Read this first:http://ocknarf.multiply.com/photos/album/68/Woe_Man-for-Others_Ateneo_Immersion_Scandal
I invited Miss Tracy Isabel Borres in Facebook, so I sent her this letter:
Pablo: The creator of Alf is a Man of Vision, with that Imagination to redefine Ugly.
Ioana: It’s not hard to imagine something ugly!
Pablo: But the UGLIEST?! You must be the Lord and Savior D;
I’m not rich yet, I’ve never been rich and lived most of my life in poverty. A part of my friends from elementary hailed from the slums in Katipunan — sons of UP employees enjoying their dependent benefits. My bestfriend’s family is one of the richest in Asia and occasionally came to school in a limousine.
I’ve always secretly admired how he can not be distinguished from my skwater friends (LOLOLLOLOL!!!) when we’re playing sipa and jolens and eating fishballs. We learned the baddEST Tagalog cuss words from him, words he assimilated from befriending their driver. During dismissal he’d leave the school amoy-araw and amoy-pawis with stains of libag all over his shirt as he enters another one of their luxury cars.
I’ve always found comfort in the fact that all the spoiled brats I have encountered in the Philippines can not even match my bestfriend’s wealth and power (his father, Rafael Morales, is the top corporate lawyer in Asia). It’s not that my bestfriend is the humblest, wealthiest egalitarian: He brandishes his superior intelligence like a crown as if he never needed money to be the coolest person in the world (: This is his only arrogance and mine d: Or perhaps his deviation from higher-upper class demeanor is another form of arrogance, stripping the right to superiority of sheltered hipsters who are rich but aren’t rich enough (:
I never hated conios. I loved it when I got to talk in English and felt like it was normal, without pretense, without minding my diction — indiscriminately choosing between the colloquial and the polysyllabic. Plus, of course, conios were always the Prettier people d:
What you, Miss Tracy Isabel Borres, have written, made me realize that extremely pampered individuals had always bored me with their impulsive shopping and monthly trips abroad consuming their blogs until NOW HAHAHA! YOU
YOU ARE PURE EVIL.
PURE EVIL.
It was a confession of hatred rattling from a skull like a caged animal.
The brutality was as sincere as the brutality of its sincerity.
It exhibited the ease of emotional expression provided by a well-established social hierarchy — a hierarchy, once demolished within your own code of values, will render you stale and lost.
I was much worse a racist than you are before I’ve gotten over my insecurities only last year. I have been relentlessly teased as an “Aeta” throughout my childhood for my complexion. I hated myself. I hated all the people who looked like me. When I left for the US I felt like Michael Jackson scrubbing away every trace of ethnicity from my body. I stopped talking in Tagalog and tried not to mingle with other Filipinos while in New York and Los Angeles:
“Again, originally for Stacey:
I don’t know if you know me and I know we’ve never talked before LOL but we are both strangers in strange lands. Yeah, “There’s a presence in what is missing.” ~Henry James. However, to me — yes, there is alienation, but I’ve always been antisocial LOL I’m bound to be alienated anywhere — to me, it’s more about the emergence of something you never knew you had before. Having been to California to New York and back in California, I’ve confirmed to myself a discovery of a part of me that had always been with me all along: my Filipino identity. Haha. You wouldn’t know how much similar you are with the rest of your ethnic group until you see how much different other groups are from you, and it is really, really, really depressing LOLOLOLOL!!!!!!”~Pablo Banila
My first love, the love that I carried with me overseas and kept for years was for my Russian-Chinese high school classmate. The rarest beauty in the Philippines. Even ordinary mestizas could not turn me on D;
Well, see, my first love was never realized nor had any clear conclusion when it ended last year — that day my life was supposed to go with it. But I didn’t kill myself: I fell in love. I fell in love with a Filipina who looks like me.
For the first time I felt that I was beautiful.
Of course I am omitting the details of why as of now I am tenfold the misery since my tragedy began.
Along with my ideals of beauty I’ve lost the feeling of being in love. My mind, liberated from Anglo-Saxon supremacy, no longer has the sense of the “ugly” that defines the beautiful. It felt like I can make myself believe that anything is beautiful or otherwise. Beauty was no longer a divination of emotions but the will of reason.
In other words, zero libido.
Your controversial account of your immersion experience reminded me of what I have lost. I’ve been searching for that feeling — searching in vain for I no longer knew what it was.
For one moment I felt myself in your place, in where I used to be. Remembering how I hated to see people who look like me for I hated myself and they reminded me of me, reminded me of that joke na may dalawang langaw na kumakain ng tae tapos yung isa umutot tapos nagalit yung isa. Yeah, “Why look down on someone when you aren’t any better?” Because I look down on myself.
Oh yeah, that, and that your experience was very similar to the two summer camps I attended back in high school. I accepted invitations to two “Youth Camps” thinking they were Fun Summer Camping stuff. The first camp was a Born Again Retreat. I was a hostile atheist back then, and my zealous cousin tricked me into coming. I had to sing hymns from my heart and pray with my head bowed down to the floor for one week, trying not to laugh while others do the same screaming in passionate cries of worship. It was the first time I respected Christianity.
On my second camp I earned a badge of honor for having survived the week-long ordeal: I got my Official Youth For Christ ID and membership.
I was a hostile atheist.
I rarely approach anyone and tell them directly that I found them hilarious. Normally I simply laugh at hilarious things, and make fun of things that aren’t funny. But your immersion experience a-la “Paris Hilton Visits the Philippines” was fucking hilarious LOLOLOLOL!!!!! Putang ina yung hindi mo alam kung madumi sila o hindi kasi maitim sila LOLOLOLOL!!!!
~Pablo Banila
is your fan d:
OH AND I ALMOST FORGOT TO ADD
THIS LITTLE STORY:
Emman: Kuha lang ako ng Ita balls.
Me: Anong Ita balls?
Emman: Yung nakakain.
Me: … anong itsura?
Emman: Ha? E ‘di nakaplastic.
Me: Parang Kulangot ng Igorot?
Emman: Ano? Anong pinagsasabi mo? Ita balls nga e nakapakete.
Me: Yung nasa loob ng maliliit na mga bao?
Emman: BOBO!!! EATABLES HINDI ITA BALLS!
Me: … ano?
~Pablo Banila
http://www.facebook.com/people/Tracy-Isabel-Borres/733497266
