By your leave The late Ruth Tighe wondered if one of our readersunderstood satire and sarcasm after an article I wrote got a mean-spiritedresponse. A reader suggested that I pen a profile,on the oft chance that I might earn extra elbowroom from those who find myprose arrogantly pretentious or ignorantly obtuse. I will use the four categories of time,space, role, and story common in my narratives. I do so on the occasion of China's national week, aseven-day holiday, one of two (lunar New Year is the other) when the nationtravels to visit family. October 1 isobserved as the day Mao Zedong declared the People's Republic of China 65 yearsago. The nationalists in Taiwan'sRepublic of China commemorate the 1911 rebellion that led to the end of theQing dynasty and the establishment of the Republic of China in 1912, referredto as the Double Ten. It also honors SunYat Sen, revered on both sides of the Straits, better known as Sun Zhongshan. Now, by your leave. Time-wise,I traveled the imaginal journey of the Book. My Genesis to Apocalypse, however, shifted to the scientific journey ofa 14.3 billion year-old universe. Bornunder the Protestant Church's steeple in time for Vatican II's oikoumene, I learned to love historicalmemory 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 andPetro Poroshenko of Ukraine. Mysticscame later. I descended from the primates of Borneo, if the NYTimes isto be believed in earlier suggested cartoons when the US was deciding onwhether to bring Spain's Filipinas into the Union, but the human journey hasonly been the last 30 minutes on a 24-hr journey chart of the planet Earth andthe human brain does wonders in imagining the nature of that journey. Space-wise, I was born in agrarian Central Luzon. On a ship to the US just turned 20, I alreadytraversed the distance from Aparri to Sarangani. I had been to all political units in the US saveVermont and Puerto Rico. After theearthrise picture in '68, I became a global citizen. I've only seen the Russian Far East in Heihe acrossthe 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 itsfoothills in Sichuan. I hope to trailthe Silk Road through Urumqi west. Ialready missed Sufi dancing in Arabic Middle East and North Africa, and I haveno plans to toe ice on the Arctic or freeze on Antarctica. I disc-jockeyed in my youth, counseled juvenile delinquents inKentucky and Texas, facilitated change agents in the Piedmont, taught communitydevelopment for 30 years in all continents save Russia, and was a peripateticpedagogue, pastored sporadically (I outgrew ekklesiaMetodista, gave up Ptolemaiccosmology and theistic metaphor in Saipan), trusted the gifts of instinct,intuition, intellect and intentions, and embraced the scientific, urban, andsecular revolutions of my time. I am afather (not a good one), husband (no better), lover (dismissible), and of late,an oral English teacher in Shenyang, China. My story pulls the particulars of time-space-role into a whole. The latest incarnation not too dissimilarfrom what it was when it first emerged in 1968 on the day MLK was shot and Isurvived a car accident, goes: I am one,unique, unrepeatable gift of life into human history. There has never been one like me before, andthere will never be another one like me ever again. I have one go at being me, an intentionalglocal Zhinoy, from August 1, 1945 to December 15, 2031. To those unfamiliar to this column, Zhinoy is a contraction of the word Chinese Zhongguoren (centered people in the middle realm) and Pinoy, the world-wise street-smart Malayof the Philippine Archipelago, pejoratively referred to as Chinoy! "Glocal"is a portmanteau, one of global mind and local behavior, a word now in theOxford English Dictionary. 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 ascribedto a "wholly other" outside of ourselves, knowing for two centuriesthat statements made on the infinite are really about us. It is time for rephrasing. Let's focus on the historical self as the subject of inquiryand narrative, the one with our name in it and whose life will be completed sans the promise of paradise, or aglorious return. It requiresauthenticity about the specifics of one's life, "honesty of telling thetruth without shit", as one colleague promotes in his practice. I am at this stage of my seven-year itch of writing groundedon 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 todefine their "me" without hesitation or apology. j'aime la vie pinoypanda2031@aol.com yesterday, appreciate; tomorrow, anticipate; today. participate. In all, celebrate!