Poster Contest

I just won P10,000 from a poster-making contest.:o I should set up a business, like a fishball stand or something.XP No! Dragz, I'll sell dragzzzzzzuh.

Pseudobitch

Let me tell you something about Babygirl. Yes, that is her name, Babygirl. She was my landlady back in Makati at a time when I ran away from the rest of the world. She has fake blond hair, fake hazel brown eyes, a fake nose, pencil-tattooed eyelids, lipstick-tattooed lips, and bleached white skin. Her house is cramped with trinkets, useless gadgets, and mismatched colorful decorations. She has a plasma TV, a large library of DVDs, a month's supply of food, and a chock-full of exquisite signature clothes bursting out her cabinets she'd have to block them out with ironing stands. But the most perplexing of all is that she never finished college, she hasn't had a job in years, and she bums around all day everyday with her bastard child. "I want to tell you a secret," she whispers to my ear at one instance. "You know these things? This house, this component, this face, the cars outside, the computer shop business? You know where it all comes from?" She points at her computer, her modem, her DSL connection, and nods ominously, saying, "I trick foreigners into sending me money."

Mountaineering

We bring raincoats, headlamps, first aid kits, arm protectors, umbrella sombreros, sunglasses, sunscreen lotions, liters of potable water, sleeping bags, and tents among other things, all in a twenty-kilogram towering hiking bag. We pitch our tents, rub fire from sticks and stones, cook our food, dig an improvised toilet from the ground, wear theme costumes, drink alcohol, and socialize with other mountaineers. We wear the same mud-caked sweat-stained clothes for two days, acquire bruises, insect bites, and illnesses from poisonous plants. We eat from the same unwashed dinner plates, wipe our ass with dried leaves, sleep on the hard ground, freeze during the night, and crane our necks stiff the next morning, not to mention the post-hiking cramps, body aches, hours wasted on sleep, and tons of painkillers. We wake up at four in the morning surrounded by clouds, thaw our ice-carved bodies with coffee, and sit quietly, meditate, facing the east. Then up in the sky, stretching across the heavens, is the first streak of sunlight. Our bodies warm up, the mountain silhouettes take their form, the trees gain shape, the rocks solidify, the grass turns green, the clouds rise, the fog evaporates, the world from our panoramic view flares into life. That second day we are reborn with a new life. We explore the mountain, study the plants up close, hunt different kinds of animals and insects, dip in streams, rock-climb the cliffs hanging over bangins (WTF is bangin in English?), and stand beside birds freely soaring in the sky. When someone asks me why I hike, I don't say all these things. I vaguely say I hike because of the endorphines--spares me from explaining the indescribable at the spot.

Cooking Fiction

I once cooked a story serving sex as an integral part of immortality. You look out into the world and see war, crime, violence, diseases, illnesses, old age, all because the people who cause them are sex deprived. It's inspired by George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-four, where Julia comments on their sexually repressed society, "When you make love you're using up energy; and afterwards you feel happy and don't give a damn for anything. They can't bear you to feel like that. They want you to be bursting with energy all the time. All this marching up and down and cheering and waving flags is simply sex gone sour." In my unwritten story, the fever, asthma, tuberculosis, heart-disease, depression, mental illnesses, cancer, AIDS, all illnesses, even bad breath, pimples, and body odor, they all go away once people engage in quality sex. And once all sickness and diseases is swept away from the face of the planet, the only thing that separates man from immortality is old age. But they all work it out; they engage in lechery everyday, feel younger and repossess their youthful bodies. Then on an earth overpopulated with immortals, the only way to kill them is to injure their genitals somehow. Cut the balls off, slice the clitoris out. In this world, people are born, people live and people die because of sex. Sex is the impetus of human evolution. And if you think about it, I wouldn't exist, you wouldn't exist, Jose Rizal and Jesus Christ wouldn't exist, the whole course of human evolution wouldn't exist had it not been for this one single element: pleasure.

Tears

The last time tears streaked my cheeks, the film Freedom Writers (based on the book The Freedom Writers Diary by Erin Gruwell) provoked a chemical reaction in my head. Freedom Writers is about a racist community in Long Beach, California, where a class of high school students are broken into factions--Caucasians, African Americans, and Asians. They spar in the streets and in the classroom like warring tribes, and are brought together by their teacher Erin Gruwell (Hilary Swank) who reads their disturbed personal lives from their diaries. The film is violent, disturbing, poignant, and raises a lot of issues. I inertly sat on my seat, gripping the armrest for two hours, eyes unblinking at the television screen. But at the molecular level, it's a different story. The images from the screen reaches my eyes and triggers the limbic system, specifically the hypothalamus, which controls our basic emotional drives such as hunger, danger, sex. The limbic system pokes at the autonomic nervous system, whose parasympathetic branch pokes at the lacrimal glands, which produce tears. Then the face reddens, gravitating at the nose, we cough, we snivel, our breathing convulses, the throat contracts, and the upper body breaks into a spasm of shuddering shoulders. Why do we wail when we cry? Why does our voice box emit a noise? Why do we have to release tears, open our pores, our glands, swallow back our saliva, and wail? For all I know, it's far more complicated than I thought.

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