HARD TIMES Mababasa an e-book na ini sa paagi na kan computer asin bako kan papel. Bako na siyang hard copy, hardened copy na an uso ngonyan, kawasa. |
Friday, November 26, 2010
Tamis-Anghang
Parents
Some three
Thursday, November 25, 2010
Parents
(Revised Student Workshop Essay)
Parents are the most wonderful persons in the world.
They help us in all aspects of our lives. They are always behind our backs. They comfort us when we are lonely. They also encourage us to go on whenever we fail.
They diligently persevere for our family. They make ends meet just to send us to school. They devote their time and effort—blood, sweat and tears—just for us to continue our studies. For them, education is the only wealth they can give us.
It is a big responsibility to be a parent. They have to bear the duties for a family. There are times when they cannot make ends meet. They find it difficult to fulfill our needs. They give us food and provide for us. But if they see that we also persevere in our studies, for them, it is enough. Because in the end they would want us to finish our studies. Only by then can we be worthy of all their hard work.
Nothing more can inspire them more than the sight of us holding our hard-earned diplomas.
Parents are gifts from God. For one, there is no parent who could not accept us back to their homes after we have run away and realized we are wrong.
At times, though, we feel that parents are the best naggers in the world. Because they find faults in everything we do and tell us repeatedly about it without even asking us why. Perhaps it’s only normal because all of them would want the good for us.
Our very good advisers, our number-one supporters, parents are our inspiration who continually love us despite ourselves.
For all of these, we can just be thankful for what they do for us. All we could do, in turn, is to appreciate what they do to us. And the best we could also do is to love them. Doing so is more than paying back for all their hardships.
In the end, our success would be their greatest achievement.
Tuesday, November 23, 2010
Parents
Parents (A student’s workshop essay)
1. The person who is always behind your back is your parents.
2. They are the one who provides your needs in all aspects of your life.
3. The one that comforts you when you are in the midst of loneliness and failure.
4. They are the diligent person in the family for they persevere the struggle in life.
5. They make efforts in many ways to sent you to school.
6. The griefs, the sweats and even the blood came out to their bodies just for you to be educated.
7. Because for them, this is the only wealth they can give to you.
8. As a parent, we all know that it is a bigger responsibility for them to carry a family on their own especially that there are sometimes an instances that they have no sources of living and that they need to engaged in such ways to have money for you to fulfill your needs.
9. Yet, when they saw your diligence and perseverance in studying it is enough for them that you are paying back all their hardworks.
10. They could be inspire by you that you really wanted to earn a degree someday.
11. Parents are unique creation of God.
12. You could not ever saw a parents that could accept you back when you fall.
13. Parents are sometimes the most nugger person in the family for everything you do they say all the things they wanted to say even those words that could hurt your feelings.
14. But that’s our parents.
15. Very common.
16. An advicer, a number one supporter and inspiration and still love us whatever we did.
17. Let us be thankful for what our parents can only do for us.
18. Let us be contented and love them in return.
19. Paying back their hardships through our success that would consider their greatest achievements in life.
Monday, November 15, 2010
Contemplating Cruz Contemporary
In the heyday of Philippine Panorama’s fiction prize some ten years ago, Isidoro Cruz’s “Chalk Dust” won first prize for 1996. A short story originally submitted to the Iligan National Writers Workshop the year prior to its win, “Chalk Dust” must have won the coveted national literary prize for its sensitivity to the individual plight of the overseas Filipino worker who, for years, has been considered our contemporary national hero [primarily because of the dollars they scrape and scrimp for one of the lamest economies around the world].
Cruz’s “Chalk Dust” weaves a piece in the life of Clarissa, a former teacher back in the Philippines who went to work as a domestic helper in Singapore. After her contract failed because her original employers backed out, Clarissa eventually worked for the Tangs, a couple with two boys—and with whom the story virtually takes an unforgettable turn.
The situation of the protagonist comes in handy—one morning Clarissa is leaving the Tangs. Apart from a cheap card that she gives to Clarissa, Mrs. Nancy Tang has only few words to say to her as she starts for the airport.
The rest of the story unfolds quite symbolically through flashback, a narrative device that best renders a regretful tone—the one portrayed by the protagonist herself. Right away, we get to ask why Clarissa is leaving the Tangs. What must be the reason why she stops employment?
We answer this question by taking the trip with Clarissa as she journeys home. As memories flash back and forth—we are bit by bit drawn into her sad story. We learn that Clarissa was a former teacher back in her country. We also learn that her father is totally outrageously against her working abroad as a domestic helper, lamenting that they had labored much to help her through college, but not just to end up “scrubbing somebody else’s bathroom.”
We then know that Clarissa left teaching because she did not like it, and it didn’t really pay. We also learn that Clarissa could not really stomach her students’ behavior. That is why she must have left the country to seek the virtual “greener pastures,” whatever that means to her. Because the previous employers whom she applied for backed out, we get to know that Clarissa had to make do with what is in front of her nose—she had to work for a couple with two kids.
Through her keen sensitivity, perhaps squeamishness, we also learn that her employers’ residence is a stifling enclosure, squeezed in a rising metropolis, a busy city where probably progress dissipates the very energies of people, and where the only thing you are given to eat is noodles.
In the midst of this cloistered, monotonous life [which she finds too irksome even exasperating], Clarissa does not at all realize that at any rate she lives in a home that instead rises from the stifling smog and pollution which can kill her.
Eventually, Clarissa realizes her work is not much different from her classroom work. Yes, she may have fewer kids to attend to—just the two sons of her employers, but she is rather convinced they are not much different from her students whom she despised back home.
In the airport, Clarissa meets Trining, a fellow domestic helper. Unlike Clarissa, Trining is a “full-fledged” maid, who must have worked for a number of employers already—so much so that she has been going abroad back and forth, seeking to earn a living for relatives back home who rather only tell her what to bring home next time, and perhaps shying away from the neighbor’s prying eyes or gossip about her work abroad.
And unlike Trining, Clarissa cannot talk as much because hers is a different story—she is not happy from where she came. She’s not excited about going home to family with bags full of pasalubong.
Along the way, after all that was said and done, Clarissa vacillates between what has beens and what ifs. Inasmuch as she does not want to return home, she is doing so right now. She is even catching her trip on time.
What has she gone wrong? When asked about her whereabouts, she also wonders why is she going back to the place where she once despised because she did not like it—everything, what she was doing, what she was, what she was not doing, etc.—there. Was it something she did?
“I’ll tell her! I’ll tell her.!”—Clarissa cannot forget the boy’s face. When the mischievous elder son Jimmy saw Clarissa eating her favorite noodle soup, he started teasing her, soliciting the attention of his younger brother Sam, and told him they’d be playing cooking. Jimmy took condiments from the countertop and sprinkled sorts of other condiments on to Clarissa’s soup.
Even when Clarissa tried to stop Jimmy, the boy did not listen to her until he completely spilled what Clarissa was eating. When Clarissa flared up and then physically reprimanded the boy, the situation only got complicated—the boy spat at her, and on impulse, she slapped him until he cried and kicked her away. When the boy cried and threatened to tell his mother, Clarissa equally threatened that she’d burn the whole place should he squeal.
Interestingly, we do not learn whether the boy ever did tell his parents about it. The slightest hint we learn is that Clarissa must have grown tired of her wards’ misdemeanor which, to some, might have been unobjectionable—if one is well oriented enough to work there for the sake of money to send home, or if one is totally disposed to earn money in a foreign country.
In all, she must have only relived the days when she was a teacher, perennially irritated by the slight, mischievous ways by her students, and taking all these things personally. After all, how else can she take all of these, without her being a person?
At least, her employers are quite civil enough to just let her go—no questions asked. Whether the boy squealed to his parents, she can only assume. She cannot demand as to ask them how come she has to go. On the ways with which they rear their children, her gracious employers must have learned a number of lessons in the past—so maids like Clarissa cannot do as much.
The story’s title “Chalk Dust” forges the clearest image for the whole story, as it spells the dichotomy between the good and bad elements of the protagonist’s experience.
She is going home now because the Tangs simply fired her for her misbehavior. Funny that it was her who most probably misbehaved. Once she must have thought she cannot be a teacher. But now she thought she cannot also be a helper—inasmuch as she must have hated the chalk dust, it is also easy for her dust off any irritating situation she finds herself in. Shouldn’t she realize that a teacher is also a helper? Or has she ever realized that?
Of course, the story ends as the journey ends. She has arrived home, but what still pesters her is how that boy made fun of her picture, and made her see it when he put it on her pillow. Clarissa’s plane landed already, but her disgust about the whole thing has not yet subsided—truly, she must have been home now, but is she at all unscathed?
Written in the context of the Filipino experience, the plight of Clarissa spells the struggle for survival in this country where individual’s hopes are shattered piece by piece—what with the crisis they face every single day, always seeking to make the ends meet, until they find some place definite until one day, like Clarissa, they arrive at their final destination some place else—anywhere but here.
In the bigger picture, “Chalk Dust” was hewn just as when the country would witness the tragic fate of Flor Contemplacion, a domestic helper charged of murder of the child of her employers. For months, Flor Contemplacion dominated the country’s headlines, as it was not just the case of one Filipina maid working in a foreign country.
It was rather the Filipinos’ global repute—the sheer dignity that people have come to associate with the “dignity of a Filipino” which reads much like our national pride. Despite the intervention pursued by the Ramos government who was rather concerned with globalization [read: the fast-rising export of domestic helpers,] at the time, Contemplacion still was hanged in the Changgi prison. The most that we succeeded in doing was to immortalize her story via Nora Aunor, whose performance raked more profits for film and media moguls.
Saturday, October 09, 2010
Some three
Jose Garcia Villa
We first meet him as the author of “The Coconut Poem,” a lyric brimming and overflowing with coconut milk and sexual juices whose testosterone-loaded innuendoes caused him his expulsion from the University of the Philippines. Enough said.
But what else could you make of JGV? Never contented with the commonplaceness of the literary environment at the time, the self-proclaimed Doveglion [dove eagle lion] Jose Garcia Villa literally rose among the ranks of writers to his own ivory tower.
An arrogant literary critic who scathed other writers’ works more than cared for them, JGV gained the ire of other promising sensibilities, perhaps primarily Angela Manalang Gloria whose poetic works he greatly berated. No one cared for his poetry which others had declared no more than intellectual masturbations that made only him orgasmic [and him alone].
But when he started making sense to other people with his comma poetry and philosophy, no one bothered him in his ivory tower. Up there, the self-proclaimed prophet of poetry can never be more alone.
Henry David Thoreau
When Henry David Thoreau wrote that he is perhaps most anxious when he is in the throngs of people, he did not really complain of agoraphobia nor did he publicly declare that he admires some of them in private. He merely harped on how man can attain wholeness through self-possession.
Living with Ralph Waldo Emerson could not have made him more social, only antisocial. A religious minister who himself fell out from the fold, Emerson’s influence on the young Thoreau helped create the masterpiece titled Walden, an insightful individualistic journal that highlighted how man can go back to his primal nature and still survive civilization.
But Thoreau’s Walden campout is not just an NSTP immersion; it is a return to man's spiritual nature in which he can rethink his purpose not really by living alone away from the noise or far from the madding crowd, but by practicing simplicity which is man’s true nature.
Emily Dickinson
American recluse Emily Dickinson is one interesting soul who selected her own society, choosing few for many and simplicity for ornament. With her hyphenated--and her Caps and Lowercase intimations about flowers and things, life and death, morbidity and turgidity, she stood out through history as another genius of the language.
Emily Dickinson’s life seemed no more than that of Eleanor Rigby in Paul McCartney’s song--“Aaaaa look at all the lonely people”--and if she were alive today, she would have preferred less than 10 friends on her Facebook account. She would not really refuse a means of networking like FB or even multiply, as she sought to bond and correspond with people following too many deaths in her family.
But would you ever forgive Dickinson for being so selfish she relished her own poetry by herself? Her poetry was made so private by her that her genius was only discovered up on a roof after her death.
Villa, Dickinson and Thoreau must have attended only one school: the University of Solitary where the major graduate paper was an Individual vs. Society thesis. By insisting on individuality in their rhetoric and poetry, consciously or otherwise they defied an existing social order that rather imposed conformity monotony lethargy. All three graduated with highest honors.
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