I am. Finally.

It's foolish, when you think about it. December's a month away. I quit now, I won't see hide nor hair of any kind of bonus but it's just as well. I'm sick of my current state of affairs.

Don't get me wrong: my company's provided me with a schedule, money and a useful way to put my talents to work. I'm happy with my workmates, especially the latest batch of trainees, who-- if management does not drop the ball-- should serve the company well for a good three years. That's longer than anyone can really expect of people in the service industry, but this is a useless digression.

The company doesn't want me to go, of course. I'm just not sure what they can dangle in front of me that will justify my staying on in my current capacity. Can they give me back Tina (of course not)? Can they triple my pay (they can but they won't)? I'm still open to arrangements that will keep me affiliated with the company and yet still free up my time for other affairs I should be devoting myself to.

I'm handing in my letter tomorrow. We'll see what happens from there.



-------------------------------

I Should Get Out of the Language Business

About Me:
Messages and Manifestos: On Art:
Work Edifies
Marketing, Politics, Man in the Mirror
Did anyone ever tell you that I dislike poetry?
I'm a Designer
Why Dex Faves (personal stuff here too)
Messages and Manifestos: Personal: On Love
On Love
After All It's Done to You, Why?
Messages and Manifestos: Personal: For Tina, For Tishie
I have a grand daughter
14 (Again, for Tin)
When is Enough, well, Enough?
To the Monastery, Jeeves
14 (for Tin)
for Tina

I really should, because I have little reason to be here (teaching Engrishii). Tina's gone, building a life that doesn't include me in any way. She was the main reason I re-injected myself into the local ESL community. She's been gone from my life for two years now. These days I have little time for anything else that doesn't involve the office. I'm not an efficient office worker bee, but there are only so many things I can do to streamline my routine.

But art on these Islands simply doesn't pay. Not in the amounts you need in the time you need those amounts. Even whoring ain't as good as it used to be, to judge by the number of streetwalkers roaming farther and farther from their traditional haunts in the city.

This is why I and hyperdex aren't hanging photos up in a physical gallery. You'll recall he and I had a good run together as video editing guys. He's a powerful photographer and he was always the better video man. He's also good with your model kits. (Stop by [link] and [link] to see this for yourselves).

Wasn't so long ago when we were idealistic kids. Now we're both fat hypertensive old men, the difference between us being "Hyperdex is married." (and "he's taking different medication.")

I digress. My point is that I was losing hope in the power of Love or Art to emancipate us. There, I said it. (Gasp! Blasphemy!) Don't get me wrong: the core of me still believes in it. But when you've been wandering more than your 40 metaphorical years in the desert of your existential uncertainty, you start to wonder about when you're supposed to enter the promised land. Indeed, you start to wonder if wandering is all you're destined to do.

Still, moments of serendipity hint that someOne is looking out for me: just enough money comes into my hands, out of the blue, to take me out of one frustrating crisis. Just enough to tide me over and into... the next frustrating crisis. I am very thankful, and much awed at the subtlety of these little interventions. But I am sorely vexed at "just enough" when all my attempts to produce a surplus meet with failure (as they must, since most of my time and my talents are slaved to office-related work).

Just enough is NOT enough when I have no one to share my heart with. I should at least be rich. Not Donald Trump rich, but rich enough to afford a trip to Bali and back in reasonable comfort when I need a place to hide from the world and cry like a girly man because Tina is not with me.



-------------------------------
About Me:
Messages and Manifestos: On Art:
Work Edifies
Marketing, Politics, Man in the Mirror
Did anyone ever tell you that I dislike poetry?
I'm a Designer
Why Dex Faves (personal stuff here too)
Messages and Manifestos: Personal: On Love
On Love
After All It's Done to You, Why?
Messages and Manifestos: Personal: For Tina, For Tishie
I have a grand daughter
14 (Again, for Tin)
When is Enough, well, Enough?
To the Monastery, Jeeves
14 (for Tin)
for Tina

...a somewhat fat, nostalgic, out-of-shape b@stard who is slowly relearning to hit imaginary opponents with a stick.

...continually writing letters to people who he feels he's wronged.

...saw his married friends walking in the university garden early in the afternoon. He envies them because they're lost in love's myopia.




-------------------------------


Tina, to your "Nihil," I will answer always "Ti amo."

-------------------------------
About Me:
Messages and Manifestos: On Art:
Work Edifies
Marketing, Politics, Man in the Mirror
Did anyone ever tell you that I dislike poetry?
I'm a Designer
Why Dex Faves (personal stuff here too)
Messages and Manifestos: Personal: On Love
On Love
After All It's Done to You, Why?
Messages and Manifestos: Personal: For Tina, For Tishie
I have a grand daughter
14 (Again, for Tin)
When is Enough, well, Enough?
To the Monastery, Jeeves
14 (for Tin)
for Tina

This week in '86 many of my countrymen trooped to Camps Crame and Aguinaldo along historic Epifanio De los Santos Avenue to form human barricades to protect then-Defense Secretary Juan Ponce Enrile and then-General Fidel Ramos against the wrath of my favorite President.

The Good Old Days

It turns out that then-President Ferdinand Marcos was becoming more and more unpopular in proportion to the country becoming more and more destitute. People who didn't agree with him and his wife were disappearing, being locked away or joining the Communists. It didn't help that three years before, one Benigno Aquino died at the hands of an unknown gunman (though everyone suspected Marcos's involvement). That death was important because Aquino was widely seen as Marcos's most capable rival and his staunchest, most visible critic. The investigation of the Aquino assassination yielded no results that anyone would believe at the time. The issue was so hot that Marcos was forced to hold elections a year earlier than they should have been (hence the term "snap elections") on this very month. His chief opponent? Aquino's wife, Corazon.

The elections were rigged (of course) and key people at the Commission on Elections, fed up with years of massive corruption and this newest incidence of barefaced cheating, walked out because of it.

Everyone could sense that the country was at the tipping point. Enrile seized his chance, and with supporters in the military, tried to stage a coup d' etat. Only, it didn't quite work, as Marcos was still at the palace calling the shots and his troops were likely to arrest the conspirators. Wikipedia tells me Enrile got Fidel Ramos to sign on at this point, but rightly or wrongly, I'd always lumped those two together from the start (that's the power of youthful memory associations for you).

Then it gets weird.

The Weirdness of EDSA

Jaime Cardinal Sin, Catholic Archbishop of Manila, called on everyone within earshot of Radio Veritas to protect the coup plotters. The people, most of them fed up with how crappy everything had become and fearful of more violence, complied. More people trooped to a couple of television stations (notably Channel 4) to defend them against any Marcos-controlled military intervention.

When Marcos sent the tanks to EDSA the people fought back... with rosaries and flowers. Tank drivers would not drive over the civilians, other soldiers would not shoot them despite orders. After the soldiers were won over, people marched all the way to Malacanang Palace and Marcos and his family were on their way to Hawaii. Corazon Aquino was finally sworn in as the Republic's first woman president.

The Unfinished Story

As with Marcos, at least at the beginning of his first term, we showed a lot of promise. There was hope in the air and it felt like we were finally climbing out of the 20-year rut we were in.

Sadly we kept dropping the ball. We're very good when it comes to saving the day at the last minute but we tend to get complacent. One change of president, or political system, and we think the job is done. It's not.

Whatever darkness and weakness that co-opted Marcos and the others after him are the same demons that hobble us today. The corruption, the pandering-- these were not invented by Marcos, but they were systematized and made highly efficient under his rule. Twenty-three years after the original EDSA, we still have our work cut out for us.

The challenge of nation building and remapping our national destiny is two-fold: keeping the memory of EDSA alive and applying its lessons-- doing something about our problems-- intelligently.

It's a tall order, but that's another journal entry.

-------------------------------


Tina, to your "Nihil," I will answer always "Ti amo."

-------------------------------
About Me:
Messages and Manifestos: On Art:
Work Edifies
Marketing, Politics, Man in the Mirror
Did anyone ever tell you that I dislike poetry?
I'm a Designer
Why Dex Faves (personal stuff here too)
Messages and Manifestos: Personal: On Love
On Love
After All It's Done to You, Why?
Messages and Manifestos: Personal: For Tina, For Tishie
I have a grand daughter
14 (Again, for Tin)
When is Enough, well, Enough?
To the Monastery, Jeeves
14 (for Tin)
for Tina

Feeling very very withdrawn again. I likely need more sunshine and exercise. Honestly tired of writing. More specifically tired of writing knowing that absolutely nothing is changed by it, that none of this makes a difference that will be felt

a) in my life at a time when I need it; and
b) in other lives when they need it.

I write on and on about the same topics, the same issues. Nothing changes. I am not a better man, everyone around me doesn't magically become a better person. The woman I love still thinks I am the reincarnation of satan. I'm not allowed to be sad, lest by my sadness I ruin the moods of the people I come into contact with.

I have no right to be sad or angry because I don't live in Darfur, or Gaza or (to be local about it) in Payatas. But I am.

It'll be my month in a few days. My month. I need to get away, maybe go to Laguna (where the hot springs won't really cure me) or talk to some friends (who will tell me nothing new).

I miss Tina.

Her jokes, her glasses, her smell, her shampoo. All the hours of talk. But I know what she'll do if and when I try to reach out. Run like all of hell was after her. Mornings like this I wish I never met her.

The whole world knows I love her and it doesn't mean jack. That's the knowledge that takes the joy out of meals or drink or porn, other women, or any of Man's traditional sources of consolation.