Pinoy Penman

Penman for Monday, March 27, 2006


IN A CORNER of my Faculty Center office is a large baul, a wooden chest into which I’ve deposited about three decades’ worth of ephemera—some people would call it junk: manuscripts, letters, pictures, old newspapers and magazines, syllabi from courses no longer taught, doggerel submitted to poetry class. Now and then, in the throes of an urge to clean up the mess, I might pick through that pile, fully resolved to let go of some provably worthless slip of paper, only to realize that, instead of losing meaning over time, these bits of flotsam and jetsam acquire more value with age—nothing but sentimental value, to be sure, but a kind of resonance nonetheless, a utility beyond the coin of commerce.

We often respond most strongly to old letters—here’s one from a friend and colleague who died in a plane crash, and here’s one from a young poet on his first encounter with America. They will mean little to anyone else—perhaps some scholar or biographer in a far future—but they will never mean quite the same thing; they will be faceless, voiceless, and disembodied; another reader will never see the church or museum or Benguet pine looming behind the person.

In the days before e-mail, writing committed you to paper, imprinted emotion even in the faintest ink, in the extravagant loops and the abrupt downturns of your penmanship. How the paper looked was almost as important as the message it bore: the folds and creases of repeated readings, the imperishable stains of wayward liquids, the yellow of creeping age. Papers keep well as artifacts. Despite my seasonal vow to sort mine out, I always end up adding more fodder to the unlit fire—a certificate here, a jotted note from a writer there, a thesis given to some deliciously obscure subject.

When classes ended last week, I felt that urge again, and began a half-hearted effort to excavate the pile from the bottom-most layers. This time my eye was caught by a nondescript manila envelope, bulging slightly; when I opened it I saw sheaf of yellowing scraps, and when I took them out I saw that they were receipts all dating from 1978.

And immediately my mind swept back to that year, the year in which Annie Hall won the Best Picture Oscar, John Paul II became Pope, “Hotel California” and “Evergreen” swept the Grammys, Jim Jones’s cult followers committed mass suicide in Guyana—and also the year in which my parents, my brothers and sisters, and my small family and I moved to two adjacent subdivision houses on the hills of San Mateo; Demi turned four in October, and I was on something of a roll, having been assigned to work with the United Nations Development Programme. It was a good year to be alive, to be 24, to be wondering grandly whether I would devote the rest of my life to the dismal science of economics or the sullen art of literature.

Receipts have a way of reducing those great sweeps to little transactions, the mincing minutes of just another day in progress. In this consumerist age, nothing quite defines us as the things we buy, and receipts are the paper trail of our vagabond preferences. They also hark back to anciently benign economies, where and when a cold beer could be had in Ermita’s yuppie-ish Shady Lane Café Salon for P2.50 (I/we had four on 3-15-78, for a total of P10.00 plus a sales tax of P0.70).

You got two Cokes from Hamburger Street for P3.00, a regular burger for P6.00, and a salametti pizza for P12.80; a special bibingka at A&L in front of New Frontier Theater in Cubao set you back P4.00.

There is, of course, more to life than food. In what had to have been a major purchase, I paid P129.75 at Silver Dollar Jeans for a pair of Levi’s, “New Mexico” style; it isn’t even the price that pains me now, but the waist size indicated—a demure 30”, ten inches in the murky past. A few days later I bought three sandos at P8.00 each and three hankies at P5.00 each; Beng got a pair of ladies’ shoes at Ian’s for P24.90 and children’s shoes for P15.90. When my boatlike Ford Cortina needed a new battery, it cost me P212.00; when we had to bring Demi in for her regular checkup, her pediatrician Dr. Gilberto del Castillo charged us no more than P20.00 for the visit.

Today it’s easy to coo about how cheap everything was back then, forgetting how hard it was for a lot of folks to set aside P100 for a nice date out or an imported book like One Hundred Years of Solitude or even just a hospital bed. But time and relative prosperity have a way of warming up the past, although I doubt that too many of us would actually want to return to it, to a life without cellular phones (the first commercial model, incidentally, came out in 1978—along with the Sony Walkman), without the Internet, without cable TV, without Google to dredge up the kind of factoids I’ve been serving you.

There’s a reason a baul has a heavy lid, and once this column’s done those receipts are going back in there, perhaps never to be minded again until my retirement day.


I WAS HAPPY to note the publication of the second issue of Story Philippines, doubtlessly the classiest, splashiest literary magazine we have in these parts. (It also has a website, with excerpts of the stories, at http://www.storyphilippines.com.) The maiden issue had “Fiction That Swims in Your Head” for a theme, and now it’s “Fiction by Candlelight,” with advertising executive Emily Abrera serving as guest editor, applying her fine taste to the selection of the stories written by Dean Francis Alfar, Mads Bajarias, Ian Rosales Casocot, Vince Groyon, Marie La Viña, Rachelle F. Medina, Jo Pilar, Anna Felicia Sanchez, Michelle Sarile, Rachelle Tesoro, and Marianne Villanueva.

Let me give you a sampling of some of these writers’ works. As for the rest, well, pick up your copies at your nearest bookstore or newsstand. “A thousand false days whirled before him—of how, together, they swam in the rivers and chased the water birds; how she rode on his back as they hunted the torpid fishes; how she told him that she loved him no matter what he looked like, no matter what he was, that she would be pretend to be a diuata enchanted beyond hope by his charming voice.” (from “The Maiden and the Crocodile” by Dean Francis Alfar)

“Why aren’t the rails singing? We see them all the time—in ones and twos—on the forest floor, foraging. Concealment doesn’t seem to figure much in their plans. Conspicuous at first light, midmorning, dusk, even noontime. After dark, they show up through the night scope, bisecting the footpaths; nonchalant. Sometimes, they’d look right back at us—or more accurately, through us—with unsympathetic, dry eyes: a sort of avian rendition of that torture device, the silent treatment. I suppose the more desperate we get, the more this silence is stretched out, until we grow inexorably mad; otherwise, we surrender, apologize for what—idiocy? Bad judgment? Wrong timing? Misreading the signals? All amounts to the same thing, I guess: a failure to communicate. (from “The Sound Wranglers,” by Mads Bajarias)

“We had our consuming feasts. We indulged, even when the daylight came intruding in, and Veronica would hurry to close the bedroom curtains, explaining in one word: ‘Neighbors.’” (from “The Painted Lady” by Ian Rosales Casocot)

“She slid into bed in a rush, half-afraid that a cold hand would grab her ankle if she stood beside her bed too long, but lay awake in the dark listening to the house creak as it cooled and thought about the ghost.” (from “The Haunting of Martina Luzuriaga” by Vince Groyon)

“The socialite-of-the-moment, who looked like a pretty, middle-aged mestiza in the papers, was frightening in person. She was a gigantess who seemed to tower beyond six feet in her teetering heels and had an eyebrow that was perpetually cocked to one side. She approached Clara, her barbaric jewelry banging against her magnificent chest.” (from “Girl on a Couch” by Rachelle Medina)

“The rest were pictures of more unguarded moments: she with clasped hands, eager for the next clean gas station; back from a dirty toilet, but grinning nonetheless; a stray chicken pecking on her toe while she heated canned beans; a raindrop on her cheek as she slept on the grass; two fireflies lighting her mouth at a moment of prolonged awe.” (from “Quizas” by Jo Pilar)

“The congee was cooking on the stove. Lira placed Mattie back in the crib, half-expecting her to start hollering again, but fortunately she was a normal baby, easily distracted and easy to please. In a moment, she had turned over on her tummy only to bend her head back to peer up at imagined patterns on the ceiling, expressing her wonder with discourses of tah-tah-tah.” (from “How to Pacify a Distraught Infant” by Anna Felicia Sanchez).

Most of these, happily, are new names, the next wave of Filipino fictionists in English coming in from the horizon. (Two of them—Mads Bajarias and Jo Pilar—I’m particularly pleased to find here, coming as they did from a fiction workshop conducted last year at the Alliance Française by my former student Migs Villanueva. So the writing moves on.)

A few months ago, when the first issue came out, I expressed my fear—founded on experience—that upscale magazines like this (sumptuously produced, extremely picky about its contents) would have Achillean lives, glorious but short. The economics of publishing may be one thing, but this issue reminds us that we will hardly ever be in short supply as far as quality fiction is concerned. I can only continue wishing it the best of fortunes.

Penman for Monday, March 20, 2006


FOR A COUPLE of weeks now, I’ve been running almost every afternoon around UP Diliman’s Academic Oval—that inner core of the campus with the Administration Building at one end and the Sunken Garden on the other. The reason is plain and painful: I need to lose about 15 to 20 pounds of impacted lard, which will probably take me about three years of running (make that brisk walking, with stops for ice cream and photography) thrice around the oval every day to achieve, at the rate I’m going. But never mind the official excuse.

I love walking around Diliman—where I also happen to live—because it just happens to be one of the last vestiges of (for want of a better term) the pastoral life in the city, the kind where you expect to see luxuriant groves of bamboo and grass-chewing animals tethered to the boles of trees.

I usually head out to the oval at 5 o’clock, which gives me just enough time to make two rounds within one hour (three, on certain days when I’m buoyed up or weighted down by the loftiest or lowest of feelings), always starting from the west end at Quezon Hall and moving counterclockwise past Palma Hall. The highlight of this routine is the long turn around the Sunken Garden—that wide and, yes, sunken sward behind the Library, large enough to be host and home, all at once, to footballers, joggers, Frisbee fanatics, couples falling in and out of love, families on a picnic, protesters and proselytizers, rockers, oddballs, and plain kibitzers.

On Sunday afternoons it might seem like half of Diliman converges there, seeking refuge and restoration, content to sit on the garden’s beveled edges like a crowd on the shore of a green but waterless ocean. And on nearly every afternoon this time of year, there’s always that moment, around 5:30, when the setting sun is at its most intense, bathing everyone and everything in that garden in a golden, beatific glow.

I don’t know who designed the Sunken Garden, or caused it to be put where it is, when UP moved from Pade Faura to Diliman in the early ‘50s. Certainly no one calls it today by its formal name—believe it or not, the M. H. del Pilar Parade Grounds. No offense to Plaridel, but even the sonorousness of his name pales beside the quiet magic of “Sunken Garden.” It isn’t so much the rhyme as its mystery, the embedded notion of untold riches and pleasures beneath one’s feet, awaiting discovery. I’ve resolved that if and when I ever become a publisher or a bookseller, my shop will be called “Sunken Garden Books”, in honor of a corner of Diliman that will be, truly, ever green.

SPEAKING OF UP, last week, with four other people, I had the privilege of serving as a member of the board of judges for the editorial examination for the Philippine Collegian, the official student newspaper of the University of the Philippines.

The Collegian, of course, has had a long and illustrious history, counting among its past editors such luminaries and personalities as Wenceslao Vinzons, Armando Malay, Angel Baking, Enrique Voltaire Garcia II, and, all right, Miriam Defensor.

Even when I was in high school, it was my burning ambition to join the staff of the Collegian as soon as I got into UP; my physics teacher, Vic Manarang, had been one of its editors in chief, and many of the people whose writing I admired—Joey Arcellana, Gary Olivar, and Rey Vea—had already served it or were on board. Sure enough, I joined the Collegian as a freshman in the heady days of the First Quarter Storm, and there met more activist stalwarts such as Tony Tagamolila, Ed Gonzalez, and Popoy Valencia (all of whom became EICs at one time or another); Willie Nepomuceno (yes, the very same funnyman) was our staff artist. As an unexpected bonus, I met my first girlfriend (whose name shall go unmentioned, to spare her the embarrassment) in the Collegian, our first movie date enabled by the P20 allowance we received per issue.

I have a thousand stories to tell about the Collegian, but I’ll save them for another time. Suffice it to say that I grew up with it, in it, as a young man and as a writer. I didn’t stay in school long enough to realize my own dream of becoming its editor in chief; fired up with journalistic zeal, I dropped out of college at age 18 and finagled my way into reporting for the Philippines Herald and Taliba until the guillotine of martial law put an abrupt end to my first foray into newspapering.

It’s a long and wayward introduction to how I felt, sitting on that panel to choose the next Collegian editor, but I think it’s important to establish how personal that function was to me, even if, over the years, the Collegian itself seems to have lost its primacy of place in the ordinary student’s consciousness—not to mention its readership. (Or could I just be romanticizing the past, by imagining that the student paper mattered more to people in our time?)

I’m not going to talk here about whom we chose in the end and how that person was chosen, beyond saying that we scrupulously observed the rules and followed the publicly prescribed criteria: editorial writing, 70%; newswriting, 20%; layout and headline writing, 10%.

What was most interesting for me was our discussion, among the judges, of possible changes that could be made to the rules and to the Collegian itself, given the realities and challenges of 21st-century journalism. (And these ideas apply not only to UP, but to campus newspapers elsewhere.)

For one thing, we found it strange that despite the fact that modern editorship is as much a matter of office and people management as it is of writing skill, no provisions have been made to interview the applicants (or even, say, the top three finalists) to get some idea of their vision for the paper and of their people skills.

As they stand, the rules (and the whole idea of a college editorship) favor and glorify the best writer of argumentative prose—in other words, the essayist. We are judging, in effect, an essay contest (with a small nod to layouting, which should really be removed and left to the paper’s layout artist, although headline writing might be left in place).

Ironically, at a time when the Collegian needs to adapt to a changing readership (who might, for example, favor an online, blog-type edition to which they can instantly and freely respond), it remains bound by age-old rules which successive boards of judges have had to follow to the letter on pain of being sued by some aggrieved loser. Alas, in today’s university, litigiousness has overtaken good sense in many matters academic and otherwise.

In any event, we wish our final choice the best of luck, and pray that the new Collegian editor runs the paper and infuses it with new ideas—beyond, of course, writing clear, sensible, and memorable prose.


AND NOW for some announcements. LIKHAAN: The UP Institute of Creative Writing (ICW) has selected 12 fellows to the 45th UP National Writers Workshop to be held at Pines View Hotel, Baguio City from April 1-8, 2006. They are: Fiction in English – Bernice C. Roldan (UP Diliman); Fiction in Filipino – Jimmuel C. Naval (UP Diliman), Zosimo E. Quibilan, Jr. (ADMU); Poetry in English – Raymond John A. de Borja (UP Diliman), Joel M. Toledo (UP Diliman), and Lourd Ernest H. de Veyra (UST/UP Diliman); Poetry in Filipino – Ariel Dim. Borlongan (FEATI University) and Paolo M. Manalo (UP Diliman); Drama – Allan B. Lopez (UP Diliman), Lisa Magtoto (UP Diliman); and Creative Nonfiction in English – Mario I. Miclat (UP Diliman) and Virginia M. Villanueva (UP Diliman). An added feature of this year’s workshop is a parallel, CHED-accredited seminar for teachers on the teaching of writing and literature at UP Baguio. Please call the ICW at 922-1830 for details. Also, the Philippine Science High School National Alumni Association (PSHS-NAA) will hold its annual membership meeting on April 1, 2006, 2:00 pm, at the Gregorio Velasquez Hall, PSHS, Agham Road, Diliman, Quezon City. Aside from the customary reports, important amendments to the by-laws will be presented for ratification. The PSHS Alumni Networking Portal will also be launched. If you can’t come, please write me and I’ll e-mail you a proxy form you can send to the PSHS-NAA.

Penman for Monday, March 13, 2006



WE PINOYS found ourselves engulfed if not paralyzed by a new wave of political turmoil these past couple of weeks, so it was a pleasant surprise for me to find none other than Army chief of staff Hermogenes Esperon Jr. singing “Bus Stop” (“… wet day she’s there, I say, please share my umbrella!”) with a bunch of other guys—myself included—in our old high school one recent Friday evening. But I’m getting ahead of the story.

The Philippine Science High School Alumni Association holds a quarterly Alumni Forum, in which invited speakers address topics of current interest (last November, for example, an alumnus-expert spoke on avian flu). This time around, the forum had DOST Sec. Estrella Alabastro speaking on the state of science and technology in the Philippines (in sum: dismal, but improving), Ibon Foundation executive director Tony Tujan on poverty alleviation, and myself on—hmm, Edsa, GMA, and all that jazz.

Predictably, it was my ten-minute presentation that provoked the thorniest responses, given the events of the previous week and the presence in the audience of a formidable group of PSHS alumni: our colleagues in the uniformed services—almost three dozen of them at latest count, about a third of whom were present at the forum, led by no less than Lt. Gen. Esperon himself (PSHS Batch 1970, and “Jun” to his contemporaries).

I brought up the need for idealism even and especially in what I saw to be sordid times, and Jun Esperon raised his own question about the relationship between idealism and the rule of law. An interesting exchange followed, capped by the reassurance that we were all, at least, talking civilly and presumably intelligently. On the way out of the auditorium, Jun (whose two daughters had been my students in English in UP) greeted me by saying that he read my pieces now and then. “Not in an intelligence report, I hope!”, I said, laughing.

We thought that was the end of the evening, but someone had donated a couple of cases of beer, and even more auspiciously, Jun had brought an Army band with him—the “Los Caballeros” outfit, which dished out one ‘60s staple after another (“Don’t You Care” by the Buckinghams, “MacArthur’s Park” by Richard Harris) with such skill and gusto that we couldn’t help jumping onstage to sing along with them. When the band struck the unmistakable first notes of the Hollies’ “Bus Stop,” all hell broke loose and the stage staggered from the combined avoirdupois of such substantial alumni as Mapua president Rey Vea, business ad professor Jun Sabug, their 1969 batchmates Jun Bernal, Perry Callanta, and Reny Lorenzana, and our host for the evening, Jun Esperon.

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I’m under no illusion that belting out 40-year-old tunes will banish our coup jitters or change the way we feel about this country’s governance and its governors, but it’s a relief in other ways to know that we can still communicate as people and as friends. I know, it’s both our boon and bane, precisely what I referred to in my talk that same evening as the “oddly familial of not indeed incestuous nature of our politics, where everybody knows everyone else to the point that nothing ever really gets done by way of serious change.” But if a silly shing-a-ling song can keep the guns from firing a little longer, why the heck not? “Please share my umbrella!”



I'VE BEEN privileged to be associated with the recent production of a number of coffee table books, two of which—Heroes (Alay sa Bayan, 2006) and Tanduay: The Filipino Rhum (Tanduay, 2005) have already been reported on by their editor, fellow STAR columnist and bar buddy Krip Yuson. I wrote essays for these books, and in the process got acquainted with people and things I might never have known anything about.

On my side of the road, I wrote and/or edited Journeys with Light: The Vision of Jaime Zobel (Ayala Foundation, 2005); Power from the Deep: The Malampaya Story (Shell Philippines, 2005); and the forthcoming Unleashing the Power of Steam: the PNOC EDC Story (PNOC EDC, 2006). Books like these take anywhere from six months to four years to produce, and since they go out with my name on the title or the credits page, I take every care to treat them as I would my own fiction or non-fiction. (Our most ambitious project so far has been the ten-volume Kasaysayan: The Story of the Filipino People, which my editorial team and I produced in 18 months for Readers Digest Asia and A-Z Direct Marketing in time for the Centennial in 1998.)

It’s easy to dismiss many coffee table books as fluff pieces, corporate PR giveaways meant to burnish the image of a company at the expense of some unpleasant truth. Depending on how a project is approached and presented, that’s certainly possible. I happen to think that, while every client will naturally seek to put its best foot forward, the best corporate histories will acknowledge the worst crises they’ve faced and how they were dealt with—such as the public outcry that greeted the proposed establishment of a geothermal plant on Mt. Apo.

Yes, they’re PR products in the way that family albums are our own representations of ourselves, for which we’ll put on formal wear and smile like the blazes, but taken with a critical eye, corporate coffee table books are also important contributions to our economic and social history, albeit from one point of view. They tell us how people lived, worked, made decisions that changed the lives of millions, built something out of nothing, and turned the daily grind of work into something far larger than the job or the company itself.

One such book was launched last Friday—Behind the Power Lines: The Meralco Engineers, the story of the men (and quite a few women) who’ve made it possible for you and me to take electricity for granted, because someone else is always awake somewhere, minding the switches and controls. Written by Cristina Pantoja Hidalgo and researched and designed by Migs Villanueva (I had a small hand in its copyediting), the book is a compendium of anecdotes from and about the professionals at the core of Meralco’s business: the engineers who design, operate, manage, and maintain the company’s power plants and distribution systems.






The stories range from the sublime (how Filipino engineers, for example, proved themselves as good as or better than their American supervisors in the old company) and the comic (having brought the wrong transformer to a repair job, engineers were forced to use their wits to make it work) to the tragic (the death of a lineman). The book’s casual, conversational style and its inspired, snazzy design do much to project these largely anonymous and unheralded engineers as interesting individuals—and Meralco itself as the bastion of a certain corporate culture (predominantly macho, to be sure, but leavened by what company oldtimers refer to as malasakit).

I’m looking forward to more such projects (whether or not I have anything to do with them) from our major corporations and our most politically, economically, and socially engaged families and institutions. The history books are fine for context and criticism, but sometimes you just need to hear people speak to make up your own mind.



SPEAKING OF the Philippine Science High School, a ghastly accident recently left a PSHS scholar in dire need of help from good Samaritans. Senior Angelynne Fabro ingested a poisonous substance in school last February 14, and developed severe vomiting and abdominal pain. That was just the start of her travails, which have gone on to two endoscopies and half a dozen rounds of dialysis.

A thorough investigation of the incident is underway, but meanwhile, Gelyn needs your help. The school welcomes and appreciates any assistance that can be extended to her. Blood donations, Type AB, are also needed. If you can help, please get in touch with Dr. Jessamyn O. Yazon, OIC-Campus Director, telefax 929-1606, e-mail jyazon77@yahoo.com. A benefit concert is also being planned for Gelyn on April 1, with tickets costing P100 and bands from various PSHS batches performing.

Lastly, let me announce that UP Batch '81 will have a salu-salo after the free mini-concert of Prof. Edru Abraham & Kontra-GaPi in Bahay Alumni on Tuesday, March 14. For more details, please get in touch with this year's Silver Jubilee chairman, Ma. Juliet Etorma-Herrera, gootzie_herrera@yahoo.com or UPBatch81@yahoogroups.com.

Penman for Monday, March 6, 2006



OFFERING YET more proof of how we’ve been spoiled rotten by technology, I can’t think too highly of a place these days if it doesn’t have access to a wireless network—or “wi-fi” to the tech-savvy, the modern equivalent of radio waves over which you can not only receive, but also send out, messages using your computer. That computer could be a laptop, a smartphone (a cellular phone with some computing capabilities), or a personal digital assistant (if you’re going to pay five figures for anything the size of a pack of cigarettes, it might as well have a name like that).

The term “wi-fi” is, of course, a throwback to what your old folks knew as hi-fi, or high fidelity, except that the “wi” now stands for wireless. For a brief history and overview of this technology, let me turn you over to the ever-useful Wikipedia, which (slightly edited) tells us that: “Wi-Fi (also WiFi, Wi-fi, Wifi, or wifi) is a set of product compatibility standards for wireless local area networks (WLAN) based on the IEEE 802.11 specifications. New standards are currently in the works and offer many enhancements, anywhere from longer range to greater transfer speeds.

“Wi-Fi was intended to be used for mobile devices and local area networks, but is now often used for Internet access. It enables a person with a wireless-enabled computer or personal digital assistant (PDA) to connect to the Internet when in proximity of an access point. The geographical region covered by one or several access points is called a hotspot.

“Wi-Fi was invented in 1991 by NCR Corporation/AT&T (later on Lucent & Agere Systems) in Nieuwegein, the Netherlands. Initially meant for cashier systems, the first wireless products were brought on the market under the name WaveLAN, with speeds of 1Mbps/2Mbps. Vic Hayes, the inventor of Wi-Fi, has been named 'father of Wi-Fi' and was with his team involved in designing standards such as IEEE 802.11b, 802.11a and 802.11g.”

So now we know that this wonderful means of letting computers talk to each other and to the Internet over the airwaves has been around for 15 years. To avail yourself of this marvel—aside from the aforementioned computer or PDA—you’ll need a wireless card, already built into most new digital devices. To these, add a vacant table at Starbuck’s or Seattle’s Best, a frothy cappuccino, a look that says “Don’t mess with me, I’m moving millions of pesos between my accounts with each keystroke” even if you’re just pretending to be some perky teenager on Friendster. I suspect that it’s that pose that draws a lot of people to wi-fi—the impression you give off of somehow being inextricably engaged with the world out there, of being umbilically connected to something larger and vaster than yourself. In a lifestyle that prizes connections and connectivity, wi-fi is the ultimate tether to the Great Digital Beyond.

In what’s become an odd downside to wi-fi, people in cafes now talk less to each other where there’s wireless to go and a laptop to play with. As happens in many of our PhilMug “wala lang” meetings, half a dozen geeks might trot out their machines on a long table, order drinks, and start chatting with absent friends or even each other—on wi-fi. As tech writer Jayvee Fernandez notes in one of the best-produced tech blogs to have emerged recently at The Aftermac, “WiFi as a social concept, at least here where I’m from, is null and void. On many occasions where my friends bring portables to a coffee shop, the buzz of conversation dies down, replaced by the muffled clicking of their trackpads. I guess the best place to start is going wireless in a pizza joint. Social food is always good. That’s Adel and myself with our PowerBook and iBook chatting, downloading stuff and sharing photos while waiting for our pizza.”

Taken that way, wi-fi sounds like a perfect prescription for losing a date or even a mate, and I can just see the term “wi-fi widow” gaining currency in the years to come, followed by the inevitable “Wi-Fi Anonymous” for the hopelessly addicted.

Unfortunately, like all presumably good things, wi-fi doesn’t come cheap. Aside from all the cappuccinos, you’ll be paying for airtime (about P100 per hour) using a prepaid card, if you do wi-fi in the malls. At home, you’ll need broadband (just think of it as a high-speed, high-volume Internet connection) and then a router to scatter the signal to your kitchen, your garden, or wherever else you may prefer to work.

Some places are rich, blessed, and generous enough to offer free wi-fi, There are some such corners here in Metro Manila, if you know where to look. (For a guide to these free hotspots, visit my blog and look for the link to Philmug’s Wi-Fi Hotspot thread—all 61 pages of it.) Elsewhere, whole cities are gearing up to make sure their citizens have no excuse to be out of the loop. In its most recent issue, Newsweek reports that Taipei is “on track to become the first major world city to attain geek nirvana” through a “WiFly” project that will wire—or unwire—all of its 272 square kilometers. Wikipedia also informs us that “Some smaller countries and municipalities already provide free Wi-Fi hotspots and residential Wi-Fi internet access to everyone. Examples include the Kingdom of Tonga or Estonia which have already a large number of free Wi-Fi hotspots throughout their countries.”

The ultimate question, of course, is what’s one to do with all that access and connectivity. Don’t you guys have a life—meals to cook, nappies to replace, exams to grade, cars to tune up, laundry to wash? (Reality check, hotel in Nagoya, November 2005: “I need a hotpot… No, no, not a hotspot, a hotpot—for cooking my noodles!”) Well, sure, maybe…. Just as soon as I check out that iPod on eBay, and count how many blog hits I’ve racked up on CQ Counter.



SINCE PROSPECTIVE beneficiaries will have less than a month to avail themselves of this opportunity, let me put in a word for my friends at the Philippine-American Educational Foundation (PAEF), which is in charge of administering the Fulbright scholarship program in the Philippines.

As it has for over 2,000 Filipinos to date, a Fulbright scholarship changed my life 20 years ago by giving this island boy a chance to study in two of America’s best universities (Michigan and Wisconsin). That started with a xeroxed advertisement I came across on some bulletin board in the lobby of UP Diliman’s Arts and Sciences building, followed by an application sent in through the post.

Today you have the advantage of reading the notice below and then downloading the forms from the PAEF website. Having served on the Selection Committee a couple of times, let me tell you that the process is extremely competitive; your grades, your track record, and the quality and sense of your proposed plan of study all count, as well as how clearly and persuasively you make your pitch, should you get as far as the oral interview. Simply put, you have to be the best or one of the best among your peers in your field of study, and you have to convince the committee of the value of your work to Philippine society at large, and of your commitment to return and to serve the Philippines.

That said, give it your best shot, and good luck! Here’s the official announcement:

“The Philippine-American Educational Foundation (PAEF) is pleased to announce the opening of competition for Fulbright student scholarships for school year 2007-2008. The scholarships are granted competitively to Filipinos who wish to pursue degree in MA and PhD and non-degree (doctoral enrichment/dissertation research) studies in US universities. Applications will be accepted from faculty of Philippine universities and professionals from other sectors. The Foundation encourages applications from qualified faculty who are enrolled in doctoral studies in the Philippines and would like to do six to nine months of doctoral enrichment or dissertation research in the United States. Faculty from CHED-MAEP institutions (in Mindanao) can apply for non-degree doctoral enrichment or dissertation assistance under the Fulbright-CHED/MAEP Scholarship Program.

“Application forms may be obtained directly from the PAEF office at 10/F Ayala Life-FGU Center, 6811 Ayala Avenue, Makati City, and can be downloaded from the PAEF website. The forms can also be obtained from colleges and universities, the regional offices of the Commission on Higher Education (CHED) and the Department of Education, Culture and Sports (DECS). Complete applications must be received by the PAEF office on or before March 31, 2006.”