves a road to my future. It doesn’t matter now how bumpy that road may get, or how many bends I should take, or how painfully searing the cuts and wounds from trip-offs and wild thorns may be. What matters I’ve been given today to accomplish whatever there is to.

For what I was and had been has made me the person I am today, and what I am and do at the present determines the person I will become tomorrow.
-T.S. Posa

A World of Sides

I got an epiphany today and I just won't let it die again when I know how far it can take me. Enough running. Life is quick, ugly, and unfair when you wear my own spectacles. False impulse and phony achievements can no longer work as replacements.

I'm saving the girl who feels she doesn't belong because the truth is that the world is far too dull for someone as colourful as she is. And there are people out there who will need her strength. She doesn't fit because she's not supposed to. It has been so long now that the world has manipulated people on how they see things. Which is beautiful? Which is not? Which is right and which is wrong? This has affected them more than they realize it could.

I find it ironic that in most crucial things, most people settle for what is safe -- the middle ground. Prejudice is set aside and age-old concepts are compromised. People tend to go for what's easy and readily available to them. Snap, snap. Just like that.

Little girl, stop playin safe. Hang up those ugly hings for display and see them for what they are and not what the world tells them to be. Choose. Take a stand. Pick a side. Buy something for heaven's sake and don't just stand with your back against the wall. Delve deeper. Break the surface. Create tension.

There will come a time when the safe will drown in his own head filled with mere ideas of things he will never have. Safe One, die not knowing an epiphany -- no matter how tiny -- has already hit you right between the eyes.

Mind your English

"I am sick, you work me! If I die, who will eat my family?! You?!"

For sure you are familiar with this old joke that started out funny and has become silly these days, and you must have known how it's supposed to be translated in Filipino. After Melanie Marquez's infamous long-legged answer aired simultaneously all over the world, the next big thing the Filipinos had made fun of for a few weeks was Ms. World delegate Jenina San Miguel in this year's Bb. Pilipinas. After a good laugh, we started introspecting whether our quality of English has degraded so seriously that Ms. Jenina has become the epitome of many of us who are not able to express well in this language. Or they're was... they was the one who just can't speak English well at all. DOT. I mean, period.

As the third English-speaking nation in the world, our country is undoubtedly facing this serious problem, since we use English as our second language. When I was still back in the Philippines, I would take pride in this fact and would make a good laugh or two at those non-English speakers or those millions of people from around the world who use English as a foreign language. Having been out of the country and conversing with non-Filipinos in English has strongly changed my seemingly invincible point of view. True, they're not as good and fluent as I am, but thinking of the fact that English is as foreign to them as much as other languages such as French, German, Chinese, etc. are foreign to us Filipinos, I have come to admire their capacity to speak quite well in that language. It's just the need to speak that has opted them to learn English.

Lately, I have bumped into an Arabic-speaking Egyptian colleague and befriended him much more than I thought I would befriend a non-Filipino. It never crossed my mind that I could ever relate to a non-Filipino before. But this time I can relate to him better than I can relate to most of my Filipino colleagues. True, our cultures and beliefs disagree most of the time but there's one thing or two that bridge the gap - English and the non-verbal language, both of which are universal. I have realized two things from him: communicating using a universal language is the lifeblood of a relationship; and non-English speakers tend to learn more than one foreign language. My Egyptian friend speaks French and German aside from English and his local tongue Arabic. I asked him one time if it's difficult to learn a foreign language and I admired his answers: first, it depends on your necessity of learning the language; second, it depends on your interest with the one teaching you. His first statement reminded me of my French class back in College because I only learned the language much more for the sake of my grade (honestly) than for my desire to use it, although I'd come to love it later.

Then it hit me, perhaps these non-Filipinos who have to learn English feel the same way as I did when I was learning French - insecurity in speaking the language for the first time. Eventually I had come to appreciate its unique intricacy although I knew it would take me years to perfect it. I was just sorry I didn't start as early as I started learning English. As for non-English speakers who have learned to speak English because they have to, they have made a lot of difference. For us Filipinos, let's keep up our being the third English speakers and avoid being the mockery of other countries. Because being made fun of due to language deficiency is never funny at all.

Meet Chino and Chito

Because I am undergoing the phase of being obsessed of relationships and the lacking thereof, I have invented men in my life. Do not ask me why I have reached such state of desperation, but I think I may have failed to enjoy my younger years when flirtation does not appear to be such a daunting task.

Chino is a laidback guy, who likes animation and film editing. He prefers wearing t-shirts and jeans in the workplace. On weekends, he likes to watch (more like study) art films. He also collects graphic novels and plastic figures, but he will outgrow this eventually. He likes to drive around when there's no place to go to and when there's good music playing on his stereo. He also loves to go places he has never been before because he believes the world is as big as it is for all the people to see.

Chito is a stud, all wrapped in his glorious frame of six feet, two inches. He has the looks to make any girl weak on her knees, but he doesn't take advantage. He has this mystery and this is precisely why I like him. This need to figure him out like a puzzle. He likes to cook and plays guitar. As most tall guys are, he is one hell of a basketball player.

*Note: Chito and Chino are based on real-life. I am just too chicken to tell them up front that I like them.

Daily Grind

The constant and steady hum of the furnace kept me awake all night। I wondered how the night sounded back home in Manila. Were the crickets still chirping as they used to when Mother would make me go to bed? And I wonder if there are still jeepneys passing by, seeming to want to get home and give their aching feet some rest from stepping on the gas. Whoever wanted to become a jeepney driver must have thought it would only be about making oneself familiar with every street and corner. But no, it also calls for mathematical genius to keep an eye on the road while rummaging for change.

Now, why did I dwell on being a jeepney driver? No, i don't think I was a jeepney driver in my past life and I don't know anyone who was. Or maybe, the daily commute must have infused so much in the fibers of my being. Oh my. I did not just become so sappy about taking a ride to and from work.

Photographs

"To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed. It means putting oneself into a certain relation to the world that feels like knowledge, and therefore, like power."

"Today everything exists to end in a photograph."
- On Photography; Susan सोंताग

Whenever I attend a wake or a funeral, I always find myself spooked at how alive these departed ones look in their framed portraits। Well, of course, that is precisely because they were alive then. But I think it's more than that. These photographs will forever show a person filled with life and dreams. Putting aside the sad note of such a tragedy as death, I think these portraits will be treasured more by those who grieve for their departed. Some even have these portraits made out for a size that can be placed in a locket, simply so they can carry their loved ones anywhere they go.

A keepsake of some sort
I will keep the edges
from being tattered
Use it to remember
you by the hour
and measure the
ebbing tides of Time।

It's just now that I remember my collection of pocket-sized photographs. These are either given by friends or taken (without permission) from their wallets. It was in high school when this craze of having your picture taken by a professional photographer began. Almost every girl I knew had her picture taken at a studio. They would intentionally make extra copies to give away to friends and admirers. And so, I ended up having pictures of some of prettiest girls in school. I was left wondering what I should do with them. I wasn't one of their admirers and I don't consider them as my closest friends back then. But then, I kept the pictures hidden in a box, together with my high school memorabilia.
After our graduation, I thought of these kept photographs and how the pretty girls in them now look like. I wondered what courses they took in college and whatever happened to their perfect smiles. Although, I never kept in touch with them, I knew that they could have easily forgotten me because I didn't give them my picture even during graduation. We're not exactly friends and besides, I don't need to establish my own fans club. But now that I think of it, I should have at least given my best friend a picture of myself.
Now that I think of it, I don't think I really did give a picture. And I also didn't get one from my best friend. This person I spent almost all of my time with back in high school has succeeded in leaving no trace behind. We don't even have letters. What we do have is companionship. We also shared some jokes and rides home, but we never took the time to make sure that we'd remember each other down the road. We just slowly faded away in separate directions and I don't think it's because of the distance. Sadly, it's something more complicated and bigger than the two of us.

Transcendence

My head aches. It swims around the room. Sugar rush comes to mind after hearing a buzzing sound in my ear. It must have been the coffee. Or something terribly familiar. Something intangible. But it can't be.

I sit here at the waiting room where unnoticed things happen and where time seems to flow, overlapping each moment more tedious than the next."

"Dear One,

The setting sun warms your face with its final glow. You sit on a chair in front of your cluttered desk. You scan the familiar room, hoping to find some lingering parts of my self. There is none. You grab an unfinished book lying around and you flip through the pages, hoping to find one of your favorite words.

But no. You would not find anything there because it does not have my name. And all along, the shoulders droop. The eyes froze in a blank stare, while the nameless thing tries to take you by the week. And it can't see you nor touch you anymore because it's already here, sitting on a brown leather couch, convincing herself that it's the other way around.

The nameless thing will not leave tonight. It will engulf me like it engulfed the infuriated by-standers of a man-made tragedy. "