My nightmare before Christmas
(November-December issue of The Benildean)

These are the days that must happen to you.

I hope, in my dark, sardonic heart, to be accepting of this quotation by the happy poet, Walt Whitman. I try, in the brink of dementia waiting to happen, to accept that in an economically-challenged country like this, one should expect to get his cell phone stolen at least once in his lifetime.

We are living in a dog-eat-dog world: people here retire at night with their sanity hanging by a thread.

My humble cellphone, without my sensing it, was taken from me one Wednesday noon as I was walking to the LRT to take a train to school.

The cracksman was incredibly stealthy. All I felt was a gentle prodding amongst the crowd in that avenue peopled with hotheads rushing about.

Only when the security personnel dug her stick listlessly in my bag did I realize that somebody had done the liberty of unzipping my bag for me. It took me only a nanosecond to suspect that my cellphone was no longer among my school things.

I was dead right.

And then, as if it was an imperative, panic rose inside the four walls of my skull.

I felt like belting out Bonnie Tyler’s “I Need a Hero” blatant enough to flatten an entire army.

I sadly reminisced the polyphonic ringing of my cellphone at midnight, inviting my fingers to explore its pappy keys. Nothing and no one awoke me in the early mornings quite like my cell phone did. Its alarm, the sweet, repetitious cricket-like sound would shock me awake in the mornings, with a smile on my face though, even if it is a Monday with a weekend hang-over fresh in my head.

This hanging misfortune of mine brings me to remember the self-proclaimed scumbag terminator and anti-hero, Travis Bickle, a New York City cab driver in the 1976 Scorsese classic, Taxi Driver. Disgusted with the sickness of corruption and perversion he sees around him, he took on a bloody crusade carrying the persona of Henry Krinkle, an army jacket-clad, .44 magnum-armed vigilante with a mohawk.

We need Henry Krinkles. Plenty of them.

I am not a believer of violence, contrary to the rumors going around that I am a sadistic scamp who chases her college paper subordinates with a fork.

However, my frustration over the theft involving my cellphone has grown too much to contain. The least I could do is to wish fervently that the scum who pocketed my cellphone suffer a permanent involuntary twitching of the head before this day ends. But right now, I could hear the voice in my noggin repeating, “You wish.”

In September 2004, the assistant business editor of Today newspaper was stabbed to his death after refusing to hand over his Nokia 7610 to three crooks who confronted him in a bus bound home. Jose Luis Villanueva perished a few minutes after the knife attack. He was only 29.

Traumatized yet?

Travis Bickle said: “Someday a real rain will come and wash all the scum off the streets.”

For now, I lie in wait.


***


Calm down. I may look like somebody with a perpetual migraine but I don’t bite. Trust me.

After a meticulous deliberation and a series of psychoanalysis in my part to ensure the mental well-being of each and everyone, I have been granted this column. Expect the unorthodox. I can write about life with burning romanticism but I won’t.

Why ‘A Perfect Day for Bananafish’, you ask. Yes, it is a complimentary rip-off of the genius J.D. Salinger’s short fiction, ‘A Perfect Day for Bananafish’. But why ‘A Perfect Day for Bananafish’? Visit the Student Publications Office and pray that I’ll tell you.

No, I am not angry. My happy meter is just pegged.

EDITORIAL
(January-February issue of The Benildean)

Starving Philippines: Something to chew on

You are being lied to.

Malacañang, lately, has been reveling in the country’s popularly-supposed fiscal development because of the growing strength of the peso over the holidays and the so-called positive economic upshot due to the implementation of the Extended Added Value Tax law.

However, these facts will reveal the contrary. Prepare to be disturbed.

The Philippines is suffering from the appalling problem of chronic malnutrition that is worse than that of North Korea, a country plagued by enduring famines, bad Stalinist policies and recurrent harvest failures.

According to UNICEF, the crisis of malnutrition in the Philippines for 2005 has reached an alarming 56%, ten notches higher than North Korea’s 46%.

Hypothetically speaking, the Philippines, being an agricultural country, should have a very low risk of facing the crisis of malnourishment. In a country where liposuction and South Beach diet are the furor, starvation is such a sad paradox. Indisputably, the country’s high tax rates and the government’s deep-rooted corruption are the guilty parties. Discernibly, brethren, we are being menaced.

But if you think it stops there…

In 2005, think-tank, a US-based firm researching on the economic stability of different countries reported that the Philippines ranked 90 out of the 161 countries included in their Directory of Economic Freedom. This connotes that the Philippines experiences low economic freedom and that the government has failed to establish sufficient reforms.

In 2006, the crisis only magnified when new reports came out that the Philippines slipped farther down the grave by ranking 98 out of 157.

Ouch.

However, the ever-spirited Filipinos are still surviving beyond hunger and adversity. With such a conniving administration running the mill, Filipinos just have one thing to conscientiously ponder on: If you don’t run your own life, someone else will.

Holy horrors

(Published in The Benildean's January-February 2006 issue)

“Whereas the words say love, love, love; the sounds and images say hate, hate, hate.”
--Andrew Sarris, NEW YORK OBSERVER on The Passion of the Christ


Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ never made even the slightest impression on me. I refused to watch this Oscar award-winning motion picture not even for the fact that its realistic and convincing ‘Scourging at the Pillar’ scene drove hordes of people to bawl their heads off over popcorn nor for gaining commendation from distinguished critiques like Scott Foundas of L.A. Weekly and Peter Travers of Rolling Stones.

Irrefutably, The Passion of the Christ has a brilliant cinematography and cast list. However, the movie failed to openly illustrate Christ as an epitome of vivacity and demonstrate his moral radicalism, charisma and fervent eloquence. Gibson, a devout Catholic and director/co-producer of the movie said that he financed the project because “Whether you're a believer or not, [Christ’s] death affects you.”

The movie, which depicted the last twelve hours of Christ’s life, apparently, is only committed to show Jesus’ agony and martyrdom. The Passion is the Christ is a visual guilt-trip; a graphic and grim illustration of blood, torture, hate, betrayal and torment.

From my twelve years of education in elementary and secondary catholic schools, I was faced with the horrors of the perishing Christ with His broken, ensanguined body nailed on the cross, the El Santo Entierro (the body of the deceased Christ enclosed in a glass coffin), Saint Rita of Cascia with a single thorn buried in her forehead and the persecution and torture of San Lorenzo Ruiz de Binondo illustrated in full color in Christian comic books waiting in the school library’s magazine racks.

Here is a compilation of other Christian idiosyncrasies that I have learned from years of being a baffled (and nightmare-plagued) Catholic:


Perpetual migraine

Saint Thomas Becket, martyr and archbishop of Canterbury, was slain in 1170 by Henry II’s disciples in Canterbury Cathedral after the former had a conflict with the king regarding the rights and privileges of the church. His images and icons depicted him as a haloed friar with a sword embedded on the crown of his skull.

I was ten, in my school uniform, tramping the vestibule of some provincial church when I first encountered his terrifying bust (in consequence of this experience, I developed my present dark nature which never ceases to horrify people, wholesome or otherwise.). Naively enough, I then thought he performed his daily routine around the Cathedral bearing the sword on his head as a form of spiritual sacrifice. Ow.


Bleeding to be redeemed: atonement with oomph

Saints such as Saint Dominic and Saint William would routinely instruct their cohorts to scourge their naked backs. Early monks, who themselves had a penchant for self-flagellation, also began to flagellate their penitents as part of their reparation. Caterina of Cardona wore iron chains which bore through her flesh and took on self-flagellation which would last for hours each day. Such acts, spirituals and monastic hermits maintained, would subject them to mystical ecstasies and visions of heavenly grace.

This brings me to recall the Penitentes of Mexico, an assemblage of supplicants who offer themselves to be crucified every Easter, which is very similar to our local dour re-enactments of Christ’s torment and death every Holy Week.

Perhaps, I will never comprehend how having the body in exquisite pain and tortured state will make one establish a union with that Someone whose ego surpasses all other egos. And perhaps, I will never figure out the underlying principle behind the Catholic Church’s seeming fixation for the morose as reflected from the image representations of its spiritual icons. I am not indulging in anti-Christian sentiments nor am I courting a blue corner seat in hell. Everyone is entitled to their own opinion; I am only taking advantage of the privilege.

If truth be told, it only boils down to one thing: No one can and will ever figure out God and what He requires for one to gain a golden ticket to His amusement park.

George Bernard Shaw once quoted: “Must then Christ perish in torment in every age to save those that have no imagination?”

With this, I rest my case.

I don’t know about you people but a door-to-door salesman weighs me down. For a keen observer, a typical door-to-door salesman is that distressed looking ambler who basks in the nasty glare of the sun typically clad in a besmeared shirt and a borrowed necktie. A boxed set of China-manufactured kitchen knives or single samples of Science books would be resting on his sleeved arm while a travel bag hangs on another.

To a door-to-door salesman, the “back-off” hand gesture is already an accepted form of rebuff. He has learned, through innumerable occasions of having it held before his face, to take it the same way a battered wife would contain a blow in the head: muted, passive and incredibly accepting.

I remember vividly an incident back in my middle-school days which transpired in my father’s medical clinic. Two women clothed in identical red and white uniforms came staggering to the receiving area where I was seated comfortably with my tube of sari-sari store-bought iced candy. The straps of the box-like postman’s bags which one of them was almost dragging on dirt gave in from the pressure of the burden resulting to tiny packets of laundry soap blanketing the office floors. I stared down at the sea of red and white Tide logos and looked up only when one of the women cried out. The woman, who had suffered a heat stroke, collapsed and conked her head on concrete. My father stitched her up and received six packets of soap as a miserable fee. After the two had left, my father reminded me that if I dropped out of school because of my continuous tardiness, I would end up like them: underprivileged detergent soap salesgirls.

The Philippines is a label-conscious country. Unlike in most Western countries where a high-school diploma can serve as a passport to a reasonable and decent employment, not being able to attend college in the Philippines is a precursor to doom: you end up doing graveyard shifts as a poorly paid security personnel or work as a promo girl for sanitary napkins in a supermarket.

One of my many frustrations as a human being is the sad fact that we are all breathing in a meritocratic society. Persons working blue-collar jobs gain little to no assistance in shoe shops, get the unimportant tables in eating places and hardly receive any nods at church on a Sunday service. On the contrary, people who work important jobs in their perfumed pinstripes enjoy the privileges of a glorified white-collar employee.

The intellectual experts in the field of Economics would argue that the cause of a country’s economic decline is the decrease in production via industrialization and failure to produce more equitable income distribution among classes and regions. I would say it is the mounting hypocrisy that is plaguing our society like a terrible black cancer.

But then again, in a conservative government like ours, organized hypocrisy exists.




This is a writing exercise I wrote as part of my training for the Editor-in-Chief/Associate Editor position for The Benildean. The exercise was given to me by the former News/Managing Editor, BJ David. The goal of the exercise is to test if I could, even for once, think out of my element and create something which is foreign to me: compassion (or so they say!).

This essay is unfinished because of the pressure of the deadline. I'm still working on a better conclusion and maybe a few add-ups.