Celebration: An Anthology to Commemorate the 50th Anniversary of the Silliman University National Writers Workshop Sands and Coral, 2011-2013
Silliman University, 2013
I had no plans to do noche buena for Christmas this year. This pandemic year has upended all expected things—and while I have not seen my family in months, I also had no wish to be in close range with them, indoors, and trust in fate to keep us safe and in check, health-wise. My mother was nearing 90, a demographic of some concern, and I felt keenly for her well-being—and so when my brother Dennis texted me the details of our Christmas dinner—"Be here by 5:45 PM"—I was ready to ignore the invitation, and keep to an inchoate wish to stay in the confines of my little apartment, eat what I could find in my refrigerator, and do some lonesome chilling with Netflix.
But the s.o. dropped by around 5 PM, full of cheer and love, and wanted to know what I was doing Christmas Eve. "I don't want you to be alone," he said.
Something in his voice, in his genuine care for my welfare, touched me profoundly, and I found myself asking for a lift to my brother's house in Pulantubig, as well as a promise he'd pick me up at 8 PM so I could join his own family for their midnight Christmas salubong feast.
So I had my family, and my s.o.'s family, for Christmas company—a bittersweet turn of events that makes me think deep about the depths of love, the frailties of life, and the chance we give ourselves for slivers of happiness.
12:00 PM |
Ranking the Queer Holiday Romance Movies of 2020
If there was one thing that's most curious about popular entertainment in our unprecedented pandemic year, it is the plethora of gay holiday movies that has suddenly come out, most particularly from platforms that have for so long embraced heteronormativity as a given. I'm talking primarily about Lifetime and Hallmark Channel, both of which grind out these holiday romances every year, unapologetic for their formula and for their sheer quantity—and more so for hewing close to an idea of love as strictly being heterosexual. Gay men and women hardly appear in these confections, and if they do, they play support: the best friend, the quirky boss, perhaps the florist.
But something happened late last year that would alter the landscape of Christmas romance movies this year. Patrick Serrano, writing for The Oprah Magazine, identifies the turning point: "Then came 2019, when the LGBTQ+ representation in the TV movie sphere shifted completely, thanks to two forces. First, Lifetime’s Twinkle All the Way featured a quick gay kiss between two C-plot characters played by Brian Sills and the ever-so-handsome, Mark Ghanimé. Around the same time as this landmark, if unceremoniously unrolled, depiction of gay affection, the Hallmark Channel pulled a Zola ad featuring a same-sex wedding and kiss because it was deemed 'controversial.'"
The pulling of that Zola ad, which was the Hallmark Channel's response to ultra-conservative forces decrying the "desecration" of one remaining stronghold of heteronormativity in the name of "family values," gave rise to LGBTQ voices protesting the decision—which, in turn, put under the spotlight, the very notion of representation in these movies. Why indeed have these movies resisted for so long gay love? After the public outcry, the network eventually reinstated the commercials.
The clapback must have been swift and brutal because only a year later, we have notably these: Hulu with Happiest Season, Paramount Network with Dashing in December, Lifetime with The Christmas Setup, and Hallmark itself with The Christmas House.
I had no plans to watch any of these. I've seen two or three of these Christmas romance movies before, and they've always struck me as pantomimes of holiday cheer and romantic love, the snow obviously fake, the screenplay an odious amalgam of retold stories [usually involving disputed real estate in some winsome rural setting, where the city rat learns to relax and give in to love, but not before a confrontation about lies and the secrets people keep], the cinematography a flatness of landscape that has no idea of depth or texture, and the characters overwhelmingly white in skin color and privilege. [In other words, I hate Christmas romance movies.]
But the curiosity eventually kicked in: what is a gay Christmas romance movie? I wanted to see how this panned out—and now that I have, here is my ranking of all four films [plus a series], from embarrassing inanity to giddy holiday joy...
5. The Christmas House (Michael Grossman, The Hallmark Channel)
Hallmark, the most conservative platform of the lot, steps ever so gingerly into diversity—by giving us a love story between a man and a woman, except that the man has a gay brother who is happily married to another man. Well, it's a start. Small steps, you could say. But it's not helped by the blandest of execution—a movie that sleepwalks its way through slapdash Christmas romance movie conflict and resolution. Brothers Mike (Robert Buckley), a TV actor, and Brandon (Jonathan Bennett), a baker, come home to revive an old family tradition—helping their parents Phylis (Sharon Lawrence) and Bill (Treat Williams) decorate full blast their house in Christmas lights and ornaments one last time, with the effusive help of Brandon's husband Jake (Brad Harder), before putting the house on the market. [Real estate!] Then Mike reconnects with high school friend and former neighbor Andi (Ana Ayora)—and a change of heart is in order, making theirs the central romance of the film, thrusting the gay couple into the sidelines, a diversity figurehead for the most part. It wouldn't have been so bad were it not for the fact they're in a film so bland nothing in it is believable.
4. Happiest Season (Clea Duvall, Hulu)
From first hearing about it, I was happy enough to dive into this lesbian Christmas romance movie, which felt very much like a corrective. But everything in Clea Duvall's film rubbed me the wrong way, from characters who are all extremely unlikable you could not find anyone to properly root for, to underlying thematic implications—gaslighting and emotional abuse in relationships, among other things—that gnaw at you, and continues at it post-screening that I had to ask myself if the film really made those choices, and what for. The story is simple and unproblematic enough: Harper (Mackenzie Davis) is taking her girlfriend Abby (Kristen Stewart) home for the holidays for the first time—but soon admits she has yet to come out to the family, thus necessitating a ruse that leads to shenanigans of all sorts. Duvall stages these "shenanigans" in strange comic sequences—a misunderstanding at the mall, for example, leads to cameos by comedians Timothy Simons and Lauren Lapkus as mall security too eager to delve deep into an accusation of shoplifting—which I take as Duvall making light of her material, but they stick out so much as sore thumbs they feel like standup comedy that has totally bombed it leaves the audience with plastered fake smiles as they try to make sense of a terrible punch line that doesn't land. This film is a joke that never lands.
3. Dashing in December (Jake Helgren, Paramount Network)
From Paramount Network comes a film that hews the closest to a typical Christmas romance movie: finance whiz Wyatt (Peter Porte) finally comes home, after five long years, to the family ranch in Colorado, ran by his widowed mother Deb (Andie MacDowell). But he has other things beside reunion in mind: he wants to convince his mother to sell the ranch [real estate!], which has long been a money pit he's been unwillingly bankrolling for years. Somewhat tense holiday dinners ensue—and it is up to ranch hand Heath (Juan Pablo Di Pace) to convince Wyatt to give the farm another go. Wyatt remains resolute, until he finds himself falling for Heath's rugged charm. It's all cute and comfortable, driven mostly by the believability of the characters and a focused sense of place.
2. Dash and Lily (Joe Tracz, Netflix)
Netflix's Dash and Lily is not a movie but a web series, but it feels like a worthy addition to this list because of one thing: the joyful pairing of Langston (Troy Iwata) and Benny (Diego Guevara) as a newly-hitched gay couple who do not just provide bland support to the titular leads, but actually provide the conceit [clues and dares in a red notebook!] that drive the story, and gets their own arc as well. The main love story, based on the YA novel by David Levithan and Rachel Cohn, is winsome enough to follow: Christmas grinch Dash (Austin Abrams) and Christmas lover Lily (Midori Francis) find themselves falling in love, sight unseen, over the course of the holiday season as they exchange heartfelt correspondence [and dares] in a notebook, making full use of New York as a veritable Christmas wonderland. And then there's Langston and Benny who are unapologetic for their sheer horniness, they feel totally deserving of a spin-off.
1. The Christmas Setup (Pat Mills, Lifetime)
Lifetime's effort, like Dashing in December, also feels very close to the tropes we demand of a Christmas romance movie, including real estate as the B-plot, but I am utterly gobsmacked by how it transcends the formula without losing a single iota of its charm. This film is utterly delightful, and earns every ounce of sweetness it concocts—and while it is derivative and predictable [it is, after all, a Christmas romance movie], its characters feel grounded enough by winning performances they actually do the same to the material. Hugo (Ben Lewis) is a somewhat uptight, if ambitious, New York attorney who decides to come home to visit his mother Kate (Fran Drescher) for Christmas together with his best friend Madelyn (Ellen Wong), and soon also his brother Aiden (Chad Connell). Kate is an indefatigable community organizer who feels compelled to lead the way in bringing holiday cheer, complete with time-honored traditions, to the neighborhood and enlists her family and friends in the selfless service to this relentless march in the name of the Christmas spirit. But it also soon becomes apparent that Kate is capable of more than just community organizing. She is also perfectly capable of setting up her sons, in conniving and subtle ways, for romances they don't think about as even plausible. This includes Hugo being forced to consider what he really wants in life, especially when "circumstances" have him reconnecting with his high school crush Patrick (Blake Lee) just as he is being offered a promotion to his firm's office in London. Plus there's the B-plot of the town's train station—traditionally the site of a particularly beloved community Christmas tradition—which is being demolished for future development by the uncaring town aldermen, until Hugo digs deep into its history and not only finds legal real estate loophole, but also a symbolic full-circle of local queer history. The movie does so much, and does it all with infectious lightness of being.
For further reading:
The New York Times: Same-Sex Kisses Under the Mistletoe: Holiday Movies Rethink a Formula Cinemablend: 9 Christmas Movies Featuring LGBTQ+ Stories The Washington Post: TV’s Gay Christmas Movies are as Benign, Charming and Cliche as We Always Hoped They’d Be Esquire: In the Queer Christmas Movie Arena, Predictability Still Outshines Realness Decider: The Gayest Christmas Ever: Inside 2020’s Big, Queer Holiday Explosion Advocate: 21 Movies That Queered Christmas Good Housekeeping: 15 Most Festive LGBTQ Christmas Movies NPR: Holiday Rom-Coms Go Beyond Diversity To Center New Christmas Stars The Oprah Magazine: Lifetime's The Christmas Setup Is the LGBTQ Holiday Movie I Never Thought I'd Get to See CNN: It's a Record Year for LGBTQ Representation in Holiday Movies Salon: TV's First Crop of Queer Christmas Movies Range From Saccharine Fun to Superficial Flops Film School Reject: Make the Yuletide Gay: Why We Need More Queer Christmas Movies
10:17 AM |
Noteworthy Dialogue: From Bill Melendez's A Charlie Brown Christmas (1965)
Lucy: Incidentally, I know how you feel about all this Christmas business, getting depressed and all that. It happens to me every year. I never get what I really want. I always get a lot of stupid toys or a bicycle or clothes or something like that.
I looked for it in a Christmas party, a sparsely attended affair held together by an unconvincing sense of obligation. The tree in the middle of the room, which was made of a variety of green strings tacked on one end to a spot in the ceiling, was sad and mournful. As sad and mournful as the empty boxes beneath it wrapped up as display presents. Christmas wasn’t there.
I looked for it in a Christmas movie, hoping the sight of New York draped in snow and tinsel, at least on film, would evoke something. It wasn’t there.
Nor was it in the marathon of Christmas albums by The Carpenters. For a brief moment, over YouTube, a cover of “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” made me wistful—but it wasn’t there either. A well-meaning friend offered unsolicited counsel during a small gathering, where there was plenty of cake and pastries all dolled up in holiday colors: “But you’re looking for it in the wrong places, my friend,“ he said. “You have to remember the real reason for Christmas.” I looked at him with a poker face, ate the head of the icing Santa in my hand, and slowly backed away. Christmas wasn’t in the Santa head either.
Somebody tweeted today: “We have eight days till Christmas, folks!” The merry tweet came complete with emojis of snowmen and fir trees—but it only left me in unbelieving shock, because I hadn’t realized it was that close. It takes a kind of emotional preparation to face the holidays, and as far as I was concerned, this was still June, and December was still the hazy gloriously far-away lump in the horizon.
I’ve considered this for some time now. The days before Christmas are a jittery sort, composed of hours suspended in the limbo of expectations, sugarcoated only by what meager cheer is brought by the elusive signs of the holidays. Christmas is the portal to year’s end—and I think this is where my anxiety lies for the most part. On one hand, many of us are not completely ready to let go of things in the current year, because most of these have yet to reach appropriate completions. We have sworn we cannot end on a note of things undone. But all we can do is half-remember the broken promises of our previous New Year’s resolutions, and think about the uncanny ways life unhappens.
On the other hand, most of us can’t wait for the year to end either—there is a sweetness to the prospect of saying goodbye to all that, to jump on the idea of the fresh start.
But we forget about the flow of days. We forget about how short they can be, how treacherous their seeming elasticity. When we hear the first Christmas song in the first –ber month of the year, we laugh at the absurdity of how early we take in Christmas in this country. The next four months are long, we think, dismissing the frivolity of that first sign of the year ending. And so we slug on, valiantly attempting to make right the unfolding days and night that resist our frail, human designs.
And so when Christmas happens, it always comes as a complete surprise.
Eight more days? You have got to be kidding me.
I suppose I was waiting for furtive changes in the air to tell me Christmas was coming fast. Perhaps some welcome chill in the air to indicate this was December and that the winter solstice has come with the relief of a cold snap for tropical skin. Perhaps some bright, twinkling lights stringed everywhere downtown, embracing buildings and trees and lampposts. Perhaps a ubiquity of holiday music—the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, or just even some Jose Mari Chan. Or just Mariah Carey whistling out what she wants for Christmas. But they have largely been sporadic, almost half-hearted in coming.
We have not gotten these reminders, and not for lack of trying by some of us. Notwithstanding the brief erratic snap of cold brought in by magnificent storms barreling from the tumultuous Pacific, there has been no elegant sweater weather, the kind that forces us to exhume from the recesses of our wardrobe the thick, long-sleeved attire for forgotten colder days. It has been a muggy, summery December, and it has become a stretch of the imagination to associate the unspooling season with the imagery of Winter Wonderland.
But I roll my eyes as I read this useless rant. I am just being sadly nostalgic, I tell myself. It is the dominant preoccupation of people in their late 30s, I tell myself. What you want for Christmas, Ian, is the innocent, youthful yearning for the holidays, I tell myself. You know it will never come back again. Yet, still. The last time I felt Dumaguete really going for the Christmas thing was 1999. Back then, the street posts were decked in lights shaped like angels, and business establishments spruced up their facades with holiday displays to rival each other. The Asian crisis killed much of that in degrees, and the city hasn’t recovered since then. It has been fifteen long years.
So I was surprised to see Silliman University’s Christmas tree at the Eastern Quadrangle actually being a quite nice-looking experiment in material and elevation, elegant and minimalist all at once. And the Dumaguete City Christmas tree over at Quezon Park looks equally great decked up the way it is. Last year’s tree was such an epic fail—so this one was a definite improvement. I caught a bit of the lighting ceremony a few nights ago, and they had a boy’s choir sing Christmas songs, a good touch.
So I was surprised to feel stirrings of joy when I spent the last few nights being in mostly unplanned dinners with old college friends. We were older now, and considered the holidays as just another bump in our regular rush of days. But as we laughed and shared memories and drank various flavored chupitos, everything felt right again.
And so I was surprised to consider it didn’t have to take giant signs for Christmas to happen. Last December 12, I trooped to the Luce to catch a concert of handbell ringers, their repertoire shining with staples from the Christmas songbook. It was an attempt to recapture the past. The last time I heard handbells in concert, it was years ago when I was younger and was out in the world for my bit of adventure, and the concert was in a small church and there was snow outside while evening fell, and Christmas colors glistened everywhere. But the past was not recaptured, and I went home amused by how desperately I was searching for the elusive Christmas spirit.
And I thought about it, and it finally didn’t matter. Christmas for now is all about the small, unexpected things—and time with busy old friends who know you’re mad as a hatter, but love you anyway.
7:00 AM |
This Week in Culture in Dumaguete: A Christmas Cantata by the Berea Choral Ensemble on November 28 and 29
The Berea Arts and Sciences High School returns to the Luce Auditorium featuring its choral ensemble in the Christmas cantata Everlasting Light: A Christmas Carol for a Dark World. They will be holding a series of concerts on November 28, Friday at 8 PM, and on November 29, Saturday at 10 AM, 3 PM, and 8 PM.The Christmas cantata features the music of Claire Cloninger and Mark Hayes.
The choral ensemble include the Berea Angklung Ensemble, the Berea Girls Ensemble, and the Berea chorus classes, performing under the musical direction of Guike Theophillus Panmei and the stage direction of Raphael de Leon Gregorio.
The show also features soprano Stefanie Diclas Quintin, the Silliman University College of Performing and Visual Arts Chorale, the Silliman University Church Children’s Choir, and the Silliman University High School Choir.
Berea Arts and Sciences is the first and only high school in the Philippines that offers extensive training in both the sciences and the arts. In Berea, students are set to a path towards gaining mastery of both the analytic and the creative spheres of learning. In their freshmen year, Berea students are exposed to various fields of learning through special elective classes in Creative Writing, Music, Visual Arts, and Science. These introductory courses expose the students to different fields of interest which help them decide later on what major track they may want to pursue for the rest of their stay in Berea.
Once in their sophomore year, students select a major track from four options: Creative Writing, Music (in which they will select a primary and secondary musical instrument), Visual Arts, and Science. Students will spend the next three years gaining mastery of their chosen track. In their junior and senior years, students are expected to undergo any of the following: a panel presentation, a music recital, an arts gallery exhibition, or a thesis defense.
While pursuing their track, students also take minor courses in music, making each Berean adept to various forms of musical performances. This is why the school is able to stage the annual Berea Artists and Guests Production, which showcases the talents of its students.
Since its founding in 2005, Berea has staged many musicales and talent productions at top-class theaters and venues in the Philippines, which include Francisco Santiago Hall, PhilAm Life Auditorium, UP Abelardo Hall, UP Church of the Risen Lord, Bohol Convention Center, Bradford Church in Cebu City, and the Claire Isabel McGill Luce Auditorium in Silliman University, Dumaguete City, among many others.
Berea has also staged major musical productions in the last four years. This includes the cantatas Everlasting Light and Celebrate Life, and the musicals David Rocks the Big G and Joseph, King of Dreams.
For their November 2014 concert at the Luce, Berea students are re-staging Everlasting Light, their choice in celebration of the 10th year founding anniversary of the school.
Gala tickets are available at P200, P300, and P500. Matinee tickets are available at P100. All tickets and season passes for Luce Auditorium shows are available for sale at the CAC Office at the College of Performing and Visual Arts Building II, and at the theater lobby before the show begins. For ticket reservations and other inquiries, call (035) 422-4365 or 09173235953.
I waited until the early afternoon to do my noche buena shopping. I couldn't resist the idea of becoming lost in the surge of people, and I was not disappointed. The day was crowded. That didn't faze me. On the contrary. I waited patiently in line with my basket of groceries, reading a few paragraphs of Daniel Boorstin's The Discoverers while listening to Yo-Yo Ma playing Pyotr Illich Tchaikovsky's Andante Cantabile for Cello Solo and String Orchestra. The music did it for me: set to it, the crowd looked almost cinematic, the hubbub reduced to a kind of slow motion that was amusing. I love how I manage to entertain myself.
For the past few months, ever since I started work on my graduate thesis, I've developed this (highly expensive) habit of just leaving the too-comfortable confines of my apartment -- and checking into the AC-comforts of a hotel room. With a good bed. And good wifi. With the TV remote untouched, hotel rooms are great havens for people who need to finish things in relative comfort, without the distractions of home.
I've been frequenting this one new hotel right in the middle of downtown, which is rather cheap and comfortable -- save for the horrendous plastic flowers as decor, and the linoleum tiling in the bathroom that ultimately turns the entire showering adventure into something quite icky. (Bring slippers!) The hotel will, of course, remain unnamed.
But here is this new find. GoHotel just opened a branch in Dumaguete, and offered me a much welcome complimentary accommodations this weekend as it goes through its dry-run/soft opening. The rates, while not fixed (they have this Internet promo thing as a system), are quite remarkable considering the compact and inspired execution of the rooms, which, while tiny, are more than good enough for a traveling nomad, or a person bent on a staycation. Like I am. (I like what they say in their website: "We want you to sleep like royalty, but we won't ask you to fork over a king's ransom. Thanks to the year-round low rates, every Juan, Dick and Larry can afford hotel-quality sleeping experience.")
I love staycations. Staycations give me the thrill and the illusion of "travel" without me having to leave the city I am bound in because of work and other responsibilities. Staycations are cheap. They are relaxing. They give one a sense of the different that never fails to jog the imagination.
So here we are, on a Friday night, behind Robinson's Place in Dumaguete, checking into this bright spot...
This is the entrance to the hotel...
These are the wonderful members of the staff, Angelo and Reicha....
This is the corridor of the first floor. (The second floor is still being finished as I type.)
This is my room...
This is me inspecting the new (temporary) digs...
This is the bed, and now home of my gadgets...
This is the mandatory bathroom shot...
And this is me easing into the night, about to start writing/editing my novel, trying to find the courage to turn off the television...
So wish me luck, and may you have a great weekend ahead.
My friend, the young film critic Don Jaucian, posted this not too long in his Tumblr, and I thought it best to share it in the eve of Valentines week: “Writers are straight up, batshit insane people. You should never fall in love with them.”
He means to be cheeky, of course, himself being a writer. I found myself laughing at this because, in all honesty—and I’m probably kissing goodbye to my career as an earnest searcher for true love in Dumaguete—every bit of Don’s pronouncement is true. One can define this “insanity” of writers in so many different ways, but there are aspects to this truthiness, especially in that claim about loving them. When a writer loves you, worry: you will get immortalized as literature. If he doesn’t immortalize you, worry: you don’t move him enough for him to see a poem in you. If there are broken hearts involved, worry: you get immortalized in literature, warts and all. (Emphasis on warts.)
I think film director Marc Webb captured it best when he commandeered a quote attributed to the writer Henry Miller, and gave it to one of the characters in his film 500 Days of Summer as a piece of advice to its lovelorn hero, Tom: “The best way to get over a woman [or a man] is to turn her [or him] into literature.”
Because God know I have.
(And not always successfully.)
Once, many years ago, I had this terrible quarrel with Mark, someone I used to love and live with. We just had dinner with my ex who had decided to come back to Dumaguete to set up a restaurant. The dinner went well, but soon—on the way home—jealousy reared its ugly head. We found ourselves soon parked in a spot along Escaño Boulevard on a Monday night. Inside that green Pajero on that slow night, we had a row that was so dramatic, complete with earth-shattering dialogue, that I couldn’t help but think, in the middle of a fierce rebuttal: “I must remember this night. It sounds like a short story.”
And I did write about it, in a short story titled “Tell Him.”
Why do writers do this? Is it nothing short of airing our dirty laundry in public? Not quite. I guess one just follows the creative writing maxim of “writing what you know”—and sometimes the affairs of the hearts, compounded by its fierceness and more than considerable drama, is too compelling to refuse being set down to writing. I think of the exercise as something of a catharsis: in writing about the loves of our lives, we are somehow trying to find answers to our own unsettled questions. It also helps that in formulating the motivations for every character, especially the one clearly based on the lover, one is compelled to think of the situation from a point of view that is not yours, but theirs. You come to embody them—and in many ways, you see yourself through their eyes. Their pain also becomes your pain, and it helps in the act of moving on. Literature as psychoanalysis, if one must label it.
This may be why in all of my books, I could not seem to stop myself from dedicating each one to someone I’ve once dearly loved. If I may make a confession, in those books, I may have inscribed my own history of loving. They may be attempts to immortalize those fleeting days when love was all that seems real.
A young writer named Mik—and that is all the name I know—once wrote something wonderful in her Tumblr blog about what happens when a writer loves you. What she wrote was the most honest, most damning, most funny revelation in answer to that question. It is something I wish I had written myself. So, what happens when a writer loves you? Mik writes:
Lots of things might happen. That’s the thing about writers. They’re unpredictable. They might bring you eggs in bed for breakfast, or they might all but ignore you for days. They might bring you eggs in bed at three in the morning. Or they might wake you up for sex at three in the morning. Or make love at four in the afternoon. They might not sleep at all. Or they might sleep right through the alarm and forget to get you up for work. Or call you home from work to kill a spider. Or refuse to speak to you after finding out you’ve never seen To Kill a Mockingbird. Or spend the last of the rent money on five kinds of soap. Or sell your textbooks for cash halfway through the semester. Or leave you love notes in your pockets. Or wash you pants with Post-It notes in the pockets so your laundry comes out covered in bits of wet paper. They might cry if the Post-It notes are unread all over your pants. It’s an unpredictable life.
But what happens if a writer falls in love with you?
This is a little more predictable. You will find your hemp necklace with the glass mushroom pendant around the neck of someone at a bus stop in a short story. Your favorite shoes will mysteriously disappear, and show up in a poem. The watch you always wear, the watch you own but never wear, the fact that you’ve never worn a watch: they suddenly belong to characters you’ve never known. And yet they’re you. They’re not you; they’re someone else entirely, but they toss their hair like you. They use the same colloquialisms as you. They scratch their nose when they lie like you. Sometimes they will be narrators; sometimes protagonists, sometimes villains. Sometimes they will be nobodies, an unimportant, static prop. This might amuse you at first. Or confuse you. You might be bewildered when books turn into mirrors. You might try to see yourself how your beloved writer sees you when you read a poem about someone who has your middle name or prose about someone who has never seen To Kill a Mockingbird. These poems and novels and short stories, they will scatter into the wind. You will wonder if you’re wandering through the pages of some story you’ve never even read. There’s no way to know. And no way to erase it. Even if you leave, a part of you will always be left behind.
If a writer falls in love with you, you can never die.
Ponder on that. And Happy Valentines to one and all.
The year that was—2011—has been a strange year. “I’m ambivalent about it,” my good friend Arlene Delloso-Uypitching tells me in a quiet note that tries to register all things in the recent past. I think back as well—and I know that I have been very happy, and I have been very sad. A seeming endlessness of both. Do we talk of the same gradient of things in the world?
And so this December ends, and the old year with it. In the waning days, when we have the strength for it, we also begin to catalogue the lives we’ve lived the past 365 days. The chill in the air is battery for remembrances and for this emotional accounting. As the bed weather—the exquisite remnant of a big storm—drags on, we find ourselves hanging on to the comforts of our beds, the only palpable joy within arm’s reach. We let the Christmas songs we play wash over us, each one underlining with a certain thoroughness what we feel. Happy. Sad. Ambivalent.
(I have taken to listening to Michael Buble’s cover of “All I Want for Christmas is You” from his Christmas album. It veers a long distance away from the manic cheer of Mariah Carey’s version of the song, and carries with it a strange mix of melancholy and hopefulness. I listen to the song in repeat mode, ten thousand times a day. I don’t know what that says about me.)
The brighter side of the year brims with good things. In that sense, it is one year I am not exactly ready to say goodbye to. And yet in the light of the disasters that have dimmed considerably the Christmas festivities, especially in my city of Dumaguete, it is also one that seems best ended, as soon as possible, if only for us to take in the phantom promise of new beginnings.
Everyone needs new beginnings. While the New Year will always be a kind of arbitrary marker—a fiction really to convince ourselves we can control and mark time and the dramatic arcs of our lives—it has become a kind of deeply-ingrained cultural convenience for blank slates. Fresh starts. Fervent resolutions. I think I have come to appreciate this very human wish to start over. The cynics among us call the effort “useless hogwash.” I can’t blame them, given human frailty and the crazy world we live in. But one learns to pity these dried up souls. Because if one has lost hope in our individual capacity to change for the better, what else is there except the abyss?
Sendong has been a sobering experience, if in retrospect. I slept through it, given the marathon of pre-Christmas parties that came before it. While I slept, the city was drowning. The riverbanks and once placid creeks were gorging up a voracious hunger of muddy water and trash. When I woke up that Saturday afternoon, post-storm, it was to an atmosphere of unbearable quiet I could not give a name to. The city was at such a stand still, and when I went out of my apartment in Tubod (which had miraculously escaped from the instant madness of a lake that swelled only a few meters away), the sun was already faintly shining in the sky.
But there was a taste of mustiness and destruction in the ether. I didn’t know it then, of course. I thought it was only a storm giving way slowly to the inevitable sunshine and the humidity that comes after. The water had subsided. I remembered feeling irritated over the closed shops and the tricycles that never materialized. When friends from afar began texting, “How are you in Dumaguete?” with concern laced all over, I innocently replied, “I’m in the mall. But I heard there was a big flood.” I would soon feel guilt, of course, when the horror stories began trickling in. How a colleague almost drowned in her own kitchen. How another colleague’s elderly mother struggled to get up to her roof as the water levels rose. How my mother’s male help had his house demolished by the mad gush of water. How a pregnant waitress we knew in our old watering hole was carried off to her death.
We became subtly schizophrenic about things. How to properly register horror and sadness, while not exactly canceling Christmas? The cheers were muted, and though we still celebrated, it was with a somber underlining to things. And so it was that we dressed to the nines—as planned—to the Sunday party with good friends, something concocted by Mariekhan Edding, Au Tabara, and Anna Katrina Espino. And so it was that we met on Monday with high school classmates as we celebrated both a house blessing and the holidays over at Niña and Eugene Kho’s. And so it was that we went to the festive and traditional Christmas party by my Wednesday reading group, and partook of ham and turkey and pecan pie, a reading of both Dr. Seuss’ How the Grinch Stole Christmas and the last chapter of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, and singing of Christmas carols till near midnight at President Ben and Gladys Malayang’s. And so it was that we spent our Christmas Eve dinner at Don and Arlene Uypitching’s for their annual holiday feast in Valencia, which was breathtaking as usual. And so it was that we spent the early hours of Christmas morning with mother over the remains of lechon, which had lovingly devoured by family.
And so it was, too, that we began helping mobilize relief efforts—which never seemed enough—for those who could not celebrate because of Sendong. And for this, we have many people to be thankful for: the people at Silliman Church, Greg and Bernie Morales, Jojo Antonio, Jacqueline Veloso-Antonio, Angeline Dy, Babes Utzurrum, among many others. There were many people who rose to the occasion and bought or gathered donations of water, food, clothing (especially underwear), toys, medicine, and distributed them to badly-hit areas all over Negros Oriental. There was also a massive injection of help from Gang Badoy and RockEd Philippines, to whom we give an infinity of thanks. It is enough to restore one’s faith in humanity.
In the final analysis, I guess ambivalence is good. Being both happy and sad, both. They underscore so thoroughly the gravity of the other—and I guess that’s the kind of lesson best learned for the New Year: to embrace all happiness, to weather all sadness, to accept that both are the very fulcrums of our fullest lives.
And for the holiday season, we owe it to ourselves to turn to each other and give great cheer above the bleakness that surrounds us, and to also extend comfort where it’s most needed. I have been blessed to find friends who are capable of doing this precarious balance. Thanks to all of you, and if only because one has friends like you one can truly say one’s year has been blessed.
Here’s to 2012 then, and God bless us all.
Those badly hit by Sendong in Dumaguete need medicine, food, clothing, and water. If you want to extend help and donate to RockEd Dumaguete’s Sendong relief efforts, please email us at ian.casocot@gmail.com. Or call 09166652214.
[Photos courtesy of Hersley Ven Casero and Natasha Irish Reambonanza.]
Years ago, I was asked by the writers Gémino H. Abad and Alfred Yuson to submit to an anthology of poetry about fathers and fatherhood in the aptly titled Father Poems (Anvil, 2004). That project, I think, was timed for a Father’s Day release.
The assignment sounded simple—write about your father—but what I had to struggle with, at least initially, was the sudden uncomfortable confrontation of remembering. And remembering is an act fraught with both reconciliation and recounting of past hurts and disappointments—all the dramas any ordinary family is capable of making.
I knew I was not exactly my father’s son. I say that in the sense of familial intimacy. For the longest time, when I was growing up, he was estranged to me, first geographically, and later on, before he died when I was turning 20, emotionally. He was a distant old man who seemed to me possessed by some dark gravity, and I had no patience to understand his tantrums, why he was the way he was, or what was going on in his mind when he would wake up very early every morning and go around the house while we were still sleeping. Was he measuring out, in the dark and bluish light of dawn, what he had made of life? Did he feel that we were disappointed with him—this man who was once young and vibrant and ambitious and wealthy, but who was finally beaten down by strange circumstances to become, perhaps to his own estimation, a shadow? I was a young man in the twilight of his years, and the young never know any better about the varieties of human experience: I only knew the depths of my own narcissistic apathy and the shared disappointments I could not even begin to chart. My father’s name was Fermin. I carry that name, too. It felt then like a burden—like I was yoked to this man whom I could not understand.
Years later, I would write a short story about him titled “The Hero of the Snore Tango” (available now in my short story collection published by the University of the Philippines Press titled Beautiful Accidents) and the first few paragraphs of that story constitute something which I have yanked from reality.
I wrote:
When Father died, the family rose to play its parts as kin bereaved with loss, but rehearsed in its grieving. There was no crying, no fretful skirmishes with acknowledging tragedy—we all knew his days had to end some time. We had played his death scene each in our minds all too frequently, in variations of muted drama. I had imagined elaborations of quiet dark dawns and bursts of hysterics—the way Tagalog movies paint us all.
But it all finally came to this: a hurried waking nudge from Mother one early morning, and one sentence fraught with subdued disconsolation:
"’Gâ," she said, "Papa’s not snoring."
We hurried to his room and there he was in bed, mouth slightly open and with eyes closed, his skin already clammy to the touch.
"He’s not breathing," I said, feeling no pulse.
"Is he dead?" Mother asked.
"He’s dead."
"Why don’t you—I don’t know—why don’t you give him CPR, or something?"
"He’s dead."
The rest was my attempt in fiction to understand the man, albeit belatedly. And in retrospect, I think I have. In my growing years, I now understand the unforeseen skirmishes life brings you that can indeed cripple one’s spirit—and I know he must have fought hard and long for honor, for respect, for love.
But I did not understand yet fully all these that afternoon when I got the invitation to write poetry about him. I remember looking at the emailed invitation for what seemed like a long time, and then I sat down in front of a rented computer terminal at Scooby’s San Jose St. and wrote the following:
Because, father, there was no chance to believe In the impossible: the freshly-dug earth, now Your home, was mute as was usual, turning away Even the last howl of mourners coming near. Their black grieving did not understand, as we did, that Ties which bound could come loose as the grass that Would feast on your memory six feet above could, as Ground swallowed-in the digging for mortal remains. We are told, as the funeral flowers wilted in the sun, that Memories should be immortal, but we prayed for no ghosts. The dead should not speak. We prayed, instead: father, we Forgive you, for you have sinned. And the burial Became growing silence as we soon dispersed for lives spent In battled reflections, the muteness of years bearing down On children struggling to forget by the bottom of Beer bottles, or the occasional want for punish. Soon, we Come, year by year, to some bidding, somehow, For holy days kept precise—that last excuse—to Listen to some eternal knell your spirit might tell. Our candles now burn low to capture some Semblance of closing, the way the ghostly smoke Wisp among flowers, down to the carabao grass kept Trim. We wait, and we wait. And life and silence Become memories built on flimsy hopes, as they must, To resound to a kind of winged believing. And then we learn persistence, by the passing Of days, that even the living must learn to reclaim Their dead, to Live, to now close The prayers with which we can finally love Our dearly departed.
Imperfect poetry from a fictionist. But still. I think I wrote those lines in white heat, although the poem that originally poured from me is a little different now, after random nights spent revising lines, changing one word or four. What has not changed is the ambiguity I still sometimes feel about the man. But that has mellowed. Life itself has taught me how to understand the man.
And yet I know now that I do love this man despite his frailties. He was human. He was me. In my life he continues to live, and I know I must carry on if I want his memory to live on.
There is a picture of him that I keep on my work table at home. It is a photograph in sepia with white borders. He is a young man there—hair slicked back, face impassive but fierce and handsome, collared shirt carefully pressed—and I am struck by the fact that I very much look like him. That photograph keeps me grounded, and makes me remember that love is real, and that it can endure and even blossom even beyond death.
That hour, I was most myself. I had shrugged my mother slowly off, I lay there taking my first breaths, as if the air of the room was blowing me like a bubble. All I had to do was go out along the line of my gaze and back, feeling gravity, silk, the pressure of the air a caress, smelling on myself her creamy blood. The air was softly touching my skin and mouth, entering me and drawing forth the little sighs I did not know as mine. I was not afraid. I lay in the quiet and looked, and did the wordless thought, my mind was getting its oxygen direct, the rich mix by mouth. I hated no one. I gazed and gazed, and everything was interesting, I was free, not yet in love, I did not belong to anyone, I had drunk no milk yet—no one had my heart. I was not very human. I did not know there was anyone else. I lay like a god, for an hour, then they came for me and took me to my mother.
Every year, around Holy Week, I watch without fail a film that is still officially banned from screening in the Philippines -- Martin Scorsese's The Last Temptation of Christ [1988], based on the searing and very controversial novel by the Greek writer Nikolas Kazantzakis. What I have always found ironic about the controversies surrounding both texts is that the protests -- always rabid -- seem to come from the camp of fundamentalist Christians who find in Last Temptation the ultimate blasphemy with regards Christianity. (And often they sharpen their knives without even bothering to see the film or read the book. They have only heard about some salacious details -- for example, that the texts show Jesus abandoning the cross and marrying Mary Magdalene, and having a family with her. Sacrilege! But if only they got the point of that pointed deviation from the Gospel.)
And I have always thought that these texts are in themselves the most Christian of all secular attempts to understand God, and every year when I see this film I am reminded again and again about the singular beauty of my faith: that there was Christ who is God made flesh and born in this world; and that there was His bloody sacrifice on the cross on our behalf, "to wash away our sins," as the Bible says.
But we, in all our unquestioning wallowing of dogma, always forget the ultimate dilemma of the Christ: he was part God, part man. The film and the book make us imagine Jesus treading that fine line of his dual nature: he is free from sin -- but that does not mean he is free from all the temptations humans face; he knows he is called to make that final sacrifice -- but why him? why that kind of pain? and for these people? The film's epigraph, taken from Kazantzakis himself, goes: "The dual substance of Christ, the yearning, so human, so superhuman, of man to attain God... has always been a deep inscrutable mystery to me. My principle anguish and source of all my joys and sorrows from my youth onward has been the incessant, merciless battle between the spirit and the flesh... and my soul is the arena where these two armies have clashed and met."
In the end, on the cross, where the clip above takes us, Jesus is confronted by an ethereal child who calls herself his "guardian angel." This is in fact Satan giving him his final temptation -- to give up the cross, to give up being the Messiah, and to live from henceforth a comfortable life, perhaps with Mary Magdalene, perhaps with family. The child knows how to tempt: that soothing, knowing voice, invoking even Scripture -- it knows the thwarted sacrifice of Abraham, for example; it knows how to coat logic and sentimentality into temptation. The child shows Jesus the kind of life he could have, if he gives up the cross. He is tempted. He is, after all, half-human.
What we don't see in this clip is Jesus' final response: he says "no" to the final temptation, denounces the child as Satan in disguise -- and brings to accomplishment God's mission for him on earth: to die for our sins to give us eternal grace.
What a beautiful message that is, and also something that exquisitely paints for us the agony of the Christ's dual nature. Only the truest Christian, if I may say so, can appreciate something like Last Temptation. And learn from it.
Dinners at Arlene Delloso-Uypitching’s are a performance, a theater to culinary spectacle—and always an occasion for celebration. In Dumaguete, there’s nothing else like it. And sure, we have all been to other dinners thrown by assorted friends, and perhaps we can even say we have had the time of our lives over good food and fine wine and splendid conversation in them. But when I think of throwing dinner in the way I think of fine art, I think of Arlene’s. She defines it.
Sometimes, with others, the food does not offer much in terms of adventure, just the usual staple of bam-i and fresh lumpia and lechon manok and what-not, but the company is nevertheless merry, and there is plenty of beer for the dressed-down lot. Sometimes, the banquet may be an orgy of taste—but the mix of guests is not right, and the night ends up with people in little cliques, each one ignoring the other, with all wrapped up in their own little worlds. Sometimes the host may just be a little too uptight for comfort, or is the illustration of a social disaster of such chatty proportions without the grace and the fierce and quiet intelligence needed to make a good evening feel even better. Sometimes, the place is too oppressive for the necessary vibes to get a party going. And sometimes, everything just plain goes wrong—the rain comes, the electricity goes out, the music is horrendous, the chef is missing, the wine is bad, the dog has run away with the turkey, the guests come in flip-flops to a formal dinner.
Dinner-giving is not a perfect science. It is almost all intuition, with lots of room for good luck. But Arlene seems to know a thing or two about how to make an evening memorable. She plans for it the way a painter sees the outlines of a story on a blank canvas. They are always about something, or for someone. “Let’s throw a party for Marvin and Kuya Bodjie,” she would say. Or: “Let’s do a little Balinese theme, just for friends.” Or: “Let’s look at the blue moon in Mampas.” Then she would invite a local chef of some renown to plan and execute the menu. One time, it was Patrick Chua—otherwise known as the city’s best orthodentist—and his glorious and inventive paella. Another time it was an Uypitching cousin fresh off a culinary school from somewhere else in the world.
Giving good dinners takes practice and time. It also takes a venue that lends itself well to flowing conversation and the orgiastic partaking of delicious food. It also takes a large enough personality that attracts an uncommon crowd, a capacity for imagination that requires dazzle but with a Martha Stewart restraint, and an uncanny sense of chemistry that is able to ascertain a killer guest list and their ability to sustain each other in interesting talk.
For Christmas Eve, Arlene threw a small dinner for friends at the house she shares with husband Don in lower Valencia, an extensive estate done with an unmistakable Balinese sensibility and aesthetics. It has spots suitable for intimate gatherings. We’ve done dinners here before, sometimes alfresco. For this night, she turned a big garage—a garage!—into a kind of Christmas wonderland, with choice picks of linen and comfortable furniture and holiday draperies and candles and carefully designed soft lighting. On one side, she assembled a dining set arranged in a square with a donut hole, which accommodated a jolly bundle of Christmas décor consisting of angels and poinsettia and what-not—with none of the garishness you will find in that other Christmas pit-stop in town. On the other side, she had appointed a lounging area ready for the after-dinner wine-drinking and comfortable boozy talk, and beside it she placed a live Christmas tree filled with 33 candles, which the Colburn and Uypitching kids lit up as dinner progressed to dessert. We played Christmas songs all night.
From left, May Justine Colburn, John Colburn, Arlene Delloso-Uypitching, Don Ramas-Uypitching, Jeremy Schmoll, Antonio Quiogue, Ian Rosales Casocot, and Aaron Jalaon
From left, flanking the Uypitching matriach and patriarch, Maresa Bengochea-Uypitching, Arlene Delloso-Uypitching, and Don Ramas-Uypitching
Ritchie Armogenia—of KRI and Likha—was the chef for the occasion, and he had a promising menu for us—herbs-encrusted maya-maya with mustard and basil butter, linguini with shrimp roasted in garlic and chili, Brazilian beef tournedos with potato croquetas and rosemary demi-glace, and finally, a roasted turkey with gravy. It was a banquet to forget diets away. Mister Donuts’ John Colburn appointed himself the bartender for the night—and was passing everyone a delicious concoction he called chocolate patron martini, composed of tequila rose and a wisp of Baileys, then garnished with grated chocolate truffles. “I’m going to give you something else,” he told me when I walked over to the makeshift bar. “This is my cranberry vodka delight,” he said and proceeded to prepare it in front of me. “First, you put in ice,” he said, and into the shaker went in some cubes. “Then you put two ounces of vodka. And then some Old Orchard cranberry juice. And then a touch of Malibu for the coconut taste. And then a little rock and roll.” He shook the entire mix, then poured the contents into glasses for me and another friend. “Then here’s the lemon wedge around the lid, to accent the drink. This is the key. It brings out the flavor,” he finally said. And it was a refreshing drink, subtle in its kick, just the way I liked it, the coconut flavor biting in at the last of every sip.
Don and Arlene with Ritchie Armogenia and his crew
The kids lighting up all thirty-three Christmas tree candles
John’s wife, the irrepressibly charming Justine, made sure the party flow proved dynamic and fun. (And I have to say this: what I like best about Mister Donuts is the Mrs.) And the guests—which included Don’s father and mother, his brother Ngo An and wife Maresa, Esther and Heinz Windler, the artist Karl Aguila, the Davao writer Aaron Jalalon, the photographer and painter Hersley-Ven Casero, and Student Universe’s head honcho Antonio Quiogue and his husband Jeremy Schmoll—proved equal to the merriment. We went beyond small talk into a kind of spell only intimate gatherings can provoke.
And to that, we toasted ourselves a merry Christmas, and toasted Ritchie’s merry spread, and toasted friendships old and new.
There was life in Dumaguete years and years and years ago on New Year's night. The noisemakers don't count. They come every year, their ephemeral brilliance lighting up the night sky to expected oohs and aahs, the evidence of their fiery short life lying in the tattered paper shells and the whiff of sulfuric smoke that litter and fog the city streets. I am talking about the congregation of people that used to meet the new year in our public byways. Those were happier days. The stretch of Rizal Boulevard, in a memory plucked from more than a decade ago, was a smorgasbord of music and merriment: I remember that when the midnight approached, we would break out to that ten-second countdown, and then finally, after the cheer of 12 o'clock struck, there would be that general swell of people singing "Auld Lang Syne," and then would come the hugging, and the kissing, and the breathing-in of the embracing atmosphere of a city alive and gearing up for another year, and the...
What happened?
Last night, we only imagined the countdown, trusting our wristwatches to give us the mark to celebrate the first hour of the new year. There was no "Auld Lang Syne," no throng of merrymakers to party with. The fireworks, projectiled from some distance off the pier, came prematurely at around 10 o'clock. It was a little too early to break into celebration, and so we met the fireworks with both restraint and heavy expectations. "There should be more by midnight," someone said as the sky above us flared. "I do hope so," said another.
We crossed our fingers. But the stretch of the boulevard looked deserted, already a ghost town. It was as if slumber was the way to go to meet 2011, all darkness, no merriment -- perhaps a metaphor for the condition of the city's soul, its psyche. The city was already wet from an early evening rain, and so the concrete streets were browning in that ugly way cement does when pelted with water. The poor tourists -- mostly white -- were huddled here and there, waiting for something to happen. "There should be more by midnight," someone said. "I do hope so," said another.
We didn't know where else to go. And so we stopped at the only place that seemed festive in the pre-midnight hours: CocoAmigos. I haven't been back to this restobar for almost a year. (In actuality, most of us haven't been back to this place for a long, long time. It has become another spot of our abandonment, the way most of us fled Why Not, for example.) It looked grimy and sad, a far cry from how it was many years ago when this was the city's hub of food and entertainment, when we delighted in its Mexican whimsy and the attention to detail spent on its decor. There were still traces of that old beauty, but the atmosphere had certainly changed -- we felt that in our bones, on our skin; the place now resembled a tawdry saloon peopled with characters of scarlet tendencies. It had certainly seen better days. We took charge of a round table near the restobar's makeshift stage, where we began nursing our bottles of beer as the explosions raged above us. In the shadow of the sparkly lights brightening the sky, two girls -- both in red, one clad in a baby doll dress and the other in a mini-skirt -- climbed up the stage accompanied by an older man, also in red, and the two began singing away our New Year Japayuki-style. Their repertoire was catchy in that Ermita vibe, their dance moves rich in variations of the gyrating bombshell. All that was certainly lacking was a pole. They sang in clipped bar-girl enunciation, ripping with gusto such songs as Lipps Inc.'s "Funky Town" and Van McCoy's "Do the Hussle." ("Do da hassa!" they breathed with affected sultriness.) The old man in red got into the groove of his sad synthesizer like there was no tomorrow. Around them, the men -- mostly white, some with bellies protruding -- held court with their women, some of them feeling like almighty kings of the world. Later, a middle-aged woman, perhaps pushing fifty, long-haired and bespectacled and clad in black leggings, her generous tummy spilling over the edges of her pekpek shorts, took command of the space in front of the stage, and danced with such knowing choreography to the sound of ABBA's "Dancing Queen," among others. She flipped, she flopped, she did the hustle. Later, the women on stage called on a "guest singer" who riffed into a soulful rendition of two Aegis songs. Later, with the dancing queen back on her dance floor, a foreign man waddled in to join her, his Hawaiian shirt open, and he swung his hips and dipped low to her dance moves, and someone -- the foreign man's Filipina companion -- burst out laughing. Perhaps scared or insulted, the dancing queen made a move to get away, offering the man a half-hearted air kiss, and soon retreated to the insides of CocoAmigos. It was sad.
It struck me that most of these people -- the locals, anyway -- must have been someone else in their past: a former dancer, a former singer, a former entertainer in some foreign bar where the lights are kept low -- and this place has become the hub of some forlorn afterlife, where they can gyrate and croon to recapture the seedy glow of past lives in the open air, in this space of personal freedom in the stifling burgis snobbishness of Dumaguete. Here, they dance and they sing on weekend nights, where they get at least some applause, from the foreigners who find all these exotic and striking, from the throng of masa goggling from the sides, enjoying the free show.
In our growing discomfort over the white man's dance, we hurried to pay our tab, and escaped to witness the last of the paltry fireworks that finally ushered in the New Year. We counted down among ourselves, then hugged each other, and then proceeded to the friendlier atmosphere of Hayahay where we got wasted on beer and rum and fried kangkong and sisig to the sounds of Cebuano reggae and Kakay Pamaran singing her sultry version of "Careless Whisper." Later, we made an aborted run to Labeled, where nothing was happening. Later, we descended on El Camino Blanco, where at least there were people dancing. There was more drinking. There was flirtation. There was no talk of resolutions.
This is newness: every little tawdry Obstacle glass-wrapped and peculiar, Glinting and clinking in a saint's falsetto. Only you Don't know what to make of the sudden slippiness, The blind, white, awful, inaccessible slant. There's no getting up it by the words you know. No getting up by elephant or wheel or shoe. We have only come to look. You are too new To want the world in a glass hat.
At Arlene's lower Valencia house for Christmas Eve dinner with some of our friends. She's always the perfect hostess, perhaps Dumaguete's best. Photography by Hersley-Ven Casero.
When I think about the Christmas that is to come, it hits me each passing day with increasing gravity that I will be spending it alone. I take this with dispassion. It does not matter, I tell myself. And somewhere in the fathoms of me, I smile with a firm nonchalance I’ve taken at this idea of exquisite solitariness surrounded by holiday tinsel and cheer.
Of course, when I mention this to people who ask me where I will be for Christmas Eve, I get a look of passing pity, and I know exactly what they are thinking: the holidays are designed for rituals of gathering, and I am the oddball that elicits—what? Pity? Suspicion? I do my best to allay their misgivings. “The thing is, my mother is in Los Angeles,” I tell them, “This will be my first Christmas without her—and I doubt I shall be sharing noche buena with the others in my family.”
(My second Christmas, actually. Years ago, when I knew no better, I spent a solitary Christmas in the dark snowy nighttime of Hokkaido in Japan, where there was no Christmas—and there, at the approach of midnight, in the silence that begat only more silence, I cried myself to sleep. How amusing that young man seems to me now, so brittle with worry and want.)
So yes, I tell them that my mother is somewhere in the sunny wonderland of Los Angeles. When we—the family, which means all my married brothers and their families and I—would gather for noche buena on the twenty-fourth of each December, it was a familial exercise we did for her. She demanded it. But we are such an unsentimental family in many ways. All of us have flown the nest, and to assuage our guilt of having donned so much of Western traditions in the habits of family, we would march to Mother’s place in Bantayan, go through the motions of staying, eat her feast, and before the fireworks threatened to make the highways impassable with noise and smoke and the smell of burnt sulfur, we would kiss her goodbye and goodnight, and off we would go to our individual lives. We don’t do gifts. I don’t remember anybody in my family ever giving me, or each other, Christmas gifts as a matter of course. We give gifts randomly throughout the year, but as a Christmas tradition, no. I do remember one time my brother Edwin buying me a computer, when I was a kid. I do remember making my sister-in-law Daisy a mixed tape once, a recording of Meryl Streep reading The Velveteen Rabbit. I do remember the occasional manito/manita, but it was never set as a rule or tradition. This has been my kind of Christmas for years. Quite unsentimental, which has taught me well. Of course, we make an effort to sweeten it with Christmas songs and decorations and a good feast, perhaps even snapshot opportunities with smiling faces, but…
“But surely,” they will continue, “you’re spending the holidays with others in your family.”
“Well, my brothers are everywhere, some place else. Switzerland. There are two in Los Angeles. The ones in Dumaguete—they have their own families to share this Christmas with.” Without the fulcrum that is my mother, it feels remarkably odd to even consider.
“Cousins?”
“I don’t want to bother them.”
“Oh my.”
“It’s all right, really.”
I don’t blame them their worry. I know where it comes from. I’ve been there. Some of my best memories of Christmas involve a halo-halo of family and friends and the magic that sometimes happen when you put together people who truly care for each other in a room or a house. Some accidental merriment is bound to ensue. One time, it was my eldest brother Rocky, fresh from Cebu, deciding to shower us kids those gold 25 centavo coins, all shining and newly-minted. We raised such merry ruckus, all that laughter and elbowing and everything else. Another time, my brother Edwin took all of us on a trek to a department store downtown, and told us: “Choose the best Christmas tree in the store, the one you want.” The merchandise was made of plastic, of course, but it was our first Christmas tree after years and years of poverty—and its huge size and its possibilities for decoration overwhelmed us. We brought the tree home to our old house in Sibulan, decked it with ornaments and light. When it finally twinkled, we gathered around it, like it was a beacon of so much hope.
I was a kid in most of these memories. But Christmas is different when you’re young. It has an inner, throbbing magic for children. When we grow up, we are forever exiled from it, possessed only with the inescapable feeling that Christmasses past were always better, shinier. The things we have left are our nostalgia.
Nostalgia will not be in the cards for me this year. I stake my claim on that alone-ness, that beautiful solitariness. But I don’t mean to make it sound sad: the word “alone” carries with it a universe of ennui—and there’s massive literature out there that has mapped out the word to contain our endless capacities for the morose and the dramatic—and so perhaps the right phrase to use may be “spending it by my lonesome.” In either case, the number is singular. And I shall take that fact with an embrace.
It is a beautiful thing to embrace. It has taught me quiet. It has taught me to appreciate the rare moments of togetherness when they do happen out of the kinetic order of the world, and not out of habit or force. It has taught me to pray. I shall thank my unsentimental family for all that. In a sense, this is the best Christmas gift they’ve ever given me.
12:00 PM |
Two Unplanned Noche Buenas
Years ago, I was asked by the writers Gémino H. Abad and Alfred Yuson to submit to an anthology of poetry about fathers and fatherhood in the aptly titled Father Poems (Anvil, 2004). That project, I think, was timed for a Father’s Day release. 
