buma-ballad of the sad cafe-ish mode

I was watching some showbiz news show earlier in a local channel when they showed what was up next in tonight's episode of Glee. I was never hooked to this show and never got interested, even when one of my college friends went gaga one time when he showed me how one episode revolved around Madonna songs. "It's just like our college barkada" he said. Well okay admittedly, that was okay. The Madonna ep actually reminded me of our own fresh-out-of-college days life in our Reality Bites mode of an apartment in QC. Yeah, that was okay. But still, Madonna wasn't enough to move me to become a regular viewer of this musically-oriented show.

Until tonight's ep.

Tonight, the lesbian plight of the cheerleader named Santana was the subject of the ep. Apparently, she just came out or something, or she made a video for the It Gets Better project or something to that effect, and since she's not yet out to everyone -- especially her family -- the story worked up on her outing.

Her storyline had a good pacing. Not too jampacked with a lot of emotional drama stuff, story handling was quite reserved in a good way, meaning not too heavy-handed in treatment. Boy, if this was Philippine TV, I tell you, it would not be this mellow! Geez, we Pinoys put the melo in melodrama, that's why. How I envy US writers who can write freely like this.

Anyway, I think what made me change my mind about the show was its handling of this issue. Now I am curious as to how they handled her whole lesbian story arc. I get bits here and there, reading posts of my friends in the lezzieverse, and of course seeing clips of the other gay-themed storyline with the boy kissing another boy and all that, which also led to this lesbian storyline. But since this is a girl-to-girl interaction, I want to watch it and see how they present such storylines.

But to connect this with reality, I also felt sad when Santana's abuela (Spanish for lola or grandma) rejected her outing, saying something like "You put me to shame" or something, meaning the lola's reaction is that this secret should have remained a secret, and that secret now burdened her lola. I can't help but compare how we Pinoys deal with such things. It's the don't ask, don't tell policy in Pinoy families when it comes to sexual orientation and gender identity things. A recent article I wrote centered on that. Read more here.

But I guess more than the lesbian storyline, it was the songs that got me. I mean, I never heard some of my favorite female-penned/female-sung songs sung by male bodies before. But somehow, it was still a kind of gender-bending treatment, I dunno. It felt that way. Like when one boy sang Melissa Etheridge's "I'm The Only One" but it still had that lesbian vibe to it. Man, I love that song, and the whole album where that came from! You kidding me? No self-respecting woman-loving-woman should be caught dead without a copy of Yes I Am heheh (or maybe that's just my generation? Bleh, ageism.) And then that lead boy sang "Girls Just Wanna Have Fun" by one of my '80s favorite Cyndi Lauper; equally good treatment, since it was melodramatic and acoustic. Well, I guess for lack of a better pop hook, they also had to sing Katy Perry's "I Kissed A Girl" but craftily avoided the discriminatory portions towards the end. Smart. (If you don't know what I'm talking about, I dissected some "seemingly gay-friendly" songs before in an article. Read it here.)

But what got me was when they sang one of my favorite favorite favorite songs of all time, kd lang's "Constant Craving." Oh man, that did it for me! And to use it for what it truly is -- a song of empowerment about who you are and what you want to attain, whether it's love or ambition (or both, or the ambition for love, actually) -- and arrange it so that multiple voices sing it but it somehow applies to their own existence, I mean wow, simple yet cool. Subtle, but loaded. I like it.

The song's lyrics are just simple, but how kd sings it is really striking:

Even through the darkest phase
Be it thick or thin
Always someone marches brave
Here beneath my skin

Constant craving
Has always been

Maybe a great magnet pulls
All souls towards truth
Or maybe it is life itself
That feeds wisdom
To its youth

Constant craving
Has always been

Funny, I just remembered one of the very first short stories I wrote that was published in the late '90s had something to do with songs, about a woman hesitatingly falling in love with a woman, and I ended it with them quoting that kd lang song. The story's title is "The Ballad of Tisha Gail" and it's actually one of my favorite stories in my treasure trove. Fiction writer Butch Dalisay, in our grad class, termed it as "the search for princess charming" heheh.

My very bad attempt at videoke, peer-pressured by my lesbian friends
in Baguio heheh. I tell ya, I can dance bad-ass like Ellen but I can't sing a song
to save my life. So un-Filipino, di ba? To be a bad singer?
And my last name means "soloist in a choir" pa naman haha!
(City Tavern, Baguio / April 2011 photo by superfriend L)

You can't find that story online so here's part of it. The pitch is, it's about this Pinay lesbian named Gina who has a huge crush on her officemate Trish, a Fil-Canadian. Sharing the ending here:

“You know, you’re really nice, Gina. You’d make some woman very happy some day, you know, when you decide to settle down.”

“Geez, Trish!”

“What? It’s true. You’re a hard-working woman, very talented, nice, kind, a good confidante, and domesticated. Am I embarrassing you enough or do you want more?”

“Ha! Yeah, right! More! Geez!”

“And you’re also sweet, thoughtful--”

“Geez, Trish! Stop it!”

“Ha-ha!”

“And what’s that ‘domesticated’ thing? How can you say that?”

“You fix up your bed and the room every morning. You even fix my own bed without me asking you to. And you like doing the dishes, you help in preparing the food. You know, wife stuff.”

“Wife stuff? Hasn’t it occurred to you that maybe I’m just doing that because I have to, because that’s my only contribution to this trip since everything’s provided for free by your Tita?”

“No, Gina. It’s more than that. You’re also like that in the office. I know, because you always fix up our cubicle. And I’m always embarrassed, because I can be such a slob!”

“Yeah, that or I’m just super obsessive-compulsive.”

“That never bothered me.”

“You’re such a flake, Trish. Did you know that? Miss Nicety-Nice is a flake!”

“Yes! I am! Ha-ha! Only you guys don’t know it!”

“He-he! Great! So what else don’t we know about you that you feel like sharing, huh?”

“Well...”

“W-ell... what?”

“Well, I’d like to know why, Gina.”

“Why? Why what?”

“Why you never made a pass at me? During all those times that we’re out of town?”

“WHAT?”

“Um, you know...”

“Uh, geez, now I’m uh, speechless...”

“I’ve been thinking about it, Gina. I’ve had more fun with you than with anybody else I’ve met and had relationships with all my life. I was toying with the idea of kissing you, you know, just to know how it feels to kiss a woman. A Filipino woman.”

“What—you mean—“

“I mean… I had some lesbian suitors back in Vancouver, but I never found them interesting. Through them, I found out that I can be open, but not with them. Perhaps I’m looking for something else in them. I’m not sure what exactly, but, um, I guess I found that in you.”

“Alright, stop with the jokes before I get really really embarrassed here!”

“No, Gina, no jokes, honest! These past three days, I keep on thinking ‘what if I lie beside you and just hug you?’ You’re so caring, so nice, that I’m wondering why you don’t have a girlfriend.”

“W-ell... I dunno. He-he… Kinda hard to find the good girls.”

“Um, I’m here, am I not? I’m good. You guys always say so yourselves.”

“Wh-- uhh, you, uh, mean...”

“You want to give it a shot?”

“Uhh...”

“Chicken!”

“No, I’m not!”

“Prove it then!”

I guess I have Freddie and Jill to thank for not showing up that night at the bar. No, I retract. I have my boss to thank for trapping them in that charades game. I have to thank her for making nepotism a priority and putting Patricia in our office as my supervisor. Or do I have to thank Vancouver for exposing Patricia to the proper gay and lesbian awareness? Whoever and whatever it is that I should thank, I thank them all. If not for them, then I won’t be receiving this wonderful feeling called love from this wonderful woman named Patricia. She taught me a new song about myself, about giving people a chance to show their true selves to me. And I’m grateful. I guess I’m also teaching her a new song, the one that says being loved by her is the most wonderful thing on earth. She then persuaded me to take a much-needed vacation. So I guess next month, we’ll be jamming in a videoke bar somewhere on the outskirts of Vancouver.

“Your Tita Myra will miss me at the office, you know. Are you sure it’s alright?”

“Gina, let nepotism work to your advantage for once.”

“But she will suspect, because I’m going with you! And you’ll be in trouble.”

“Gina, why do you think she’s still called Miss Myra and lives alone in her house with her adopted daughter at the prime age of 42? It’s just one of those family things that the family doesn’t really discuss, you know what I mean?”

“You mean…”

“Yes, I mean.”

“Oh. OH! Oh. Wow. WOW!”

We were both wondering if Freddie and Jill noticed the special closeness Patricia and I had after the Burnham Park walk. I guess they did, because I saw the two wink at me when I said goodnight. Sleeping early Patricia, Jill said. Well, the walk back here was tiring, she said. Besides, Gina’s teaching me the lyric to this new song I liked, this k.d. lang song the bar band sang. O-kayyy... So, goodnight, you two. Wink, smile, courtesy of Freddie. Wink, smile, courtesy of Jill. Smile, thumbs up, courtesy of yours truly.

“So, how does it go again, Gina? And constant craving is -- is what?”

“Has, Trish, has always been.”

("The Ballad of Tisha Gail" ©1999, this revision ©2008)

Yeah, it's really interesting to note that the good kicks I get from pop culture stuff still have something to do with women-loving-women-themed stuff. And I like it. So sige, will put this show on my backlog of things to watch for the holidays and see how the storyline goes.

Trans Pride and genderqueered thoughts

We're celebrating this today, worldwide:


I am one with my fellow transpinays, STRAP, in their candle-lighting ceremony and readings event later at my old NGO office Isis International Manila. I'm just jampacked today so I can't make it.

The list of worldwide events to commemorate this day is here.

I also wrote two trans-related articles this month for POC Pinoy LGBT, in commemoration of this. It's sad that outside the lgbtq and specifically in trans advocate communities, the Philippines never really try to make an effort in understanding the trans identity. That's what my first article is about, sort of a Trans 101 Pinoy style type of article.

Excerpt:

To put it simply, we should all respect what a person wants in terms of labeling herself or himself in terms of gender identities. Thus, if you meet a transgender person, please ask them first what their identity is and how they want to be addressed. If you know a biological male who started dressing like a woman and presents himself as a woman, please don’t pin him to a label he doesn’t want to be identified with. If he wants to be identified as a woman because he feels his heart, mind and soul is that of a woman’s, then refer to him as a woman – not a gay man, not a bisexual man, and not a “transvestite” since gender identity doesn’t involve merely dressing up. It’s the same for transmen, or biologically-born women who want to be identified as men. Stop calling them lesbians if their identity is beyond that.

I know that in the Philippine context, this is mostly a struggle reflected not only outside the LGBTQ community but also within it sometimes – proper recognition. Since the country runs on default dichotomies of labeling people (man/woman, straight/gay, heterosexual/homosexual, good/bad), people are automatically lumped in either/or categories, no in-betweens, and certainly no patience for varied sub-identities. It’s either you’re just gay, or you’re just lesbian. What if you’re not just that? Again, where are the Bs, Ts, and Qs?

The article title is "Trans identities in the (Pinoy) SOGI alphabet." Read more here.

The other article is the more interesting one (it comes out anytime this week), since I detail there how, for the first time in my life, I've seen a transman, or those born females but transitioned and went under the knife to become male. We call this FTM, female to male but they are post-op. It was soooo cool! It was when I was doing this video, actually, for Mama Cash Netherlands, last summer.



Yes, the Spanish-speaking one there, Andres, is the transman. I just wished we didn't have a huge language barrier. Mi espanyol no es bueno kasi hehe ay caramba. I wanted to converse with him sana about lots of things about this. Grabe it's just sooo cool!

I guess I'm interested in these things because since I have embraced the queer label instead of the lesbian (specifically the lesbian-feminist), it is somehow related to questioning gender nuances. That's why I prefer to be a genderqueer person, meaning someone who doesn't give a damn about the man/woman labels, because it's limiting, and especially its heterosexist application in the Filipino lesbian context. What I mean is when you are a lesbian in the Philippines, you are made to "choose" if you are butch or femme, and if you are butch, almost always you have to be like a man and people refer to you as a man. If you are femme naman, you assume the "woman role" in a relationship.

I don't like this, really. It's so patriarchal. I had a good conversation about this last night with a good friend of mine, a lesbian who is my "exclu buddy" hehe meaning we only get to see each other, at least once a year, whenever there's an exclusive party going on haha! And we update each other on our lives and our friends and such. And we were just amazed yesterday because we saw that the lesbian scene outside the advocacy community is still pretty much the same -- butch-femme dichotomies abound. I wondered about this and she said that as long as patriarchy is not dead, we will have such patriarchal mimicry in our spheres. I was like PAK! Swak sa banga, teh. Grabe. May tama siya. Interesting.

Oh, if you're wondering what an exclusive party is, check out this article I wrote about it. Yes, it's an exclusive event for lesbians. Or women who love women.

Last summer din, I also met someone who identifies as gender nonconforming, Christine Sun, this queer rights lawyer na Asian-American. And she was so cool about it. We had an interesting conversation thanks to the US Embassy people who brought her here. I also wrote an article about that here.

Yeah so I think more than anything, I could also be gender nonconforming since I don't really want to subscribe to merely being referred to as a man or a woman. Kaya going back to these un-politicized lez circles -- and even the politicized circles rin naman -- they're still having a hard time grasping such newer forms of identities. I think aside from me, I only know one person who wants to seriously transition naman to the trans identity for real, not merely sa genderqueer and nonconforming like me. She is a good friend and I am happy that she's finding her true self again these days. I guess we all make those journeys once in a while, several times in our lifetime, and I support her all the way, wherever level she wants to take her identity anew. I'm all for that, as long as it finds her happiness.

this is what (my) genderqueer looks like
(Nov 2011 on the way to Eastwood Libis QC)

As for me, well, most times I just keep these things to myself because it's also quite tiresome to explain to people, especially to people you know won't really absorb the answers but are merely making conversation. But I'd gladly lecture on this to those who want to listen, and certainly I won't stop writing about it.

Comme ca.

Bakit? Book it?

At this very moment, I am still debating whether I should attend the Manila International Literary Festival or funnily shortened as MILF. I swear, whoever thought of this name last year is... a genius. Haha!

I just don't like the reference to a certain author's past novel.
Said author was just easily "forgiven" for plagiarizing issues
early this year. I don't think that's right.

The program line-up is here. It doesn't look as exciting as last year, the first, but what the hey. Yeah so maybe I won't attend all three days na lang since the ones I'm interested in are in the two days lang naman. But I don't know.

Let's see. Will give feedback in my pop culture blog if ever.

the bearable lightness of being (there)

My friend is right.

To reiterate:


And Project Fortify is SO ON!

commencing Project Fortify. right. about. now. funk soul brutha.

And it looks a little somethin' like this...









It's best to stay focused.

Like that song in Avenue Q said, "but only for now..."

Life is only for now.

...and the deathly hollow(ed)

It's quiet here in my part of the world -- deathly quiet.

The Philippines is "celebrating" undas season right now, or All Saints Day today and All Souls Day tomorrow. Today is an official holiday and tomorrow is an unofficial one for those who can get away with it. Officially, it was also holiday yesterday since Halloween was sandwiched in between holidays and the weekend. Hence, it was a long weekend for most people here. So most of the people are either out of town on a vacation or went to visit their dead relatives in the cemeteries. Hence, the quietness of the area.

It has been an interesting long weekend so far for me. Coming from deathly sad thoughts, I think it was a good transition time for me to ruminate things over and stuff like that. I like the quiet that this weekend has offered so far. I wish to extend it until tomorrow.

But first, I want to get the deathly sad thought out of the way.

I was reading this column by feminist writer Rina Jimenez David about the concept of "e-lamay" where overseas Pinoy workers can participate in real-time during the wake of their dearly departed here. Yes, this is a legitimate service offered by funeral homes here now. Strange, no? Anyway, that column made me realize that it's not such a bad idea after all, this online wake biz, since I participated in one myself lately.

While I introduced the better concept of Skype-ing to my relatives in Canada the past week (the usual phone line conferencing already sucks), we somehow took it to the next level as my sister, using my cousin's iphone, called me up online so that I could see how they are during my grandfather's wake. My lolo died about 10 days ago or so, and it really made us so sad. What's even sadder is the fact that I was contemplating on how I wanted to go there to visit him, alive, for the last time, but my luck ran out, I guess. Hence the virtual participation.

There was even an online registry/announcement of sorts
which you can find in the funeral service's website here.
I wonder how long they're going to have it there?

My tita in front of my lolo's open casket.

It was also good for us to call each other in person, Skype-ing that way during the time we were waiting for the service. North America does death differently, as we found out, so instead of hanging out with the dearly departed in the funeral home, my relatives hung out at my tita's home. That was when we started Skype-ing, and I'm glad I got to see them and hear them again, after so long.

New nephews with my Ontario-based cousin and
my sister who flew in from California, just in time,
and was the one who broke the news to me.

Now I can't wait to hang out with them. I hope I could do that real soon.

Sharing hearty laughter with relatives that matter are priceless.
I have long forgotten that. Thanks to this event,
I am reminded of things that should matter more.

Yeah, we Filipinos do death differently. Like today. I was telling a foreign friend how this holiday is seen as a celebration, a time to also have the family get-together in a reunion of sorts, in a cemetery, with their departed loved ones. So it's not a quiet, solemn type of gathering. When Pinoys gather, it's always loud. Fun loud. And I was glad we sort of had that fun loud type of session online, even before undas. I think we all needed that.

It also goes to show that life, indeed, is so short, that we should not dillydally and therefore we should make things happen the way we want them to happen. If we don't have the resources, then we take the next best thing, whatever they may be.

And this realization made me realize another thing: that if old connections falter, then by all means make new ones, or re-polish existing ones you sometimes neglect to make them shine more in your life.

Two good friends somehow admonished me in that manner because I didn't tell them about my grieving, or even my lolo's death, when we saw each other. I guess it also has something to do with coping and how I wanted to cope with grief. Yeah, I kinda wanted to go it alone for a while since this death has such a profound meaning for me. Sometimes, those whom I think would grieve with me won't or didn't, and those whom I surprisingly thought didn't give a damn actually did care, and still do. So again, tipping of balances in terms of premiums here. Only death makes you realize who your real friends are, and who are the ones who are there only for convenience -- mostly for them. And yet again, that painful realization that we should let go of people we care for if, in essence, they really don't care in return. Life is too short to be surrounded by negativity.

Anyway, I've resolved to come out of my shell as well, to just hang out with happy people who are happy to be with me, as I found out, surprisingly. A simple film showing session last Saturday proved that, as two gay friends sincerely showed their support and told me that they missed my company. Two other colleagues expressed the same thought online. And I can't wait to hang out again with this queer(ed) bunch of people. Yes, hopefully ending the night again with rounds of videoke sessions over beer and crispy pata.

I also want to intersect them with some new queer people I have been meeting here and there as well, as part of my shedding that shell involves meeting new people outside of my usual circles (a very Taurean trait to be fiercely loyal to a few, even if their loyalty to me falters). Never mind the rumormongers and the insecure people who are intimidated to be with me. There are seven billion people in the world, as the news now says. If they are that insecure, then they might not be interesting people to begin with, so why bother? So let's hang out with the other six million people of the world. Que sera sera. Yes, the world is an apple, and we should always bite.

The world is a stage. Partake. Please remind me if I forget.
(Oct 2011 at the CCP showing of Stomp)

And, despite the revamp of my socials, maybe it's high time to have alone time again, somewhere where the sun, the sand and the sea intersect. Either that, or somewhere that snows. We'll see.

So it was just a fine time to get the two new decorative additions to my being. One is that picture I posted ahead of this. I guess this is the start of more hopeful beginnings for me. The second semester of school will start in a week, new projects will be realized soon, looking forward to meet new people around Manila, and the year will have to wrap up itself in a positive way.

So be it.

Life's always full when you fill all hollows with memories that matter.