Sun.Star Essay: All winners
WHEN I made sure that I would not miss the final show for this year’s American Idol, I knew I fall under the Pinoy type whose simple sense of pride in one’s nation is “strong and alive.” I wasn’t surprised to read about the fiesta-like American Idol-watch in Samal, Bataan and the cheering groups...
Sunstar essay: Filipino blonde
A NEWSY item two months ago came out to engage the curious. This was about the international Filipino singer Charice Pempengco. She came for a concert and she looked unlike the Charice we could recognize. She’s now a blondie!
A newspaper reacted, “Gone is the long-haired, preppy Charice...
Sun.Star Essay: Of disconnecting
LONG ago, connectedness in a community was a picture of the summer sun slowly sinking in a twilight scene where traffic had slowed down in numbers in a sidestreet just before evening and the spot was full of children at play, children touching each other, laughing, connecting firmly until the...
Sun.Star Essay: Do you hear me?
SOME years back, I was in Malibay, Pasay city in a friend’s place one morning when a plane passed by on its way down to the runway of the Manila International Airport. Inside the house, I was standing by a small bookshelf when the engine noise came seemingly like a blast on the roof. The book I...
Sun.Star Essay: A charging station, anyone?
A FRIEND and I turned right into one of Manila’s side roads when traffic slowed down and we noticed that the jeep ahead of us on the same lane was facing us! It was like a joke. But when the traffic moved, the jeep moved, too, as though backing up all the way and fast! It turned out that the...
Sun.Star Essay: PHL entertainment
I SAW only one film of Nora Aunor, none of Vilma Santos. But I was very much aware of Nora’s presence in the national entertainment scene some decades ago. Who wasn’t? I did wonder why she became so popular way ahead of the time like now when an entertainer’s manager could package a personality...
Sun.Star Essay: Of flags
LAST week, I read the news about the Cebu City Government buying more Philippine flags, this as promised for the June 12 celebration of the Philippine independence. This was revealed during the 70th Araw ng Kagitingan (Day of Valor) program held last April 9 which celebrated heroes defending...
Sun.Star Essay: The unwanted child
I WAS barely in high school when we had a pregnant housemaid who refused to go home to a husband who wasn’t there. With a big stomach, she continued cooking for us and doing a few things safe for her to do. One night, I woke up to see Papa and Mama out in the sala getting tense over something....
Sun.Star Essay: Small changes, big changes
HOW can we stop talking about climate change when it’s around, unnerving us? We used to call atmospheric changes “seasons” but the changes today are too fast, is it one season mixing with another?
Still, it’s probably the way the universe goes—moving on from change to change in small and...
Sun.Star Essay: Hail the bamboo!
IN THE face of the world’s problem in climate change that humanity did not prepare for, we have a new way of looking at trees these days. Trees are one of nature’s healing.
This is why I welcome the good news in Sun.Star Cagayan de Oro, of villagers planting bamboo trees along a...
Sun.Star Essay: The Cebuano saint
WE KNOW a few things about Beato Pedro Calungsod who is said to have Ginatilan, Cebu as birthplace. In the 1600s, the Manila diocese, later in those early years considered the most powerful archdiocese in Asia, would reach out for missionary work to nearby islands, such as Guam. This was where...
Sun.Star Essay: The first language
A LANGUAGE is always vibrant and dynamic. So this could mean it can grow, it can move, or grow out of itself. Thus, we really can’t keep it pure. The good news is that we always try.
I bought a book in early 2000 from mv Duolos, the book ship. It is a dictionary of “forsaken” words, or...
Sunstar Essay: Keeping children safe and bright
IMAGINE a time when in this part of the year the schools open, instead of close for the summer break. The idea of changing the school year is seen by some leaders of the country as a solution to solve the problem affecting school children during floods and landslides. We don’t want to see...
Sun.Star Essay: Changes
THE unfamiliar climate swings we experience these days are only one of the changes in a world we need to accept, this one of nature’s. Before you go anywhere on work day tomorrow—to office or the mall or the Internet café—go back to your room and reflect on changes.
Sun.Star Essay: Pray it will not rain
THEY say rain is “water falling in drops from vapor condensed in the atmosphere.”
But it could be more romantic and personal.Remember back in your college days a poem entitled “Rain” written by Scottish poet Robert Louis Stevenson published in his collection of verses entitled “A Child’s...
Sunstar Essay: Like children
I ASKED the taxi driver I took a day after the recent Negros-Cebu 6.9 earthquake. “Diin ka paglinog?”
The strength of the tremors differed in the places where they landed, from 6 to 6.5 to 6.6 to 6.7 to 6.8 to 6.9, unhappily not below magnitude 6.)
Sun.Star Essay: Who’s wearing what
YOU sit in a pungko-pungko corner while waiting for what you ordered for this quick eat-and-go lunch and you have just a few minutes to watch people pass up and down the divergent sidewalk, to the roadside (quick!), then up and back to a swift sidewalk rise and a normal jump (ooops!) to get a...
Sun.Star Essay: Walking well
IT’S good that they’re running and biking. And let’s walk.
These are good times to grow healthy in, if the inspiration lasts. Some people are more aware now of what running or biking can do to shape up physically and mentally. There’s an awareness of health and physical fitness among...
Sun.Star Essay: The pain of a ride
IT’S the same old picture you see, but this one takes the cake—a mother on board a habal-habal motorcycle with her three children, two of them perhaps less than three years old, clasped to each of her sides, while the third sat in the middle, in her front. Both the mother’s arms held each of the...
Sun.Star Essay: Filipino drama
YEARS ago I’d come across scenes from the American soap opera “Sunset Beach” as I tinkered with the remote control gadget without much thought. But I was never attracted to the American teledrama. Neither to any soap operas in our local media.
That was almost two decades ago when...
Sun.Star Essay: Hail, Sinulog
IN high school when it was time for me to learn a bit more of 1521 Cebu history, my younger brothers hadn’t heard of Lapulapu or Magellan. They heard “Opon” or “Mactan” mentioned in conversation only ever so seldom and to them it was nothing but the quiet place “out there” reached after a boat...
Sun.Star Essay: New Year resolutions
A DAY and just a few more hours after the flash floods occurred following the Sendong storm two weeks ago, a mortuary in Cagayan de Oro city made known to its clients that they were running out of coffins for children, even as the owners worried about having only five embalmers (each one...
Sunstar Essay: The gift-givers
ONE of the nice things in life is gift-giving. You receive something nice and in accepting it, you in turn make the giver feel good twice (even without the actual reciprocation, like giving in return). And so if one were left to choose what to do to express love and good feelings (and get it...
Sun.Star Essay: Harm in blasts
IT’S just 13 days before Christmas but the festival of light goes on way before Christmas in the world’s longest celebration of the coming of the Child Jesus.
I’m talking of the Philippine Christmas which many think is the longest Christmas holiday on earth; somebody even saw Santa Claus...
Sunstar Essay: Cory in Edsa
A FRIEND asked if the congressman who filed a bill seeking to rename Edsa (Epifanio de los Santos Ave.) into Cory Aquino Ave. was kidding.
All of these efforts of naming and renaming streets are attempts to “construct places of memory.” But renaming streets too often (as often as the...
