It is for various significant reasons that I started this personal blog, but they all, in the main, mark beginnings and endings, both by design and by coincidence. I was at first confronted by the issue of style and the editing and all the things that come with writing but decided to cast away those worries and simply write as spontaneous and raw as I could. Never mind the critics. This is my blog.
I have been wanting to do this for the longest time but never found the strongest reasons nor the greatest inspiration to do so. But a not so strange confluence of events and mood finally pushed me into it. So here I am, signing up and posting my first blog on my birthday. Yes, my birthday and easter sunday convinced me to get a few days off from work and gave me the time to write this post. Although I don’t feel the same excitement I had as when I sent my first email a decade ago (remember Juno?), I am nonetheless thrilled because of its public character and without having a school adviser or editor dictating the contents of my writing. It is like writing your own column in the op-ed section of your favorite broadsheet except that you don’t get paid and there’s no pressure or deadline to beat.
I was primarily impelled by Easter for this undertaking, not because of the excitement of egg-decorating and egg-hunting or the sight of cute bunnies (the kind that abound in stores, not the ones that roam the playboy mansion although I don’t really mind seeing them in easter except that they don’t really convey any message of new beginnings or rebirth in these troubled times) but because it reminds us of rebirth, of a new beginning and a reaffirmation of new life. Of hope.
I am starting this blog while the Iraqis are calling for a pullout of US troops and bases from Iraq on the fourth anniversary of the fall of Baghdad . After four years of occupation, 3282 US troops dead, hundreds of thousands of Iraqi men, women and children dead, $414 trillion of US taxpayers money, I see the end of this war, with imperial America losing like a big budget hollywood action movie flopping at the box-office and failing all critical reviews. Well, what can I say, you start a war for the most unjust and false reasons, you lose for the most just and right reasons. And as if the debacles in Iraq and Afghanistan are not enought, Latin America rises while the US descends.
At the homefront, I do not see the immediate ending of the extrajudicial killings in the Philippines. Despite international pressure from the UN, Amnesty International, international church bodies, the US senate committees, world legislators, international human rights organizations and world special courts, Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, fake president and US stooge, continues to send her fascist attack dogs in a killing spree of innocent civilians including a 9 year-old girl last April 6. Insisting that the girl was a rebel combatant, the military put an M-16 A2 rifle next to the dead girl’s body and took her picture only to reveal that the young girl was as big as the firearm. This lying, cheating, stealing, fake and murderer president tries to outdo but not outclass her master George Bush. But I see, with a confidence of an oracle, a destructive end for both the master and the stooge, figuratively or otherwise, although I would surely gladly prefer the latter. What did the Greek dramatists say, whom the gods wish to destroy they first make mad. Nothing could be more foretelling.
In a month, we will be expecting a new member in the family. The parents have not chosen a name yet but I wish it would be something the child will like or forgive her parents for when she grows up. I myself was cursed into being named after a saint in a catholic calendar as required then by the church. Cursed because first, I have no pretensions or aspirations of divinity even as a child growing up in a Catholic school and second, it was pure torture to spell my complex name, the x and the q combined with a triphthong, when I was a child. My recourse was to adopt, no matter how belatedly, a nickname that spelled and sounded better, even though my given name stuck like an indestructible DNA imprint.
I do not expect nor do I wish for a deluge of greetings today not only because I am not a popular figure but also because I prefer it that way. I think birthdays are only important to the person celebrating it in a manner he chooses and for reasons of his own. To everybody else, its significance is reduced to mere acts of thoughtfulness or a reason to get together for merrymaking. And so I got my first greeting through a text message from Jen earlier in the day, and got a call from a friend as I pound the keys of my loyal laptop. Oh well, perhaps I will have to add that birthdays also are a perfect reason for others to rekindle friendship, repair strained relations, and reaffirm various levels of commitments to the celebrator.
In the end, everything marks the end of something and the start of another, whether in substance or in form and, all things considered, eventually always comes full circle.
