Just Some Write-Ups

  My wife and I had just dropped my aunty at a hospital hostel where she is staying and where a good number of floors are closed because of a lack of staff. The same is true for several other hospitals and healthcare facilities where I’m from. The puzzling thing is, over ten years ago, when the vast majority of us millennials were still in college, a good number of our generation majored in nursing and other medical programs. In our own college alma mater alone, nursing block sections would reach well past Z and into the double letters, going all the way to blocks AA, AB, etc. Fast forward to the present decade, and the high number of enrollees nursing programs enjoyed in the late 2000s and early 2010s should have translated into adequately staffed hospitals or even a surplus of licensed medical staff. But this is far from the case. Harbison and Myers stated that “a country which is unable to develop the skills and knowledge of its people and to utilize them effectively will be u...

A pleasant Saturday morning to everyone in attendance. My relationship with Mr. Ryan Dave Rayla goes back at least a decade. He’s one of two people I discreetly refer to as “ex friends,” meaning I was friends first with a former significant other of theirs before I had the privilege of meeting their acquaintance. Ironically, while I don’t really keep in touch with the aforementioned significant others anymore, I have since cultivated quite the fruitful and intellectual friendship with these “ex friends” of mine. I first met Ryan, or “Ryry” to many of his peers, when we were both undergraduate students at what was then USC’s College of Arts and Sciences in the Talamban Campus. I was a Linguistics and Literature major, while he was majoring in Political Science. Upon first impression, and I’m sure many will share this observation of mine, Ryan didn’t strike me as the jolly, uppity type. I honestly found this rather odd. We were college students, after all, and we had our whole life ahead...

  Original image from  The New Yorker From a radical agrarian reformist ordering the evacuation of whole urban populations and moving them to the countryside to toil in rice paddies, to a voodoo-obsessed physician ordering the execution of all black dogs across his small island nation amid rumors that his most dangerous political rival could morph into said animal, “the pathological fascist tyrant” (to use book critic William Kennedy’s words) has been a staple of many a postcolonial nations’ literary works throughout much of the twentieth century, with some regimes even extending well into the present day. In addition to Africa and much of Southeast Asia, the Spanish-speaking world has seen its fair share of these maniacal, ostensibly messianic despots: from Spain’s Francisco Franco to Mexico’s Antonio Lopez de Sta. Anna to Paraguay’s Alfredo Stroessner; each of these strongmen—typically hailing from military backgrounds—came to power through less-than-democratic means and rul...

A little bit of a disclaimer: I took the TPI quiz twice not because I wanted to make sure my results were consistent, but because I forgot to take note of some of the questions that I needed to write this paper. Both instances, however, yielded the same results in terms of my highest and lowest priorities: social reform for the former, and transmission for the latter. 1   The disparity between both has much bearing. When I think of transmission in relation to teaching, terms like pedagogy, methodology, assessments, and outcomes come to mind—concepts that, as someone who did not major in education in college, I am neither enamored by nor excel at in making documents for. What I lack on the pedagogical side, though, I try to make up for in content.   Prior to joining academia, I was a graduate student taking up an MA in Literature while working a full-time office job. Not being saddled with checking test papers or preparing lesson plans after office hours afforded me the p...

There’s a couple of days every June where self-professed geeks like yours truly feel relegated to the peripheries of public discourse so that the louder, more pumped-up jocks and dedicated sports fans can have their moment of uninterrupted enthusiasm. The reason for this sidelining? The NBA Finals. As early as the middle of May, NBA fans begin jeering at each other and start placing bets on the last two teams remaining in the league and jostling for that much-desired championship trophy. There are a number of ironies one can note about this phenomenon from our context: the fact this is a sport that originated half a world away, that we have no stake in it (it’s not like there are any Filipino citizens playing in the league), and most notably, our biological limitations (the average Filipino males’ height is just a little over five feet; a good number of NBA players exceed six). Still, I can understand why it can be entertaining to watch. There’s a lot of movement and contact involved t...

This short article was originally read as part of a discussion on contemporary Philippine literature on Sari-sari: Panitikan at Kulturang Filipino ng Radyo Katipunan 87.9 (Ateneo de Manila University), held via Zoom and recorded on March 4, 2021. * * * When I was first asked by CB [Christian Benitez] to participate in this discussion on contemporary Philippine literature, I figured this would be a great opportunity to highlight the work of a fellow millennial writer from the province of Cebu, but one who, in some ways, subverts certain expectations or assumptions many of us may have upon hearing the term “Cebuano literature.” At first, said term may seem pretty easy to pin down. In his essay “Ang Sugboanon: The Cebuano,” scholar Resil Mojares states that the most obvious hallmarks of a Cebuano include “language, local residence, or orientation to Cebu province as a cultural or sentimental ‘homeland’” (266). To add to this, the average Cebuano also tends to be trilingual, with Cebuano s...