< this may sound boring >

   When I started blogging two years ago, it was seen as akin to psychological striptease.  We bloggers have often been accused of publicizing our private lives on the public sphere, thereby seeking publicity for all our actions.  Making blogs were almost nonsensical on account that too much information flooded the World Wide Web and resulted in an anarchy of various discourses.

   Today, it's different.  More and more blogs are sprouting out like mushrooms from the void, talking about everything from one's lovelife to one's taste in food to one's opinion on politics.  And the difference now is that it actually makes sense.  Not only blogs, mind you: YouTube is starting to be a popular venue for amateur filmmakers to show their work.

   Is this the beginning of a popular digital democratic revolution?

   TIME magazine voted us bloggers and them users of YouTube to be the Persons of the Year, on account that a massive change has resulted from the democratization of mass media.  The philosopher Jurgen Habermas stated before that commercial mass media has contributed to the downfall and decay of the bourgeois public sphere and resulted in consumption of media rather than media being a tool for public discourse.  What seems to be, however, is that more and more discourses are formed over the World Wide Web and the virtual environment and have resulted in a new public sphere, where there is an accelerated democratization of information.  Anyone can now be a journalist by blogging or a filmmaker by using YouTube or a talkshow host through Podcasting.

   If you asked me, information is the new capital.  The ability to create and disseminate information has become a crucial turning point in human history.  Although the fact remains that the Internet is still pretty much a Western construction and is part of the monopoly of societies that revolve around the exchange of information, one cannot deny that the ability to manipulate information is so central to our existence.  Without competence in information technology one is condemned to the sidelines of the information revolution.  To answer Habermas, yes, the public sphere has been revived in the form of the new digital democracy.

   From the anarchy that characterized the blogosphere just a few years ago we are seeing a new revival in the creation and exchange of information.  The blog, in my view, has become the single most important factor in the formation of the new digital democracy.  It is the new virtual newspaper.  Anyone can now opine about the news, and more and more opinions have resulted in a healthy exchange of discourses along the World Wide Web.  Anyone can now practically manufacture information - become a celebrity, a pundit, a commentator.  The new mass media is now the central focus for the exchange of information in commercial society.

   I mean, think about it: we are at a crossroads.  Not that it's a new paradigm shift, but when you come to think about it, there must be something to the rise of outsourcing the information industry.  This is new capitalism.  This is the revolution that Marx has seemed to have propounded in The Communist Manifesto: the equality and equity of all information and the production of information in the ultra-democracy that is the World Wide Web.

< politics >

   When you have the likes of Prospero Pichay, the man who wants to be planted in the Senate like Chinese cabbage (his namesake), waste all your television time, you start to wonder if it makes sense to vote for a man with a vegetative mind to run for the Senate even if he is one of the prime proponents for the abolition of the Senate.

   That's Philippine politics for you.  Go home and plant camote.  May you be picked up where kangkong grows.

   When I come to think about it, making a living out of camote and kangkong is paradise for the likes of us who wonder if it still makes sense to live in this country despite all its imperfections.  It doesn't: being a Filipino nowadays means to be a moron in the political arena.  We don't know what's going on because personality politics dominate this country.  Rather than having strong parties with strong platforms, we have political parties where incompetence predominates.  I mean, really, in the real world, with all the obviousness of it, would you vote for Richard Gomez or Cesar Montano and the lot of actors and actresses who profess nationalism and run for a seat in our already awry government?

   Would you vote for a guy like Kiko Pangilinan who runs a cheesy ad even if it is obvious that he is a modern version of a political butterfly?  Would you vote for the likes of Mike Defensor and Migz Zubiri who pretend to be everybody's friend on the account that they have Lito Camo jingles?  Come on, there has got to be more to this than what we already have now.

   Next thing you know the battle lines will be drawn on the pregnant belly of Kris Aquino and the vote becomes evident on what they think is up with her and James Yap.

   I say, let the battle lines be drawn on real reform.

< hmmm... >

   When they say that quitting smoking is a mere matter of mind, I guess they were right.  I was able to quit smoking for two days until I once again smoked like hell today to compensate for the lack of smoking I've been doing.

   I've always said to the neophyte smoker that the only way to quit smoking is to stop smoking, but I couldn't say that to myself considering that I am already smoking anyways.  I wouldn't do well in the "Pinoy Big Brother" house considering that a single smoke will cut the budget of my housemates by a good amount (I hear a smoke costs 50 smackers a stick) and that Big Brother would probably give me a special assignment consisting of quitting smoking.  Abroad, I would probably get arrested for smoking in all the wrong places.  But that's just me.

   Of course, I couldn't quit smoking just yet.  I'm at that point in my life where I am practically addicted to nicotine.  I don't know why I even smoke anymore.  It's just one of those silly little vices I have.  Of course, I managed to quit drinking and kick alcohol out of my system.

< hmmm... >

   I guess you want to know where I've been for a month, not writing experiments.  First, I haven't been eating shawarma at Session Road even if it's tempting to do so.  Second, I haven't had a love life, even if it is tempting to go back to being a bumbling Casanova.  Third, I am not dead, so there.

   What has been troubling me for the past few months is my thesis proposal.

   Yup, Marocharim has finally moved on to write his great thesis.

   The topic?  Virtual communities and Alfred Schutz.

   Before you wonder who this Alfred Schutz guy is, lemme explain.  Alfred Schutz is a phenomenological social philosopher who theorized about the Lebenswelt and gave us a fuller understanding of the temporality of life pace Husserl.  Before I lose you on the account that I'm smoking while I do this, I am wondering if a really fast PC will work for me while I'm hunched over my books, a pile of readings and 10 megabytes of downloaded related literature.  I don't know about my professors and thesis adviser, who all say that we should return to the classics and read real books instead of copying and pasting text in Internet research.

   I say, "Duh, my thesis is about the Internet.  How else am I going to read books when the damned library has very little literature on my topic?  Do you expect me to create a magical little book about virtual communities and then propound myself as a maverick?"

   Short answer: they are, considering that the magical book expected of me is a thesis.  I always said that I'll get my little revenge on the College of Social Sciences faculty by writing a 300-page thesis, and I guess I'm on Page 10, plus the nifty little theoretical framework I built for my theoretical analysis of virtual communities.

   Sir Gino, my teacher and social scientific confidante, says that I am working on the very frontiers of social science.  I am: I like working on edge, but I guess I bit off just a little more than I can chew.  Maverick as I am when it comes to methodology and theoretical framework, I have little in the way of balls in defending whatever I have in mind to some androgynous professor who grades my rev-lit a 5/30.  What else should I do, bend over backwards?

   Well, bending over backwards is another one of my specializations.

   The voices in my head are telling me to read more, but I have adopted a special technique in reading while writing down a very niggardly (I don't mean niggardly as meaning something to throw off my black audience) review of related literature.  While I read on the material, I instantly hunch over formatting toolbar to write a long quote, just to prove to my professors that I'm not stupid.

   While my other classmates are probably as frustrated as I am when it comes to writing their thesis proposals, I guess they have it better.  They have simpler topics that run the gamut from, as my favorite Philosophy teacher puts it, the analysis of a hundred pan de sal shops to tigers marauding the wildlife in the Cordilleras, and I have a frontier topic that, at the rate I'm going, would go to my promise of 300 pages for my thesis.

   I knew I should have taken up Journalism, but being in MassCom in my university is tantamount to admitting that I'm a social climbing insecure idiot whose idea of a thesis is about newspapers and making a documentary or an independent film.  I know how hard that is, but I can make one in a snap if I have the proper equipment.  I would probably suffer more if I took up Engineering (hey, I passed the quota) but if this thesis is going to make my name in Social Sciences and as my friend Mhik put it, "Rock Soksay," I'm sure as hell gonna do it.

   Marocharim Update: I'll be heading to UP Diliman on the 26th.  See you there when I see you.  Don't be surprised about my short hair.

   Marocharim Out.

< hmmm... >

   After my ten-year-old computer went bust, my parents came to the rescue.  On a loan, they got us a brand spankin' new Intel Dual Core PC complete with 512 MB of RAM.

   Now that's power.  Now to figure out how to pay for it.  With my own money.

< hmmm... >

   It's Flower Festival season once again and the world I live in is teeming in over a hundred thousand people.

   I can't take it.

< hmmm... >

   I told you, but you just won't listen...

   Now that it appears that June 2006 board passers would not have the chance to be employed in an American medical facility, I have this rather smug attitude which I would gladly apologize for, since after all, I'm not a Nursing student.  But outside of that, this is what happens when cheaters prosper: everyone suffers.  When presented with an avenue to actually act upon the anomaly, like, say, a retake, everyone seems to be against it.  A friend of mine puts it this way: he's not going to retake an exam he passed.

   Well, too bad for them.  A retake of the Nursing Board Exam is the only way out of the scandalous impasse, but would anybody listen?  Nope.  Would anybody let cooler heads prevail and let the case run its course?  Nope.  Would anybody have at the very least an idea of the benefits of a retake?  Nope.

   To be honest, I wouldn't entrust my life to a Gapuz reviewee or a June 2006 board passer because of the scandals, and the only way that can be internally resolved is when these people take a retake of the exam so that I can be sure of their competence.  In any high school setting (again), one cheater makes everyone a cheater.  Anyone who fails to understand the consequences a single cheater may bring upon a class means that everyone fails to understand the consequences of cheating.

   But would anyone listen?  No, everyone's up in arms over the simplest and most favorable way to resolve the impasse and everyone wants to be a nurse even if credibility is already an issue passed on by a single cheater.

   Cheating to win never helps anybody.  As I said before, cheaters only prosper if the end is that simple.  But in this case, the end is anything but simple.  Therefore the means are everything but simple.

   See what happens if you just don't listen?

< hmmm... >

   I have finally eliminated alcohol out of my system.  The cigarettes may be there to stay, but so far as alcohol is concerned, I quit.

   We people who have quit drinking are often ostracized in many social circles because of our refusal to drink.  I quit drinking because my medicines counteract the effect of alcohol, and I end up puking the hell out of myself.  The old ironclad stomach has corroded.  I can't drink anymore.

   The health benefits of quitting drinking are wonderful.  For one, you start to have a better feeling in your guts because of irritation.  For two, you start to enjoy the pleasures of other drinks, like say plain old-fashioned water.

< hmmm... >

   I appeal unto all senatorial candidates and party-list groups to please, stick to the rules.  The sight of all your putrid and bottom-of-the-barrel-scraping posters littering every corner of my fair city is just sickening.

< for all intents and purposes >

   A specter is haunting the world, the specter of Valentine's Day.  All the powers of the romantically inclined have entered into an unholy alliance to exorcise this specter: Man and Woman, Boyfriend and Girlfriend, Number Three and Number Four, Spongebob and Patrick, Jack and Ennis...

   The history of all hiherto existing commercial societies is the history of romantic struggles.

   Boyfriend and girlfriend, "Baby" and "Baby," "Darling" and "Sweetheart," swain and swain, have stood in a constant flux of emotions with one another, carried on an uninterrupted union that ends in the constant re-constitution of society.  The ends of which have been the reification and objectification of the institution of marriage and the state of togetherness, yet have also led to the oppression of humankind as a whole.

   The earlier epochs of society have shown that a romantic association is neither universal or necessary.  The ends of associations between human beings through time and space are ends towards common survival - through the production of necessary resources and the perpetuation of human life.

   Commercial society, though, has taken this end and distorted it.  Hegemony, commercial exchange and the control of ideas by the commercial elite has translated human association into romantic associations.  This has been evident in the very ideas that have shaped humankind's history: as such, social life has been made to fit the idea that "Love conquers all," "Love is all that matters," and "All you need is love."  History has been reduced to nothing more than a dyadic interaction between couples in the form of romance.

   This reduction of human associations becomes all the more evident in history itself.  Christianity is molded around the romantic characterizations of Adam and Eve.  The work of William Shakespeare is best known for "Romeo and Juliet."  We live with the notion that, "Behind every great man is an equally great woman."

   The idea of love, while relative, has been universalized by the elites and the bourgeoisie into an idea that furthers their own interests.  One is ostracized for not being in love.  Even science, which is supposed to be objective and detached from the emotions, has prostrated itself before the juggernaut of romantic love created and run by the commercial bourgeoisie.  One "marries" into science, one finds "beauty" in natural phenomena, and scientists betray the world of their life's work by getting married to the local librarians and other members of the intelligentsia.

   Commercialized love, however, is only strengthened by the epidemic of Valentine's Day.  The commercial bourgeoisie have taken into their full control the very fabric of time and created a single day to celebrate their domination over humankind, now turned into mindless drones driven by the will of the heart and the sensations of the erogenous zones.  Within this single day, humanity turns into a tide of the lovestruck.

   The continuing economic oppression of humankind is immediately translated into the purchase of items unnecessary for human survival: chocolates, balloons, cologne, stuffed toys, flowers and other items which are manufactured by the very same commercial elites who perpetuate the structures of commercialized love.  The enslavement of humanity continues, and yet again we seek emancipation, only this time from those gossamer chains of love, the warm embrace of romance that most of us, in our fallible humanity, find difficulty to escape from.

   The romantic tyrrany has had their hold on us, and revolution is now.  We fight for the right to live our lives free from the oppression of commercial love, therefore declaring our independence from the commercial elites.  We shall no longer depend on the material manifestations of love, therefore we no longer depend on any material manifestation of any emotion.  We singles have overcome and transcended the crass demands of romantic love and so we shall continue to overcome and to transcend the crass demands of flesh and bone.  We shall no longer be silenced by the rule of the mob who, for this one day, show their enslavement and attachment to the tyrannical rule of commercialism and hegemony.

   We shall not love romantically for we shall seek - and find - enlightened love.  Love that goes beyond the single celebration of the date.  Love that goes beyond kisses and hugs and sexual intercourse.  Love is to seek the peace of life, love is to liberate one's self from the imprisonment of that which is superficial and understood by the common horde.  For we are not the common horde: we are the enlightened to not reduce our lives into hearts and chocolates and roses and Valentine's specials.

   Singles of the world, unite!