Of Sickness and Thickness

I have never been sick, not this much and not for a quite a time since I can remember. When I do get the flu, it would be a terrible experience. It is characterized by dizziness, and weakness of joints, slight elevation in body temperature and occasionally dry cough to make it more realistically included in my list of actual and legitimate reasons to ditch work.

It was a horrible day yesterday. I woke up with a pervasive feeling of weakness all over my body. My joints were sore, my chest heaving with rhythmic cough, one which I know betray a windpipe ready for expulsion of phlegm. When the doctor examined my throat, she said it was already reddish and suggested antibiotic medications to arrest my worsening condition.

Earlier that day, I texted my bosses' and told them I can't make it for the day due to my illness. The day was long and I had this weird feeling of "thickness". It's a weird bodily sensation as it is characterized by a sense of "increasing" in bodily space. I don't know if I am describing it correctly but I think it is a sensation of being larger than how you think you are of such a specific size. I am not sure if I am developing allergic reactions to the medicine, that's why I have such weird feelings. I can attribute to the fact that I keep on snorting because of my runny nose and that my ears were a bit "full" of something. I am thinking the latter is brought about by my flu and my temperature. I don't know.

But the sensation was really odd. It made me aware of the fact (again) that I am "here", that I am alive and that I am this "body" and not "that" one. It made me conscious of the fact that I am a living, feeling, thinking, embodied "this-ness". In other words, it made me feel/think that I am a concrete person. Those who read this might think, that is such a strange deduction or thoughts allowed to take too much flight. Maybe, they might think it's the medications' side effect, but for me it's just another confirmation of my being human. Philosophers of consciousness will find my observations as nothing uncanny nor queer. I do find them, quite "entertaining" because I find in them a confirmation of something I was made attentive to (not that I wasn't paying attention to them since I was born in this planet".

I guess, all I can say is by going through this sickness, I am able to use it for something quite interesting. Yes, I do hope I get well soon. As I write this line, I am still sniffing and I still feel the "thickness" of my being, as a playful jazz tune hit the airwaves of this coffee shop I find myself in.

Seeing Sounds and Hearing Shapes

As we grow old we learn more about the world around us. Our cultures significantly shape our worldview, the institutions built around our identities (family, religion, or lack thereof, governments, schools, etc.) around us form much of what we later call as our beliefs and convictions, and more importantly we are, to use Althusser's term, interpellated by our social, political and cultural identities. We are who we are because of our culture and we react to our culture forming our belief systems, whether we fully follow what societal conventions express or we choose our own sets of principles based on what is available to us, often creating a mixture of beliefs molded out of our own personal evaluations upon first principles given by our direct contextual references (such as religions, philosophies, political preferences, aesthetic categories for what is good or admirable, and other patterns of thinking brought about by our education or our own chosen ways of acquiring these inner senses of creeds we try to live by).

Because of such concretizing tendencies in our striated "thrownness' into the world, we cannot but form our sense of self and beliefs along these fault lines of thoughts, sensibilities, dispositions, feelings and imaginings. I say they are fault lines, because as we grow older they move along different directions, making us adjust our beliefs to the dominant worldview that rules our thinking, imagining and feeling. They may change and move us forward or perhaps lead us to a step backward.

And because these more or less established Weltenschauung provide a sense of center to our beliefs, a sense of disruption maybe felt by us whenever we feel that this established structural center can make us feel threatened, causing us either some form of stress to our slowly being threatened creeds.

As we grow old some of these beliefs would change while others will stubbornly persist because we are convinced of their truthfulness, lest we have to radically alter our way of viewing the world. To what extent we grow holistically depends on how we adjust to these changes and how we rationalize either our persistence to our beliefs or make needed changes whenever possible.

We have been brought up to think logically and follow what is reasonable as the basis of much of what we believe and flaunt as our creeds. I remember Thomas Aquinas, echoing Aristotle's "What has been in the mind has gone through the sense" or something like that.

Many of what we accept as true have been mediated by our logical abilities and retained and accepted by our "selves" as coherent and rational. Thus we form memories out of thousands of experiences (seeing colors, remembering past experiences, knowing how to ride a bike, recalling country capitals, etc.) and sustain them as part of our mind set's ways of thinking, imagining and feeling.

Even our feelings which are responses to external events to our bodily experiences can be committed to memory (although not in a mechanical way). What I wonder at times is how perhaps along our sensitization to dichotomous logical thinking and the neglect of exercising the imaginative functions of our brains, then it makes me wonder how much we are missing. Naturally our academe-bound thinking has been trained to "think" along rational grounds and reject anything reasonable and consider them unworthy of consideration.

Thus, I think will there be a point in human evolution when we see sounds or hear shapes? Beore you think this is absurd, please take time to consider these weird thought.

Anxiety Attacks in an Age of Fast-Paced Living

I have periodic anxiety attacks. Some may think of it as exaggerated seeking for attention or perhaps a mild form of delusion rooted in a need to be understood. Consciously or subconsciously, they maybe right; or they maybe wrong.

My anxieties are usually fueled by a string of future worries - most of which are founded on actually existing concerns, deadlines and tasks which must be done. I guess it's really more of an overly imaginative anchoring of fears, worries and aspirations which are always thwarted by realistic demands of work, family concerns and dreams.

My most common anxieties are about deadlines and often I am full of them. Add to that occasional proddings which are family concerns in nature - a phone call from my mom, some problems with my brother, etc. Occasionally worries about the future - my own sense of security, my fears of growing old alone, my need to pursue my dreams ( I won't let go of them) and my concerns for my parents who have no secure retirement benefits.

It appears that I am just worried and my worrying will continue if I do nothing about it, giving me more sleepless nights, a bad day whenever I report for work, lower immunity, an increase of health concerns - headaches, stomach problems, heart palpitations etc.

What have I done to address this problem? Well, for one I have researched about the nature of it, and I reflected on how it affects me as a person. By knowing about it, I was able to take charge of the fact that it is not completely uncontrollable, that there is a sense to which I can manage it.

The next thing I did was to apply those researches - I had to practice deep breathing, physical exercises (of which I wasn't used to before this) and what my friend said, as cognitive management. In layman's words, simply telling myself that I am experiencing anxiety but I can do something to control how I worry and I can assess that those sources of worries can be dealt with realistically.

My doctor, to my relief informed me that I am still sane and that I need not see a psychiatrist yet.

I just want to be grateful of that fact for now.

Write Again!

I have read somewhere that in order to nourish the craft of writing, one must engage in writing exercises on a daily basis. The comparison links writing with any other human activity that needs refining and fluency. Apparently, this seems true for me too. Although I have swirling ideas in my head and find almost no time to incarnate them on a page (or an online dashboard, in this case) I know that I have to abandon that pointless alibi.

What moves me further is that I have to come to realize that The Annual Palanca Awards are out again. I have shied away from joining the Palanca for varied reasons: ideological biases of juries, lack of time, no inspiring idea worthy of my attention, fear of grammatical violations creeping into my work, ridicule from peers and above all, an empty mind.

I tried perusing samples of worthy works : short fiction, poetry and non-fiction. Many of them actually have little or no "Carmina Burana" sounding background music heralding the grand nature of their themes. They are simply articulations of hearts and minds willing to speak out whatever their authors wanted. So then again, I ask myself: "To join or not to join."

Say It Out Loud

I am always at a loss when it comes to words. I relish the idea of writing and seeing how a well-thought plan finds fruition in the form of an essay or a short fiction, but I guess the most entertaining and perhaps most rewarding idea of all is to find joy in seeing your own work take shape and find polish in careful and attentive edits. I have always taught my students the importance of refining and editing one's work.

What I find so appealing in the process is the engaged work of the mind as it examines assumptions held behind every attempt to present the truth. Or in some cases, truths. The mind of course is given that terrible opportunity to grasp reality and experiences and make it an appearing report of interesting things, expressed in a narrative that is both sustaining to the mind and rewarding for the spirit.

While not everyone will be as focused in following some precious truth promised by the writer, the need to present the truth as perceived by the presenter is something that has to be considered carefully. While all human experiences are but touches on the reality of a grand truth which the writer must consider is something worth paying attention to. Every human experience - every heartache, every momentous bliss, every sigh of surrender and every tear, is worth the attention.

Cory Aquino, freedom and the Filipino way

With Cory Aquino's passing, the Filipino people once more are united under one sentiment - loss. She has been so many things to different people - a mother, a friend, a fighter for the oppressed and a woman of faith. The political context which produced the icon Cory Aquino is the not just responsible for inculcating in our national consciousness the need to grasp the interrelationship of responsible politics and moral accountability in the way we interrogate our understandings of social involvement and Filipino identity.

I first heard of the death of Ninoy Aquino as a child from my mother who told me Ninoy was a man of principle, one who is unafraid to stand for what is right even if it has to jeopardize his own personal comfort. Growing up I learned of the other players in that story - the Marcoses, Enrile, Ramos and Cardinal Sin. To me as a child, politics sounded more like an adult quarrel but as time went by my education in politics was birthed and nourished by curiosity for things larger than me. School added a lot more in this quest for understanding meaning, social consciousness and identity formation. My own heroes were forged for me by my teachers, by the media and by my own grasp of the events of EDSA Revolution.

Although she was interpreted for me by the media, Cory Aquino isn't hard to understand because she spoke the language common to many people - the need for freedom and meaning . As such she aligned with the heroes in my childhood - Jose Rizal, Lapu-lapu, Andres Bonifacio, Abraham Lincoln, and George Washington. What made her more alive was the fact that she was very much alive and accessible through the events of the day. Understanding her role today for many fo us and acknowledging her contribution to Philippine democracy will be short-sighted if we fail to continue in our current mandate to be watchers of our own freedom. We have to be very much aware of the need to guard freedom and consider it a precious gift, one thta can be abused and one that can be easily ignored.

As an educator I often think about the inevitable and intricate inflection of politics in the discipline I teach. That along the appreciation of literary texts there is an unspoken obligation to teach students the responsibility of carefully planning out one's politics, one's philosophy and one's nationalistic sentiments. Although I still try to find actual and specific expressions of this responsibility, I find it rather unsurprising to see that some students will never get the value of history and the role it plays in contemporary sensibility. The young people of today rarely speak of politics because it's contentious and uncomfortably partisan. Their vocabularies are full of myopic humor and shallow rants, mostly focused on personal discomfort and abused rights. It's about the good things about life and rarely about causes or overarching world-views. I guess this is a failure on part of the teachers who fail to educate the young on the necessity of politics, convictions and active social transformation. Many if not most teachers in many schools have abandoned that call towards educating the young about the involvement of the personal and the national.

Cory stood for freedom and Filipinos ought to be grateful for the sacrifices she made because she loved this nation dearly. Many loved only their pockets and their own personal comfort. The Filipino despite his poverty continues to celebrate this although after all the furor and fatigue, he will go back and confront the empty table at dinner.

The Power of Fatigue

This seems to be a ridiculous title. How could there be strength in weakness? or purpose in chaos?
There is one good thing about being tired. It's knowing that the body needs rest, that it has it's limits to and that we cannot choose to squeeze everything in the moment. The demands of a fast-paced society has reinforced this lie if not happily preached it among the working class. Achievement is found in busy-ness and the clamor for accomplishment sent to our ears by our workplace.

When I get tired I cannot help but be tired. It is something I cannot stop or bury in smiles or pleasantries. And because we are always cajoled to be happy, to be always fun and to be on the move there seems to be no place for fatigue. It is always demonized as a curse; something we cannot be happy to be with. But there is wisdom in finding the end of the rope. It is a time for reassessment and recalculation of priorities. We get tired for a variety of reasons. Some are self-induced foolish habits to do the impossible, others are inevitable consequences of a passion filled heart and others are simply form so injustice.

Being tired brings me back to thinking - about what matters significantly and whether the reason for my own weariness is of great value or simply a consequent of a foolish endeavor.