By fightinfilipino
i am a Herreria. i am stoic. i prefer actions over words.
i am empathic. i am at times maudlin. but at the end of the day my emotions are for those i care about most.
i am impatient. hoo boy i’m impatient. and at the same time, i think a hell of a lot before i act. it’s a bit of a strange dichotomy.
i like to sing-a! about the moon-a and the June-a and the Spring-a. i love to sing-a! about a sky of blue-a or a tea for two-a, anything-a with a swing-a to an I love you-a!
i’m gregarious with alcohol. too bad i don’t have an alcohol gland. seriously, what’s up with that?
i like animals. i have a soft spot for canines and felines in particular. i’m also a fan of raptors. (no, not the dinosaurs, those guys suck)
i like basketball, just like all the other Herreria guys in my family. we just disagree on which coast is the best coast :3
i want to help my family. and when i have kids my life is going to be dedicated to them. that’s pretty common in my whole family too.
i like brains, but i definitely appreciate the need to have and use brawn when necessary.
i want to explore, try out different lives. seems like the guys in my family have done the same: doormen in San Francisco, computer programmers in LA, waiters in Seattle, merchant marines in many port cities, liquor store workers, doctors, real estate agents, surfers, community organizers, politicians…we seem to like wearing a plethora of hats.
what underlies all of this? Herrerias are kind and loving. we can’t do wrong by people, because its in our blood. we have to do right by people, because we cannot be any other way. there’s a strength of honor and of sympathy for our fellow human beings.
and if this sounds like unnecessary boasting or lack of hubris, yeah, well, Herrerias are kind of like that, too 
By fightinfilipino
there’s a lot to be thankful for, i know.
plus, i really should follow my own advice: don’t look back in anger. i’m also gonna follow my friend Makini’s advice: cheer up emo boy
By fightinfilipino
i realized over this weekend that i’ve been angry. not really angry at anyone in particular. maybe angry at myself for moping about for a week and not doing anything about it. or really, not doing anything about it for these last two months.
damn. has it been that long?
we law students are now standing on the precipice. below is the gaping maw of final exams, filled with rows upon rows of diamond-sharp teeth, each begging and yearning to slice and dice 1Ls. i will survive it; of that i don’t have any doubt. but how i’ll come through, how everyone will come through, is a whole different matter entirely. the logical side of my brain knows that there’s still two and a half years yet to go. but to my emotional side, it feels already like the final year, when everyone comes out of the trials alive but cut and shaped and honed, the very things that make people who i know them to be excised away. it already means the drifting apart of the friends whom i’ve come to know (and care for) to find their own paths.
i thought i had gotten over this feeling when i left Brown. i wasn’t fully prepared for it when classes finally finished, when exams and papers were finally done. back then, the same logical part of my brain screamed out to me that that was it, that college phase of life was done, that all of us were going our own ways. but my emotional side never really let go, never left that place until maybe a year after i had been working in Boston and forging new friendships. and even then, i was still close to Providence. the hour-long drive from Boston to Providence, that brief trek through the unremarkable “backwater” of both Massachusetts and Rhode Island, was an insignificant distance; even less significant was the distance between me and my classmates who simply migrated northward to Boston at the same time. it was safe. warm. comforting.
leaving that comfort was something i knew i needed to do. it was like ripping a particularly intractable band-aid off a sensitive wound. to grow and to learn, to find my own way, meant straining and sometimes tearing the ties i had weaved in place. but in setting my roots here, in creating ties with people i started to care about, i had forgotten about the kind of pain that comes with ripping those same ties to shreds when the time comes to move on. and now we’re at that time.
i’m angry with myself for having forgotten this. i am a nomad by nature. part of being a nomad is never allowing yourself to get too attached to places or people, because once you do, you are unable to live as a nomad again, preferring the safety and comfort of the home you have built…of the people you’ve come to care for. law school is not supposed to be my home. maybe it’s just that i haven’t had much time here yet. but the changes coming of the next semester will alter the ground upon which i stand. relationships will change; people will grow distant. these are things i know are inevitable, merely from having seen and lived it so many times.
i should have known this was coming. i should have not reveled in or enjoyed the comfort of these last months. and i am damned angry that i have been so complacent. all i can do now is focus that anger on my finals.
By fightinfilipino
it’s hard being a transplant. sometimes i wonder if i should have stayed on the East Coast, cold weather be damned.
By fightinfilipino
the fine folks at Newsweek seem to believe that Obama’s election is going to spark a baby boom. truly Obama is our country’s next saviour (note the grauitous usage of the British “u”).
i’m starting to think that this was part of Obama’s plan all along. during the campaign and in his election acceptance speech, Obama recognized that this election wasn’t his alone, or was even his to begin with. the election really belonged to the American people (as it rightly should). and in this recognition, Obama called all Americans to help serve, do their part, contribute to democracy. sure, you’d think at first that Obama meant he wanted to see Americans of all walks of life to get involved in their communities again, to shed the parochialism championed by Bush’s GOP. it’s a reasonable assumption; from the time he wrote Dreams from My Father, Obama has valued democratic participation of American citizens. this is a philosophy completely distinct from the specter of the socialist interventionist government with which the McCain campaign tried to scare voters.
from his writings and his policies, Obama clearly values the kind of government that doesn’t belong to the government, but to the voters. it is an idea completely American, and i really think no other country has come close to articulating it as the U.S. has, even with many of the U.S.’s flaws. however, to enable citizens to vote, to have the skills and knowledge needed to take part in the shaping and nurturing of their communities, you need strong support and open access for education (and i mean a complete education, including sciences, social sciences, the arts, music, history, and global topics). you also need to help Americans have a strong foundation on which they can stand: things like more open healthcare and home ownership help. i don’t think that these should be given for free; like Habitat for Humanity’s philosophy on helping poor folks own their own homes, we should help people gain access to health care, homes, and other basic necessities, but each person needs to put in “sweat equity” too. fortunately, Obama’s general policies seem to favor all of these things.
but we’re really here to talk about another kind of “sweat equity”, aren’t we?
do i make you randy baby? do i?
yes, that’s Obama in a cowboy hat. why this did not win him Texas will confound historians for centuries to come. but, hell, i’m a straight man and i can honestly say that that’s hottt. now imagine election night, when the election results came in around 11pm EST. right there you have prime party starting time. i’m sure you’ve already seen the numerous articles and TV news reports about the raucous celebrations that broke out all over the country once Obama secured those 270 EVs. people were dancing in the streets, in bars and clubs, at house parties, and even in front of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. men and women alike all had Obama in a cowboy hat on their brains, not to mention the Change and Hope flowing through their veins and from numerous bottles of fermented beverages. if those aren’t aphrodisiac conditions, i don’t know what else would be.
we know that Obama’s campaign has probably been one of the most disciplined, carefully orchestrated political efforts our nation has seen in a while. Obama had the community organizing ground game down to a science. every action the campaign took was one of, yes, calculation. Obama is after all a politician; he has been and continues to be able to accurately read the ley lines of American opinion and feeling. so it’s not a far of a stretch to say that during the last year and a half, Obama’s campaign also “seeded” America for an Obama Baby Boom. and why not? baby booms have historically strengthened the economy, driving retail sales, tax revenues, and a whole host of other things that help the GDP. right now the US could use a monetary boost, and an Obama administration would be able to reap the benefits and the accolades for presiding over a recovery.
what i’m saying is that Obama had another kind of stimulus package in mind this whole time. and i’m certain that Obama’s plan is to keep up American optimism, give young Americans regular shots of Change and Hope and Yes We Can every once in a while, to create the kind of optimistic environment where people will, quite frankly, get it on. if this helps America regain that optimism and can-do spirit we seemed to have lost in the last eight years, i’m all for it
By fightinfilipino
one of my favorite works ever crafted is the Divine Comedy. you might have heard of it. the Comedy is a an epic poem written at a time when, for many people, the concepts of heaven and earth were drowned out by the upheaval caused by the Great Famine. Dante arguably wrote the Divine Comedy at the “best” possible time, too; the 14th century later saw the coming of the Black Plague and the schism of the Roman Catholic Church, events that could and did shake the faith of so many people.
perhaps this turmoil is why Dante felt it important to explore what it truly meant to be good or evil, and what this meant with regard to the afterlife. certainly the world was left for the better with the creation of the Divine Comedy; Dante’s description of the circles of hell and the spheres of heaven left an indelible imprint. peoples all over the world, regardless of creed or nationality or ethnic background, came to conceptualize the construction of heaven and hell, as well as the interstitial spaces of purgatory, through the lens of Dante’s trek through the levels of heaven, purgatory, and hell.
Dante’s idea of the levels of heaven and hell is incredibly compelling to me; i was raised Catholic, went to a Catholic school, went to church regularly as a youngin’. while i now have many disagreements with organized religion generally and am bothered by many of the social positions Christian churches can take, i still truly believe the idea that your acts and deeds in life translate directly to the varying levels of good or evil reflected by Dante’s circles of hell and spheres of heaven.
there’s something else though that i’ve drawn from the Divine Comedy, something that Dante did not explore well enough, i think, when he committed his pen to the parchment. in his schema, Dante never fully discusses the nature of Earth, our home. he certainly explores where Earth falls in relation to the glory of the heavens and the horrors of the burning hells. but Dante did not address the living, the human beings existing on Earth.
i believe Earth is our last heaven. Earth is the missing piece from Dante’s formulation of heaven, purgatory, and hell. Dante describes nine spheres of heaven in the Comedy, assigning a level of goodness to each sphere. if this is the case, if each sphere represents the good of the denizens of each sphere, then our planet is the the tenth sphere, the final place where we human beings struggle with the basic question of what it means to be “good”. i like to think that we interface with heaven (as well as hell) on a daily basis; each human being encounters moral and ethical decisions regularly and must decide among the “good” and “evil” with which he or she is presented. wherever we go after life, whether it be one of the circles of hell or one of the courts of heaven or something else we have yet to even imagine, our acts and conduct while living on Earth determine which place to where we all shall eventually go.
our planet is the borderland, the “last heaven” between the spheres of heaven and the circles of hell. i don’t claim at all to know or even believe in a specific idea of the afterlife, but what i do know is that while we’re all here, living on these borderlands, we must strive to do good, to do unto others as others would do unto you and me. translated to 21st century internet english, the rule really is “don’t be a dick”. wherever i end up after the adventure of law school, i can only hope to remember the fact that we live on these borderlands. like i said, i personally don’t know right now if there is a heaven or a hell. but ultimately this doesn’t matter; it is the good that we do with our time here that should be our focus.
By fightinfilipino
that's a lot of beers.
courtesy of awesome webcomic Married to the Sea.
By fightinfilipino
there, i said it. that’s a huge load off my shoulders.
and why shouldn’t i be? my car is a mystical silvery box of metal, resting atop four (count ‘em, FOUR!) circlets of velvety rubber, that automagically sweeps me away from my home to places far far away. and like any good boyfriend, i’m attentive to my car’s needs; when she’s grumpy and needs some comforting, i’ll listen to her and try to figure out what’s causing the knocking and clanging. when she’s hungry i’ll take her out for a pricy petrol dinner. even when her gears are a bit tense i’ll give her a Lube-Oil-Filter change.
yes, that was a badly-contrived metaphor for massage.
i’m not alone here. some people (like myself) show their love by naming their car. my car’s name is “Bebot”; it means “babe” in Tagalog, and was recently made famous by apl.de.ap of the Black Eyed Peas (the word, not my car). naturally, naming your car also imparts to it a personality. my car is a slick, speedy, and horribly generic 2003 Honda Civic. but she’s fast, runs hot, and handles curves like smooth butter, just like a bebot. she also happens to produce noxious emissions, just like a filipina woman produces very unhealthy food, but we won’t get into that.
a Honda Civic in its natural environment. note the totally sweet curves and the prominent Junk in the Trunk
i know a lot of people ridicule folks who lavish trinkets and baubles on their cars. while i’m riding along with Bebot, i’ll see other car owners in their driveways, polishing a Beemer decked out with spinning rims, silver trim, a spoiler, maybe even some racing trim (which, when you think about it, doesn’t make sense on a BMW). the car, accoutrements and all, probably costs five times the single-decker three room shack directly next to the driveway. one might ask, why dump all your resources into a car when you can’t even afford a can of Spam and the plastic forks you’d need to eat with? but we true car lovers understand: we couldn’t live without our cars. they’re our better halves. who cares about where we live when we spend at most two to three hours of our waking lives in them. where is the rest of our time going? that’s right, our cars. i like to think i spend around, oh, twelve or so hours a day with Bebot. that’s a relationship right there.
things aren’t always so smooth between me and Bebot. like most girlfriends, Bebot can be a little inscrutable at times. she can be angry with me and refuse to start. or she can sometimes not steer the way she normally does. our fights usually end up with me not going to the car wash for a while and letting her collect a lot of the infamous San Diego Dust Layer. often it feels like i need a manual or something to figure her out. but in the end, i always come back to her and make up, because let’s face it, i couldn’t keep going without her.
sometimes my eyes do stray a bit, i’ll admit. i’ve been checking out those fine Acuras passing by on the street. sometimes i’ll even think that i’ll try to get with an Acura RL for her high-end deluxury. but in the end i know i’ll stick by my girl through thick and thin. she’s got a few scratches here and there, a huge dent in the rear bumper. but that to me makes her special and beautiful. Californians might frown on Car Marriage, but in my mind the relationship’s already sealed.
so Bebot, i hope you know how much i care for you. please keep running the roads with me for a long long time <3
By fightinfilipino
i’ve got an idea on what to write for my next post, but it’s gonna be a bit long. so in the meanwhile, i’ll treat you with this fine piece of art:
Classy
as a side note, i truly believe that this was the first US election where the internet played a significant role.
yes, even among the dumb image macro constituency :3
By fightinfilipino
“wine and cheese…its”
addendum:
