5 Perks & Childhood Memories of Being an Ayala Boy

Being an Ayala Boy is not a choice I had growing up, but even if I did have the choice, I would still choose to be one. Call me anything by being one of the 15,000+ residents of the slum area beside this popular mall, but one just cannot deny the glitter I have all over me being one of the kids who grew up seeing the forehead of the Pag-ibig tower every single waking morning.

#5. The Fireworks

Christmas, New Year, Chinese New Year, and Sinulog—these times of the year call for a quick climb on the roof, laying on my back facing the sky and waiting. Because any minute then, the sky would be filled by hundreds of stellar colors branching to every direction and pattern. It had been an annual sight during these festive occasions that the Ayala men would spend thousands to put on a minute of light show against the evening canopy. How happy were Cabantan’s les miserables for these annual sights.

And during the third or fourth year of the new millennium, a foreign group emerged and took Philippine TV by storm. Prior to them had done the Mexicans. But upon the arrival of this new group, they nearly wiped out to a trace the likes of Monica Brava and Marimar from the Filipino's fervent taste. Of course, who would not fall for these new faces, these boys behind Meteor Rain and “Oh, baby, baby, baby” whatever the title of that one was.

I brought that one above up because I wanted to tell you that as I was watching the fireworks above the Ayala skyline, I was stroking my hand at the same time to the beat of Meteor Rain a la Domeng fucking Su.

#4. The Jogging Gabi

I was a fierce basketball enthusiast when I was younger. Waking up, seeing the shiny forehead of the Pag-ibig tower, and leaping out of bed, the first thing that goes into my to-do list is not breakfast, but taking my daily dose of Vitamin D in the basketball court. I played voracious basketball, and wouldn’t mind the amount of time I had spent playing. I wouldn’t even mind that the sun was no longer giving me Vitamin D, but instead scorching me with UV-fucking-rays. This insatiable greed for basketball games had anyway given me a glimmer of vanity. There was this 3-on-3 league years ago where I was awarded the “Best Player” for the elimination round after bringing my underdog team to the finals, eventually losing in that round to the team who had the MVP for that tournament. But hey, at least I had an award, right? He he. It turned out the whole awarding ceremony became more like a recognition day for a Kindergarten class—everyone brought home an award, including, among many others, “Most Honest Player” and “Best in Uniform.”

Keeping up with the hunger for daily playing meant that I had to keep a fit body—albeit being consistently lean as a Chinese bamboo shrub. The solution to having the stamina for the demanding games? Jogging. Me and my friends turned to this fitness habit sooner as we realized that basketball was every kid’s life. And guess where we jog around for hours starting four in the early morning until when it was bright enough to start playing hoops? Cebu Business Park, I hear you.

Jogging had been a habit of us circle of friends for years, and we only slowed down and began missing set days in the summer when we eventually realized that basketball was just a pastime and not the life that we look up on it to be. Of course, if you stop growing at 5-foot-fucking-3, basketball is but a hole in the wall. But still, the memories of those early mornings are still fresh in my head—and I will never forget that one time when we had painit in a funeral wake held in our sitio’s chapel after a morning of determined jogging.

#3. The Sambag Business

The whole Cabantan street resembles almost the Carbon market. Why, about more than half of the residents there are entrepreneurs of varied businesses. When I was in Elementary, my mother was selling shakes in our neighborhood. I also had friends who sold luthangs and fighting spiders. And I even was the best person to go to for text cards and POG’s needs. Living in Cabantan gives you a huge chance to want to pursuit a business.

And there was this business also that was only open during rainy seasons. I did not take part of it, sadly, but I had a lot of friends who did. Standing by the jeepney stop near Ayala, these mamayongay boys offer commuters coming off the jeepneys umbrellas to cross from the Pag-ibig side to the mall on the other. It was five pesos per head per crossing. It was a promising business indeed, given that a person who had no umbrella would have no choice but to rent one. The demand during those seasons was just tremendously large.

But the business I did have a share was the sambag business. For those of you who don’t know, there had been a time when sambag trees surround the area of the Cebu Business Park like a forest. And having none to do one time, walking casually along around with my friends, one of them suddenly spotted a large sambag tree. I believe it's still standing there presently—the one behind the new building beside the Ayala FGU. The tree was bursting with life and was bursting with sambag hanging on its branches, and my friend immediately climbed his way up on them and picked the sambag all like they were boogers inside his nose. We had a whole plastic of sambag harvested before the sikyu finally noticed us and pretended to give a chase. And we ran away with our treasure.

At first we ate to our stomach’s content the sambag we had collected. But then we found out that we actually had harvested more than we could consume. So we did what one logical Ayala boy would do with the extra sambag. We packed them in plastics—the one used for ice and ice water—and sold them for five pesos per pack. We picked an empty spot inside the public market—which was at that time also our playground—and hang the packed sambag on hooks that were meant to hold meat and sausages. After an hour or so we were able to earn a little amount of money, but were left still with a lot of the sambag, as we only attracted boys and girls of our age as customers and none of the grown-ups to trust the fruit we were selling. I had a large plastic of sambag for dinner that night.

#2. Brownout? No Problem!

One of the most disappointing nights to spend when I was a kid—or even until now—was when we had to spend it amidst a barangay-wide brownout. It’s hot, it’s dark, and the mosquitoes seemed to be having a fiesta on our skins. I’ve missed a lot of Bubble Gang shows before to power outage—a problem too tiny now compared to missing a night without an updated Facebook status and drained cellphone battery because of a failure to recharge it when there was a chance before the brownout. But it’s dismaying, all the same.

The disappointment was more so if the brownout happened during the day and during the hottest months of the year. These were days when no matter how many times you pour yourself with water in a bath, the heat still managed to penetrate your skin, and boy! did that feel insanely uncomfortable.

But the people in our barangay had found a solution to this discomfort. Brownout? No problem! Armed with nothing but the sheer need to refresh ourselves from the heat of the day, we would march down our way toward the mall that was just a stone-throw away from us and window shop our eyes off around its air-conditioned premises. At that time, Cabantan was nothing more than a ghost town void of any proof of human occupation.

#1. Occasional Bragging Rights

Of course, Ayala Boy is what an Ayala Boy is. I went to Mabolo Elementary School during my grade school days, with no classmate coming from Cabantan—students there were going to the much nearer Bo. Luz Elementary School instead. And so when I told my classmates that I lived near Ayala and had a chance or two to share the perks of being an Ayala boy, I became an instant though fleeting celebrity.

Want a sambag?

Her (2013) | Movie Review

Director: Spike Jonze
Cast: Joaquin Phoenix, Scarlett Johannson, Amy Adams, Rooney Mara

This film is a telling of another intricate kind of love story that may not be far to happen in the years ahead. Set in the distant future where every technological gadget is voice-operated, Theodore (Joaquin Phoenix) is shown struggling to understand what has gone wrong with his marriage with his wife Catherine (Rooney Mara) and turns his attention to a new operating system with artificial intelligence and a capability to adapt to its environment. Having been given a female voice (Scarlett Johannson), she then names herself "Samantha" after reading a whole book of names in less than a second.

Theodore eventually grew fond of Samantha in the coming days and began to adapt human traits for herself. She would later ask him what he would do to her if she had a physical body, which he answers that he would touch her and make love with her. The intimacy between them would deepen and they soon had sex, in a manner similar to what we call "phone sex."

This film effectively strikes us with the fact that technology can do so much things in our everyday lives, but yet, it also delivers a troubling possibility of what it might give us in the future with the existence of operating systems that have almost human consciousness. I cannot help but think about the security of one's privacy if ever we would reach this kind of technology in the future. Although the film focuses on Samantha's  rapid evolution in the human field of senses and the eventual conflict that arises, one cannot but think in the side of his/her head about the probable side effects of possessing such system.

The biggest effect of this happened in the later part of the movie when Theodore became entirely attached to Samantha, that he consequently fell into panic when the operating system would not go online. It turned out, after Samantha finally responded, that she and other OSes had undergone a huge system upgrade. Theodore would learn that he was not the only user that Samantha responds to and even fell in love with. Simultaneously, she could in fact interact to hundreds more of users. The heartbreak this caused Theodore, who had felt deep emotions toward Samantha, is pure human and understandable. Later on it became evident the possibility that the system would no longer be available for them, after going on an evolution beyond human capacity and yearning to explore more of their existence.

This film ends with Theodore going over to his longtime friend Amy (Amy Adams), who was also in grief of losing her own OS. They went to the rooftop of her apartment building and watched the sunrise together. The message this sequence entails maybe is the most important, that no matter the advent of high-technology, the greatest emotions are still stored in a human mind.

What's Your Joaquin Number?

When Jesse Eisenberg said in "Now You See Me" that you have to be the smartest guy in the room, I told myself, "Not in my College, sir."

Michael Joaquin, batch 2011 graduate, was the first and so far still the only Summa Cum Laude graduate of UP College in Cebu. And being his classmate for four years plus the three years in High School, I am a first-hand witness to the smart-assery and near extra-terrestrial dedication and wisdom of this man. I had been all ears on every girl he roamed the mall for for gifts, almost always unrequited they were, as well as all eyes for his innocent ability to imbibe lessons like they were food in a free taste booth.

Being a classmate and a friend to him somehow guarantees me a right to feel pride, and then I ask myself, what if there was a number that would describe how much pride you can take from being a classmate to him?

What if there was?

So here are some rules that may make that probable:

1. An initial number of 5 is set to a person.
2. If there was any class that a person has shared with Joaquin in a sem, subtract 1 from 5. The subtracted 1 will suffice for all the classes that a person has shared with him for that same sem, or that same year (e.g. If a student was a classmate in a Math subject in the first sem of first year, and a classmate again in a CompSci subject in the second sem, a subtracted 1 from 5 will do for both classes).
3. And, if a person has another class shared with him on another school year, the subtracted will increment by 1, and so on for another school year. The highest possible subtracted number therefore will be 4, and the range of the final resulting number is [1,5].

So... start remembering that face above now and maybe you'll realize you have more to brag about in the dining table!


Mine is 1. Calculate yours!

Conjecture: Persons with Joaquin number of 2 are lonely persons.

Ed Wood (1994) | Movie Review

Director: Tim Burton
Cast: Johnny Depp, Martin Landau, Sarah Jessica Parker, Patricia Arquette

The year 1994 was a year of memorable and top-rated movies, led by Frank Darabont's The Shawshank Redemption, and Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction. And together with these greats came a biopic of a legendary filmmaker who made movies for his love of it, who rose to acclaim by winning the Golden Turkey's Worst Director of All Time, and who served in the second World War who was more scared of getting wounded--and being patched up in a hospital after doctors would find out about the bra and panties he wears under his uniform--than dying. Ed Wood is Tim Burton's feature on Edward D. Wood Jr.'s life on and off the camera as he tries to make his name in the glittering road that is Hollywood in the 1950's.

Not sure how Bela Lugosi would look like in color, Burton decided to present the entire movie in black and white. I wouldn't have imagined seeing the great Dracula or Wood's Glen or Glenda and Plan 9 From Outer Space in color either. The decision was just fitting and reasonable as it was. So, dissolved of color, the movie just went on celebrating in almost absolute realism the persons behind the two mentioned cult classics. Johnny Depp's performance as the optimistic Edward D. Wood Jr. made for a good tint of color in the eyes of the audience. And although not without some inaccuracies, Martin Landau mirrored to perfection the character of the late Bela Lugosi, eventually earning him an Academy award for his troubles.

Film making is not an easy craft, and it also is not cheap. You have actors and crew to pay, sets to build, locations to rent, etc. Sponsorship is neither hard to obtain. And given the meager credentials of Ed Wood and yet finding producers to finance his films, anyone would still praise the man for his optimism and his innocent love for the craft, and the lengths he had gone to keep on making films, albeit bad ones.

Burton, though, was able to keep the movie out of becoming a mock on Ed Wood and his works. Instead, he had made a great praise on the man, reliving his legacy, and showing to all that passion for what you love to do is more than anything. The movie relived the memory of Ed Wood, the greatness of Bela Lugosi, and the undying perseverance of the people who worked with him.

All glasses to the worst director of all time!

The Prestige (2006) | Movie Review

Director: Christopher Nolan

Cast: Christian Bale, Hugh Jackman, Scarlett Johansson, Michael Caine

A brilliant yet dark story of two magicians gripped by a fierce competition, this 2006 drama film shuns the separation between professional rivalry and personal vendetta, on a stage where illusions are weapon and secrets its gunpowder. The film is an adaptation of the 1995 novel of the same name by Christopher Priest.

Christopher Nolan shared his idea of the novel to be made into a movie to his brother, Jonathan Nolan, after their first collaboration in Memento. The writing process afterward took about five years to complete. Although the final story is faithful in theme with the book, several key points are revised by the brothers, which in turn impressed Priest, calling it a brilliant and fascinating adaptation of the novel. Christopher Nolan then pulled together an ensemble cast of actors who blended well with each other and successfully drove the narrative into a sequence of pictures that makes an audience pick and repick a side to root for.

Magic tricks have always been a thing of fascination to me, especially the secrets behind how they are done. But though I am not a voluntary walker of lengths just to know these secrets, if, say, a willing magician would offer to show them to me, then I should be very willing as well to pay attention. There’s actually a television show about this (Masked Magician, if it rings a bell). The film then came like a Masked Magician to me: showing me the trick, then showing me the secret behind the trick afterwards—old-timey magic tricks. The film is set in Victorian London.

The title of the film (and as is the novel) actually refers to one of the three acts that comprise a magic trick, namely: the pledge, the turn, and then the prestige, in that exact order. Cutter (Michael Caine) explains these acts in the opening sequence of the film.

These three acts are exactly what I felt describe the movie. Christopher Nolan shows us the pledge by letting us see the sequence of events starting from when Alfred Borden (Christian Bale) and Robert Angier (Hugh Jackman) were working as planted audience of another magician up to the incident leading to the tension between them and their consequent one-upmanship. He shows us ordinary elements of storytelling, and at the same time showing us a bundle of tricks—the exchange of stage illusions between the magicians, as well as the left and right attempts of one to sabotage the performance of the other. These made me think and think twice of whom to expect the victor will be in the end. The growing complexity of the illusions, especially that of Borden’s Transported Man, not only made the story more intriguing and interesting, it also made me more eager to know what their secrets were.

The final series of twists in the latter part of the film is what embodies the title of the film itself. The prestige of this whole magic trick of a movie is what gives it the darkness and the drama it surely promised to give. Although this act should make an audience applaud for the trick he/she has been shown, the mere resolution of the conflicts before it was enough to make up the final act in a satisfactory note.

Aside from the grim characters magnificently acted by Christian Bale and Hugh Jackman, this movie also features an unlikely character in Nikola Tesla, played by musician David Bowie. Tesla has been known to have developed the usage of alternating current as a safer means of utilizing electricity, but most of us also know that Tesla’s experiments aren’t all widely covered in the papers around the scientific community. Cutter gives the best description of Tesla in this movie: a wizard—a man who can actually do what magicians pretend they can. Tesla’s role in the story turns the table around for the two magicians and it is with the machine he built that the grimier part of the tale starts.

Revenge, bitterness, and eventual obsession make this movie as riveting as it is; and along with a continuous exchange of twists from both sides, an audience is left to wonder at the end, who is the better illusionist then?

"The Thirteenth Sign" and other stories never told

I started to become fond of writing when I was 11 years old, during my sixth and last year in elementary school. My only influence at that time was these high school literature textbooks that featured poems like Poe's "Annabel Lee," Whitman's "O Captain, my Captain," and some other excerpts from Browning, Keats, and the others, and short stories like Jan Neruda's "The Vampire," and Anatole France's "Our Lady's Juggler." I tried to write my own set of poems and prose and somehow got to finish some verses and paragraphs before concluding how terrible my works had been before (although I still write terribly hitherto).

The first story I finished, or so I remember I did, was some kind of a slasher type of plot, with a serial killer killing scores of people narrated in very bad details. I remember he had a somewhat of a symbol he leaves within the crime scene after every murder he commits, may it be on the victim's body or on the walls or wherever. The symbol was "&" or the ampersand symbol, which I called the thirteenth sign, which was also the title of that short story. Oh, there's the word: short.

A female classmate of mine, aware of what I had been doing, offered to encode it in a computer word processor and have it printed out in a hard copy. I agreed with the offer, thinking how nice it would be to see something you have written getting computerized on a paper, feeling authorship like you have just won the lottery. So the night that followed she got possession of my first and only draft of the story and encoded it on Microsoft Word. She gave me the printed output on the day that followed. Five or six pages of double-spaced narrative about a deranged serial killer and his thirteenth sign.

I took it home like a trophy and showed it to my parents and my eldest brother, who owned those high school textbooks I mentioned above. They read it and the next moment I was at the verge of cursing how bad the work was. It was a work of vague lines and conversations and pointless plot and damn, it was just that bad. My brother told me it was not a short story. It was a "very, very, very short story." I hid it somewhere and I have never seen it again.

The next one I wrote was a zombie apocalyptic story that was even worse than the "Thirteenth Sign." I also have never seen it again.

I wrote consequent stories and poems that were mediocre and terrible, apt for me to become discouraged with writing. For months I was scrawling on random notebooks and purposely bought ones. But I had never written anything that was good enough. I thought, "Yeah, I must have been tricked and made to believe in a talent I thought I had, where I actually do not." I had a writer's block, even if I was not a writer. I dumped writing for the next months.

The light, albeit faint, at the end of the tunnel came during my third year High school, when our English class introduced me to the innocent gem that was "The Last Leaf." It is a short story written by American writer O. Henry (or William Sidney Porter). The story not only inoculated me into a broader look at the craft, but also magically pulled me out of my slump and then pushed my hand to write successive short stories, one after one after another. Although, when I look back at them now, they're still the "very, very, very short story" I had once had made.

But clearly I was starting to show some promise. Or whatever.

In a course of one and a half month, I was able to churn out about thirty short stories, with at least thirty more titles still as ideas in line after them. At that very moment, I felt I had trudged a long trip toward being a writer at last. Then I promised myself that I should be able to write at least hundred before I turn twenty. I was fourteen then, and given the six years allowance ahead of me, there was not a bit of pressure rocking me, sir.

Now, there was this advice given by Stephen King, the writer out of Maine who consistently makes laundry a dirty work since Carrie, about writing and writing successfully--'cause those two aren't the same, obviously. He said that one has to find about 4-6 hours of reading and writing per day, otherwise, one should not expect to be a successful writer. So, yes, talent is, as will be, not enough to succeed. One should add hardwork and patience into the mixture.

But I am a lazy bastard. There had been times when I felt my Panda pen weighs almost as heavy as a fucking bridge. I wrote with the old method of pen and paper back then. Even with the advent and the occasional availability of a computer, I would always prefer to do the handwritten way. So through all the coming years, I had gone in and out of my slump, and the rate of going in defeats the rate of going out by a tremendous odds of 100 steps to 1. I got stuck up with the thirty short stories and eventually I exhausted all the six years without even going halfway of my target.

Of course, the bitter despair following that disappointment was almost immediately dissolved with my fixed thought of changing my path of career. Anyways, it was not about composition or creative writing that I had took up in College. I graduated a degree in Math using up four and a half years. Yes, I found a new love, and it reciprocated me with the same love I had for it.

I am quite good with analysis, so I figured I could pave me some way toward a career in Statistics, perhaps at least. Teaching, typically appointed to a graduate of this major, is but a thing in the stellar future. I would teach someday, but teaching early in my nascent stepping into the "real world" is one I am not considering yet.

So I went on and in a competition with other graduates for jobs in the field away from writing. It had been a promising path, though. I got to savor a more comfortable life from my employment.

But after almost three years, I found out that the heart really tends to turn itself back into the place where it feels most at home, despite having led it into a different path. After days of exhausting myself, days of trying to turn about my body clock, I eventually found myself before a word processor again, ultimately begging that I might get another chance to try it out again. After all, writing proves to be the only thing I can do anytime. Writing is my comfort zone. The opportunity to paint a picture out of words is what I had really needed.

After all the journey into the other roads diverging in a yellow wood, after all the promise of a happy ending in an endless happiness in someplace else, Dorothy had all the point to say, after all, that really: "There is no place like home."

Love is a play in five acts

Love is a play of five acts.

First:

It is an adjective, a multitude of descriptions,

a subject of teeming pictures.

And while it blossoms, it blooms

like a garden of flowers.

Second:

It becomes a noun, following the birth of each side,

a start of becoming new persons.

And while it personifies, it grows

into a mingling of meeting characters.

Next:

It becomes a verb, a succession of effortful actions,

love made into a visible entity.

And while it goes on, it burns

slowly into either of two directions.

Then:

It becomes an interjection, an exchange of outburst,

and a point of making or breaking.

And whether it is one or the other, it dictates

whether the next act is necessary.

(Otherwise, finally:

It becomes a question.)