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PUBLISHED: Student & Campus Section, Manila Bulletin, 26 November 2008 Issue (Page F-3)

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Back in the summer, I had gone on such a book-reading frenzy that I eventually ran out of things to read. When this happened, I started using my personal money to buy new paperbacks whenever I could pass by a bookstore. But my money could not keep up with my spending (books are so expensive nowadays!), and sooner or later I was forced to stop.

When this happened, I started looking through my family’s bookshelves. In time, I exhausted my parents’ respective collections. In the end, I became desperate enough to go to my sister’s room and look through her bookshelf.

That is how I became acquainted with Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight series, the trilogy that is today’s version of Harry Potter in terms of popularity.

Unlike Harry Potter, however, I was never able to finish even the first book. For the life of me, I could not get past the first fifty pages. The plot line was beginning to appear as banal as it sounded on the back cover, and I honestly didn’t have much of an appetite for such stories.

Then again, a friend of mine once tried reading Haruki Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore and ended up having the same experience, while I, on the other hand, loved it. Taste in literature, I reason, must really be different for everyone.

But I must be a bit of an oddball, because everyone seems to love this book with such rabid passion. Whenever the topic of conversation turns to books, my female friends inevitably have to mention Twilight, and I am ineluctably left out in the cold. In fact, I occasionally get jealous of Edward Cullen, the sexy male vampire protagonist, who gets to be sexy because he is a vampire. That is, until I realize that I’m not technically jealous of anyone because he is fictional.

Irrational enviousness aside, though, I guess I appreciate how the book has gotten more people into reading much like other popular literature has, if only for the simple reason that there’s more to talk about with friends now. Maybe a five minute discussion about the merits of Edward Cullen’s utter hotness is a fair trade-off for a chance to exchange book recommendations, even if I have yet to see these aforementioned ‘Twilight friends’ read the stuff I recommend. But even that is reasonable: they’ve been telling me to read the blasted book and I still haven’t.

Yet despite my apparent shortcoming, I guess I understand one facet of its appeal: this book sells so much is because my peers can relate to it. I mean, if what book reviews say are true, then this book is just the highly-dramatized, idealized, and sensualized story of our repressed desires and untamed hunger, but with the wanton possibility of blood that flows violently from pierced necks. It is the experience of youth, with a malevolent, and therefore, erotic, twist. It is arguably the book of the young generation.

So it is that books like these become wildly popular because society says they should be. We read what our friends read because our friends like them. So, it usually follows that we end up liking them, too. It doesn’t matter whether the material is truly excellent; subjective eyes can turn anything into something beautiful. So I guess it isn’t so strange that even guys read this kind of stuff—and claim to like it—even if they normally wouldn’t. Why not, if it gives you another topic to talk about with your crush?

Also, these books become popular because they tackle subjects that interest us. After all, who isn’t interested, even faintly, by vampires, or magic, or sex? These are the topics that the human race collectively eats up. But what is it that we are interested in but that which is fed to us by the television screen?

Not to mention, the series itself is incredibly easy reading. The books don’t make us think; they make us feel. And isn’t that the stuff of which good literature is made?

Needless to say, I really don’t like it.

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PUBLISHED: Student & Campus Section, Manila Bulletin, 12 November 2008 Issue (Page F-3)

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It was a normal Thursday afternoon, driving home after spending the day with my father. We were about five minutes away, but it felt more like ten since the road was congested. I was slowly preparing to turn right on one of the streets when a taxi, coming from the adjacent street, came speeding towards us.

I had the right of way, and I wasn’t in the mood to get hit by another car. So, I hit the brake, figuring that he would see me and stop as well, or at the very least, give him enough space to inch through. But he was moving much too fast to pass through, though, and my dad, a very experienced driver, knew it.

Worse off, he was only looking to his left (he probably didn’t want to get cut by the next car); he neglected to look back in the direction his car was turning. My dad lowered his windshield and shouted to catch the attention of the driver, who was centimeters away from making a dent on our car’s right side. I finally had to honk at him. This caught his attention, and he went on a full stop.

But instead of letting me pass, he quickly started maneuvering to get out of the tight space. But he was careless and hit a tricycle parked on the curb.

During those last few minutes on the wheel after the incident, I couldn’t stop thinking of the taxi driver. I was still a bit angry, but I did feel bad for him. Being a taxi driver isn’t exactly an easy line of work: even if you drive for long hours, usually there’s just barely enough income to bring home at the end of the day. Maybe he was half-asleep on the wheel, tired and sore from long hours of continuous driving. Maybe he was hungry; perhaps he didn’t eat lunch in order to save some money. Or maybe his mind was somewhere else, thinking of how he was going to scrape up enough cash to pay his overdue bills. I pretty much transformed him into a pitiful creature in my head.

Did that excuse his lousy driving? No, it didn’t. Considering how many of the car accidents reported on television involve public utility vehicles and their kaskasero drivers, the last thing we want to do is to vindicate their being ill-mannered on the road. Besides, I too could have been hungry, or tired, of thinking of my overdue bills.

But the fact is, I wasn’t.

I’ve been on a couple of taxi rides alone myself, and I’ve met my share of taxi drivers, some of whom can get quite talkative about their lives. Of course, you never really know whether they’re telling you the truth, and you always have to be wary of the things you reveal or the routes they’re taking. But sometimes, they drawl on for such prolonged periods of time that I can’t help thinking maybe they’re just lonely and in need of someone to talk to, or even talk at. Or maybe I’m just lucky I haven’t been kidnapped yet.

In my own insufficient way, I guess I sympathize with these people. It’s quite condescending, really, to claim that I feel for them when I’ve had no real experience of poverty myself. But what I do understand is that these taxi drivers also contend with high LPG prices, have qualms with higher management, and do overtime, because times are hard and that’s how they get by.

Of course, if I had gotten into that accident, I wouldn’t have thought about it that way. I would’ve been too busy arguing with the taxi driver about whose fault it was, and making him pay for the damage he caused the car. It also would’ve justified the demonized perception I have of PUV drivers in Metro Manila.

It never would have occurred to me to see the human face behind the monstrous taxi driver.

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PUBLISHED: Student & Campus Section, Manila Bulletin, 5 November 2008 Issue (Page E-3)

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In my earlier years, All Saints’ Day didn’t strike me as significant by itself. What gave it value, if there was one, was coming to the province to spend time with my cousins and enjoying a change of scenery. But I saw no point in visiting the cemetery. Why should I have to be dragged there to pay my respects to people (granted, they were relatives) whom I had never even met, and quite possibly, had never given a damn about me?

I couldn’t find a satisfactory answer, but I continued to come along on these visits anyway, if only to observe tradition.

Then when I was nine, my first pet, a poodle named Tanny, died. Her death caused me so much sorrow that I refused to have her buried. Burying her would mean that I would never see her or hold her again. We eventually had to, though. So it was that the days for the dead came to hold its first real significance for me: it was a time to offer a prayer or a moment of silence in honor of my beloved Tanny.

In the years that would follow, I would be provided with more reasons to commemorate it: a pair of rabbits and lovebirds; my grandmother, who endured two years of recurring strokes and heart attacks; my dear grandfather, who died while I was abroad. Most recently, there was my other grandmother, who died on All Saints’ Day last weekend.

It is on occasions like these that I wonder whether there is a point to honoring the dead. What good does remembering really do to them? It’s not like they’ll be brought back to life by it. Nor, if we are to talk about heaven and judgment, will it alter the way their lives played out or the choices that they made. Or, if we were to take it from the opposite spectrum of belief: they’re dead anyway, they can’t care. No, I still don’t see how it benefits the dead to be remembered by those still living.

But if that’s true, why do we spend our lives trying to leave some mark, brand, or impact—in other words, a form of remembrance—on other people’s lives? Why are we so obsessed with remembering and being remembered?

I’m no philosopher, but the answer I came up with is this: our individual lives are but one single, infinitesimal speck in the infinitely boundless dimensions of time and the Universe. Thought of in another way, this means that our lives are meaningless and insignificant. If this is the case, then there is no point in living. Like the stars, our lives will burn brightly for an instant, die out in a blaze of glory, and finally disappear, as if we had never existed.

But just because we are hopelessly small does not mean that we have to be resigned to our own insignificance. Our lives may be tiny, negligible dots against the backdrop of the infinite cosmos, but at least we can make a mark on our fellow dots, however small or fleeting that mark might be. This is where remembering takes significance: we indelibly leave our marks on the lives of the people we have touched. Also, we remember so that we, too, can be remembered. It may be a small consolation, but it is a small (and important!) consolation nonetheless.

Honoring the dead might not do much for those who are already dead, but they do much for those who are still living. It is through those who have run the course of life that we learn how to live ours, and through them that we find the heart to keep on running.

Finally, we can also think about it this way: if all human beings have souls, and souls essentially consist of a person’s thoughts and identity, then what is a soul but a collection of all the memories we have gathered during our lives? Memories, then, are the only things we can bring along with us in the next life.

They are also the only things we truly get to keep of loved ones who have just passed away.