Broken chord

Dirty finger not intended. This is how they play E chord with the two lower strings open and they do this with the A and the B chords. Drives me crazy especially since the guitar is the main rhythm instrument in the church , so instead of adding flavor to the music, the droning two lower string confuses the singers. This is good if there are other guitars playing conventional chords, but if there's none, its quite irritating.

I am having problems with the 9th chord. I am talking about guitar chord that does not contain the third note, and instead of the the third, guitar players replaced it with the second or the 9th. Guitar players in the church especially the youth like to use this chord because of what they see on Hillsong videos. I mean they think it was a cool way of playing the guitar.

I have tried explaining to these guitarist that removing the third note and replacing it with the second makes it difficult to sing and there's that droning sound of an open string playing with the bar or something. So, I kept telling them, don't play that kind of chording because its not cool, you are giving me head aches and you are abusing the minor 9th. But instead of listening, they kept using the chord even on songs that do not need them. I mean, popular and simple songs do not require broken chords.

Be careful with my heart blah, blah, blah...

Absent from work for four days, still reeling from bronchial asthma (or asthmatic bronchitis, whatever the difference maybe, it's beyond me) that gave me chills for many nights, I am not quite that excited about going back to work. Well, I guess nobody would be what with the lesson plans and lessons to catch up with, the deadline for the submission of test papers, the charts, the quizzes...whew really glad that I have no advisory class.

Anyway...the good thing about the absence is that I was able to follow the new ABS-CBN series "Be careful with my heart" starring Jodi Sta. Maria and Papa Chen. I have been seeing the series on-off because I go home for lunch and am able to see portions, but it was only last week that I was able to see several full episodes. 

The series was about an aspiring flight stewardess, who, through circumstances, ended up becoming an airline executive's babysitter. She was attracted to the much older father of her ward, but he was too busy to even take notice of her and so on...of course the story is as predictable as a fart, but the development of the character is something that made this series quite likeable. Richard Yap, is good, whose bearing, by the way, reminded of the Capt. Von Trapp from the Sound of Music movie. 

Anyway, I am not a critic, just watch the series and be entertained by Jodie's and antiques and Papa Chen's  hmmm....minimalist acting because it gives the series a relaxed and relaxing ambiance, which is a sort of a relief compared from the tensions from the so-called-heavy-drama-actors whose facial expressions even when expressionless radiates pain, suffering and struggling  .

another dolphy blah,blah...

Okey, this is another blah, blah, about Dolphy but I couldn't help it.

I really felt sad when I heard that the King of Philippine comedy died last Tuesday, July 10. I was watching some of his movie and TV shows clips and I couldn't help but feel nostalgic about my childhood and my late father, about my classmates, about eating aratiles and catching fish using tin cans...I mean all my childhood memories came flashing back to me and suddenly I felt my age.  

The black and white movie has this  magic like a time machine of some sort. I was never was and never is a Dolphy fan and I couldn't remember ever watching his movie in theaters because I never took his movies seriously. I mean, its not that I never liked his movies; I did and still do, its just that I never liked his slapstick comedy but I did like his singing and dancing. But even though I did not like his slapstick, I did laugh at his antics.

Dolphy was like one of those things hmmm...a fixture on TV and movie that just was there, always there. one does not have to take him consciously and seriously because he was always there, a part of, to borrow the word from a scholar, collective consciousness and memory of  the Filipinos especially those who were able to see and follow his movies and TV shows.

Anyway, just attempting to express how I felt about his death and I felt the lost... hmm... I thought he was ...hmm...immortal. 

_____________

My childhood friends and I used to go hiking and trekking at Antipolo and we used to pass by Valley Golf Country Club where a house allegedly built by Dolphy for Alma Moreno was being constructed. We would look at it and tried to peek and peep looking for Dolphy but we didn't even catch a glimpse of the man.  Anyway, the house is now rotting.

CS Lewis:Time and sin

We have a strange illusion that mere time cancels sin. I have heard others, and I have heard myself, recounting cruelties and falsehoods committed in boyhood as if they were no concern of the present speaker's, and even with laughter. But mere time does nothing either to the fact or to the guilt of a sin. The guilt is washed out not by time but by repentance and the blood of Christ: if we have repented these early sins we should remember the price of our forgiveness and be humble. As for the fact of a sin, is it probable that anything cancels it? All times are eternally present to God: Is it not at least possible that along some one line of His multidimensional eternity He sees you forever in the nursery pulling the wings off a fly, forever toadying, lying, and lusting as a schoolboy, forever in that moment of cowardice or insolence as a subaltern? 

It may be that salvation consists not in the cancelling of these eternal moments but in the perfected humility that bears the shame forever, rejoicing in the occasion which it furnished to God's compassion and glad that it should be common knowledge to the universe. Perhaps in that eternal moment St. Peter - he will forgive me if am wrong - forever denies his Master. If so, it would indeed be true that the joys of Heaven are for most of us, in our present condition, "an acquired taste" - and certain ways of life may render the taste impossible of acquisition. Perhaps the lost are those who dare not go to such a public place. Of course I do not know that this is true; but I think the possibility is worth keeping in mind.

Repetitions...

I was watching TV while my wife was pulling out my white hairs, scratching off patches of dandruff here and there, when I asked or rather shouted what day it was. My wife replied that it was Tuesday. Aaahhh...it was Tuesday and tomorrow will be Wednesday. Then after Wednesday, it will be Thursday, then Friday, then Saturday, then Sunday, then Monday again, then Tuesday again, then Wednesday again...drives me crazy !

doesn't anybody notice...

I sometimes wonder why the whole human race does not commit suicide en masse and be over with the never-ending cycles, repetitions, ennui, etc. 

Repetition is bad. 

I mean... when people go to zoos and they see the animals doing this strange repetitive movements like walking back and forth, raising their heads and then bobbing them left to right they (I mean the insensitive people who love  zoos) think the animals are dancing or performing or doing these thing for their benefits as if the animals, like portrayed in inane movies and cartoons, are happy that they have audience, but actually these animals are developing nervous disorder because they are confined in cages are not only small but also do not emulate and simulate their natural habitat. Their will to live or their essence and life force is slowly dying and what the zoo gawkers are seeing are nothing but zombies that moves without or with very little consciousness.

Zoos are evil places and are not educational places because the animals do not show their natural behavior and  nothing is learned except seeing these animals suffer from the torture of captivity. Animals that are put in there are virtually dead animals. 

People also suffer from this disorder called stereotypy. Of course, the pathology of the disorder points to conditions like autism...well look it up at Wikipedia. 

Anyway,  all of us, generally speaking are already suffering from it. I mean,  from observing people, I found that though the symptoms are not as classic text book case but its analogous and it's there: the habitual looking, texting and checking of cellphones though there are no messages and notifications. There's the repetitive motion of opening FB accounts first before doing anything productive, drinking the same brand of soft drinks, scratching something, etc..

Then when I look into the larger picture, at the macroscopic level of our existence:  going to work in the morning, taking lunch at noon, eating dinner in the evening, sleeping at night, going to the comfort room, taking a bath, marriage, childhood, infancy, death....come to think of it its like we are all animals trapped in a cage doing the same thing over and over and over and over and over and over and over ... I suddenly realized that our life, the whole gamut is nothing but a divine pantheistic-reality-mind-psychological-disorder (I mean, if the whole of reality is one emanation from a cosmic sentience) we are all just exhibiting the symptoms of the disease of the whole: cosmic stereotypy.

 Hmmm...not making any sense and not supposed to, anyway.

What the Fact! We are no better than the animals in a zoo!

Lorenzo's piracy, Earthquake drill

I saw the teaser of channel 2's newest tv drama called Lorenzo's Time and again I was dumbfounded at the blatant intellectual piracy. I mean, the least ABS-CBN and its people should have done is to acknowledge that the show is an adaption, or loosely based, or inspired by the 1992Mel Gibson movie Forever Young.

Lorenzo's Time is a touching journey of a young boy named Lorenzo (Zaijan Jaranilla) who was diagnosed with progeria, an extremely rare genetic condition wherein symptoms resembling aspects of aging are manifested at an early age. In order to preserve his young body, he was subjected to cryonics until his parents find a cure for it. After 30 years, Enzo will wake up to face the world with missed precious moments of his life—including his family and the only girl he loves.

A 1939 test pilot asks his best friend to use him as a guinea pig for a cryogenics experiment. Daniel McCormick wants to be frozen for a year so that he doesn't have to watch his love lying in a coma. The next thing Daniel knows is that he's been awoken in 1992. 

I mean..the cryogenics, the waking up a la Rip Van Winkle  thing was there. The only original thing that, I think, could be added to the idea of the series as based on the Gibson movie is that the show  would have the usual recipe: terrible writing, very very predictable twists, mediocre acting and cliche dialog.

But anyway, it entertainment and maybe that's what's important in the end--to escape.

________________________

The school conducted the national earth quake drill. The drill was conducted at 9 in the morning with the police and the Taytay MDRRMC. The school was teeming with unformed people: the police, the orange rescue guys and the--I don't know why some wear black--and the para-police , para-rescue guys.

The pupils were pissed off. A grade four pupil even complained that this was recess time. Don't we adults understand this, recess time is inviolable even by earth quakes, fire and nuclear war! (Photo: Ms. Redgie)

Anyway, there were lectures and all that stuff that goes along with the drill.

Teaching Filipino

This class drives me crazy.

Filipino is now one of my teaching loads, aside from music, arts and character education. I was offered to teach one English class but I have taught English for almost five years and, to tell the truth, my English sucks so I opted to take up teaching Filipino since I haven't taught this subject.

It's a new challenge for me. Maybe next school year I would ask for a math teaching load for fun and, maybe, to kill the monotony of teaching: a little bit of everything, so to speak but subject to the chief's approval, of course.

Anyway, I was quite troubled when I found out that quite a few Filipino words that were not that deep, really, and was quite well used during my childhood were now virtually unheard of and unknown to most of my pupils.

I was discussing Filipino sentence structure, which is reverse to that of English sentence pattern because in Filipino the predicate comes first before the subject... well...this is grammar stuff which I hate. 


I was discussing sentence pattern and the sample sentences used words like "aso" (thick smoke), "dukwang" (to reach and grope), "parang" (plains), etc. I saw puzzled looks from my pupils and they started raising their hands asking for the meaning of these words.I scratched my head and told them, irritably may I say, that these words were plain, simple and not-that-literary words that Filipinos use daily. But they gave me the look.

With little reflection, I realized that these words are not that popular anymore because nobody uses wood fueled stove anymore; there are no more plains, and there are no big tables filled with food to make dukwang  with. I had to illustrate "dukwang" by telling them news stories of how celphone thieves steal items from display counters.

Anyway...

TV Controls

 I was having fun with my camera when a kid form our church borrowed and tried to look at the pictures by touching the screen; he thought that my camera was a touch screen camera but it was not. Anyway, got me thinking and got me nostalgic about controls especially TV control which I think was the paradigms for designing control interface for devices...or whatever.

I spent my childhood with dial controls. We used to have a vacuum tube cabinet type Zenith television and all the controls used dials.  To change channels, a dial was turned.  The on/off control was also dial, and so was the vertical and horizontal controls; everything was controlled by turning knobs and switches.

Not our TV. I remember the horizontal and the vertical and horizontal control was located at the back panel.  In retrospect, the sound these old tvs made when turned on and turned off was horrifying by today's standards.Also, the static created by the crt was so powerful that they could literally make the viewers, when near enough, hair stand on its end.

When I was small, I used tot think that any house that had a telephone was owned by a very rich resident.  I think I may have used this kind of telephone maybe three to four times because it was a sort of a technological novelty especially for a child like me.

Then after a few years, the push buttons came. Everything then was push button. In fact, when our neighbor’s new TV arrived, we were there to witness how this push button control thing worked. It was quite a change because the TV controls had no dials. There were buttons for each channel, which during those years, numbered around four or five TV stations. Also the antenna was indoor and that meant no climbing up on the roof to rotate the aerial to look for better reception. 

No dials, just buttons. A church member had one of this. We used to watch betamax tapes on this TV. No more fine tuning dials...

Of course the next stage was the remote control. ( Then there was the rotary something called the click-wheel made famous by the  Apple IPods for the personal devices.) 

And then it was the touch screen but now some TV are responding to gestures...

I mean, even Spock didn't anticipate this. Hmmm...what's next?

MP lost

Going home from the church, I passed by an elementary school where Manny Pacquiao's fight with Bradley was being telecast live via satellite, I knew that something was not right because the people leaving the school was somber; the aura was funeral. 

There was no jubilation and excited description of the highlights of the fights instead what I heard were shouts and mumblings of accusations of being cheated: Pacquiao was mafiad by the Ameican mafia. He was karmaed because of his anti gay views (which MP vehemently denied). The fight was rigged for him to lose so that there would be rematch hence more revenue. He lost because he held Bible as if the Bible brings bad luck, etc. and so on.

Whatever the reasons, our champion lost and  MP was humble enough to admit defeat. He was magnanimous in defeat and that's what makes him more of a champion. Anyway, I think he needed the lost because he has taken his sport too lightly lately. Even though he may have won technically, the judges may have been expecting more hence they gave Bradley a handicap or something (just a theory).

Anyway,  the streets were quiet. There was no jubilation and though there were those who kept on mumbling theories about the lost, the people had that bleak look, lost look that made me think how pathetic it was for a human being to be emotionally involved over something as senseless as boxing.

I mean...  

The Chinese have occupied Bajo Masinloc and  our country's sovereignty was threatened yet the Filipinos was stoical about the issue, but when MP lost to an American it looked like as if my countrymen were ready to declare war on the United States...I mean...you gotta be kidding me.

Expect another analysis overdose.

Hmmmm...I did not watch  the replay. Somehow, I hate to admit it, me, too, was affected by the lost.

First Day of School/Smiley thing

Woke at 5:00 in the morning. Banged on the wall to wake my daughter up. Heat water and did a cup of coffee. Got dressed and then brought my daughter to her school and then went on to work. This is my first day of school, and this will be  the pattern for the next 200+ school days.

The Department of Education launched its new gimmick: the "your smile is your uniform" thing which aims to promote smiling among the teachers. According to the Department's think tank, smiling teachers promotes better learning among the pupils since it relaxes them; it lessens the tension in the classroom.  

So, each teacher is now wearing a smiley pin on their uniform. I kinda like the idea, but I don't know if it would work. Personally, I rather would not smile in class.

It would really be nice for a teacher to walk in a classroom smiling and exuding that aura of positivity and fun while the pupils are all smiling back, being respectful and exuding that aura of angelic benevolence, etc. But that's not the reality.

I have tried smiling on my first teaching days in public schools. I tried singing Sunday School songs and promoting peace and love and God's grace to my pupils, but the pupils just made fun of me and made my life miserable. 

The teachers, their smiles, their religious benevolence and what have you and all the psychological theories and understandings and all that stuff, unfortunately cannot undo, or cannot even alleviate the dysfunctional environment from which some pupils grew up with. I mean this is kinda bleak, but one has got to be in the classroom firsthand to know what I'm talking about.

But of course, there are pupils who respond to smiles very well. But...anyway, it's a progressive thing: I'd rather keep a poker face which may or may not develop into a smile rather than keeping a smile, a mad dog smile that bites or something. 

I would rather keep a blank expression on my face because pupils especially among the lower sections would consider a smile as a sign of kindness which, to them, means that they can "bully" the teacher. Anyway, I have always been a smiling teacher...well, maybe it's a good idea after all. We'll see.

Am I making any sense?

Jessica/Manny Pacquiao Overdose

Okay...I do not hate Jessica Sanchez. I have nothing against her. She's a very talented Mexican-Filipino-American. I don't know which part of her the singing talent could be attributed to but heck I don't care about the Filipino's propensity to take credit...you know what I'm talking about.

Anyway, the American Idol contest has been over and done with for almost a month, but still I am hearing and seeing video clips of Jessica singing that Whitney Houston (no disrespect to WH) over and over again on Philippine television (just  few seconds ago, I heard it again). Heck, can't we move on people!  I am beginning to develop Jessica overdose syndrome: itching ears, raised blood pressure and what have you.

Not another video clip...please!

Another human being that keep popping up on the news daily is Manny Pacquiao.I see him jogging, singing, Bible Quoting (good development), dancing and being nice to his opponent. It is a relief that he is not shown singing that ghastly over emotional blah, blah, blah Dan Hill song "Sometimes when we Touch" thing, but still seeing him covered by media minute by minute is hmmm...troubling.  Now, Jinky is also there.

Anyway, I think Manny is now good because I don't see Gov. Singson in his entourage. I think his new found faith in God exorcised the guy off the group.

No, I 'm not angry or anything, just sour about...hmmm...nahhh. Come to think about... it's numbing.