reminiscing sydney

Sydney's got a multiracial vibe; Asians, middle-easterns, latinos, whites, they're everywhere.

I met up with a few old friends who have since migrated there, and they're all doing great. They love their life there, so much so that they don't feel they'd ever come back for good. And i can see why.

great beach and parks just a short train or bus ride away; sacred weekends for bonding with family and friends; well-compensated hard work, whether by a blue or white collar; a plumber who can afford to drive the car/eat the steak that a corporate executive drives/eats; a government that makes sure everybody can live a decent, balanced, and happy life.

It feels like everybody's having a great time or on their way to having a great time.

Yeah, Sydney's nice, but it's not home.

reminiscing salzburg and vienna

Vienna felt so quiet and muted (it was winter). You'd see people huddling and talking but you won't hear a sound. Walking around the city with that distinctive 'european siren' in the background, I was almost expecting to bump into Jason Bourne anytime.

Our host treated my buddy and I to the Opera, and it was such a blast. People there are all glammed up; Japanese tourists were in their best kimono. Midway into Figaro, I felt very hungry because we only had champagne for dinner. Before that we just had a slice of cake at the famous Hotel Sacher. But the sacher torte wasn't anything we imagined it to be. It was dry, unspectacular, something our local bakeries can easily whip up.

The highlight of that trip was my first ever taste of snow. My old classmate who's a resident told me it hadn't snowed in the city since 3 months prior, so i wasn't expecting it anymore (though i really hoped it would). But God never fails to surprise us with miracles because, one morning before we left, i woke up to a snow-capped surroundings :)

Pinoy Inception

What do you feel when you think about where this country is headed? Hope? Excitement? Despair? Resignation? It can be a mixture of these things or mostly the unpleasant ones. With the bottomless national scandals, tasteless police reports, and basically just bad news sensationalized for maximum effect served to us 24/7, it shouldn’t be surprising that some of us have long ago forfeited our right to dream for this country.

And even when we do dream, my guess is these dreams are usually just the reverse or the negation of our problems, like:

“Sana wala ng mahirap” “Sana wala ng kurakot”; “Sana di na kailangang umalis ng bansa para makahanap ng trabaho” “Sana gumanda ganda naman ang mga lansangan” “Sana wala ng batang kalye” “Sana magresign na si ______(whoever’s in malacañang)

What’s wrong with that?

Well, I think they’re not powerful enough dreams. They’re just basically rants disguised as dreams. And so they still perpetuate that negativity we’re all so addicted to.

Now I’m not saying that dissecting and articulating our national malaise is pointless and futile. No. We need introspection. But we shouldn’t do it for its own sake. Our introspection should lead us to a shared dream.

The Koreans were united in their dream to outdo the Japanese, in everything, even in their kimchi. The Chinese were united in their dream to never be humiliated as a country and as a people again. The Malaysians share the dream to never be left far behind by their neighbor Singapore whose plea for integration they once rejected.

How about us? What’s our unifying dream and battle cry as a people? The operative word there is unifying. Our shared burden shouldn’t just be about our dislike and discontent for the government, under whosever regime. Such a burden is neither unifying (there will always be a pro- and anti-administration), nor compelling (we may succeed in overturning an administration or kicking out a president, but what’s next? Kick out the next one? more like a waste of energy, if you ask me).

How then are we going to discover that shared dream and burden, that battle cry that moves us as a people? What will it take to make us get our act together and finally re-create the Philippines that we can all be proud of?

I don't know. But I hope it will not take us more years of humiliation and more undignified lives.

I hope it’s soon, because I’m afraid I’m starting to ask what’s the point.

Outsourcing Reflections (or keeping the Tony's in business)

i wasn't expecting to get an inspiration for a reflection from a joel stein article. after all, stein doesn't really do life lessons and all those stuff that make jessica zafra cringe.

But in his aug2 TIME article, he talked about his conversation with this guy tony robbins, apparently a biggie in the self-help industry. i have nothing at all against self-help* but i didn't think tony was the kind of guy the likes of stein would be excited to write about (at least not in a serious, mindful way).

so it was kind of a surprise treat to read his article about a chief purveyor of self-help (was probably instructed to do so) and their discussion on, whatelse, understanding and improving thyself. despite being written with the humor and sarcasm i read him for, stein's article, for the first time, got me into some serious thinking.

like:
if happiness is when your life conditions are the same as your blueprint, what is my LC and BP? how do i know my BP? do i even believe in this theory?
what are my paradigms: what do i believe about myself and my circumstance?
If tony is about understanding and helping, what am i about? If the things stein values the most are significance and variety, what are mine? how are my values and self-image affecting my decisions, interactions, relationships?

then i asked myself why i bother asking myself these things. is it because there's always an opportunity to become better and i indeed long for my better self? because before i can help myself become better i need to understand myself?

ten minutes into my reflection, i was lost in a maze of questions. it got heady and nauseous so i emerged out of it even without getting any answers.

i then just wished tony would do it for me the way he did it for stein ("You'll be less critical of others if you stop believing that you lucked into a gig in which you seem funny only because you're in the world's least funny magazine without the word science in the title.")

then it got me thinking again: would an external opinion on who I am be more acurate or important than my own? Probably not, but it doesn't mean we shouldn't bother getting it. (Hello? juhari's window)

Perhaps there's really no such thing as honest-to-goodness self-help, because what others think about us also helps, others like our family/friends and even experts. If self-help was really possible, Tony and his cohorts will be out of business.

(see how i drifted in my reflections? it was supposed to be about self-discovery but i ended up questioning the concept of self-help. i say we all need guided reflections. tony, hello?)




* on the contrary, and i say this with all the courage i can muster, i might actually be an SH junkie. and it's not funny