Caffeinated Conversations

"Why are people online so addicted to over-sharing?" a friend, downing a shot of espresso so ever casually, openly blurts out. He says this with a tang of contempt, bewilderment and bemusement. "Need we see another update on what flavor of cupcake she had?"

"They are asserting their existence." I reply half-bored, partially intrigued as to where the conversation will skew.

"Don't you think it's too much?"

"Depends on your present mood. Some days it gets tedious scrolling on stream  of the most mindless, banal updates. Some days you feel bad that people would rather connect on the most impersonal way, online, than actually meeting up in person, having actual conversations and listening to someone like you whine about people online while downing overpriced coffee."

"Ass. Seriously. It can get annoying. Here take a look."

His phone's social media feeds appears like Paris Hilton and the Kardashians got cloned and all erupt into an updating spree.

"Well?" He presses on trying to extract a reaction or a sweeping manifesto on the sheer mindlessness of online life.

I continue reading my book.

He continues downing his coffee grimly,  his sulk rising every second.

"They are asserting themselves." I say, half mocking his bratty high-mindedness. "The more you are sad and feels that there's nobody who'd ever fully see through your carefully-crafted facade, the more you'd hunger for some kind of recognition. You should be more indulgent to these mindless updates. It's a plea for love. Someone wise used to say: 'The most cruel thing you can do to another human being is to make him/her feel s/he doesn't exist.'"

"Really, Socrates?"

"No, it's actually my Microbiology professor who said that."

"So the people who are not updating a lot are so secure and happy?"

"They are equally sad. They just do not see the need to hang their sadness for public viewing."

"Are they? Who is the happy person then?"

"Finish your espresso. Then take a sedative."

This freak of a friend is giving me equal measures of headache and existential crisis.

 


P.S.

I still need to finish the Dimsum Chronicles. Argh.

Packing for another trip, singing my lungs out

Is the kindness we count upon Is hidden in everyone

He'll rekindle all the dreams it took you a lifetime to destroy

Three Days In The Land Of The Dreamweavers

DAY 01

- Fear of missing very early morning flight. Traded sleep with reading online Manga.
- Airport. Strong coffee. Hot cinnamon roll. Humans you'd genuinely want to be around with. Animated talks.
- Vertigo plagued a friend. On-air vomiting (not projectile vomiting. All the throwing up happened in the cramped bathroom)
- landed. Vertigo hasn't subsided. Compounded by motion sickness on the road. Massage said friend's back while she's agonizingly curled, face buried in the roadside restaurant's latrine. Missed breakfast.
- Made a dent on Dave Egger's The Circle. Gripping read.
- Hotel. Vertigo worsens. Rushed friend to nearby provincial hospital. Missed the scheduled cultural tour.
- Gripped by all the suffering and hopefulness surrounding the ward. All shades, stripes and sounds of bodies plagued by diseases and poverty.
- Finished Dave Egger's book. Feeling partly horrified and angered by distorted idealism and loss of humanity.
- 5pm friend's stable and was discharged. Back to the hotel, tucked her in her room and rushed down to meet two more friends who arrived in the latter flight.
- Governor's Ball. Skinny black denim, black shirt. Red Andy Warhol Campbell Soupcan pocket square. No tie. Feeling reassured on the not under-dressed department.
- Post ball beer-guzzling, drowned in the throngs of quiet revelers. Oddly overdressed in a sea of casually dressed festival goers. Not in the last embarrassed for the out-of-place attire.
- Buzzed by beer. Nerves from lack of sleep. Dove to bed and passed out in a minute.

DAY 02

- Mildly hung over. Hotel breakfast. Vertigo friend recovered and in high spirits. The Sun blazed. Good day.
- Missed the festival parade. Proceeded to the provincial stadium. Almost dozed off from all the long speeches. Cultural show. A blast of ethnic colors, choreography, cants, beats and movements.
- Sister of Congressman smuggled us from the festival proceedings to her house. Served grand lunch. Strong coffee canceled the hang over.
- Artisanal hopscotch. Brass artisan demonstrated antiquated process. Displayed local ingenuity. Felt bad for his living conditions despite his heroic struggles to eke out a decent living.
- Met a living artist. The last of the few authentic T'Nalak weavers. A woman whose creases can fill the pages of a novel yet remained with quiet dignity and detachment. The women in the design mission contingent went crazy buying rolls of fabric she's woven. Her face still haunts me. Regal and sad, submitting to the ravages of old age, yielding to the histories of poverty yet triumphant in its gift of skill and artistry.
- Women went crazy part 2 in the center where crafts are displayed and sold.
- Dinner with the governor. Instant presentation. Very promising development discussed.
- Festival street party. Strong beer. Danced with kids. The four of us getting wasted, guzzling alcohol, flailing hands like wild spasms, not giving a flying fig about the lack of dancing skills.
- Ambled back to the hotel drunk, slurring words, negotiated the grand staircase up to the third floor, not tripping or tumbling down. A triumph of motor skills.
- Threw myself to bed and passed out.


DAY 03

- Drifted in and out of sleep. Tried to ignore phone alarm. Tried to think that if I ignored the day it will go away. It didn't. Bastard.
- Quick shower. Frantic packing. Gone to the lobby to check out. Hung over but managed to smile to the counter clerks and the rest of the group seated calmly on the lobby.
- Breakfast at the Congressman's house. The local sausage wiped out tiredness and sluggishness. Strong coffee, is and will always be, my best friend. My stomach automatically disagreed by instantly producing acid. Ignored and had a second cup.
- Travel to the pineapple plantation headquarters for lunch. Calming, rolling, sweeping hills of pineapples. Pineapples as far as your eyes can see. Passed proud pine trees. A gold course. Rows of american type bungalows. Quick lunch of fern salad, raw tomatoes and dried anchovies.
- Rushed to another district for a quick meeting. Sealed the deal. Feeling buoyant from the progress. Feeling much lighter. Dozed off.
- Airport frenzy. Exchanged hugs and kisses with the hosts.
- Unexpected gusts of wind. Flight delayed. Path leading to the plane flooded. Unzipped boots, rolled up jeans. Boarded the plane barefoot. The cold rainwater sent shiver up the legs.
- Dozed off.
- Landed.
- Friend who had vertigo whisked three of us to an authentic Burmese dinner at her home. Noodle dish. So rich. Explosion of flavor. Feeling less mortal after finishing it.
- Home. Downy white sheets. Sleep racked by unremembered dream.


- An aftertaste of dread upon waking up.

The Dimsum Chronicles - Prologue

Hong Kong, you have changed.

That is a big fat understatement so let me rephrase.

Hong Kong, you unabashed mecca of shameless consumerism, I am both disenchanted and enthralled!

I must have hoarded and gargled on the naivete cocktail because of my stupid assumptions that a decade will not lend significant dents on your topography and personality. Familiar pockets of neat little discoveries are now gone. Alleys of cheap beers and exotic souvenirs are but faint wisps, landmark ghosts, and in their places now stand the proud winking temples of global greed, seducing, pouting, cajoling the impressionable into mindless consumption.

The grit is still there, no doubt, but I am a perverse optimist in my belief that chance encounters with fascinating strangers are the most welcome outcome, and, I suspect, the very core of many expectations on why people can't sit in one spot two years in a row without getting butt sores or yield to the inescapable famine for adventure.

Yet, my naive assumptions notwithstanding, my three days in your dizzying labyrinth of unapologetic sleekness, is one of the brightest spots in a dreary blur of deadlines that has so overtaken most of my recent days, fogs spilling into midnights, swallowing new dawns, that I have totally forgotten that all it takes is to pop a bottle of beer with a friend and unlock a stream of refreshing conversations and inconvertible truths.

I am exhausted today. I had to hit the ground running when I got back. Yet some stories cannot be abandoned or contained.

They swell from the recesses of memories into proper rivers.


-

Speaking In Spheres

In the immediate future I shall learn how to make films and I'll write one with conversations revolving  entirely around this piece:

Looping x Three Tracks

Wait
Send your dreams
Where nobody hides
Give your tears
To the tide
No time
No time
There's no end
There is no goodbye
Disappear
With the night
No time
No time
No time
No time
No time

Light Test Dummy

An alternate career as light test dummy. Very hard work especially if you've been up till three in the morning four nights/days in a row. But someone has to do it. Caffeine made this snap looked vaguely human :)))

The Sadness Of Beautiful Strangers

Sometime in the past I have written about the sadness one feels upon passing beautiful strangers - beautiful strangers who will remain strangers and you feel that deep, curious wave of regret and loss and the kind of haunting that one cannot put a finger on but can sometime recognize with such tender clarity in the gravelly creaking of a Billie Holiday song.

Last year, in one of the most absorbing conversations collected from the Vietnam-Cambodia-Bangkok-Laos digressions, a question was solicited by a restless transient that I remembered while idling in Yangon's airport last month:

"Do people really travel to find themselves?"

Walking home from tonight's dinner with friends, I again suddenly remembered the question. I searched my memory and cannot recall what insane reply escaped my drunken mouth at that time, but the question hit me.

What if the same question was asked of me now?

What if I can revise my inebriated, clumsy reply then?

What if I can say:

"What if...what they are trying to find, they already possess, and all they really need is someone to point inward and remind them?"

Non sequiturs

Whenever I hear anyone mention the words “New Year Resolutions” I have this overwhelming twitch to grab anything blunt and aim three direct swings on whoever was speaking’s head. But that’s outlawed. Which is a shame considering that in so doing you are extending humanity a big favor. Instead, I would remove any form of expression in my face, stare dead on, but in my mind I roll my eyes and start humming a subversive rock song.

So it is my resolve not to make any resolutions. Devoted readers usually crowding the self-help shelves will of course view me like an irresponsible aberration but I am finally getting better at not giving a flying fig about what anyone thinks.

Though quite liberating, this can be a source of mild terror too.

 -

 Not enough memory.

That’s what my Blackberry groans, impersonally, every time I try and snap a picture.

To which, the delinquent brat in me would flirt with the impulse to stomp on the underperforming device or fling its sorry whiteness on the nearby wall. Partly in resentment, partly in protest and partly because that cold auto-response is a goshdarn lie.

The BB memory card is bursting to the seams with memories.

In there swims images snapped from last year’s Ho Chi Minh, Phnom Penh, Siem Reap and Bangkok misadventures. The uncooperative memory card holds random notes that will help shape stories to be transcribed should there be a window in the immediate future to do so. Confined in its bytes and computing algorithms are archives of faces of strangers, curious objects and anything considered to be exotic as tokens and testaments fueled by restlessness and the desire to leave comfortable rooms.

It is loaded with memories; it’s the availability of storage legroom that’s just missing.

-

January 2013, I found myself in Myanmar. A multi-sensorial paradox.

But I am not giving Yangon justice by summing it up just so.

All I wish is for summer to come soon, a little spot somewhere with a hammock and, in the lazy afternoons, write properly, contently, retracing the misadventures and rediscovering them like a box of childhood trinkets, then to drown in the gush of familiar feelings you thought you have misplaced.

-

Pretoria, South Africa popped into March’s work itinerary. High time to invest in a proper camera. Though the mind can amazingly pickle things for eternity but when a memory blurs, what comes out of a proper camera will be cherished familiarity.

-

Authenticity.

The very word that induced tears from a smart, overly-achieving, energetic woman who at a very young age was a delegate to this year’s World Economic Forum.

We have decided to meet in the obscenely-priced hipster café slash bar slash deli and the meeting was framed around the idea of catching up, explore a collaboration and map a strategic branding initiative for projects of common interest.

What we both haven’t predicted was how, without admonition or preamble, the antiseptic formality of the business agenda drifted into a conversation on authenticity.

I was talking, without noticing, that my vocal decibel changed tack. I was speaking in a cadence that, I wasn’t aware until too late, bordering into an odd alternate of bruising guilelessness and emphatic tenderness and when I looked up from stirring my cup her eyes were not only welling but streaming.

She told me that I hit the nerve and I totally nailed how she felt about the complex partnership she had with her co-founders in a social enterprise. The difficulty to assign proper words for all the struggles. That I spoke the truth and articulated everything she was grappling to come to terms with.

I told her I wasn't pulling a gambit. I was describing the things the way I truthfully saw it. And there should be no other way of putting it.

I walked home, a block away from the café, authenticity, that seemingly innocuous word, floating in my mind like a dandelion hovering in the eye of a hurricane .

Siem Reap

Mess Saigon

And here's the song looping in my head upon leaving Ho Chi Minh en route to Phnom Penh:

I'm Hungry, Therefore I'm Ugly

In one of those rare instances when I actually find idle gaps and manage to sit down in front of the idiot box, I punch the clicker southwards of the channel menu with a partial nervous twitch.

I mention this because when I say southwards of the channel menu I mean local channels. Now before you jump into accusations of elitism and fire off an angry, flaming remark in the comments section, may I remind you that I grew up during the '80s, which means, for my generation, cable is not a television subscription service but a wire connected to an antenna that someone has to keep on rotating to get better screen reception. Don't laugh, this is serious business and woe is the man who will be forced to climb up the rooftop to shake the antenna when the screen goes all zigzaggy during a crucial third quarter of a basketball game, the particularly tense scene in Regal Shocker, or for some people, the Q&A segment of a Ms. Universe coverage.

The point of all this is: I have a particular affinity for local programming. Until this past decade when television  stepped on the banana peel of "masa" ratings war, slid off into the mediocre ditch and was unable to get up.

So you must understand the neurotic anxiety of clicking into a random local channel and beholding, say, Daniel Padilla singing, hellbent into making music obsolete.Or having your lunch soundtracked by aimless banter, over-recycled jokes and a menagerie of unbelievably untalented starlets in tacky cocktail outfits being serenaded by matinee idols who sound like they are in the middle of a massive hiccup and about to throw up undigested squirrels they had for lunch.

I exaggerate.

And if you thought that you have descended into the abyss given the sorry state of local programming, the advertising will confirm your suspicion that Hell has no basement. Majority of local advertising are flickering proofs that Hell is a bottomless well.

I exaggerate. Or am I?

So I cheer a little bit every time I wander into the gates of hell and beheld this ad:



The first time I saw this work my auto-enthusiastic exclamation was monosyllabic: "WOW!"

It's a very classy, sophisticated piece of work. Spiced with double entendre and sexy innuendos, the rich visuals and that sparkly-sexy-moody music delivers the message across smartly with panache, puns and pitch. Work of this caliber is to be encouraged - it's a testament to the brilliance of its creators and the courage of the client who refuses to give in to the least common denominator school of ad-making.

Then this humorous piece came later on:



Again, a hilarious take on most Filipinos' habit of making 'kupit' if he can get away with it. The punch line is a direct pun. Good job!

Just when those two ads seem to be a fluke - random bright sparks in the sea of triteness, I encountered this one:



It stops just right from tipping towards saccharine cheesiness and charms your socks off with its unapologetic, sheer optimism!

Just when every smart viewer was deeply convinced that there is indeed a bright spot in local advertising, and that the client-agency relationship must be on perpetual honeymoon given all the client trust-creative output ratio, this ad just might change all that:



I was passing through my living room, rushing towards the bathroom when this spot hit the screen.

I froze on my tracks, chilled with disbelief.

My jaw hit the parquet with a comatose thud.

What is the message here?

Hunger results to ugliness and expensive meals make it doubly ugly. Get the value meals and as the chirpy girl cheerfully exhorts the viewer "Don't get hungry, don't get ugly."

Now people who know me will attest that I am one of those folks with the most warped sense of humor. Twisted things amuse me and I take every absurd situation with a pinch oh hilarity. Hey, I laugh at everyone in the same measure I laugh at my very own idiocy.

But P50 McSavers Meal #dontbepanget seems to be an exercise in lapsed, misfired judgement. I'm all for a good joke, for not steering everything into UptightTown.

However, try and look into the context of  the huge slice of the population and this ad will have a different flavor.

In a country bursting in the seams with people scraping barely to get out of the gaping poverty trench, I am not sure it is an appetizing proposition to tell all the hungry people that they are ugly.

That anyone without fifty bucks and suffering from starvation is hideous-looking.

The whole spot runs for thirty seconds but the cringing, unpleasant aftertaste stays with you all day.

Hoodlum Humor

Esquire UK initiated me to the riotously sick comic world of Dagsson a long time ago and his insane sense of humor can hook you like an asteroid to a black hole.

In that illustrious magazine's twisted cartoon a stick figure woman was extending her hand to another stick figure man. The woman’s quote balloon says: “How do you do?” and the charming man say “I was masturbating.”

Obviously this is not Sunday school catechism material.

Do The Pressure

Publicity put it that the strategy behind this Coke ad is to highlight how unique people handle massive pressures differently and here illustrated two minutes between sets of what appears to be a rapturous gig and the spectacular Duffy biked her way through a supermarket singing with her trademark raspy version of the Sammy Davis Jr. classic I Gotta Be Me. This speaks directly to me and I'd love to follow suit (and finally buy a bike) and plow my way through the downstairs Seven Eleven franchise.

I'd probably get apprehended and detained.

Speaking of pressure, isn't this another gorgeous version of the Queen classic?

Apartomatic

Great credentials (mother, wes anderson, roman coppola), achingly fantastic art direction, wit and sophistication. neat, stella artois! this will be a great flat to have!

In Flight Entertainment Is No Longer Limited To Winning Merchandise

Aviation need not be a stuffy sector and innovation is most welcome but I was speechless at Cebu Pacific’s latest “innovation.”

I am no prig, but this makes my molars grind in disbelief. Flight attendants are beacons of dignity: you have to respect them as authoritative frontliners with impeccable manners, polished behaviours and unshakeable air of graciousness and pride of her job. This is supposed to be fun for Cebu pacific but I hit the replay button in hope that the “fun-ness” of it will win me over with repeated viewing (sometimes things just grow on you) but I still have that sinking feeling of disappointment. I fly Cebu Pacific all the time and Fun Games is cool but this stunt robs the hardworking flight attendant a sense of nobility. Aviation is not a chorus line for Wowowee, Eat Bulaga or Showtime. There is a need for us to trust and respect the men and women who ensure our well being thousands of miles above the ground. It is humbling enough to serve every whim of people much lesser than you are; it’s demeaning when your safety precaution measures/message is drowned by ghoulish pop tune and bad choreography.

Passengers should pay attention to instructions, not swaying hips and jiggly boobs.

Floored

Precisely what came to mind, this particular episode/song from Across the Universe, when I suddenly remembered you.

Page Fetish

Rescuer of Makati pusakals slash Dutch lensman Mark Mulder messaged me straight from Amsterdam a couple of weeks ago. His earthshaking question via SMS centred on my favourite fixation: what kind of magazines do I want for him to bring back to Manila? Friends would know that the question is like asking whether I prefer crack or heroin. My thumb automatically zipped through my phone’s keyboard spelling out a hard to get title. Mr. Mulder however surprised me by adding these two titles in his pasalubong bag. I have back issues of Sleek Magazine and I welcome into my ever expanding collection of print fetish the edgy Blend\ Magazine. Thank you very much Mr. Mulder and Marvie for lugging the titles all the way from Netherlands! (See you on your housewarming!)

Excuse me while I inhale fresh ink and fondle gorgeous paper.