Segunda Mano

SPOILER ALERT. You have been informed.

By joining, I agree.

I hope this is short. Longer reads are for more important things, other than worrying about the little fiefdoms of social influence in Philippine cyberspace. Certainly, a national association of social media users doesn’t deserve as much attention as… say… the situation of nuclear reactors in Fukushima, or of nuclear energy as a whole.

So, here’s the short of it.

I’ve given some thought to joining a nascent group of bloggers based in the Philippines, the idea of which was again brought to my attention when the online equivalent of fisticuffs erupted over a certain manifesto that went around via email. The manifesto can be seen at the websites of Janette Toral at digitalfilipino.com and of Tonyo Cruz at tonyocruz.com. (No hyperlinks necessary; they should already be on your RSS feed).

While I have some reservations about some of the specific ideas in the draft, such as creating and enforcing a unified code of ethics (a can of worms too lengthy to discuss for the purposes of this post), or a claim of representation on behalf of all social media users (who died and made Me king?), there can be no doubt that the authors of the manifesto only had the best interest of the anonymous poster in mind when drafting those articles. Good is supposed to come out of it, and only insofar as the intentions of those joining this nascent group are as pure as their manifesto purports to be.

I understand that there were attempts several years ago to create something similar, but the project fell apart at the end when things became a little too personal between key personalities within the group. I figure that if we advocate for stronger institutions that veer away from personality cults in our day to day lives, we would be hypocrites if we let strong personalities put color in social institutions of our own making – one that web writers, social media users, and other similar stakeholders are trying to create.

The manifesto isn’t, by any means, precise. Not by a long shot. However, as the intentions are pure, I figure they’re going to need help along the way. Maybe I can be of some assistance. After all, I do make my living out of making words fit the idea in a precise, tailored manner, out of making the ideas march in single file, ready to attack and destory the contrary meme.

So, at this very moment, I hereby declare I am part of what may be known as the National Bloggers’ Association of the Philippines.I am part of it now so that later I do not complain that it does not represent me. I am part of it because now I have the opportunity to do so. Some things just cannot be done from the outside.

As with all things in social media, it’s a work in progress. The going may be slow for a few months, but that’s okay. One must have patience in building social institutions, especially after the institutional wreckage of the past few years.

God (or whatever deity you believe in) help us.

To Anna and Zeke, on the occasion of their wedding

On Interstate 5 the other day, I saw a billboard for that new Paul Rudd-Reese Witherspoon-Owen Wilson movie, “How Do You Know”.

If you haven’t seen it, it features headshots of Reese, Paul, Owen, and Jack Nicholson, and the words “HOW DO YOU KNOW” in large type, with the word “KNOW” in boldface.

I think the copy is genius. With only four words, you get the point of the whole movie. Everyone just KNOWS the question. The answer, from what I know of it, is just as cryptic. As my me and my wife or any old married couple will tell you, sometimes, you just know.

Quiet, I’m praying.

The Jesuits believe that it’s only when you’re alone and in absolute silence that God speaks to you. So once a year, they talk to God. To do that, they stay absolutely silent for forty days. Their eyes only read the Bible, and their ears only hear the sounds of the passing day. They do not talk or communicate with another soul. No touching other people. No eye contact. Nothing.

Maybe they’re right. Vows of silence are known across other religions: Hinduism, Jainism, Buddhism, and Islam. They all have their own followers of silence.

So it was that I found myself somewhere in Tagaytay, contemplating silence one summer in a three-day retreat, Jesuit style. Read: in absolute silence.

How to Cook Chicken

Cooking is simple. I should know; Mom taught me how to cook when I was around ten. Or twelve. I’m not really sure. Before she got sick.

Rub one whole chicken with a mixture of chopped ginger and sesame oil.

Before, the world revolved around the kitchen. The dirty kitchen, to be precise. Some chicken had been culled earlier in the day, and Mom was collecting the coagulating blood for later. Mom had seen them at the wet market and thought it would be good to demonstrate how an entire animal becomes dinner. I was transfixed by the cooking process; nothing went to waste.

Culture Shock

For Father’s Day, I enrolled in a writing workshop-cum-tour of Writer’s Block Philippines featuring the irrepressible Carlos Celdran. We walked from Plaza de España (Roma) in front of Manila Cathedral, to the crypts behind San Agustin Church. Along the way, Celdran talked about Manila’s bloody past and how it helped shape our national identity. In so doing, he extolled Manila’s charms with a passion rare in Manileños. Most would rather talk about how decrepit Manila has become, or how it’s just a shell of its former self, but not Celdran. “I may not change Manila, but I can change the way you look at Manila,” says Celdran at the end of each tour, and I believe him. After earning his degree from the Rhode Island School of Design, Celdran now makes his home in Ermita’s fabled North Syquia Apartments, where on occasion his pad also hosts other interesting events.

Long Stories

1. When I was in private practice, the boutique firm where I worked rarely took walk-in clients. This was not because we were snooty lawyers who turned down work we deemed to be beneath our level (although I admit there was a certain pride to be had working for my firm), but because it took some effort to reach our office. The office was (and still is) on the eighth floor of what was designed in the sixties as a seven story building in the heart of Makati. Sometimes, when both elevators servicing the building would conk out, ours was an office on the top floor of an eight-story walkup with some of the worst parking in the country. As Randy Pausch would later explain, this was, in its own way, a filter to ensure that only those who really wanted us got us.

The Betrayal of the Proletariat

If you can’t take the heat, malamang mahina ang aircon mo.

Kiko*

Communism in the Philippines has had a long history, existing before the establishment of the present-day Communist Party of the Philippines. As a meme, the dream of absolute equality among individuals can be traced as far back as 1930 with the founding of the Partido Komunista ng Pilipinas (PKP-1930) in November seven of that year. It survived several attempts of being outlawed during the American period, the Japanese occupation, and during the massive repression by the privileged classes at the beginning of the Second Philippine Republic, mainly through armed struggle that officially ended in 1954.

Pardon My French, Part Deux

I first came across Ninoy as a young boy. Mom had somehow come across a bootleg tape of a speech Ninoy gave in Los Angeles in 1983, just before he came home to his destiny. I hear snippets of the same speech on television from time to time. It is, I think, his most remembered and most quoted speech. Ninoy’s tongue was on fire.

Matapobre

My good friend Lille Bose posted a note on Facebook today. In it, she spoke of how her grandmother, presumably now a retiree living somewhere in Wisconsin, sneered at Barack Obama’s acceptance speech – because, or so the story goes, Barack Obama is a black man and people like her have a general distrust for people of color.

I had an interesting conversation with the “older” people who live next door – my mother and her current best friend, an aunt of hers who spends a few nights now and then coming over for a nice visit. This aunt is a widow who met her late husband (a German national) while working for the United Nations. Like most of my relatives who are now or at one point in their lives based in the United States, she is a fanatical supporter of the Republican Party. She does not fail to send to my mother, my sister, and anyone else in her Yahoo! contact list the latest dirt she finds on Democrats and their candidates, Obama not excluded. She is not alone in this endeavor. Most of my relatives there are similarly engaged in the McCain campaign.

Fortunately, my mother, being sensitive to my libertarian tendencies, has decided to bear the brunt of these information campaigns, which does not mean to say that she does not believe in them – the opposite cannot be closer to the truth – but she hesitates forwarding these messages to me knowing I do not hesitate to classify them as spam.