Sex, Lies and Education

It was supposed to be just like any ordinary day: me being constantly barraged by questions I don’t want to answer but is forced to being the one and only slave in the universe of educated people. I have to entertain questions and comments about Kris Aquino and react to every angry statement on GMA. 

But no, this day chose to be different. S/He blurts s/he is disgusted by the way the Education Department makes a lot of fuss about sex education. I braced myself. I know where s/he stands in this given her/his straight Roman Catholic background and his/her deeply-rooted belief in marriage and things related to it. 

“Well, they should.” 

Shit, wrong answer. Instead of ending the conversation I got the biggest look of surprise from her/him. You’re one stupid girl, Rej, how could you forget s/he asked you not too long ago about your family devotion. What?? Don’t the 3-pierced left ear and my lack of holy figure in the desk give away my distaste for any form of organized religion? I thought you were into typecasting? 

“Well, isn’t sex education the role of the parents in the first place?”

HUWAATT??? I should sue my parents. Apparently they shortchanged me, neglecting their primary duty to educate me on sex. No, they didn’t give me no sex education at all. I got all my sex education from 90’s rock and roll, MTV and DH Lawrence.

table manners.

when i eat i want to be left alone.

eating is  a very personal thing and intruding in one's eating routine is crass. pure crass.

that is why when i eat i hate to be bullied to eating this food that i don't want to eat. like pork for example. or beef. or getting an extra serving of everything. I will eat the food that i want to the pace that i am comfortable at. So i wish you'd just stop commenting on how i chew my food very well before i swallow it. so i will also stop commenting on how fat you are and how you'd consumed so much in a blink of my eye.

when i eat, even if we eat together, i'd like you to treat me as a completely different entity and not an extension of you stomach. why does it pleases you so much stuffing me with food? and why does it surprise you when i say i am already full? didn't you ever think my reason for turning down your offer is because i do not want to eat your food?

when i eat i don't want you nagging me to eat some more. or complain to me for the lack of napkin. or for the lack of kalamansi that is already on the bowl to your left, ready to swallow you whole. look for things with your eyes, not with your fucking mouth. why do you always have to do everything with your mouth? are you orally fixated? i'm anal retentive, in case you'd like to know. I don't think we are a good combination.

i don't even nag my husband about eating his eating habits because i don;t want him nagging me about it, too. i don't dump food on his plate, because darling, really, it's bad manners to be dumping food on the plate of somebody who did not ask for it. did you even ask me if i was vegetarian? NO. it's like you just assumed i have a religious devotion because you also have it. all people are not like you. and neither am i.

you know for a fact that making generalized conclusion will lead to a general mistake. unless your study wants to establish conclusions across all culture and ages, but you very well know, too that you can therefore not make specific judgments if you do that. i don't believe in god. i don't to church.i don't believe in marriage and did i ever tell you that? no, because it is rude to talk or ask about somebody's religion, more so, conclude that she is catholic. and knit your eyebrows when she say she isn't.

you're just rude.

please do not make an issue out of leftovers. it's not my fault that i can;t finish what you gave me. I didn't ask for it. you just gave me. you didn't ever hear my NOOOO.

and we thought it was again HACKED.

Pushpullbar was down yesterday.

Admin's notice 22 hours ago:  5GB out of 7GB of data missing during server transfer. Not impressed downtownhost.com !
about 22 hours ago via TweetDeck
Meanwhile, here's pushpullbar's facebook account and the tweeter account.

Keith panicked there for a moment especially that he has just recently earned his six-nippled reputation. I remain gray which does not really matter because i'm just a lurker in the forum. But better gray than red. Or gray than being reprimanded.

I think they have fixed it but of course when they are down all my links to them would be inaccessible.

and thank god it wasn't what we thought it was.

David and Goliath: a storytelling of some sort.

This is a story told to a young boy, 3 years old, by his 30-year old father just before they went to sleep.
(da mother has some cameo appearances here somewhere, so beware, don't lose focus.)




Once upon a time there were two warring groups near the Valley of Elah ---- (the mother suddenly says, Oh! that movie, is it related to that somehow? Father: Yes. The Tommy Lee Jones movie. Mother: I forgot what it was all about. Father: Somebody stabbed Tommy Lee Jones' son to death. Mother: Oh, yes. his boy was sent to some war and he died. The war was in Valley of Elah. Father: Yes) --- the Palestines and the Jews.

The Palestines, the father said, was headed by a really big man, a giant named Goliath who must have measured 3 meters in height and weighed a lot more than you could imagine.

One day, Goliath announced to the Jews that he would stop terrorizing them if they could defeat him in a one-on-one battle: the battle of the best Jew soldier and Goliath, the Palestine. The battle would be held at the Valley of Elah where both groups could openly witness it.

(Son: and the rescue pack and the backpack. Father: you listen a while, there will be a rescue pack and backpack chapter later.)


These clever Jews taunted David to volunteer and being there is nothing he can do, being an underdog to a underdog group, he gave it a try. (Here comes the twist to the story). So David brings in the rescue pack. The rescue pack asks him what he wants him (the rescue pack) to become, as the rescue pack can easily transform itself to anything (Mother: a nuclear warhed.)

Father said that the rescue pack gave David three transformation choices: a bag, a slingshot, and another thing i forgot. David chose the slingshot and with an abracadabra he rescue pack turns itself to a slingshot.

David has been practicing target using a slingshot for the past days, following Goliath's announcement. He held on to the slingshot, clutched the ends tightly with his right hand, and slowly but carefully, he placed a (Mother: NUCLEAR WARHEAD! you have to have a nuclear warhead somewhere!) large nuclear warhead, bearing the spray-painted tag: United States Army, at the tip of the slingshot.

With all his might, David swings the the slingshot with the nuclear warhead weapon and whooops the nuclear warhead goes to the side of the Palestines. It was a perfect target. The nuclear warhead hit Goliath right in the middle of his eyes just directly above his nose and Goliath was pulverized to nothing.

Father to son: Do you know the moral of the story?
(in the background Son was muttering: Waw. I want the rescue pack to turn itself to a helicopter. Father replies: It will later. The US Army has lots of it)
Mother: If you fought with the Jews they'd send you a nuclear warhead.
Father: NO.
Mother (in disbelief): You mean they'd send something else?
Father: Do not fight with the Jews because you will surely lose, no matter what. That is the moral of the story.

The End.

Exhibit A

Keith and I attended the opening of exhibit for the National Artists for Architecture at Museo Iloilo last May 28.

I was quite excited to see the exhibit as i have been diligently digging the goldmine that is pushpullbar (pushpullbar.com) for more than a couple of months now. The thought of this exhibit set off the excite button in my head: Filipino architect hero post. In pushpullbar. Which I'll coerce Keith to do because I don't think I'll manage (meaning I lack credibility?).

I have always admired the Museo Iloilo. It is probably one of the first (and true) modern buildings in Iloilo City. The architect, I heard was a big fan of Neimeyer, and named his son Oscar. Designed to conform and use nature to its advantage its door opened to a mini amphitheater, landscaped with mini-rolling hills and mini-rinks that both board and inline skaters loved. Large canopied fire trees provided shade to the grounds and cooled the air that enters the Museo. When the firetrees bloom in summer, the Museo looks like a building on fire, postcard perfect. Few years back, that amphitheater was demolished to give way to a parking space. The landscape drastically changed following the construction of the Iloilo Provincial Capitol. During the construction of the Capitol, rumors about the Museo being on the list of structures to be demolished circulated and we could only hope the people concerned reconsidered their decisions. One firetree after another also gave way to disease and eventual deterioration, the last, fallen by a tropical storm.

The Museo still stands today though multi-colored (it used to be just white), dwarfed by the 8-storey Iloilo Capitol. It used to look so proud and inviting with the firetrees abound. The former site of the amphitheater was not as bad, good thing they planted trees but it could be better.

Urbanists would have loved the Museo grounds since it was not gated and it was blanketed in grass. Open-air concerts used to be held there sans the very cumbersome set up of monobloc chairs, now a pre-requisite in the concrete Capitol parking lot. There's a new but very inferior stage (also in a rather awkward orientation) to replace the old amphitheater. I have never attended any concert there for more than 5 years now.

The exhibit opened late but it is not something I don't expect. After all, it is a tradition, if not an SOP, for dignitaries and special guests to arrive late. The program was however, forced to start when it started to drizzle.

I imagined the exhibit to be like browsing through the Architecture Travel forum in pushpullbar where you learn about architecture/buildings textbook-wise and, at the same time, get the feel of it from the point of view of the poster. The pushpullbar forum requires all posters to provide background about the building/architecture featured so readers won't be lost as to what is being featured in the post. Some posters would quote a page off wikipedia (properly acknowledged of course) but because people from this site are so good, they would, more often than not, add a trivia or two, a stock knowledge here and there and the background information becomes a very interesting read. Posters are also required to provide other details such as the address, opening hours, contact details, a KMZ file of the building (and if the poster isn't able to do so, pushpullbar has its own "specialist" to do that, how convenient!). The most interesting chapters in the posts are the photos. They don't even need to be Architectural Digest material type of photos. Posters here make it a point that the photo documentation would be close, if not equivalent, to their own personal experience while visiting the building. Alongside the photos which the poster took, s/he would oftentimes discuss his/her own impression of the architecture and compare what the books said and what his own senses now tell him, standing in front of this...thing. Reading through the posts is like being inside a gallery.

I'm not saying that this should be done by everyone who wants to document a building but believe me, reading about architects being chased by bouncer type security is enough to debunk the black-turtle-neck-le-corbusier-glasses-wearing-scholarly-looking myth on architects. And these things, these pieces of trivia (but not trivial information), these field notes, made the building more "human" to me, a non-architect. And I suppose this is what the exhibit wanted to do, also. Only that it failed.

What made it fail, really? Well, let us see.

First is that we didn't get to see architecture travel type of posts. But I should be entirely blamed for that – for the very high expectations. What we found were blown-up pages from what seemed to be an annual report/national artists brochure: black and white posters with low-res photographs of an angle/corner of the building, watermarked with things I can't recall.

Second, some printed posters were described using the same captions. Yes, poster #1 or Featured Architect A had the same caption as the three other succeeding posters and this to me made it a total FAIL. Imagine a Davies brochure given out during product presentation. That's how the whole thing looked to me.

I am disappointed by the exhibit. I don't think the exhibit was inspiring enough to make architecture enthusiasts want to grab a book and read about the architects featured in the exhibit. Most of them would probably forget about it the moment they step out of the museum and I don't think that is a good sign. After all, they have had their pictures taken beside those posters, in the very small museum gallery that for a good minute or so suddenly turned into one humid photo studio.

I cringed.

It doesn't really make me wonder now why so many people think the houses in Savannah are good architecture. But you architects should. You should.