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

parenting pointer #1

If there’s one thing I want to be really good at, it’s parenting. that's not surprising because most parents feel that raising kids is their most defining life’s work. (That is the benefit of parenthood: you don't need to go on endless soul searching to discover your purpose. you only need to look at your kids and you know exactly what you're here for*)

But I’m not a natural when it comes to parenting as I feel some people are. I’m not the motherly type, never the supermom that most people equate with the good parent. I don’t exactly prepare my kids’ baon everyday; I don’t mind their homework most of the time; didn't breastfeed them exclusively for a year; didn’t make it a point to give them a bath myself everyday during their pre-grade school years.

I delegate these things (well, except for the breastfeeding part) most mothers (even the working ones) would probably do themselves. There were times that I felt guilty about this but I don’t really enjoy guilt-tripping. So I snap out of it fast. Good for me but as for my kids, well, from the looks of it, maybe good for them, too. A guilt-ridden mom is no fun mom. (yup, that’s me rationalizing).

A lot of moms attempt real hard at becoming the society’s idea of supermom** And that's fine because it seems like a noble aspiration. I say "seems" because I have a feeling that supermom tendencies are partly borne out of the parent's own need for social validation and affirmation, and not just out of a desire to make the children feel more loved. of course, validation or affirmation is a natural human need.

but if that's our major driver for wanting to be superparents, then we're missing a very important point. becoming a good parent then becomes the end rather than the means to an end, which to me, is the forging of the child's character***. our supermom aspirations can then become counterproductive, doing more harm than good to our kids. they'll feel betrayed if they sense that they're being used to feed their parents' ego and sense of achievement. and that's no way to build trust.

i remember when I first enrolled my eldest in a private big school. my father told me he hoped i was doing it for the right reasons. what?! so there were wrong reasons for sending children to good expensive schools?! i initially tried to ignore the comment but it continued to nag me. so i examined my motive. why was i indeed sending him to an expensive**** school? there are of course canned rational answers to that but my deepest reason for sending my son to an expensive school was because i didn't want to shortchange him. i didnt want to scrimp on the most important financial investment a parent can give a child. parang feeling ko, dapat ang education ng mga bata, medyo ginagapang naman. my element of sacrifice dapat.

was that philosophy shaped by societal expectations? was it valid? i don't know. but what i know is that i didn't send him to that school because of the attached status symbol. and that I think was what my dad was driving at.

his comment gave me an important pointer on parenting: always check your motives. the decision that you make will not be judged by its outcome but by the intent behind it. who will be the judge? yourself. nobody else has the right to judge your intention. when you're not too fixated on the outcome, that takes off a lot of pressure. because honestly, we can't control the outcomes in parenting. that's probably why my mother always tells me that my children's success and failures are not mine. it's not meant to be an escape clause for lousy parents but that's just the way it is.

i think that's worth keeping in mind.

-oOo-

so i said if there's anything i want to be good at, it's parenting. i asked myself if i wanted that because of the attached premium of that label on my ego. my heart said no. i want to be a good parent because my wonderful children deserve no less.

that's probably fair enough.




* probably not universally true

**There’s an emerging pop term for it: helicopter parents. ok, they're not actually the same. unlike "supermom", HP has a bit of derogatory tone to it, at least to me.

*** the goal of parenting is worth exploring in a separate post
****that's how an 80k tuition feels like to me

why we are poor 1.1

'As long as the Filipino people have not enough spirit to proclaim, brow held high, and breast bared, their right to a free society, and to maintain it with their sacrifices, with their very blood; as long as we see our country men privately ashamed , hearing the cries of their revolted, and protesting in conscience but silent in public, or joining the oppressor in mocking the oppressed; as long as we see them wrapping themselves up in their selfishness and praising the most iniquitous acts with forced smiles, begging with their eyes for a share of the booty, why give them freedom?" - El Filibusterismo

why we are poor 1.0

"That so many Filipinos now eat only once a day is a blatant confirmation of the immorality of our people and particularly of our leaders. When I see all those fat and glossy cars in our elite schools, the thousands upon thousands crowding our churches and religious rallies, I realize how dismally our schools and churches* have failed. " - F. Sionil Jose

*If I may add, our homes, too.