Wikipedia, font of all knowledge in today's online world, defines mental obsession as a condition that may cause mental, physical, or even emotional pain, associated with insomnia as well as other health-related issues, and may keep one from focusing on more important tasks such as work or social activities. Some examples of what people can be obsessed with are: music, shoes, coffee, gambling, fire, celebrities, drugs, health/fitness, plastic surgery, royalty, money, religion, love, fame, cleanliness, diamonds, etc.
This latest facebook craze has ignited certain levels of obsession among people. Obsession? Nay, you'd say. But I have a hypothesis that it is addictive because it pushes the right buttons of longing to belong and be noticed. So, employing rigorous sociological field and survey research, I've plotted out how it happens.
Stage 1: You Join.
You scoff, roll your eyes, raise your eyebrows, snort, shrug, do the hokey-pokey and turn around--why are people all around you talking about Facebook, you ask yourself. Whatever. Sure, you'll join to stop people from bugging you to. It'll be passé soon enough. You blithely and obligingly fill out the forms, select a photo, sit back and wait. You claim that you are just checking out the Facebook bandwagon. Yes, that's what you tell yourself. And it's probably true. For now (ominous laughter...).
Stage 2: Your inner Narcissus rears his egotistic head.
Someone has tagged you in a photo or video! Now things are getting interesting. Obviously, the Facebook people have read Dale Carnegie's "How to Win Friends and Influence People"--an opus of ego manipulation and instruction manual for sycophants. People love to see photos of themselves. When presented a photo, the first thing they search for is their own face. So, at this stage, you are now more seriously trawling through your friends' profiles, noticing strange and possibly interesting features of Facebook like publicizing what you like (or hate) about life. You begin to understand that this can be an outlet for your inner celebrity slash publicity hound. And you start to believe that people might care to know what your absolute favorite movie is, or--channeling Oprah Winfrey--what book you're currently reading. You also get to find out whether your friends think that you're most likely to get swindled by a couple of old ladies in Vegas or show up in a bunny costume for no apparent reason...
Stage 3: You have all these friends to poke and bite and compare and throw inanimate objects at.
Facebook requests for undying friendship come flying into your email Inbox unexpectedly. You start to log in more frequently, directed by those insidious little email messages. Why not ignore them the way you're used to ignoring Friendster, Multiply, Linked-in and other social networking messages? Well... it doesn't hurt that someone's bought you a virtual beer or compared your smile to someone (and thought yours was nicer). This guy or girl you used to have a crush on or go out with is suddenly back in your life; wanting to be "friends" again--you can finally be magnanimous, it costs you nothing; besides, he/she sent you the invite first! Plus, once someone's chucked a shaved monkey at you, there's no turning back.
Stage 4: You're Hoooked
The first time you spend more than an hour on Facebook exclusively, you're hooked. By the time you start competing for Mogul status on Superlatives, you're doomed. If you were handcuffed 10 feet away from your computer, you'd gnaw off your hands and learn to type with your toes.
Your only hope is to live on an island. Without internet connection.
Tuesday, August 21, 2007
Saturday, August 18, 2007
Spaghetti in Sol's Midnight Marinara Sauce
I found myself pretty hungry at around half past one AM. When I couldn't convince Junior to fix me anything to eat, I resignedly went downstairs to cook.
I didn't grow up in a family that expected me to learn how to cook. My mom didn't really cook a whole lot, but she has a number of "signature" dishes, cakes and pies. My dad, according to family legend, has some sort of onion and tomato thing; but that may have all been just hearsay. I have three sisters and May, the second, is a really good cook (but she's also always been the "girly" one anyway). Gay, the eldest, can bake great blueberry cheesecake. Anna, the youngest, who lives on coffee and cigarettes, at most knows how to boil water by microwave (or at least I hope she does).
My first kitchen foray happened one summer when I was about eight or so (my most vivid childhood memories seem to begin at eight). Gay and May had this idea for us to cook an elaborate lunch for ourselves, complete with a fancy menu for dishes like "sautéed zygotes" i.e. fried egg. I contributed the beverages for the meal: "nestea con hielo con sprite".
Take the tallest glass in the kitchen. Fill three quarters with sprite or a similar colorless soda. Add two teaspoons of lemon-flavored instant iced tea powder. Witness the Rootbeer Float Effect: the powder causes the soda to fizz and a light brown froth bubbles to the surface. Take a long and slim teaspoon and stir gently, taking care that the froth doesn't diminish too much. Add a few cubes of ice.
I tried baking in high school and I wasn't too bad at it. Partly because they taught it in "home economics" (I also had a "practical arts" class with the boys, where I welded a swan-shaped ashtray for my class project). And partly because I had, for a long time, secretly wanted to grow up to be just like my best friend Lille's mom (who was a cool, single mother with her own company; and she gave away baskets of homemade pastries at Christmas).
I never cooked even when I lived on campus throughout college. I only tried my hand at cooking again years and years later when I started living with Junior. As a grad student, I had a pretty free schedule. But I eventually learned to hate sharing a kitchen with him--he was really merciless when it came to my dubious culinary eptitude. He made fun of my lack of common sense (with cooking and life in general--but hey, who cares about details when you're a genius, right?) and rolled his eyes at my reliance on recipes. When he petulantly complained that I had made spaghetti marinara one time too many, I literally threw the towel in (and at him).
But then Gabby came into the picture. Finally! A captive audience! An uncomplaining customer... at least before he could talk; and it is pure coincidence that his first word after mama and papa was "no"! Anyway, on Sundays (the nanny's day off), I started to cook for him. An improvisational spirit that I had sort of learned from Junior emerged. I got on a diet earlier this year and started cooking for myself, too.
Which brings me to tonight. The height of my haught cuisine. After two years of experimentation, I've come to the conclusion that I have a specific talent for combining a few specific ingredients into lush, flavorful food nouveau: tomatoes in any form (fresh, peeled, puréed, sauced), shrimp, olive oil, pasta, and oregano. And I've written my own rule of cooking: you can never have too much garlic--just be prepared to keep your trap shut for the rest of the evening!
And tonight's dish was a product of imagination.
Cook wholewheat pasta in boiling water and drain; place in a bowl. At the same time, heat a sauce pan, add a dollop of olive oil; fry a little minced fresh garlic and a few fresh large peeled shrimp or prawns. Don't be shy about leaving in all the weird orange gunk from the shrimp heads for flavor. Add some chili flakes. Add a couple of heaping spoonfuls of taba ng talangka or crab fat (available from Filipino stores at Lucky Plaza). Set aside. In the saucepan, leave in the sea-foody residue and add midnight spaghetti herbs (available at Carrefour; they come in little flat bags with brown paper labels) with just enough water to submerge the herbs. Wait until the herbs/spices are fully re-hydrated, then sauté with a little olive oil. Add chili flakes and tomato pesto. Stir into pasta. Top with shrimps and "marinara" sauce. If I'd had any fresh orgegano leaves, I'd have used them as a garnish. Cooking & preparation time: 20-25 minutes
Junior offered me fifty bucks to whip up another bowl, haha!
I didn't grow up in a family that expected me to learn how to cook. My mom didn't really cook a whole lot, but she has a number of "signature" dishes, cakes and pies. My dad, according to family legend, has some sort of onion and tomato thing; but that may have all been just hearsay. I have three sisters and May, the second, is a really good cook (but she's also always been the "girly" one anyway). Gay, the eldest, can bake great blueberry cheesecake. Anna, the youngest, who lives on coffee and cigarettes, at most knows how to boil water by microwave (or at least I hope she does).
My first kitchen foray happened one summer when I was about eight or so (my most vivid childhood memories seem to begin at eight). Gay and May had this idea for us to cook an elaborate lunch for ourselves, complete with a fancy menu for dishes like "sautéed zygotes" i.e. fried egg. I contributed the beverages for the meal: "nestea con hielo con sprite".
Take the tallest glass in the kitchen. Fill three quarters with sprite or a similar colorless soda. Add two teaspoons of lemon-flavored instant iced tea powder. Witness the Rootbeer Float Effect: the powder causes the soda to fizz and a light brown froth bubbles to the surface. Take a long and slim teaspoon and stir gently, taking care that the froth doesn't diminish too much. Add a few cubes of ice.
I tried baking in high school and I wasn't too bad at it. Partly because they taught it in "home economics" (I also had a "practical arts" class with the boys, where I welded a swan-shaped ashtray for my class project). And partly because I had, for a long time, secretly wanted to grow up to be just like my best friend Lille's mom (who was a cool, single mother with her own company; and she gave away baskets of homemade pastries at Christmas).
I never cooked even when I lived on campus throughout college. I only tried my hand at cooking again years and years later when I started living with Junior. As a grad student, I had a pretty free schedule. But I eventually learned to hate sharing a kitchen with him--he was really merciless when it came to my dubious culinary eptitude. He made fun of my lack of common sense (with cooking and life in general--but hey, who cares about details when you're a genius, right?) and rolled his eyes at my reliance on recipes. When he petulantly complained that I had made spaghetti marinara one time too many, I literally threw the towel in (and at him).
But then Gabby came into the picture. Finally! A captive audience! An uncomplaining customer... at least before he could talk; and it is pure coincidence that his first word after mama and papa was "no"! Anyway, on Sundays (the nanny's day off), I started to cook for him. An improvisational spirit that I had sort of learned from Junior emerged. I got on a diet earlier this year and started cooking for myself, too.
Which brings me to tonight. The height of my haught cuisine. After two years of experimentation, I've come to the conclusion that I have a specific talent for combining a few specific ingredients into lush, flavorful food nouveau: tomatoes in any form (fresh, peeled, puréed, sauced), shrimp, olive oil, pasta, and oregano. And I've written my own rule of cooking: you can never have too much garlic--just be prepared to keep your trap shut for the rest of the evening!
And tonight's dish was a product of imagination.
Cook wholewheat pasta in boiling water and drain; place in a bowl. At the same time, heat a sauce pan, add a dollop of olive oil; fry a little minced fresh garlic and a few fresh large peeled shrimp or prawns. Don't be shy about leaving in all the weird orange gunk from the shrimp heads for flavor. Add some chili flakes. Add a couple of heaping spoonfuls of taba ng talangka or crab fat (available from Filipino stores at Lucky Plaza). Set aside. In the saucepan, leave in the sea-foody residue and add midnight spaghetti herbs (available at Carrefour; they come in little flat bags with brown paper labels) with just enough water to submerge the herbs. Wait until the herbs/spices are fully re-hydrated, then sauté with a little olive oil. Add chili flakes and tomato pesto. Stir into pasta. Top with shrimps and "marinara" sauce. If I'd had any fresh orgegano leaves, I'd have used them as a garnish. Cooking & preparation time: 20-25 minutes
Junior offered me fifty bucks to whip up another bowl, haha!
Saturday, July 28, 2007
Do-Gooders Anonymous: Coffee & the Laws of Physics
So Chocolatini and Divehammie get into this deep and highly technical discussion about theories of motion and kinetics.
Thursday, July 19, 2007
Chiaroscuro: Curtain Call
I caught a play by myself last Sunday (the day after the final curtain call was made on Chiaroscuro). Two modern noh plays written by Yukio Mishima; Richard Chua was co-director and Mishima is one of my favorite authors. I was late, and there were only two people outside the theater, handling the ticket sales. The lady asks me if I'm a student and I say, no. The guy looks at me and says, "Oh... Sol!"; he turns to the lady and says, "She's an actress."
Nat and Rahiman will kill me for repeating this story, but it really brought home the message. Am I an actor?
screenshots of the DVD that Junior produced for Project Chiaroscuro 2007
In the first place, how did I negotiate between and among the roles of actor, playwright and director?
First, I suppose, I had to grapple with the role of playwright. Rather than use the book as just a point of departure, I really worked more to adapt a 230-page book into 15-20 minutes on stage. This required an intense reading of the book, taking notes, doing further research on the author (especially since his book was semi-autobiographical). What powered me along was the words. Pessoa writes beautifully, and it was a matter of (1) piecing together what struck me the most in his writing; (2) reading common themes throughout what was effectively a journal, and identifying them; (3) trying to form a character. What I ended with, to cut a long story short, is a character who is a woman, a writer, looking for affirmation as an artist and who writes in the belief that her art necessitates cutting herself off from the “vulgarity” of reality and humanity, but at core she is lonely, unloved and thinks that she is ugly.
Second, starting with a script, I had to be an actor and director simultaneously. I had a vision for how I wanted the performance to look (I knew I wanted to play around with a table, chair, notebooks full of writing, a cup of coffee, cigarettes, and a window) and I wanted to convey that the character was alone in her room, speaking to her unseen readers (the audience), speaking to herself. So when I first wrote some stage directions for the script, they were based on a vague idea of what I imagined the performance should be; but I had no formal training either to act or direct and no concrete idea of what I wanted to do. Without Anjeli's help (she made me try to perform the first draft script a couple of times very early on; just before I left for Timor on 21st June) I wouldn't even have gotten a script together.
In the end, became most instructive was actually performing—especially the preview performance that we did barely a week before the actual event. Here, I got feedback from the audience, which included both friends, other people in the theater scene and the Chiaroscuro director-mentors. What they said was that I had stage presence and could create tension within the audience, but what the performance lacked were: clarity (movement and speech), effective dramatic build-up and breaks in the tension, and a lack of conveyance of the motivations for what I was doing. I had further talks with Michael Corbidge and Richard Chua in particular, that put me on track to re-work the sequences in the script and think further about what tension I really wanted to convey and how I should convey it.
Thus, the result was that I re-sequenced the script. I let the audience in first, to see the character, lonely and alone, before going into this whole diatribe of how life as we know it is not really life, how everything is nothing—the whole existentialist shebang. I reduced the words and cut the script down by a third of the original. There are three movements in the performance.
First, I show with hardly any words, the lonely writer; alone in her room, writing in a frenzy but finding it hard to concentrate. There are distractions she needs to overcome: street noise from outside the window, which she shuts; food and drink on the table—she’s hungry but can barely stop long enough to have a proper meal; she spills her coffee and almost ruins her work... The reward is finally getting a clear thought through; and she lights a cigarette and enjoys her little triumph.
Second, she starts to reveal what she’s been writing about. She feels defensive, as if her little victory is empty. She lashes out that she, alone in her room, knows better than anyone about what the meaning of life is. But she starts to reveal that this knowledge is painful.
Third, there is another battle: she wants to continue to write, but she is distracted by the life outside her window. She goes to the window and tries to see whether the beauty outside is reflected in her. But it’s not, and she reveals her true fears. That she is nothing, that her life and her writing mean nothing, and she tries to reject all her work.
Finally, resolution: she cannot reject her work nor her life. She picks up her writing and leafs through it, seeing the beauty of the characters she has created. And this is the truth of her life: to produce art, she took herself out of the stream of humanity (even if she suffered for it with her loneliness), but by creating art, she has contributed to humanity. She returns to her table, and as a reward, lights a cigarette.
here's a little self-promotion... heh heh
It was my interaction with the directors and the other actors, that was most instructive. I learnt from their advice on how to better bring out the dramatic tension in what I wanted to convey with my performance, and from the excellent talents of the other actors, I learnt how to use more visual cues and other means like my voice; demonstrating how little challenges (distractions) needed to be overcome in order to win small victories (writing, deserving a cigarette), things like that. I would not have been able to do this alone.
At the Q&A with the audience after my last performance of From the Book of Disquiet, I said something that I hadn't verbalized until that moment: "I could no by measure or account have been considered an actor; but now, maybe I can start to define myself as one."
Nat and Rahiman will kill me for repeating this story, but it really brought home the message. Am I an actor?
screenshots of the DVD that Junior produced for Project Chiaroscuro 2007
In the first place, how did I negotiate between and among the roles of actor, playwright and director?
First, I suppose, I had to grapple with the role of playwright. Rather than use the book as just a point of departure, I really worked more to adapt a 230-page book into 15-20 minutes on stage. This required an intense reading of the book, taking notes, doing further research on the author (especially since his book was semi-autobiographical). What powered me along was the words. Pessoa writes beautifully, and it was a matter of (1) piecing together what struck me the most in his writing; (2) reading common themes throughout what was effectively a journal, and identifying them; (3) trying to form a character. What I ended with, to cut a long story short, is a character who is a woman, a writer, looking for affirmation as an artist and who writes in the belief that her art necessitates cutting herself off from the “vulgarity” of reality and humanity, but at core she is lonely, unloved and thinks that she is ugly.
Second, starting with a script, I had to be an actor and director simultaneously. I had a vision for how I wanted the performance to look (I knew I wanted to play around with a table, chair, notebooks full of writing, a cup of coffee, cigarettes, and a window) and I wanted to convey that the character was alone in her room, speaking to her unseen readers (the audience), speaking to herself. So when I first wrote some stage directions for the script, they were based on a vague idea of what I imagined the performance should be; but I had no formal training either to act or direct and no concrete idea of what I wanted to do. Without Anjeli's help (she made me try to perform the first draft script a couple of times very early on; just before I left for Timor on 21st June) I wouldn't even have gotten a script together.
In the end, became most instructive was actually performing—especially the preview performance that we did barely a week before the actual event. Here, I got feedback from the audience, which included both friends, other people in the theater scene and the Chiaroscuro director-mentors. What they said was that I had stage presence and could create tension within the audience, but what the performance lacked were: clarity (movement and speech), effective dramatic build-up and breaks in the tension, and a lack of conveyance of the motivations for what I was doing. I had further talks with Michael Corbidge and Richard Chua in particular, that put me on track to re-work the sequences in the script and think further about what tension I really wanted to convey and how I should convey it.
Thus, the result was that I re-sequenced the script. I let the audience in first, to see the character, lonely and alone, before going into this whole diatribe of how life as we know it is not really life, how everything is nothing—the whole existentialist shebang. I reduced the words and cut the script down by a third of the original. There are three movements in the performance.
Click here for the full script and images from the performance.
First, I show with hardly any words, the lonely writer; alone in her room, writing in a frenzy but finding it hard to concentrate. There are distractions she needs to overcome: street noise from outside the window, which she shuts; food and drink on the table—she’s hungry but can barely stop long enough to have a proper meal; she spills her coffee and almost ruins her work... The reward is finally getting a clear thought through; and she lights a cigarette and enjoys her little triumph.
Second, she starts to reveal what she’s been writing about. She feels defensive, as if her little victory is empty. She lashes out that she, alone in her room, knows better than anyone about what the meaning of life is. But she starts to reveal that this knowledge is painful.
Third, there is another battle: she wants to continue to write, but she is distracted by the life outside her window. She goes to the window and tries to see whether the beauty outside is reflected in her. But it’s not, and she reveals her true fears. That she is nothing, that her life and her writing mean nothing, and she tries to reject all her work.
Finally, resolution: she cannot reject her work nor her life. She picks up her writing and leafs through it, seeing the beauty of the characters she has created. And this is the truth of her life: to produce art, she took herself out of the stream of humanity (even if she suffered for it with her loneliness), but by creating art, she has contributed to humanity. She returns to her table, and as a reward, lights a cigarette.
here's a little self-promotion... heh heh
It was my interaction with the directors and the other actors, that was most instructive. I learnt from their advice on how to better bring out the dramatic tension in what I wanted to convey with my performance, and from the excellent talents of the other actors, I learnt how to use more visual cues and other means like my voice; demonstrating how little challenges (distractions) needed to be overcome in order to win small victories (writing, deserving a cigarette), things like that. I would not have been able to do this alone.
At the Q&A with the audience after my last performance of From the Book of Disquiet, I said something that I hadn't verbalized until that moment: "I could no by measure or account have been considered an actor; but now, maybe I can start to define myself as one."
Friday, July 06, 2007
East Timor Notebook: Hateh logo, Timor-Leste!
4th July
Somewhere between Dili and Denpasar
It’s the fourth of July and I am on a plane. I took one last look at Timor and its cold, foggy mountains, the 100% cotton clouds, the blue skies.
It’s goodbye to the four little kids in Villa Clara—Acela, Asoko, Abai and Anoko.
Goodbye to Kevin, who could be a pain in the ass sometimes, but was a good guy in his own way.
Goodbye to Humberto and Boni, who were the best Timorese partners possible in a team like ours.
Goodbye to Ainaro and all its cute ponies, piggies and especially the cows that are still animals* and not beef.
Goodbye to the aussies, who were all so kind and were great election observers. Goodbye to Damon and Tom, who let Kevin and me tag along their hike up the hill on Sunday afternoon, to get a good look at Ainaro from above.
Goodbye to all the UNPol, especially Joginder from Singapore, who was always looking out for the tired and hungry at the counting center.
Goodbye to the hard working (and good looking!) UNV peeps, even to the funny German guy who flirted so outrageously that it was amusing.
Goodbye Hans, goodbye Gustav, who were always a pleasure to have around, especially for games of “name the author” and other trivia, on the sidelines of vote-counting.
this way to dili
And goodbye to the team: Jill and her leadership, her attention to process rather than just output, the good food, good wine and good conversation, the cigarette breaks, the airport send-off and the tais; Dee and the lucky lighter she was sweet to leave behind for me—it brought me back safely from Ainaro but exploded last night when it fell out of my pocket at dinner; Bron, who cemented our friendship from Day 1 by suggesting that I move into the blue room and share it with her, her open-heartedness and ready smile; Endie, my first friend in Dili, with the smoke breaks on the veranda and late at night on the back porch, the insights into Timorese society, politics and the international solidarity movement; Jeff, for the trash runs and security checks with the Kiwis down the road; David, Willy, Barbara, Roy, Jakob, Sue, Katha…
I’ve just landed in Bali. My heart is heavy, not for sadness, but because it is full.
* On Sunday morning, after the elections, Kevin and I took a walk down the field behind the primary school in front of Villa Clara. There was a group of five cows, including a couple of calfs, grazing. As I walked toward them, they ran away and it struck me as odd. I realized why: they were acting like animals normally act around humans—evasive and wary, on the defensive—and not like slabs of uncut beef. As Belinda from the Aussie observer group put it: they were still able to express their cow-ness! The alpha cow kept one eye on the herd and one eye on us the whole time.
This was my first trip to East Timor. Won’t be my last.
Somewhere between Dili and Denpasar
It’s the fourth of July and I am on a plane. I took one last look at Timor and its cold, foggy mountains, the 100% cotton clouds, the blue skies.
It’s goodbye to the four little kids in Villa Clara—Acela, Asoko, Abai and Anoko.
Goodbye to Kevin, who could be a pain in the ass sometimes, but was a good guy in his own way.
Goodbye to Humberto and Boni, who were the best Timorese partners possible in a team like ours.
Goodbye to Ainaro and all its cute ponies, piggies and especially the cows that are still animals* and not beef.
Goodbye to the aussies, who were all so kind and were great election observers. Goodbye to Damon and Tom, who let Kevin and me tag along their hike up the hill on Sunday afternoon, to get a good look at Ainaro from above.
Goodbye to all the UNPol, especially Joginder from Singapore, who was always looking out for the tired and hungry at the counting center.
Goodbye to the hard working (and good looking!) UNV peeps, even to the funny German guy who flirted so outrageously that it was amusing.
Goodbye Hans, goodbye Gustav, who were always a pleasure to have around, especially for games of “name the author” and other trivia, on the sidelines of vote-counting.
this way to dili
And goodbye to the team: Jill and her leadership, her attention to process rather than just output, the good food, good wine and good conversation, the cigarette breaks, the airport send-off and the tais; Dee and the lucky lighter she was sweet to leave behind for me—it brought me back safely from Ainaro but exploded last night when it fell out of my pocket at dinner; Bron, who cemented our friendship from Day 1 by suggesting that I move into the blue room and share it with her, her open-heartedness and ready smile; Endie, my first friend in Dili, with the smoke breaks on the veranda and late at night on the back porch, the insights into Timorese society, politics and the international solidarity movement; Jeff, for the trash runs and security checks with the Kiwis down the road; David, Willy, Barbara, Roy, Jakob, Sue, Katha…
I’ve just landed in Bali. My heart is heavy, not for sadness, but because it is full.
* On Sunday morning, after the elections, Kevin and I took a walk down the field behind the primary school in front of Villa Clara. There was a group of five cows, including a couple of calfs, grazing. As I walked toward them, they ran away and it struck me as odd. I realized why: they were acting like animals normally act around humans—evasive and wary, on the defensive—and not like slabs of uncut beef. As Belinda from the Aussie observer group put it: they were still able to express their cow-ness! The alpha cow kept one eye on the herd and one eye on us the whole time.
This was my first trip to East Timor. Won’t be my last.
East Timor Notebook: How did I end up here? cont'd
1st July
Counting Center, Ainaro
The possibility of actually going to East Timor was a kernel of an idea because of the paper that I’m revising. I was always apologizing for not having done any field research to substantiate my paper. I remember writing, at the start of the year, about how I was simply not doing enough with my life, and asking myself: is tomorrow the day I finally go to East Timor?
And here I am.
Counting Center, Ainaro
The possibility of actually going to East Timor was a kernel of an idea because of the paper that I’m revising. I was always apologizing for not having done any field research to substantiate my paper. I remember writing, at the start of the year, about how I was simply not doing enough with my life, and asking myself: is tomorrow the day I finally go to East Timor?
And here I am.
East Timor Notebook: How did I end up here?
30 June. Election Day.
Sitting on a hillock outside a Polling Center, Ainaro
East Timor. How did I end up here? The story as I tell it is this: I’d first heard, even just heard, of the country when I was a freshman or sophomore at don’the University of the Philippines. APCET (Asia-Pacific Solidarity Coalition for East Timor, methinks) had invited Ramos-Horta to speak on campus and then president Fidel Ramos barred him from entering the country. In some circles, particularly in UP—which holds academic freedom above all (or mostly) else, there was a furor, and I was dimly, dimly aware of it. I really don’t know how the incident seeped into my consciousness, but my mind retains an image of Ramos-Horta’s face on a poster about the event. That was in ’93 or ’94. Probably a consequence of international attention on the 1991 Santa Cruz massacre.
santa cruz cemetary
in 1991, to protest the killing of sebastiao gomes, a student activist, hundreds of timorese in dili walked in a procession to the santa cruz cemetary, where indonesian troops trapped the protesters and killed a reported 271 people with hundreds of others injured, hospitalized and 'disappeared'.
In September ’99, I had just moved to Singapore. On the daily commute to hang out with Junior at the Yacht Club, I’d read the Straits Times—its coverage of Southeast Asia especially. Somehow, I followed the developments in the news as the 1999 referendum for independence in East Timor unfolded. I’d complain to Junior: why hasn’t the UN intervened? Then, why have only the Australians sent troops? Et cetera.
In April 2000, I was thrilled to discover the Singapore International Film Fest. My graduate studies and scholarship hadn’t yet started yet, and Junior and I was still living very simply on his salary. I was surviving on a contract for some technical writing (a procedures manual) from the Yacht Club. But I allowed myself this one luxury: to watch as many films as I could in the week and a half of the film fest. One of which was Punitive Damages.
Punitive Damages is a documentary about a young Malaysian student activist named Kamal Bamadhaj. It’s about the underground student movement in East Timor that developed in the 1990s. It’s about the human rights groups and NGOs in Australia and elsewhere that supported this movement. It’s about Kamal, killed among the Timorese massacred in the Santa Cruz cemetary by the Indonesian military. And the case lodged by his family in American courts that indicted the culpable parties, though none have been brought to justice.
At the screening, they sold copies of a book of Kamal’s journal and essays and analyses by his sister, Nadja, of the political context of Kamal’s life and death: the Suharto regime, the occupation of East Timor, and military oppression in other places such as Aceh and Irian Jaya. I read the book avidly and finished it fairly quickly, poring over it through silent evenings in the little bedroom that was home then.
christo rei or christ the king, a massive statue overlooking built in dili by, oddly enough, the indonesians
In Kyaw’s class on social movement theory, I decided to write my course paper on East Timor. I read books and books on the Indonesian invasion and occupation of East Timor and on Fretilin especially. John Taylor, Helen Hill (who I met in Dili, completely randomly, last Thursday!), Noam Chomsky, Matthew Jardine, Constancio Pinto, Ramos-Horta, Joao Saldanha—through these authors, I tried to understand what had happened in East Timor. Pinto, an underground movement student leader who fled to the US, is now ambassador to the US. Saldanha is the lead candidate and president of the Partido Republikan. I attended their campaign rally at Kampo Demokrasya.
So I’ve got this paper. I presented a version at the International Convention of Asia Scholars in 2005 in Shanghai and Kasarinlan Journal of Third World Studies is interested in publishing it.
Sitting on a hillock outside a Polling Center, Ainaro
East Timor. How did I end up here? The story as I tell it is this: I’d first heard, even just heard, of the country when I was a freshman or sophomore at don’the University of the Philippines. APCET (Asia-Pacific Solidarity Coalition for East Timor, methinks) had invited Ramos-Horta to speak on campus and then president Fidel Ramos barred him from entering the country. In some circles, particularly in UP—which holds academic freedom above all (or mostly) else, there was a furor, and I was dimly, dimly aware of it. I really don’t know how the incident seeped into my consciousness, but my mind retains an image of Ramos-Horta’s face on a poster about the event. That was in ’93 or ’94. Probably a consequence of international attention on the 1991 Santa Cruz massacre.
santa cruz cemetary
in 1991, to protest the killing of sebastiao gomes, a student activist, hundreds of timorese in dili walked in a procession to the santa cruz cemetary, where indonesian troops trapped the protesters and killed a reported 271 people with hundreds of others injured, hospitalized and 'disappeared'.
In September ’99, I had just moved to Singapore. On the daily commute to hang out with Junior at the Yacht Club, I’d read the Straits Times—its coverage of Southeast Asia especially. Somehow, I followed the developments in the news as the 1999 referendum for independence in East Timor unfolded. I’d complain to Junior: why hasn’t the UN intervened? Then, why have only the Australians sent troops? Et cetera.
In April 2000, I was thrilled to discover the Singapore International Film Fest. My graduate studies and scholarship hadn’t yet started yet, and Junior and I was still living very simply on his salary. I was surviving on a contract for some technical writing (a procedures manual) from the Yacht Club. But I allowed myself this one luxury: to watch as many films as I could in the week and a half of the film fest. One of which was Punitive Damages.
Punitive Damages is a documentary about a young Malaysian student activist named Kamal Bamadhaj. It’s about the underground student movement in East Timor that developed in the 1990s. It’s about the human rights groups and NGOs in Australia and elsewhere that supported this movement. It’s about Kamal, killed among the Timorese massacred in the Santa Cruz cemetary by the Indonesian military. And the case lodged by his family in American courts that indicted the culpable parties, though none have been brought to justice.
At the screening, they sold copies of a book of Kamal’s journal and essays and analyses by his sister, Nadja, of the political context of Kamal’s life and death: the Suharto regime, the occupation of East Timor, and military oppression in other places such as Aceh and Irian Jaya. I read the book avidly and finished it fairly quickly, poring over it through silent evenings in the little bedroom that was home then.
christo rei or christ the king, a massive statue overlooking built in dili by, oddly enough, the indonesians
In Kyaw’s class on social movement theory, I decided to write my course paper on East Timor. I read books and books on the Indonesian invasion and occupation of East Timor and on Fretilin especially. John Taylor, Helen Hill (who I met in Dili, completely randomly, last Thursday!), Noam Chomsky, Matthew Jardine, Constancio Pinto, Ramos-Horta, Joao Saldanha—through these authors, I tried to understand what had happened in East Timor. Pinto, an underground movement student leader who fled to the US, is now ambassador to the US. Saldanha is the lead candidate and president of the Partido Republikan. I attended their campaign rally at Kampo Demokrasya.
So I’ve got this paper. I presented a version at the International Convention of Asia Scholars in 2005 in Shanghai and Kasarinlan Journal of Third World Studies is interested in publishing it.
East Timor Notebook: You know how people always say that having children will change you?
26th June
Dili
You know how people always say that having children will change you?
Until Gabby, I’d always been dismissive of children. Not that I disliked them. Not at all. There have been plenty of occasions where I prefered the company of children to grown ups. I still remember what it was like, holing out in my bedroom, hoping not to have to entertain my parents’ guests. Seeing affluent foreigners in a country like Burma or Cambodia going all Angelina Jolie with the children had always made me cringe inwardly.
But things are remarkably, remarkably different now.
I see children suffering, little children who should have every chance as anyone to a decently life, suffering, my heart contracts painfully into a little fist, and I see Gabby’s sweet face on theirs, thinking of the impossible.
Oh Timor-Leste.
Maubere, maubere,
stand up, and let me stand with you.
Your wounds are the wounds of all humanity,
your hopes are too.
Maubere, maubere,
you sing without sorrow,
you dance without tears.
Remind us what it’s like
to love a people,
to dream a tomorrow.
Dili
You know how people always say that having children will change you?
Until Gabby, I’d always been dismissive of children. Not that I disliked them. Not at all. There have been plenty of occasions where I prefered the company of children to grown ups. I still remember what it was like, holing out in my bedroom, hoping not to have to entertain my parents’ guests. Seeing affluent foreigners in a country like Burma or Cambodia going all Angelina Jolie with the children had always made me cringe inwardly.
But things are remarkably, remarkably different now.
I see children suffering, little children who should have every chance as anyone to a decently life, suffering, my heart contracts painfully into a little fist, and I see Gabby’s sweet face on theirs, thinking of the impossible.
Oh Timor-Leste.
Maubere, maubere,
stand up, and let me stand with you.
Your wounds are the wounds of all humanity,
your hopes are too.
Maubere, maubere,
you sing without sorrow,
you dance without tears.
Remind us what it’s like
to love a people,
to dream a tomorrow.
East Timor Notebook: What is a full life?
25 June 2007
Dili
What is a full life? Pessoa argues that one should abdicate from life, otherwise abdicate from one’s self. To belong to something is banal. Creed, ideal, wife, profession: prison cells, shackles.
I gallop in the opposite direction. I feel mortality closing in on me and race to fill my life with ideals, with living out my dreams, with pursuits of grandeur, with turning my hobbies into passions. Because it is an effort, there is a skein of falsehood in this attempt. And yet, how can it not be an effort? How can I not push myself to achieve more, to travel farther, and to fill, fill, fill the pages of my notebooks and screens with the words and evidence of the density of my life.
I can’t pause. I can’t stand still. I’m a motor that is constantly running.
Last week, EC tender.
These two weeks, election observer mission in East Timor.
After that, Chiaroscuro.
And now, I am alone with Pessoa’s coffee cup and cigarette, following the blinking cursor to the next thought.
Traveling to Dili was like travelling to any destination I’d gone to before. Sitting here and typing on my iBook, alone in the living room, is no different from staying up until the wee hours of the morning, doing the same thing with Gabby and Junior sound asleep upstairs at home.
Thirty years and I still can’t tell you the meaning of my life.
I’ve tried so hard to be independent, need no one, touch nothing; but without the love and friendship of the people around me, I’d be bereft and forlorn.
I need to be liked, I need to be loved. Respect and admiration are food for the craven soul.
From needing to be the good girl, as a child, I’ve grown to needing to be a great person.
I wish I could write, right now, about all my mundane observations in coming to Dili for the first time. Is this the Dili of my dreams? In that, Pessoa was right: nothing in reality could ever be as good as their versions in our imagination, in the ether where there exists only two: you and your thoughts.
Dili was familiar territory because I’m always carrying around the same baggage of who I am. There is nothing alien about the wide, empty highways and the small, uneven streets, littered with the rubble of 25 years of Indonesia’s brutal military occupation.
You don’t see it in the wide, smiling eyes of the women and children. Children play in the street, scattered by the occasional big vans with “UN” emblazoned on them. They play soccer and own the road. They laugh and practice English on me and on any foreigner they see, probably. They grab at the US dollars of my guilt for being a thousand times more affluent than them. They sing and dance and link hands with you and step forward, step back. Maubere, they sing, man, woman, stand up for Timor Loro’sae.
Dili
What is a full life? Pessoa argues that one should abdicate from life, otherwise abdicate from one’s self. To belong to something is banal. Creed, ideal, wife, profession: prison cells, shackles.
I gallop in the opposite direction. I feel mortality closing in on me and race to fill my life with ideals, with living out my dreams, with pursuits of grandeur, with turning my hobbies into passions. Because it is an effort, there is a skein of falsehood in this attempt. And yet, how can it not be an effort? How can I not push myself to achieve more, to travel farther, and to fill, fill, fill the pages of my notebooks and screens with the words and evidence of the density of my life.
I can’t pause. I can’t stand still. I’m a motor that is constantly running.
Last week, EC tender.
These two weeks, election observer mission in East Timor.
After that, Chiaroscuro.
And now, I am alone with Pessoa’s coffee cup and cigarette, following the blinking cursor to the next thought.
Traveling to Dili was like travelling to any destination I’d gone to before. Sitting here and typing on my iBook, alone in the living room, is no different from staying up until the wee hours of the morning, doing the same thing with Gabby and Junior sound asleep upstairs at home.
Thirty years and I still can’t tell you the meaning of my life.
I’ve tried so hard to be independent, need no one, touch nothing; but without the love and friendship of the people around me, I’d be bereft and forlorn.
I need to be liked, I need to be loved. Respect and admiration are food for the craven soul.
From needing to be the good girl, as a child, I’ve grown to needing to be a great person.
I wish I could write, right now, about all my mundane observations in coming to Dili for the first time. Is this the Dili of my dreams? In that, Pessoa was right: nothing in reality could ever be as good as their versions in our imagination, in the ether where there exists only two: you and your thoughts.
Dili was familiar territory because I’m always carrying around the same baggage of who I am. There is nothing alien about the wide, empty highways and the small, uneven streets, littered with the rubble of 25 years of Indonesia’s brutal military occupation.
You don’t see it in the wide, smiling eyes of the women and children. Children play in the street, scattered by the occasional big vans with “UN” emblazoned on them. They play soccer and own the road. They laugh and practice English on me and on any foreigner they see, probably. They grab at the US dollars of my guilt for being a thousand times more affluent than them. They sing and dance and link hands with you and step forward, step back. Maubere, they sing, man, woman, stand up for Timor Loro’sae.
Friday, June 15, 2007
Chiaroscuro: From the Book of Disquiet (A Script)
Nothing, nothing.
Just the night—
The silence of emptiness—
the space that exists between me and me—
a thing mislaid by some god.
We are death.
This thing we think of as life is only the sleep of real life, the death of what we truly are.
The dead are born, they do not die...
When we think we are alive, we are dead, we live even while we lie dying.
Oh, that I should die--feelings first!
We must learn to sublimate the pure from the contagion of the vulgar.
We must know, immediately and instinctively, how to abstract from every object and event only what is suitable dream material and to leave for dead in the External World any reality it contains...
Harboring no ambitions, passions, desires, hopes, impulses or feelings of restlessness.
The very fact of completing or achieving anything, be it an empire or a sentence, contains what is worst about all real things: our knowledge that they will perish.
To belong to something—that’s banal. Creed, ideal, lover or profession: nothing but prison cells and shackles.
To be, is to be free.
Touch nothing!
Abdicate from life, so as not to abdicate from one’s self.
Do not think with your feelings, feel with your thoughts!
Find for every feeling the most serene mode of expression; reduce love to a mere shadow of a dream of love...
Make of desire something vain and inoffensive, the delicate private smile of a soul to itself...
Lull hatred to sleep like a captive snake and order fear to preserve agony only in its eyes and in the eyes of our soul.
Let pain instruct you. The pain of not understanding the mystery of life, the pain of being unloved, the pain of others' injustice to us, the pain of life crushing us, suffocating and imprisoning us, the pain of toothache, of pinching shoes--who can say which pain (is) worse?... Everything is nothing, and our pain is no exception.
If my heart could think, I think it would stop beating.
A cup of coffee, a cigarette, the penetrating aroma of its smoke, myself sitting in a shadowy room with eyes half-closed...
I want no more from life than my dreams and this... It doesn't seem much? I don't know. What do I know about what is a little and what is a lot?
Summer evening out there. How I would love to be someone else.
I open the window... Everything outside is so gentle, yet it pierces me with an indefinable pain, a vague feeling of discontent.
And one last thing pierces me, tears at me, leaves my soul in tatters. It's that I, at this moment, at this window, looking out at these sad, gentle things, ought to present a beautiful figure, like someone in a picture--
and I don't, I don't even do that.
I'm nobody, nobody.
I am the outskirts of some non-existent town.
I don't know how to feel or think or love.
My life is a tragedy, booed off the stage by the gods after the first act.
I am the long-winded prologue to an unwritten book, a character in a novel as yet unfinished, hovering in the air and undone before I've even existed, amongst the dreams of someone who never quite managed to breathe life into me.
I am... the very prose that I write. I shape myself in periods and paragraphs, I punctuate myself... I've become a character in a book, a life already read.
With all this rewriting, I have destroyed myself.
Everything in me is a tendency to be about something else; an impatience of the soul within itself as if with an importunate child, a disquiet that is always growing, always the same.
... For light fleeting moments, I manage to forget the taste of life, to leave life and noise behind and die, feelings first, into an empire of anguished ruins, a grand entrance amidst flags and victorious drums, into a vast final city where I weep for nothing, want for nothing and not even ask not to be myself.
My imaginary world has always been the true world for me. I never knew loves so real, so full of passion and life as I did with the characters I myself created.
I am the very prose that I write. I shape myself in periods and paragraphs, I punctuate myself... I am a character in my book, a life read.
words adapted from Fernando Pessoa's "The Book of Disquiet"
Just the night—
The silence of emptiness—
the space that exists between me and me—
a thing mislaid by some god.
We are death.
This thing we think of as life is only the sleep of real life, the death of what we truly are.
The dead are born, they do not die...
When we think we are alive, we are dead, we live even while we lie dying.
Oh, that I should die--feelings first!
We must learn to sublimate the pure from the contagion of the vulgar.
We must know, immediately and instinctively, how to abstract from every object and event only what is suitable dream material and to leave for dead in the External World any reality it contains...
Harboring no ambitions, passions, desires, hopes, impulses or feelings of restlessness.
The very fact of completing or achieving anything, be it an empire or a sentence, contains what is worst about all real things: our knowledge that they will perish.
To belong to something—that’s banal. Creed, ideal, lover or profession: nothing but prison cells and shackles.
To be, is to be free.
Touch nothing!
Abdicate from life, so as not to abdicate from one’s self.
Do not think with your feelings, feel with your thoughts!
Find for every feeling the most serene mode of expression; reduce love to a mere shadow of a dream of love...
Make of desire something vain and inoffensive, the delicate private smile of a soul to itself...
Lull hatred to sleep like a captive snake and order fear to preserve agony only in its eyes and in the eyes of our soul.
Let pain instruct you. The pain of not understanding the mystery of life, the pain of being unloved, the pain of others' injustice to us, the pain of life crushing us, suffocating and imprisoning us, the pain of toothache, of pinching shoes--who can say which pain (is) worse?... Everything is nothing, and our pain is no exception.
If my heart could think, I think it would stop beating.
A cup of coffee, a cigarette, the penetrating aroma of its smoke, myself sitting in a shadowy room with eyes half-closed...
I want no more from life than my dreams and this... It doesn't seem much? I don't know. What do I know about what is a little and what is a lot?
Summer evening out there. How I would love to be someone else.
I open the window... Everything outside is so gentle, yet it pierces me with an indefinable pain, a vague feeling of discontent.
And one last thing pierces me, tears at me, leaves my soul in tatters. It's that I, at this moment, at this window, looking out at these sad, gentle things, ought to present a beautiful figure, like someone in a picture--
and I don't, I don't even do that.
I'm nobody, nobody.
I am the outskirts of some non-existent town.
I don't know how to feel or think or love.
My life is a tragedy, booed off the stage by the gods after the first act.
I am the long-winded prologue to an unwritten book, a character in a novel as yet unfinished, hovering in the air and undone before I've even existed, amongst the dreams of someone who never quite managed to breathe life into me.
I am... the very prose that I write. I shape myself in periods and paragraphs, I punctuate myself... I've become a character in a book, a life already read.
With all this rewriting, I have destroyed myself.
Everything in me is a tendency to be about something else; an impatience of the soul within itself as if with an importunate child, a disquiet that is always growing, always the same.
... For light fleeting moments, I manage to forget the taste of life, to leave life and noise behind and die, feelings first, into an empire of anguished ruins, a grand entrance amidst flags and victorious drums, into a vast final city where I weep for nothing, want for nothing and not even ask not to be myself.
My imaginary world has always been the true world for me. I never knew loves so real, so full of passion and life as I did with the characters I myself created.
I am the very prose that I write. I shape myself in periods and paragraphs, I punctuate myself... I am a character in my book, a life read.
words adapted from Fernando Pessoa's "The Book of Disquiet"