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Those awkward moments when I find myself unable to utter anything but brief banalities and I realize that I am behaving like a zombie on obituaries...

Sometimes, I think of the other side. Topics under the sun can range from mammoths to economics. Sometimes I cannot relate myself to some topics yet I must force myself to respect the speaker by making sympathetic noises if needed. Responding to the topic may sometimes get delayed, not really cancelled, because I usually reflect before speaking my mind. I cannot expect myself to talk like there's no morrow on trivias about football. Surely, we all have our own line of interests.

At other times, what holds me from opening my mouth and eventually fail to keep up is mistrust. When I am with my intimate friends, I am comfortable talking especially sensitive topics like lust and other dreadful things I could imagine. Yet when conversing with new people, I usually don't open up everything especially personal matters that might touch principles of others. When I am forced to make a comment or share an experience, I do but with reservations. 

Many instances also, I am having an emotional lag. Gauging my maturity level, I can say that I have not so far reached the ideal stage to be a sensible adult. When my colleagues in work talk about topics like family life I usually find myself able to relate some times and unable to relate at other times. Maybe because I cannot expect or force myself to speak on something I did not personally experience like taming a partner or rearing a child.

I think that it is normal that as humans we experience a period of fixation in this planet that is drowning with words. I must admit that oftentimes I get mercifully slow and run out of words to say, and well, even words to write like for this blog.

A Prayer of Teacher

Most gracious Heavenly Father
I humbly kneel to You as a teacher
Grateful for the precious breath of life
You bestowed for my work's strife.

Help me always consider in the world
Youth's mind more precious than gold
That I fill them with things not wrong
But with beautiful as a flower or a song.

Give me a patient and understanding mind
And a heart that is firm yet kind
To teach not just how rivers flow
But also how Your path to follow.

I ask Your guidance so divine
As I touch that miracle called mankind
Midst winds of challenge of this noble job
Help the world's morrow in my hand.

Amen.

Seminar and Sleep

I listen to the lecture of gods

But why I hear the midnight?

I see vision of dancing ideas

But why these eyelids dance too?

So, I hold this private pleasure

And seal it with a sweet kiss

Hush, my world, I whisper

As unto sleep I did surrender.

A Cradle With No Baby Yet

I found this newly built nest in one of our plants in the front yard. I always spot the chestnut munia hopping around the plant for some moments before entering it, acting as if not to be too obvious about its little hideaway.

It gives a special feeling of contribution to our nature, knowing that at least our garden provides a suitable and secured place for these birds to make their homes. We know that our forests, which are the natural habitats animals like birds, are continuing to disappear. 

Imbyerna

When somebody declares that he is feeling imbyerna, we instinctively understand that the person is annoyed. In informal conversations, the word has popularly come to express a person’s annoyance towards another person, thing or situation.

Before I decided to write down this post, I have always thought at the back of my mind, if my trying hard Spanish would allow me, that the expression comes from the Spanish word '"invierno" or "invierna" which means winter.

In the novel entitled Nothing Lasts Forever written by the master storyteller Sidney Sheldon, when Ken Mallory was naked and hard, and Kate Hunter just stared and left him all alone, Ken Mallory must have felt imbyerna - literally for feeling wintry with nothing on the body and figuratively for getting angry being toyed by a woman.

But what probable connection is with the annoyed feeling and winter season that they seem to have the same vein in our parlance?

In my own putting of one and one together, probably our ancestors back then were so pissed towards the injustices of Spanish conquistadores that they exaggerated their cold feelings to a complete icy season. Instead of just describing the feeling as cold, they overstated by illustrating it as something winter.

In a short piece in Wikipedia discussing about Tagalog loanwords from the Spanish language, it mentions that some words have acquired an entirely new meaning, such as imbyerna (invierna) once meant 'winter' but is now a word for 'bummer'.

Some time during the course of my thesis writing, I asked a close friend to enlist his cooperation in the data gathering since he is working in a SpEd school. After a month, we planned to meet up so I can personally retrieve the questionnaires, which were actually the last batch, as the deadline is lurking horribly on the calendar.

"And the accomplished questionnaires?" I asked with a final sigh of relief.

"Oh, I forgot them in town!" he answered in a totally stunned fashion.

 "Imbyerna!" I cried before he could explain in front of my wintry look.

Rosy White Lie

As you sit on the couch and turn on that idiot box, you see on scene a woman in pink walking through a passing crowd. Then, fate crosses her path to a man with whom she had a relationship in the past. The man notices her rosy white skin and is instantly love stricken as though saying: "Can you be mine again?" The woman looks at him longingly as if implying her sweet approval. Then they are lost from each other's sight. The music plays fast with thrill. The woman runs up a room of a skyscraper and opened the window. And presto! There she sees the man in opposite building proposing a marriage to her. The huge cut letters spell out: WILL YOU MARRY ME AGAIN? Or so that is how the commercial director wanted to spin the yarn.

If you were a couch potato some five years ago, surely you are not a stranger to this commercial skit. It is the advertisement of Ponds, one of those whitening products that promises a rosy white skin - in just two weeks! So, how does that grab you?

Ponds and among others like Silka, Vaseline, Maxi Peel, Metathione, Belo Essentials... these are just some to name whitening products so widespread in the markets like the frogs of Egypt. These whitening stuffs include facial creams, body lotions, soaps, fluids and capsules.

As there is nothing wrong with craving to have a rosy white skin nor with being naturally light skinned, the horrible side of it is how in our lives today that beauty is wrongly perceived. There is a growing "misequation" of being beautiful and having white skin.

Needless to say the media as a culprit, the print media is an agent which shares a part in sowing these seeds of misconception in our  minds. As you turn the glossy pages or look at the screen of gigantic billboards, you can see a massive circle of melanin deprived women topping. Seldom you spot morena beauties in the scenes. This leaves Juan Dela Cruz misconstrue that the only ideal to become beautiful are those with light skin.

However, one cannot blame such a crook to the media alone. Such a lie has been an old business down our racial experience. Tracing the roots of foreign conquests in the country, you can find how the Spanish made the Filipinos feel inferior in almost all aspects of life. Over the course of history, this very same inferiority complex was impressed in the concept about beauty of Filipinos.

Today it is apparently natural that when you hear that a person is a foreigner, you logically think that he is handsome or she is beautiful, and for that, superior. This could be the reason why medical tourism is becoming a popular culture nowadays. Many experts are on the research of discovering faster and easier ways of achieving white skin.

Unfortunately, in spite of this, not many determined people are making solution to alter this kind of mentality. The stigma is even stronger. It is seemingly a trivial issue but it is in fact a social malady; subconsciously accepted as a social norm.

Somehow, it is a fact that the society demands every person to look beautiful. Being beautiful is a prized symbol. However, it should be understood also that being beautiful does not necessitate a rosy white skin. You do not need to horse around and look for ways to attain what is the crooked view about beauty.

The reality is that, true beauty is the one that is what we are inside our hearts; not about having a rosy white skin - artificial or natural... for what is then beauty but a blossom that never lasts....

P.S. Yours truly wrote this during college and is not bitter once and for all. Peace.