I don’t usually indulge in feeling good about myself.  As a general rule, its usually self-condecension, looking into a mirror and seeing all my faults.  But lately, two great opportunities have opened up, and I feel (dangerously?) good about myself.  Its like I’m exactly where I’m supposed to be, doing what I know i’m supposed to be good at (to a certain extent).  First off, the presentation in Dapitan is fast approaching, and i just got the formal invitation yesterday, signed by the mayor and the Czech ambassador.  It’s all very charming.  I was reminded that the occasion calls for Filipino formal dress, and thanks to my sister’s wedding last year, I have just the stuff.  I’m going up on a stage next to people with PhD’s, "Dr." attached to their name; people associated with the National Historical Society, people from government, people from UP.  I’ll be talking to a crowd of students and experts, from around Mindanao and the Visayas.  It gives a sense of distinct privilege to be there, at the same time apprehension.  This is a very big FIRST for me, and I don’t want to screw it up.  I have my power point, my notes, and my brain; I refuse to underestimate my audience.  They might ask me about Hegel, about communism, about post-modernism… I’ll just have to be honest and answer as best I can.  If I don’t know, well, it simply reinforces a very deep lesson that I continually imbibe: there is always something more to be learned.  The process doesn’t stop.  I go to Dapitan afforded a privilege to share my ideas, and through the process of discourse, gain more insight into how to improve those ideas.  And I definitely feel good about that.

The second is the invitation to Manila for January. Again, its about ideas, but now its something a different tack from Jose Rizal; Ateneo and Harvard are teaming up to present papers on globalization and the Philippine perspectives on this trend.  I like it a lot, and i like it even more that Sharmiela invited me to go.  Too bad I don’t have a paper for this one, as I’m simply going as one of the participants to bounce around the ideas of the presentors (Glenn, Kip, Leloy… Bobby Benedicto is also doing a presentation, and all in all, it’s very exciting).  Maybe next year, I’ll do a presentation on an analysis of Philippine media and the Heisenburg’s uncertainty principle.  Or better yet, maybe i’ll present that at the PACE Pinoy Media congress next year in Silliman.  Whatever.

Lots of door opening, and I’m jumping in.  Finally, I’m on the road to doing the things I really want to do.

The following link takes you to the blog of Lorybeth Baldrias, a good friend from the UP College of Law, and currently VP of the College of Law Student Government.  We’ve known each other since… the Los Baños days, where she was classmates with my sister.   I’m not given to copy-pasting into my blog, but you guys have to check out her post on the UP Law’s statement on the attempt of Congress to enforce Con-Ass.  Click here: UP Law Statement from Lorybeth

Yes, we’ve all talked about how wonderful a play "Rent" is; how it’s full of real life lessons, not the least of which is the "No Day but Today" tagline, telling us to live life from moment to moment, not to regret the past, but continually experience the Now. 

But while listening to the lyrics of the song "Santa Fe", and thinking about its context, there maybe another deeper interpretation of the play.  It has something to do with ideals and the pursuit of those ideals, and what really matters may actually be found right at the very doorstep of the seeker. 

New York City: Center of the Universe.  Times are shitty, but I’m sure they can’t get worse. 

In the eyes of Angel, the most positive character in the story, New York represents a sort of frozen over hell of run-down apartments, mice and cockroaches.  It’s not the best place to be, where she has to drum out on the streets just to make a few bucks, where people with AIDS are ostracized, where their block is threatened by Benny’s attempts at making a corporate monument out of their bohemian haven.  Despite all of all the proclamations to make the most out of where they are, the friends, in the song "Santa Fe" reveal that they know this isn’t the best place to be; Somewhere Else is better to be then Alphabet City.

Curiously, only one of the characters actually makes it to this fabled Ideal.  Roger makes it to California, in an attempt to write his "bittersweet symphony that doesn’t remind us of Musetta’s Waltz".  But what come of him?  He doesn’t stay in California.  He discovers that the Ideal isn’t what it’s expected to be.  At the end of "Living in America", he returns to New York, realizing all that the Ideal he was looking for wasn’t really to be found anywhere else but with Mimi. 

Probably this maybe a minor point, but I think its significant enough when compared to the more obvious interpretations of this play. 

"Asking the question of ‘what happened at the beginning of time’ is like asking ‘what is two degrees north of the north-pole’; the question is meaningless" - Stephen Hawking

This morning I woke up thinking about this problem (and several other parallel problems, ahem) and whipped out the calculator to do the math.  Yesterday, there was a video in my Physics 25 class that tried to explain how time began, as is supposed to be illustrated by the Big Bang theory.  The analogy was corny and amusingly simple: ascending the steps of a light tower, each window beside the staircase was opened to provide a glimpse into what the universe looked like at that point.  The higher the window, the closer to the Beginning.  It was time in reverse, which is basically what Big Bang theorists are doing: rewinding the video according to the laws of physics. 

But a problem arises when they get very very close to the Beginning point, when time was essentially zero.  Mathematically, they can’t reach it; scientifically, all the rules break down (one can point to quantum gravity explanations, but it’s horribly speculative at this point of human history). 

In my own simplistic way, I thought of the paradox of continually divided distances.  The equation is easy to understand.  Given a distance of 100m, an object must travel this distance but at increasingly halved speed.  In the first second, it travels 50m.  In the next second, it travels 50m+(50/2), or 75m.  What is so disturbing about this is that at the start of the journey, the object appears to be making very good headway, and is believed that it really can reach its objective of fully crossing 100m.  But if we take this equation 1/2d+(1/2d/2^X)<d where d is the distance to be traveled and X is any real number, no matter what the value of x, the answer will always be less then d (to put the equation into words, its one-half the total distance plus (one-half the distance divided by two raised to x) will always be less then the total distance). 

The closer the object gets to achieving the end, the more impossible it gets to reach it.  So close, yet increasingly, so far. 

When this idea is applied to the quest to figure out the question "what happened at 0 time", there is no real way to determine this, because the measurement of time becomes increasingly smaller the closer you get to its beginning, so much so that you will never reach 0 seconds. The concept of time having a "beginning" is intuitively undeniable (it HAS to be finite, all our observations and equations show this consistently) but its being finite cannot be duplicated or explained.  I won’t rule out the possibility that further questioning and new knowledge could unravel this dark area of modern cosmology, but as of right now, we can’t.

This concept of impossiblity can also be applied to human relationships.

Love is the single most futile emotion I have ever had to endure.  It’s
messed up, and complicated and it tears you apart from the inside out.
You fall in love with with someone, and then your lost, in a sea of oblivion, and you can’t do anything about it except endure it. 

Everytime I fall for someone, it’s always the wrong someone.

I don’t blame them (well, i don’t blame some of them), there are valid reasons that I support for why reciprocation just can’t happen.  I can live with that.  But then, explain to me, why any of it at all?  Why do the feelings have to continue even when there has already been a decision that their continuation is pointless? 

Tonight, I feel like i have to just write off love as one of the things to be avoided, its just not worth it to have to spend so much time and energy on, only to have it fall flat every time.  I hate it.  It’s so stupid, and in the end, I’m the fool.

I know my friends can understand where I’m coming from on this.  To those of you who never understood, full of lies and irrationality, manipulation and self-centeredness, go throw yourselves off a cliff. 

And guys, this is not an appeal for support or pity or whatever.  If all your comment on this entry is going to be consolation in one form or the other, stuff it.  I don’t need that.  This blog is a simple statement of very strong opinion and general frustration.

Some days just don’t agree with you.  Today is that kind of day, when
the optimist within takes a vacation to some place in the distant
corner of the galaxy, and all you’re left with is sweat, exasperation
and tired eyes.

Woke up early this morning to catch my 7am class, which never
happened.  Our teacher sent us a text at 7:07 telling us to just write
400 word news releases on the Pinoy Media Congress.  Lazy bum. I hang
out until 8am.  At 8, i’m supposed to do a presentation of a power
point that i’ve been working on for two weeks, with all the creativity
and brain power to make it totally different and interesting…only to
find out that this class has been cancelled as well.  It’s hot, humid,
and I’m already tired and p.o.’d that teachers, who had all of last
week to meet and work and get whatever the hell it is they have to get
done done aren’t showing up in class.

My 10am class goes as planned, except that this is opinion writing, and
this particular teacher tends to ramble and say things without really
thinking them through.  She gives us a bunch of busy work homework, all due on the 11th.  Its mindless homework ("collect five opinion articles and classify them, citing what kind of lead they use").  I hate freaking profession oriented activities. 

Somewhere along the way, i lose my ID, so i can’t leave this part of the campus (which is why I’m stuck at home this afternoon).  Even if I did get past the guards, my teachers would be pissed that the "son of the president" isn’t following the university policy.  I don’t want to put up with that.  I also cannot find my airplane ticket that i need to get the reimbursement from the university for my travel expense.  That money is supposed to be for groceries.

I’m feeling a headache coming on, and I still have an organization meeting tonight at seven.  I’ll probably just sleep the rest of the afternoon away.  Monday is not agreeing with me, and i know i can be optimistic and just suck it in and stand up to the punches, i’m just tired right now.  Screw it, i’ll start over tomorrow.

Isn’t disturbing?  I mean, when you really think about it, so much of our lives is actually dictated by a physical act of sharing bodily fluids with another person.  The clothes we wear, the hairstyle we choose, the handshake when we meet new people, the way we choose how to behave… if Freud was right, it all boils down to sex.

(Maybe in the beginning, Freud had it all wrong, but because everyone listened to him, we all ended up affirming him… sex has become so acknowledged to be a thing of the subconscious that now it’s plastered all over the place)

I just saw a video that Ara placed on her blog, about not being able to have as much sex as other people.  Apparently, it is considered tragic not to have stuck your appendages into a large number of people.  Because, really, I think sex is being given more attention then it deserves. Why?

The obvious reason is attraction.  Sex turns people on; it’s biologically hard wired into our system to seek out the most genetically viable mates in our environment, and social norms dictate what we translate as "geneticaly viable".  Big breasts, broad shoulders, flat stomachs, rugged good looks, slim figures, beautiful eyes, nice smelling hair, shaped legs… the list goes on and on, and different cultures have different norms of what is considered "sexy".  But whatever the case, when people see something sexy, its an attention-grabber.  A consumer-driven economy capitalizes on this, because attention means advertising.  Its a simple idea, and it uses sex as fuel.

Another probable reason is that liberal attitudes towards sex and all its expressions are being forwarded as part of the culture called "cool".  Shock value and rejection of prudish traditional values and norms, challenging the bounderies and injecting new definitions into an act that has become highly institionalized (by both State and Church)– all these are the product of a combination of the activist youth spirit of the 1960’s-70’s and contemporary internet free-information culture.  For young people, sex is seen as empowering, shocking and non-conformist. 

A combination of biological drive, corporate reinforcement and societal affirmation results in an individual who considers sexual activity to be one of the prime motivators for behaviour.  All because orgasm feels damn good, and almost everyone is equipped to do it.

There’s nothing wrong with the sex drive in itself.  What I find disturbing is how much crap society attaches to sex, linking even alcoholic drinks and game shows to gyrating bodies.  And the sad part is, most of us buy into it without question.

"Have you ever been in love? Horrible isn’t it?  It makes you so vulnerable.  It opens your chest and it opens up your heart and it means someone can get inside you and mess you up.  You build up all these defenses.  You build up a whole armor , for years, so nothing could hurt you, then one stupid person, no different from any other stupid person, wanders into your stupid life…you give them a piece of you.  They didn’t ask for it.  They did something dumb  one day, like kiss  you  or smile at you , and then your life isn’t your own.  Love takes hostages. It gets inside you .  It eats you out and leaves you crying in the darkness, so simple a phrase like ‘maybe we should just be friends’ or ‘how very perceptive’ turns into a glass splinter working away into your heart.  It hurts. Not just in the imagination.  Not just in the mind.  It’s a soul-hurt, a body-hurt, a real gets-inside-you-and-rips-you-apart pain.  Nothing should be able to do that.  Especially not love.  I hate love."

- the character Rose Walker, from Sandman#65, Neil Gaiman

Free Speech Inc.

Delivered in Miriam College
Nov. 28 2006

[in reaction to earlier
remark by Mrs. Karen Davila on the Philippine media being the freest in south
east Asia] It’s free, but is it independent? Independent in the sense
that we our truths are not adulterated by profiteering? The debate for any media owner is what
exactly should take the fore: business interest or public interest? And it is my opinion, here today, that media
ownership should pay close attention to what their programming is focusing on.

When examining today’s Filipino media, especially the powerfully
engaging television networks, I find a
scene of disturbing and frightening images. Let me begin with a fact, so often quoted to the point that—for some—it
has lost its scandal: The vast majority of our nation’s population live below
or at the poverty line. Mr. Lopez spoke about this yesterday. Three points
about these demographics should concern the Philippine media:

1) Most Filipinos have the least access to quality
education among all the sectors of society.

2) Most Filipinos gain most of their information about
the world and current issues from television networks and newspapers.

3) Most Filipinos are the prime audience of the large
media networks dominating our nation’s air waves.

These
people are the masa, the people who
everyday switch on their television sets (or watch television through the
window in their neighbor’s house) and see the programming for what Mr. Lopez
yesterday called “free TV”. We all have
to keep in mind the point that “free TV” is a different animal from cable
television that most of us here are used to.

We
all learn in whatever training or schooling we have, that the media is a
powerful tool for social change, a channel for information, a force multiplier
of events. To paraphrase from a
commentary in British newspaper The
Guardian, 9/11 would not have been 9/11 if not for the millions of viewers
who watched the World Trade Center towers fall on live television across the
world. I think a lot of us understand is that there is enormous potential in
the ability of the media to generate events and affect public opinion, to
uplift society and develop a country. But more importantly, the same potential
to do enormous good can also do equally enormous harm; the media can degrade a
society, and wear away at its mental fabric, compounding apathy and ultimately
carrying the Philippines into a social septic tank. Television is supposed to be the new opiate
of the masses, diverting them from the actual state of the nation, from issues
that are truly of public consequence; and I think we’re doing a good job at
that.

The
other day, while waiting for the boarding call at the airport, I found it very
difficult to ignore the two large televisions dominating the pre-departure
area. In most airports, televisions are
tuned in to informative programs, such as those that offer advice on healthy
living, the latest headlines, or at the very least, weather updates for
travelers. But on this particular
afternoon, the show was actually providing detailed insight into the romantic
affairs of the latest teen celebrities. It was a good example of Philippine prime-time; television programming peppered with
soap-operas, entertainment gossip, scantily-clad women, and generally shallow
entertainment. We say that this kind of
programming is emotional and engaging, if we delve into the nuances of the
stories and the values being forwarded. But that’s IF we get past the girls gyrating on the screen; that’s if we
can get over the kilig feelings of
the latest teen celebrity couple. A
contradiction arises: on one hand, we want to forward values; on the other
hand, we pepper our shows with distractions, from nameless dancers to
starry-eye inducing personalities.

Throughout
the day, the viewers are pulled through the gamut of emotional states:
energetic wake-up “light news” in the morning, morning soap-operas to make us
fall apart, noon-time variety shows to makes us smile again, then back to the
sordid lives of fictional characters. By
late afternoon, as the kids come home from school, we put on entertainment news
to give our audiences the latest insider information on our favorite
celebrities. Early evening, we get
shocked or angered by the latest stories of corrupt politicians and
drug-related murder. As the evening
draws on, we start laughing again, happy that our slap-stick comedies are
showing. The programming at least lets
us go to bed with the satisfied smile of the properly opiated.

[two minute time limit called; speaker summerized the rest of
the paper in delivery]

A
common defense for this kind of programming is saying it’s maka-masa, it’s what the people want and its what the people can
empathize with. Frankly, I find this
point of view insulting.

If
the Philippine media companies were really serious about taking an active role
in this rhetoric of “nation building”, heck, if I woke up one morning and found
myself the owner of one of these media corporations, there’s one thing I would
STOP doing: I would stop catering to the
“lowest common denominator” and try to find a way to give programming that
raised the bar and pushed the limits of what the audience can take. I like what Dr. Banerjee said this morning:
we have to look at our audiences as citizens rather then consumers. Not only to listen and engage the audience in
two-way discourse, but to also try to find ways to uplift the material that my
audience is consuming. This country’s
media could do it a huge favor by taking the majority of our nation’s people
who aren’t going to big universities, and giving them programming that is provocative,
socially relevant, and sensitive to the needs of a country in its growing
pains. Programming that actually focused
on the issues that truly matter to a developing nation.

People
would say that this kind of programming runs the risk of being boring, and
sermonistic. But if media companies
today can take the shallowest material and elevate it to the heights of
excitement and euphoria on prime time TV, why can’t they do it for the things
in our country that really matter, like gender issues, sexually transmitted
disease, environment, and corruption in government. [following
stated explicitly] By the way,
Gina Lopez’s work is really good, I just want to know why that content isn’t being
made into full-time shows on prime time.

I
like to think that we can do a better job at pulling the Filipino consciousness
out of the ruts of our emotions and into the stimulation of our minds. (We need
to get out of our hearts, and into our minds) I like to think that we can forward programming that gives deeper
insight into national issues, gives information to help encourage
entrepreneurs, provides guidance to help the average Filipino have a sense of
history and feel that they are a part of a larger and active society, instead
of the lot of us merely being a faceless mass of the audience, placated by
glittering personalities, confetti and cash prizes.

What
is the deal with the portrayal of women in today’s mainstream media? I’m not talking about talk show hosts and
news anchors. I’m talking about the
skimpy clothes and the squealing girl squads. The media is hitting the audience below the belt, in more ways then
one. It’s almost as if we can’t hold the
audience’s attention with anything more base then women displaying themselves
as smiling objects of male attention. And this is on prime television hours, at lunch time, when most of the
Philippines is sitting at midday sipping soup while watching TV. What do they see? News commentary? A feature on the history of a local
hero? Not unless we can get a young lady
in a bikini to talk about socially relevant issues. Yesterday, the reply to this point was the
notion that this is a middle class sensibility, and that the lower income
levels of society don’t see this as problematic. Is that a sufficient reason? Just because the majority thinks that women
portraying themselves as sexual objects and decorations is okay, doesn’t make
the outright objectification of people right.

We
are sending a message to the mass of Filipino minds. Sometimes, I think that once in awhile we
need to seriously think about WHAT kind of message we’re sending, and how often
we’re reinforcing it. The same article
from The Guardian that I referred to
earlier stated that the media is often seeking to speak truths; sometimes we
need truths spoken to us.

Last
of all, I believe that it is the media’s imperative duty to get actively
involved in programming that uplifts and edifies our society as a member of
this society. I like to think, in spite
of all the political cat-fighting and poverty-induced social problems, that our
country is at an exciting stage in its history, in a sort of high school
identity crisis, trying to figure out just what we, as a nation, are to
become. Everyone should have a say in
what the Philippines of tomorrow should be. And the media is a particularly
heavy handed contender in this discourse, with the ability to choose what
information gets into the mainstream Filipino consciousness and what
doesn’t. Will we choose to simply
entertain and appease our audiences and investors, catering to what the
audience wants? Or do we aggressively
start by revolutionizing our content, going beyond specialized cable channels
and bringing empowering information to the mainstream airwaves to the Filipinos
who really need it, presented in a way to make the information useful and
relevant? For the sake of the building
this nation we call our own, I hope it’s the latter.

Thanks
for letting me share my views. Good
afternoon.