More than meets the eye

Time passes by so quickly that it sometimes catches me off guard. It has been one year to the day I arrived in SH. It has been a month since I went back home. It has been 6 months since a friend entered military service (as I told him repeatedly "never pick up the soap!"). One good friend (a former boss) just marked a significant milestone (wish I could give her a ruby for it if you get the drift). And an old roommate from my college days recently spent several days here in my humble abode. This human rights advocate is now based in Bangkok (talk about the best location right now for a human rights org...) after having spent her internship in Geneva. Talking until the wee hours was all we did. It felt like deja vu. The only difference is we were not in the dorm. But the topics remained the same - of life, liberty and property! Although I could say another issue closer to our hearts dominated our conversations (One guess hahaha).

I had a good Japanese lunch with my headhunter last Friday who was obviously trying to test my mettle in eating exotic food. Too bad for him. He never knew I was that adventurous. So the bill turned out to be quite expensive for him. =)

07-07-07 seems to be a great day for a lot of things. For one, there is Live Earth the concert against global warming. They had ones in the cities that I love (Hamburg and SH). The commercials were nicely done. I wish the message would really cut across and be remembered. Another memorable event was the announcement of the 7 new wonders of the world. I had actually voted and only got 4 of them. It seems like lobbying worked for some of the sites. Too bad for Cambodia.

Watching the Transformers was like a trip down memory lane. Hot cars, hot men (Josh Duhamel...ok Shia LeBeouf who is the IT boy of the moment with Indiana Jones as his next movie), hot girls, funny script (that Visa call was really funny), lots of fighting scenes...too bad Jazz had to die. And I hate Megatron's appearance. Well, who cares about the plot when you have all those dazzling Autobots lining up!

Optimus Prime: With the Allspark gone, we cannot return life to our planet. And fate has yielded its reward: a new world to call home. We live among its people now in plain sight, but watching over them in secret, waiting, protecting. I have witnessed their capacity for courage, and though we are worlds apart, like us, there's more to them than meets the eye. I am Optimus Prime, and I send this message to any surviving Autobots taking refuge among the stars: we are here, we are waiting.

After reading Al Gore's The Assault on Reason, I realized that indeed my home country can be best described as the 51st state, for it copies even the problems of Uncle Sam! Gore's treatise on how the politics of fear, secrecy and blind faith subvert wise decision-making, degrade democracy and imperil the country and the world may have had the Philippines as a setting. As he succinctly emphasizes in the end: "The question before us could be of no greater moment: Will we continue to live as a people under the rule of law as embodied in our Constitution? Or will we fail future generations by leaving them a Constitution far diminished from the charter of liberty we have inherited from our forebears? Our choice is clear."