Mark as Unread

I'm reminded of this every time I unfriend someone who seems to have forgotten his/her principles. The most recent case is a college friend. But then again, I keep on finding out that the former University of San Carlos Department of Sociology and Anthropology (now the Department of Anthropology, Sociology, and History) just keeps on churning out graduates who are either die-hard Dutertards or Marcos loyalists, or both. Which is a shame, really. Especially now that they're producing history graduates too. How can you study (or teach) history (or sociology/anthropology) and not know what the Marcoses did to the country?  The latest I've unfriended is someone who took up sociology, like me, and who even supported Leni Robredo -- like me. But lately this person had been sharing posts of some members of the Marcos family because, apparently, he is supporting -- and working with, (hence the cozying up) -- Ace Durano now. The same Ace Durano who was convicted of graft by the Sand...

The audacity of these scumbags fighting over the nation's coffers in the guise of "love of country" makes my skin crawl. In the North you have the Marcoses who, for many years, plundered "their" land amid the Ilocanos' indifference (or worse, amid their idolatry), and in the South you have the Dutertes who made Davao City their fiefdom and ruled unchallenged for decades (amid the Davaoeños' idolatry, of course).  We lost our chance to elect a Leni Robredo, just like we lost our chance years ago to have a Jesse Robredo as commander in chief when he died in that plane crash. Power-hungry Mar Roxas subsequently hijacked the Liberal Party and made it the most-hated political party in the Philippines, eventually giving rise to the landslide win of Rodrigo Duterte. Likewise, it was Mar who ensured the demise of the Otso Diretso senatorial slate in 2019; everything he touches dies. Makes you wonder if it was the Roxas touch that finally gave PNoy his illness th...

As soon as I stepped into the apartment, turned on the light, and let the cat out of the pet carrier, I knew I screwed up.  It scrambled away to safety, away from this stranger who, just minutes before, had been holding it hostage inside a plastic bucket.  It wasn’t as if I had a choice on the matter. My wife, Diana, who hours earlier spent her entire Sunday perched on a foldable ladder trying to get the scared kitten down from a lemon tree, successfully lured it from the tree with some cat food, and I was waiting to catch the poor little thing with the help of a rag – I’m a dog person, have always been, and I honestly didn’t know how to handle a cat. The rag was a pathetic attempt at trying to protect myself from scratches.  I managed to grab the kitten soon as it jumped down, and it struggled mightily against my clutches, but I was able to place it inside the relative safety of a plastic bucket, keeping it trapped there with a small aluminum washbasin that served ...

The animals were imperfect, long-tailed, unfortunate in their heads. Little by little they put themselves together, making themselves a landscape, acquiring spots, grace, flight. The cat, only the cat appeared complete and proud: he was born completely finished, walking alone and knowing what he wanted. Man wants to be fish or fowl, the snake would like to have wings the dog is a disoriented lion, the engineer would like to be a poet, the fly studies to be a swift, the poet tries to imitate the fly, but the cat only wants to be a cat and any cat is a cat from his whiskers to his tail, from his hopeful vision of a rat to the real thing, from the night to his golden eyes. There is no unity like him, the moon and the flower do not have such context: he is just one thing like the sun or the topaz, and the elastic line of his contours is firm and subtle like the line of a ship's prow. His yellow eyes have just one g...

I swiped this image off someone else's post on Facebook. The gist: most of the time we can't really make money off our passions. I used to write fiction when I was a kid. It started in sixth grade, all the way through high school, and sporadically in college. I even joined the Palanca Awards once, submitted a short story. But I knew early on that I couldn't make money writing fiction. After dabbling for a couple of years as a journalist -- which, at the very least, paid more than fiction but still not much -- I "sold out" and became a copywriter. Almost 20 years later I'm still "selling out." But at least I'm still writing for a living. At least I can actually earn a living doing my thing. I still love fiction, although now I enjoy it by reading stories, not by writing them. Who knows? Maybe I'll start writing short stories again -- just for fun. Maybe I can even post them in this blog. Sometimes you discover that what you really want to be w...

It's been five days since I got back to Mexico City from a three-week stay in Minneapolis to visit my sister and her family. I have to say I already miss the talks and walks I had with my sister, playing with my two nephews, and the drinking sessions with my brother-in-law. But such is life. We all need to go back to the place we call home -- wherever that place is. It's been a little less than seven years since I made the big decision to depart the Philippines for good and live with my wife (then my girlfriend) here in Mexico City. It's been great -- don't get me wrong. Mexicans are warm and friendly (like Filipinos), Mexico is a beautiful country, and it has been fun (okay -- sometimes painful) learning Spanish.   Living here in North America, however, makes it difficult to visit the Philippines regularly -- the biggest problem, obviously, is the expensive plane tickets. And it hasn't helped that this so-called revenge travel has jacked up the price of flights.  W...

Katong officer sa NAIA nga nangawat og 300 dollars sa isa ka foreigner, unya gilamoy ang kwarta para dili masakpan -- that incident brings me back to a conversation I had with classmates back in my elementary days. Nagstorya mi sa akong mga classmate unsa among ganahan kuhaon nga kurso inig college. Kadaghanan nitubag og Customs Administration, para makapangawat -- para madato. Seriously, dili ni binuang. Kasagaran man gud kay naa sila'y kaila (pamilya, parente) nga taga Customs -- nga nangurakot, nangawat, unya nadato. What's troubling about all this is that every one of them answered like it's normal to steal, that to aspire to go into Customs means -- yes -- you MUST steal. If you don't, you're a fish out of water. Mike Ehrmantraut, the bent cop turned "cleaner" and hitman in Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul, lost his son Matty, an honest cop -- who, ironically, idolized his father -- because the kid didn't want to take dirty money. Whe...