March 2009

From the webcomic site xkcd.com:

To find out if you are “normal” or a “scientist”:

Step 1. Look at the comic above.

Step 2. Choose from the two pictures at the bottom the one that resonates more with you.

If “normal”: Congratulations! you are a fine, upstanding member of this planet.

If “scientist”: Just try not to blow up the planet while you’re doing research, okay?

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If you’re into forensics and criminal procedure and psychology and watching the television show “Bones”, this book and the others by the same author will give you what you want.

Kathy Reichs is a practicing forensic anthropologist, a university professor, PhD graduate of the prestigious Northwestern University, and, in her spare time, a best-selling novelist and television series producer. Over-achiever.

Yes, but how great is that? She’s doing what she loves, both as an occupation and as a hobby, and getting paid for it. Now that’s the life. Is she a Gogirl? You bet – classic textbook definition of.

Dr. Reichs’ books are loosely based on her own experiences, with the central character, Dr. Temperance Brennan, a forensic specialist like herself. Plots and characters come from incidents and stories from her own life and practice. The books are fascinating for this reason – because they could actually have happened. Thus they aren’t as far-fetched and suspension of disbelief is easier to achieve.

The books have spun off into a television series, ”Bones”, starring Emily Deschanel and David Boreanaz (both of whom are excellent actors and deserve more opportunities to display their talent). In the timeline of Tempe’s world, the incidents in the TV show take place at an earlier time – decades earlier – than those of the book.

Devil Bones, set in Charlotte, North Carolina (Reichs’ home state), revolves around grisly artifacts found in a forgotten cellar, used for strange religious rituals. But for what? and by whom? Thereby hangs the tale.

It’s got many of my favorite story elements – anthropological observations, police procedure, a brainy scientist, and a handsome detective. Add a sprinkling of gore and a dash of suspense, and you’ve got a summer-read salad that’s perfect for whiling away those hot lazy afternoons.

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This is another of those books that I didn’t get when it first came out in 2006. I’ve always been kontra-pelo when it comes to trends – going against the flow – and I’m suspicious of whatever’s been declared a “best-seller”.  Who gets to say what’s hot or not?

But, seeing nothing else of interest at the bookstore, I picked up a paperback copy of Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat, Pray, and Love, without any expectations, and just settled in for a succession of letters forming words and coherent thoughts to imprint themselves on my retinas.

I was surprised that it was good.

There have been many accounts of both men and women – usually Westerners, the Americans and the British – going on journeys to exotic places to “find themselves” or achieve spiritual enlightenment. I find it hard to relate to such stories, though I enjoy reading them for the “travelogue” part. It isn’t in the Filipino culture to spend sums of money on travel for such esoteric reasons. We’re too busy trying to survive.

But that’s what makes multi-cultural interactions interesting. People are a product of their culture. It seems that it’s the Western orientation to go looking for something undefinable, something missing, something they will recognize only when they see or experience it.

Writer Liz Gilbert’s account of her own journey brings it down to a personal level, and the honesty of her story shines true. A failed marriage and a shattered relationship pushes her to put her life on hold for a year as she travels to Italy to learn the language and eat her way across the country; to India to meditate for several months in an ashram; and to Indonesia to make friends, influence people, and find love and happiness.

On a technical level, it is well-written. The net of words that Gilbert weaves is taut and shimmering; it is a pleasure to be caught up in it. From a communication perspective, it’s a look at both intra-personal and inter-personal communication practice, with a hefty dollop of intercultural insights.

On a deeper level, it is an intriguing story of how one woman manages the conflicts in her life in her own way and finds healing. It’s the tale of a Gogirl, empowered, confident, and happy.

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When He’s Just Not That Into You came out in 2004, I resisted buying a copy, even if one of my best friends got it, read it,  and loved it.

I thought, “It’s another one of those self-help baloney books that their authors write just to make money off a trend or something.” I don’t read self-help – I consider them too wimpy. I belong to the bury-your-problems-in-chocolate-ice-cream-and-then-pull-yourself-up-by-the-bootstraps-through-sheer-willpower school of survival.

But lately, a movie made from the book came out and I wondered, how could they turn a self-help book into a movie?

I didn’t watch the movie, but I bought the book. Nothing like going straight to the source to find what’s up.

Now I wish I had read it sooner. Written by a guy and a girl who have had their share of failed relationships, the book does tell girls how guys really think. It delivers valuable and practical insights about the murky world of male-female interpersonal communication.

Basically, what authors Greg Behrendt and Liz Tuccillo, former Sex in the City writers, are saying is  - it’s no use over-analyzing a relationship. Guys tend to think one-track. And if they want out, they want out. If they tell you or show you in other ways that it’s over, accept that it’s over.

He’s not going to change his mind. He’s not going to come back. He might not come straight out and say, “I don’t love you anymore” – he may be too chicken for that or maybe doesn’t want to hurt you – but if he does, he’s telling you the truth.

Nothing you can say or do will change his mind.

If he cheats, it’s also over. Betrayal combines intent and deception. You don’t need that kind of disloyalty.

Best reaction: shut him out cold-turkey, and get on with your life, girl! In Filipino, we’d say, “Kung ayaw niya, ‘wag niya.” In other words – his loss, not yours.

Never ever beg or plead for a reconciliation. It just diminishes you in his eyes. It hurts, oh yes it hurts, but better to find out it’s not working sooner than later. Turn 180 on your high heels and walk away.

It will take a lot of strength and courage, but all of us women have that. That’s why ours is the real “stronger sex”. And it’s best to end a relationship with dignity, with your head held high, knowing that you tried your best to make it work.

As Greg says: “Don’t waste the pretty!” Make this your mantra.

Meanwhile, visualize yourself with the man of your dreams, someone who will truly love and respect you for who you are, because you are worth it!  Don’t ever settle for second-best anymore.

Behrendt continues this train of thought in his next book, written with his wife, Amiira Ruotola-Behrendt – “It’s Called a Breakup Because It’s Broken”.

When is this going to be made into a movie, I wonder?

Bottom line: great reads. And they’ve changed my mind about self-help books, because goodness knows ain’t no one gonna help you, baby, but yourself.

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After 72 years on this site, the Santa Ana Park of the Philippine Racing Club is being razed to make way for new developments on the prime property in Makati City, the country’s premier business and commercial district.

Racing operations were transferred to a new facility at Naic, Cavite, last January 6. Today, structures at the old track are coming down – grandstands, betting windows, paddocks, stables. Everything is being reduced to piles of rubble and stacks of wood.

The turnstiles at the pedestrian entrance (Gate 3).

The right-hand grandstand (facing the track). It used to have badminton courts and a Savory Restaurant. Before that, there were rows of betting windows and open-air canteens.

The bridgeway between the two grandstand buildings. The structure behind it had the weighing scale, viewing deck, racecaller’s booth, and stewards’ stand.

The main grandstand, with the ballroom with the painted horses on the wall and the VIP boxes for horseowners and well-heeled patrons.

You can still see the green staircase to the upper floor, now choked with rocks and leading to nowhere.

My children and I live just behind this former racetrack, on my father-in-law’s property, most of it given over to a twelve-stall stable, now empty, as the horses have all been moved to Naic.

The once-vibrant and noisy neighborhood is quieter. Yes, that’s a good thing, but we were used to the racket – the chatter of grooms and their families, the neighing and snorting of horses, the clatter of hooves on the street in the morning, the faintly-heard voice of the racecaller over the PA system during race meetings.

All gone from here, now.

PRC management says that part of the property, around four hectares, has been purchased by taipan Lucio Tan’s group, perhaps for an Allied Bank data center, or some other  purpose. The rest of the property, maybe 21 hectares, will also be developed in time, into a mixed-use residential and commercial area much like the Rockwell area, also in Makati.

It’s hard to imagine a Rockwell here, but if it does happen, it’ll be good for the ‘hood. Property prices will rise. There’ll be jobs and other economic benefits.

Call me a sentimental fool, but I’ll miss the old track. It’s where I trained every morning for two months back in 1990 as the country’s first female apprentice jockey. It’s where my husband asked me on our very first date, to marry five months later. It’s where I sunned my babies; it’s where they learned to walk, on the strip of grass beside the rail, while their father exercised horses in the mornings, all of us coming home smelling of sun and dust and the sweat of horses. It’s where I picked up my career when I had to go back to work after my marriage faltered.

Murals still on the wall, barely glimpsed.

Murals of  Gypsy Grey and Little Morning, champions my father-in-law trained.

The jockeys’ quarters, once so noisy and alive, now silent, yawning, empty.

When a mall or condo is built here, right on the track, will the ghosts of gone horses still race, silently, where they used to run free? Shall phantasms of riders and horses, or their manifestations of psychic energy remaining in the rocks, in the soil, and carried on the breeze, still run races until entropy consumes the sun and time runs backward?

Now my eldest, Alex, is nearly 18, and in college; she took these pictures. Erika is 10. Where did time go?

And the racetrack, that stood here for many generations, and that some thought would never be torn down in our lifetime, is no more. You know what they say about change. And in fact, it’s for the better – the new Santa Ana Park in Naic is modern, roomy, and with an excellent cushiony track.

But I never thought, when I married a jockey almost twenty years ago, that the time would ever come that I would be a historian of this track’s demise.

The far end of the main building.

The white stripe divides the part that the Lucio Tan group bought (the right) from the Prime Channel and PRC corporate offices, and the rest of the property. The line extends to where the outer rail of the track used to be.

PRC corporate offices; on the left, what used to be the PRC Motorpool.

Lush vegetation frames a view of the bridgeway.

The side of the main grandstand. Here used to be carinderias (eateries) with tables, chairs, and cases of San Miguel beer.

The side of the grandstands facing the track. People used to stand and watch races from here.

The tote board gapes with holes. Well, it hadn’t been working properly for years, anyway. The rails beside the track have been removed and taken to Naic. This grassy area, where my children learned to walk, is now overgrown and unkempt.

The saddling paddock, with the jockeys’ quarters at the end.

Right across the saddling paddock was this viewing area where horses were walked for warmup/cool down. People came right up to the fence, where the stacks of wood are now.

This is what it looks like from the other side of the fence.

Open-air grandstand and private boxes being stripped of anything usable.

Photo credit: All photos taken by Alex Alcasid with a Nikon D60.

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It’s been a while since I blogged about books, any book. Blame it on school. I’m in my first semester of PhD studies, and am feeling my way back into the social sciences after a twenty-year hiatus.

But with the sem winding to a close, and with my requirements done – well, mostly done, except for a couple of papers that just need finishing touches – I’m ready to hunker down for some serious reading. With that end in mind, I hit Fully Booked last week and carted off several inexpensive paperbacks, among them Salman Rushdie’s 2008 offering, The Enchantress of Florence.

I have admired his work ever since reading his The Satanic Verses, in 1998, which so offended the Ayatollah Khomeini. The Ayatollah’s regime slapped a fatwa on him for offending Islam, put a price on his head, and had every Muslim out for his life, forcing him to go into hiding for ten years. Nothing like notoriety to bring an author to the top of the bestseller’s lists! That and the scandal of a bald, aging writer mysteriously attracting the most gorgeous women on the planet. You have to wonder – what’s he got that isn’t obvious? Maybe if we read his books, we’d find out.

The Enchantress of Florence is pure Rushdie –  masterful use of language, deft story-telling, plots within plots. This novel is well-researched, mixing, as it does, the history of Renaissance Florence and the Mughal Empire in a rollicking tale featuring a European storyteller calling himself “Mogor dell’Amore” (The Mughal of Love); Akbar the Mughal Emperor; and the Enchantress, whom Mogor claims is his mother.

Though long-dead, she captures the imagination of Akbar and that of the populace of his city of Fatehpur-Sikri so intensely that she acquires a life of her own that makes her even more real than the other people in the book.

Indeed, the insubstantial ghosts of women are more important than those of flesh-and-blood. Akbar’s favorite queen, Jodha, is imaginary, created and sustained by the force of his will, inhabiting his palace like a shadow. Yet the resentment of his other queens against the phantasm is all too real. Later it is directed against the “Enchantress”, Qara Koz (“Black Eyes”), the sister of Akbar’s ancestor Babar, when she gains a life of her own.

Stripped of its flowery language and convoluted storyline, the novel centers around an impossibly beautiful woman and her magical effect on the men around her. Like la belle dame sans merci, she loves only as long as she wants to, but her men love her forever.

One wonders – was Rushdie inspired by a real woman – someone, perhaps, like his fourth wife, actress Padma Lakshmi, from whom he was recently divorced?

Having lived with such glamorous arm candy for three years, it isn’t far-fetched to speculate that here is Rushdie’s “Enchantress” in the flesh, and the novel, his tribute to a stunning woman who captured his heart, his fancy, and his imagination.

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I’ve been taking a lot more pictures lately, since we got the Nikon D60. There’s something about a kick-ass SLR camera, that, well, kicks ass once you’re squinting through the viewfinder, with trigger finger itching to pop off a shot.

Mind you, I’m nearsighted, and often all I see through the teensy window is a mass of color. I try to frame using shapes and lines and forms. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. Like Forrest Gump’s box of chocolates, you’ll never know what you’re going to get until you upload those files into your hard drive and look at the images you captured on a 19-inch color monitor.

Then in comes Photoshop or Windows Photo Gallery for a dose of  “auto-adjust”, increased brightness/contrast, cropping, or whatever it takes to resolve the images’ minor issues to bring them to full, colorful, spectacular beauty, ready to tell their story to the viewer.

Here are some of my personal favorites (mostly taken on a recent trip to Hong Kong) and the stories behind them:

A dragon dance ritual for luck in Hong Kong, Feb 2009. From the demeanor of the store manager and other people nearby it was clearly an important ceremony; yet they allowed me to get as close as I wished to take this shot.

View of a hilly street in Hong Kong, taken from the top deck of a #973 bus on the way to Stanley Street.

View of Repulse Bay, enclave of ritzy homes and yachts.

The Stanley Street market.

Jade jewelry on display.

Lanterns like colorful bubbles.

Another view of Stanley Street.

One of my favorite images. Macro shot.

Miniature “terracotta” warriors at Stanley Street.

View at Stanley Street main. I love landscapes and macro shots.

Another favorite macro shot – a sign in Braille somewhere in the bowels of the MTR (subway) system.

The Happy Valley cemetery, as seen through a moving bus.

A traditional Chinese building on a hill in the New Territories looks more at home in its setting than does the modern tower beside it.

A cup of Chinese tea. Gazing into its depths, I tried to read my future…and couldn’t. So I drank it. *burp*

A serving of chocolate mousse at Bambu buffet, The Venetian hotel, Macau.

View of a bay and harbor in Hong Kong. Taken from the top of the revolving tower ride at Ocean Park.

Australian wool tapestry designed by artist Michael Santry. It took several weavers three months to finish.

Drain in the shape of a horseshoe at Sha Tin stable.

Saddlecloth and helmet at Sha Tin.

A groom leads a horse into the John Size stables at Sha Tin.

As a graduate student of communication, anything to do with signs and symbols (semiology) interests me.

I love this shot of jockeys, their owners, and trainers huddled together before a race at Sha Tin.

Jockeys wait for their mounts.

One of my favorite shots – I love how the jockey’s leg is parallel to the horse’s back. This is one of France’s leading riders, Cristophe Soumillon, getting aboard Steel Nerves.

Soumillon’s face is set, strained, serious.

In contrast, Hong Kong’s leading rider, Douglas Whyte, always had a half-smile on his face.

Hong Kong Jockey Club race judges bank to see the action better. I love this!

A judge makes notes as horses cross the finish line. I like how the shot incorporates part of the indoors with a view of the outdoors.

Another nicely-composed shot of a scene at Sha Tin.

The huge video screen in the infield at Sha Tin shows the jockey in the lead looking over his shoulder. It’s a metashot – a shot of a shot.

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As a Starbucks fan, I “collect” stores wherever I go. This one’s at the corner of Nathan Road, in Hong Kong.

There was a branch inside The Venetian hotel in Macau.

At New Town Mall in the New Territories, Hong Kong, I took a picture of the Starbucks signage as I spotted it from afar. I went inside and had a Raspberry Mocha (skim, no whip) while waiting for friends to finish looking around the mall.

I didn’t take a shot of the interior because Starbucks stores look the same inside wherever you go – Hong Kong, Manila, Dubai, New York, Pasadena. They all have the brown tables and tan, chocolate, or olive sofas, the warm orange lights over the bar, the same smell of roasted coffee, the same subdued chatter.

The consistency is boring, but it is also comforting. I know that wherever in the world I go, hearing a cacophony of languages I don’t understand, brushing past tall men in robes or fashionable women in knee-high boots, once I enter a Starbucks it’s like coming home. It’s something familiar, something I understand. Being in a different city, you can go adrift, cast loose from the moorings of your own place and culture.

Starbucks, transcending culture, having created its own, is a pocket of home wherever it is.

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Are there still fountain pens to be found in the wild – in Manila?

Fountain Pen Network-Philippines members went to find that out last February 21, with a field trip to Escolta.

Escolta is part of “old Manila” and used to be the main shopping district from pre-war times until around the 1960s. Luis Store, a fountain pen sales-and-repair shop, has been located there since the 1940s. The plan was to meet up at Savory Restaurant at the corner of Escolta – another local landmark – then visit Luis and any other places that happened to catch our fancy.

On my way there in a cab, I saw many things. The sight of a Philippine flag flying in the warm breeze stirred me to near-tears. It was so beautiful.

A monument to heroes, near Manila City Hall.

It was, I felt, a good start to the day.

When I got to Savory, quite a few FPN-P’ers were already there, scribbling away. While waiting for the others – and for lunch – to arrive, we celebrated our passions of pen, ink, and paper.

The entrance to the FPN-P function room.

Early birds play with pens, paper, and ink – the triumvirate of our obsession.

A peek at some of writer-University of the Philippines professor Dr. Butch Dalisay’s Parker Vacumatics.

Lunch was another celebration, this time of gastronomic delights not often relished. The Savory  flavor is like no other. It is Chinese cuisine, yes. But it is also has a unique identity that sets it apart. Especially the fried chicken, which is famous.

Bird’s nest soup, pansit Canton, Yang Chow fried rice, pork something, fried chicken, and lumpiang Shanghai.

After lunch, it was back to pens.

Raffle items – pens, nibs, a loupe (for peering closely at nibs), and ink.

A leaf from Leigh’s notebook.

The attendance sheet – for pens, not humans.

Spot the Sailor, Danitrio, Pelikan, and Bossert and Erhard.

From Savory, the next stop was Luis Store. The fifteen or so of us crammed into the tiny piece of paradise, ogling the beautiful pens on display. Many of them are NOS (new old stock), some dating back to the 1950s, if not earlier.

Carretelas are still a common form of transportation within the area.

Walking down Escolta to Luis Store. The dome of Sta. Cruz Church can be seen in the distance.

FPN-P’ers crowd into Luis Store.

Dr. Butch Dalisay, Mrs. Pua, and Terrie Pua, who runs the pen store.

Pens on parade.

Plates for the engraving machine.

Class picture!

The Puas pressed boxes of warm and delicious chicken empanada on us, and we ate as we walked. Our next stop was Binondo.

The Starbucks – and the Pancake House beside it, and most other establishments in the area – have signage in Chinese.

Leigh holds up the Frankensnork representing TAO, fellow FPN member. In the background, life in Binondo continues its busy hustle, oblivious to the posse of pen collectors chatting and drinking coffee.

Binondo Square still sports the red and gold lanterns left over from the Lunar New Year celebration.

The penmeets celebrate not only the shared interest in pens and ink, but also friendship, love, life – as do all gatherings. That which binds is important and significant, but when people get together and interact, there is so much more that is shared. Enjoy that. Enjoy each other. Let life be a series of celebrations!

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