Wednesday, June 09, 2010

Dear Facebook


It has been noted that you have infiltrated a lot of private lives. No amount of intoxication – neither by liquor nor by prohibited drugs - could even match your capability by ease to let people voluntarily or by others, expose their long kept secrets and love stories and childhood memoirs and high school crushes and first kiss and college boyfriends and girlfriends and embarrassments and weaknesses and other forgettable moments and fun memories of their lives - I included. Your feat has been an upheaval beyond manuscripts, and worse is to see that no one is even willing to be rehabilitated from their addiction of you.

This is in direct manifest that I will face you toe-to-toe. I will not blink, and I will not back off. As you keep following me - that even in my dreams you'd not let me off, so that in retaliation, I will be very vigilant of you too. I will watch your every move, and I will never let you loose. I will hold grip on your every trail, as I try to surpass all your stuffs so you won't be any prouder anymore.

To expose your motives, you have made mimes speak their hearts. You have let people express their opinions and interpret their minds to fit with the flow, or can we just agree and label it as the hype? Yes, you always tend to update fashion every six hours and now people are going gaga on almost everything. I can't call that an upgrade because of your very untimely and ever changing mood, err… mandate! At times you'd even keep people sleepless but tireless, or even preferring virtual over reality in most cases. You've ferried the loudest laughters in zero decibel. What a lame...

You may not have thought at all, but you've crept into a lot of business entities as not many people even send snail mails anymore. Not many people send text messages now because interactivity has been more prompt through you. Not so many voice calls are even necessary anymore as our mobile phones had also been interfaced by you. There are no more photo albums in our living rooms since you became the keeper of our mementos. Tell me; just how heartless and unkind do you even plan to be?

An eye for an eye, I will then collect as many photos as I can and post and share to every human beings around the globe and eat up all your bandwidth until you crawl. I will share a lot of stories for others to comment on, and make you feel so twisted and dazzled on how to catch up or even jump in since some inputs would be traced back even before you even existed. I will proceed with a solid battle plan to invite more friends without any thought of subduing your inhabitants. That the only control I will mend you is to let those undesirable invites just hanging and not out-rightly ignoring them so they'd continue to proliferate some of your strength.

Generally, you just held me clueless of my objective now, and I am not even sure what to jot next. Being perceived as humanitarian - though I'm not sure if you are, I only ask you one single favor.

Got a pill..?

Friday, June 04, 2010

Sweet Sixteen

   
03 June 1994, I told you; “I can’t stand this anymore. We must have been through this thing separately many times. Either we agree to the next level or call it quits”. And you replied, “What about this coming Wednesday?” And that was it! On that 8th of June, we went to Manila City Hall by ourselves - with just about a thousand pesos above poverty line. Single-hood was rescinded, and we went home as couples.

Sixteen years later, here we are. The sail was rough, but the adventure was all worth it. Now blessed with three amazing daughters, that even along the tests of times, if my love for you is a disease, with its magnitude and enormity, I would say that it must have long been diagnosed as benign. My heart only beats for you, and I am sure it shall go on forever. Not because you always love me back, but because I knew that I was cursed to love you.
 

I can not yet say that you complete me, because we still have a long way to go. We are not yet done. As a matter of fact, we must have just come out from honeymoon stage when it concerns our partnership in building our family. As we see our children grow, we are just like paddling off the estuary through the ocean of greater life where the stakes are higher. There is yet a bigger battle to come, and it will be a lot harder, or even bloodier - so to speak. But having you by my side shall make all those challenges far manageable. And I hope you feel the same way my most beloved one, or I may not survive.

For the last sixteen years, we leapt through a lot of stages. And I’m inclined to believe that the scars of our debacles are now dazzling like golden tattoos in our hearts. It’s still a far cry, but then again, we’ve survived another year honey. Thank you for coming into my life… into our lives… and hope you’d hang on for more. Not because you are stuck, but because it is where you belong. You and me to be together until we breathe our last, and our children too.


And to our three wonderful gems, we assure you that we will never cease dreaming for you. We are not yet very proud of what we have done to our family because Papa and Mama will always cling on the vision of a better us, or you in particular. I cry for the moment that you will significantly appreciate what I and Mama will bring onto you, with the hope that your future will be a notch better than we can imagine. So please cling on too, our dearest kids. Continue to shower us of better reasons to smile. Always be the source of our strength, and the wind beneath our wings as we soar higher and higher each day. Inspire us to be on focus, as we promise to dedicate our lives only to you.

And to you Mama, as I pledge my loyalty to our vows, that even without you saying it - I shall always embrace to your assurance that we are in this together. I love you, honey… and I’ll always will.

Happy Anniversary..!

Friday, April 23, 2010

Taki Taki

I’ll be celebrating my 42nd birthday this coming 26th of April, and my mom’s 66th the next day, together with my Uncle Sam’s 63rd. I have had lots of write ups about me and my mom so many times already, so I won’t go to that for now. This then goes to my beloved uncle.

Samuel Ubas Aguda. My mom’s brother. A teacher by profession, and an extended father to all his nephews and nieces by his own choice. He is gay, penniless (I’ll explain this later), and I’m proud to say publicly that he is my uncle.

My mom is the fourth child of their brood, and Uncle Sam is the fifth. They have a 3-year gap, but they share the same birth date. A twin with a 3-year gap, well, we can put it that way. And that may be the reason that they get along so well.

Everyone’s life; relatives and extended families included, he would touch. He is funny, bubbly, and always a party clown. He never misses to give presents on/for any occasion, how humble it may be. Saying he is so dearly loved is an understatement, while to provide balance to that, and unsurprisingly, some hate him too. But that’s just fair; he isn’t gold or a diamond that everyone would love anyway. He takes no offense anyhow.

He spent all his heydays supporting most of his nephews and nieces. He sent them (me included) to college until they had their degrees. Not full and total support, but he shouldered the greater chunk. No money was wasted, and he treated everyone as his own blood. Being feminine, he would quip that the only difference is no one among us came from his womb. With him as guardian, no one felt away from home.

Admittedly a gay and single all his life, some friends and distant folks alike would picture him out to be ‘self-containing’ and flying free like a butterfly. But instead, he sacrificed his own very self for us. Not for our sins, he isn’t that religious, but from the perspective of another hard life. His rules were so simple; convince him that you are good at what you want to be, and he’ll be good to you too - and he’ll take care of all the rest.

Simply put, there was nothing left for us to do but to do well with our grades, of which we must not fail him – and we didn’t fail him. As a fact, if all our diplomas had to be dedicated to him, all his walls must have been strategically covered by now. But he’s got no walls of his own. He is until now renting a room. He moves around everywhere near the site of his assigned school, and we seldom can visit him due to his always changing addresses. But he never fails to visit us. That’s how we stay connected. It’s all him doing the effort to check on his ‘clout’. That’s so him actually.

As a public school teacher, he only receives a very humble income. He had entered into lots of personal loans, now with compounded interest rates, and most if not any of those didn’t serve him at all. He spent every penny for our (us cousins) schooling. And until now he is still paying back those loans, leaving him of almost a nil paycheck. But he never complains. Always all smiles. He claims to be happy of what he does. And we just can’t fathom how to respond correctly.

When one graduates, he’d pick another ‘scholar’ again, and so on, and yes, up to this moment. No one would approach him whom to choose among his siblings’ kin. He has his own formula. It’s still a puzzle that he does this thing when he should already be looking forward to his retirement plans. No house of his own, no savings, only professional kids that are not his – of which are not yet ‘so made’ to be capable of reciprocating the goodness he has mended them (us). No genius would think that his two remaining years could earn him all he needs when he would no longer be teaching (forced retirement for public school teachers is at age 65). 

Of which all these thoughts are coming back to us now. What have we done to this man? Why had he sacrificed all his vigor to better our lives? What motivated him of his wisdom? Is it because he hailed from an extremely poor family, that the long exposure made him so allergy to and so sick from poverty? Boom..! It almost took us forever to find the most apt and fitting answer for that two-cent question.

Now his time is at a dive. Soon he’ll be alone by himself – with only the memories of those little kiddos he had ‘raised’ to become what we are now. Though success is subjective, but comparing to what we were, the leap was just so imminent. I’m hoping for the day that we can repay all the good things he has done. Not on a mathematical basis, but deeper than anything. Though some are showing isolated responses – which he may at times appreciate, I hope we can provide him of all the loving and caress that he deserves for all the kindness that he had bestowed us. Not that he would ask, but because we find it to be our responsibility to give back.

Happy birthday, our dearest Uncle Sam. As you have conquered our feats, we shall forever be loving you with all our hearts; not because you ‘made’ us, but because you are just so lovable, and lovely and all like that. For one, this world is never ever the same without you.