Caustic Thoughts
Random funny thoughts with a taste of Pinoy and a hint of acid.
The King of Pop Michael Jackson and 70s sex symbol Farrah Fawcett were reported dead, June 25, 2009.
Jackson was found unconscious and was no longer breathing. The official cause of his death was cardiac arrest. He is survived by his three children, Prince Michael I, Paris Michael and Prince Michael II.
Fawcett succumbed to anal cancer after three years of fighting her illness. She is survived by her partner Ryan O’Neal and son Redmond O’Neal.
May they rest in peace.
I am an addict, a TV addict that is. Unfortunately, my only real options right now are the two warring local networks that continuously shove melodramatic fare that’s either too bad to be true or just plain bad. That’s why I was drooling yesterday when I saw that new small 18 inch dish perched on a neighbor’s home.
I’ve been thinking of getting DreamTV too which is what is available right now in my area but I wonder if the cost is worth the limited channels I can access. I still wish we had Direct Satellite TV here. With more than 200 channels to choose from, I’d have died and gone to TV heaven.
Like DreamTV, Direct TV works through satellite transmissions. Ground facilities transmit programming to satellites and satellites transmit back to viewers’ dishes so you’re sure you’ll get what you want to watch in full digital clarity. This is a more reliable option than cable and plain local TV.
It’s a bummer being a couch potato when I can’t get my hands on Satellite Directv.
I’ve been asked why I bother to keep this blog. It’s obviously worth less than the time and effort it takes to maintain it. I am more likely to attract flies than rabid hordes of fans with it, although I think flies are a better option than contracting rabies.
My stubborn loyalty to my first ever crib online can probably be attributed to a flaw in my character. I can never let go of something I’ve begun even when my creation and I have become mutual parasites. But of course, being human, I prefer to paint my character in a better light so I have to create a nicer excuse for keeping this dead weight of a blog. I can always adopt the usual excuse and say that it is all for the sake of therapeutic self-expression, but I’d like to be original so I’ve deluded myself (like a virgin bride on her wedding night) into believing there’s something more.
My excuse has its roots in college. I used to be able to write in a way that would give my readers nosebleeds. Friends and teachers told me I had the potential to become one of those non-bathing, obsessive compulsive magnets of priceless (because they have no value in a pawnshop) literary distinctions, and then I graduated and reality took over.
True enough, all the jobs offered to me involved writing in some form but I was told not to write in a nosebleed-inducing kind of way because tissue paper prices were at an all time high and clients tended to balk at the idea of having to stock piles of tissue paper just to read my work.
If I insisted on writing my way, I had to become a literary writer instead. I was told though that in the Philippines, a literary writer can only hope for a comfortable life if she learned to write not just to induce nosebleeds but to induce hemorrhages, if she took more brain-killing higher studies and if she taught classes of fresh rebels who will make fun of her diction, her stone age fashion and her nose hairs for the rest of her monotonous life.
So I HAD to learn to write in a way that would not cause bloodshed of any kind, otherwise, I’d be the one shedding all sorts of body parts including my sanity for lack of financial resources. The end result is that I’ve forgotten to write in my materially unrewarding style.
This blog is an attempt to keep in touch with a small fraction of who I was as a writer before. But hell were they ever right. If crime does not pay, this pays even less.
My parents raised me to be so independent that I rarely ask for help for anything even when College Algebra nearly killed me. I mostly get by on my own steam which explains why I’m still lost in the middle of the
Because I have only one obvious skill (my other skills are hidden behind a veneer of sarcasm), there is only one kind of help people ask from me. They ask me to write. I’ve written reports, assignments, love letters, resignation letters and fake excuses all in the name of kinship. People apparently think that, just because I know my letters better than my numbers, I can sit in front of a keyboard blindfolded and write a thousand page philosophical exposition on mice and men.
As every writer would know though, writing is never easy. Since I’ve had to write so much lately, every extra piece I have to do is as appealing as a pail of vomit. Every time I write it feels like a brain cell just expanded and went “pop.” If I had to lose my brain cells with such certainty, I’d really rather get paid in cash or in ego credits.
Do you want to know how to write so you can spare that poor crippled bastard whose been doing your reports for you for free? I have one piece of advice: READ like a rabid reader and then you will learn how to write and then maybe you’ll understand too what it feels like to be asked to die slowly for free.
By the way, I’m not as unfriendly and as unaccommodating as I sound. I happily help people who can help themselves to some extent first.
There are worse things than death. Apparently, one of them is being a writer in the Philippines. Be a journalist and expect to disappear into another dimension or to have a shorter lifespan than your 90-year old diabetic grandmother. Be an online writer and expect to wring your brains dry for the cost of a meal a day. The worst fate however is reserved for the serious creative writers, many of whom have to rely on the mercy of their long suffering parents and relatives for their meals and whose talents are largely met with a “Huh?!” by the uncomprehending public.
Two Filipino authors in my reading list seem to confirm the sad state of books and book writers in the Philippines. Conrado de Quiros says writing books in the Phillipines will only earn you enough beer money. Bob Ong also says in one of his books that it would take a good Filipino author 3 years to sell at least 1,000 copies of his books. To survive as a writer in the Philippines, you need to have a full time job you partially hate, be an enterprising businessman or have a face as thick as the telephone directory so you can live on donations from people who constantly mistake (or not) your pensive mood for hunger.
I must confess, despite my claim of wanting to work again as the head of a corporate firing squad, I have this subdued suicidal wish to one day become a great book writer. By “great” I could mean great as in popular great or great as in, “I feel great but I am dirt poor but that’s okay because I am an intelligent artist who will have her rewards in the after life granting that the Filipinos in heaven or hell are more inclined to read books.” If one of my evil friends becomes a supervisor in hell, I will ask him to make reading my books a requirement.
Of course, that’s even granting that I have talent at all. How can you tell if you have talent to justify making a career suicide for the sake of art? How can you tell if you’re not the only one who thinks you’re talented? How can you tell if your mother isn’t bleeding her pension fund dry just to buy 1,000 copies of your work?
While you are helping me answer these questions, do drop by the local bookstore and help me support our great (popular and “I feel great”) writers. Buy their books and get a bonus freebie– improvement of the dwindling national collective intellect. Here are only some of these great authors:
1. Bob Ong
2. Pol Medina, Jr.
3. Jessica Zafra
4. Ambeth Ocampo
5. Conrado de Quiros
6. Cristina Pantoja-Hidalgo
7. – who, if she finds out more than ten people think she has enough talent will publish books entitled: Memories of Sanity, Save Me From Extinction and I’m Going to Die Poor Because I Think I’m an Artist; What’s Your Excuse?