Year 2004-2005

In The Cafe



Well, it's been a busy day. I worked 8.5 hours today.

I did not work-out this morning because I woke up too early. I smelled something's 'burning' beside my bed and I immediately pulled the cord out of my laptop. I am not sure but I think my laptop's battery should not be plugged/charged when its fully charged. The battery might explode(it's just my theory of course).

Nowadays, I am so free. I have this freedom of doing what I want and what I want are very simple things. They don't even cost me a fortune. 2 dollars for coffee and that's it. I even typed this article while sipping that coffee, though now, I'm sort of expanding my piece in my laptop.

Ever since Matt departed for Europe for good, I've decided to just go on solo for a while and do what I really want to do. Sometimes I don't understand myself: When friends leave, it's so easy for me to shrug them off and forget. This has always been my case ever since I was in Manila. Co-workers ask me, "Do you have a boyfriend?" I say "No". Then they ask, "Who are you dating?" And I say, "Nobody." And in exasperation, they finally ask, "Did you ever have a boyfriend?"

Ah, how do I answer such a question. HOnestly, I never had a boyfriend. I had lots of friends, sistah friends, party friends, fuck friends(you read that Matt) but no boyfriends. I don't know how to explain it but, I hate gay crowds and I don't belong to straight crowds.

I am an anomaly.

What I love remain constant: good company, good books, solitary exploration of nature, running in open spaces, biking, gym work-out, writing like this one, computers and programming.

I never really prioritized that thing called love. I mean, love in a romantic way.

I love sex but to me, sex is simply a biological need. I do it when I want it and nowadays, between a good book and sex, I prefer the first.

It seems the older I get the more I want to do things the way I want them done. And maybe, on a subconscious level, my brain is already counting the shrinking numbers I have left on earth, soooo, maybe my body is doing what it really wants to do because, maybe, it will die soon.

Who really cares.

This probably explains why I keep visiting the cafe since I found I could enjoy reading books, and discover new authors. Free of charge. There.

Since last night, I could not take my eyes off the books written by Paul Auster. I've read two of his books already and I really love 'his flow'. I am so much into 'the flow' of written works. 'Flow' whether written or spoken is like water coming out of the faucet (for lack of better comparison). That is the flow of Paul Auster. If I were to become a full-time novelist, I'd like to write my sentences and paragraphs the way Auster writes his.

I like this pasage from his "Invention of Solitude":

"Solitary. But not in the sense of being alone. Not solitary in the way Thoreau was, for example, exiling himself in order to find out where he was; not solitary in the way Jonah was, praying for deliverance in the belly of the whale. Solitary in the sense of retreat. In the sense of not having to see himself, of not having to see himself being seen by anyone else."

Auster describes his father. The thing is, I love his father the way he is described. Because I see myself in him.

There is nothing wrong with solitude, and even if I were alone, even if I ended up like Thoreau, even if I lived in the belly of the whale, I'd still feel nothing's wrong with that. Solitude is what I've been thriving on all these years.

But mine is a busy solitude, lemme tell you. In solitude I invade libraries and bookstores and cafe's and parks and bike trails. There is something intellectually stimulating inside libraries and bookstores. For many years, I've dreamt of owning a bookstore and reading its books the whole day. And little by little, I'm moving towards that.

But I have something else to discuss in this piece - please keep reading.

I am now in the café drinking coffee. In front of me lie the books of Paul Auster (Book of Illusions, Moon Palace), also, I am browsing "Living To Tell The Tale" by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Finally, there is this humorous book entitled "handling sin" by Michael Malone.

I am only intending to browse these books and if one of them is really good, I might buy it. I had my payday today and I usually buy something neat for myself. I just worry about filling up the already tight space of my bedroom with books I don't read due to time limits.

But this is what I do in the cafe. I try to browse and read books and when my eyes get tired reading, I open my portable keyboard, connect it to my pocket PC and out comes what you are reading now.

This is what I want to clear up with you my Pinoy readers : we must become readers more and more because what we are being fed intellectually everyday is worse than horse manure. We live in a country where political drama, like its soap operas and movies and literature, revolve around the same stupid plots over and over.

This is really what I am trying to say: I wish we have a country that stimulates intellectual pursuits outside of universities. I wish instead of us watching movies and TV's or surfing useless websites; and instead of reading Philippine media so prone to sensationalism to make money, we read novels, write novels, discuss written works, invent products, discover new life-altering theories, improve our tech and sciences. We should get rid of stupid political battles that I hate to the max (Now if there are politicians who think every Filipino loves watching them on TV, please, there are also people like me disgusted).

This time, I would share with you what I know. They said we Filipinos do not read, true, since most of us can not afford books. Because, our politicians never intended to make this country and each Filipino rich. Thanks to them, the peso is down, the prices are up, and there is nothing to do for a job. (Hey, the downfall of the nation is the handiwork of ALL, not one). They say we don't write good books. Of course we can not if we are subjected to the same plots and storylines every day.

Not only are we desperate for books, we are desperate for intellectual stimulation we expect from our Elders.

But out Elders especially the ones in Congress are not interested in teaching us. Instead, we have a barrage of Congressional and Senatorial cenaculo and zarzuela teaching us.

So they taught me what 'impeachement' was all about. Now they mean to tell me they will teach me how to impeach a President every three or four years? Is this what they call intellectually stimulating?

Because they are politicians. And politicians are Machiavellian, and that is the nature of their business.

If any Filipino is smart enough to create a persona for himself or herself to beat all his/her enemies, I say, "Go girl! OR boy!".

If I can create a fictional personality about myself to become popular or successful writer, I won't hold it against a politician who will do the same for his/her success.

What I really don't understand is - a smart Filipino knows how dirty politics is - and why do our politicians still go through the route of claiming: We want to know the truth.

Let me tell you the truth. You are all corrupt. I lived in Lubao all my life and it's no secret most of the politicians AMONG OTHERS were friends with the original jueteng king Pineda.

Pineda was a few kilometers away from me.

Don't give me this crap about you being holier than anybody else.

Again, I do not hold that against any politician or against Pineda. Pineda is considered a Robin Hood in Lubao. He is the nephew of Apung Asia who sold pork( I'm not sure if she's still around), he was poor as a young man and became super rich through jueteng. And if I were Pineda and have money in sacks through illegal means, hey, I'd probably befriend the biggest politicians in the country too. C'mon, that's common sense. And now if you want to punish Pineda, you may as well go put to jail my kubrador Aunt Diming, and maybe unearth my mother who was the biggest bettor in my town.

This has been going on since I was in college (I think). I have an Aunt whose livelihood was as a 'kubrador' and only God knows what she does now to earn a living. My mother was the biggest bettor of jueteng in our barrio (despite my pleas against it. And my disapproval to jueteng has nothing to do with moral issue. It has something to do with people tempted to live in fantasy of winning instead of working hard to earn a living. Jueteng, to me, like the big R, is the opium of the people. Hey, I am from UP ok, so don't get surprised if I throw in some Marxist sayings here and there).Now, I don't know of anybody who doesn't know that. And I am surprised why all of a sudden, everybody is 'shocked' by that.

Now, unless you want to expand our jail system and imprison almost all the people of the Philippines for particiapating in jueteng, maybe you can all just legalize it and make the country happy with the income it will generate?

What this jueteng investigation is doing is to aid those who seek to change the government by extra-constitutional means. This is the problem of our politicians really: Everything is pointed at a personality everytime something goes wrong. Will you all for a second consider another approach in your blame game? Will you for once understand it is the SYSTEM, STUPID not the personality? The media claims Arroyo is at her lowest rating. So is Congress occupied by the holy senatorial men. And women. It's not like everybody is in love with the likes of some Senators who seem to be so good in arguing for the sake of arguing. Every time one of them speaks, I feel like listening to a lawyer in the court of law. I never admire such people, again, this is my personal opinion.

But what is at stake here is the future of our youth. I don't give a hoot about these politicians who will be dying anyway, but when they start giving these horrendous speeches that seem to have been directly quoted from law books of 1950's, I mean, what type of maturity are we achieving for our children and nation?

Does your political drama make the Congress and Office of President cleaner? I mean, when you ask leaders to resign, who do you propose to replace them? You? C'mon, make our people learn REAL learning. You should focus on improving your presentations to build up our kids whose intelligence, language, skills and even thinking are now approaching the bottom of the heap in the stack of nations. Where is the encouragement of analysis and scientific thinking and logic and right thinking? You keep insisting on cleaning politics when you know politics whether in RP or any other country is dirty.

That's why I don't listen to you anymore. You are all broken records. I can not listen to the same refrain over and over again.

One time, I made an Americna friend listen to a Filipino album and he asked, "Do your songs sound like that all the time? They're like playing the same tune over and over again."

Please guys, lets change our tunes every now and then. Lets read books instead of listen to these has-been Law professors who think the entire country is a big classroom on Political Science and Constitutional Law. Really, I'm tired of it. If you wanna prosecute everyone on your path, spare the rest of us who aren't interested in your lawyerly professions. FIGHT YOUR FIGHTS INSIDE YOUR CHAMBERS. And when you're done, just come out and pronnounce the verdict. Period.

Please, don't drag me into your English full of accent and aaaahs, and ooohs in every sentence, as if trying to figure the next hifalutin word. Your English is so slow that I simply get discouraged listening. I sometimes wonder if you're the best of the best in the country, if you were, God help us!

And Filipinos should not be timid anymore. Tell your politicians that not everyone wants to listen to their 'ala' People's Court show everyday.

Tell them we want conversational English. Like ordinary English. We wnat them to talk about our daily lives. About where to find the next job. How to reduce prices. How to make us rich. How to give the best education to our kids. Tell them we want our people to stop dreaming jueteng dreams, wet dreams, and fantasy of going abroad to work.

Is that too much to ask? Or are the Filipino politiicans really convinced we all want to learn how to be lawyers like them?

Heck, I'd be a PT anytime, or a novelist or a story writer than be like them.

Meanwhile let the Filipinos do what they love doing. As for me, I love to be fed by these books on front of me. Better than listening to the debate of politics. And I love to write more stories of different tunes in a land of beautiful colors.