One Youth

divishop

Will start an online store with lee.... hope it works =)

New Phase

Just recently updated this blog. I haven't been on this since forever.

Birthday Girl

It sure hasn't been easy living in this country for the past 27 years...
Today is my 28th year living under the Filipino sun.
A lot has changed, and a lot has not changed.
What can I say... being pinoy is the best. Given the chance
I would love to be born pinoy again. For the simple reason that Filipinos
are on the middle of everything. We're not poor, but we're not rich either.
OK, mostly poor, but happy and poor.

Someone emailed me an article, from an American Expat. What he says is true.

read on:

The Philippines Through the Eyes of a Foreigner
Posted by: " Cavalier58@AOL.COM "


A Point of View
Inferiority Complex: A Filipino Malady?
by Barth Suretsky
_____

The unedited article below was written below by an American friend, Barth
Suretsky. This will still be edited but you will get the gist. I find his
observations interesting. I hope this will make an impact on the Filipinos
who read this article as I greatly lament the worsening situation of our
country. - Frank Woolf
_____

My decision to move to Manila was not a precipitous one. I used to work in
New York as an outside agent for PAL, and have been coming to the
Philippines since August, 1982. I was so impressed with the country, and
with the interesting people I met, some of which have become very close
friends to this day, that I asked for and was granted a year's sabbatical
from my teaching job in order to live in the Philippines. I arrived here on
August 21, 1983, several hours after Ninoy Aquino was shot, and remained
here until June of 1984. During that year I visited many parts of the
country, from as far north as Laoag to as far south as Zamboanga, and
including Palawan. I became deeply immersed in the history and culture of
the archipelago, and an avid collector of tribal antiquities from both
northern Luzon, and Mindanao.

In subsequent years I visited the Philippines in 1985, 1987, and 1991,
before deciding to move here permanently in 1998. I love this country, but
not uncritically, and that is the purpose of this article.
First, however, I will say that I would not consider living anywhere else in
Asia , no matter how attractive certain aspects of other neighboring
countries may be. To begin with, and this is most important, with all its
faults, the Philippines is still a democracy, more so than any other nation
in Southeast Asia. Despite gross corruption, the legal system generally
works, and if ever confronted with having to employ it, I would feel much
more safe trusting the courts here than in any other place in the
surrounding area. The press here is unquestionably the most unfettered and
freewheeling in Asia, and I do not believe that is hyperbole in any way! And
if any one thing can be used as a yardstick to measure the extent of the
democratic process in any given country in the world, it is the extent to
which the press is free.

But the Philippines is a flawed democracy nevertheless, and the flaws are
deeply rooted in the Philippine psyche. I will elaborate.
The basic problem seems to me, after many years of observation, to be a
national inferiority complex, a disturbing lack of pride in being Filipino.
Toward the end of April I spent eight days in Vietnam, visiting Hanoi, Hue,
and Ho Chi Minh City. I am certainly no expert on Vietnam, but what I saw
could not be denied: I saw a country ravaged as no other country has been in
this century by thirty years of continuous and incredibly barbaric warfare.
When the Vietnam War ended in April, 1975, the country was totally
devastated. Yet in the past twenty-five years the nation has healed and
rebuilt itself almost miraculously! The countryside has been replanted and
reforested. Hanoi and HCMC have been beautifully restored. The opera house
in Hanoi is a splended restoration of the original, modeled after the Opera
in Paris, and the gorgeous Second Empire theater, on the main square of HCMC
is as it was when built by the French a century ago. The streets are
tree-lined, clean, and conducive for strolling. Cafes in the French style
proliferate on the wide boulevards of HCMC. I am not praising the government
of Vietnam, which still has a long way to travel on the road to democracy,
but I do praise, and praise unstintingly, the pride of the Vietnamese
people. It is due to this pride in being Vietnamese that has enabled its
citizenry to undertake the miracle of restoration that I have described
above.

When I returned to Manila I became so depressed that I was actually
physically ill for days thereafter. Why? Well, let's go back to a period
when the Philippines resembled the Vietnam of 1975. It was 1945, the end of
World War II, and Manila, as well as many other cities, lay in ruins. (As a
matter of fact, it may not be generally known, but Manila was the second
most destroyed city in the entire war; only Warsaw was more demolished!)

But to compare Manila in 1970, twenty-five years after the end of the war,
with HCMC, twenty-five years after the end of its war, is a sad exercise
indeed. Far from restoring the city to its former glory, by 1970 Manila was
well on its way to being the most tawdry city in Southeast Asia. And since
that time the situation has deteriorated alarmingly. We have a city full of
street people, beggars, and squatters. We have a city that floods sections
whenever there is a rainstorm, and that loses electricity with every clap of
thunder.


We have a city full of potholes, and on these unrepaired roads we have a
traffic situation second to none in the world for sheer unmanageability. We
have rude drivers, taxis that routinely refuse to take passengers because of
"many trappic!" The roads are also cursed with pollution-spewing buses in
disreputable states of repair, and that ultimate anachronism, the jeepney!
We have an educational system that allows children to attend schools without
desks or books to accommodate them. Teachers, even college professors, are
paid salaries so disgracefully low that it's a wonder that anyone would want
to go into the teaching profession in the first place. We have a war in
Mindanao that nobody seems to have a clue how to settle. The only policy to
deal with the war seems to be to react to what happens daily, with no long
range plan whatever. I could go on and on, but it is an endeavor so filled
with futility that it hurts me to go on. It hurts me because, in spite of
everything, I love the Philippines.

Maybe it will sound simplistic, but to go back to what I said above, it is
my unshakable belief that the fundamental thing wrong with this country is a
lack of pride in being Filipino. A friend once remarked to me, laconically:
"All Filipinos want to be something else. The poor ones want to be American,
and the rich ones all want to be Spaniards. Nobody wants to be Filipino."
That statement would appear to be a rather simplistic one, and perhaps it
is. However, I know one Filipino who refuses to enter a theater until the
national anthem has stopped being played because he doesn't want to honor
his own country, and I know another one who thinks that history stopped dead
in 1898 when the Spaniards departed! While it is certainly true that these
represent extreme examples of national denial, the truth is not a pretty
picture.


Filipinos tend to worship, almost slavishly, everything foreign. If it comes
from Italy or France it has to be better than anything made here. If the
idea is American or German it has to be superior to anything that Filipinos
can think up for themselves. Foreigners are looked up to and idolized.
Foreigners can go anywhere without question. In my own personal experience I
remember attending recently an affair at a major museum here. I had
forgotten to bring my invitation. But while Filipinos entering the museum
were checked for invitations, I was simply waived through. This sort of
thing happens so often here that it just accepted routine.
All of these things, the illogical respect given to foreigners simply
because they are not Filipinos, the distrust and even disrespect shown to
any homegrown merchandise, the neglect of anything Philippine, the rudeness
of taxi drivers, the ill-manners shown by many Filipinos are all symptomatic
of a lack of self-love, of respect for and love of the country in which they
were born, and worst of all, a static mind-set in regard to finding ways to
improve the situation. Most Filipinos, when confronted with evidence of
governmental corruption, political chicanery, or gross exploitation on the
part of the business community, simply shrug their shoulders, mutter "bahala
na," and let it go at that.
It is an oversimplification to say this, but it is not without a grain of
truth to say that Filipinos feel downtrodden because they allow themselves
to feel downtrodden. No pride.

One of the most egregious examples of this lack of pride, this uncaring
attitude to their own past or past culture, is the wretched state of
surviving architectural landmarks in Manila and elsewhere. During the
American period many beautiful and imposing buildings were built, in what we
now call the "art deco" style (although, incidentally, that was not a
contemporary term; it was coined only in the 1960s). These were beautiful
edifices, mostly erected during, or just before, the Commonwealth period.
Three, which are still standing, are the Jai Alai Building, the Metropolitan
Theater, and the Rizal Stadium. Fortunately, due to the truly noble efforts
of my friend John Silva, the Jai Alai Building will now be saved. But unless
something is done to the most beautiful and original of these three
masterpieces of pre-war Philippine architecture, the Metropolitan Theater,
it will disintegrate. The Rizal Stadium is in equally wretched shape. When
the wreckers' ball destroyed Frank Lloyd Wright's Imperial Hotel in Tokyo,
and New York City's most magnificent building, Pennsylvania Station, both in
1963, Ada Louise Huxtable, then the architectural critic of The New York
Times, wrote: "A disposable culture loses the right to call itself a
civilization at all!" How right she was! (Fortunately, the destruction of
Pennsylvania Station proved to be the sacrificial catalyst that resulted in
the creation of New York's Landmark Commission. Would that such a commission
be created for Manila...)

Are there historical reasons for this lack of national pride? We can say
that until the arrival of the Spaniards there was no sense of a unified
archipelago constituted as one country. True. We can also say that the high
cultures of other nations in the region seemed, unfortunately, to have
bypassed the Philippines; there are no Angkors, no Ayuttayas, no
Borobudurs.True. Centuries of contact with the "high cultures" of the Khmers
and the Chinese had, except for the proliferation of Song dynasty pottery
found throughout the archipelago, no noticeable effect.
True. But all that aside, what was here?
To begin with, the ancient rice terraces, now threatened with
disintegration, incidentally, was an incredible feat of engineering for
so-called "primitive" people. As a matter of fact, when I first saw them in
1984, I was almost as awe-stricken as I was when I first laid eyes on the
astonishing Inca city of Machu Picchu, high in the Peruvian Andes. The
degree of artistry exhibited by the various tribes of the cordillera of
Luzon is testimony to a remarkable culture, second to none in the Southeast
Asian region. As for Mindanao, at the other end of the archipelago, an
equally high degree of artistry has been manifest for centuries in
woodcarving, weaving and metalwork.

However, the most shocking aspect of this lack of national pride, even
identity, endemic in the average Filipino, is the appalling ignorance of the
history of the archipelago since unified by Spain and named Filipinas. The
remarkable stories concerning the Galleon de Manila, the courageous
repulsion of Dutch and British invaders from the 16th through the 18th
centuries, even the origins of the independence movement of the late 19th
century, are hardly known by the average Filipino in any meaningful way. And
thanks to fifty years of American brainwashing, it is few and far between
the number of Filipinos who really know - or even care - about the duplicity
employed by the Americans and Spaniards to sell out and make meaningless the
very independent state that Aguinaldo declared on June 12, 1898. A people
without a sense of history is a people doomed to be unaware of their own
identity. It is sad to say, but true, that the vast majority of Filipinos
fall into this lamentable category. Without a sense of who you are how can
you possibly take any pride in who you are?

These are not oversimplifications. On the contrary, these are the root
problems of the Philippine inferiority complex referred to above. Until the
Filipino takes pride in being Filipino these ills of the soul will never be
cured. If what I have written here can help, even in the smallest way, to
make the Filipino aware of just who he is, who he was, and who he can be, I
will be one happy expat indeed!



--
ikalat ang tsismis:
Support and Buy PINOY Products on October 21, 2007!

www.yabangpinoy.com/globalpinoy

Action Figures

Just got them today!
Superman Through The Ages set which includes 4 figures, a JLA Wonder Woman Action Figure, and a Wonder Woman Kingdom Come action figure which is still in the box..... I LOVE THEM!

BUHAWI

Look at this pic:



It was scary watching that thing. I was at the balcony of our apartment and looked up and saw this awesome thing. The clouds were circling as if forming a vortex. Good thing it stopped after a while. But I was in total awe.

GOING TO BOHOL

I'll be off to Bohol today in the afternoon with my Momma.

Will give you a lotta pics since I have this new digicam that
I'll be testing. Cheers!

What's On Karla

OK... am up to my nose in bills and stuff...jeez... help!
But I know I can wing it....somehow.
If only someone can help a bit...jeez.

What have I been up to?

Well, a lot of things...mostly work... an outing with friends,
and just simply enjoying life.

I went to Baguio with my friends and my good friend James Hall.

It was both fun and crappy...I love Baguio. But I spent most of my time inside bars and hotel rooms. I barely got to see Baguio. Darn.

But it was fun spending time with friends. Wish I had pictures but my phone got stolen (see my previous posts).

Anyway, back to work.... I'll be spending a lot of time in the beaches, so I'll post more pics when I can. Just came from a pool outing with some CallWave agents and good girl Mae.... very tiring but fun nontheless.


xoxoxoxo

The Election

Ok, it's time for the local elections here in the Philippines. Personally, it's a load of hogwash. Streets will be littered with election paraphernalia and walls would be full of those ugly politicians's faces.

It'll be a carnival, one I'd hate to be part of. Hence the reason why I abstained from voting ever since whenever.

It's like watching a parody of sorts. Life is a parody.

People around you are bunches of morons waiting for their own demise.

The world seems like it'll end sooner than expected with these idiotic personalities present in Philippine politics.

From what I heard, we're not alone.

Americans have to worry about another idiot as head of their country.

Sam Milby and Piolo Pascual

In Love?

What's Up

Ok, I've been so out of the blogging scene for a couple of months.

As you may have heard, I have been mugged, my Lola died, I moved, and upgraded. All in the span of a month and a half. I didn't know that so much can happen in so little time.

Is it just me, or are the planets out to get me? But truthfully, change has been good. I have accomplished so much and done so much that if I am my own daughter, I'd be a mighty proud mom!

Next project on my list would be to own a house. My own house. I don't know if I can afford it yet but hopefully I can. I need a 3-bedroom house for me and my immediate family, and maybe also when I get married. Owning a house is a huge achievement for a small-time filipino family.

So guys, pray for me.

Right now, am looking forward to a vacation on the beach this coming week. It's sort of a working vacation since I needed to get somethings done, but it's a nice change of pace.

And Barry my baby, thanks for the Nano.

Floyd, ako rin nag IQ test!

Mac

Gosh, I'd love to have a Mac Book Pro...(People if you can, send me one ok?)

I love the metal finish and the huge screen.....mommy! It's so freakin' great. My friend bought one and I saw it yesterday and took a picture.... it's dumbfreakin fantastic!

Here's the pic I took:




WOW. I want one.

What A New Year...

What a way to start the new year...jeezz......


All in all, it's not half bad... we moved to a new apartment, bought new stuff, and we're free!!!!


But everything has its price...a huge price. No sweat (even if I know I sweat glitter).


Anyway, here's a peek at our huge apartment....the color is grotesque but I'll be fixing that... for five grand a pop, it's worth it...it's the whole 3rd floor of a building and I like it sooo much!



I'll post more later on.

Honda Happy

There are some things that you really have to have. As for me, I indulged in getting a motorcycle,not a fancy one. It's a small 100cc of bike called the Honda Wave. It's cool and it's the first time I ever am using a shifting bike,so I had trouble at first,but it's so darn awesome.I love it...can't wait to get my license.

Amici Di Don Bosco

I have been reading numerous blogs on food (so, I guess I'm a foodie), and I'm in a Yahoo Group called PINOYFRUGALCHOWHOUND, when I first heard about this small eatery along Arnaiz Avenue called Amici Di Don Bosco. Amici means 'friends' in Italian. I read so much about it and people were talking so much about it, so me and my friend Alona decided to drop by.

I was fortunate enough to get tips from another blog who I am an avid reader of. Be sure to check out http://www.marketmanila.com because that guy is totally awesome. He has great taste when it comes to food and food preparation. Imagine preparing tuyo ala elitista. Hard to fathom but he did make it really grand.

Anyway, we went to Amici Di Don Bosco and it was a flurry of activities. The location itself is setup like a school cafeteria, which reminded me of my days at UST Pay High School. If it's your first time, you would have no clue what to do. But me, being the sleuth that I am, researched on the place before I went there.I read somewhere that there are different counters where you order food. Pasta, pizza, panini and gelato are served at different counters.

Upon getting off the car, we were hit by the scent of Italian seasoning. That's when you know you aren't lost. We went up the steps of 'Amici' and was pleasantly surprised to see lots of people eating. Mostly upper-class citizens of Makati braving the rainy condition of that saturday afternoon.

Once you enter, on your immediate left would be the pasta counter. Alona and I grabbed a Lasagne al Forno and Canelloni Agni Spinaci,plus a huge bottle of Lipton Iced Tea. The lines were long and people were queueing to grab some food,but well worth it because the service is quick.

I also ordered some Four Seasons pizza with artichokes and olives. But the longest line was for the infamous Don Bosco gelato. As we sat down to enjoy our repast, it was quickly understood why 'Amici'had long lines for the gelato. It was simply sinfully good! The pizza was ordinary, the pasta was great,but the gelato was to die for!

Mine was Tobleron flavoured while Alona's was strawberry. For P35.00, it was more than worth it. I didn't take pics, but I brought homw the pasta menu which you can get here.

This place deserves another visit, and would definitely be part of my weekly eating adventure. Fast, affordable and absolutely yummy!

confusion

Just utterly confused right now with beh. Help?

Guess WHO?

Ma fille préférée outre de toutes les fois !
KC Concepcion, qui a toujours beau.... Je l'aime !

Pamangkin, Yay!

This is my new nephew Chris Justin Del Rosario. Cute noh?!?
May sipon pa!

Dreams

Last night, I dreamt of my bestfriend who was killed last February 14.

I really loved him and treated him as a real brother.

The dream seemed to last only for seconds. We were on a jeepney, going through this highway. Everything was blurred, but I remember going through a factory of Ritz crackers, which was weird, but then again dreams are weird.

I suddenly saw his face clearly, and he was smiling at me. I forgot what he was saying, but I knew that he was saying goodbye. I knew this because I kept on saying: "Mag-iingat ka, mag-iingat ka..." (You take care, you take care).

I guess it really is time to say goodbye. I was not able to say goodbye to him properly....


On the night of February 14, 2006, Duke and I were supposed to have our yearly date. Every Valentine's day, we try to go out, even if we're not lovers.

We have been through so much together, we were in love once, but that turned into a different kind of love.

I was waiting for him and was wondering why he was not dropping by....minutes turned into hours.

I fell asleep waiting for him.

By morning, my cousin woke me up and told me that my bestfriend had died, with 2 gunshot wounds and 4 stab wounds, after getting into a fight with a long-time nemesis.

I asked my mom to go to the morgue to identify his body. From that point up to the time that he was buried, I didn't have the guts to visit him. I wanted to remember him as what he was in life, and not in death.

I guess he got tired of waiting for me to say goodbye.

I miss you Duke. I'm sorry.