< fourteen >

   Since this is "Death by (Friendster) Degrees," I'm going to start complaining.  We all complain about death: figurative and literal death.  I'm doing these entries for the sake of letting off steam.  If I don't, I'd end up being more of a lunatic than what I already am.  Bear with me.

*      *      *

   "So, how's your thesis coming along?"

   Everytime someone asks me how I'm doing with my thesis, I feel the urge to flick out my middle finger, shove said finger in said person's nostril, and poke around looking for brain matter.  I've eaten brains before - cow brains, pig brains, goat brains - and if I could only have a bit of an incompassionate human brain, I would prepare dinakdakan.  Usually, "How's your thesis?" comes from persons who have already submitted their second draft.  Not so me: I do my thesis submissions chapter by godforsaken chapter.  Thick chapters, I might add: lately I've been submitting half of a full chapter every week, the second half being discussions.  This afternoon was Chapter Nine's discussion: "Color as Myth."

   My claim is rather simple: the color is a sign.  There is no ontological reality behind a sign: it is an arbitrary association.  There is nothing "in" the color pink, for example, that allows it to have the "universal meaning" of "pink = girl."  Fundamentally, its ontology is not of presence or of unity, but of difference.  So technically, your Friendster profile is not yours: it's something in the structure you appropriated for and as yourself.  As such, your Self, if only to use the example of colors, is a connotation of the signifier that is the Self: you are, in fact, not a "unity of selfhood," but a "difference of selfhoods."  You are fragmented: the signs you think "are yours" are actually not yours.  For all intents and purposes, you are Dr. Frankenstein, and your profile is your monster.

   That is a one-paragraph summation of a nine-page discussion composed of at least a dozen paragraphs, a diagram, and a table.  The thing is, one-paragraph discussions are not allowed in my discipline.  You have to elucidate.  You have to be "scholarly."  One-paragraph diatribes don't cut it.

   Steamy.

< hmmm... >

   No, I'm not joining "Pinoy Big Brother," but I've just been invited by no less than one of "Kuya's" "siblings" (BigBad) to join the Celebrity Pinoy Big Brother Fantasy Game.  From what I heard, this spin on "Pinoy Big Brother" involves "celebrity Pinoy bloggers."  I don't know if I'm a "celebrity," much less a "celebrated blogger," but I'm still considering if I'm going to be trapped inside a "Bahay ni Kuya" in cyberspace, interact with people (I'm shuddering right now thinking of that), and perhaps be the next Gerald Anderson.  Or Rustom Padilla, if I realize that I'm actually gay.  Or Wendy Valdez, if I turn into a man-bitch.

   I wrote before (but I can't place exactly where... it's not like I memorized everything I've written) that one of my more perverse thoughts is to be a Housemate.  I can only imagine what would happen to me if I were ever in a reality show.  I could only imagine how much moral corruption I will sow upon the minds of the youth.

   Anyway, I'm still considering the offer.

< more nausea >

   With all the talk surrounding US Senator Larry Craig's gay sex scandal in a public restroom in an airport, I'm kind of rethinking the whole idea of urinating altogether.  The urinal trough is not the most meaningful thing in the world: we men are quite content with just standing there, flicking out our penises, and start doing our business.  All too often, it's just fifteen seconds or so of assuming one's most comfortable stance and staring at the wall.  Men don't look sideways or down-ways to admire a penis aside from his own, but looks forward admiring the tile grout.

   Of course, unless in your in the dirty bathrooms of cheap cinemas showing dated local porn flicks, some guy will tap you in the back and whisper his rates.  It is then that we straight and homophobic men risk physical damage to our prostates to squeeze out the remaining ounces of urine left in our bladders, lest that gentle tap becomes a vise-like nerve hold that will knock you out and have you risking even more physical damage in the prostate by the time you wake up (you know what I'm talking about).

   I don't know about female comfort rooms: last time I checked, the stalls are enclosed.  But for male comfort rooms, the amenities are dependent on design: you either have solo urinals with dividers, or a long trough where men can line up shoulder-to-shoulder and heed the call of nature.

   While both sexes of the human species can theoretically do their business anywhere, the man has the advantage.  It's all a matter of standing facing some wall or a tree and pretend to do stuff, like have a phone call.  The other day, I saw a smartly-dressed banker-type in a neck of the woods, looking like he was answering some call.  I'm no fool: if you're stopping by that woods on a clear sunset, you've got miles to go before you get a clear signal to make a call.  The steady stream of urine was the next thing that caught my eye.

   It's all a matter of performance.  To paraphrase Shakespeare, all the world's a stage, and all men and women merely players.  They have their exits and their entrances.  But one man, in his time, has many pisses... his acts being seven ages.

< hmmm... >

   I feel so out of place whenever I'm in a beach.  There I am, in a t-shirt and beach shorts showing off a skin tone and a figure that many girls would kill for (nix the boobs), feeling the wind in my hair, the sand between my toes, staring at the horizon.  Somehow, I feel the urge to go a'la Nicholas Cage in City of Angels and catch the big wave, but I can't: I don't know how to swim.

   I did by own fair bit of "swimming" before: wading on the shore is more like it.  The last time my dad taught me how to swim when I was a kid, I almost drowned.  My fear of swimming became quite severe that I became more content walking along the shoreline, or in a beach hut peeling shrimp or shucking oysters.  It doesn't get me hunk points, but I'm not going to do a David Hasselhoff on the beach.  The fabric of the universe must be preserved: besides, I don't have his body.

   The nauseating color of blue sea is only compounded by the nausea I get watching the kinds of people in the beach.  It's the kind of nausea that only Sartre was able to articulate in No Exit, in the famous quotation, "Hell is other people."  It's the existential nausea that comes with that initial belief that the sands will be dotted by voluptuous, sexy women in two-piece bikinis, but you see some potbellied fat guy with nipples you can barely make out from his flabby pectorals.

   Such nausea.

< going to change some lyrics >

   I'm a bit lazy to write an Experiment today: coffee and thinking don't mix.  Here's a modified version of "Street Fighting Man" by The Rolling Stones, a tribute to the monks of Burma.

*      *      *

Everywhere I hear the sounds of marching, charging feet, boy
'Cause freedom's here and the time is right for fighting in the street, boy
But what can a poor monk do
Except to march for a free land
'Cause in sleepy Rangoon town
There's just no place for a street fighting monk
No...

Hey!  I think it's time for Pagoda Revolution
'Cause where he lives the game to play is the violent solution
Well then, what can a poor monk do
Except to march with a clenched hand
'Cause in sleepy Rangoon town
There's just no place for a street fighting monk
No...

Hey!  Said my name is called Myanmar
I'll shout and scream, for my rights taken away by all these soldiers
Well, what can a poor monk do
Except to march for a free land
'Cause in sleepy Rangoon town
There's just no place for a street fighting monk
No...

< number 13 >

   Shoutouts to Krissa and Camille, who have just submitted their final thesis draft.  They're working on something pertaining to juvenile delinquency, and here I am still on draft mode.  My thesis is far from complete.  Owing to the way I'm writing my thesis, my adviser takes things chapter-by-chapter: some corrections, explanations and elaborations here and there, and then I stop.  It's the kind of mercy I have to accord myself if I'm going to finish, graduate, and get the hell out of school.

   But every so often there's that nagging thought of committing some mistake where I re-read and rewrite entire passages in some chapter.  It's the kind of paranoia that comes with the thought of delivering my thesis in a colloquium next semester or worse, an academic conference.  It's the kind of paranoia that comes with your thesis being the subject of some talk in the faculty room.  My framework is synthetic, not analytical: it is extremely fragile.  One wrong move and I'll be in hot water... my friends know how much I dislike hot drinks.

   My parents don't understand why I subject myself to such extremes of working late into the wee hours of the morning to the point of overexertion, but I do understand their concern.  Like my framework, I am extremely fragile: physically, mentally, emotionally.  I can't count how many times I found myself in the verge of tears in front of my computer looking over profile after profile, poring over book after book, making sense of it all.  Whatever shred of sanity is left in me is something I put into my work as if it meant life and death for me.

   My dad, in particular, is getting angrier every weekend he comes home, every time he sees me working under self-imposed pressure.  I always thought I'd see some pride in his eyes when he sees me exerting some degree of diligence, but I have to listen to his angry rantings at 1:00 AM Sunday.  I don't know what it takes to regain my dad's respect and good favor, but I've long reminded myself that this thesis is not that which will make my father proud.

   I look upon my work as something special: a ticket to the train of opportunity.  I work my ass off because I haven't really worked a single day in my undergraduate career.  I want to establish myself in my field: it's not that I look down on call center agents or what, but because I believe I am capable of being more than a failure.  My thesis is my penance for the grievous sin of not looking after my family when ideally, I should be in a position right now to do so.  It is an act of contrition for underestimating myself for so long, not doing what I can do, limiting myself to what I considered "actual" about myself.

   I find myself in one of the strangest positions imaginable for a "delinquent:" the chance to be a legitimate social scientist.  The chance to put the name my father gave me into the annals of history.  I won't accept that I'm at the losing end, and I refuse to have my hands on the short sword on the draw.

   Right now, my work is paying small dividends: not in me being called a scholar, but my adviser just nominated my work for "Best Thesis" awards for qualitative analysis, which is the hardest thing you could do in my discipline.  If I really am what I write, I just, in my friend Mhik's words, "rocked" CSS.

   The time is now... for me to start working on the most tedious part of my thesis so far: Chapter Ten.

< hmmm... >

   I thought that the Chinese had enough problems with toys containing lead, buns filled with cardboard, and a Beijing food stall selling horse meat.  Now, one of the luminaries of the Philippine academe claimed - and apologized for - China "inventing" corruption.

   That luminary is no less than Senator Miriam Defensor-Santiago.  Say what you will about Miriam's average rating (78%) in the 1968 Bar, but she is one of the greatest minds of her generation (noting that she was Elly "Spike" Pamatong's classmate).  Miriam is also known for her mercurial temper: following the annoying debating debacle in the Senate regarding the ZTE deal, she said: "China invented civilization in the East, but as well it invented corruption for all human civilization."

   Like Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, Christian Bautista, and Vanessa Hudgens before her, she apologized.  These days are ripe for mea culpa's of all sorts: the President apologizing for calling "a COMELEC commissioner," Christian apologizing for missing a few phrases of the National Anthem, and Vanessa apologizing for those nude shots that spread like meningococcemia all over the Internet.  The common denominator is that they were all caused by a "lapse in judgment."  "Lapses in judgment" are made by plebeians: not a Miriam Santiago.

   I have Chinese blood in me: my maternal grandfather is Chinese.  I should be outraged, but Miriam has a point.  In Miriam's defense, if you invent civilization, you would effectively have invented corruption.  It's basic anthropology: when bands of hunter-gatherers come together in a more complex form that is agriculture, the power relations become more sophisticated.  Society is now divided between "haves" and "have nots."  As agricultural societies started to develop politics, barbarism gave way to an ordering of society based on slavery, fiefdoms, and having social inequalities compared to the relative equality of barbarism.  Any anthropologist worth his or her salt would know this: it's a banal reading of Lewis Henry Morgan.  Or perhaps the Civilization games.

   I say, hooray for corruption.  Civilization is built around corruption.  Without corruption, we would still be stuck picking berries.  Let us rejoice and bask in the light of being corrupt, sing the "Kumbaya," and shoot ourselves on New Year's Day.

< hmmm... >

   I grew up on "Thomas the Tank Engine," so I'm definitely not surprised that toy companies are recalling toy trains that contain lead paint.  It's a syllogistic fallacy: toy trains are made of metal, lead is a metal, so toy trains contain lead.

   To be honest, I'm getting quite annoyed with toy recalls: maybe the elves from the International Standards Organization have done a quality check on Santa's Workshop, denied him an ISO-9000 certification because of lead paint in his inventory, and there will be no new toys for kids these days.  Too bad, kids: Santa has a longer subpoena than his Christmas list.

   I was even more flabbergasted when "Tickle Me Elmo" was recalled from toy stores because of lead content.  Do plush dolls of some potential murdering Muppet contain lead?  What exactly do you paint in an Elmo doll?

   Now if toy companies start selling Lego bricks made purely out of lead, that's a different story altogether.  Because of these toy-recall things, I'm starting to believe that we should blame stupid kids themselves for licking their toys.  I mean, my nieces and nephews don't lick their toy cars, dolls, action figures, or Disney DVD's.  Sure, I've seen them get gashes from riding small bikes on a rocky backyard.  Not that I'm anti-American or anything, but is there something uniquely American about toy-licking?

   Heck, I grew up around completely unsafe toys: spiders in an empty box of matches, tops made out of guava wood and a roofing nail, plastic "Dinosaur Eggs" that catch grime and cobwebs when thrown onto a classroom ceiling, "Magic Capsules" made out of pharmaceutical gelatin and a small steel ball.  I played with toys that apparently "corrupt my morals:" rubber cigarettes, toy fetuses, fake vomit, plastic cow dung.  An entire tower of Zaks and Legos collapsed on me in the Guidance Office, and I cried because three hours of building went to waste.  And no, I didn't lick a single toy.

   But for all the apparent joy that there is in licking toys, I think that protecting our children from every danger there is in the world is not only impossible, but futile.  Kids will be kids: they will always be in danger.  The bubble we surround our children in will only serve to make them devalue the kind of fun that is in dangerous territory.  The reality of the world is that it is fraught with more dangerous things than lead: kidnapping murdering pedophiles, for example.  The safety of our children lies in them discovering how dangerous life can be.  A kid will get sick not only because of licking a lead toy, but also by eating too much sweets, horseplay, inhaling pollution, and even living life.

   Risk, if I may say so myself, makes for a really useful engine.  Dammit, watch your "Thomas and Friends."

< hmmm... >

   The idea of "place" has been bugging me for the past few weeks that it has sort of become a nagging issue for me.  It's an issue of people having no place in a world that is their own.

   I read somewhere that if you put all the people in the world with a comfortable distance between them, they'll fit in an island in Hawaii, with enough room for portable toilets and snack stands.  Imagine that: six billion people standing on a single island.  All this talk about "crowding" is quite overrated, then: if you can give every person on Earth a single spot on a Hawaiian island, then everyone would have a place.

   The issue of "place" found me on the school gates today, with younger acquaintances complaining that thanks to a new "no smoking" rule, they no longer have places, at least underneath the shade of the trees in the relatively distant woods.  My complaining, though, is not the grieving kind: I understand that the policy is an application of the laws of the land.  But finding so many people lined up on the curb has me sympathizing: not because I'm a smoker, but because I understand the feeling of having no place.

   I start to see the world not as a world of places, but as a world of near-complete transience.  We move and live in places we do not own (and cannot call our own) because we have no place.  Place is, fundamentally, a point in space, but some of us don't even have the benefit of having a point in the vast expanse of space.  The poor, the displaced, the dispossessed, the disenfranchised: they are those who are either out of place, or have no place.

   The "demand for space" is fundamentally a demand of a place: to me, place defines identity.  Identity is constructed in place: of living here, of working here, of being here.  To demand place is to demand somewhere where one can construct and articulate identity: no individual exists apart from space, and all actions take place in some point in space.  Thanks to technology, we can create spaces in the Internet (like MySpace or Friendster), but what of this real world where some of us don't have spaces of our own?

   I see it everywhere: the barong-barong, the street food stall, the piece of cardboard where a beggar kneels on the sidewalk, is effectively one's place in a place he or she does not own.  I've seen the vast expanse of Hacienda Luisita from bus trips and from the time I went there, and the sugarcane haciendas of Negros from the window of an airplane.  I see big mansions, exclusive condominiums, villages and estates and ask myself the question of place... one I'll be asking myself for a long, long time.

< i'm going to get flak for this... who cares >

   I wrote on the new GMA-7 series "Zaido" before, but that was before I actually watched it.  But one episode of "Zaido" is enough for me to hurl: not only did it urinate (figuratively) on "Shaider" and Star Trek, but add a ripped-off version of Zordon to it and yes, it kind of reminded me of a bastardized version of "Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers."  Just so you know, Dennis Trillo reminded me of Tommy.

   While we're on the subject of the Power Rangers, I didn't follow the series as much: I never watched an episode of "Dino Thunder."  For all intents and purposes, the Ranger I loathe most is Tommy, the most popular Ranger of them all.  The guy can do practically everything, became three Rangers (Green, White, and Red), and he's always the hero.  My favorite among the original Power Rangers is Billy, because he represents my peeps just fine.

   While I'm more of a "Transformers" fan (not the disgraceful but beautiful-looking version made by Michael Bay), I kind of liked morphing of Mastodon, Pterodactyl, Triceratops, Saber-Toothed Tiger, and Tyrranosaurus.  I still don't understand why Saber-Toothed Tiger (Yellow Ranger's Zord) is a "Dinozord," since the prehistoric animal is not a dinosaur, much less a reptile.  The Thunderzords, though, were way cooler: combining the Mega Thunderzord, Tor and Pyramidas together formed a badass robot, but it's not cool enough compared to the imaginary and hypothetical combination you can get from combining any two Autobots, or Grimlock.

   OK, here are the lyrics:

*      *      *

They've got a power and a force that you've never seen before
They've got the ability to morph and to even up the score
No one will ever take them down
The power lies on their side

Go, go, Power Rangers
Go, go, Power Rangers
Go, go, Power Rangers
You, Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers

They know the fate of the world is lying in their hands
They know to only use their weapons for defense
No one will ever take them down
The power lies on their side

Go, go, Power Rangers
Go, go, Power Rangers
Go, go, Power Rangers
You, Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers

No one will ever take them down
The power lies on their side

Go, go, Power Rangers
Go, go, Power Rangers
Go, go, Power Rangers
You, Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers

Go, go, Power Rangers...