Tito Genova Valiente

A few days ago, I received an email from Doods Santos of De La Salle University. For those who know Doods or Dr. Santos (formally to many), she is a Bikol literature scholar always looking for manuscripts and compiling them under titles and rubrics. Poems about Bikol, works about Bikol and the storms, etc. The email last week simply announced that she found a poem of mine from an old compilation.

By now you must have known how a washed-up starlet in this brainless program called "Showtime" lectured on how students should curse their teachers for not teaching them right. It was a long talk and, at a certain point, she offered an advice to everyone: Wikipedia.

As the year was coming to an end, a Blue Moon was declared. The name conjures mysticism but it really is just a term given to the phenomenon when two full moons appear in one month. But names are names and the unusual always leads people to magic or business. Soon, over free national television, people were making the most of interpreting what this colored moon means.

I like to believe my good friend, Howard Tate, brother under the skies because of the great late writer, Socorro Federis Tate, believes there is Christmas. Still, I offer this column to all those who, like Howard, reads, and is conscious of the coming Christmas even as he is bothered by the dam being constructed somewhere in our province. Howard wonders " why some stinking politicians and their rah rah boys are moving heaven and earth for its completion when the Pangasinenses are cursing those people responsible for constructing SAN ROQUE DAM which brought havoc to some parts of Pangasinan a few months back. I'm not being paranoid, but I assume there's a lot of money at stake here not only for the contractor but also for some people who are recipients  of what we call SOP. As the saying goes, When money talks, people listen. Dae na bale kung magkaralamos ang mga taga Pamplona."

Last Monday I was in this school, which now bears the name "Universidad" but one that will always be for me the Colegio de Santa Isabel.

I was not expecting much that night; I was there to provide moral support to Beth, my sister-in-law and my niece, Teris, who were both playing the violin as part of the symphony orchestra of music majors, faculty and alumni.

I am in the middle of my research, which is the revisiting of Frank Lynch's universe. His field site was in Canaman, a small town where he witnessed inequality that was part of the society. The sociologists of that period talked about structured inequality. It was, however, an inequality that has a sweet component to it: a seeming acceptance of the world in that unequal world.

We plunder gardens to get flowers and we again gather around graves to light candles. We paint the crosses that mark the tombstones of our loved ones and we pinch the cheeks of the solitary angels by painting their faces as they hover over the final destiny of those who have gone ahead of us.

It is the day for and of the Dead and we who are alive are running about to remember ourselves remember them.

Does it really matter that for the Japanese typhoon is a mere strong wind? Or that our word for typhoon comes from Japanese language?

For a long time, we had been naming typhoons after women, with the sexist notion that storms were like women's mind that changed and shifted direction every now and then.  The unpredictability of the storm led policy-makers to then call storms after women's name.

Last Friday, the city woke up to a whole day of "Traslacion." The day and the week promise - or threaten - to bring about more changes to old practices. Some of these acts and gestures gathered through accretion, some by introduction from outside, and other by sheer power of local or native culture.