Day 44: Community Quarantine
  FROG-  I was removing garden soil from a plastic bag when eyes popped out from the bottom. There was a frog. Good thing I was using my hands and not a trowel else I could have wounded or killed it.
   It was a big bellied frog commonly found in moist areas buried under ground or in mulch.
   I remember doing bisection to frogs during our biology class decades ago. I didn't feel any remorse torturing the animal then.
  Now, older, I don't feel like I can intentionally harm animals. I guess when one gets older one gets more emphatic.
   I picked up the frog and put it in a moist and shaded area without ants. I have seen frogs like this killed by ants. 

    POWDER- There are fine powders under of the bamboo sofas and one look I knew what it was.
   I brought the sofa out to check. One leg was infested with dry wood termites (bukbok).
    I had a left over general insecticides that I applied, but it did not work. The wood needs to be immersed for the poison to seep through the tunnels where the insects live. I will need a lot of poison.
   I had an idea. I boiled water and poured it into the affected node. The node was filled to the brim with scalding hot water, sure enough I saw termites floating to the top.
   I will be repeating the process three times every morning.
   MALUNGGAY- I planted five malunggay cuttings near the papayas. This I should have done long ago. The thing is, I am running out of space and there's no more "social distancing" between the trees. I will have to regularly trim them to give each trees their equal share of the sun.

PARES and condiments and franchise

    Yesterday, I got out of the house to buy grilled boneless milkfish in Cainta (seedless bangus). On my way there, I passed by the sidewalk lined with street food carts and mobile stalls, the pares mami, siomai, barbecue, kwek-kwek and fishballs. All of them emitted that unmistakable fused aroma of grease, condiments, and kerosene. All were beckoning me.

    I have been into "healthy" diet lately, but then again, what the heck.  I had a bit of struggle but its been a long time since I had some of these hepa foods, as they are called.

 

       I caved in.

    I tried was the pares mami without the fried rice. The chef, I mean what else should I call the guy, got a plastic bowl wrapped in plastic bag (or plastic labo). He tied the open end to secure the bowl, used the dripping ladle to push the air out of the bulging plastic wrap, scooped up few bits of beef chunks (from what part of the cow, who knows?) from the strainer on top of the boiling cauldron, and then ladled a cup of steaming, dark, murky thick soup onto the plastic wrapped plastic bowl. 

   

     I guess the plastic wrap is a hygienic improvement from the dip and then rinse in a pail of heaven-knows-how-many-times used water of the past, also its more convenient for the vendors for they don't have to lug bulky water containers, pails and basins needed to wash and rinse. But it's a one use plastic warp, which I thought was banned in Cainta. It's bad for the environment. 

    One thing about eating pares is the assortment of condiments added on top of it: spring onion, calamansi juice, hot sauce, chili garlic, etc. You can create your own formula to suit your taste and state of your mind. Its like the soup and the noodles are the blank canvass and the rice, eggs, chicharon and condiments are the paints from which you can create your own epicurean dish. 

   

    There are many street foods that are now being served in restaurants and in the malls. They have gone mainstream and some chefs even experimented with them,  spiced them up, decorated and artsified them with expensive leaves, spices, served in fancy containers arranged with other whatchamacallits to give that illusion of class to the poorman's food, which to my opinion is an effing waste of time.

   In the case of the pares, I don't think the rich will get into eating slaughter house by-products and the common pinoys are not going to pay twice or quadruple the price for a cosmetically enhanced street food that most of the time lacks the grit and the flavor of the ones served in street carts and pedicabs.

 . 

TOO many CHOICES, just MOVIES and STUFFS

 I am checking my Netflix account (paid by my daughter) and I notice that I have accumulated scores of series and movie  titles in the "continue watching" panel. These are titles that I clicked, watched, a few seconds later got bored with, then clicked another title, got bored and so on.

  

This is frustrating because it seems that my attention span has dwindled to a few seconds, and I can not get to the point where the interest builds up.

I miss the days when I could focus on one movie, one book, one task. Now, I can't decide on a choice whether it be a movie, a book, and musical piece to study and learn because there's just too many of them available online now.

There must be name for this condition. I mean, everything has a name now.

I Googled "I cant decide disorder" and there it was:

 Aboulomania (from Greek a– 'without', and boulē 'will') is a mental disorder in which the patient displays pathological indecisiveness. It is typically associated with anxiety, stress, depression, and mental anguish, and can severely affect one's ability to function socially. 

Well, maybe not that bad. Its just that.

I don't want to waste my time watching  a bad show. The Last movie I saw in full in weeks was "I Care a Lot" with Rosamund Pike and Tyrrion Lannister (yup, he is Tyrrion to me now), and I had to fast forward it by 10 seconds every time the scenes became dragging. This is not good. Just like in music, silence is important, it builds up anticipation that leads to the climax. 

I have lost appreciation in the art of anticipating, of waiting for the denouma, the revelation, whatever it is called,  because the power to fast forward movies, music and even books has been granted to me by technology.

REMINISCING:

I grew up in the 80's and 90's before ICT era. We had a cabinet type Zenith vacuum tube TV which was later replaced by the transistor type NIVICO 12 inch TV. This was the boob tube that I had spent my teen age and adulting years with until it conked out in 2000s. It served the family for almost two decades.

There were only five channels then BBC 2, Maharlika TV 4, IBC 13, RPN 9 and GMA 7. Almost all of them had limited airing time with the exception of RPN that screened midnight movies. I was an insomniac, so I had the TV by myself and since there were no other channels that aired on graveyard shift, I had no choice but to watch what's being shown. 

I saw eclectic collection of movies from Mel Brooks classic Young Frankenstein, The Last Time I saw Paris with Elizabeth Taylor, Bertollucci's The Last Emperor, to Richard Attenborough's Life on Earth. 

I also devoured paperbacks like there's no tomorrow, I could finish a James Michener novel in a day but now I could hardly get through a 2 minute Esquire article.

Anyway, I think most people have indecisive moments and get by normally. Its just that this is made worse by the fact that there too many options now especially with the internet. So unlike 20 years ago when it was so boring in the afternoons that one can learn and play a musical instrument within a week, or read a tome in a day, or got to have a lot of good and unforgettable time with friends chatting in street corners just wasting time hanging around, looking at the surroundings, observing people, listening to music, singing along to the accompaniment of a badly tuned guitar, being in the moment, things move so fast now. 

People still hang around now but they are trapped, mesmerized by a small screen. Like me.

Boredom is important, the right one, that is. The time to think about nothing for ithout it, we cannot declutter the mind. Boredom is the space and playground where the mind gets creative.

Left handed classical guitarist, is there one?

I have been a guitar enthusiasts, a casual player, since my high school years,  and any music that has guitars in it catches my attention whatever the genre from blues, heavy metal, folk, reggae, to Jazz, and lately the classical guitar. 

With YouTube and Spotify (thanks to my daughter's subscription), I was able to download some Jazz guitar music by Wes Montgomery and Joe Pass hoping I would develop a taste for it but jazz was not my thing though, too abstract for me.

I listen to Wes Montgomery once in a while because of the guitar and I sometimes catch a glimpse of comprehension but generally, I don't know what the heck is going on. WTF, it seems there are no wrong notes! Its like they are just fooling around with their instruments and having mindless fun, but somehow, it all seems to fit together. That's what makes Jazz mystifying to me.

Of course, behind the jumble of confusing polytonal, polyrhythmic and abstract mishmash of aural algebra are advanced and  sometimes experimental musical theories that are accessible only to the few who have reached a certain degree of musical divinity.

Wes Montgomery

In my forties, I started to listen and learn classical guitar music out of frustration. I cant sing in tune! I can sing, though, if croaking is counted as one. Finger style guitar lets the guitar sing for me but its not easy especially with  knuckle breaking spread and broken chords that sometimes span three to four frets. But I get by with my short and stubby fingers.

There's a misconception that classical music is on the top of the hierarchy of musical taste. Maybe this is true a hundred years ago when classical music was for the consumption of the noble, aristocrats, and the cultured rich and middle class because of the fact that its an expensive form of entertainment back then with live group of musicians performing the masters' compositions.  

But today, the social media age, when classical music became accessible to everyone through the internet, it's now just another musical genre to be enjoyed, appreciated and studied by anyone who wants to. 

 And also, anyone can now enjoy and learn the pieces since there hundreds of free scores, arrangements, and performances available for free (or for a fee) to anyone who is interested in it.  Of course, a real music school is important for structured and systematic study , but virtual lessons are the next best thing for the hobbyists and enthusiasrs who cannot afford tuitions.

Today, it's not unusual for heavy metal music to be played and enjoyed by classical musicians and vice versa. Philharmonic Orchestras now record and perform popular music from heavy metal to shitty ballads.

 I think one video that made this crossover  popular to ameteur guitarists was the electric guitar cover of Pachelbel's Canon in D by this guy around 2008:

Can you play Canon in D? What the hell is that?

After this guy's video went viral, Pachelbel's Canon in D became the Stairway to Heaven of 2010s. I was asked many times by young guitarists (who thought I could play everything) if I could play it, which of course I couldn't. It was a big thing then. After that video gathered millions of views, electric guitarists followed and uploaded their videos playing amped and effects driven classical and baroque music. 

Anyway...

I am a Jimi Hendrix guy and Jimi was considered the GOAT of electric guitar for his musicality, creativity, and on-stage antics. He also had the added mystique of being a left handed player, and of course, of dying at the "cursed age" of 27. 

There's this idea that left handed artists are better or more gifted with their skills than the normal, average right handed human being. There's Jimi, Paul McCartney, Manny Pacquiao, Sting, etc.

But there's one guitar music genre where it seems there are no left handed players, of note at least: the classical music. 

So, I posed the question to an FB Classical Guitar Group with members from all sorts of musical levels,  from professional concert players, teachers, students to hobbyists and casual players of different nationalities to see if there are any lefties.  Also, I was wondering if left handed classical guitar students are corrected to play right.

Surprisingly, there are a lot of left hand dominant classical guitarists but they play right handed with no problem at all. The reason?

In the classical guitar both hand share almost equal amount of work just like in the piano. Both hands and fingers are doing their work independently and there is no need for one of the hands to be dominant over the other at all.

 In rock, jazz, folk, etc. guitar one hand is doing more work than the other, usually the dominant hand, and this determine how the player holds the guitar's neck and which hand does the strumming and picking.

This does not mean there no classical guitar player who play their guitar inverted at all. 

I mean, there are white crows.

What the heck...

I need to cut down on coffee...

Time Relativity and Old Age and nonsense

I have this fascination with mathematical formulas and I thought about or rather wished that I could have the facility to understand or at least catch glimpse of what all these symbols and how they operate. But no, they are and will continue to be hieroglyphics to me.

In my grade school days, I thought I was good with math, or at least not that bad at it, that was until I graduated from grade 6 and had my first encounter with algebra, then geometry to trigonometry and from then on, I gave up trying to figure out what all these symbols were about. Happy enough to have the arithmetic skill to count change.

But the fact that I was bad at it did not stop my fascination at the concept behind these seemingly powerful numbers and symbols, which are really nothing but shorthand for something that will take too long to explain using the English alphabets.

 As one of my former math professor said, "the shorter the formula the more difficult or complicated the concept behind it is", which didn't really mean anything to my numerically challenged brain, at all. NOTHING!

I guess the most famous formula is Einstein's E=mc2. Which I don't know what it is all about and all my introductory understanding of are from science fiction movies and stories.  From which I gathered that underneath the letters are stuffs that changed physics how we view reality from space, black holes, Uranus, etc. and of course time.

Time for us mere mortals (who are not given the magical powers to understand the mathematics of physics) is the passing of moments, the rotation of the earth, the passing season, ageing, white hairs, rheumatoid arthritis,  etc. It is fixed and only moves forward, according to common sense and classical Newtonian physics.

When Einstein came along and shocked the physics world with his theories, time became another dimension, space is not space anymore, it is now space-time. Time can be slowed down with velocity. Also his theories opened up the possibility, at least theoretically speaking, of time travel. Here I will stop because everything else from here is dark matter, as in dark. I have no idea about.

Philosophically, there is the idea by Immanuel Kant which says that time has no objective reality: "it is subjective and ideal, and originates from the mind's nature in accord with the stable scheme, as it were, for coordinating everything sensed externally." Simply put, time is not real, it is just how our brains are programmed to understand reality. 

But for all its mystery time is very real, at least the passing of it. I can feel it in my bones, in my mind, and in my heart (the organ, I mean). In my youth I was unmindful of its passing. its like a blur. time seemed so slow back then. I want to skip my teens, the restrictions, and the awkwardness that came with it and jumped right into adulthood, job and freedom.

That was until I reached the age of 30. The days had shifted to the high gear, everything seemed to be twice as fast as before, days flew by so fast.

I am now into my late forties, two years short of my fifth decade, and things are starting to get blurry with speed. Its been that long? How long has it been since I freaked out my elderly neighbors by riling up their dogs and have the snarling beasts go and chasing after me and my friends? 

Now, I am the elderly neighbor who is freaked out when my dogs are teased by children.

I cannot slow down time but I can do things slowly.

Walk slowly.

Eat slowly.

Sit down and stand up slowly, aside from the fact that my joints hurt now.

There's an old Indian proverb that says, "sitting down is better than standing, lying down is better than sitting, sleeping is better than lying down, being dead is better..."

I guess as I grow older I am becoming less and less attached, more detached to things I can not control.

Or maybe, I am just a highly functioning depressed individual who has lost interest in everything except guitar, gardening, art, music...maybe not that depressed, just lazy.

But whatever the case maybe, I have always taken comfort to the fact I am still alive and trying my best to be in the moment as much as possible wherever I am, whatever my situation is and whatever mood I am in.

Walking Away Your Worries

These past few weeks have been an emotional roller coaster. I will not go into the details but February 2021 I think was one of the, if not  the worst period of my life. 

A lot of things were going on in my head, I was catastrophizing resulting to anxiety and insomnia.

The bombardment of worries are about things that I actually have no control of, useless and futile, yet seemed uncontrollable. 

Negative thoughts, and even positive thoughts for the idea that tomorrow everything would be better was just as bad as thinking that tomorrow things would get worse for both produce anxiety and stresses to the mind in somewhat the same way.

I had to keep reminding myself that I am thinking needlessly about things I could not control and that I should focus on what I can do.

Of course not thinking is impossible. To think about nothing is self cancelling it just does not happen that way. thinking about nothing is thinking about something. it occupies the mind, it requires effort.

To lessen the anxiety and stress, I walk. Walking helped disperse the thoughts, it lessened the hyperactivity, I guess its a physiological thing, the action lessens the flow of the blood and oxygen going into the brain because it is needed somewhere else, in the feet, the arms, the torso.etc, and the physical exertion promoted sleep.

Though I guess people may find it weird that I walk going to the public market when there is a talipapa in our street, or when I walk to buy fruits at high noon...I walk when I feel anxiety is creeping in. People have asked me what happened to my motorcycle, or my bicycle, I guess they are not still used to see me walking almost all of the time.

Anyway, life goes on.