<font color='black' size='2' face='arial'><b style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: large;">By your leave</b><br>
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<div class="MsoNormal">The late Ruth Tighe wondered if one of our readers
understood <i>satire </i>and <i>sarcasm </i>after an article I wrote got a mean-spirited
response<i>. </i>A reader suggested that I pen a profile,
on the oft chance that I might earn extra elbowroom from those who find my
prose arrogantly pretentious or ignorantly obtuse. I will use the four categories of time,
space, role, and story common in my narratives.</div>
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<div class="MsoNormal">I do so on the occasion of China's national week, a
seven-day holiday, one of two (lunar New Year is the other) when the nation
travels to visit family. October 1 is
observed as the day Mao Zedong declared the People's Republic of China 65 years
ago. The nationalists in Taiwan's
Republic of China commemorate the 1911 rebellion that led to the end of the
Qing dynasty and the establishment of the Republic of China in 1912, referred
to as the Double Ten. It also honors Sun
Yat Sen, revered on both sides of the Straits, better known as <i>Sun Zhongshan.</i></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal">Now, by your leave. Time-wise,
I traveled the imaginal journey of the Book.
My Genesis to Apocalypse, however, shifted to the scientific journey of
a 14.3 billion year-old universe. Born
under the Protestant Church's steeple in time for Vatican II's <i>oikoumene, </i>I learned to love historical
memory from Abraham to Moses, the exile and Iesu, Paul of Tarsus to Augustine,
(a big hole on Muhammad), Aquinas to Kierkegaard, finally to Bultmann, Tillich,
Bonheoffer and Merkel, the Niebuhrs, Argentine Francis, demonized Putin and
Petro Poroshenko of Ukraine. Mystics
came later.</div>
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<div class="MsoNormal">I descended from the primates of Borneo, if the NYTimes is
to be believed in earlier suggested cartoons when the US was deciding on
whether to bring Spain's Filipinas into the Union, but the human journey has
only been the last 30 minutes on a 24-hr journey chart of the planet Earth and
the human brain does wonders in imagining the nature of that journey.</div>
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<div class="MsoNormal">Space-wise, I was born in agrarian Central Luzon. On a ship to the US just turned 20, I already
traversed the distance from Aparri to Sarangani. I had been to all political units in the US save
Vermont and Puerto Rico. After the
earthrise picture in '68, I became a global citizen. I've only seen the Russian Far East in Heihe across
the Amur in Manchuria's Heilongjiang, Manzhouli in Inner Mongolia's grasslands,
and Mohe at China's northernmost point.
I have yet to trek the Himalayas though I've tramped a bit in its
foothills in Sichuan. I hope to trail
the Silk Road through Urumqi west. I
already missed Sufi dancing in Arabic Middle East and North Africa, and I have
no plans to toe ice on the Arctic or freeze on Antarctica.</div>
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<div class="MsoNormal">I disc-jockeyed in my youth, counseled juvenile delinquents in
Kentucky and Texas, facilitated change agents in the Piedmont, taught community
development for 30 years in all continents save Russia, and was a peripatetic
pedagogue, pastored sporadically (I outgrew <i>ekklesia
</i>Metodista<i>,</i> gave up Ptolemaic
cosmology and theistic metaphor in Saipan), trusted the gifts of instinct,
intuition, intellect and intentions, and embraced the scientific, urban, and
secular revolutions of my time. I am a
father (not a good one), husband (no better), lover (dismissible), and of late,
an oral English teacher in Shenyang, China.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal"> </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">My story pulls the particulars of time-space-role into a whole. The latest incarnation not too dissimilar
from what it was when it first emerged in 1968 on the day MLK was shot and I
survived a car accident, goes: <i>I am one,
unique, unrepeatable gift of life into human history. There has never been one like me before, and
there will never be another one like me ever again. I have one go at being me, an intentional
glocal Zhinoy, from August 1, 1945 to December 15, 2031. </i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal"><i> </i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">To those unfamiliar to this column, <i>Zhinoy </i>is a contraction of the word Chinese <i>Zhongguoren </i>(centered people in the middle realm) and <i>Pinoy, </i>the world-wise street-smart Malay
of the Philippine Archipelago, pejoratively referred to as <i>Chinoy!</i> "Glocal"
is a portmanteau, one of global mind and local behavior, a word now in the
Oxford English Dictionary.</div>
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<div class="MsoNormal">My journey so far has been given to efforts on creating
"pig pictures" of sweeping eras and epochs used locally. Friends bridge distant transcendent mystery ascribed
to a "wholly other" outside of ourselves, knowing for two centuries
that statements made on the infinite are really about us. It is time for rephrasing.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal"> </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">Let's focus on the historical self as the subject of inquiry
and narrative, the one with our name in it and whose life will be completed <i>sans</i> the promise of paradise, or a
glorious return. It requires
authenticity about the specifics of one's life, "honesty of telling the
truth without shit", as one colleague promotes in his practice. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal"> </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">I am at this stage of my seven-year itch of writing grounded
on this historically finite "me".
The west's myth of original sin is not very trusting of native selfhood. I trust this musing will push readers to
define their "me" without hesitation or apology.</div>
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<br>
<div style="clear:both"><i>j'aime la vie</i><br>
<a href="mailto:pinoypanda2031@aol.com">pinoypanda2031@aol.com</a><br>
<div><i>yesterday, appreciate; tomorrow, anticipate; today. participate. In all, celebrate!</i></div>
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