Going Somewhere?

The cab driver was rather cranky. "It's that Oktoberfest at that place near Megamall,” he says in the vernacular. "Traffic was jammed, so many kids in there, beer is available at P2 each," he was fuming.

It's a Friday night, my favorite yet most dreaded night of the week when nobody is supposed to be with nobody. And yet at 10 pm I find myself braving the rain on my way home, albeit in the cool comfort of a taxi. I chatted up the driver, finding his moodiness rather amusing.

"Traffic! And those drivers on the road, those slow bastards who don't know where they're going? Sometimes I just want to douse them in gas and light them up," he exclaims. "I want to burn them."

As we rounded up the QC circle, he tells me: "Look at all those cars. Is this a poor country? There's so many of those cars; that's why it's traffic. They're all headed somewhere."

I look out the window and realize he is right, except for the poverty thing. Outside there were cars (and buses and trucks) gaining speed, swerving, passing each other, heading off into all directions, making their way against time.

"Yeah," I reply. "They're all headed somewhere."

It got me thinking. They say plus ce change, plus ce meme chose. But it seems like the world is moving at an increasingly rapid pace, leaving little room for us to look back and rectify whatever unfinished business we may have left behind in the past.

We are a forward-looking society, I believe, meaning we don't dwell on what's done and over with. Maybe the cab driver instinctively knows this, and venting is just his way of recognizing he can't do anything about the traffic. Especially since he grew quiet as we headed down Visayas Ave., when the traffic eased up and the jam he kept complaining about became a thing of the past.

I guess the driver is on the move just like everyone else, on his way to another day. And as he moves along, he puts the past behind. It is this collective amnesia, this feeling that we as a society moves on at all cost, even at the risk of forgetting that probably explains why some injustices continue to this day, because those who knew would rather forget epochs like, for example, Martial Law.

"Yeah, Martial Law babies," I tell myself. My recollection moves a few weeks back to a night when I am on the el on my way to Megamall where I would later meet Len and Cess. The "babies" I'm thinking about are two short, lean-bodied guys standing in front of me. My gaydar was in high gear, with the tight shirt, low-hung faded jeans and overgenerous serving of gel on their hair.

They seemed like lovers, but I was more concerned with the nasty thoughts brewing inside my head about the one in the white buttoned-down polo shirt. He was fair-skinned, but with some pockmarks on his otherwise smooth face. His partner was a shrimp; skinny with over-pronounced jaws and other details not worth my spit. They were laughing, whispering jokes at each other, pausing once in a while and then looking at each other, knowingly and oblivious. Such abandon tugged at me, as if I had never known what it feels like to express myself with my lover in front of complete strangers.

I looked down on the cuter guy's rear, thin and drowning in the looseness of his pants. I did so all the way to Ortigas where they got off and I caught the shrimp throwing me a glance as the door closed.

"Maybe they'll be fucking later," I tell myself, and made a mental note to end my own dry spell. Maybe the shrimp and the pockmark are off to party, to imbibe alcohol, or maybe have coffee or maybe meet up with other fuckwads. A pair of sisters on the move, indeed.

As the el moved along, I became aware of just how many people were populating the train. To my right was a mom with her kids, the younger boy sitting on the older one's lap, while a burly, sunburned man sits next to them. Across from me, a guy leaned against the sliding door thumbing away a message on his mobile. At the other end of the coach, a bunch of noisy teenagers bantered, and the shrill of their nonsense grated on my ear.

And it occurred to me: where did all these people come from? What lives do they lead? And more important, where are they going?

"Laoag," I tell the man behind the counter, with much tentativeness, afraid to appear ignorant and give away the fact. I am standing in line, purchasing a ticket for a bus ride for the 25th hour.

Thankfully though, he seemed satisfied with my curt request, and punches through a ticket, takes my crisp 500 and hands me back some pathetic bills of crumpled 100s and 20s.

It is the night of May 1st and the clock is just about to pass through midnight. I take my seat along a row of wooden, dilapidated benches poorly coated in cheap red paint that has started to peel off. I leaf through the pages of a poetry book I had brought along, and help myself with some random servings of Whitman and Rimbaud. In between verses I watch as people drag huge square tin cans of crackers, bags of synthetic weaving, boxes of what-nots off and onto buses. I see people watching TV, a couple of older men sleeping in some of the benches, and am disturbed every now and then by the blare of the overhead speaker announcing arrivals and departures.

Terminals are such inappropriate places to observe people and judge them. The element of time works against you, as often these people are, like you and me, in a hurry to get out of there and make their way to someplace else.

But still, as I boarded my bus, I realize terminals are the embodiment of people in transition, a showcase of souls in transit from one life station to another. Here, waiting for a ride, they display their general attitude to their own, and ultimately individual journeys even if they share the ride with other passengers.

But luckily for those with cars, they just have to deal with whoever is on the passenger seat.

"Sentimental crap," I tell myself of the lyrics of a Stephen Speaks song that plays in my head as Cess and I walk the length of Xavierville Avenue on our way to Katipunan.

We had just left the 70s Bistro because I just found out his eyes don't have it, and I just wanted to let off steam and calm myself. It was late 2003 and it was the start of a very interesting year.

With words of comfort, Cess also helps me come to terms with the awful realization I'd just had. And tonight, I am very much a man on the move. I am walking so fast, that looking back I finally understood why the world seems to move ever so fast.

We're all headed somewhere, true. But we're all coming from some place else as well. Some are running away from pain, some from fear, some from confusion. We're all in a hurry to get somewhere else because we're either excited or exhausted. We're all either headed towards trouble, a night out on the town, to someone dearly loved, seeking sanctuary from a weary day at work, or for people like me, still finding our true north.

It is in those moments of respite from walking, running, standing in lines, waiting for a train or a bus, before take-off and upon landing, in pit stops and lay-overs that life affords us a moment, a rare chance to wonder and ask ourselves: where am I going?

Maybe we don't really want to know, which is why the world seems to move so quickly, but how do we go about life without ever really being aware? Some approach the question with anger, like my cabbie, some with wild abandon, like the shrimp and the pockmark, some with resentment and bitterness, like me on that night at the Bistro. In most cases people just deal with their journeys by trying to make sense out of all the chaos of life, a disorder best exemplified by terminals.

It is, after all, always a messy road between point A and point B.

This is a society on the move. But in a world that merely goes around in circles, why is it that sometimes we find ourselves ending up right back where we started?

"Park over there," I tell my cranky cabbie. Thoughts of the Bistro on my head as the taxi stopped and parked along the curb. It is where my recollections end. I pay my fare, and leave him the rest as tip. I am home, and my own journey, going around a circle as it seems, will have to wait another day.

I Do Not Want What I Haven't Got (apologies to Sinead O'Connor)

My new friend, RG who works on-cam for one of those news programs, is right. Something's gotta give. "You have to learn not to want everything," he tells me, and I am given food for thought that has me worked up two weekends ago.

As a confessed workaholic, I ask him why satisfaction with work seems to come at the expense of a love life. I was feeling so good about having two jobs that was giving me a lot of new challenges, but in doing so I had to forego a couple of dates. I tell RG how it seems that to be happy in one area of life means neglecting another.

"Kris Aquino tried to have it all, and she got STD!" he rebuts, and the meaning is not lost on me.

It looks like a compromise a lot of people are familiar with. Everything's okay at the workplace, your boss adores you, you love what you do, the income is steadily flowing in, you have a sense of purpose, and maybe even a commendation is around the corner.

But what trade-offs do they come with?

Last November 2 I went shopping with Princess and almost got my ears pierced. We passed by a stall selling those studs and rings of faux silver. I was about to pick out an earring when my eyes settled on a necklace instead. While Princess was busy on the phone with Z, I dropped the idea of a piercing and settled for the necklace, a drawstring piece with a yin-yang pendant.

I was drawn to it because I felt like the yin-yang symbol signifies the balance I felt I lacked. I now wear it on a daily basis, and people who see it say they like it. (Nina and Princess both say it would look better on them, which makes me wear it with even more pride, knowing I've picked out a nice piece of artwork.)

I guess the exhausted motivation behind the purchase is that, if one can't get a man, he might as well accessorize.

But beyond the symbolism, however, I still feel a gaping hole that no amount of Javanilla or accessorizing could fill. That is, until I logged on to Friendster one night and found the solution.

I've had Mr. Mosscake on my list for a while now, knowing he does those adorable, even if sometimes, undecipherable editorial cartoons on TODAY, my favorite broadsheet. I was just checking out his pictures, taken some place where he was doing volunteer work on HIV/AIDS awareness. And he looked so cute.

I then moved on to other people on my list and checked out G's profile, he of BED fame. Same thing. The guy is adorable.

Then I realized the giddiness was a welcome respite. It was then that I realized I didn't need to look at the market for inspiration anymore. I'm just so damn tired of trying to put myself out there, or at least being the one to do all the work. I came to the conclusion that if I take myself out of the "meet market" then I might as well put myself in fantasyland and oggle cute guys like mosscake or g instead.

I don't want to say these people are not real, for I'm sure they lead real lives, with real jobs even if it seems so impossible that such beautiful creatures could exist. But they wouldn't know me if they tripped all over me on the street and that makes it fine.

I guess this is my way of balancing my life. While giving all my time to my work, I take breathers every now and then, enjoying beauty for what it is worth. Distant and knowing almost nothing about mosscake, or G or even Jigs (of OUT) makes the terms of reference more clear and easier to deal with. They are just crushes, nothing more.

What purpose do these infatuations serve in my life? Maybe it's just the extra heartbeat they inspire that makes the swooning all worth it. It makes me feel like some sort of a fan sometimes, but it's okay: mosscake's artworks are intriguing, their colors seem to grab at you from the canvass (although the thought of grabbing him instead has also crossed my mind several times) and his cartoons are witty and accessible for the most part. But do I want to get to know him better? Maybe not. I'm too resigned and lazy to exert myself that far.

Is G attainable? No, there's a line to his door, and I'm not standing there because life, I believe, is still waiting to happen for me out there and I have to keep moving.

For now, this is fun. It helps me define what I want in a man. I find I'm drawn to someone who is involved in one way or the other in the arts, someone preferably older (and hopefully wiser), good-looking (in the vaguest sense of the word), a music lover, works for a cause (at least part-time), who can teach me a thing or two about life, a good talker, an incessant conversationalist who still values all the things that may pass by unsaid, someone tangible yet cognizant of my need to have my space sometimes, someone who can be patient with my politics, preferably someone who can keep up with me physically, someone who knows how to cook, has his own place, and someone who can speak volumes with his eyes.

*sigh*

At the risk of falling for the ideal, I realize I can't have all this in one package. This must be what RG called "not wanting everything". So I guess someone real, someone flawed, someone wounded is fine with me. But these unreachable infatuations, these ideals are fine for now. I'm going back to working on me and hope that somehow, somewhen, someone out there will find I have what he has also been looking for. Someone who can yin my yang, whatever the hell that means. But for now, if it isn't in my life then I don't want it.

Tech Support! Tech Support!

(November 10, 2004 over Double Mint Choco Chip Javakuhla, hehe)

Take the easy way out. Think all of life is just a dream, and all one has to do is call out tech support, and they'll push a button or two, re-adjust one's thermal settings and all the glitches in his or her cryogenic state will be restored, giving way to a convenient resolution to all the problems in one's life that are nothing more than quirks in a technology called Lucid Dreams.

How comforting isn't it, to think that all that passes for what we call real life is just some simulation and the truth is time has stopped in reality and one is just frozen in some sub-terranean chamber until the time specified in one's contract comes and he or she will be re-awakened.

That's how I feel sometimes. When things take a turn for the worse, or when I lose sight of my purpose in life, or when I just want to shut out the rest of the world, I think of vanilla skies, and wait for someone to say in my ear, "open your eyes". It's so easy to believe nothing I've ever experienced is real, and that somewhere, somehow, not too long ago, time had actually stopped and my physical self is sustained only by an advanced technology relying on the neural impulses that go on despite my slumber and give way to this artificial world I am in now.

That all the hassles of city life, of struggling with heartache after every heartache, that all the pain and misery I see around me on a daily basis are just digital illusions designed to exercise the relevant portions of my brain just to keep me alive.

But that's just some otherworldly possibility. I haven't heard voices telling me anything, nor have I ever felt as if my own private narrative was jumping from one plot point to another, and I do feel like I'm aging with each day that passes, something impossible in a cryogenic dream. I guess it's all natural -- the feeling of wanting to escape, of dreaming other possibilities other than that which one is going through at the moment.

A lucid dream is impossible, and more often than not, I get to thinking that existence does not come around in cycles, but alongside each other. That while we deal with this reality, there is a whole range of other realities where other versions of ourselves are also leading a life that may or may not be similar to ours.

I imagine that maybe, in another dimension, I am my own exact opposite. I'm still living this life, but in a direction that is opposite of the way I'm heading now because of the choices I have or have not made. Maybe over there I am a journalist for the Inquirer, or a teacher for the UP English Department, choices I didn't make in this dimension when I chose to go into activism and even earlier, when I dropped the idea of enrolling at the College of Arts and Letters instead.

Maybe in one of those other dimensions, I am a communist, after making a decision to leave that kind of life behind in this reality. Maybe in another dimension, I am even a Canadian citizen, had my mom acquiesced to my uncle's request for him and his ex-wife to adopt me.

In another dimension maybe I'm a college drop out barely making ends meet, had I chosen to give up college instead. Maybe in another dimension I have a problem with substance abuse, as opposed to being a "supposed former infatuation junkie" in this one. Maybe in another dimension I had not ended up fighting with Bobet and I am not Eileen's friend. Maybe I did not log on to peyups.com last October 2000, had stood up Princess on that June evening in Megamall and who knows, I would be one best friend short in another life.

I'm just saying that with every choice we did not take, could it be possible that an alternate reality opens up where we can catch a glimpse of what life would be like had we done what we chose to forego instead?

Whether it be alternate realities or lucid dreams, I guess it's all just about the fact that second chances are a rare commodity. In a world that seems to move ever more so quickly, it seems so few people are given the chance to have another go at something they might have left behind in the past.

And I get to thinking that if in those other realities my "non-choices" have a bearing on the kind of life I live there, then it could be possible that the choices people in my life did not make in this life could also affect those realities. What if in another dimension, Joey had replied to my text saying that I would go out with him? Had we gone out, would it mean that we have been able to give it another go? Had Lourdes not accepted me into the Collegian, would I still have the courage of my words? Had Ronald not recruited me into this political party/family, where would my stubbornness take me? What if in another dimension my mom never met my dad and I wasn't even born, what would life be like for the people I know in this one?

We all make decisions that set us off in directions we never knew were possible, and make life more interesting for the most part. But in those split seconds before making those decisions, lies an entire universe of possibilities that we will never know. And that's what my Lucid Dreams are all about. Had I not gone in one particular direction, what kind of a person would I be now? Is it wrong to even think about it?

But at the end of the day, this is the reality I have to deal with. No matter how insurmountable some problems might be, I cannot wish it out of existence and take comfort that maybe I am doing better in some other life in another plane of existence. It's all science-fiction, and life as I know it is anything but sci-fi. There is no omniscient tech support in this life, except for the hands that move us, unseen yet knowing.

Choices are beautiful in that we are free to make them, but even more beautiful as we have to deal with their consequences. True, second chances are rare, and perhaps rightly so. If we were given the chance to go back to every single choice we would later regret and try to do them all over again, who could say anyone of us would go anywhere?

Settle or Search?

Her Royal Highness pays for my cup of Mochaccino and we take a seat, al fresco, on the pathwalk, outside the Shangri-La near the MRT station.

She sits across me, her back turned against the flow of people rushing home from the harried pace of Friday. The air is thick with the passing banter of strangers, and I lean closer to hear better what she is saying.

"Do I get back with him?"

For the nth time tonight I tell her not to. We'd met up earlier with Len for a movie called "Three", a horror flick of three films from three different Asian countries. But we decided to stay put after Len left and grab a cup of coffee instead. We needed to catch up on the things that have happened to both of us over the past month since we last saw each other.

Apparently she'd broken up, gotten back together, then broke up again with her boyfriend of some umteen months. I, on the other hand, had the same story to tell -- another "almost" who drew the line on me then bugged me for a date then ignored me again.

If friends can truly see us in a way that we can't, then Her Royal Highness had only the most brutal words I was too afraid to use. "Maybe it's just the thrill of knowing someone is going after him," she said, explaining the botched movie date I was fuming about.

She, on the other hand, laments how she wants to give her relationship another try, if only for the fact that Keech had been so good to her. Keech says in his blog how much she loves him, and how he's willing to take Her Royal Highness back in. "I can't wait for her to 'lie' to me again, and tell me she loves me" she said were his words.

"If he knows you're feeling that way, that you just want to stay because of a misguided sense of gratitude, then you shouldn't go back," I tell her. "It's not fair to either one of you."

Her Royal Highness looks at her situation like she's trapped between two choices: the boring, yet reliable goody-two-shoes willing to worship her; or the asshole who will treat her like shit but she can't stay away from. She's had her share of assholes, so Keech was a welcome respite evnthough she feels being with him has become so predictable that there's no challenge in it.

In the booming gimik enclave of Libis on the other side of town, meanwhile, She With the Deep Dimples was on a date with her on-again, off-again suitor Rico.

"Do you like him?" she asks by SMS, and I tell her what had been my opinion from the very beginning when Rico started hanging out with us. "He balances you out, he seems to complement you in areas where you're weak. He's a better bet than Richard."

On Saturday, She With the Deep Dimples and I meet up at Fabricare in Katipunan. We discuss Rico again while she folds her laundry and I am gushing over Jason Moss's artwork on the Saturday Inquirer.

"I'm very much in love with him. He's even introduced me to his dad already," she confides. In the past she was always complaining (and rightly so, I think) how she doesn't feel special with Rico. "I fetch him from work so we can go have dinner and he makes me wait for him while he played computer games! And he drives my car back to his office and makes me go home alone!" she said before, fuming mad.

But now she says she loves him, and I am not surprised. For the past year they've been dating, I could feel Rico wanted to take their relationship farther, but maybe just didn't know how, or when. In the meantime, there was Richard, even though by saying that I have probably signed my death warrant.

Her Royal Highness has a choice between staying in a relationship because she has to, or cut loose and rejoin the "meet market". She With the Deep Dimples has a choice between a guy who seems serious but stumped by his own indecision, and a guy who excites her, but looks like a player. so in all, I could sum up their predicament as a choice between settling or searching. Her Royal Highness can settle for Keech, secure in knowing he'll always be there, or risk solitude hoping she'll find another who will be just as solid yet inspire her. She With the Deep Dimples has a choice between Rico - stable, dependable and predictable, or Richard, unavailable, funny, a tease, but knows how to tickle her fancy.

Which makes me think: are relationships really all just a matter between settling down and endlessly searching?

It's a scary thought. If one does not want to settle, does that mean one is doomed to wander around forever waiting for the one to ignite those sparks and make it last?

Settle or search?

But maybe it's in the way the question itself is phrased. Why does love have to be an either-or proposition? why ca't we just accept people as they come and learn to make something out of it, even if that doesn't fit the narrow-minded preconceptions of know-it-alls like me who do not know the first thing about relationships?

So maybe She With the Deep Dimples isn't settling as much as she has come tot he end of her search. And maybe Her Royal Highness isn't searching as much as she is settling with what she really wants our of her lovelife.

Ah, relationships. So much shit has been written about their complexity when we should just heed the words of Jewel: what's simple is true. If we love someone, it doesn't matter if we feel like we're searching or settling. Like I've been told before, 'love doesn't need a reason other than itself'.

So why even bother?

(in any case both friends of mine are still single, a few weeks after I wrote this)

Positively Somewhere

I miss being miserable, if only for the words it inspires in me. But as Ziggy Marley says, 'gotta be true to myself'. I can't deny that I don't have everything in my life right now, but I'm content with what I have.

However, the other night Princess and I were lamenting about our respective stations in life, and got around to talking about how it felt so much better to be in the middle of a messy relationship than be serenely outside of one.

As we were walking along the Megastrip on our way to Starbucks, I began to feel as if I were contradicting myself. I've always said, after the rocketman episode that I needed no more drama in my life, and that I would focus on myself instead of trying so hard to put myself out in the "meet market". But there I was, actually telling Princess that "At least when you're with someone and it's not going alright, you have those feelings, the anger, the resentment, the bitterness, the joy, the excitement, the elation to look forward to. A relationship allows you to feel those things, and more."

I felt uncomfortable about myself for the first time in weeks. I thought that from hereon it was all about me, that it would all be about coffee, oggling cute guys, signing up for pilates lessons, taking up a language (French-German-Spanish!, I even lined them up), movies on Saturday nights, and volunteer work for AI.

I guess a part of me still longs for the mess that comes with relationships. But to look at it when one is sober, what you want may not be what you need. In any case, Cess seems to have lost interest in furtehr dicussing the topic. She is on the phone with Z, a character worth another article, another time.

So I put out my cig, down my cup of hot white chocolate, smile and bid farewell to Cess as I made my way home at around 3 am.

I got to thinking. Maybe I was not really looking for the feelings as much as I was looking for an outlet for my energies. And by that I don't always mean sex.

It is Sunday afternoon, and everyone seems busy doing something else. Eileen is not responding to my text messages. Nina's stuck at home, watching TV and dreaming of Keanu Reeves (I guess) and Cess is off shopping with her mom.

So on a weekend when nobody seemed available to meet up with, I met up with the faceless crowd of my fellow netizens instead. So off I went to my ever-reliable community of fellow UP students and alumni, to peyups.com, where I spend some time (not as much as before) as a moderator for its forum boards.

Being a moderator basically means you have access to people's IP addresses and can, with a little patience find out which nick is someone else's alternick, and by some stretch of research prowess, where that person might even be logged on at any particular time. But that's a power I have rarely exercised, since I myself have a few alternicks in my pockets not a lot of people know of.

But today I log on as myself, and intentionally avoiding the explosive threads of the Current Events folder, shifted my attention to the Relationships folder instead.

A particular discussion caught my eye, and clicked on it. There was this guy who calls himself grinpepper. The guy's apparently confused because he's been living in the closet for a while, and had had two girlfriends before venturing out into same-sex relationships. He's had three boyfriends and is currently (in his word) sleeping with a guy (lucky dawg).

The problem is, he thinks he's falling in love with his female friend who just broke up with her boyfriend. He says he can't do anything about it because he's afraid his past will "haunt" him.

My initial reaction was - 'what hogwash!'

I have to admit, I have this unspoken bigotry against guys who call themselves 'discreet', or guys who take comfort in the "B" category in the "LGBT" acronym. To my mind, it is people like them that make it doubly harder to mainstream gay life in Filipino society. 'Discreets' seem to take a step forward and then two steps back while the rest of us out and proud people are doing all the work. It's unfair. It's like society doesn't tolerate us already, and to make it worse, here comes along a subsection of this sector saying "Don't use the G word, it's so....whatever" and I hate it. Just because a guy uses the G word to describe himself doesn't mean he wants to grow a vagina. I'm gay. I like guys. But I don't want to be a girl. I have a penis. I'm happy with it. Now THAT is what I call gay.

And by it's very nature, I used to tell myself that you can't have it both ways, and that ultimately you'll crave for just one, not either of the two sexes. In fact, I had a particular liking for this guy I would like to call Flint, who works for an NGO I might have eventually worked for, had I left Etta's office. But the thing with this guy is that nobody knows for sure whether he's "in" or "out" (insert stupid Sandara song here). I've been told how he lit up when I dropped by their karaoke session at Tat's, but in the same breath I was told that it would probably take a while before he comes out of the closet. Somehow that, and the fact that he insists on putting "dating, relationship women" on his friendster profile really turned me off.

I was just about ready to pounce on grinpepper when I realized I might be shooting myself in the foot if I did. Just a few weeks ago, I found myself attracted to a girl during one of those moments when I was totally detached from my usual surroundings and in the company of people I really didn't know that much (no, not a raunchy grope-as-you-please bar in Malate, but a serious, regional conference with an entire ensemble of foreign guests). I actually brought it up to Eileen and Enteng who were only both too happy to shoot down the idea of me asking this girl out for a date. And it made me sad. Am I now totally defined as a person, and the idea of going out with a girl is totally off-limits since by definition, I only sleep with men? How limiting can we get!

Maybe we get to thinking about taking on a new direction because we crave those feelings Princess and I listed down earlier. Maybe, just maybe, grinpepper is getting all those things from this girl. I know for a fact that with my girlfriends I can be myself with no fear of judgment, and I've often told them stuff I wouldn't tell my boyfriend. So does thinking he loves her allows grinpepper to feel confused, angry, resentful, sad, rejected etc., and hehas just mistaken that for love? Or maybe he really is falling for her. In any case, who am I to judge?

So I took a few deep breaths, and tried to put myself in grinpepper's shoes, taking into account his own particular context. With rational sobriety, I tell him, "Just be yourself, do what makes you happy, live a life, don't tie yourself down to anatomy. Life is so much more fun when you live it to the fullest, free of all misconceptions, stereotypes and conventions."

Enteng had a sure-fire way of knowing if I was intent on getting to know the girl I wanted to date. A test which I decided to pass on to grinpepper. I asked him, if he can see himself sleeping with her, then fine. Otherwise, I said, maybe they were just giving each other an intense amount of emotional support one does not get from intimate relationships. I applied it to my own case, and like a hot potato dropped the idea of going out with that girl. Maybe not now.

But just the same, I told grinpepper, "Don't worry about people saying you can't do this or that just because this is where you came from or something, something. Our sense of identity is constantly evolving, being redefined, exactly by people like you." And it is true. It's okay to be confused. Hell, I'm even dropping my prejudice and say it's okay to straddle between sexes. Just make sure you're someplace you want to be in, and not stuck in limbo.

silip

still happy. fuck. no material. :)

Power to the People

There has been very little discourse going on in national affairs over the inherent weaknesses of a presidential form of government. Unfortunately in years past debate about what structural changes needed to be implemented to do away with the personalism of the current form of government has been effectively reduced into questions of power grabbing, term extensions, and basic human greed.

Which is why when one talks about shifting to a parliamentary form of government, he or she risks the danger of being branded a supporter of charter change, which in itself is not entirely bad. Hardly anyone would say that the Constitution should be left alone for the next hundred years or so, even as it has provisions that need to be strengthened. But in the present milieu, to advocate for charter change means one is playing into the hands of entrenched elites and trapos with their own agenda.

So the first step needed to drum up support for a parliamentary government is to take the limelight away from vested interests and pursue discussions along the lines of what we have to gain from doing away with the current form of government.

First and foremost, let us revisit the current set-up. We have a chief executive directly elected every six years, and a bicameral legislature with the lower house dominated by representatives voted along territorial boundaries defined by population as well as an upper house voted at large. Through the party-list system, there are also members of the Lower House with a national constituency, but they remain in the minority (no more than 50 at any given time, and only around a dozen or less at present).

How does this set-up work? Hardly, as legislation is oftentimes held hostage to the narrow agenda which incumbents hold. The legislative process is tedious and often anchored on exigency and cues from Malacañang. Governance is highly concentrated in the national government, as the national legislature holds control over most of the legislative work. This has grave implications for the local governments since despite the passing of the Local Government Code, not much authority has been practically devolved to the regional, provincial and municipal levels.

A change in the form of government will allow regions like the Cordillera and Mindanao to define their development agenda for themselves, without relying too much on a central government that is often insensitive to their plight.

The details of institutional design in the aftermath of a shift to the federal/parliamentary system need to be threshed out through careful study. Initially it would probably involve a unicameral legislature, a prime minister, shift to proportional representation, institutionalization of parties, bureaucratic insulation from political whims, among others.

But let us get one thing straight. Among genuine reformers, the shift to a parliamentary system is not in the realm of immediate demands. There are prerequisites to this shift. First and foremost, there must be wide-ranging political and economic reforms. The modernization of the electoral system, an anti-dynasty law, asset reforms that will eventually weaken patronage politics by bridging poverty gaps, the presence of programmatic parties whose unities are anchored on platforms and not on personalities, a fiscalizing opposition (which must not only be the minority borne of an election at any given time), among others.

That sounds like a lot of work, but to say that the system will fail regardless of its form is an arrogant and simplistic argument. If one is truly interested in reform, one must dare swim the murky waters of institutional analysis and realize that indeed, there has got to be a better system than the one we have now.


(originally appeared in BNEXT during the period Sept. 9-15, 2002)