TO ANDREW

I close my eyes and your

face haunts me. Beautiful,

familiar, pained. Every

inch, every twitch invites

me to share the conflicting

emotions that you now feel.

Can you reach my hand?

Can I touch you?

I wish to hold you and

let you know that

I love you

not in a romantic sort but

in a way a connected

soul would.

un rezo

Algunas veces, Señor, cuando no puedo rezar, sento silenciosamente con nada decir. Sin embargo, lo se que estas alli, y sursurro tu nombre porque lo se que cuidas. Sabes los problemas en mi mete, y mis flaquezas y los fracasos en mi vida, y a menudo, mi ser poco amable. Lo se que su espiritu esta conmigo, y nunca me abandonares. Amen.

Rambling to write...

How does one write while her mind floats? How does she begin - with what word, with what sentence?

My mind is floating as I attempt to write something sensible and coherent. I want to write what I feel, but my heart - like my mind - is also drifting, and my emotions are now as unfathomable as my thoughts. But I have to write. Something in my gut is telling me to put things into words, hoping that if I do so, I will somehow sort this jumble of thoughts and feelings that is me.

It’s almost two in the afternoon and I have not eaten lunch. Instead, I’m in front of my laptop, trying to write while the divine Alejandro Sanz is singing Corazon Partio in the background. A fitting song, because I feel a little broken-hearted at the moment. (Por favor, Señor Sanz, dime, ¿quien me va a curar mi corazon partio? )

But why am I feeling broken-hearted? Maybe because I feel like I don’t belong with the people I’m now with. Maybe because I feel that my mother loves me the least. Maybe because I know what I need to do but I can’t seem to get myself to do it. Maybe because I want to talk but there’s no one who is really willing to listen. I don’t know. I really, honestly don’t know.

Maybe I should just call Dial-A-Friend and just ramble on, but what’s their number, anyway? Maybe I should just sit by the window and watch the clouds drift (everything drifts, it seems). Maybe I should just go find that Stephen Hawking book stuck somewhere in my room and educate myself about the cosmos. Maybe I should just go to sleep and will my subconscious to dream about Diego Buñuel.

Life’s a beach and a bitch, indeed.

Cheekily Envious of Ian Wright

There he goes again, smiling cheekily as he cheerfully chats with the dreadlocked female cab driver while cruising along one of the Big Apple’s streets. Moments later, he’s on a boat holding a fishing rod, trying to convince the uncompromising Italian-American man with the gray hair about the merits of Hawaiian pizza. Then he’s back in central New York, armed with a digital camera and a cheeky grin, living the paparazzi life as he takes pictures of Hollywood stars in a film festival.

I am not one who easily gives in to envy, but there is one person I am envious of with passion: Ian Wright. That short, endearingly irreverent Englishman who is living the life I wish is mine.

He slept in an igloo and communed with the Inuits in frigid Greenland. He downed pints of Guinness in Ireland. He ate ginger-flavored ice cream in Tanzania, and feasted on roasted sheep innards with Genghis Khan’s descendants in Mongolia. He lived like royalty in Dubai, and traveled to his heart’s content all over the United States.

That Ian Wright went to all those places and did all those things is not so unusual – other people have been to more places and done crazier things. But what is quite unusual, and what makes me green with envy, is the fact that it’s his job to do all that. As a presenter/traveler for the Travel and Lifestyle Channel (and formerly for Lonely Planet), adventure is the key word in his job description.

I really wonder how he landed his job. Was it his looks? I guess not. His height? Quite unlikely. Perhaps, it’s his gung-ho attitude and his cheeky English wit that convinced the Discovery Channel gods to give him the job. But whatever and however Ian Wright got it, I want his life.

I want to go to Brazil not just to watch the beautiful game and dance the samba, but to experience its diversity, its mystic, its passion. I want to go to the Galapagos Island not to disprove Darwin’s theory, but to behold the raw beauty of creation. I want to go to Amsterdam not to legally smoke pot, but to understand tolerance. I want to go to China not to unearth Mao’s follies, but to discover the secrets of an ancient civilization’s longevity. I want to go Sarajevo not to see leftover bombs, but to better understand the evils of war.

I want to travel because I want to experience life. I want to know how it is to be Mexican and French and Japanese and Cameroonian and Danish and Cuban and Samoan and Croat. I want to be a citizen of the world.

I wonder where Ian Wright will go next – the International Space Station, who knows? And I wonder where I will go next. I’ve been to some countries and have known cultures other than mine, but I want to experience more. My wondering, wandering spirit thirsts for more adventure, and the only thing that can quench it is adventure itself.

BACK TO SESAME STREET

I was channel surfing one lazy afternoon not so long ago when I chanced upon Bert looking for his socks. After a short while, in came Ernie, asking, as always, what his friend was doing. I watched, transfixed, as my favorite orange boy with the endearingly mischievous laugh helped his often grumpy yellow friend find the missing pair of his sock.

My parents hired a nanny to look after me when I was a small child, but I grew up with the television as my babysitter. Some of my earliest memories were those spent sitting on the floor, my eyes fixed on the television screen as Big Bird and the Sesame Street kids learn about letters, shapes and colors with the lovable bald guy whose name my failing memory can no longer recall. I ate cookies as Cookie Monster ate his. I mumbled as lovable Elmo mumbled about things. I sang with Kermit the Frog and, much that I disliked him then, I learned about numbers from The Count.

Sesame Street was not just a TV show - it was a seminal part of my childhood. It was a teacher, a playmate, a babysitter. It laid down the foundation of my English language proficiency (I often tell my sister that one of the reasons why my English is better than hers is because I grew up watching Sesame Street, while she grew up watching Batibot, a Filipino adaptation). As I watched creatures - humans and puppets alike - of different colors, genders and kinds mingle with one another, I, unconsciously, learned about the beauty of diversity and the truth that friendship transcends categorization.

I sometimes manage to catch Let’s Play Sesame – this generation’s version of my beloved show - and I never fail to notice the modifications. Not only does it come with a new title, the set-up and the settings also have changed. Gone are the kids playing with hula hoops and skipping ropes. Now, they have computers for toys. Gone, too, is the infectious theme song (“Sunny day, I’m on my way…”) that I still sing as an adult, replaced by one that can be best described as monotonous.

It’s just natural for the show to evolve as time passes and as technology advances, but somehow, there’s something amiss with this new version of the Sesame Street. It surely looks sleeker than that of my generation, but it feels synthetic. It’s as if the show has been robbed of its humanness.

I don’t know what the kids of today think of their version, but I’m mighty glad that my Sesame Street was how it was back then.

Some more verses...

It's been a while since I last posted. I've been  writing a film script lately but I'm only on Scene 15 and only God knows when I'll be able to finish it, what with my difficulty writing the descriptive narratives in Tagalog. (So sue me, I'm Ilocano: I grew up speaking Iloco first, English second, and Tagalog third.) 

However, while I've been trying my hand on scripwriting, I was able to write a poem or two and I'm posting one now. Here it goes...

NUMB

Familiar

that’s  how things look

but I can’t recognize them

my memory is shrouded

by a black fog

that blurs my eyes

from discerning the figures

from the shadows.

 

The bottle is full

but it spins too fast and

I can’t bring myself

to choose what’s good

from what’s bad.

My heart is confused from

the compulsive beating

of the forces that

pillage outside.

 

The sun is out

it’s enticing me laugh

but I can’t force my lips

to form the slightest trace

of a smile.

They are numb

from the cold

from the alienation

from the isolation

from the silence

from not being kissed.

 

The heat is not enough to melt the icy heart.

The light is not enough to brighten the murky mind.

There’s some hope left, but there’s no more love. 

español, por favor?

I come from a country colonized by Spain for more than three centuries. Christianity is the pre-dominant faith, introduced by the conquiztadores when they came looking for spices and precious metals. We have surnames like Reyes, Garcia, Marquez and Santos, and we eat lechon, paella and chorizos. The Spanish left so many marks on our culture but, heck, they forgot to leave their language.

Unlike the Latin American countries conquered by the Spanish armada, Spanish never became the lingua franca of the Filipino nation. Sure, our local dialects are peppered with lots of Spanish words, and the national greeting “Kumusta?” is a bastardized version of the Spanish “Como esta?”, but that’s all there is to it. Instead, we learned English, propagated by the Thomasites, the American teachers who came to the Philippines in the early 20^th century to educate Juan dela Cruz.

So now we are one of the biggest English-speaking countries (but not necessarily among the best) in the world, and it’s not uncommon and unusual to hear brown-skinned sorts   trying terribly hard to fake an American accent. Call centers have sprouted all over and have become one of the biggest employment providers in the country, all because of the Filipino’s English language proficiency and very trainable tongues ("With what accent do you want me speak, ma’am – British or American?"). And yes, hordes of South Korean kids have made Manila an extension of Seoul because they want to learn English.

No, I have nothing against English being the Philippines’ second language. Our ability to speak this most international of languages has given Filipino workers a competitive edge in the global market, and it has made travelling to other countries a lot easier. (I once sat beside a French woman who repeatedly muttered, “Je ne parle pas anglais!” on a Lufthansa flight to Ghana and boy, did we understand each other!)

I am grateful to the American educators who imparted their language to us, but how I wish that the Spaniards who gave us siesta and fiestas bothered to teach us their language while they were exploiting our natural resources. But no, those haughty Spanish friars who spoke of God but lusted for gold deemed Filipino Indios too insolent to be taught their Castillan tongue.

So now, as I reread Don Quixote and listen to Alejandro Sanz (¡eres muy divino, señor Sanz!), I am once more cursing the Spanish colonizers for their failure to teach my forebears their beautiful language. Because if they did, I’d be reading Miguel de Cervantes’ masterpiece – not to mention Gabriel Garcia Marquez’ novels and Pablo Neruda’s poems - in its original form, instead of a second-rate English translation. ¡Que pena!