In this comeback post, I shall share my reflection on my favorite book in light of my experience as a volunteer in Eastern Samar. It was published in The Philippine Star. More posts on my JVP experience, I’m warning ye. :)) (I think.)

In the modest number of years that I have lived not once have I been troubled by a lack of freedom. I was in fact too boldly free for my own good that shortly after graduating from college, I violated my parents’ wishes and chose to be a Jesuit volunteer. Fresh from middle-class Manila and brimming with idealism, I stuffed some twenty shirts into my behemoth of a suitcase and flew to Eastern Samar last June.

Friends would ask about my plans after this and I would be quick to say “I don’t know.” The possibilities are many and it is taxing to go through them. More taxing is to be weighed down by the question on the meaning of my work. Was I sent here for a reason? Some days I have the answers to console myself. But some days I imagine Tomas rearing his head from under a blanket to say: “Es konnte auch anders sein” (It could just as well be otherwise).” 

In The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera illustrates the human condition: people stumbling from one pole of human existence to another only to discover how closely these ends touch. Thus the womanizing Tomas inexplicably falls in love with the vulnerable Tereza. The artist Sabina, disgusted with collective sentiments, finds herself enamored with Franz who perpetually dreams of becoming part of a revolution. Compassion is defined capriciously as pity, but also as the supreme ability to feel the whole gamut of emotions another person feels. When Yakov, son of the powerful Stalin, electrified himself because he could not justify habitually streaking the soldiers’ latrine with his shit, Kundera notes, “No one felt more concretely than Yakov how interchangeable opposites are, how short the step from one pole of human existence to the other.” 

In darkness we grope for answers, in light we are overwhelmed by many. In poverty we complain of hunger, in prosperity we lament that there should be more to life. We have witnessed how history overthrew kings and proclaimed rebels as heroes. And have you realized that the hands we use to receive the body of Christ are the same ones we use to wipe our asses clean? It is this world where something can be simultaneously scorned and exalted that accounts for the coming together of Kundera’s colorful characters in a deceptively simple merger between choice and chance.

Tomas, a surgeon, was never the hopeless romantic. Outside the operating room, his hands skillfully and dutifully pried into each female body he encountered in bed. He believed that the only dissimilarity worth discovering in womankind is the one not easily exposed. No one could be more surprised than him when he was gripped by an emotion he couldn’t identify—“Was it love or hysteria?” 

Tomas would continue to stroll the distance between love and sex. Yet in love there is desire for physical union. Intimate acts can in turn water the soil of love. A drunken escapade can excusably be a pretext for starting a family.

Kundera remarks that we are drunk on the idea that our love can never be ordinary. “We all reject out of hand the idea that the love of our life may be something light or weightless; we presume our love is what must be, that without it our life would no longer be the same.” In a song, one pleads, “Tell me how two people find each other in a world that’s full of strangers.” I’ll tell you how: people just really tend to marry within the same social class, interest spheres, and geographical zones.

In all this, where does love really begin? Should I fall sad at the realization that my and my future lover’s names are not written in the stars? Maybe to accept that love can be ordinary is to believe in a relationship’s capacity to transcend its mundane beginnings, and that to have faith in a relationship is to be able to bank on your maturity to keep things together rather than blame bad luck for your every argument. 

“We can never know what to want, because, living only one life, we can neither compare it with our previous lives nor perfect it in our lives to come,” Kundera writes.

We have only one life and that is a burden. What fatigue would we suffer if we had a dozen lives to spare? We can have an itinerary for each and not spend a minute panicking over how our souls might be saved. The first one we can spend in guiltless indulgence and the last in begging for absolution. But in this tragedy of having only one life, there is grace in the power to choose. In choosing, I still the waves of uncertainty. In choosing, I create my own certainty. Perhaps our heaviest yoke— the unbearable lightness of our being— is that in love and in life, we are fated to choose.

Known for his dalliances but crushed by his strong feelings for Tereza, Tomas did the unexpected and chose to marry her. She could not stand the smell of another woman in his groin yet she stayed with him. Tomas “came to the conclusion that the love story of his life exemplified not “Es muss sein! ” (It must be so), but rather “Es konnte auch anders sein” (It could just as well be otherwise).” I can only surmise what they both held onto, but they showed me how hope can be grounded in a certainty that may be absurd but which I myself have created. I volunteered not because I was sure I would survive a year away from everything that is comfortably familiar; I knew I would survive because I signed a piece of paper signifying my year-long commitment to it. My having chosen it prepared me for the worst. That’s why after amoebiasis and typhoid fever, insurmountable frustrations, and the heavy experience of disillusionment, I am still here. I volunteered not because I was sure my efforts would amount to something; I was only sure of my fragile but unrelenting hope they would. 

On December 6, my friend Bro. Kim will be ordained to priesthood, and it’s not because he’s absolutely sure that no woman could ever lure him out of his priestly vestments. For all we know, he may one day meet the girl of his dreams and find himself in shady situations where the only certainty is his vow of loyalty to God, which should then be enough to decide everything.

12:43 pm  •  23 April 2012  •  View comments

And I intend to be an active blogger once again. Hello!

12:30 pm  •  23 April 2012  •  View comments

I’m on break, like I have been these days. I’m here at the office, with nothing to do. I’ve gone through my assigned readings, written everything I had to, and now there’s nada. Work hasn’t formally started yet. I feel that I’ve been savoring the scents and noises of Borongan longer than I want to.

The place suffers from an identity crisis. Sometimes it’s a city, sometimes it just isn’t. Coming from a highly urbanized place, though, where buildings shoot straight up to the sky and dark smoke bellows from cars that crowd on highways, I say they still have a long way to go. But sure, the many establishments are to be appreciated. Rivaling Chooks-to-go is Nak’s chicken. Rose Pharmacy and Mercury Drug are almost parallel to each other. A wave of a hand would instantly freeze a tricycle at an arm’s length. Still, despite the semblance of activity characteristic of the city life, time remains painfully slow.

I guess what I am most at odds with is the lack of things to do. I know, it’s only been a week, and I’m just being impatient. But at the very least I feel I have to acknowledge this itch, lest it evolve into a much bigger frustration that I won’t have any time to deal with in the hopefully busy future.

I’ve always managed to find beauty in stillness. But recently it became this wall that threatened to block the path I wanted to walk on. I came here a fresh graduate, idealistic, happy, eager to be of service, and in my head I was just like, let’s go, game, now na.. and then I heard cricket sounds.

Perhaps the reason why I don’t get frustrated about doing my own laundry, washing the dishes, or walking from the office back to the staff house is because I find solace in performing any task. I don’t want my hands empty, or my brain idle. I can say that for the first time ever, I feel the need to be Magis. The work we now do is higher than theory, past the beautiful things ever said in Theo and Philo classes. Confronted with faces behind the names and numbers once glossed over or tinkered with in research classes, I was overcome by a sense of what Pagsy called “mustness.”

So that’s how it has been lately.

But I remain calm. I’ve already met some inspiring people here. I shall talk about them at length someday. I hope the idleness ends tomorrow. And I don’t want to reduce my entire experience to this! I just feel the need to express myself right now. The neediness probably won’t just disappear, but I choose to be happy in (virtual) communion with my friends and family. The God I believe in tells me to always be happy! So for now, I will continue to be bakla in this cityyy of Borongan! :)

5:08 am  •  14 June 2011  •  4 notes  •  View comments

(via thewordsalloverme)

11:48 pm  •  23 May 2011  •  14,846 notes  •  View comments

fuck-yeah-tumblrs-best-posts:

thesufferingtiesthatbind:

I’d like your help to spread the news.

Do you see these photos? Dogs and cats, living or dead, are being used as shark bait by amateur fishermen from the island of Reunião, which is under French administration. Animal protection organizations and local authorities revealed the information. The small volcanic island off the east coast of Africa is full of stray dogs. To get an idea of the size of the problem, there are more than 150,000 animals.

Camera crews were sent by Reha Hutin to film the atrocities committed after being exposed to it on television, and on the Internet. The news was not very widespread, and still the problem continues.

There was a petition, but the link I found was broken.

Submitted by theparadisefiles

2:03 pm  •  23 May 2011  •  51,199 notes  •  View comments

My area of assignment is Borongan, Eastern Samar! Excited to go there in a few weeks. 

12:48 pm  •  22 May 2011  •  1 note  •  View comments

Too much has been said about the topic in such a short span of time that some people have grown weary of hearing the same things and finding themselves saying the same things all over again. I honestly don’t know of any person who has changed his or her stance on the matter after lending an ear to (and occasionally butting in a few words into) every debate held within a household, in the classroom or workplace, among a group of drunken friends, and aired on national television. But I guess having a firm, almost unchangeable stand is better than not having any say at all.

It’s a hot topic, locally and internationally. I’m glad about that. This bill needs all the attention it can get. And not just because it must be passed—but, more precisely, should it be passed, that it be implemented with much greater caution and the process be subjected to even greater scrutiny. We can’t afford to proceed with sheer carelessness. 

For the educated, it’s very easy to say that he or she is for the RH Bill. Being for the RH is cool! I guess it’s the neoliberal’s way (and a very convenient one at that!) of telling the Church, (mis)construed as an antiquated institution, to back off.

(I’d like to think that) I support the passage of this bill not for that reason. My prediction is that the Church isn’t going anywhere. It is here to stay. It will continue to safeguard our religious principles, and will fight tooth and nail to make sure they are lived out and protected especially at this time of great changes in the social landscape.

I support the RH bill for religious reasons.

Being a Catholic means that you do not condone the dire social realities, you don’t even just frown upon them—you fight them with the greatest tenacity your feeble body could muster.

I support the RH bill because women have the right to be informed of what’s best for them.

The underrated way of looking at the bill and the overpopulation situation is through feminist lens. Years ago I made the assumption that women in rural and urban poor areas are subjected to a lot of pressure from men. The male-female dynamics in those areas, I supposed, are less flexible than in the modern middle class society. I guess that makes a lot of sense now. It is clearly manifested in their lack of choice in matters of pregnancy. What RH gives them, ideally, is that power to make a decision. By giving them the information they need, by educating them, we give them the upperhand in deciding whether to have a baby or not. And no, I am by no means advocating abortion. If the wives knew better, abortion wouldn’t appear too large in the picture.

I support the RH Bill because poverty is multi-faceted, and there is no unidimensional solution to it.

When you say the people are poor, they are poor not only because they don’t have food. Amartya Sen will define poverty as capability deprivation. Even depravation of rights! You can’t solve poverty simply by putting food on the table. It is absurd to ditch the health care department, the roads and highway guys, the causes for the environment, to put food on the poor family’s table. I support the RH Bill because there is a need to control the population. These problems are interconnected. Imagine that food on the table is spurted out by a large tube that is connected to another set of tubes; cut one off and the large tube shoots out only toyo or vinegar, and not solid food. You get the point? That’s why we have education. And jobs. In RH, we get population control. It’s not like RH will hoard the entire national budget. The other departments will do their job. When you’ve got two wounds, you can’t treat one and leave the other bleeding. What good would simply feeding the poor do when they keep multiplying?

I support the RH Bill, but I admire the passion of those against it.

Times are a-changing really fast, and it makes me feel secure to know there are people who strive to keep us grounded, to remain true to the principles which we have always stood by.

It is valid to ask: Are people prepared? The bill might just be that fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Might people recklessly take a bite at it and run free? This freedom might set them off towards the opposite direction—against the telos of the sacred sexual act, and in the end, against life.

We always need a counterculture against which to examine our own beliefs so that we may not fall into the falsehood of our own creation. 

In situations where the good to be done does not show its face clearly, we may only lay our ears next to our hearts, and listen to the voice of God. We are gifted with conscience, the final arbiter, so that in the midst of all uncertainty, we learn to listen and once we hear the sound, we proclaim to the world, “This is it, this is what I heard” — and we move according to (and are moved by) what we have heard.

2:38 pm  •  21 May 2011  •  5 notes  •  View comments

littlepunkryo:

This is my second favorite tattoo of Angelina’s; it’s actually seven tattoos, a set of coordinates that leads to the place where a member of her family was born.

N11° 33’ 00” E104° 51’ 00” - Phnom Penh, Cambodia, for Maddox
N09° 02’ 00” E038° 45’ 00” - Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, for Zahara
S22° 40’ 26” E014° 31’ 40” - Swakopmund, Namibia, for Shiloh
N10° 46’ 00” E106° 41’ 40” - Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, for Pax
N43° 41’ 21” E07° 14’ 28” - Nice, France, for Knox
N43° 41’ 21” E07° 14’ 28” - Nice, France, for Vivienne
N35° 19’ 44” N96° 55’19” - Shawnee, Oklahoma, for Brad

Angelina Jolie is my ULTIMATE girl crush! Beautiful, inside and out. Complex. Different. Reaches out to those in need.

(via fuckyeahangelina)

6:43 am  •  19 May 2011  •  344 notes  •  View comments

James Franco is too good to be true! 

(via thewordsalloverme)

6:37 am  •  19 May 2011  •  323 notes  •  View comments

I’m officially part of the Jesuit Volunteers Program, Batch 32!

I applied last year! Against my parents’ will! I guess that’s just how I’ve always been. I really wanted to do this and I knew in time they would realize how much I want to jumpstart my life after college in this way. 

These last two days left me feeling high. A natural kind of high. Former volunteers shared their experiences. We were invited to re-examine our motivations for volunteering. We prayed. It felt so nice be with like-minded people.

But when the excitement dies down, we will be left to contend with routine again. What will keep me going? Righteous indignation (haha) and the thought that I will be doing it for Him!

So today I am happily telling everyone who cares (haha but I told them already!) that I am designated as Technical Support Officer at the Catholic Social Services Center, Diocese of Borongan in Eastern Samar. My initial reaction was: “There’s a call center there?!” Haha. Simply put, I’ll be engaging in socio-pastoral work. I will help conceptualize and implement projects to institutionalize parish-based social action. My clients will be children, farmers, fisherfolk, the youth, and women. I love how I will be able to mingle with all these people!! 

Looking forward to learning to speak Waray! But before that, the 12-day Orsem.

Don’t you just love it when passion and love for God collide? (But Augustine says I shouldn’t separate these two! Chos.) Wala ako masyadong masabi. I’m really just happy to be starting somewhere.

My cup runneth over. 

Mag utos Ka, Panginoon ko

Dagling tatalima ako

Ipagkaloob Mo lang ang pag-ibig Mo

At lahat ay tatalikdan ko

10:15 am  •  15 May 2011  •  View comments

A week ago I watched The Shawshank Redemption in full. It’s currently ranked no. 1 on IMDB’s Top 250, and now I don’t really need to wonder why. 

It tells, among other things, the story of Andy Dufresne, his stay at the Shawshank prison, and how, one morning, the policemen found his cell empty.

Great acting, especially by Morgan Freeman, and amazing story by Stephen King! It lives up to the hype. And oh, this post has spoilers!

Andy Dufresne was a middle-aged man who had it all— intelligence, a burgeoning career in banking, a lovely woman for a wife, and perhaps a whopping insurance to boot. Really perfect, that is, only on the cover; his wife was unfaithful. While making love in bed at a countryside hotel, his wife and her lover were gunned down and were dead instantly. Andy was charged guilty of murder. He was sent to Shawshank prison.

But Andy was not guilty. The swift movement of “justice” to settle such matter reminds us of the tendency to compromise universal principles for the sake of convenience. The evidence was only circumstantial. Yes, it was most likely to happen, but he could have been given the benefit of the doubt, no matter how little. In the trial, the examining lawyer unleashed his fury on him, and he became only a passive recipient, and he had very little, or nothing, to say in return. This would be portentous of what was to come: justice, being kept under the rugs; justice, distorted, reduced to a tool for amassing riches and power; and justice, or lack thereof. 

Shawshank Prison is a terrible place filled with criminals, and they weren’t the ones behind bars. The warden and his team of cops looked down on the inmates and treated them like animals. It was with pride and joy that they threw a miscreant down a dark room where there was no way to figure out what day or time it was. This reminds me yet again of the grudge we tend to harbor towards the persecuted. Man is reduced to the mistakes he or she committed. We are quick to strip the guilty of their dignity, we deny them our kindness, understanding, and forgiveness, and forget that the point of putting them in jail is so that they can be good again. 

There is a distinct kind of justice in prison. It consists in yes, making sure the world is safe from the people there, but also that while they remain works in progress, that they are also safe from the world and whatever prejudice it may hold against them. Treating them unkindly contradicts the message that we want to tell them— that human beings should be treated with respect, and life, valued.

That is what the warden and policemen forgot. They concerned themselves, instead, with using the rod to their heart’s content. This film will put you down in this kind of way. It will tell you that it really stinks in this microcosm of a universe.

It was the rock hammer that got Andy through the day. He made little rock sculptures, for random displays or chess pieces, to keep himself occupied. He read a lot and computed insurance and tax returns for the policemen, too. More than that, Andy made an effort to make Shawshank a better place. He flooded the senate’s mailbox with requests for funds for a library. He taught Tommy how to read and write, and he passed the high school equivalence test with a C+.

My favorite scene is when Andy grabbed a record and set it on the player the warden had in his office. He locked the room, played the record, and put the microphone next to the speaker. He reclined on the office chair, folded his arms behind his head, and put his feet up the table. The prisoners, laboring and sweating in broad daylight, stopped in their tracks and began to look up. Awakened by the sound of music, they turned towards the sky, mouths agape and in awe.

It was beautiful. 

We didn’t know that aside from carving figurines out out of grey matter, Andy was also patiently digging a hole towards salvation. The rock hammer indeed had great metaphorical value. It’s the little thing he had in his pocket everyday. It was small yet it led to one man’s liberation. It was something we could only associate with hope.

Andy told Red to never stop hoping. Red was granted parole in the end. To hope had been the message of the story. And of our lives. The last words in the movie were “I hope.” We are called to recognize again the brokenness of the world, not to condone it, but to rise above it, and proclaim the power of goodness over evil. 

It’s probably a tad bit too difficult to escape a highly guarded place with a humble rock hammer, but learn not to belittle the hope you have though it may be small. Like Andy’s rock hammer, it’s what will get you through the seeming meaninglessness, and sometimes, hopelessness, of everyday. It’s tiny, thin, and like candlelight that flickers, the darker you’re in, the brighter it gets.

6:49 pm  •  12 May 2011  •  2 notes  •  View comments

This is Anais Pouliot, my crush. This may not be the most flattering picture of her, but I sure like how naturally pretty she looks!

(Source: modellove)

2:28 pm  •  8 May 2011  •  56 notes  •  View comments

More than anything, prostitution is a sad, sad thing because of this.

(Source: scarymansion)

1:24 pm  •  8 May 2011  •  21 notes  •  View comments

I really want this limited edition Sound of Music memorabilia.

And after all these years this movie is still among the many things I love. Yes, something I love, a movie that transcended its movie-ness and became something loved. Haha. As a kid, I would keep track of the number of times I watched the film. I was that mad about it. I probably still am.

I even created a twenty-page long quiz book about it. My questions ranged from easy to hard. Some were absurdly nitpicking like “How many passengers are seen on the bus that Maria first rides?” and “How many steps are there towards the altar in the Church where Maria and the Captain are married?”; and some were so-so or even very easy if you had been a big fan, like “Who wants a pink parasol?” and “When does the Captain fall in love with Maria?” How I wish I could find that thick book again, oh the ink, the bond paper, and the minutes and blood and sweat I invested in that thing, all in the name of fandom. 

I love this movie. I just remembered it when I saw a thumbnail of this picture in my desktop folder. I’ll really visit the mansion someday.

1:42 pm  •  6 May 2011  •  5 notes  •  View comments