a lot of things i realized tonight

it's not just the mere discussion and appreciation of the literary pieces but how it transcend and reflect on different cultures, philosophies, and forms and systems of human life. primarily, it is where literature springs itself. literature is the manifestation of an answer, of a daily philosophy that is hidden within intricately and scrupulously woven words. and in deciphering  its beautiful riddles and conundrums that we disclose the meaning of the literary piece and of life itself. it is by digging deep the depth of its semiotics that we realize the shallowness and profoundness of life and the system we are living.

tonight i enjoyed and indulged myself to another literary piece and that was of Gibran's The prophet. i knew from the begging that my report wouldn't just be a sole reporting and dishing out of facts and meanings of the poem. nevertheless, it would be a discussion or a conversation and a debate of different perspectives and opinions from people in various walks of life. it would be an exchange of rebuttals and propositions within the group. verily, i was delighted and even excited with the thought that i would be listening and conversing with people who really makes sense, who can really defend their stands. it would be an attempt to intertwine the bizarre and the absurd, the fiction and the fact. it would be a transcendence of different knowledge and experiences in which our philosophies and idealism sprung. 

***

a classmate spoke to me earlier this evening that my classmates in a certain subject is making fun of the way i speak, i don't know if it's my accent or my grammar though i know it's correct, or is it my diction. nevertheless, this classmate of mine said that my classmates are secretly chuckling every time i speak up or discuss things in front. she said that she's deeply concerned with me and that's why she took the initiatives to inform of my current status in class. i don't know if she's profound of the word "concern" cause visibly it didn't even show a hint. but what my concern is not my stratum in class but the shallowness and stupidity of my classmates thoughts including that of the "concerned" classmate. 

first, i would like to say that i can speak in different accents. i have a smooth grammar and i trust my diction. i even try to appropriate my terms into the level of there understanding. i even spend most of my saliva in interpreting the point in the simplest way i can, in the simplest way their brain can comprehend.

second, it's not my problem anymore if you guys are too dumb or too influenced with your notions that you're dumb. believe me when i say that there are no such people as stupid or dumb when they are willing to learn. i can say that a person is a fool if he says no to knowledge and fears new learning. 

there is this one instance when this "concern" classmate reprimanded me for speaking in English because her opinion was that why would i use the language if most of my classmates can't understand it. i was seriously taken aback with what she said. i mean, isn't it alarming?? these are graduating students yet they don't know basic english! how did they survived college and all of their other English medium classes if they are having hard time comprehending the book... which are mostly written in  English! 

so i made a side comment about it and said: "guys, did you heard what she just said? well, she thinks you're dumb because you can't understand my simple English. how pathetic."  

oh please, prove her wrong! because i don't think you are.

third, i believe that i don't have to conform myself with the system our class is in. i don't even have to attach myself to you though friendly acquaintances will be entertained. but to subside myself in such a level will do me no good and to you as well.  how will you learn if you will confine yourself on the little learning  you attain now. how will you know wisdom and knowledge if you'll keep on mocking others and not see yourself as someone who could be greater and better as a person. this could only be achieve through profound willingness to learn. 

please don't stop with the current notion and grow and prune to be someone greater. please don't be stocked in the mediocrity of life...to laugh at others because you don't know what she's talking about.

The Prophet

Gibran in 1897. Told he was a mystic—“a young prophet”—he began to see himself that way. Photograph by Fred Holland Day.

Shakespeare, we are told, is the best-selling poet of all time. Second is Lao-tzu. Third is Kahlil Gibran, who owes his place on that list to one book, “The Prophet,” a collection of twenty-six prose poems, delivered as sermons by a fictional wise man in a faraway time and place. Since its publication, in 1923, “The Prophet” has sold more than nine million copies in its American edition alone. There are public schools named for Gibran in Brooklyn and Yonkers. “The Prophet” has been recited at countless weddings and funerals. It is quoted in books and articles on training art teachers, determining criminal responsibility, and enduring ectopic pregnancy, sleep disorders, and the news that your son is gay. Its words turn up in advertisements for marriage counsellors, chiropractors, learning-disabilities specialists, and face cream.

“The Prophet” started fast—it sold out its first printing in a month—and then it got faster, until, in the nineteen-sixties, its sales sometimes reached five thousand copies a week. It was the Bible of that decade. But the book’s popularity should not be laid entirely at the door of the hippies. “The Prophet” was a hit long before the sixties (it made good money even during the Depression), and sales after that decade have never been less than healthy—a record all the more impressive in that it is due almost entirely to word of mouth. Apart from a brief effort during the twenties, “The Prophet” has never been advertised. Presumably in honor of this commercial feat, Everyman’s Library has now brought out “Kahlil Gibran: The Collected Works” ($27.50), with a pretty red binding and a gold ribbon for a bookmark. While most people know Gibran only as the author of “The Prophet,” he wrote seventeen books, nine in Arabic and eight in English. The Everyman’s volume contains twelve of them.
The critics will no doubt greet it with the same indifference they have shown Gibran ever since his death, in 1931. Even his publisher, Alfred A. Knopf, brushed him off. When Knopf was asked, in 1965, who the audience for “The Prophet” was, he replied that he had no idea. “It must be a cult,” he said—an ungrateful response from the man to whom “The Prophet” had been a cash cow for more than forty years. In 1974, a cousin of the poet’s, also named Kahlil Gibran, and his wife, Jean, published a good biography, “Kahlil Gibran: His Life and World.” Then, in 1998, came the more searching “Prophet: The Life and Times of Kahlil Gibran,” by Robin Waterfield, a translator of ancient Greek literature. But until the first of those books appeared—that is, for forty-three years after Gibran’s death—there was no proper biography of this hugely influential author. Both Waterfield and the Gibrans complain about the literati’s lack of respect for their subject—Waterfield blames it on snobbery, “hard-hearted cynicism”—but the facts they dug up were not such as to improve his reputation.

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Part of the reason there were no real biographies is that little was known about Gibran’s life, and the reason for that is that he didn’t want it known. One point that seems firm is that he was born in Lebanon, in a village called Bsharri, in 1883. At that time, Lebanon was part of Syria, which in turn was part of the Ottoman Empire. Gibran, by his account, was a brooding, soulful child. From his earliest years, he said, he drew constantly—painting was his first art and, for a long time, as important to him as writing—and he communed with nature. When a storm came, he would rip off his clothes and run out into the torrent in ecstasy. His mother, Kamileh, got others to leave her strange boy alone. “Sometimes,” Gibran later recalled, “she would smile at someone who came in . . . and lay her finger on her lip and say, ‘Hush. He’s not here.’ ”
Gibran’s father was not a good provider. He owned a walnut grove, but he didn’t like working it. He preferred drinking and gambling. He eventually got a job as a tax collector, but then he was arrested for embezzlement. Poor before, the family now became destitute. In 1895, Kamileh packed up her four children—Bhutros, Kahlil (then twelve), Marianna, and Sultana—and sailed to America. They settled in Boston, in the South End, a squalid ghetto filled with immigrants from various countries. (Today, it is Boston’s Chinatown.) Kamileh, like many other Syrian immigrants, became a pack peddler; that is, she went door to door, selling lace and linens out of a basket she carried on her back. Within a year, she had put aside enough money to set Bhutros up in a drygoods store. The two girls were sent out to work as seamstresses; neither ever learned to read or write. Kahlil alone was excused from putting food on the table. He went to school, for the first time.

He also enrolled in an art class at a nearby settlement house, and through his teacher he was sent to a man named Fred Holland Day. In European art, this was the period of the Decadents. Theosophy, espoused by Madame Blavatsky, became a craze. People went to séances, dabbled in drugs, and scorned the ugly-hearted West in favor of the more spiritual East. Above all, they made a religion of art. Day, thirty-two years old and financially independent, was a leader of the Boston outpost of this movement. He wore a turban, smoked a hookah, and read by candlelight. He did serious work, however. He and his friends founded two arts magazines, and he was a partner in a publishing house that produced exquisite books. By the eighteen-nineties, though, Day’s main interest was photography. He particularly liked to photograph beautiful young boys of “exotic” origin, sometimes nude, sometimes in their native costumes, and he often recruited them from the streets of the South End. When the thirteen-year-old Gibran turned up at Day’s door, in 1896, he became one of the models. Day was especially taken with Gibran. He made him his pupil and assistant, and he introduced him to the literature of the nineteenth century, the Romantic poets and their Symbolist inheritors. Robin Waterfield, in his biography, says that this syllabus, with its emphasis on suffering, prophecy, and the religion of love, was the rock on which Gibran built his later style. According to Waterfield, Day also gave Gibran his “pretensions.” Imagine what it was like for a child from the ghetto to walk into this world of comfort and beauty, a world, furthermore, where a person could make a life of art. Fortuitously, Gibran already fitted into Day’s milieu in a small way: he was “Oriental.” Day made a fuss over Gibran’s origins, treated him, Waterfield says, like a “Middle Eastern princeling.” Gibran looked the part. He was very handsome, and also reticent. A later mentor declared him a mystic, “a young prophet.” (This was before he had published anything professionally.) And so he began to see himself that way.

Read more http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2008/01/07/080107crbo_books_acocella#ixzz1ETbuYLzz

ako, ako, at ako pa!

 pa cute.

 normal!

 suspicious.

 pout!

Sleeping.

something for he♥rt's day

How to survive valentine's day without being and feeling pathetic?

a. hang out with friends who has the same status with you. 

b. read books and lots of them. i recommend mystery, intellectual and suspense thrillers. 

c. solve difficult math problems.

d. decipher codes, figure out riddles.

e. go outside and observe people. make sure you're several meters away from them, just right distance for viewing.  and then you could start making up stories in your head about the different scenarios happening. it could be a comic dialogue between sweet couples or about groups of people.

 this is best done with a company so that you won't look stupid jerking and laughing alone. or better yet buy Piattos.
f. lecture on safe sex and make people aware of the different sexually transmitted diseases.

e. make a table showing the statistics of people getting pregnant, acquiring HIVs and STDs, taking suicide, and breaking up during V-days.

g. make a table showing the rapid increase on capitalists revenues during V-days. besides, they were greatly affected by the season. i even believe that they are the ones who invented V-day. nyayks!

h. recluse yourself at home. don't go out unless if it's for calls of nature. 

i. make a list on how to survive valentine's day without being and feeling pathetic.

j. Sleep the whole day.

k. clean your house.

l. just forget V-days ever existed.

and a lot more!!! singles, don't feel so down during valentine's day cause there's a lot of people out there who were wishing to be on your shoes. valentine's are not just for two people who are sexually and emotionally and physically attracted with each other. but also for people, singles like us who also wants to mingle and to be mingled with. it's not because it's V-day then you should withdraw yourself. go out there and have fun!

however, if you're as apathetic as me. who just wants to spend the day at the library or bookstores then care less what others think. if they're thinking that you should be more sociable today just ignore them and go on with your usual pace. you can always choose not to go along with their celebrations of mediocrity. why would you heed them anyway. they're not the ones feeding you. right?

it's just how you perceive Valentine's day, some sees it romantic and others plain. just happens that i see it plain this time, for no definite reason actually. i spent the day reading books and sleeping. (oh include this one.)

WOWA, WOWA at APO!

springer of warmth

 cold is the dawn's breeze

nestle us back to our nests

warm and life giving deities

still lying upon their mother's breasts

curling my toes behind the waves

 clad myself from the cool

your breathe hampers my haste

slumber me back to my wool

but your softness slides beneath

and over the glass shutters

forming myself to a wreath

and cursing you with my mutters.

but you're persistent, undaunted

find your way through my cheek

tracing tiny kisses upon it,

 playful and tickling prick.

 

"greetings of peace and fidelity,

to whom this may concern."

apologies for the introduction, i simply don't know what to say first in a birthday letter specially if it's a crucial one-- for a best friend. give you a better intro next time. hehe. but just to sort of connect the first lines to where i'm typing now.... i would like to greet you with PEACE, world-peace? no. green peace? corny.

but Peace of Mind for you to decipher the few intricacies of life, for you to judge well and weigh things with sincerity of conscience, to decide with wisdom not shrewdness. 

Peace of Heart that in every pulse of it, beats for the people you profoundly love, beats to the dreams you passionately build, beats to the place you truly want to be.

Peace of Soul, i don't mean the R.I.P.. peace your soul by constantly praying to God and trusting Him. peace your soul by surrendering yourself to His will, for it is the best  if it's Him, if it's His guidance that you take heed of your plans.

i greet you with FIDELITY, trust my devotion and faithfulness to our friendship that in every struggle we try to surpass, our presence our love will be undaunted and untarnished.

i love you kyle, seriously. everyday is a new day to love you and to discover another lovable about you. maybe i hadn't mention this everyday but i adore you apow . as they say, actions speaks louder than words. so don't  find it obscene every time i try to move your wig from your head. i'm just being sweet. if it's just me who call that sweet. i know you'll be spending more years with your hair allegedly attached to your scalp. hehehe. (it's protruding out. )

 stay cute and impish. not the despicable-gnome-like-cute but kinda like that in many ways. (joke.) Mygawd i wanna pinch you kid!!! and another don't think yourself fat cause you're not. CHUBBY is north-to-south different from fat. just stay healthy, cause you're AMAZING just the way you are, in whatever sizes you are and will be. :)

happy is the day that you were born, happy are we who are blessed by your birth, happier are the years to come.

yours love,

WOWA

 

nefarious

speech for filipino

    ika nga ng mga kabataan ngayon: "ang taong di lumingon sa pinanggalingan ay may stiff neck." nakakatawa man ngunit kung pagkakasuriin ay totoo at may naaayon na kabuluhan. paano mo naman lilingunin ang iyong pinanggalingan, ang iyong sariling kultura at paniniwala at ang iyong pambansang sining kung di mo na maigalaw ang iyong leeg sa sobrang pagtanaw at pagkahilig sa kultura ng ibang bansa? o di ba? parang stiff neck lang. pag di ka lumingon, pag di mo ginalaw ay mas lalo kang mahihirapang ibalik at ilingon ito sa iyong pinagmulan.
ngunit kung tutuusin lahat naman ng karamdaman ay may kaukulang gamot, kahit ng simpleng stiff neck ay mareremedyohan kung ito ay gugustuhin. paano mo naman kasi maibabalik kung ikaw mismo ay tinatanggihan ang remedyo?
   sa kuntemporaryong panahon hindi maitatanggi ang sobrang halatang pagkahilig at pagyakap ng mga pinoy sa kanluraning kultura o ilagay na lamang nating sa kultura ng iba. mapa-koryano, ingles, amerikano ay pilit nating ginagaya. may iba pa ngang sadyang nagpapaputi kahit kayumanggi naman, may naglalagagy ng mga makukulay na "contact lens" para masabing ka kulay nito ang mga iniidulo nilang artista. ngunit ito ba tayo? ikaw ba ay ikaw pa rin? o tuluyan mo nang iniba ang kulay ng iyong pagkatao para magkaroon ng "green card".
  kung ang layunin ko sa pagharap sa inyo, sa pagsasalita ko dito sa entablado ay upang kumbinsihin kayo na tangkilikin ang sariling atin ay di ko alam kung san sisimulan. kung ang iniisip niyo ngayon ay ang kapangitan at kasiraan ng ating bansa, ang mga katiwaliiang umaanino sa kinang ng perlas ng silangan ay ito ang pilit kong hahawiin upang lubos na maintindihan at mahalin natin ang tila tinataya nang pinagmulan.
   simulan natin sa mga taong nagbigay ng karangalan sa ating bansa. mga pilipinong buong dangal na ibinahagi at inilahok ang kagalingan upang maging kinatawan ng ating bansa. perpektong halimbawa sina Maria Venus Raj na naging isa sa mga finalist ng Miss universe 2010 at Danica Magpantay na tinanghal bilang supermodel of the world ng Ford. kung tutuusin kayumanggi ang kulay na pinanglaban nila sa mga nagpuputiang kano. buong pagmamalaki nilang nirampa ang pamanang kulay ng balat ng ating mga ninuno. tunay ngang magaganda at matatalino ang mga pilipino.
  sa sining naman, di maitatanggi ang kagalingan ng mga pilipino sa paggawa ng mga disenyo ng damit, bag, kasangkapan at iba pa na tampok ang mga kultural at katutubong disenyo na gawang pinoy. mga disenyong sumikat di lamang sa pilipinas ngunit maging sa ibang bansa. ito ay marahil sa orihinal na konseptong pinoy na kitang-kita sa pagkakagawa o pagkakahabi ng mga ito. isang pagpapatunay na hindi nating kailangang manggaya para maging kilala sa iba't ibang larangan.
  ang mga likas na yaman ng ating bansa ang isa din sa mga pamanang lubos nating maipagmamalaki. mga tanawing natural at talagang world class. sana nga lang ay hindi ito pagsamantalahan ng mga kurakot ng lipunan o mga dayuhan.
   kung ating susumahin maraming mga bagay ang tunay nating maipagmamalaki bilang mga pilipino. kaya bakit pa ba tayo maghahanap ng iba kung meron naman tayong sariling atin. kaya hamon ko sa bawat pilipino na remedyohan natin ang ating mga stiff neck at tuluyan nang lumingon sa ating ginintuang pinanggalingan.