these are the kinds of stories i want to write.
i started writing something about the GMA RESIGN things, the floods in leyte and samar that have left over 307,000 people displaced, and the estimated 3,000 people in calamba, laguna who suddenly succumbed to a mysterious typhoid epidemic. but my laptop froze and i ended up losing everything i'd already typed.
so i'm just going straight to the point.
i wanted to be a journalist not just because i wanted to polish my writing, but also because i wanted to learn more about life and people. while i was studying for this in university, it dawned on me that i wasn't ready for a life of hardcore reporting, and i probably never will be. i was being trained to devote my negligible writing talent to a public service... and while i may sound a little less than capitalist at times, public service is simply not my calling.
but now and then, when i monitor the news, i come across stories like this and envy and remorse eat away at me. i wish i could have been there, covering this issue. i wish i could have talked to this guy. stories like these are inspiring and definitely good fiction fodder. i mean, just look at this:
Franco Tito, a former hired gun who is the senior elected official in this village named after a woodland fairy, awards honour students with gold medals and packs a .45-calibre gun, a stark reminder of the region's violent past.
He worries about the stream that bisects the community of some 40,000 people -- it is choked with plastic, garbage and the milky-coloured detritus of the area's preferred antiquated mining process.
The tailings -- residue from the process of separating the gold from the ore -- run into the Naboc stream and eventually poison the Agusan, one of the country's largest river basins.
"There were four major problems when I arrived here -- law and order, legality, taxation and siltation. I have solved the first three, and now I want to solve the fourth," he told AFP.
[..]
Fortune hunters flooded in after September 1983, when a Mandaya tribal elder first panned the yellow metal on the Naboc river. They promptly bastardised the hamlet's name to "diwalwal," slang that refers to exhaustion after hard work boring holes through rock on the mountainside.
Tito, who still moves around with armed bodyguards, does not dispute rumours that he has killed at least 40 men, saying: "We were all illegals, so none of the killings were reported to the authorities."
There were few winners in the land grab that followed the discovery of gold here, and most of them are now firmly entrenched in local politics.
"In the old days this was the wild wild west," Tito said, recounting his transformation from army misfit, neighbourhood tough, bodyguard and mineshaft guard, to a key stakeholder, thwarting three assassination attempts along the way.
"All sorts of undesirables were drawn here -- discharged soldiers and police, hoods, holdup men, kidnappers, rapists, ex-convicts, fugitives, people who welshed on their debts," he said.
The national government was largely absent in the early days, and it was cut out of the spoils since by law small-scale miners need only pay income tax.
Instead miners forked out a "revolutionary tax," essentially extortion money extracted by the self-styled New People's Army to fund its deadly decades-old Maoist insurgency.
we're looking at a hired gun who somehow became an elected official of an extremely (understatement of the year) beleaguered province. he's cleaning up the place with an iron hand, literally and figuratively. you can tell that he's not a good person. but he's gotten a lot of things done (according to him) and one wonders if there's really any hope for such a forsaken place.
i would have access to stories like this if i had media clearance. i'm more interested in the grit, preserving the remnants of the area's violent and colorful history - but if by chance i could write something that could change the way things are, it would be - in a word: fantastic.
...and then i think about the many raped children and women gone insane from physical and emotional abuse, their abusers, the obnoxious scion of a wealthy family whose benz got totaled and is vehemently blaming the other guy, squatter shanty demolitions, tedious and delicate paper trails leading to one anomaly after another - all of which i will also have to cover if i had a real reporting job. i'll be the first to admit that i don't have the emotional strength for a job like that.
it just led me to ask myself, and i think i'd like to ask everyone else as well: what are you going to do with the talent you were given? what if, god forbid, you suffer a massive stroke in your sleep and when you wake up all you can move is your left eyelid? will you start thinking about the stories you never wrote, the works of art you never made, the dances you never got to master, more than the other kinds of opportunities you missed in life? more than not saying "i love you" enough times and not eating as much ice cream while you still could? will you regret not changing the world, or even trying hard enough to change it, to make a real difference?
i just think of living without being able to write, even on a blog like this, and it paralyzes me. but i'd hate to think that when it's time to cash in my chips, all the writing i'm doing now won't be nearly enough to keep me from being sorry that i wasted all this time. i don't feel like my life is flushing itself down the toilet because i'm devoting my time to pursuits that are bigger than myself; i make it a point to have a goal, or several, to keep my head out of my ass - where it tends to go when it has nothing better to do. but is it enough?
will it ever be enough?
probably not, but if you feel like there's a way to be somehow prepared, i'd sure love it if you shared it with me.
***
...had a bunch of lighter things lined up, but this is all i remember.
i would just like to admit to having two favorite performances on American Idol:
1. David Hernandez' "Papa Was a Rolling Stone"
2. David Cook's rock version of "Hello"
the rest are really just good, and there are much better performances, but i was surprised and impressed by these renditions.
yup.
***
Pitiful is the person who is afraid of taking risks. Perhaps this person will never be disappointed or disillusioned; perhaps she won't suffer the way people do when they have a dream to follow. But when that person looks back-and at some point everyone looks back-she will hear her heart saying, "What have you done with the miracles that God planted in your days? What have you done with the talents God bestowed on you? You buried yourself in a cave because you were fearful of losing those talents. So this is your heritage: the certainty that you wasted your life"
Pitiful are the people who must realize this. Because when they are finally able to believe in miracles, their life's magic moments will have already passed them by.
- Paolo Coelho, By the River Piedra I Sat Down and Wept
so i'm just going straight to the point.
i wanted to be a journalist not just because i wanted to polish my writing, but also because i wanted to learn more about life and people. while i was studying for this in university, it dawned on me that i wasn't ready for a life of hardcore reporting, and i probably never will be. i was being trained to devote my negligible writing talent to a public service... and while i may sound a little less than capitalist at times, public service is simply not my calling.
but now and then, when i monitor the news, i come across stories like this and envy and remorse eat away at me. i wish i could have been there, covering this issue. i wish i could have talked to this guy. stories like these are inspiring and definitely good fiction fodder. i mean, just look at this:
Franco Tito, a former hired gun who is the senior elected official in this village named after a woodland fairy, awards honour students with gold medals and packs a .45-calibre gun, a stark reminder of the region's violent past.
He worries about the stream that bisects the community of some 40,000 people -- it is choked with plastic, garbage and the milky-coloured detritus of the area's preferred antiquated mining process.
The tailings -- residue from the process of separating the gold from the ore -- run into the Naboc stream and eventually poison the Agusan, one of the country's largest river basins.
"There were four major problems when I arrived here -- law and order, legality, taxation and siltation. I have solved the first three, and now I want to solve the fourth," he told AFP.
[..]
Fortune hunters flooded in after September 1983, when a Mandaya tribal elder first panned the yellow metal on the Naboc river. They promptly bastardised the hamlet's name to "diwalwal," slang that refers to exhaustion after hard work boring holes through rock on the mountainside.
Tito, who still moves around with armed bodyguards, does not dispute rumours that he has killed at least 40 men, saying: "We were all illegals, so none of the killings were reported to the authorities."
There were few winners in the land grab that followed the discovery of gold here, and most of them are now firmly entrenched in local politics.
"In the old days this was the wild wild west," Tito said, recounting his transformation from army misfit, neighbourhood tough, bodyguard and mineshaft guard, to a key stakeholder, thwarting three assassination attempts along the way.
"All sorts of undesirables were drawn here -- discharged soldiers and police, hoods, holdup men, kidnappers, rapists, ex-convicts, fugitives, people who welshed on their debts," he said.
The national government was largely absent in the early days, and it was cut out of the spoils since by law small-scale miners need only pay income tax.
Instead miners forked out a "revolutionary tax," essentially extortion money extracted by the self-styled New People's Army to fund its deadly decades-old Maoist insurgency.
we're looking at a hired gun who somehow became an elected official of an extremely (understatement of the year) beleaguered province. he's cleaning up the place with an iron hand, literally and figuratively. you can tell that he's not a good person. but he's gotten a lot of things done (according to him) and one wonders if there's really any hope for such a forsaken place.
i would have access to stories like this if i had media clearance. i'm more interested in the grit, preserving the remnants of the area's violent and colorful history - but if by chance i could write something that could change the way things are, it would be - in a word: fantastic.
...and then i think about the many raped children and women gone insane from physical and emotional abuse, their abusers, the obnoxious scion of a wealthy family whose benz got totaled and is vehemently blaming the other guy, squatter shanty demolitions, tedious and delicate paper trails leading to one anomaly after another - all of which i will also have to cover if i had a real reporting job. i'll be the first to admit that i don't have the emotional strength for a job like that.
it just led me to ask myself, and i think i'd like to ask everyone else as well: what are you going to do with the talent you were given? what if, god forbid, you suffer a massive stroke in your sleep and when you wake up all you can move is your left eyelid? will you start thinking about the stories you never wrote, the works of art you never made, the dances you never got to master, more than the other kinds of opportunities you missed in life? more than not saying "i love you" enough times and not eating as much ice cream while you still could? will you regret not changing the world, or even trying hard enough to change it, to make a real difference?
i just think of living without being able to write, even on a blog like this, and it paralyzes me. but i'd hate to think that when it's time to cash in my chips, all the writing i'm doing now won't be nearly enough to keep me from being sorry that i wasted all this time. i don't feel like my life is flushing itself down the toilet because i'm devoting my time to pursuits that are bigger than myself; i make it a point to have a goal, or several, to keep my head out of my ass - where it tends to go when it has nothing better to do. but is it enough?
will it ever be enough?
probably not, but if you feel like there's a way to be somehow prepared, i'd sure love it if you shared it with me.
***
...had a bunch of lighter things lined up, but this is all i remember.
i would just like to admit to having two favorite performances on American Idol:
1. David Hernandez' "Papa Was a Rolling Stone"
2. David Cook's rock version of "Hello"
the rest are really just good, and there are much better performances, but i was surprised and impressed by these renditions.
yup.
***
Pitiful is the person who is afraid of taking risks. Perhaps this person will never be disappointed or disillusioned; perhaps she won't suffer the way people do when they have a dream to follow. But when that person looks back-and at some point everyone looks back-she will hear her heart saying, "What have you done with the miracles that God planted in your days? What have you done with the talents God bestowed on you? You buried yourself in a cave because you were fearful of losing those talents. So this is your heritage: the certainty that you wasted your life"
Pitiful are the people who must realize this. Because when they are finally able to believe in miracles, their life's magic moments will have already passed them by.
- Paolo Coelho, By the River Piedra I Sat Down and Wept