Thealove recently gifted me (in advance for our 4th anniversary, we were so excited) with a specimen of the Ferrari of notebooks, the Moleskine notebook.

It’s the popular ruled pocketsize version, which looks like a tiny bible or a black book of secrets. The notebook also has a cardboard and cloth pocket inside to store photos, receipts, and other items.

We’ve been looking at these notebooks at Fully Booked Serendra for some time now, but until recently we’ve been looking at them as insanely-priced notebooks and thought money was best spent elsewhere. However, a few weeks can change one’s opinion, and after seeing some old and loved specimens filled with writings and drawings (mainly from Butch Dalisay’s blog) we planned get Moleskines.

And so here they are! Twin Moleskines, one for me and one for her. We wrote dedications to each other on the first page, and it initially felt weird writing on the very expensive paper. I thought to myself that if there were no laptops in this world, this was the equivalent of writing with a top of the line Mac. It’s a bit of a paradox, because if I think about how expensive it is, I find it hard to write on, as if I have to save the paper by writing only the most important things and even then only microscopically! But the beauty of these notebooks only reveal themselves when they are filled, so, as with most quality items really, you get your money’s worth the more you use it. So I have to minutely temper my skinflint nature and embrace writing on the acid free paper bound in leather.

 It’s the old-world charm that makes me love this notebook. It reminds me of the Sandwhich song “Betamax.” (Wala pa noong ipod, internet, cd, mp3…) Too many people write on computers nowadays, and they spend so much upgrading their hardware, which is not really bad, but sometimes stepping back to something old and classic is worth trying. I wanted to rekindle the classic feeling of writing on a fine notebook, and I am inspired by the quirky idea of using a pocketbook to store important information instead of in a smartphone, pda, or ultramobile laptop.

Now what am I going to write in it?

Or, what pen am I going to use with it? Dapat ba fountain pen para bagay? These are the sort of nutty inquiries this little pocketbook has illicited. Or maybe I should slap myself and say wake up you’ve got something impractical. Sometimes I enjoy plainly looking at it, and I don’t find that strange. The finer things in life are never impractical, if you use them well and often.

“I’ve got to write this down” has suddenly achieved an interesting personal twist. = )

P.S.

Check out what Thealove has to say about her notebook here: http://theaalberto.wordpress.com/2008/06/28/my-legendary-notebook/#comments

Arnel Pineda, Journey’s new vocalist, was discovered thru Youtube. A lot of us would probably say “now what are the chances of that?” You think about the foreign bands you idolize, they seem so far away, almost as if existing in a different dimension, and then one day you receive an email from one of your gods asking if you’re for real and would you like to be their new vocalist. Insane!

Then I realized how big Journey was, that Steve Perry was the original vocalist, that they’re toe-to-toe with those other 80′s one-name bands like Chicago and Toto and so on. But the most amazing thing with the story is always Arnel Pineda. I watched selections from Journey’s Chile concert from Youtube, and Pineda is for real. Close your eyes and you can imagine it is Steve Perry singing “Faithfully” (the song that landed Pineda the job) but not quite. The range is a bit farther, a bit less restrained compared to the original, the way Filipinos sing and win all these singing contests all over the world. The performance can pass for “plakado,” but listen carefully and you’ll figure out how Pineda is adding his own vocal signature to the songs. Incredible. Journey has been Filipinized, haha.

I’m writing like a fan now. Fantastic. Imagine your favorite band, then imagine fronting that band. Brilliant.

Arnel Pineda sings “Don’t Stop Believing,” and somewhere Mark Wahlberg is smiling.

Last April, we received the Calls for Promotion from the UP Administration. I was a member of my department’s Academic Personnel Committee (APC), and was tasked to assist the Chairman in all the promotion matters. Suddenly, my humdrum life as an APC member, which hitherto consisted mainly of watching fidgety and nervous teaching demonstrations from applicants, became a high-octane existence.

We, the members of the APC, worked at refining the guidelines for promotion, making sure that the “scholarly/creative work distinct to the unit” was added, so that our poets, playwrights, actors, and directors could have some share of the promotion pie. This task, because of some silly miscommunications and misunderstandings, probably took us nearly 100 man-hours to finish.

Then there was the task of collecting the portfolios of every interested faculty. The thing that bothered me with this part of the promotion was this: How could we be so strict with the submissions of our students (showing the height of anal-retentiveness by specifiying the font size and margins and folder color and paper type and format and all and refusing to check-or even accept-anything that strays from this format) and be so lax about rules and guidelines ourselves? I could only think of a handful of faculty members who followed the format of the portfolio. It was absurd. It got even more absurd when some faculty members actually argued that their format was “almost exactly like” the prescribed format, so can’t we just accept them to spare the teachers the work of having to reformat? It was crazy. Rules and formats and guidelines are exactly what they are–being a teacher doesn’t excuse you from them, in fact it’s your supreme responsibility to follow them, so that you could lead by example. Anyway, we chucked our anal-retention aside and took in the portfolios, but somehow that simple exercise of collecting them left a bad taste in my mouth.

Of course, there was the job of assigning points to the portfolios, looking for missing proofs and documentation, quadruple-checking the computations, and placing everything in the all-important matrix form. This was hands-down the most mind-numbing experience I’ve had in my career as APC member, for the simple fact that the promotion guidelines seemed written in water and open to misinterpretation. So we had to compute and recompute, and argue endlessly who got the correct interpretation of this or that guideline. Then almost daily we received emails from the Dean regarding “corrected” guidelines, so we had to go back to square one, and sometimes the work we had achieved in some of our marathon meetings (from lunch up to 9PM at one time, up to dinnertime in so many others) were scrapped.

All this work inevitably frayed our nerves. At times I seriously contemplated some form of recreation to alleviate our stress (boxing each other glove-less perhaps?). We lived, breathed, and exhaled the promotions. We were neglecting loved ones (Thealove was becoming increasingly suspicious of my “overtime”) and even ourselves. Here one piece of advice I got somewhere became very useful: never take your work home. After every marathon meeting I’d take a cold shower to wash the sweat and revitalize myself, then I would read Stephen King or The Motorcycle Diaries by Guevara to, as Wittgenstein once said, “wash the mind.”

The promotions are now out of the APC’s hands (I pray). We submitted the final matrix to the dean, including all the summaries with all the computations, remarks, and Coke Zero stains intact. 

So you see how I meant that wishing for everyone’s promotion can be self-interested. I’m not really a fan of everyone in the Department, sorry. But if somebody doesn’t get promoted, after all that brain-bleeding APC work, I’m going to be really pissed.  

Dedicated to the APC of the Department of Humanities 2007-2008 

This first entry is about car maintenance, but it is also about our way of looking at things and situations. I recently had Beetlecar serviced, so i remembered this short piece I wrote a little over two years ago, when Beetlecar and I were just getting to know each other. So many things have changed!

Sometimes world, you can be so strange. I have something fixed, and it comes back needing a bit more fixing. Or no fixing at all. Maybe I’m the one who needs to be repaired.

       My trusty Beetle was recently tuned up. I had it done because it was really scheduled to be tuned, and because I couldn’t keep up anymore with the speedfreaks in the highways. So it got tuned, and it ran better. No problems there till I subjected it to twenty minutes of turnpike driving.

At the tollgate, as I stopped, the oil light came on. Problem with the oil is always bad. I broke in a cold sweat, since the oil warning light coming on usually meant that I needed to stop and check things. Lord knows what I would find if I stopped and checked. Running the engine with oil problems could ruin it in minutes, as what most books say.

I couldn’t really get an accurate measure of the oil from the dipstick because of course most of the oil was still in the engine. Nevertheless, I poured a quart of additional oil, then drove on.

The light didn’t come on again, but my father suggested that I had the ignition timing checked. The oil light could’ve come on also because the engine got so hot. So I had the timing checked, and the mechanic swiftly diagnosed another problem, something about needing a new part. More expense. So that part was replaced, some parts like the points were inspected, and the ignition timing was corrected—sort of.

After driving back from the mechanic’s garage, I noticed the engine to be even hotter than before I had the timing “fixed.” Now the heat was really obvious, the oil smelled, and this occurred even in short travels.

I consulted the mechanic about it, and he said in exasperated tones that he had done the timing correctly and I was worrying needlessly. So I half-took his word for it. When I drove back from the garage this time, the oil light really came on and steadily.

I felt like the protagonist in Zen in the art of motorcycle maintenance, the guy who brought his overheating and seizing bike to a shop and got the bike back worse than before. He had it checked and fixed by the same shop, and again it came back worse, with more things to fix.

I was also reminded of what the Top Gear folks said regarding Mercedes ownership: it’s the road, then the shop, then the road, then back to the shop. But I didn’t have a Mercedes, I had a Volkswagen, the “people’s car.” Cars like mine aren’t too fickle, because they’re so simple that there’s little that could go wrong. But there was something wrong.

The mechanic must have thought that it was my attitude and lack of Volkswagen expertise that needed fixing. I thought it was his attitude that needed fixing—really. What a bind, isn’t it? I thought so myself, but the solution readily presented itself: I looked for another mechanic.

Turns out there was another Volkswagen mechanic within a five mile radius of my house. This other mechanic was actually just five minutes away from where I lived, instead of the previous one whose garage was about twenty minutes away without traffic. This new mechanic didn’t have a garage full of waitlisted customer’s cars, just a home garage with lots of trees and grass. This home garage was accessible by a tiny street in a small subdivision, compared to the previous mechanic’s commercial garage that was beside an especially fast curve of the national highway. All of this constituted, in my young car owner’s point of view, a world of difference. To top it all off, my new mechanic happened to be my old mechanic’s older brother. Sometimes world you can be so strange.

So I had the Bug checked, fixed, and re-checked. I even had the chance to test drive the results first before paying, something I had not thought about before. Everything was back to normal, even better. The car ran smoother and didn’t “overheat” too early.  Though the oil light came on again in standstill traffic after an hour’s worth of driving, I got assurances from other “people in the know” that there was no cause for worry unless the light came on while I was driving at moderate and high speeds. And though the changes can be attributed as psychological for my part as the owner, it made all the difference for me. I was going to have to live with a few different things from now on, like the oil light coming on more frequently than usual, or at least it was a better place to start in having things really fixed. At least I had a bit more peace of mind this time—and that was a big fix.

All of this started when nothing was actually wrong, I just wanted something to be better. Sometimes world you can be so strange.

I am an office rat. That is my personal slang for people who like to stay in the office, even when it’s not absolutely needed. I arrive a few minutes after Tita Daisy, our secretary, opens it in the morning, and I stay until it is open. I do this even if we don’t have a bundy clock to punch in and I can’t claim all the overtime hours I’ve logged in. I do it at the risk of being ostracized by people whose reputations I unconsciously impugn because my needless visibility contrasts with their conspicuous invisibility. But this is not for personal glory, and there is no holier-than-thou mentality behind my strange fixation with the office. It’s an addiction I can’t shake.

            Ever since I set foot in an office, I’ve always been attracted to them. In movies, I often am drawn to office scenes. I like office paraphernalia and furniture, such as filing cabinets and computers. I like the sound of printers at work, of phones ringing, and of papers being shuffled. I also love the lunchtime smell when everyone’s lunch aroma mixes with the cold, recycled air. Oh, I also love the free air-conditioning.

            My first memories of an office were of my mother’s. She worked in accounting, and when I was in early elementary I would tag along on overtime-weekends so that I could lure her into the comics store at the nearby mall and convince her that I needed that new issue of The Uncanny X-Men. Later on though, I noticed that I also went with my mother so that I could be in her office.

            I was fascinated with cubicles, or how three and a half short walls gave you your own personal space in such a wide, nearly depersonalized environment. I was amused at how people took off their dress shoes and wore bedroom slippers while at their desks. I smiled when I noticed that gossip and personal counseling do happen around the water dispenser, as the movies depicted.

            What captured my attention further, aside from the sights, sounds, smells, and textures that the office offered, was the important concept on which the physical existence of an office rests. This was a place where people worked. This was a place where adults made important decisions and earned money. People dressed differently in this place, their faces looked differently as well. All of these came to me as manifestations that the office, much like the church or the gym, was a special place. This was not a place to lounge around in; you had to have a purpose to be there, even if it was something mundane such as filing letters or taking out the trash. All this purposiveness fascinated me, but it also frightened me a bit.

            Unless you work in some office on the brink of foreclosure, or you simply have not understood that you have to work when you get there, time passes unnoticeably at the office. People are in a hurry, and people who aren’t are labeled and talked about derisively. People just can’t wait till the next paycheck. Cooperatives are drawn up and goods and merchandises are sold and traded during “downtimes.” People have to do something, even if it means having to gossip about one lady officemate’s surprising cosmetic makeover or how so and so is not worthy of that promotion.

            This is why, as I have earlier mentioned, I love cubicles. Unfortunately, I haven’t shown my own much love, but that is another essay. Anyway, cubicles offer you shelter from all the craziness (peripheral or otherwise) that offices cultivate. The conventional office desk tells you a lot about the person using it. Somebody should seriously study this. Why do people have all these family pictures under their glass tops? Is it because they need something to look at to remove their minds temporarily from the drudgery they call work? Is it to remind them the reason why swallowing one’s pride and not talking back to the obnoxious boss is of extreme importance? Or is it, as Seinfeld once suggested, because we are in constant danger of forgetting that we do have families and we might unwittingly blow our entire salary on hookers and booze on closing time?

            Lately I’ve been having one of those spells when I seriously contemplate on why I have this office fixation. Or, rather, my addiction to the office is temporarily waning. But, just like any office rat, I’m able to convince myself that the weekend is near. Two days away from the office, or two days spent doing something meaningful besides staring at computers and crunching numbers, will cure me and by Monday I would be itching to get back to my desk.

            I forgot to tell you that my work means I don’t have to be in the office every single working day. I teach, so office time takes second place to lecturing and classroom discussions. Also, we have the option not to teach in the summer, and we are allowed not to report to the office during the summer break. Some of you reading this might already be convinced what a nutter I am, and let me persuade you further. I actually look forward to the summer term because it gives me more time to stay in the office. An officemate frankly asked me if I still had a life. For a while I wanted to throw the photocopier at her. After a few more minutes I was asking myself the same thing.

            All this obsession with going to the office can be negative as well. If you’re always at the office, people will definitely notice your absence. You can spend days and days going to the office, doing your own personal work such as reading up on backlog lessons or typing an updated syllabus, and nobody looks for you in your little cubicle in the massive office complex. But the one freak of a day that you say to yourself “I’m not needed that much in the office today, might as well stay home so the office can save on electricity and I can watch the NBA Playoffs” is the day they need your signature for some important document or you have to report directly to the Dean for some urgent impromptu matter. Then you go to the office the following day, so guilty of your negligence that you hope somebody asks you to do something important to redeem yourself. Sometimes, this thought is enough to drive me to the office every single day. Or I could just be over-reacting. Some of my officemates have developed a sixth sense that tells them when they are needed in our office and only then do they go. I haven’t mastered it, and I envy them.

            Some people dread the thought of working in an office. They say it deadens their imagination, that they feel “boxed,” or it’s the corporate nightmare to their counter-culture dreams, that it “cramps their style,” and so on. I do not have a problem with their opinions. As far as I’m concerned, I’ve always wanted to work in an office. I’m not a workaholic, but I finish my tasks and try to be as helpful as possible—that’s as un-self-gratifying as I can put it. But I do love the office.