Café Kontra

Tech Break

2008-08-27T23:34:00.004+08:00

Have a break, have a KitKat! Belated happy birthday! She's turned three last August 26. Isn't she cute? Yeah, even I'm not immune to gushing over children, sorry.

It's kinda funny posting a picture of her all smiley and whatnot, because she usually doesn't smile for photos at all, and instead stares at you with her mouth hanging slightly open. Honestly, this kid could stare you down bigtime. And her voice isn't high and tinny either. She has this huge, booming voice, and when she calls her brothers she knows she's boss. She's awesome that way.

Anyway, this wasn't what I was supposed to write about at all. What prompted this post was Mozilla's Ubiquity, which I found super-cool, and I just had to gush (yes, lots of gushing from me today. Hormones, perhaps). I titled the post 'Tech Break' because for once I was planning to (key word: planning) to take a break from writing self-involved posts and instead talk about cool nerdy things (again, not an oxymoron, dammit), like all the million and one tech-oriented blogs in this world do (sorry, the word blogosphere is a huge personal no-no). But then the first line wrote itself, and all was lost.

Yeah, anyway, Ubiquity. Pretty much anything Mozilla does every major tech blog writes about, and explanations are tedious anyway, so I won't bother (watch the video if you haven't yet, or honestly, just try it out, it's beyond awesome). It's an alpha, of course, but it's surprisingly usable.

I've been pretty much a fan of Firefox's customizability from the get-go, and until now it's the reason why I love the browser. Extensions that have extensions are particularly interesting to me intellectually, even if I don't use most of them (e.g. Greasemonkey and Stylish), which is why I like the way Ubiquity makes it easy to make custom commands. It's nice seeing Mozilla continuing being supremely extensible and developer-friendly, given that the approach has been a huge part of their success.

The first time an extension for Firefox really blew me away was when IETab came out. Admittedly, Firefox was young and everything was bright and shiny then. Still, admit it, you know what I'm talking about; it was like a huge 'wow' moment that that froze time when I discovered IETab. The killer was that it could open IE-only pages in a Firefox tab, automatically. I used it on my bank's site, among others (fortunately that bank has since decided to use non-IE-specific javascript). Nowadays everyone knows about it (aside from its usefulness, it became infamous for certain memory leaks), which has diminished the bling factor, but the fact remains that it was one of the reasons I stuck with Firefox. I doubt that I'm alone in that regard.

In the short time that has passed since I first 'discovered' IETab and now, technology has changed immensely, especially when it comes to the web. It's funny, though; in essence, most of it is just glorified text parsing (XML? Yeah. JSON? Yeah. Atom, RSS? What do you think? Microformats? Same thing), but the applications are staggering. Same thing with Ubiquity. It's all simple applications of existing technologies, but damn if it isn't useful.

Back

2008-08-25T19:57:00.015+08:00

I'm cycling back. Maybe I should make a new blog, or get a microblog account or 12 (then again, with my propensity for verbosity, that probably wouldn't work. Or perhaps that would help prevent the the loss of focus and burnout?).

Yeah, this blog is so 2005. Heh.

As I have said so often, I'm not really the social type. I don't snap a thousand fifty-six pictures and upload them for the world to see, I don't network with people (Friendster? Deleted. Eskwela.com? Deleted. Dozens of invites to Multiply and the like? Ignored. I'm sorry, I really, truly am. Maybe tomorrow, the Procrastinator says.), which is why I lose touch so frequently. I don't really update or, erm, share, because I don't have the drive and energy. Or because I just forget.

In case the above sounds like a self-involved whine, well, I suppose it is. Let me assure you, however, that the state of things is my fault entirely, and that I'm (somewhat) fine with things as they are.

I miss writing, though. I haven't created anything of worth in literally years. That's the sole reason for this.

Right now I'm just trying to re-familiarize myself with writing, as I think that that part of my brain has atrophied. So forgive me if things don't make sense.

A Snippet, v1

It happened slowly, like an avalanche.

It's not an oxymoron, dammit. Do you think that a mound of snow appears instantly, snap, now there's snow packed at critical mass, ready to blow? Snow falls and accumulates on a steep slope until it reaches a critical mass, and only after a trigger, a shout, a squawk, a whir, and only then does it go boom.

So yeah, exactly like an avalanche. And that last one was onomatopoeia, so you're still wrong. Mwah.

How did we meet again? Was it Beth who introduced you to me, who set up the conversation to make you appear thoughtful and intelligent and (other)worldly? Or did I ask Beth for the setup? I can't remember, I'm forgetful that way.

I know, shut up.

So yeah, critical mass, and a trigger. Snoring is a fair trigger, right? Your snoring is loud enough to cause the heavens to fall from the skies. Like a fighter jet on turbo, and with limitless fuel.

Hyperbole and simile, love. You got it the other way around.

...What? I can't believe you're mad. Do you blame the mountain when it explodes? How the hell can you blame me for smothering you with a pillow? It's simple enough: no oxygen for you = no snoring for me to hear. Duh.

Dude, if I knew you'd be more talkative dead than alive, I never would have killed you. Fuck you.

I didn't mean that literally, dammit! How can somebody so smart not understand figures of speech?

Everything I've ever said, ever done, has been a metaphor for love.

[end snippet]

I'm not sure what that was. The approach is interesting for me, although admittedly somewhat cliché. It's a different version of an old short story I wrote. I'm basically trying different writing styles.

It's actually part of a larger and somewhat surreal story, but this particular scene is interesting to me, so I wanted to try and write different versions of it. The figures-of-speech theme is something that wasn't planned and basically appeared while I was writing it, but I found it cute so I kept it. I'm trite that way.

I'll try something else in a few days. If I can find the motivation, as usual.

These are the perils of weilding a weapon you do not know how to use:

2005-11-08T21:05:00.001+08:00

Imagine walking down a dark alley, unlit save for the light of a distant building near its mouth, and, for a moment, the glint of a pen-knife in your hand, the blade drawn and ready to use on any would be attackers.

Picture, now, a figure emerging from the shadows, face dark, impassive, dangerous. See him ask you, quite politely, for money. Hear your voice, trembling, as you hold up the knife---too late you realize it is puny, small, and not entirely useful---and warn him to stay away. Smell the ambient air, thick with traces of smoke and something rotten (you would not deign to think what that something could possibly be). Feel the pain as, after lurching forward and stabbing at him clumsily, he grabs your wrist and twists the knife out of your grasp. Taste the blood in your mouth as he uses the knife to stab you in your chest, takes your money, strips you naked, and leaves you to die, burbling and drowning in your own blood.

And you think, in your last moments, about shameful, painful arrogance, and weapons, and the forms that they take, and the souls that they break.

The worst thing about weapons is not that they kill, or injure, or inflict tortures both real and imagined; it is the illusions they provide, which only break when you cut yourself, and oftentimes not even then.

The pen is the mightiest of weapons, and the one most abused.

2005-09-05T01:11:00.001+08:00

Welcome once again to this pathetic freakin' corner of my everyday world.

On the headlines tonight:

Small, petty woman for sale. She claims that she can burn your balls and scratch your eyes out at the slightest provacation, but what you actually get is closer to a high, droning whine, the insistent pitch of a griping hound.

This, on a happy day.

Several small things.

Small thing number one: You're cruelest to the people you love.

Number two: Temper. It flares. It burns. It scars.

Three: I don't want you to understand.

Nothing happened, dear. There is no why. I love you. Oh happy day.

Thank you for putting up with such a small, petty little personality.

This is not an entry. You are hallucinating after more than a month of seeing the same words ove and over again, like a mantra. The sheer monotony is creating the illusion of something new.

These are not my words, they are the products of your imagination.

Chase the Rain

2005-07-20T02:08:00.009+08:00

You wouldn’t think something like rain would have a distinct boundary, but once, when we were driving along the Service road one cloudy (but dry) day, I looked ahead and saw that part of the road was wet, and that—yes, it was raining. In a few seconds we had crossed the boundary and raindrops tinkled on the car’s roof and windshield. Comical representations of rain—you know, those little dark stormclouds hovering over the head of some dour, unlucky ‘toon—spring to mind.

When clouds move, rain follows. There was a character in Douglas Adams' So Long and Thanks for All the Fish that was followed by the rain all his life; wherever he went, any time of the day, it was raining. It turned out he was a Rain God.

In cartoons and in stories, rain chases us, because the thought is supposed to be funny, especially given the fact that we’re not supposed to like rain. A sensible person, in the English idiom, is someone who “gets in out of the rain”, thus a character’s comic annoyance when the rain follows.

Consequently, the opposite is never considered, being much too absurd. The idea of a role reversal always is fun, though; what if it was you who chased the rain instead, always following storms and clouds and the tinkling raindrops?

People chase the rain, in a way, when they burst out of their homes to dance in the rain. I’ve done that all of once in my life, and that was very, very long ago. And we catch the rain our mouths and hands, which are spread wide open in anticipation.

It rains practically every day here during rainy season, and I chased the rain only once in my life. This will be something I will regret, surely, but tomrrow and tomorrow and tomorrow will pass and the number will remain the same.

What reason is there for me to chase the rain, anyway? During the rainy season, people get runny noses and pneumonia and walk home in floods, wet and cold and utterly miserable. Why would any sane person subject herself to that?

[Perhaps to remain sane.]

Anyway, rain or not, here’s to greeting everything with our hands and mouths spread open in anticipation instead of slinking underneath overhangs and trees. Cheers!

Nostalgia (part V)

2005-07-19T01:01:00.003+08:00

I saw a copy of "Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH" strewn on the tambayan table today; it was a not-so-old-looking paperback with an orange cover. It made me sad, in a way, because I remembered my old beat-up copy of the book. Mine had a blue cover and showed Mrs. Frisby riding Jeremy across the sky, depicted in ink and flat colors.

That copy I saw in the tambayan and partly reread that afternoon belonged to a friend who was taking a Children's Lit class. Honestly, when she told me that, I felt an undeniable twinge of envy. I love children's books. If I had a class that required me to read children's books all throughout the sem, I'm pretty sure my average would go up [albeit the increase would be, for all intents and purposes, insignificant].

The other books that were in her required reasing list included The Little Prince [a classic, of course], The BFG by Roald Dahl, and even Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone. The aforementioned books, along with Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH, were the only ones I had read in her list and thus the only ones I remembered.

I am personally not overly fond of Harry Potter but I understand why it was included in the course. On the other hand, I was overjoyed to see The BFG included, because Roald Dahl is one of my favorite authors [contrary to popular opinion, he wasn't just a children's writer; read one of his short stories for confirmation. I recommend "Skin" and "Genesis and Catastrophe"].

The encounter brought back memories of all the books I had read as a child and as a pseudo-child [which is an adult who still likes reading warped fairytales and playing with yoyos]. If I were to teach a children's lit course, I would include something by Madeline L'Engle and A Series of Unfortunate Events. Maybe I'd also choose one of those Pollyanna-type novels with "inspiring" plots. Perhaps even something from popular literature [admit it, you read The Hardy Boys too (nope, was never a big Nancy Drew fan)].

One of my dreams, truth be told, is to have a library of children's books when I have a house of my own.

I regret that I will probably never see the majority of books I had read again, mostly due to my inefficient, shameful memory. Most likely I will never remember the title of the series of fairytales I stole from my cousin, from which the only thing I remember is the ending:

They lived happily, of course, and the king and queen ruled justly and wisely, but many years after they died the nation once again fell to wickedness and decadence, and the good rulers were forgotten. Such an ending is echoed by Stardust, a novel not-quite-for-children written by Neil Gaiman. In the end, the king dies and leaves his queen alone to sit atop cold mountains and look up at stars with sad eyes.

The immensity of a childhood fills you up to the brim, but when you've spent only a few years in this world, you're too caught up in swimming in this sea of games and laughter and thoughts to see and appreciate what, in just a few more years, you will have to lose.

Let's move on to a different type of nostalgia now, shall we?

I saw the rules for the Accoustic Jammeng'g' competition earlier this evening. The theme was, quite simply:

90's,

The first thought that came into my mind was: my God, was the 90's that long ago that already it's being made into a theme?

And then: awww, the 90's.

Grade School, as well as half of High School, was in the 90's. Our generation's culture--our music, our humor, our language, our ideology--was largely determined by this decade. The whole OPM boom we have now owes a lot to giants such as The Eraserheads. And although uncountable bands keep cropping up nowadays, the sound will never be the same.

I used to watch Tropang Trumpo, telenovelas such as Mara Clara, and--the perennial favorite--Home Along da Riles. Those days it was still commonplace for a student to reply the title of a local production when asked what her favorite show was (my answer was Home Along da Riles, thank you very much). Then again, maybe that was just us.

The 90's are over. Long live the 90's.

I write quite often about nostalgia (try to find the four previous nostalgic posts), and I'm still fixated on the letter V, hence the title of this post. Ha.

If I experienced childhood, grade school, and high school nostalgia, today I experienced college nostalgia as well, despite the fact that I'm still in college. Tonight, while helping a friend look for an old short story in an old, now-unused yahoogroup, I took to reading the old messages.

Looking back on yout past plans and aspirations as a group and realizing you lost them through the course of time makes this set of nostalgic reminiscence far more poignant, even though most of the said dreams we had were mere trifles. Such nostalgia would seem silly to most people, just as childhood seems silly. But for the nostalgic, the silliness translates to a longing (yes, and as said before, according to Milan Kundera, suffering) that is heightened by the fact that:

These memories are special only to you, and when you forget, no one else will remember.

Echo

2005-07-05T00:51:00.005+08:00

Well, it’s been almost a month, so I thought it was about time for another long-ish post. Unlike the previous one, though, it’s hardly going to be coherent

Let’s start with something I have done relatively rarely in my college life: publish a poem for public viewing. Because,

What you don’t know is—

I want a secret.
I want a word, whispered to myself
And a soft smile
Maybe even a laugh, thrown to the wind
That no one will understand.
I want to see their puzzled faces,
Musing on my
unknown.

I want to stare off into space and
Think thoughts no one ever thought I’d
I want to hide my sandwich and scream
at the ants crawling on my sundress
and run into the building and disappear
for three days and come back to the world with amber
sap all over my hands and hair
dripping into pools at my feet reflecting
my eyeslits as they widen
and glisten with newfound wonder at all the things to be known
and found.

You look at me with that twitch at your mouth
helpless to know what,
exactly,
exactly.
I tilt my head, the amber still dripping,

To look in your eyes and share with you a secret smile
and have you know everything
and laugh with you
our voices disappearing
into the night sky,
This night that keeps secrets so well.

That was brought to you c/o one whacked-out night. Subject to personal interpretation (mine, that is).

V is such a curious letter. In several pieces of literature, it has been made into the symbol for the enigmatic, unattainable, and indefinable as much as the letter X has been transformed into the symbol for the unknown. It’s ironic that both letters are non-existent in the original Filipino alphabet. What does that say about us, I wonder?

This current fascination I have for the letter V springs from a graphic novel I read recently—“V for Vendetta”, written by Alan Moore. I think I have a thing for novels political plots, especially those that revolve around totalitarianism (what can I say? George Orwell is the best). I suppose V may not have the most original plot: England falls into fascism after almost being destroyed by nuclear warfare—but I like the way characters interact. The main character, V, is particularly interesting; despite his extreme single-mindedness and apparent cruelty, he still exists as someone very human.

A little spoiler-filled background on our (anti) hero: On the surface, V is a vigilante (unsurprisingly, the letter V appears throughout the novel quite often) fighting against England’s fascist government, headed by Adam Susan. V acts more like a terrorist than a vigilante though, and I suppose that would be a more accurate description; he blows monuments and structures indiscriminately and without regard for innocent lives, and even wears a Guy Fawkes mask (Fawkes, as I recently learned, was a 17th century terrorist). He espouses the ideals of anarchy and pursues his goals almost single-mindedly. Just to teach his protégé, Evey, the meaning of true freedom, he misleads and tortures her, with Evey believing that everything was being perpetrated by the government. V, at times, is unflinchingly cruel, especially when carrying out his “vendetta”.

V, however, is so much more than a vigilante or a terrorist or a murderer. He is a man, yes, albeit somewhat superhuman due to an experiment the government carried out on him when he was in a concentration camp. Despite his being able to break free and starting a whole new shadow life, I believe the experiments—whether chemically or psychologically—changed (dare I say broke?) something essential in him. The main part of his vendetta is against the former staff of the said camp. Yet V transcends petty revenge; his pseudo-conversation with Lady Justice is both telling and intriguing. But what I found most poignant about the character was his recognition that a person such as himself—someone whom he characterized as essentially a destroyer—had no place in the new society. In the end, a train filled with explosives serves as his grave, and Evey takes his place as society’s symbol for truth and freedom.

At this point, the discussion could branch off into so many places, such as a deeper, more in-depth discussion of V for Vendetta, I will not go there now. I advise you to read the graphic novel (and “From Hell” as well, if you have the chance … hell, anything by Alan Moore).

Instead, my mind wanders and wonders about frivolities, such as the different instances where the letter “V” appears in recent history. Most prominent is Thomas Pynchon’s first novel, entitled—surprise, surprise—“V”. This is a huge novel, oftentimes hard to grasp, but from what I gathered, V is another potent symbol, this time of something unknowable or unattainable. V appears in a myriad of forms in the novel, but we never really find out what she really is, probably because what she really is as a concept does not exist. We cannot really know.

On an even more frivolous note, V is the assumed name of the hooker (or is it stripper? I can’t really remember) in the movie Milk Money. Again, V has that enigmatic sheen.

I really wonder sometimes whether it’s a good thing or a bad thing that V doesn’t exist in the original Filipino alphabet.

Suddenly I’m normal.

I’m active in my organizations and doing well in my academic work. I go out regularly on excursions, hang out around school and elsewhere, and even find the time to read a good book or seven. I even have a love life. I watch TV, listen to the radio, talk to my friends, laugh, gripe, tease, and dip my prying fingers into the latest intrigue, of which I am, for once, part of.

This has never happened to me before. Suddenly I’m wonderfully, surprisingly, irritatingly, nauseatingly normal.

My brain, briefly baffled by this turn of events, thinks at first that it must be a portent of things to come, one of the signs of the End of All Things. Then it, too, is engulfed by the utter ordinariness of the situation, and it realizes that no, the End is not near, lest it be simply the End of My Life as I’ve Known It. I am—and a shudder runs through my entire being as I realize this—growing up.

And I sound like one of those pompous idiots who dramatize everything, don’t I? What most people—those who’ve been “normal” all their lives—don’t realize is, realizing that you’ve become your average Maria is quite unsettling, especially for someone who has tried so hard to maintain a façade of uniqueness, for one who espouses the principles of self-expression and individuality. The God was the Individual, the Key Word: “extraordinary.”

Suddenly those labels seem so hollow. It’s a bit of a letdown when you realize that, all this time, you were never really that different. Then you get used to it, and suddenly you’re happy with the way things are, which is: normal. Just like it’s always been.

The following nonsensical piece was something I wrote some time ago. Now the lights and the toilet really are fixed, but cable is non-existent and due to some weird going-ons at PLDT, we have no phone. Again. Ah well.

The place I have always known as home has leaky faucets and a broken fuse. The lights don’t turn on in half of the house. The telephone line’s disconnected (yeah, no internet). The toilet doesn’t flush properly. The fridge is empty. And the TV’s only use is for watching pirated DVDs (yeah, no cable either).

I spend my time outside, usually. Me and my mom, we buy food and just take it home to eat a lot. And we don’t eat lousy Chinese takeout or greasy American fastfood; we eat good food, like the roast chicken over at Rustan’s, or Paksiw over at Milky Way. And we eat out a lot, too, usually at Dulcinea but sometimes over at a fancy resto in Greenbelt. When she’s with her friends they like eating at not-very-well-known-but-extremely-good restaurants like Segundo Piso and Café Juanita, and I like tagging along, for the food. I just eat and stuff myself while they gossip and chat about their good old days

When we’re at home, I watch DVDs. I’m not sure what she does; we don’t talk much, at home. She gives me water, prepares dinner sometimes, and disappears, probably to do her pottery, most likely to sleep. And I sit in front of the TV, glazed like a doughnut and equally inanimate.

===

I’m not home, right now. Mom’s getting the lights fixed, and the phone as well. The toilet was fixed a few weeks ago. Maybe she’ll even have cable installed. She told me not to go home yet, while the house is being fixed.

When I go over there, the first thing I’m going to do is sit on a chair, draw my legs up to my chest, turn the TV on, and watch a DVD, my eyes glazed like a sugar doughnut.

I’m tired, really. And I should be studying.

Anyway, one last parting shot:

"Nothing's a pretty good hand."

Food and Death

2005-06-12T17:52:00.001+08:00

My grandmother died in the wee hours of May 31, 2005, and I spent most of the first week of June going to the wake. It’s been some time since there’s been a death in the family; I’ve been to other wakes recently, but they were mostly relatives of friends and the like. The last time a first-degree relative died was years ago.

This is the reason why, although I’ve attended many wakes in my short life, my grandmother’s wake was the first in which I experienced the actual preparations. Way back when, I was still too young to really help (or at least remember) how people set the place up or entertained the guests. The most we did, after being bored out of our minds and playing card games, was run out into the lawn and play Frisbee Football.

She passed away last, last Tuesday due to complications from a bad bout of pneumonia (I don’t really know what time, exactly, but I was still up then because I was cramming our org website), at the age of 81. That was, as mentioned, in the wee hours of the morning. Later that afternoon the mania began.

We Filipinos have an insane preoccupation with wakes. Celine Lopez once wrote about them in a column; specifically, about how she hated it when people made wakes into a sort of mini-fiesta. Even when I read that column so many months ago I already knew that I disagreed with her; though it’s been some time since I’ve attended a proper wake, I remember them as enjoyable times, where family and friends would gather and sometimes (actually most of the time) play a game of cards. My recent experience reaffirmed my position. With wakes, as with every aspect of our lives, we Filipinos cope by celebrating.

And so barely half a day after my lola’s death, there was a chapel and there was her body and there were already a number of condolence flowers along the chapel doors. People kept on bringing food every minute, and we cousins were put to work on mini-projects such as a photo-collage. At the end of the day there were nine different condolence bouquets, and I marveled at all the flowers. I spent the night picking away at the food and letting my cousin solve puzzles he’d eventually give up on.

The next day everything was in full gear, since the preparation had, more or less, been finished. When I arrived my mother told me that there was pancit, which I expected because that was what they served the previous day; what she didn’t tell me was that there was also pork roast, rice, and mashed potatoes. Mmm. The day after that, aside from pancit, venison, rice, and vegetables, there were also sandwiches. The food multiplied every day. During the last day of the wake there was even a cake and patries. One of my guests who had visited commented that “it was like being in a hotel.” The impression was facilitated by the fact that there was a keyboardist and a bassist (actually my Tito Roy) playing decidedly un-wake-like songs, with me and my cousins and titos and titas singing along (using 1001 Songs, volumes 1 and 2). I almost felt sorry for Monsignor in the other chapel; his wake was so much more quiet and boring in comparison. I half-expected him to get up from his coffin because of the racket.

It wasn’t only the food that multiplied, either; after the four days of the wake, I counted thirty (!) huge, towering, but still absolutely beautiful condolence flower arrangements, coming from everyone from the ABS-CBN Publishing House to Teddy Boy Locsin to Dick Gordon. I suppose that’s what you get when a mother leaves behind nine children who have worked in every conceivable place and field. My favorite set of flowers, though, came from a bunch of my mother’s friends; they were bunches of spring flowers in hues of pink and lilac. They looked so alive.

The family organized a program for lola during the last day of the wake; they got all (well, most, anyway) of the cousins to either do a reading or to sing something dedicated to her. My tito made a speech, after which someone told me that he finally saw where I got a lot of my traits. And of course, the program ended with me singing “Ikaw” off-beat and in a quavering voice. Go figure.

I never actually saw anyone cry until the day of the burial, which I understand is not an uncommon occurrence. The wake is a celebration, of sorts; actually, it’s just an excuse for people, regardless of how often they see each other, to get together. The burial, that’s different, though. It’s the last time you’re ever going to get to see that person before she’s finally committed to the ground, the last goodbye. Emotions ran high, that day; my tito JP, my mother’s youngest (and only) brother, was about ready to smash the face of the lawnmower man in for being so noisy while everyone was praying. Even so, after everything was done, the mood was still festive, in a way; of course, there would be food, no matter what. The food that day was good, as usual. I don’t think there has ever been a family event where there was truly bad food. One of the favorites during the day of te burial were the mini-tacos, which were bite-sized (but complete!) tacos, which tasted just as good as the real thing but weren’t half as messy.

I think it was during the day my lola died that my mother told me about how lola didn’t like extravagant funerals, and neither did my papa, who died years ago, which was why they didn’t spend an extravagant amount on the coffin, etc. Of course, that might seem a bit hard to believe after all the food and everything else, but for all that, all the preparations and succeeding events such as the burial and the ninth day mass and dinner weren’t extravagant. Everyone just contributed and helped to make everything happen, which is one of the advantages of having a large family.

Everyone did it for Lola Del’s sake, but I suppose for our sake as well. We need to celebrate to cope. Meanwhile, my lola is in Manila Memorial, her coffin on top of my lolo’s, which in retrospect was exactly the right place to put her.

A Surfer History

2005-05-29T00:40:00.001+08:00

I’ve tried, with minimal success, not to have any sort of net presence. It’s a fairly easy feat for a lazy git who boils inside for hours on end and then runs out of steam as soon as the cover of the pot is lifted, but surprisingly hard for a meddling git who can’t leave well enough alone. One ends up with a vicious cycle that involves creating various usernames and passwords in a flurry and, after a brief affair with words, photos, and other miscellaneous objects that can be represented in a string of 1s and 0s, promptly forgetting them.

This is why, after deleting an awful Fanfiction.net account, neglecting my Friendster account to the point of oblivion, letting my Hotmail e-mail address rot, and delegating numerous YahooGroups to web-only mail, I have started a friggin’ blog and started posting at groups again, whose mail is now received in my now-very-active Gmail.

Not having a net presence is hard for a person who knew what the Internet was before her classmates even had PCs. I remember the first time I surfed; it was in my mom’s office, and I was holding one of those ludicrous Internet Yellow Pages or some other book of a similar persuasion. The book had descriptions, too, the kind of cheery, mind-boggling claptrap that made you choke. I was entranced, and spent my whole after noon randomly opening a page and looking at each kitschy or demented or just plain normal site. I visited many sites from the “yellow pages” but I can vaguely recall only one: it was about frogs and had a yellow background and a sad-looking image of a green frog on the main page.

Pretty soon I was an active participant of several clubs for kids over the Net (you know, those sites with names like KidZone and such); I even had my own column in a newsletter. It lasted all of two issues, I think. Back then there was a list of kids with profiles, their likes, dislikes, hobbies, whatnot, and you e-mailed anyone who you thought was interesting and exchanged a few chirpy messages with them before forgetting to reply and then forgetting your newlost friend altogether.

Web design and even San Serif fonts were practically nonexistent; sites had solid-colored backgrounds, tables, and, well, Times New Roman. I developed web aesthetics a wee bit later in my life, which was why the horrible marquees and the blinding colors were not only tolerable, but were something that escaped my notice (almost) entirely.

People still used ICQ and IRC(and they still do, albeit less of them. Face it, IM is more convenient; maybe that’s because it’s easier to use and usually consists of contact whom you’ve actually met face-to-face, but probably because its acronym has fewer letters), which for me lasted until I was in high school. Yes, for a short while I was chatter, and I could spew acronyms and shortcut lines with the best of them.

There was a time when some people made a small fuss over the self-proclaimed future of chatting, which consisted of a site with virtual rooms and chatters who had avatars. Time had an article on them once, but I forget the name of the place (The Palace? Was that it?), which doesn’t really matter because that obviously went nowhere.

Those were the days when, after meeting someone in an mIRC chatroom and getting past all that a/s/l nonsense by introducing myself as someone from the Philippines I would quickly type, “Do you know my country?”, which was a habit developed by someone who’d been asked “Oh really? Where’s that?” much too often. Once, after a guy I was chatting with assured me that yes, he knew of my country, we talked about trivialities and he subsequently told me I was tall for a Filipina, which was … unnerving, in so many words (I was 5’3, which was tall then for my age but still). Those were the times when, after telling an e-pal (which was like a penpal, only we got each others letters faster and was probably why I got tired of replying) that I ate spaghetti at McDonald’s she would reply: “They have spaghetti there?” I could practically imagine her big blue eyes widening. Probably such encounters stoked the beginning of any nationalistic fires I harbor today.

E-groups were all the rage as well, back when Yahoo hadn’t bought them yet. My poor email addy, which was provided by my then-ISP iConnect, was flooded by mail from all sorts of groups (but mostly it was that Evangelion group that had 500 messages a day). Hell, I was even active back then. I read all those messages (well, a great deal of them, anyway), if you would believe. Needless to say, that was a bit of a short stint; I don’t think that anyone who loses focus as easily as I do can stand five-hundred-plus-plus messages a day.

Google didn’t exist then, either. The search engine I always used was Alta Vista, although occasionally I used Lycos. I don’t remember ever using the Yahoo search engine. I had a short love affair with the Ask Jeeves search engine at ask.com, but that died, as all things do.

One of my first encounters with Google was when my cousin used it to search for Sailor Moon websites. He checked all those sites, one by one, and what stuck in my mind was the fact that he reached all the way up to page 20 and was disappointed to find that there was no more “Next”.

Coincidentally, while searching idly for my name and my old email address on Google (which is currently the only search engine I use now), I stumbled upon the old EVA mail archive, and saw one of my old, childish, naïve posts and experienced a sort of shock run through me. Afterwards, I felt a strange feeling of nostalgia.

Since we’ve gone some way from the path, let us follow this sidetrack a little further: According to Milan Kundera, “nostalgia is the suffering caused by an unappeased yearning to return.” I have no idea why I should have a yearning to return to old-and-often-senseless mailing lists, but I suppose the concept goes down a bit further than that. Things are simpler, the less you know, and there weren’t so may things to worry about, like web savvy and Netiquette and, well, how sensible messages are supposed to look like.

Chain letters were still passed on, sometimes, in the hope of a little magic.

I eventually lost my old groups when I lost my old email, which happened when I lost my old ISP—iConnect had been bought by inter.Net, and, well, transitions aren’t always smooth. I lost my email when we shifted (forcibly) to an inter.Net account, and along with that all those groups and things. That was when I said goodbye to Eudora and Outlook. For a while Edsamail was popular with the people here, but I never used it. Edsamail reminds me of the texting phenomenon: it started out free, then had a rate of one peso (for Edsamail, it was P1 per day), and was eventually flooded by ads.

And so I trashed all those mail clients and shifted to webmail—first Hotmail, then YahooMail, a rarely-used UP WebMail account, and then finally Gmail. I started collecting groups again, filling up my inbox with unread mail from YahooGroups (I haven’t tried Google Groups yet, but eventually…).

After networking with all sorts through the many-fangled ways that the Internet offered, one developed an urge to create—what else?—a personal website. My first website was created by using a primitive editor called Claris HomePage 2.0, years and years and years ago. Yes, that was it, they were called homepages. My homepage was yellow, I believe. With little flower graphics at either side of the header. I talked about myself, my family, my interests, hobbies, and more about myself. It was a standard homepage, with a personal gallery that never took off and a family profile that was never finished. I suppose it doesn’t come as any surprise that I scrapped the site eventually, and that later, when I tried creating a personal site called Obsessed (it was hosted at xoom.com), it never even got off the ground.

Ah, right, xoom, along with his pals geocities, angelfire, tripod, and the numerous other webhosts that multiplied like rabbits all over the web-O-sphere. Of those ad-ridden behemoths only geocitites seems really alive, nowadays, although I wouldn’t really know, of course. It was only good ol’ HTML on those hosts; it was some time before all those other letters jumped in, letters like PHP, JSP, XML, XHTML, and all their brethren. It was a strange world, one that was full of slashes and hard-to-memorize URLs.

High school provided some inspiration, though. The advent of high school provided the discovery of Moyra’s Web Jewels, a discovery I had made only then even though the Jewel Mines were open two years prior. It was a whole new world, almost, and although Moyra did may different designs, it was her jewels that fascinated me. I remember being particularly enamored with a collection called “Xenorococo,” a beautiful interface that wrapped text around intricate, gem-studded, unmistakably golden curlicues. Another favorite was a set called Alien Gold, which, as the name suggests, is … gold. A pattern emerges.

What this beautiful collection of hand-painted gems started in me was my digital art mania, which continues to this day. It was the Web Jewels that (indirectly) introduced me to previously-Fractal-Design-and-then-Metacreations-and-now-Corel Painter and all the wonderful things it could create. It started me down that road of graphics, web design, and (digital) art for art’s sake.

One of my first ventures into web design, which was the website of my high school newspaper, was a bit of a flop because I tried to do something like Xenorococo, only not so ornate and in silver and black. The result was … ok, I guess. I’m pretty sure the layout was replaced in a hurry.

Eventually things like minimalism and CSS and web standards and Flash happened to web design, but I ignored them dutifully for the longest time before finally trading opulence for cleanliness and practicality.

I haven’t quite got the hang of it, even now; I probably wouldn’t be a successful web designer or graphics artist because, too often, I do what I want with a design instead of what a customer wants. When I designed the site for the online newsletter of one of my organizations, well … let’s just say I did it in hot pink and apple green, which probably blinded just about everyone that visited (I still maintain that the colors were nice).

I’m enamored with Digital Art, though, its difference from web or graphic design being that you create not for other people, but for yourself. Is that a selfish world view? I don’t know. Much of art is self-centered, anyway; when you write or paint, it’s usually for yourself. Art isn’t a team sport (except in very rare cases).

Remembering my surfing history, I can’t help but marvel at the progress we’ve made. I had a lot of web-related (mis)adventures along the way; I did try my hand at internet shopping, buying a complete Escaflowne VHS set with all four OSTs free, but the delivery was too expensive and took too long, so I never really, erm, took to it. I opened accounts, closed them, talked to digital personas and forgot them over and over again, and constructed many ephemeral personas that I destroyed repeatedly once I had enough of the fakery.

When I was an active member of the Pinoy Otaku ML (which was in the iConnect days), I had a number of these personas, mostly depending on who my favorite character was at the given time. I was Kaika, I was Kansas (which is not the name of any character I know of, but it's too long a story and I’m tired of typing), and so many others until I realized I was tired of it and just became Jael. After that I never used any other name in any of my other web-related undertakings. Since then, whenever I wrote fanfiction or replied to email I was, simply, Jael.

For some time I did try not to have any sort of web presence, since I was getting a bit fed up with it. I was tired of updating things. It was too much work. Besides, a deeply personal creature does not benefit when people who actually know you in person see the trash that come forth from your brain. And so I deleted my Fanfiction.net account, left my Friendster account to practical oblivion, let my Hotmail rot, and delegated dozens of YahooGroups to web-only mail. Yes, I said that, will say it again, and, wait, have said it again. I also deleted a certain fanfiction site at Tripod, in accordance to what I did to my xoom account some time before.

Now I have a blog, am a member of a group blog as well (although I haven’t posted—yet), and, although I wouldn’t exactly call myself a presence, there is a slight clue there, a rustling of the leaves without wind.

My dear, the main characteristic of a cycle is that things come around.

And so this blog, which is a glorified homepage, when you think about it. You have a profile and journal you can pour all your egotistical little ramblings into.And so I write, how long I do not know; until the next cycle sets, and rises again, perhaps.

We probably have nostalgia to blame. You always want to go back to where you started.

I just realized, you remember a lot more when you force yourself to think back.

This entry owes its length not only to the sheer volume of my nostalgia (although I’m sure I have forgotten a great many things), but also to the fact that I have not posted anything new in a dozen days. The surest way not to have any net presence is not to have an Internet connection, which is precisely the case in my house right now.

Why I persist on writing as if I was talking to an audience I do not know, since this blog is of no use to anyone but myself.

In the meantime, this serves as an extended apology. Or punishment, you be the one to choose.

Losing Neverland

2005-05-16T23:33:00.002+08:00

It’s funny how things change. When I was a freshman in college, I knew where my life was going. I was going to write forever and ever, amen, and to hell with Computer Science and programming. I was going to finish the course so that I could get a fallback job somewhere, but that didn’t matter, because I was going to write.

Now that I’m about to start my fourth year, I know that I’m going to work in some company and type a thousand lines of code a day.

What’s funnier, though, is that I’m probably going to be happy, for a given value of happiness. I like computers and programming, I like my school, and I love my course. That’s something you don’t hear everyday; most people write about the extreme drudgery of their (un)chosen major and how they would love to shift. Usually said major is in the field of Math, Science, or Engineering, while their ‘dream course’ regards Social Sciences, Philosophy, or any of The Arts (notice the capitalized The).

Just a small sidenote: my second choice, when I applied to UP Diliman, was Fine Arts.

I had no big revelation, no huge moment of insight; eventually, I just realized that, against all odds, I was enjoying myself. Could have been the people; I made a lot of close friends and became part of a lot of cool orgs. Or maybe I’m really just a nerd at heart. Or maybe I'm too easily satisfied by my lot in life, who knows?

No one knows, really. For a given value of ‘knowing.’

I can’t remember what I dream anymore. Not that I remembered all my dreams before, but now they’re so uninteresting that I forget them the moment I wake up.

I think up stories less and less as well. My imagination works less, and on the wrong sorts of things.

I started writing a story once, about a girl who, when she became sad, would suddenly be surrounded by butterflies. It was inspired by random imaginings and small white butterflies that fluttered down short shrubs by library pathways.

When I read A Hundred Years of Solitude, I said: ‘damn,’ because there was a character in the book who was always followed by yellow butterflies.

Originality is hard to come by, these days.

Pigs fly

2005-05-13T12:31:00.002+08:00

Yesterday I read “City of Truth”. It’s the third book I’ve read by James Morrow. I like the way his imagination works; all sorts of weird, fantastical things happen and his characters (almost) don’t bat an eyelash. It’s a shame his books are rarely available here in the Philippines. I only happened to see a copy of City of Truth because of a late lunch, rain, and a pervading laziness to return to work which led us to browse the shelves of a bookstore which sold previously-owned books. I bought it on the spot and read it once I returned to my OJT, despite the fact that my two companions and I were half an hour late. Not that there being on time would have made any difference; it was an unnaturally slow day, which was why I had enough free time on my hands to finish the book before going home.

It was more a novelette than a full-sized book, which may be the reason I found it less than satisfying. It would have probably benefited from a bit more length. Even so, it touched something fundamental inside me.

The plot is something familiar in many ways: in the city of Veritas, people are forced, through a process called brainburn which they undergo when they are ten years of age, to always tell the truth. As usual, rebels exist, and underneath the city of Veritas is the city of Satirev, where dissemblers go to recondition their truthful minds and learn how to tell lies once again. In the middle is Jack Sperry, a faithful Veritasian until his son Toby gets bitten by a rabbit and falls ill, whereupon he gets caught up in Psychoneuroimmunology and other New Age healing methods and is convinced that lying in order to keep his son happy is the only way to cure him of the disease.

Veritas, being a city of absolute truth, destroys any art which it deems is a lie: paintings of angels, literature riddled with metaphors, and similar works of the imagination. This is Jack Sperry's job, as a so-called “art critic.” It’s funny seeing art critics with sledgehammers. Meanwhile, Satirev attempts to teach lies by creating a wonderland wherein lies literally exist: pigs with wings, hot snow, talking dogs (they have a chip in their throat), and huge, genetically modified rats that chase cats.

I like this book because it shows both extremes (extreme truth and extreme falsity) and exposes the failings of both. Veritasians and Satirevians alike seem somewhat absurd and two-dimensional, and only when Jack denies both cities and sails away into the night (literally, since he leaves by the sea with his wife and an old sea captain) does he finally seem fully human.

So let me tell you why this book touched me:

I’ve always tried to avoid extreme positions; when I was in high school, neutrality was one of my main mottos. For a while I wanted gray to be my favorite color, even if it technically wasn’t even a color (I couldn’t stand it, so eventually I ended up with the standard blue). Eventually I realized that taking a stand was important sometimes; however, I also maintain that absolutes, strictly speaking, do not exist, and that humans cannot have absolute truths without losing something in return.

The point, the whole point of this contrarian café isn’t to just be a smartass and take the opposite view of every point but to see that, by taking the opposite view on everything, you actually take in all possible views and mold it into a somewhat messy but still coherent whole. You don’t need either/or. Recognizing that we are both honest people and liars every day of our lives is what makes us human.

To cut a long entry short: this café exists because, well, every story has two sides, even if that story is only being told by one person.

13 days less 'til the end of the world

2005-05-13T09:50:00.001+08:00

Happy Friday the 13th! I hope that chaos, mayhem, pandemonium, and discord reign supreme this day. I will certainly be doing my part.

They say that one definition of time is a movement from a state of less to more chaos, which is why a cup breaks but does not fix itself. The act of fixing the cup, while lessening the physical chaos, actually adds to the overall chaos in the universe due to the energy released while fixing it.

Since time is only an increasing progression of chaos, why do people continue having any hope for the future?

That was a really stupid question. Aside from the fact that it’s practically baseless (the colloquial and scientific definitions of chaos differ, for one, and anyway the so-called progression isn’t a literal progression), it ignores a basic fact about human nature that should be obvious to anyone who has lived in this earth for more than three days: humans have an amazing way of lying to themselves. It’s a survival trait.

Reminds me of a quote from Animerica’s English serialization of X/1999: “The end and the future are one, but we keep on living for the future.” Pretty senseless, when you think about it. It was one of my favorite quotes.

Chaos is a favorite topic because, for the longest time, I called myself the personification of chaos just because I was clumsy and, for some reason, things fell down around me. It’s fun, being chaos. Destroying order is always fun, until you realize that chaos is just a different kind of order.

This is why I haven’t stopped calling myself chaos; eventually, people realize that, yes, there is a certain order to my actions, but that order is my own.

Midnight Snack

2005-05-10T16:22:00.002+08:00

This would have acted as an addendum of sorts to the last post, save perhaps for the fact that it didn’t really add anything.

I was only around nine when I went to Singapore for the first (and last) time, and I only remembered it today because of the traffic in my brain.

Foremost on my mind was the utter lack of Manila-style traffic. We stayed in a house owned by my mom’s friend, who had lived in Singapore for 20 years. The last time she was in Manila, she told me, she couldn’t stand the traffic. It’s only in Manila and Italy (although my biased brain disregarded the latter), she said, where driving is literally a life-and-death situation. [Coincidentally, both have mainly Catholic populations.] When I heard her deride Manila traffic while simultaneously looking out towards Singapore’s spotless streets from the second-floor window, I felt an inexplicable sense of pride for being a part of a city with the (perceived) worst traffic in the world.

I really don’t know why I’m proud of traffic and Filipino time and other so-called Filipino faults; I guess uniqueness is a virtue even if the actual trait isn’t.

There are other things I remember about Singapore, of course: Chicken Tonite (no Madame Copyreader, that’s not a typo), for one, which is a weird chicken dish in potatoes and white sauce. I ate it every night and loved it. My mother tried to imitate it many times over and in many different variants (Beef Tonite!) when we came back home, but I have a suspicion that any subsequent offerings were nothing like the original.

I also saw the play Les Misérables in Singapore, and the original London cast performed. Later in my life (around October of last year) I learned that a friend of mine went to the same play in Singapore, all those years ago, before he ever existed for me. It’s funny how things work out.

I remember my mom haggling over an Olympus camera; a cable car ride to nowhere; the taxi drivers; and, vividly, the trees everywhere, along the streets and across the skyline.

I also remember how the comfort wrought by a place as well-off as Singapore only made me love home more.

Technically it isn’t midnight here, but somewhere out there in the wide, wide world the landscape looks like an outpouring of azure and Prussian blue over cities and fields of aster, and that’s where I am.

Opening Night

2005-05-09T21:41:00.003+08:00

...it's a soft opening, yes, but then most openings are.

S'funny: I seem to remember that the roads were more congested, way back when, even though there were fewer cars. Each and every time, when I went home to Alabang, the cars would be at a standstill along South Super. Edsa was hell as well. Commonwealth? Dear God. Traffic was awful, when I was a child. I always ended up dizzy (why do children throw up so often, anyway?). The airconditioning was also worse in those beat-up old cars, and always smelled of air freshener. Usually citrus. Now, we go back and forth Quezon City and Alabang in an hour, and we always pass through Edsa, and there is not a trace of faux citrus in the air. Even so, people yap on and on about the MMDA and the buses and the traffic.

People complain more, nowadays, with less problems, about all sorts of different things.

I once got mad at my mother because she made me kiss her goodbye, then stayed another hour in the house before leaving for office.

Don't kiss me if you're not going to go yet!

She had to stay even longer after that to calm me. I was about four, I think. I had a lot of tantrums when I was a kid. It's weird, thinking back on those times.

I complained more, back then, about so much less.

I liked being a child.