Why We Do Not Hate Meralco

Just a question: Have you seen me in any of those epic protests against Meralco? The answer is obviously a resounding No.

And it is not just because I'm a bit indifferent to some of the company's alleged "misdealings". It's simply because if you were to receive billing statements like the one below, you would also think twice about marching across the streets, screaming for fairness and justice:



Another question: When do you think will we pay our electric bill? Well, we'd rather wait for the next disconnection notice before we start answering that question.

Maybe, next month they'll bill us for P5.00 instead of P7.50. Who knows?

Note: Some concerned board mates of ours have told us our current bill might be a miscalculation. After all, we do use the iron and the wall sockets every once in a while. But I'm crossing my fingers still. Hehe.

Selective Chivalry

The first time I rode a bus in Manila, I offered my seat to a lady in her 40's (It was the Fort bus and I rode it after my first day of work). I remember thinking then that for as long as I live here, I would offer my seat to any lady found wanting.

Well, that was the idea anyway.

Nowadays, I don't exactly follow that kind of principle. I like to blame it on the bad examples around me: I have been witness to a lot of able-bodied men turn a blind eye to women while riding the bus or the train.

It's true. Chivalry is definitely dead here in Manila and I cannot blame the men for being so "callous". Commuting can be such a pain in the neck and it is so tempting, and I repeat, oh-so-tempting, to just sit down on the bus/train seat after a hard day's work and not mind everyone else.

But even as I acknowledge this lack thereof, I am also aware of my pedigree: I may not be a lady's man but I am still a gentleman, at best. And as a gentleman, I still have to practice this now-forgotten art of male civility. But since I'm here in Manila, I have to play by a different set of rules:

Criteria for offering a woman/girl your seat

Criteria No. 1 - I must be sitting along the aisle.

This first criteria generally applies when I'm riding a bus. If I were seated near the window or sandwiched between two people, I won't bother getting up. Why? The reason is because I risk inconveniencing my seatmates by stepping on their toes and budging through them while I offer a lady my seat.

Criteria No. 2 - The woman/girl in question must be near me.

I'm now a lazy brat and I won't offer anyone my seat unless she is 3 feet near me.

Criteria No. 3 - The woman/girl must be alone.

Suppose the lady in question is with company, say, a boyfriend. Plus, they are hugging each other like boa constrictors in the Amazon, should I then offer my seat? Or the lady just loves standing up because she's chatting away with friends and the quality of their conversation would be severely diminished if she had been sitting down (just imagine teenagers shouting at the top of their heads), should I offer my seat? Those were rhetorical questions.

I do hope my set of criteria is fair enough. Nevertheless, I still want chivalry to make a comeback in Manila. That's because if my mom, my sister or a close girl-friend of mine would be standing on a bus or train, I would still appreciate it if a guy would be gracious enough to offer his seat.

Now, think about that for a second.

Riding The Bus

There are some days when I feel like an action star. But I'm not the one to blame for having those feelings.

I was recently transferred to our Makati office and the commute to and from the office has been, to put it mildly, very unpleasant.

Let's put it this way: You are walking down to the East Service Road to catch the bus to work. You're glad that you're early, at about 8pm. But you realize there are many others waiting for the bus too.

15 minutes pass and you're still at the exact spot waiting for the stupid bus. By now, you are part of the crowd, one among the many vulture-eyed citizens who are secretly wondering where the bus is and how to get on it when it arrives.

Then, as if you're seeing a mirage, the bus arrives. It isn't fancy; it's downright rickety and old. But the most depressing sight is it looks like a box of sardines, with a lot of people standing up and others clinging on to dear life while hanging on to the bus' doors.

As if on cue, you start running towards the moving bus and so does the rest of the crowd. By sheer luck and adrenaline, you manage to grab hold of a railing, haul yourself up and be part of the masses sweating it out inside.You pay for your ticket and wait till you arrive at a bus stop along EDSA. Along the way, you pray that the Lord God delivers you from this misery or otherwise makes you learn to treat it as a normal part of growing up.

Obviously, what I just described is a scene typical of rush hours. There are also times when I could comfortably ride a bus minus the aggravations brought by a stampede of people in corporate garb. But those times are few and far between.

Oh well, this is life. No wonder then people in Metro Manila can be so morose at times.

Oh My Gosh!

Hello there!

Just discovered this while browsing through Dagmay!

And as not to appear like I'm just ego-tripping (which, of course, I am. Thanks Kuya Dom!), I would like to invite everyone to be a contributor for Dagmay. It's a great opportunity both for fulfilled writers and novices like us. Click here!

Arnis Ta Bai!

My question is, "What motivates you to take up Arnis?"

Finally.

After more than a year in hiatus, I've resumed my training in arnis.

The experience back to it was quite long-winded actually. The story goes like this: I joined ("coerced" would be the right term here by the way) the Emerald tournament last 2007, held at the Jaycees gym, Davao City. It was a tournament participated by members of the Mandirigmang Kaliradman (MK) nationwide. Since I recently passed my Level 2 examination and I was unfortunately part of the crowd, I got myself participating in the tourney. The problem was: I didn't have any prior training.

To cut the story short, after the tournament, my right shoulder hurt like hell (at least, I know now how rheumatism/ athritis feels). It hurt so bad, I could not raise my arm. For months, I had to endure this. I stopped doing arnis as a result (my official reason was I had to devote time for my thesis, which was legitimate enough, come to think of it).

I planned to resume training after graduation but ended up in Manila by May 2008, as an employee for an IT company. I knew that there was an MK chapter in UP Diliman but for the rest of 2008, I was never adventurous enough to go to UP.

Then 2009 came and with it, a change of perspective. Last January, on a Saturday, I went on my first trip to UP Diliman. I ended up walking from Trinoma to UP's oblation because I simply didn't know the route (It was fun actually, except for the part where a man kept following me until I reached the Elliptical Road. By the time I did, he tapped my shoulder and asked me where the city hall was, which I didn't know. So much for assuming he was a hit man out to get me). When I reached UP, I tried looking for the building and the classroom where they practice (based on a text message I got from a friend). All was to no avail however. I didn't find any arnisadors.

But as luck would have it, I did find them. I surfed through some websites, found an email address, emailed these addresses, someone replied and gave me a number (which would be Joepot's number, an MK veteran in NCR). Before I knew it, I was on my way back to UP Diliman, with the correct info on when and where they practice (for your information, MK NCR practices are from 2 to 5pm every Sundays, at the Vanguard Building, Classroom 2, UP Diliman Campus. That's why I never found them on my UP Saturday trip).

I met the resilient few who have stuck it out with the art: Nico, Rin, Karin, Joepot (who are all in their mid-30s. So I'm the young kid, the "ruh-kee"). After practice, we went to a restaurant beside Conspiracy to unwind.

That's when the inevitable question came. Nico, my soon-to-be mentor/ instructor asked, "What motivates you to take up Arnis?"

My answer? Well, it was cheesy. The answer was all about doing something Filipino, the pride associated with practicing the art, for self-defense, friends urging etc. Simply put, I guess I blundered my way to an answer because I haven't thought of that question that well.

So what does motivate me to take up arnis? Why endure all the body pains, the blows, the seemingly sado-masochistic cycle of hitting with a stick and getting hit back in return?

The answer is quite simple, and cheesy too. I want to be a Filipino. And before you castigate and lecture me on the many ways one can be a Filipino, let me explain first.

I am a Bisaya. As a Bisaya, whose family are immigrants from Visayas, I have no unique culture to speak of. No heritage I can honestly declare my own.

I started having this acute feeling back in college, when I was doing our thesis on Dagmay motifs. We were studying the Mandayas then and I was simply impressed by what I learned. They had material artifacts, literature, and other cultural emblems. They had a vast cultural heritage, a heritage brought down from generations past.

I was humbled. Here I was, a person who claims he is a Filipino, but who is as culturally empty as the person next to him. I don't speak or write either Bisaya or Tagalog fluently enough. My drawing is basically influenced by Japanese anime. My thoughts and speech are inherently Westernized. In sum, there is nothing I could claim as my own, nothing that posed as my badge of Filipino-ness ( if there was ever a word). Nothing, except Arnis.

It's hard to explain really. It's tempting to say it's a mystical experience. But every time I hold a stick, it does feel good. It makes me imagine the countless Filipino men and women who wielded the same objects of weaponry as they faced enemies in the premodern jungles of the Philippines. It makes me think of the generations before who, through their blood, sweat and tears, perfected indigenous systems of martial arts which are still being taught and admired around the world. It's as if I'm holding something from history, something that if I let go of, will surely be lost for good (right now, I'm taking this statement literally. Nico let me borrow his sticks, sticks which came from the grandmaster himself, the late Manong Ben Lema!).

So there you go. Forgive me for being cheesy once more but I have become really passionate about this art. If I were asked what defines me as a Filipino, I would say it is not my complexion, my surname, or the language I use. It will be arnis.

And I believe that's reason enough to continue on training.

Nothing's New Under The Sun

Ever get the feeling that every idea you've come up with is no longer new and original? Well, that's how I feel.

Take for instance, my idea for a story simply consisting of a series of letters (Letters for Duncil, my project which is classified "in limbo"). I thought I had pretty fresh stuff back then until I got hold of the book, Last Days of Summer, which also had the same idea! Someone had thought about it first.

Another is my idea for a sleep vest for weary bus passengers, a vest which keeps the dozing wearer strapped onto the seat instead of bobbing side to side as the bus twists and turns. Little did I know there are already less elaborate (and I daresay less "functional") neck cushions available.

Or take my idea for a metropolis filled with green roofs or, better yet, squatter houses acting as mini-power plants because they're juiced up by solar panels on their tin roofs (business plan to follow). But someone had already thought about that (evidence is Discovery Channel's Ecopolis and Holcim's award to a city council in South America).

Oh well, I guess that's one disadvantage of being born late: almost everything had been thought up. But then again, I have other ideas in store. A short story which is strictly bilingual, a screenplay of the short stories of a writer I like, a memoir of my parents' love life, a website that will contain the links to all your social networking sites/tools so you'll just have to access them all with a single password (Please don't take this away from me. This is my baby) or a Web 2.0 site for married couples.

Or maybe I can write an alternative history/biography of Paolo Ray E. Bataller. That's one idea nobody has ever thought of before.

What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun. - Ecclesiastes 1:9

Happy Singles Awareness Day!

While I'm writing this post in the office, snuggling couples are walking by along High Street below, whispering sweet nonsense to each other's ears. It can be a bit depressing, come to think of it, but I guess being single for the whole 21 years of my life has made the word "single" not as menacing as some see it to be.

It's Singles Awareness Day (SAD) again and the world abounds with single people who choose to be single or are downright unlucky when it comes to love. As for me, I like to think of myself as an "NGSB (No Girlfriend Since Birth) By choice" type of guy (Sad to say, in this modern era, a lot of girls can't say the same thing. It is still deemed unnatural for women to court men. But then I ask: why invite possible rejection anyway especially when a lot of men out there are jerks? But I'm already digressing...).

Now that I don't have a date and I'm all alone in the office (save for some die-hard accountant ladies doing the audit for my company), what's the next best thing I can do to save this day? Hmmm. But of course! Talk about love!

Hypothetical Scenario: If I had a girlfriend, what are the romantic, cheesy things that I'll be willing to do for her on Valentine's day?

1.) Got this from my previous dentist in Davao who also cultivated orchids- Give her flowers. But not just any type of flower bought from a nearby kiosk or flower shop. I'll give her a tulip (or whatever flower she likes) that I purposely cultivated in my backyard for a year, all in the hope that on Valentine's day, I could give it to her.

2.) Got this from Kit- Set up a date in Shrine Hills, Davao City, where we'll lay a banig on the grassy hillside and just stare at the starlit sky and talk all night.

3.) Got this from Kit also- Send her love letters through post mail or LBC a la The Notebook.

4.) Got this from My Sassy Girl- Bury a time capsule, with all the heartfelt messages of love, and dig it up on the eve of Valentine's day

5.) Got this from The Mona Lisa- Use my extraordinary skills in drawing to paint her a portrait of her face (by the way, she does look like The Mona Lisa, Pinay version). There'll be no cheating for this: no Photoshop/Gimp, or any other fancy graphics or gimmickry. Just plain talent and, well, love.

6.) Got this from Mama and Papa- Stay at home and just talk. Or go to some lonely restaurant away from the kids and talk some more.

7.) Got this from a friend- Write her a bedtime story, complete with a book full of graphics and preschool sentences, about Prince Charming (Who is Prince Charming? I wonder...) and, obviously, the lovely Princess.

8.) Got this from Ryan Agoncillo- Give her a scrapbook of sepia tone or black and white photographs of her looking over the beach.

9.) Got this from Nacho Libre- Compose a song for her, sing it to her on Valentine's day, complete with bedroom voice and a stud guitar, all the while praying that she doesn't break out in fits of laughter.

10.) Got this from somewhere I don't remember- Call her up and start talking about this girl you met in college, who really struck your heart and changed your miserable life for the better. Ask for some counselling from her about what to do with this girl all the while aware that both of you know the girl is her.

Ok. I think that's it for me. Good night (Jeesh. I didn't know being cheesy is hard work). If you have other brilliant ideas, please let me know.