JayVee, here is the last one. I will excise a lot of emails henceforth, and will concentrate on University responsibilities. Keep this email though, in case you have to get to me, and I to you.
Been a pleasure!
Jaime
End of August
Our er lao po, mother two
autistic children who turned 18 and 21 this year, hits the big Six-Oh tomorrow,
but since the 31st is a Saturday,
this shall be the end of August writing for ST for me. At least, it spares us from meditating again on
the heavy emotional toll that got er lao
po with our two kids and I separated by halfway across the planet during
turbulent winds that shafted a marriage eons ago.
Karen Ann sings The End of May,
one of the songs that students invariably mention in their profile as a
song they are familiar with, or would not mind learning. Karen Ann attempts to be down-to-earth to
Close
your eyes and roll a dice
Under
the board there's a compromise
If
after all we only live twice
Which
life's the run road to Paradise.
It is still, however, a bit escapist in the “live twice” dream.
Unfortunately, the other version by Michael Bubble fares no better:
Golden haze,
another morning feels like yesterday.
End of May, a
year is gone and I still feel this way,
When we meet
again, I'll ask you how you're doing
And you'll say
fine and ask me how I'm doing
And then I'll lie
and I'll say, it's just an ordinary day.
While The End of May is
(are) my students’ song(s), we might let our hair down and pen our own song;
call it, The End of August. Nah.
That would be too corny.
We are on the final installment of our prolonged exit from this page,
and bid adieu to the sparkling waters
of Saipan (the ocean, not what trickles from aquifers) as well. We dragged luggage to Ada International two
years ago, and our shadow had not been seen since.
I shifted to the exit mode the first of August, and during the whole
month, our bidding a permanent farewell loomed big on our consciousness. Add August as our personal Autism month and
we can say that we had our mental luggage rack full lately.
But our pieces have been focused content-wise, in addition to its
contextual education intent, to earthly issues and current events. Our end of August should not be different.
We note the rape of a female photojournalist intern in Mumbai and how
it is that the patriarchal arrogance in our society, global and local, still
prevails. There might be a difference in
degree but not in kind – in Mumbai and Shanghai, Chicago and Tokyo, Lima and
Manila, and alas, even Shenyang and Pyongyang.
Defensive and condescending males
reign.
The Pentagon, bastion of entrenched machismo, reeling from cases of
sexual harassment, will now have to deal with a new issue as erstwhile Bradley
has become Chelsea Manning. She now
requires the hormone therapy in jail he was denied while active in the armed
forces. With the LGTB community finally
getting the official and legal attention it deserves, a nail on patriarchy’s supercilious
conceit (redundancy intentional) is welcomed.
This brings us to the hypocrisy revealed on how we treat Texas
Senator Ted Cruz’ Canadian citizenship.
No surprise here. Our eldest
child was born in Manila but having a U.S. citizen mother, there was no problem
registering her as a naturally born American.
Technically, she had dual citizenship.
Younger sister was born in Saskatoon, Canada, and when it was time to
get a passport that she needed to travel at 1 year old, the Philippine and US ones
cost three times more than the Canadian.
Technically of triple citizenship, she crossed the border with the maple
leaf. Our family entered the US through
Honolulu later. I was asked by INS to
appear at the Federal Building in Chicago for bringing in an unidentified alien
into the country. Her passport did not
bear any record of parentage, Papa or Mama, and we were duly accused of having
a low regard for the Federal laws of the country.
Both my daughters are American citizens, plus. Ted Cruz is, of course, an American, plus
Texan, etc. And Obama is Ethiopian! Get
it?
Our last noticing is with ChannelNewsAsia of Singapore doing
speculative reporting on the Bo Xilai trial in China. We do not mind editorializing but when it
parades as news, portrays a kangaroo court, and furthers the image of Beijing
as a bunch of scheming Fu Manchus, then something else is going on. We do know that already, Pagan’s future is a
done deal in the US strategic policy of containing China (she with a navy that
has one Russian discarded but refurbished bathtub for her lone cruise carrier!)
What we can discern is that the politics
of oil that led the CIA (finally fessed up 60 yrs. later) to banish Time
magazine’s 1952 Man-of-the-Year Mohammed Mosaddegh out of Iran has just shifted
into China’s continental shelf. Mind
you, it is all Obama-the-Ethiopian’s fault!
Our picture of our exit sans ceremony is clear. Ed Stephens of this page who we met once in
an As Lito bar settles his canvas chair on the lagoon’s shore on his regular
Thursday relax time after sending off his Friday column. I join him on my stool. He greets me with a lifted English stout, and
I respond in kind with my cerveza. In
a non-verbal toast, we nod as if to say: “It’s a good day, and I am happy to be
here.”