james.soriano

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PUBLISHED: Student & Campus Section, Manila Bulletin, 11 February 2009 Issue

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The season of love is also a season of sadness.

Or at least it is for all the single people who are desperately seeking Men or Women for Dating, A Relationship, or Activity Partners—whatever that is supposed to mean.

Valentine’s Day also goes by another internationally-recognized moniker: SAD. These three letters stand for Singles Awareness Day, a self-deprecating joke of a holiday celebrated worldwide by singles as an alternative for the holiday of love. Singles celebrate it for a number of reasons. Some do out of spite; maybe you’re fresh from a breakup, or your best friend got the girl whom you also secretly liked. Others do it as a form of protest against Hallmark holidays, so that they celebrate it a day before or a day after to avoid the wave of commercialism. Still, others do it to remind themselves that being single isn’t so bad at all, even if you’ve watched Love, Actually and believe otherwise.

But regardless of the reasons, I am impressed by the fun, non-cliche ways that people have concocted to celebrate it. While the private school boys would usually be at the gates of their actual/would-be girlfriend’s school, waiting for the bell to ring—their cue to make some exceedingly amorous declaration of love with flowers, chocolates, or Hallmark cards—the single guys would go out with their best buddies to the nearest bar/coffee shop and commiserate over free-flowing beer/coffee. In some countries, the creativity with which they celebrate is truly inspring: on Valentine’s Day 2006, the singles in Taiwan had a demonstration activity against couples in the town of Tamsui.

I don’t know who came up with the idea for this holiday, but God am I thankful that it exists, and not only because it’s fun and not cliché.

I’m glad because it reminds you that you don’t need to be in a romantic relationship in order to be happy.

The problem with Valentine’s Day is that it has come to represent entirely romantic notions of love and companionship. For this, media and commercialism are partly to blame: we have been conditioned from birth, via fairy tales, Disney movies and romantic comedies, that the only way for us to be truly happy is to have a happily-ever-after, or in other words, be in a relationship. What this holiday does is to pressure us into submission, to the profit of businesses and media corporations, and to the detriment of all the single folks forced to gape at the spectacle of couplehood.

For teenagers, this pressure is intense enough without all of the mass marketing. This past week, I have not gone a day without having at least one conversation with a friend who is sincerely, subconsciously, or otherwise pretending not to be sad about Valentine’s Day. It seems to me like everyone’s so eager to experience love without really knowing what that is. I’m not sure that many of us, even those who have had some experience, know what we are looking for.

Talk of hormones aside, I think that’s partly because it is so easy for us to associate having a significant other with feelings of kilig or self-worth. That’s not necessarily bad, I guess, since it’s natural, but what is detrimental is when we fail to look beyond it and become sad for entirely irrational reasons. Relationships are just as much about sadness, solitude and self-loathing as they are about happiness, companionship and self-respect. They also become more complex as time passes, in a way that romantic movies can never entirely do justice to. But that’s because relationships last for at least a couple of days, while romantic comedies only last at most for a couple of hours.

What I am saying, though—and this is the message of Singles Awareness Day—is that it is okay to be single. On the one hand, maybe you’re missing out, but on the other hand, you also aren’t. It’s just that most people look exclusively at the former and forget about the latter. And celebrating SAD is a good way of combatting the pressures of a culture that forces us to believe that romantic happiness is the best kind of happiness.

If you ask me, the best kind of happiness is to be found in any sincere form of companionship. And you’ll never lack for both on the fourteenth of February.

Happy SAD, everyone!

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PUBLISHED: Student & Campus Section, Manila Bulletin, 29 October 2008 Issue (Page E-3)

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Halloween is the only time of the year when we can afford to take the notion of death lightly.

This was what I realized after watching my neighbors prepare their spooky decorations, after hearing many of my friends talk about the costumes they plan to wear to parties, and after witnessing the kids trick-or-treating around our village during the annual Halloween celebration which, strangely enough, isn’t usually held on the day itself.

It’s an interesting contradiction of sorts. Sure, when we think Halloween we think of scary apparitions and ghost stories. But we also think of pranks, parties, and pastries. I guess death isn’t as fearsome or painful to think about when we don’t associate it with a sense of loss.

We now associate it with merrymaking and celebration. Halloween is a time to go dress up as your favorite villain or movie-inspired creature and go partying with your friends. It is a time to be lively and to be alive.

But when you think about it, it is also a form of escapism. After all, what is Halloween but a convenient form of recreation to relieve the unpleasantness derived from death?

When we celebrate it, we remove ourselves from the reality that death is often painful, mortifying and incomprehensible. And by turning it into a form that is entertaining, we are able to grasp and cope with it. Perhaps Halloween is also an opiate of the masses.

This is made even more effective by the advent of media and commercialism. After all, our image of Halloween comprises mostly of what the filmmakers and artists in this last century have constructed for us. It has become largely commercialized and tailor-fit to the desires of the market. In this sense, not only have we desensitized ourselves from death’s reality, perhaps we’ve also commodified it.

Hence, it seems to me that whenever we celebrate Halloween, we run the risk of trivializing what it stands for.

’m not saying, though, that we ought not to celebrate it, or that we ought to celebrate it in a particular way. Nor am I saying that it’s bad that we try to associate death with happier things. But I do think that the true spirit of Halloween is lost on most people.

To remember what that is, it might help to go back to what the holiday originally was. In ancient Celtic tradition, it was a festival celebrating the end of harvest season. Since it was also considered the end, or the ‘death’, of the year, the Celts used to believe that the boundary between the living and the deceased would disappear, and spirits could come and be among the living. Thus Halloween, then called Samhain, was a time for the dead to commune with the living and vice versa. It was something that was to be taken very seriously, if in a festive and celebratory manner.

If the eve of Halloween prepared the people of old for the beginning of a new year by marking the end of a cycle, in modern times it prepares us for the morning after. It is, after all, directly followed by All Saints Day and All Souls Day, holidays which commemorate the faithful departed. And the fact that these three holidays are strung together is neither random nor coincidental. These were deliberately situated alongside each other by the Catholic Church.

Since that’s the case, I would like to think that Halloween is a time to remember the importance of honoring our dead and keeping their memory. It doesn’t matter so much if we choose to celebrate it in a particular manner. What matters is that we know what we are celebrating it for.

It is so easy to boil down Halloween to candy apples, jack-o-lanterns, or dressing up as Rihanna from ‘Disturbia’. A large part of what makes Halloween is what media and pop culture has propagated. But what is truly important is to remember that behind the candies, the costumes, and the merrymaking, is the spirit of Halloween.

Halloween is there to celebrate the importance of commemorating death—and therefore, the importance of a meaningful life.