< hmmm... >

   I'm not environmentally-conscious, but I read somewhere that bottled water poses as an environmental hazard.

   Because the Philippines is a Third-World country, the safest water you're going to get comes from a plastic bottle or a water dispenser.  Even the poor would take the recourse of boiling water they get from the common artesian well (poso): only an idiot would drink water straight from the tap.  In the competitive world of water purification, the more stages your water goes through, the safer it is.  The bottled water company where we source our household water goes through 11 stages of purification, but it's still water.

   But in America, where you can safely drink tap water, there's a commercial obsession with bottled water.  It's not limited to Perrier, but there's a market for water that comes from volcanic aquifers in Fuji.  Evian water comes from a spring in Switzerland, and Voss comes from an artesian aquifer in Norway.  There are brands of water out there that come from Arctic glaciers (for all intents and purposes, bottled snow).

   It begs the retort: it's just water.  The molecular structure of all forms of water follows the same valence bond between two hydrogen molecules and a molecule of oxygen.  Because I am a chemist by virtue of one general education course (Chem 1), I have this idea of selling pure water by releasing the contents of oxygen tanks and hydrogen tanks.  It can't get any more purer than that.

   The environmental danger that comes with bottled water comes with plastic bottles, which are made out of petroleum.  But science aside, the danger comes with the pecuniary canons of taste: the common clamor for water is overshadowed by a preference for special water, while poor people all over the world are dying from lack of clean drinking water.  The irony that comes with the extreme: a global advocate like Madonna would drink Voss.  Or with another extreme of Philippine Senators who can't get by meetings without their own bottles of water.  At the barest minimum, people who can safely source water from the tap without threat of cholera, but drink bottled water like their lives depended on it, like the world is a giant exercise club.

   Samuel Taylor Coleridge once wrote: "Water, water everywhere, but not enough to drink."  I rest my case... for now.

< hmmm... >

   I read somewhere that the Japanese have a particular problem with a repressed collective id, and that they suffer from a social neurosis of sexual fetishism.  Consider the Japanese schoolgirl: I don't know what's so parochial about such short skirts.  Or that a certain store in Tokyo is named "Love Love Hot Cake," or that a certain store that sells designer eyeglasses has its attendants and clerks wearing French maid uniforms.

   Alvin Toffler, in Future Shock, prophesized that one day, airline services will revolve around themes: flight attendants will be wearing French maid uniforms, or wenches in a pirate ship.  In the Philippines, you can expect a Gabriela-led picket on a place that will feature attendants dressed in Catholic schoolgirl uniforms.  But that would be the extreme: a certain sports store in SM has its attendants dressed in tennis gear akin to what Martina Hingis would be wearing in Wimbledon.

   Yes, indeed, sex sells.  Karl Marx's concept of the "commodity fetish" could be extended to fetish being a commodity.  The person interested in sexual politics or gender studies can make an entire thesis out of it, and the gender advocate will have no end stones to cast against sexually-charged atmospheres (no matter how benign) that sell products.  If you can't go after the dildo shop, go after the place that a man would wish to be a dildo shop.

   Why the Japanese complain of sexual harassment... well, duh.

< hmmm... >

   I sometimes get depressed thinking about poverty in the Philippines.  I found myself in one of those feeding programs the other day, and saw a mother preparing milk for her brood of a dozen children.  The small packet of powdered milk couldn't possibly be enough for all of them, so they all had a plastic cup of what passes to be "milk."  To me, it was more of a bluish suspension that only out of formality is called "milk."  What's in the glass looked more like formalin dissolved in water.

   Methinks that poverty is more poignant when seen through the eyes of children.  Children suffer the most from it: to see them clad in ragged clothes, caked in dirt and grime, bellies bloated with ascaris.  Yet innocence cannot hide the knowledge that you have to savor your free fried chicken, because by day's end you'll have nothing more than watered-down instant noodles to look forward to.

   Food, to me, becomes more of an expedience: perhaps there is forgiveness in Heaven for a man deprived of food and becomes a glutton for a day.  There is forgiveness in the afterlife for a child who enters Church for a bowl of free soup.  When I come to think of it, it's kind of hard to blame people for their own poverty, or to put the blame squarely on the economy or our culture.

   It's a vicious cycle, and I was caught up in it.  I was caught at the maelstrom of watching a poor woman make ends meet with a packet of powdered milk, as if to spare for her children some much-needed nutrients that the President wants to solve with instant noodles.  But time and time again, I find myself in the odd, "I-want-to-kick-my-own-ass" situation of having no solution to offer, of having no answer to the problem.  Just where do I begin, when I am confronted with a problem that has been there from the beginning, and has no end in sight?

   Yet cynicism wouldn't feed me, just as that woman won't feed her brood with a plastic bag of groceries.  Yet that glass of blue haze, with all its affinity and comparisons to formalin, brings about me that dark pall that indeed, we are all doomed to live a vicious cycle.  No wonder it's so depressing.

What is Your World View? created with QuizFarm.com

You scored as Postmodernist Postmodernism is the belief in complete open interpretation. You see the universe as a collection of information with varying ways of putting it together. There is no absolute truth for you; even the most hardened facts are open to interpretation. Meaning relies on context and even the language you use to describe things should be subject to analysis. Postmodernist 100% Cultural Creative 81% Existentialist 69% Modernist 56% Idealist 56% Romanticist 56% Fundamentalist 38% Materialist 31%

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   Oh shit.

< latin for "on your knees, dog" >

   I'm not to call the "pardon" granted to Joseph Estrada a "pardon" per se: if anything, it was not an act of forgiveness (genuine or hypocritical).  The way I see it, President Gloria Arroyo is not in a position to grant Erap a pardon.  To me, the executive clemency granted to Erap is a paranoic precedent where GMA that would be entitled to by the time she gets her turn at the Sandiganbayan.

   Surely, as a participant in EDSA Dos, I would find it in my stomach to forgive Erap for being an incompetent buffoon: for all purposes of admission, plunder is the weakest case you could hurl against Erap.  But last time I checked, GMA is the accidental benefactor to EDSA Dos: she wasn't actually in it.  As far as I am concerned, her magnanimous offer to Erap is an accidental magnanimity, and the pardon she granted to Erap is an accidental executive's accidental clemency.  It's just like Joey de Leon asking Willie Revillame for an apology following the flak from the "Wilyonaryo" farce.

   I rue the day I participated in EDSA Dos.

< hmmm... >

   My brother, known in DeviantArt circles as Rohancorwyn, does 3D animation as a pastime.  He's good... damn good.  I never really get to see his finished renderings, since I almost always see the "skeletons" in Blender, but never the finished product.  Visit his Deviant account and you'll see how good he really is.  The pictures in his gallery are all made from scratch, and I attest to that.

   I dabble in graphic design a bit, but my skills are sadly limited to the images in my blog.  Because I used to work for the campus press, I am more of a layout artist than a graphic designer.  My patience is geared more towards hunting down typographical and grammatical errors than how cool the graphics are.  But my brother, who used to be a blogger, will not settle for anything that's not cool: in a Monty Python-esque way, he waves his privates at my graphic design exploits.

   Anyway, this entry is an advertisement for my brother, who is a great graphic designer.

< oh boy >

   If you think of me as a "social scientist" (a term I'm embarrassed to append to my name), I don't necessarily believe in parsimony.  Some former classmates of mine, particularly Erik and Nicole, know of my propensity towards overkill: not only would I bombard people with evidence to back up claims, but I also have this tendency to illustrate ideas through a diagram.

   Such is the reason why at this point, with two chapters to go, I have close to 300 pages for my thesis.  At this point, my paranoia is taking over my egomania: I can only imagine the number of people who would fall in line to read my thesis for purposes of blasting the living hell out of it in their own works.  I like criticism, for so long as you don't append "objective" or the fragment "criticism self-" before it.  While I don't necessarily believe in the snake-oil of Karl Popper, I think that he's right in saying that truly scientific theories need to be subjected to conjectures and refutations.  Ah, so that's why dialectical materialism is "unscientific."

   I met up with my mentors Ronnie and Chris over at Pizza Volante (I didn't have pizza, just so you know) for that exact purpose: my crucifixion.  I was already crucified (in a good way) by my thesis adviser on the psychological merits of my work (basically, zero).  I want more: I need the philosophical claims to be adjudged by legitimate philosophers.  After all, in a joking mood the other week, my adviser has already given me the cement shoes of being "postmodern."

   Here's their prognosis: "ambiguous" is not a good word.  "Vague" is the exact word they were looking for.  It's a good "vague," in that the synthesis offers a 360-degree view of just about everything about a web page, from color to name to pictures to YouTube videos to the stuff you write.  What makes it a bad "vague" is that because I tackled almost everything, I am in a very good position to talk about nothing as well.

   Excellente.

< this will be a cute one >

   While I'm still on the topic of my friends' newborn babies, I'm thinking about baby names as well in the remote chance that I would get married and have kids of my own.

   While I don't buy into nomenclatural pamahiin (superstitions surrounding names), a nephew of mine got sick a year ago: the village quack said that the sudden illness was caused by him not liking his name.  After all, "Gervic" is not exactly a good name in my book.  When my cousin and her husband decided to change their son's name to "Lander," the sickness then went away.  So whenever they visit, we have to take special precautions into not calling the boy "Gervic," lest we see the toddler in bed again with a high fever.

   I'm partial to cool names, not necessarily long ones.  Me and my brother are both Warhammer fans, and names like "Grothor," "Aekold Hellbrass," "Louen Leoncoeur" and "Sigmar Heldenhammer" are right up there with the short list of cool-sounding names.  We share in the opinion that if Don LaFontaine (the voice of the guy in movie trailers) makes the name sound cool, it must be cool.  Think about Antonio Banderas, Joaquin Phoenix, Lou Diamond Philips, Richard Dean Anderson, Benicio del Toro, and of course, Jeremy Irons.

   Yet I'm not one to name my boy "Antonio Banderas:" if living up to the name of the guy who played Zorro and the dance instructor in "Take The Lead" is bad enough, those who have a good memory for movies will note that it was the Latin Lover who played Tom Hanks' lover in "Philadelphia."  As sexily as "Antonio Banderas" rolls off the tongue every time you say it (either in climax or to train yourself for a golf swing), it just doesn't work for people who are not Antonio Banderas.

   Maybe "Keanu Reeves" will work (now try saying that with a movie-trailer voice), but it must occur to anyone who thinks of that name that your offspring must at least look like Keanu Reeves.  But if celebrity names don't work for you, I once had a classmate in elementary school named "Harley David," and in my dossier of Friendster profiles needed for my thesis, there's a girl named "Hresikesa."

   Marocharim, Jr.?  Or maybe I should just name my boy "Marocharim."  Nah: the little twerp, by the time he becomes aware of the world, has a lot to live up to in the name "Marocharim."  Maybe names that come off a game of Warcraft III or DoTA will work: "Kel Stonebull?"  "Luna Moonfang?"  "Lina Inverse (OK, name came from "Slayers")?"  Perhaps spite the priest in Baptism and call the little angels and bundles of joy "God," perhaps even "Satan?"  What's in a name, when I can take my cues from Prince and give my baby, boy or girl, an unpronounceable symbol as a name?

   But I still like how "Antonio Banderas" rolls off the tongue.  I mean, compare that to "Chuck Norris" or "Gerard Depardieu."  But if anything, "Arnold Schwarzenegger" is cool: especially if it's preceded by those movie trailers that begin with "In a world..."

< politics >

   I could only breathe a sigh of relief that I wasn't one of those who voted for Antonio Trillanes IV as Senator.  But that doesn't change the fact that someone who obviously suffers from cabin fever is in the august halls of the Senate.

   Following the tragedy at Glorietta II, Trillanes was the first person to come up with the theory that the government - in the way of General Hermogenes Esperon and National Security Adviser Norberto Gonzales - was behind the explosion that claimed the lives of nearly a dozen people and injured nearly a hundred.  Yet as much as I don't like the government, I have to take Trillanes' theory with more than a grain of salt: it's something that comes off the pages of "V for Vendetta."  The only thing is that Trillanes is more of a Creedy than a V in my book.

   I'm not saying that Trillanes' claim is way out of line: there is a very, very, very small and slim chance that the government is behind the explosion.  The thing is, there are a few things wrong with Trillanes' theory:

• It is based on a personal claim that he has yet to back up with concrete and solid (maybe leading and damning) evidence;
• Trillanes himself has an ax to grind against the government, which makes him the least credible source for this particular incident, and;
• Trillanes isn't exactly credible or above suspicion, in that the accusation comes from a guy who was part of the core leadership of the 2003 Oakwood Mutiny.

   Just what exactly is going on behind the mind of Trillanes, I do not know.

< hmmm... >

   Some of my reader-friends ask: in all the years that I have been blogging, did I ever get paid?

   To be honest, no.  I haven't made a single centavo from any one of my 1,263 entries so far (1,264 if you count this one).  I thought that getting paid to blog is something that only happens in America, or that AdSense is just part of blogosphere folklore.  It's only now that I realized how many Filipino bloggers have made money out of blogging.

   Am I a "noble" blogger who remains faithful to free information, or am I just so blissfully oblivious in not even having the good sense to have AdSense?

   It kind of hurts the pocket to know that 1,263 entries written in the approximate span of one hour have amounted to a good amount of money.  If the commercial rate goes at 20 bucks an hour, that would amount to... (gasp) P25,260.00.  That's almost a month's wages for a fairly decent prospect in the job market.

   As much as you can't put a price on the number of readers you have (I have no idea how many people read my blog), I don't understand how I could have spent so much for absolutely nothing.  For all intents and purposes, I love money: to not have made a single solitary peso in blogging not only baffles me, but it makes me love and desire money made out of blogging even more.  Heck, I haven't received a single job offer for writing here.

   Before I started blogging, I had a relatively stable "job" in the school paper, where my monthly pittance of P450 (when I was in an editorial capacity) is a gold mine compared to the economic absolute zero I get for writing here.  Technically, this is "vanity publishing:" I pay to get my stuff published online.  Yet I don't regret that decision: the prospect of a few hundred bucks at the end of the month is tantalizing, but not enough to keep me there for all it's worth.

   Yet there's always the ideal of "public service" that I can fall back on whenever my hands itch for the feel of money: to get some respect in both the local and global blogosphere is one of those things that money can't buy, but for everything else, there's MasterCard.  I figure that in the future, I may get the Nobel Prize for Literature for writing for free.

   Of course, I don't write for the money: I've long since conceded to the fact that I'm doing something for free.  Some people think that I deserve more than nothing: money, fame, money, a book deal, money... but you simply can't buy the pleasure of writing.  If only by a wild dream, I think that my wheelbarrows and dumptrucks full of money will come in due time.  All I have to do is to keep this "writing for money" thing on the back burner, and cook up some more stuff - for free - for now.