Another Miss

I recently had an interview with an editor looking for a staff-writer/associate editor. The text that I received a week prior to the interview proper was promising. The text message that was sent to me told me to visit a certain site in the Internet and study it. The site is all about hardware a techno geek would drool over having his hands on. The site deals about the latest computer processors, laptops, mobile phones, mp3 players, gaming rigs, and even the not-so exciting projectors.

It was my first time to get a schedule for a job interview with a gap of a week after the sought announcement. And the text message instructed me to study. Yes, to study. I said to myself that this prospective employer is different since it was like a college professor ordering me to cram for what seemed to be a Final Exam.

Without an Internet access and cash strapped, I went back and forth at Netopia to copy paste the site’s new articles, laptop reviews, and everything that I thought important for the exam (prospective employers usually say it is an interview but that comes after the exam and a week at least of waiting).

Indeed I learned about the ongoing trend in personal computing merging with home entertainment; HDTV, that’s High Definition TV for you, as the coming craze for us techno consumers; Intel’s Centrino Processor evolves into a more efficient Core 2 Duo, and, like every military intelligent operations, they have codenames. Carmel for Centrino I think and the latter Banias, if my memory serves me right.

It was only unfortunate that the 10-item first-part exam wanted a more deep knowledge of IT, something that only a special few knows like an esoteric teachings. But I’m getting ahead of my story.

There is nothing more exciting to review and get abreast of than music other than the fast-pace, bullet-speed (at the speed rate of 18 months at the average) continuous evolution of Information Technology. There is always something new coming out: faster, better, and sleeker. If music critics are always being dumped by bad albums and sample music from upcoming bands which make them frown at their reviews, I can only think that that is rare to happen in the IT industry. In IT industry, there is only one direction it is heading: innovation and perfection. It is like a sound heavy-laden with riffs that keep on getting perfected and rearrange to the benefit of tranced listeners.

When it finally got to the day that I got drilled by questions by the editor, everything suddenly came crushing down on me. I am left behind by the times. The first question thrown at me was whether I know how to assemble a PC. Good God! I know but never did it alone. I looked like a wet chicken who didn’t know anything about computers. My mouth dried, I hardly could speak and lost the confidence to say my piece in style.

But I yakked all the way till the end of the interview about what little do I know about computers. I don’t know if the editor was still listening in awe or in frustration.

In the end, the exams was shoved toward me and told to take them home. A disaster. I know.

But boy, how did I studied for that interview.

You know the end of the story of course.

A Young Creative Passed Away

I rarely read my links in my blog due to the reason that I don’t have the means: no internet access in my home computer.

But recently, I visited the blogsite of Dean Alfar, dated July 9. There’s a bad news. A young poet by the name of Ana Neri just passed away.

No, I don’t personally know Ana Neri, nor heard of her name until I read Dean’s post. Yet, in this young creative heart of mine, there is something that bleeds for the passing of this young creative person.

I know in the first place how they (the creative people) dream of making it big in the literary scene in this country and probably internationally. On how they aim of someday publishing a book with their name on its cover and between its covers all they learned from this world, sharing their one dime of wisdom to ardent readers of theirs.

It is sad. I am sad. Even though I didn’t hear of Ana Neri before, I know it is a lost for everyone of us. Here we are on a race and practicing our craft or trying to plan to write someday our masterpieces, yet when someone among us creative people bite the dust it’s a lost through and through for the community of writers and poets. And for the whole humanity who think and feel.

I might have no rights to say this, but Ana Neri how I wish you have stayed a little longer.

See you at the crossroad.

Searching for the Enlightened One

I watched over on the National Geographic their presentation At the Edge of the Earth (pardon if I failed to remember the program’s title) the life of buddhists somewhere in Tibet. I was only able catch part of the program but the effect on me was tremendous. And for somebody who can boldly say that I am not a Christian and does not have a religion, converting to Tibetian Buddism for me is enticing.

Fortunately, my youngest sister too has an interest in this philosophy cum religion. So on this day, we planned to take a ‘pilgrim’, as she described it while we were on a pedicab on the way to a Buddist temple.

Armed with nothing but the knowledge that Buddist temples are located somewhere in Manila, somewhere near Chinatown, we headed to for the city smirking over our silly plan.

The question was how would we explain our unexpected visit to the temple? In what way would we talk to the Buddist monks if we were already before them? Are we going to pretend as students (I’ve graduated a more than a decade ago and only my sister is the student) researching over their religion? Or are we going to be straightforward that we have plan to convert or to dig deeper into their religion.

Honestly speaking we didn’t know what to do that made us laugh even more. All we want was to know, and we were dead serious about it, is what Buddism is all about and luckily follow the footpath towards enlightenment.

For good luck, I brought a copy of Don Miguel Ruiz’s Four Agreement. After having a quick lunch, we started our ‘pilgrim’.

We alighted at the Carriedo Station of LRT, and on the way down, passing stalls selling DVDs, a rare find of Bob Marley’s concerts made me buy it in an instant, but that is another story.

My rule in looking for a place I don’t know where is to ask people until I reach my goal. This is easy to do if you have enough dough in your pocket because it means using transportation and you need money for that. And this is exactly the style that we employed in our short ‘pilgrim’.

When we reached Sta. Cruz in Manila, the goal was to know where Chinatown is. When we entered Chinatown, it seemed we were transported into a different, alien place we could not describe. Ever corner was all stores of different wares.
A number of questions where we could find a temple or a congregation of buddist led us to enter alleys until we found somebody who directed us to take a pedicab, going past Tutuban, at Narra St. where he said buddist monks resides.

Now, this is the sad part of the story. When we reached the Buddist temple in Narra St. of Manila, we were ‘shooed away’ as student researchers by the administrator of the church. The Chinese man whom we talked to was surprised when I approached him. He seemed to have seen a ghost. I assumed that he was fearful of a pure-bred Filipino. He said he would be busy for the rest of the day making white-lies that he still had to attend to something.

So what happened in our short piligrim in searching for the Enlightened One: NOTHING.

I would also like to use this post as a call for people who know about Buddism to please inform me where to go and search the footpath of the Enlightened One.

Tuesday, June 26, 2007

Several wounds in my feet that would not heal soon. A red flag was raised. I am growing old and complication in health is popping up. I could be diabetic. I thought of the last several months that I had been splurging in sodas. It could have triggered a family health problem with sugar in the body.

I have to check my sugar level. But before that, I have to take in antibiotics for the wounds. If ever I have had my sugar level checked and the result is positive, then there would rise another problem. The question now is whether I would have to maintain and keep my body healthy by insulin.

Then I realized that I am growing old. It is expected that my body, like a machine would succumb in its wear and tear, is starting to fail.

Well growing old is not a problem. But the problem that I see is money. Dough. I should have had a health insurance just for the sake of minimizing health related expenses.

And I see all this concern with money with the fact that I am growing old but I still have no regular job.

Drat! Life is tough.

But it is only tiny matter compared with what is within me (I think I heard this before in a commercial). I can take it.

Thursday, June 28, 2007

This story could have been started with the cliché opening phrase of happening once upon a time. Anyway, what is the difference from the old times and now? Nothing so it seems. Everything that is happening now happened before. Same old story, same old pain, same suffering, same joy and same celebration of life.

This story is about an old man. He lives in his prefab row-house alone. In the neighborhood, he is known as a good carpenter because of his relative knowledge in building houses and in repairing it.

We can say that he is a good grumpy old man. Yes, he is sociable to some extent but many a people among his neighborhood do not like him for his grumpiness. He is known for his false principle that most of the time gets him into a heated argument. So this old man does not have an intimate, close friend.

Alone and without a wife, he lives in his cold house staring at the ceiling for lizards as his neighbors describe his nights.

I am only talking about this because I saw the old man the other day loitering, sitting on a bench in the small mall near us. When our eyes met, there was that embarrassed look in his eyes. Liked a child caught with his hand in the cookie jar, he reasoned out that he should have had gone to the city. I said bye to him and asked if he wanted to go back to our place alone. He said no. That he would still stay there.

I just went away feeling his intense boredom about life.