Recent Events, February 2013

Am blogging for the sake of blogging - go, me! It's been a month since the last time I wrote for this space of virtual pseudo-property, and while much has happened, there's not much that can be put into words. Chos.

Here are some pictures that I hope are capable of summarizing what I've been distracting myself with lately:

 

This was taken just earlier, 12. Feb, when the UP Deutscher Verein or the UP German Club, of which I'm a member, hosted a literacy program in New Era HS. Auf Deutsch. I must have had a virtual nosebleed - teaching high school students is so challenging! The batch salutatorian - who, with a little push in the right direction - might turn out to be an interesting specimen for Blair Waldorfs in the Philippines, was in my study group. She was not impressed that I did not know what the German word for Hamster is. (It is, by the way, (das) Meerschweinchen.)

Do I?

My favorite celebrity, the wonderful Sakurai Sho, once said in an interview that although he doesn’t quite wish to settle down yet, during weddings, when the slide show of the couple’s pictures from their youth to the present is shown, he feels the intense desire to have a wedding. Just a wedding. I believe I’m beginning to understand.

My cousin S had her church wedding last Saturday, and I was one of two maids of honor. With the change in her marital status, I am pushed into quite an interesting position, and truly, had I been merely an innocent bystander I would be very much intrigued with the progress of our clan drama. After my 31 year 0ld cousin – the oldest cousin, who can’t marry yet despite having a ‘family-approved’ long-time boyfriend because she’s waiting for a migration cue to the United States – I am the next girl in line for ‘the wedding trail’. That is, I’m the next oldest single girl out of six female cousins. You can imagine the pressure from five noisy but well-meaning aunts, who all settled down in their twenties.

 It’s not that I don’t want to get married though. It’s just that I can’t imagine myself dating, so I can’t imagine myself having a boyfriend, and as a consequence I can’t imagine myself getting married. I wonder how many people like me are out there. I don’t quite feel desperate to get into any sort of relationship yet, but I don’t want to reach my thirties still single either. It’s complicated. And it’s also very Filipino.

Which leads me to the main anecdote of this long-winded soliloquy. The malicious – although, I’ll admit, very capable – wedding planners of my cousin’s wedding drafted the bouquet throw to go in my favor. May luto – for God’s sake. Filipino wedding traditions go: the single women gather around the bride as she throws the bouquet over her head, and the [unfortunate] soul who catches said bouquet is said to be the next to marry. Same tradition applies to the single men, only in their case it’s a garter throw.

What happened during my cousin’s wedding was that they tricked all of us girls by saying the first few people to catch the bouquet would be saved from having some stranger pull the garter they got from the groom up her leg, until I caught the blasted bouquet and the equally malicious emcee changed the rules. So I had to be the unfortunate girl who had one of her twenty-eight-year-old cousin’s college buddies pull a garter up her leg. In front of her parents and half her maternal side, mind you.

Surprisingly, the experience was not as traumatic as I had always imagined it to be. Maybe because the guy was really nice. We even shook hands.

On Family

I was scratching the cat in the Faculty Center earlier this afternoon when a certain professor briskly walked past me, a little girl held in his right arm. Instantly, I lost track of what my companion was saying - which was pretty irresponsible, considering we were discussing how we would handle our report next week given two of our groupmates have completely evaporated - and got to my feet, following said professor with my eyes as he walked on, completely oblivious of the stare glued to his remarkably clean blue shirt. (Ehem. Let me clarify he wasn't exactly Best Dressed Faculty Member of 2007 when he taught me.)

I thought he would keep that pace until he reached SC, which is where I think he goes whenever he walks via the Freshie Walk, but when I saw him again - I was momentarily distracted by the perfunctory goodbye I threw at my groupmate - he had turned left of the road, down the literal untrodden path, into the woods, and whatever cliche you wish to use for Diliman's lagoon area. He wasn't exactly talking to the little girl, but I'm sure he didn't just wander off that way because he was looking for the proverbial fertility tree. Seeing him, the little girl held close, I thought of my father, what we must have looked like fifteen years ago...

And then, yes, perhaps the thought of a certain friend being a dad did cross my mind.

***

Eiga Sai is here again; it's depressing my schedule won't allow me to watch everything I wish. Good thing though, that my father came for dinner late, so I managed to watch 3/4 of TOKYO TOWER Mom and Me and Sometimes Dad starring Odagiri Joe.

It was honestly bizarre, seeing the guy whose name I'd been playing in my head forever - fine, ever since I discovered Kashii Yu was married. Surprisingly, he's not just a handsome face; he actually made me cry. Or maybe the actress playing his mother did. Either way, it was heartrending to see the cancer slowing sapping away his mother's life. I never want that to happen to my family, to anyone I love. And just when he was starting to make it up to her, too....

Stagnation

16th August, 12:29 AM

Has it ever bothered you that 12MN is also known as 12AM when it actually follows 11PM?

Had a long, enjoyable, enlightening talk with Chinnie at the Araneta complex earlier. We sat on those stone borders separating the Araneta Coliseum plant life from the sidewalks, chatting for hours, pondering the behavior of our friends, discussing the concept of stagnation.

Stagnation. To me, it seems the complete antithesis of progress. So if one doesn't progress at all, that's literally decay, even if one does manage to produce "something". Personally, the idea is vague to me. I'm not an artist, or even an artsy type, so I don't know how to gauge my "progress" as a person. Is growth measured by the number of friends you accumulate in your Facebook account? Is it the steady rise of your grades from freshman year to senior year? (Empirically, I would argue such a case is close to impossible, but anyway.) Is it the number of books or movies you've read or seen, including the amount of reviews you've written about them? What is growth? How do you know you're maturing, developing as a person?

Is it always something other people have to point out for you to understand? Must your opinion of yourself always be based on what other people - regardless of whether they know you well or not - have to say about you? Doesn't that mean that somehow, your happiness is hinged on what other people think of you?

...

On a lighter note, Sassja and I saw Orosman at Zafira, the 3PM screening today. That was my second time seeing it, and I believe it's gotten better. I didn't recognize most of the faces onstage this afternoon, but all the same, the production was beautiful. Some pictures from the show:

Good show, good show. Makes me proud to be part of the UP family, even if I'm not DUP at all.

Guests

In my Global Studies class earlier (for the record, it's not a compulsory thing, it's a FREE elective) we played hosts to the 11 visiting students from Yokohama National University. Now, I know I may seem very outgoing, if not noisy, but actually, there are times when I prefer NOT to talk. Such as this afternoon.

CIS Classroom C was an overwhelming sight. Students were milling about, mostly Filipino students who wanted to interact with the Japanese guests - and most of them were from TomoKai and Arirang. Originally, I sat at the back of the classroom, but then the professor-organizer saw me and asked me - no, she sort of gave me no choice, actually - to sit beside one of our guests. And because I didn't want to sit there without knowing her, the girl to my right, I introduced myself.

She said her name was Akiko.

Over the 1.5 hours we spent together, I observed a lot of things about Akiko. I know it's not right to judge based on first impressions - take that further and you could say it's wrong to judge at all - but I thought Akiko was a very driven young woman whose facade gave one the opposite impression. She looks very timid and shy but she had the confidence to speak to a weird looking girl aka me, and she looked very smart. I also loved her outfit - black and white large checkered shirt dress with really thin, dark jeans and Roxy slippers - and yes, they were Roxy.

What bothered me most, however, is that she looked... I dunno. Confident but unconfident. She seems sure of what she can do, but somehow she seems unsure of herself. I can't explain it. But it shows. And I think it's such a shame because Akiko seems like the type of person I would like to be - elegant, smart, sophisticated and friendly. But she doesn't believe in herself.

Sad. I wanted to be friends with her. But our 1.5 hours of acquaintance just wasn't enough for us to reach that level.

Korean Hospitality

One of the values Filipinos are proud of, to the point of drilling it to our elementary-age kids by way of textbooks and conscious example, is hospitality. According to my trusty Merriam-Webster, to be hospitable is to be: 1) given to generous and cordial reception of guests; and, 2) to readily receptive. To be honest, however, I've never been particularly fond of this innate trait of ours. It's not uncommon for heads of households to borrow money from their friends or, God forbid, 5-6 lenders just to be able to serve something to their guests during fiesta time. I don't like that. (But for the record, if I were in the tightest spot imaginable, I think I could tolerate it.)

My point is that after attending the UPD International Center Korean Night (20 November 09), I realized that our Korean counterparts may just be as hospitable as we are. The whole event was very carefully planned, as evidenced by the "parody movies" that they presented - as anyone who's tried to film and edit anything would know, you can't edit and sub decently within a short span of time. They also made sure that the guests were very "at home", and I daresay they even thought of everything with the guests in mind. Obviously, one of their top priorities, if not their top priority, was to please the crowd.

I have to admit that, initially, my goal for attending the event was getting free food to save on dinner; I'm not big on KPop, unlike a certain faction of the Filipino below-20 population. I stayed even after having eaten though, because: 1) I thought it rude to fall prey to the infamous eat-and-run habit; and, 2) the first half of the program looked promising. So I guess the organizers got their wish: it was a DEFINITE crowd pleaser.

Bana and I didn't get there in time to see the Super Junior impersonation that some of the guys did, but I really don't mind because the succeeding performances were excellent. I particularly liked the Taekwondo Dance, the Fan Dance, the solo performance that a visiting dance professor performed, and the Sign Language Dance - just for the record, I thought the solo performance was breathtaking. Of course, the last 'stage' was very moving, too: an acoustic version of Heal the World by everyone involved in the event. Another thing I liked about Korean Night? They had a donation box near the entrance, the proceeds of which will go to Ondoy victims. Isn't that nice of them?

I couldn't help feeling biter though, even after I had such a good time. See, I was wondering why we couldn't come up with something like that - every culture has its own interesting details, after all. Why is it that, despite the large number of Filipino immigrants in each corner of the world, their children don't organize events like this? A university is the perfect venue for cultural nights, so why can't Filipino kids studying abroad (and maybe even in the country) take advantage of that? Is it because they've assimilated too well? And is our 'colonial mentality' worth blaming for that?

Then again, I'm not the right person to rant about things like this.