The Bigger Picture

(This essay was published in the March 28, 2010 Issue of the Baguio Midland Courier)

Today, being strong is equated to being independent. For every setback we encounter in this life, we tend to be headstrong and try to face the dilemma alone. We even term it maturity—and we justify that since the consequences or rewards are exclusively for us to reap, then we might as well rely on our own.


Same is true when we address bigger issues. We count on our own individual powers and intuition and say “Hey! I did what I had to do.” Then we sit back and wait for the rest of the world to do their individual responsibilities.


So much for “you have to start with yourself.”


Let’s face it, being an individual, you are like a dot in a vast canvas and you don’t have the ability to effect a big change. Sure, your action made a slight alteration in the society, but in our present era where quantity is necessary like in People Power and the political elections, where does being alone stand out?


In this era of economic instability, social sites, YouTube campaigning, and “virtual life” (as in, a technological alter ego), the lethargic mind set of every Filipino results in a country that misses its purpose: a progressive and colorful country where there are no hungry mouths to feed nor estranged feelings with each other needed to be dissipated.


I was reminded of my History teacher who said that the Philippines was conquered well and easy way back because the Filipinos were divided by language and disparate ends. Although they all seemed to want freedom and revolted against the oppressors, their sense of camaraderie was limited to who they knew only—thus, they are in small numbers and tribes and can be easily attacked by the foreigners.


Likewise today, we are all divided by our different passions and beliefs. We tend to believe so well in the notion that individuality is what can lead us to that big thing called development. What is worse is, we limit ourselves to our single human powers and expect others to do the same, not realizing that some still need help and inspiration.


Let us not stop by ourselves. As human beings, we have our social proportions to fulfill. Let us change the notion of being alone. Yes, it should start by ourselves, but it should also pull others to do the same. And, like a child’s play of connect the dots, we can see, that the minute dots can form something—a bigger picture.

[March24, 2010]

FaveQuotes From Coelho's ELEVEN MINUTES

1. "When you really want something to happen, the whole universe conspires so that your wish comes true."

2. "Everything tells me that I am about to make a wrong decision, but making mistakes is just part of life. What does the world want of me? Does it want me to take no risks, to go back to where I came from because I didn't have the courage to say "yes" to life?"

3. "Keeping passion at bay or surrendering blindly to it - which of these two attitudes is the least destructive?"

4. "Life always waits for some crisis to occur before revealing itself at its most brilliant."

5. "At every moment of our lives we all have one foot in a fairy tale and the other in the abyss."

6. "The power of beauty: what must the world be like for ugly women?"

7. "Considering the way the world is, one happy day is almost a miracle."

8. "What is real always finds a way of revealing itself."

9. "It wasn't necessary to know your own demons in order to find God."

10. "The strongest love is love that can demonstrate its fragility."

11. "Pain and suffering are used to justify the one thing that brings only joy: love."

____

Coelho's "Eleven Minutes" started with: "Once upon a time, there is a prostitute named Maria."
Although it sounded really intriguing, i think it is an ingenious way of making the reader engage with it by also asking him/herself: "Once upon a time, there is a ______ named me."

:) Hope you read it sometime, too.
Like every Coelho, it is worth your while.

Unwavering Through This Rain

I dedicate this to the unsuspecting souls who didn't see it coming.
May you rest in peace.

It was the evening of Sunday (11.28.09). It was my father’s birthday and the third day of the Northern Luzon Debate Championships. I got home by 10 and sat down to rest. What my eyes met on the day’s paper will be one of the events that won’t escape my mind as long as I live.



It is very ironic that I spent my day in an auditorium with bright people and debating on policies and values while the typhoon Ondoy (international code name Ketsana) raged over the Philippine metropolis and created a killer sea to claim lives and take away properties. I cannot help but think that if only that same auditorium was in Manila, then it could have been an aquarium if not a refuge for some victims.



I cried for how something like these can happen. Like a thief in the night, the rain just came and poured in a few hours what it could have shedded in days. It is Mother Nature’s cry. But to put it in the sense that even the innocent is claimed is something I cannot comprehend.



My Business Law instructor related it in “what if that is how the end of the world would look like?” It is very hushed, unspoken. You just go to bed and say your prayers. But before the sun could set on God-only-knows when, you would be fighting for dear life.



I am very troubled and blessed by Ondoy. I think this is what it means with “unity and diversity.” Tears would always spring from my eyes whenever I see the news of rising figures of death and the sight of fellow Filipinos and foreigners alike guiding each other… Helping, donating, embracing, loving.

Sometimes, I think what Ondoy wants to teach us after all is not death and hurt and pain. Maybe she wants us to face life with the colors that only grief and hurt can bring. Maybe she wants us to realize that regardless of who we are and what we do, we are all the same: we love, we feel, we cry. I think I realized that your money cannot help you in this impasse.

Well, I am glad that through the media, we can see that we are finally living to that lesson. We are all standing up in our won ways to help and do even the most minute things for them.


My brother asked: “If only there is something we can do too.” Being far away from Manila, I think there is always something. After all, prayers can also dissipate even the biggest of the seas.

[sept.30, 2009]
from my journal

Mind Out The Box

(Previously published in the Baguio Midland Courier under the column "Speaking Out", October 11, 2009)

If I say that every leaf I see is colored black, would you believe me? Check me, now that would be more definite. If I also regarded your top as unsuitable to the jeans you’re wearing, would you just shrug it off or heed my advice to change?

I am in my right mind. I do not suffer from colorblindness, and I do not really enjoy criticizing garbs for fashion matter. I simply posted the questions above because as far as I have observed, we tend to become what others want us to be.

Paulo Coelho in one of his books brought out this question: “What is the real ‘I’? The answer was simple but challenging: It is what you think of yourself, not what others think of you.

As a teenager, it is no longer new to me if somebody pushes me towards something or forces an option for me to take. As a teenager too, I am prone to manipulation. But I am 18, and haven’t the law express that you are considered to be intelligent if and only if you reach 18?

Sorry if you have not reached your 18th birthday and the law consider you to be not intelligent and excused from not understanding the things around you. But being the ‘youth’—and the hope of the fatherland at that, I think it is not an excuse to be not of legal age and keep on committing mistakes. After all, thinking is one of man’s prerogatives among other creatures.

My instructors usually tell us in class that the youth now are “passive students”. We just eat, we just chew, but we do not digest what we take in. So I also get the idea that we are indeed getting dumber and dumber every day. We lack to see substance. When someone tells us something is to be, then it should be.

It makes us fall then to the negative sense of being followers. We fail to think on our own, and we willingly concede to what culture and the status quo dictates. These are the same reasons why we think leaves are “green” and horizontal stripes hides fat.

It is also very shameful to admit that for times in our lives, we actually rationalized that we do something because everybody does it anyway. Example, when we commit ourselves to certain appointments, we tend to be late and call it “Filipino Time”. Sometimes in class, we cheat and reason out that it is just but normal.

Normal? Then what will happen to our country at the end of the day? We all cheat, we all fail, and we all lose because it is “normal”? No one asked you to ride that boat on the first place. You just resorted to join because it is an easier alternative and it held no commitments.

The point is, if we can’t deviate for the better on smaller issues, then how could we efficiently face the bigger ones soon?

Our world is a better place to live in because of the genius of our predecessors. They were also ordinary people who chose to think outside the box. They invented the technology, they devised the techniques, and they came out with our laws. They had believed that there is a better way than what is already present, and with that conclusion, they worked things out from what everyone says is—even to the extent of being considered insane. Without them, we might still stick to the knowledge that the earth is flat, the sun is a moving body, and that we are held by a turtle.

Going to Paulo Coelho’s challenge, I think it boils down to ourselves as the masters of our fate. Yes, we should listen. Yes, we should learn. But whatever culture dictates is not constant—and the power to change it resides in us.

[Oct 4, '09]

Don't Wanna Stutter More

As a campus journalist, an Accounting major, a novice debater, and simply a human being, I came to realize that expression is the most lucrative and greatest asset that we ever used.
It does not matter what media we use, nor is it a care if we say it with numbers, symbols, ciphers, codes, words, calligraphy, ad infinitum.

However, I realized that as we delve into this technological era as chat, text messaging, e-mail and social sites, our gift (and freedom, per se) of speech is slipping its way through our fingers and we are getting away from its REAL purpose. In fact, with it, I think we are becoming weirder.


Case in point:

[A text message thread between BF and GF]
BF: Hi, babe.
GF: Hi 2. (Wrong grammar!)
BF: Musta ang day?
GF: Fine nmn. U?
BF: Fine dn.
GF: IC. Lab u. (nahiya pa... “lab” eh?)
BF: Too. (huh?)
GF: Ingat.
BF: Too. (uli?)
GF: Tnx.
BF: Tnx too. (wrong grammar again!)
GF: K.

(The next day…)
BF: Hi, babe.
GF: Hi 2. (Wrong grammar uli!)
BF: Musta ang day?
GF: Fine nmn. U?

You tell me now what is next…


It is short. Futile. Stupid. And it goes again and again, day by day.

I don’t want to be a hypocrite, though I admit that I have been to a conversation like this (but it’s not that bad.) I also text other people when I miss them with messages like “Hi. What’s up?” (Street-like). Or, Hi, anu gawa mu? (‘u’ nalang ba lahat?) and some of them blast off while the rest go with my dim-witted strategy.

My teacher in Theology 101 at Saint Louis University said that interaction is more important than actions. It is straight, WYSIWYG, and it does not misled other people with their disparate interpretations. It is our Biblical proportion as social beings.

How I miss the days in my grade school years where I always stay late in school to chat with friends and we do not have to be worried about “extra load” (for contra-sim providers) and low batt. We are happy, and the next day, we do it again. It is not short, of course. But it is never futile. Never stupid.

It goes with our way as children of the technological era. We have them all (YM, e-mail, FS, FB, Multiply) but these should not get in our way of being comprehensible and intelligent speakers.

I do hope that the world may change its media but it should not change out ways. With this, it is not too late to develop into weird aliens of weird language.

Not short. Not futile. Not stupid.

PEACE!


[sept8,'09]

CAMPUS COLLAGE

I write this with a million things stuffed in my mind, with articles on my corkboard waiting to be touched, and accounting homework left ignored. I don’t know. I think i am just starting to feel wrong about myself. I just remembered about high school so i face this desktop trying to seek a friend’s attention.

I miss high school. I remember not being the best student but at least I know that there are a lot of things i have yet to achieve. I miss my Chemistry teacher who made me feel like I am Harry Potter and she is Snape- and she do hate me! I miss writing for the school paper and running away from my adviser when I myself did not pass an article on due date. I miss cheering, dancing and screaming in the grounds like life mattered only on that moment. I miss my bestfriends. Carl, who became my twin brother, and my Math homework sharer. Corelle who share my passion with writing and our heated arguments sometimes. Venus and her mimicked Tweety voice. and Danielle of course who supplied me with an ample load of paperbacks or novels and our imaginative conversations. To my surprise, I also miss the first years in my senior year who loves to pick on me, teasing. I rather they laugh at me now while i write this quite emo blog.

But i just don’t know.

When I was in high school, i don’t count the days I spent with them, the school, the teachers, the activities i incurred, the projects. Instead, i count the days when I would graduate. Leave that stinking pighole (at that moment, i really was thinking this) and enter university.

I really hope I hadn’t counted at all. That I should have
joined my very noisy girlfriends and uber-partyholic boyfriends. I also wished I
did not count so that I had the time to write my articles and finish my essays
and reports rather that run away from my adviser or rush them on recess times
when all the fun really happens.I just have to wish now. But it ends there.

I will always miss high school like you might do feel sometimes. I still have college after all, right? Maybe I shouldn’t be counting now, too. I’ll just shut this down and go after my articles and maybe i could spend the night with my book and Accounting things.

Life is limited. So i shouldn’t count. I’ll just spend…

[aug26,'09]

Prologue

Phew... I thinks this is the right word for me to start blogging. :)

My name is Ivan Jim but you can call me Van for short. I wish i have started blogging years ago instead of just scribbling my thoughts on paper and worn-out notebooks that reached the trash bins when my mother saw them lying about in any part of our home here in the Philippines.

Actually, I live quite a boring life that I have to become a writer to keep me sane and moving. That is, being a writer, I have to observe so I may comment.I need to read and watch that I may share and criticize.I need to talk and interact that I may learn, and I have to live so that I can say that what I have written is something that made something good (or bad) in my life.

Days are rolling fast in my Life now. I'm growing up and I hope to share the things that I saw and experienced. Forgive me if i seem egotistic and proud sometimes. I'll try to keep it down...

Join me! :D

[mar18,'10]