Back in Original TMX, I swore on God’s green earth that I will never - ever - return to Metro Manila to do absolutely anything ever - ever - again.  I am so wrong.

   I am dead wrong, and I’m damn proud of it.  These are moments where I can’t fuck up anything anymore no matter how hard I try.  Which is one of the benefits of being wrong: P70.00 taxi fares, big hulking luggage, and your own bank being temporarily disconnected to Megalink.  So no matter how hard or how much I try, I’ll always be damn proud and damn wrong from this point forward.

   Marocharim has landed.  Prepare for heck, Manila.

   Karlo Mongaya of Postcard Headlines wrote some thoughts about postmodernism yesterday.  To be honest, I have had my own fair share of “paradigm shifts” over the course of my active intellectual life: like most UP students, I started out reading Marx, but eventually moved my own line of thinking parallel to anthropological theory, where names like Tylor and Morgan come to the fore.  Then I became a bit radical: later on in college, I became riveted to the ideas of Louis Althusser, Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, and nowadays I’m doing some self-study on the work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari.

   I can’t say I understand every bit of them, but I try.

   I met up with Tano, a philosophy instructor and a friend of mine back in college, yesterday, and she put things rather bluntly: “That’s the problem with you: you are the exact opposite of Ockham’s Razor.”  To which I playfully responded: “Because I don’t shave.”  Did William of Ockham have a beard, a stubble, or was he clean-shaven?

   I’m reminded of the Sokal Affair: basically, a physicist named Alan Sokal wrote a “piece of nonsense” and the paper was eventually published in a journal.  I don’t know: I can claim publicly right now that my own thesis on Friendster played on the Sokal Affair (although I’m not saying that my own thesis is a bunch of bullshit).  I could have entitled my thesis “It’s Complicated,” but I opted against it.  My own “philosophy of social science” can be summed up in one sentence:

   “When confronted with a social problem, fuck it up.”  To which the response would be, “Depends on how you fuck it.”  Basically, a social problem is a whore, and you can penetrate it by the ear or the nostril if need be.

   I’m off to Manila, and I’ll be explaining this through a 20-minute lecture in two weeks.