Death

Death seems to be so unattached to our everyday life. A concept so inhuman. A phenomenon seeped in mystery.

Surreal.

Only when it directly affects one of our loved ones does it become real. In fact, the pain becomes so real that you would be hard pressed to find any other pain that compares to it.

Some say that the dying and his family undergo the 7 stages of grief… and that this process is needed to be able to comprehend the seemingly incomprehensible situation. Disbelief, Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Guilt, Depression, Acceptance and Hope… is there REALLY a way to quantify what we feel? To gauge the well of emotions that seem to encompass our whole being? To calculate the surge of feelings that engulf our very existence?

It would seem to be an enormous task to recover from a lost such as this. A lost not only from someone you love, but a lost of a PART of you as well.

But time moves on however brutal. Unfazed by the trivialities of life. Undaunted by its nuances. Seemingly callous. Ignoring our suffering.

However, curious as it is, time is said to heal all wounds. Erase all scars and temper our emotions. It would seem that this constant is an ally to all of us as well. For in time, we may accept easier… breathe freer.

Time, with the presence of all that we hold dear, can help us rise above this darkness and find the light from the void.

You were raised by a great man and I know you will overcome.

The Plagiarism of Life

Somewhere along the way man forgot to be original.

Much like the family Buendia of Macondo fame (and so much unlike it), man is caught in the never-ending, multi-occurring cycle that is a reproduction of life.

Nothing is new. Everything has been done before. And anything will be redone again.

So, man, failing to recall originality remembered the capacity to put a string of syllables together with the purpose of renaming objects and phenomena so that (much like a phoenix) with each new renaming (of the same reoccurring objects and phenomena) a refreshing sense of novelty can be experienced… again.

And as a piece de resistance to his highly paradoxical, unoriginal idea, man (sadly similar to the 10 second gold fish) forgot about the act! Thus consummating the circle of unbelievable belief that man has always been and always will be original… non-duplicating… non-imitating…

With each action repeating itself over and over again, the cycle has been made unbreakable, indefatigable, infinite…

The carousel of deja vu ad infinitum.

The clearest, most blatant example of Life imitating Life imitating Life…

The Plagiarism of Life

Somewhere along the way man forgot to be original.

Much like the family Buendia (and so much unlike it), man is caught in the never-ending, multi-occurring cycle that is a reproduction of life.

Nothing is new. Everything has been done before. And anything will be redone again.

So, man, failing to recall originality remembered the capacity to put a string of syllables together with the purpose of renaming objects and phenomena so that (much like a phoenix) with each new renaming (of the same reoccurring objects and phenomena) a refreshing sense of novelty can again be experienced… again.

And as a piece de resistance to his highly paradoxical, unoriginal idea, man (sadly similar to the 10 second gold fish) forgot about the act! Thus consummating the circle of unbelievable belief that man has always been and always will be original… non-duplicating… non-imitating…

And with each action repeating itself over and over again, the cycle has been made unbreakable, indefatigable, infinite…

The carousel of deja vu ad infinitum.

The clearest, most blatant example of Life imitating Life imitating Life…

The Plagiarism of Life

Somewhere along the way man forgot to be original.

Much like the family Buendia (and so much unlike it), man is caught in the never-ending, multi-occurring cycle that is a reproduction of life.

Nothing is new. Everything has been done before. And anything will be redone again.

So, man, failing to recall originality remembered the capacity to put a string of syllables together with the purpose of renaming objects and phenomena so that (much like a phoenix) with each new renaming (of the same reoccurring objects and phenomena) a refreshing sense of novelty can again be experienced… again.

And as a piece de resistance to his highly paradoxical, unoriginal idea, man (sadly similar to the 10 second gold fish) forgot about the act! Thus consummating the circle of unbelievable belief that man has always been and always will be original… non-duplicating… non-imitating…

Of Baguio, Mobile-Advertisements and “The Proper Business Attire”

When I was looking for a job, I was twice asked to return in my “proper business attire”. Sure, to some it sounded like a reasonable request but walking-around-wearing-debilitating-long-sleeved-shirts-and-suffocating-ties-in-the-sweltering-30-degree-heat-of-Manila-while-knowing-that-the-employees-in-the-company-you’re-applying-to-wear-jeans-and-art-deco-shirts-to-work was just too much of an unbelievable proposition to me that 100 % of the time I was asked to come back in the frigging “proper business attire”, I didn’t.

Don’t get me wrong, It wasn’t that I had no interest in the job nor was I wearing customized t-shirts or poser looking Vans-Off-The-Wall apparel, I was, to my mind anyway, wearing proper business attire (read: button-down polo shirt, slacks and leather shoes). I just really couldn’t get down with the idea of doing “business” in the most uncomfortable manner possible.

Another thing, what could be more of a mobile-advertisement for job seeking than to be in “the proper business attire”? Honestly, they might have as well asked the unemployed to wear placards saying we were looking for jobs! The sheer number of walking zombies in “proper business attire” with their envelope-cum-folders in hand was staggering! The number was even more so than that of the art-deco-jeans-wearing-employed.

Sure, in Baguio I often times wore “the proper business attire” but for god sakes this was Manila! Surely, us highlanders were exempt from this mandate? After all, we are at an unfair disadvantage, aren’t we? No amount of ten-minute-saunas could ever replace a lifetime of living in this roasting urban jungle, di ba? And never could 8-hour-well-airconditioned-mall-marathons ever take the place of a life span in cool Baguio…

In retrospect, I think I needed a little more time to adjust in this climate. And in the long run, I might be forced to wear “the proper business attire” but for now I was just too used to 16-degree-heat-waves-and-hail-forming-weather to be able to grasp the concept of “the proper business attire”.

Resurrecting UP College Baguio 1996-? (or: Pavlov VS Skinner, Round 1)

As a great person once said: “The only thing constant in this world is change.”

True this phrase is repeated often enough and, with all certainty, will be truer tomorrow than today. However, to be able to present this in the most precise and valid way possible (which of course is oh so applicable to our post-UP situation), we must do so in a quasi-hermeneutical perspective (psych 180, anyone?) [albeit, hermeneutics the mark-way ; )].


We time travel to the past by resurrecting memories of old, comparing new situations with history in feeble attempts to remain in the past. To live in that bygone glory, to feel as we once felt and to live as we once lived. We strive to achieve this sense of reality by altering our logic. We fall into the simple trap of misconceiving our own perception. Forming a virtual sift for segregating reality.

The simple S-R model of Ivan Pavlov, as embodied in Classical Conditioning, can greatly explain this and thus, inadvertently overly simplifying this inherent process.

We come face to face with various situations that force us to compare with our recent past that after awhile this becomes a conditioned response for us. That after a period of time of unconsciously deceiving our reality we become nostalgic of the past, bitter of the present, and wary of the future. We are forced in automatically believing that in the past the grass was greener, the sky was bluer, and we got through everything through hardwork and perseverance.

But it is in this cyclical reaction, our reminiscing, do we stay grounded. Remain as our true selves, unfazed by change, unfrazzled (hey! I know this word doesn’t exist just don’t dis my artistic license in writing this piece) by time. Where we remain true to our ideals… uncompromising… unbending. It is in our incessant comparison with the past, do we make sense of the constant bombardment of time against our very own persona. It is this continuous battle with time where we must remember in order to stay aloft regardless of change… we must remember in order to cope and survive in the process.

Thus life can be more so comparable to B.F. Skinner’s model. A model where in we are not mindless, pre-cognitive individuals, a model where we seek to reason and voluntarily react to whatever stimuli is brought upon us. Thus reacting to change in the most humanly way possible (the only way possible), by way of assessing new data by sorting through whatever available past experience we can hopefully tally with and make sense of the current situation.

Tabula Rasa, they say. And this is definitely more applicable to us. For we are not just vessels of innate yearnings and instincts, we are basins of potential and sponges of intelligence…

The past will remain past, the future impenetrable. As time goes on, we move on. But as we change with time, we must always remember a bygone era, an infinitesimal epoch of our mundane and sedentary existence… a time we spent in UP College Baguio. Where we can readily affirm and take to heart that when we talked about classical and operant conditioning, we were doing so in order to understand the dynamics of learning and not in trying to elucidate questions in perception and humanity… ; )