As happy as I am with the way my life is going on right now, I can’t help but be a bit anxious.  It never occurred to me until now that next year is the beginning of the rest of my life: I thought I was struggling then to make a career, but 2008 will be a year I bet I would never forget.  Or that I would do everything in my power to forget it.

   Oh that’s right: 2008 didn’t happen yet.  As my mom says, I’ll have to cross the bridge when I get there.  But I’m already at the bridge: crossing it is a whole different story.

   What’s getting me really, really anxious is the ICWSM conference for March 2008.  There still isn’t word on whether my paper got accepted or not, and I’m working on my poster presentation just in case.  I took a gamble on it, knowing that I don’t have the credentials or the academic backing.  It’s me going for the kill, but there are a few things in the way.  Few, really big things, one leading to another.

   I did some calculations a few weeks back, and did them again today, and figured that I would need at least P100,000 for everything: plane tickets, registration fees, accommodations, and pocket money.  I understand the apparent reluctance of funding institutions when it comes to matters like these: I don’t have a masteral degree or a doctorate, and given the state of the economy, I am asking for too much.

   I could write the powers-that-be at school to ask for money, but UP is hard-pressed for money, too, and I could understand that.  I understand that the priority when it comes to conferences are faculty members, and I understand that there are still “political” things involved in getting funding for anything in UP.  I should know.

   So I decided to take up a job to earn what I can to partially cover a prospected trip to the US.  But I can’t earn that much in two-and-a-half months: I’d be lucky to cover my pocket money or my registration fees.  But I won’t hear from the company until January: even if I saved up every cent I can in my allowance, I wouldn’t be able to pool up the money in time.

   I’ve pulled rabbits out of the hat before, but this has got to be one of the toughest challenges I’m facing right now.  I laid it all on the line a few weeks ago, knowing that whatever I’m going to do back then maps out not only the rest of my life, but my place in the world.  And it makes me - no, forces me - to think about where I am and where I’m going, and how many times I forced myself back in line when I was way off it.

   Come to think of it, I always followed my own line, if not the line I always thought to be mine.  As I moved back, forward, sideways, and all ways, the line moved.  When I crossed the line, so did it cross me.

   Disclaimer: I’m not a sexual beast, nor am I sexually preoccupied. 

   Yesterday’s entry was about a hypothetical porno movie about lechon, and it makes me kind of rethink the whole idea of porn in general.  Even if pornography is a multimillion dollar industry, it’s still pretty much illicit.  “Immoral,” even.  The conservative right would rather have it that the mere possession of porn be made illegal and criminal: Sen. Loren Legarda, for example, made waves in shutting down BoyBastos.com.  “Investigative reporters” with weekend shows make headlines out of busting porn rings and nightclubs.

   Like marijuana and herpes, having porn is one thing: hiding it is more important.  DVD hawkers, for example, sell X-rated DVD’s behind displays of pirated martial arts movies that feature Jet Li or Chuck Norris.  In Internet shops, surfing porn means really small browser windows.  Internet-sourced porn are hidden in folder trees or in ZIP files.  There’s no shortage of gay and lesbian MPEG files in the Internet.  This basically means that if you really have to have porn, you have to hide it.

   Rather than talk about porn movies, I delimited this experiment to kinds of porn accessible to many people: novels, magazines, and Internet porn.

Smut novels

   Before the Internet, “porn” was more of “smut.”  This basically meant sexually-charged novels.  (Vladimir Nabokov’s “Lolita” is not “porn” per se, but a classic piece of 20th century literature.)  Novelists like Harold Robbins and Irving Wallace, for example, became famous in discount bookstores for their very libidinal works that dealt with showbiz and sex: Robbins, for example, peppered his novels with sex on every chapter, and Wallace’s formula for sexing up his novels was to do it in each quarter of the novel.  Sidney Sheldon’s familiar solution was to put mild descriptions of sex in the beginning and towards the end, but puts graphic detail in the middle.

   But even before the romantic American novel, there were really “pornographic” novels that surfaced and made their marks in literary history.  The French are particularly famous for this, like Pauline Réage and Anaïs Nin are particularly good examples.  Réage’s “The Story of O” dealt with sadomasochism, and proved to be the quintessential model of hardcore porn films in the 1970s to the 1990s.  Nin’s “Delta of Venus,” considered by many literary critics as the most erotic novel of the 20th century, was basically a collection of short stories that talked about sex from a feminine viewpoint.

   While Réage and Nin are considered to be the mistresses (no pun intended) of porn, I think that “real porn” was “invented” at the turn of the 19th century by the Marquis de Sade, in his works “Justine” and “The 120 Days of Sodom.”  “Sodom,” in particular, would have even the most perverted of Literotica.com subscribers cringe with its graphic descriptions of torture, rape, and murder.

Tijuana bibles, “Heavy Metal,” and smut periodicals

   “Playboy,” “Penthouse” and “Hustler” are tame, and even classy: there’s nothing morally wrong with the photographic portrayal of nude women in my view.  There are, however, certain exceptions to the rule: in this section, I tackle a few of them.

   Tijuana bibles - or “Playboy of the 1920s” - are short pamphlets that tackle such sexual themes as bestiality and interracial sex, among others.  In “The Green Mile,” for example, a Tijuana bible is shown being read by one of the prison guards, concealed under a thick book.  Basically, a Tijuana bible is like a “Bazooka Joe” strip.  With the advent of glossy magazines, porn really came to fruitition.

   In the 1990s, the comic book “Heavy Metal” was the dirty little secret of many an elementary school kid: back then, some of my classmates were corporeally punished for having the magazine.  It’s more like hardcore sci-fi that involved muscle-bound women and machines.

   For the masses, though, P5 street tabloids became their dirty little secret.  Until now, sex tabloids represent a powerful force in shaping public opinion.  While “Bulgar” and “Tiktik” represent the archetypal smut tabloid, more and more tabloids have surfaced that serve the public right to be informed… about sex.  You have “Nightlife,” “Ang Playboy,” “Toro,” the list goes on.  National issues take fourth fiddle to the things that matter more to the readership: showbiz, sex crimes, and sex.  The reportage encompasses rape, sex scandals, and tips on sex.  There is no shortage of “news” in 75-year-old women getting raped on a news week.  “Xerex Xaviera” and “Roma/Amor” became part of Filipino popular culture for sex stories.

Internet porn

   With the Internet, porn became much more ubiquitous, even omnipresent.  Havoc was wreaked in flash drives and computers all over the world for viruses that came from searching porn.  With the Internet, porn became readily available and readily consumable: it’s no longer like an awkward moment in a drugstore to buy condoms.

   Internet porn made even illegal and morally-bankrupt porn readily available, raising global concerns on the proliferation of child pornography.  Global legislation and action made watchdogs like Cyber Angels and the End Child Prostitution, Child Pornography and Trafficking of Children for Sexual Purposes (ECPAT).  This raised - and continue to raise - debates on the matter of censorship and free speech (more on that next time).

Porn: quo vadis?

   The debate on porn raises so many questions: is porn the cause of sexual crime?  If we see porn as an effect, what causes porn?  With the Internet, new directions for porn have risen that it almost becomes a Quixotic struggle to battle pornography.

   As a passing “anthropologist,” I look at porn as not a dysfunction of society, but has become a function of it.  I did not define porn here because there is a certain stigma attached to porn: a moral stigma, an ethical stigma, a political stigma.  Sex, hidden from view for so long, has taken the character of the monster under the bed.

   Like I said before, if you have porn, you have to hide it.  Not because it is meant to be hidden, but because the function of it in society is to be hidden and deemed to have a corrupting value.  Porn is like many things we hide: corruption, Angst, among others, that contribute to how our society works.

   Eliminating porn, to me, is not only a matter of factoring out porn from the complicated equation that is society, but to reconfigure society in general to situate where porn belongs in the order of things.  This will involve a lot of critical assessments and debate: meaning we should take all sides into account.

   The dirty little secret that is porn will continue to hamper free and open communication.

   This isn’t about that old French porn movie shown in MEGA that involved erotic acts surrounding cheesecake and French actresses play-acting and role-playing Japanese geishas in a lesbian scene.  Nor am I saying that you can make a Filipino art-porn movie that involves lechon.

   If anything, I like lechon.  Yet whole roasted pig can only go so far: there’s a certain limit to the consumption of it.  The crispy skin eventually degenerates into a chewy unappealing mass, and the meat becomes a chore to eat.  There really isn’t anything you can do to resurrect an appetite for lechon, when all there is to do after is to make lechon paksiw.  As such, as a holiday dish, it is overrated.

   Of course, I’ve been known to despise a lot of foods in my time: pizza, cake, banoffi pie made by chain restaurants, gourmet coffee, pancit canton.  Lechon should be served sparingly: piling it into your dinner plate is not only scandalous, but strangely unappetizing.  I wouldn’t have problems eating the head, however.

*     *     *

   I have the feeling that this will develop into a sexually-charged entry.  A sickening feeling in the pit of my stomach.  After all, I started it: on this day of days, of all days.

   I can’t get the image of making a pornographic film centered around the theme of lechon out of my head, but of FAMAS or MMFF material (the latter sounded so wrong).  Something like “Lechon de Leche,” perhaps.  I’m not talking about another gay indy film that revolves around “Brokebacking” the whole idea of lechon roasting, but the kind of bomba film that would draw dirty old men into dank back-alley cinemas and have another taste (so to speak) of the 80s.

   Films like “Kangkong” and “Itlog” were disappointing: water cabbage or eggs didn’t really develop as central themes in both movies.  What I’m planning to do with “Lechon de Leche” is to capitalize on the heat of the roasting yard, the stench of the pigs, and sprinkling in liberal amounts of raunchy, filthy sex.

   I’m thinking of the kind of dumb porno in Filipino sex films: perhaps a scene near a pit of smouldering coals, a kinky scene involving a roasting spit.  For those who like idiotic seductive scenes, I have plans for my leading starlet to dance with a crispy roasted pig and end up so oily, greasy, and dir(r)ty.  I even thought of some really, really stupid dialogue involving a jock selling the lechon and the starlet buying it:

Jock: Malutong.  Kaluluto lang.
Starlet: Malaki.  Mauubos kaya?
Jock: Mauubos yan.  Masarap ang sarsa ko.
[Jock and Starlet lock eyes, then have sex on the chopping block]

   And then there’s this:

Starlet 2: Pakitanggal mo naman yung bituka.  Gusto ko laman lang.
Jock 2: Sandali lang.  Kikiskisin ko lang sa loob.
[Starlet 2 and Jock 2 lock eyes, then have sex on top of the lechon]

   This will resurrect careers.  Or kill them.

   Like many unemployed 22-year-olds who happen to be convenient uncles, people don’t understand my limits.  Especially my nephews and nieces: until such time that I have a source of income, I can’t give away aguinaldo.

   And like many convenient uncles, I kind of feel that children are too smart in Math.  Even a four-year-old kid would know the value of twenty pesos: nowadays, your nephews will kick you in the shins and your nieces will wail like banshees for anything less than two one-hundred peso bills.

   It’s not like I’m complaining, though.

   Of course I am.

   Merry Christmas, monkeys.

   Now that I’m officially off thesis-mode, I’ve been meaning to read books outside of academic requirements.  Christmas is a good time for leisurely reading, after all.  For all intents and purposes of admission, I’m still pretty much stuck in reading academic texts: I suppose I have to learn to read comic books again (like Batman), or that I should head off to Book Sale for stuff people throw away.

   As of late, I’ve been doing self-study on the work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, if only because I want to familiarize myself more with a great part of the philosophical foundation of my thesis.  I finished skimming over “Anti-Oedipus,” and I’m halfway done skimming over “A Thousand Plateaus.”  Then I’m planning to cap off Christmas reading the last three chapters of “Of Grammatology” by Jacques Derrida (before I abandoned it in favor of Deleuze).

   Of course, it’s inanity bordering on insanity to read philosophical texts for “leisurely reading:” a kind of self-evident, self-validating thing that reinforces common stereotypes about me.  There are a few books I’ve been meaning to read, like Haruki Murakami’s “Dance Dance Dance,” and I’ve been meaning to read more on the irreverent atheism of Christopher Hitchens.  But I’m a big fan of the classics: I’m going on a bargain bookstore raid in a couple of days to look for William Faulkner.

   In the spirit of the holidays:

• To the call center agent reading my blog while working the night shift at some outsourcing company;
• To the OFW reading my blog wanting to read about what’s up in the Philippines while six or so time-zones away from these shores;
• To the student reviewing for his or her exam scheduled for next year;
• To the foreigner who reads blog in the morning of December 23;
• And to all of you who have been reading me for the month that Marocharim.com and have followed me in Original TMX for the past three years…

   A MEANINGFUL AND MERRY CHRISTMAS TO ALL OF YOU!

Truthiness is “What I say is right, and nothing anyone else says could possibly be true.” It’s not only that I feel it to be true, but that I feel it to be true. There’s not only an emotional quality, but there’s a selfish quality.

- Stephen Colbert

Empirical reality is overrated. Santa Claus exists, because kids feel him on Christmas Eve. Elvis didn’t die, because we feel his presence. It’s not knowing, but feeling. Thank you, Stephen Colbert.

The talk of the Philippine entertainment blogosphere these days is the “Wilyonaryo scam:” in a YouTube video, it seems that the wheel in “Wilyonaryo” has two numbers in it. Which means two things, if you asked me:

• It seems that Willie Revillame cheats his contestants, and;

• It seems that this particular video is the most-watched YouTube video in the Philippines today.

Of course, Joey de Leon is pointing to YouTube to be the source of all truth and the font of all knowledge, as far as the “Wilyonaryo scam” is concerned. As it seems, you can - if not should - believe everything you see in the Internet. After all, if it’s in YouTube, it must be true.

There’s nothing wrong with this picture, ladies and gentlemen. You don’t have to actually know the truth: following the doctrine of truthiness, you need only to feel the truth. If it seems to be true, then it must be true. The question here is not a question of being, but a question of seeming. Seeming is believing, guys.

Now because it seems that you can’t edit a video and post it on YouTube, everything about “Wilyonaryo” - or cats playing piano - must hold true. Yes, Willie cheats, and all cats play piano. If you see it on YouTube - and if Joey de Leon refers to that on TV - then it must be true. It doesn’t have to be true, either: it only needs to be truthy.

Because everything is truthiness, we only need to feel the truth about things, regardless of whether or not they are true. Like, if I feel that Gloria Arroyo cheated or if Erap Estrada plundered the public coffers, it has to be true. The Senate need not launch full-blown investigations on whether or not Willie Revillame cheated in “Wilyonaryo” because it seems like he cheated. Seeming is believing.

Yup, it’s all about one thing: truthiness. It only has to feel like cheating.

   I’ve been checking out Friendster profiles, and found out how many people use MyHeritage to establish themselves as “celebrities.”  MyHeritage is the 21st century equivalent of deluded beliefs of looking like celebrities.

   It’s not that I’m immune from delusions: I take medication for delusions.  So to humor myself, I ran the MyHeritage face recognition on two of my better pictures (my yearbook pictures) and I was pleasantly surprised.

    And needless to say, my ego is inflated to the size of a scrotum stung by a thousand killer bees: the hypothesis being that all MyHeritage users are deluded.

*     *     *

Exhibit A: Me without glasses:

72% Mary-Louise Parker, 72% Lalaine, 70% Joshua Jackson, 68% Jonathan Rhys Meyers, 68% Andie McDowell, 67% Gary Cooper, 66% Richard Dean Anderson, 66% Ernest Hemingway, 64% Chew Chor Meng, 63% Keanu Reeves.

   I heart MyHeritage: I have a strong resemblance to Ernest Hemingway, McGyver, and Keanu Reeves.  It figures: I read a lot of Hemingway, I watched (to a certain extent) “Babylon 5,” and MyHeritage was not the first time I was compared to Neo (that distinction goes to Krissa).  And like Keanu Reeves, I can’t act my way out of a paper bag.

Exhibit B: Me with glasses:

63% Joey Yung, 62% Daviegh Chase, 61% Takizawa Hideyaki, 58% Megan Ewing, 58% Vivien Leigh, 57% Woranuch Wongsawan, 57% Siti Nurhaliza, 56% Son Ye-jin, 56% Michael Vartan, 56% Zsa Zsa Gabor.

   Save for a celebrity named “Takizawa Hideyaki” and Michael Vartan of “Alias” and “Never Been Kissed” fame, I find MyHeritage to be dubious: how in the heck do I look like Zsa Zsa Gabor?  I mean, I’m the first one to admit that I look like a woman, but this is ridiculous.  I don’t heart MyHeritage.

*     *     * 

   Because I don’t heart MyHeritage, I think that people who use face-recognition technology from Shockwave Flash objects in the Internet - and take it seriously - are fools.  Insecure, pitiful wretches.  Canker sores on the herpes-infested mouth that is the indifferent society.  Hemorrhoids in the inflamed anus that is the world.  Stray bits of feces in the rectal hair of stray dogs.  Vain souls who should be first in line at the purge of sinners at Armageddon.  Locusts on the fallowed fields of life itself.  People who should be rolled into the city square chained naked into wooden cages, hanged in the gallows, dunked in boiling asphalt, paved into a road, and ran over with a steamroller.

   Figuratively speaking.

   As it seems, a couple of my friends have posted MyHeritage-related stuff in their personal websites.  I don’t know about friends who look 68% like Matt Damon, or 74% like Charlize Theron.  He sure as hell doesn’t look like Matt Damon, and she looks more like Anne Curtis than Charlize Theron.

*     *     *

   But there really is no substitute to flattery: the kind of “MyHeritage” that does not require an Internet connection.  Take my dad, for example.  Here’s a 52-year-old man with a balding spot at the top of his head the size of a personal pizza, and he compares himself to Sam Milby and (goodness gracious) John Lloyd Cruz.  I love my dad and all, but I don’t see him in “Maging Sino Ka Man” anytime soon.  And oh yeah, his dancing skills are enough to win him P5,000 in “Wowowee.”

   On the outset, however, I did inherit the genetic trait of celebrity delusion from him, but of a different sort.  Last night, my friends jokingly alluded to me looking like Ryan Agoncillo in “Ysabella,” when he used hair extensions.

   Needless to say, I was flattered.  Go ahead, flatten me with a steamroller.

   Nothing is more comforting than a steaming hot bowl of bulalo.  If anything, bulalo is my favorite Filipino dish.  I’d go to many places to look for it, to eat it, and to warm my heart and soul with its quintessential simplicity and taste.

   Because bulalo is served on almost every bus stop or travel stopover in the Philippines, the proverbial hat is overflowing with all sorts of places where “the best” bulalo is served.  But if I have learned anything from eating late dinners at greasy spoons, the best bulalo is not the stuff served at Michelin-starred restaurants, or in places where it’s a mortal sin to take soup with the wrong spoon.

   But allow me to add another place to that long list of bulaluhan, where a bulalo addict like me should go in the search for the best-tasting bulalo in all 7,107 islands of the Philippines.

   It was 3 AM today when me, Jayson and Inin decided to cap off the night with a feed of bulalo at the 3H terminal at Abanao Road.  I’ve eaten bulalo in all sorts of places, and figured the bulk of them to be tasteless, chewy, sinewy, and expensive.  The bulaluhan where we ate was characteristic of the many places where I’ve eaten bulalo: dank, dark, musty, and smells of diesel oil.  This was different: it was deep inside a bus garage.  There was no sign: this is a place that you go to by word-of-mouth.  Because it was unlighted, I expected a hobo sleeping under a bus chassis or a woman being raped and snuffed out on a very dark corner of the place.  It looked like a scene straight from Wes Craven when he started out making horror films.

   The place was well-lit enough for you to see the comfort room-green paintwork, the cracked tiles, and the tattered linoleum floor.  This place had no menus or menu boards: the old signs made out of cigarette boxes or used white folders made it blatantly obvious that this place served bulalo, and nothing but bulalo.  For P60 a bowl and a P7 plate of rice, this was a cheap place.  There were no glass cases that showcased other food served.  There were no frying pans in sight: there were just dilapidated gas burners where big cauldrons of bulalo continued to simmer away.  This was a bulaluhan, in its strictest, most honest sense.

   Not exactly a family-friendly environment, either: the people who ran the place aren’t the cheery people of McDonald’s who have smiles literally sewn on their faces from serving Happy Meals.  I doubt that they would break out tambourines to sing the “Happy Birthday” song when a birthday is celebrated there (if there ever was).

   But for all the unappealing things you can say about this place, the first thing you should notice is that this place is crowded.  This is not the kind of “crowded” that there is in coffee shops in between shifts at call centers, or “crowded” Sundays at Jollibee.  This is the kind of “crowded” that says that the food here is good.  The people in there encompassed and represented a broad spectrum of society, from bus drivers to call center agents to clubbers from Legarda Road looking to stall a hangover.

   I think I know the reason why this place is crowded: the bulalo tasted damn good.  Unlike other bulaluhan’s that cheat the flavor by adding beef boullion cubes, the bulalo soup had that unmistakable flavor of bone marrow and beef that has simmered for hours, and imparted its flavor on the stock.  The beef was extremely tender, but still retained its texture and its character.

   The most impressive thing about it is that it didn’t need any side condiments like soy sauce or patis: it was perfectly seasoned.  You won’t see the smallest packet of Ajinomoto in the place: it was simply stock and beef garnished with young onion leeks.  I think that the bulalo was an old family recipe that wouldn’t be sold even to the Sultan of Brunei himself.

   Yup, Jayson was right.  Best.  Bulalo.  Ever.  Don’t mind the screaming woman.

   I had a lot of fun last night.  Too bad I didn’t bring my own digital camera, so the pictures will have to wait until next time.  Although I must point out that a few things didn’t go according to plan:

• I didn’t get really drunk and wasted;
• I didn’t get to watch the UP Baguio Lantern Parade, much less attended Pasiklaban, and;
• Because I’m not drunk, I’m blogging with a really benign hangover.

   With bullet-points over and done with, let’s get to blogging.

*     *     *

   Last night, me and a few friends from high school got together to celebrate Christmas the best way we could: good food, good drink, and good companionship.  There was Dette and her boyfriend Bep, our two engineers Lincoln and McJames, our future engineer Chedan, our registered nurse Aaron, our future registered nurse Mickey, our insurance agent Haidee, our future events-planner Katz, Jayson and his wife Inin, and our future pharmacist Rhoda.  My good friend Noel couldn’t come to the party because he had a company Christmas party to attend, but showed up for a couple of minutes to say hello.

   We started off the night by having dinner at Kubong Sawali by Military Cut-Off Road.  “A bite to eat” is a nuanced expression: since it’s Christmas, we ordered three bilao’s of mixed seafood platters that included octopus, grilled squid, tuna sashimi, steamed mussels, steamed tilapia, and rellenong bangus.  While I’m not the biggest fan of seafood, I had a particular liking for the squid.  The tuna sashimi, while not very fresh, was quite good even if the wasabi obviously was the kind that comes in a tube.

   Because it was about time I treated my friends, I decided that a round of beers at 18 BC at Legarda Road to prime our stomachs was just the way to do it.  Then, at Aaron’s suggestion, we headed off to Samurai Comedy Bar, found at the basement of La Azotea.

   I can’t say that I like comedy bars: I’m not a fan of gay humor.  But if anything, there’s something enjoyable about comedy bars if you’re not dragged into the stage to interact with a gay dude.  It got very funny when both Jayson and Bep were dragged into said stage.  I just hope that that they didn’t hear me calling them “animal food-trough wipers” on the way out.  Ah, what I wouldn’t do to find a comedy bar inspired by “Monty Python.”

   We headed off to Nevada Square to end the night.

   Pictures to follow… something tells me this will be better if I posted pictures.