Want a (cup) of Filipino?

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/p00hgk3l

In the first three weeks of September this ending pandemic-infested year, I was revisiting two BBC documentaries: one was Western Civilization: A Personal View by Kenneth Clarke; The Story of Art Painting by Sister Wendy Beckett, another.

The greatest BBC documentary ever was being said of that was the former (which is why I would again and again revisit it again, which somehow I could not do unless I leave where I am often in - the Westernmost province of Canada, British Columbia.) There are only humble reasons why I’d go back to Sister Wendy’s: I just didn’t know enough about art. I remember her before memorably explaining to me great art paintings.

It is to explain our own existence as well why I am hovering, watching these documentaries. I currently don’t have a job, and have time on my hands. I wanted to know - and still want to know- whether we do matter at all. Or, of course we do, but when. . . at what point?

Viewing Sister Wendy’s first episodes of her 1990s documentary made the answer I was seeking obvious: we never really mattered until Christ came here. This said, all art before his arrival, was all that I should start looking for before Wednesday. Come Wednesday, the middle of the week, can I tell myself Christ has already come (the universe being weekly remade by God every week) and then only from that point should we really start looking at ourselves, whom God did found worthy of assuming being.

Si Fitz. Si Ariane. Si Nikka. Si Jose. Si Patrick. Si Vanielyn. Si Minette. Si Kaye. Si Mae. Si Tanya. Si Coreen. Yung may takip yung mukha. Si Teressa. Si Alan. Yung nakayuko. si Elaine. Si Kim. Si Fitz.

Nakalimutan ko sa gitna si Ishe. Nakalimutan ko ring si Teressa nga pala si Tix.

You: What’s the point of reading a story when it is so long?

Speaker: So that I could have something to speak.

You: Why do you not speak instead to me?

Speaker: Because bad breath doesn't smell if you hear me through recording

In 1995, I left for the Philippines from America. Jose is one who arrived in America at 12, whereas I with my own family of 5, arrived twelve-years younger, and stayed there for five years until two years upon Jose’s arrival. Having been separated from America since 1995, until 2007, when I went to the continent for Canadian-university campus visits, I see Jose filling the gap of my life, the could-have-been-me scenario had I not lived in the Philippines but instead in America from ages 6-to-17. What we don’t have in common (and what we do both DON’T HAVE in common), respectively, are those 5 years he had in America starting 12 and 5 years in America from the age of 6 to to that of 11. In that case, we both experienced the Philippines in those ages of mine from 1996-2001 that in his case were the 1987 to the beginning of August, 1993. I assume he was just in the Philippines those latter frame of years.

I was born on December 31. In the scale of one-year only as regards the creation of the universe, December 31 is the date we us humans ourselves were born.

Specifically, I was born at 3:02 AM (birth certificate). Using the one-year-only entire duration of this universe we all live in, I must have been born at a time when we weren’t there yet (but 2180 millennia or 2.18 billion years of life did already unfold.)

Successfully buying at Fully Booked, Alabang Town Center Volume 1 of My Struggle by Karl Knausgaard