The Irate Spectator

I miss my old High School Batchmates. Being immersed in this Hellhole of a college with its mountains of papers to submit and exams to study for (which is exactly what I'm supposed to be doing right now), makes me feel some nostalgia to the carefree days of High School when i could make the Honor's list without passing any projects and all the books we had to read could be retrieved out of my trusty backpack. Nowadays, miss a single paper and your grade plunges to the abyss and you have to spend half a school day wandering around hunting for reading materials you need to have a photocopy of for tomorrow's exam.

Speaking of wandering around, back in High School you had your own room where you could stay for the whole day with your own people to chill with, unlike in college where you spend a full one-fourth of the day just looking for a place to chill. And the people, college people are like boarders in a dormitory(which most of them are really). One minute there here, a second later their off to class or to a watering hole or a mall or God knows where. High School people, on the other hand, you're stuck with them so you might as well make the best of it and join them in their plot to sneak past the unsuspecting security guard to a wonderful place wher you can all play DOTA...

Yes, those were the days. Which is why I always look forward to reunions with my high school buddies although College cruelty truly knows no bounds and keeps me so busy that when a text message tells me to go to this place where my batchmates will be trooping together I can only sigh and grumble about having to finish my case digests so I can't come. Fortunately, I run into them from time to time, while wating for the ferry, at the V-hire terminal, even in school, some of my batchmates go to the same university as me after all. I welcome these chance encounters very much although lately I find these quite unsettling, honestly.

When we get together, conversation inevitably wanders to our other batchmates. Earlier I would hear things like, "Did you hear? So-and-so is a Dean's Lister!" or "Well, So-and-so and his girl are still together." Pretty usual stuff punctuated now and then by a few more out of the blue remarks like "So-and-so and Blah-blah-blah broke up!" and "So-and-so stopped schooling this semester." But the unsettling part is the shocking "SO-AND-SO GOT PREGNANT!!". And its getting more and more frequent.

But of course, by saying I'm not making any judgements in any way. PMS happens with people my age and I'm perfectly aware of that. A lot of mornings, usually the one after Valentine's, I wake up and wonder how many people I know got laid last night for some reason. I can be quite loony sometimes. Anyway, this isn't just speculation i have the statistics to prove that more young people are having sex and people who have sex are getting younger. For Example, the 2002 State of the Philippine Population Report said 16% of young people had sexual encounters before age 15, and that was like six years ago. Plus, the Young Adult Fertility and Sexuality Study concluded that the mean age of sexual encounters were 17 for males and 18 for females (as a side note it also said pornographic acculturation occurs at a mean age of 15 quite high by my estimates.. ;D).

But I'm boring you with numbers, suffice it to say more young people are having sex and as a consequence, more young people are getting pregnant and I can attest to that personally. This is why we need to do something about this problem and don't talk to me about moral renewal or something. That's the Church's job and frankly, if it did its job there wouldn't have been a problem. We don't need some Manichaean moralizing on the evils of the flesh. What we need is a concrete government policy to address this problem of teenage pregnancy and that's why i have always suported the really controversial, but gradually being forgotten, House Bill 5043 or the (in)famous Reporductive Health Bill. I won't go into the details of this piece of legislation, having done so lots of times before somewhere else, but I will say that it isn't like the old Population Control Bills that preceded it. It focuses, as the title suggests, on Reproductive Health and any population result there would just be a positive externality. One of its provisions also mandate reproductive health and sexuality education for students beginning the Fifth Grade, which is actually already available in some schools - I had reproductive and sexuality topics integrated in some of my subjects way back Grade 4. This is especially aimed at young people who honestly don't know what they're getting into when they "get into it".

That's why let's all urge for the passage of HB 5043. I did my part. The USC-SSC passed a resolution expressing support for the Bill authored by myself and co-sponsored by my colleagues Hon. Rojas and Hon. Kho. I also sent a copy to the Reproductive Health Advocacy Network (RHAN) to show our solidarity with other sectors in pushsing for the passage of the RH Bill. Until then, I'm hoping that the next time I cross paths with a High School friend, we can talk about a batchmate who won a beauty pageant or something.

And so ends 2008 and so begins 2009. As another year ends, yet another begins to take its place. Change is the only thing constant,as they say, and the changing of the calendar has been constant since human beings invented the things.

An endless cycle of beginning and end that's what this all is. Sounds pretty harmless at first, but once you think about it, it starts to look real scary.

Imagine, being trapped in a never-ending cycle, condemned to keep beginning, then ending and then beginning again, ending that beginning and just repeating that cycle on and on. Just like that guy from Greek mythology who was condemned by the gods to push a boulder up a mountain. When he takes a break, the boulder rolls back down. And yes, he has to push it back up again.

And for what is all of this for? You begin so that someday you will end and you end so that you can begin anew. Ours is an existence with no sense of purpose, no idea why we must go through with all this, absolutely nothing to look forward to and make us feel that we are doing all this for a reason. No, we just trudge on, dragging ourselves to another day, concerning ourselves with the myriad trivialities we find ourselves facing, then dragging ourselves out. Before you know it, we dragged ourselves in and out of three hundred sixty five days and it's time to change the calendar. Just an endless cycle of beginning and ending. Fortunately, our trivial pursuits give us little bite-size servings of purpose that keeps us from asking, "What's the point of all this?"

From attempts to find the answer to this question began religion. Hindus and Buddhists make it their ultimate goal of finding a way out of their endless cycle, birth and rebirth for Hindus, suffering for Buddhists. Hindus try to attain this with their karma, bhakti or jnanani. I won't discuss in detail because it's so complicated I got lost in the middle of attempting to understand. My apologies to my Asian History professor, who is quite a capable teacher really. Buddhism sounds easier, albeit in a slilghtly deceptive manner. All we have to do is find enlightenment. Yeah, like that's easy.

Meanwhile, Christianity makes it all simpler. We don't get reincarnated, we are taught. But our souls will all be restless unless we find rest in Him. We must become one with God and understand His plan for us and live by it. Simple, reasonable, rational and more humanistic. No wonder Christianity spread all over the world. Or was it the frailes gripping the coattails of Imperialism that spread Christianity? Anyway, the Muslims have it even more simple: Follow the five pillars of Islam and maybe wage a little jihad if you have to and you'll do just fine.

Regardless of what creed you follow, everything just goes around and around. The triumphs and achievements of humanity with the follies and perversions it proliferates. The unspeakable beauty and order found in nature and its cataclysmic wrath that claims the lives of ordinary mortals minding their own business. War and peace, life and death, prosperity and poverty, joy and sorrow, and love.

Well, love is something of a special case. It doesn't really alternate with its antithesis of hate the same way with the above, as it does not necessarily follow that where there is no love there is hate. Nonetheless, it is not devoid of a cyclical nature.

Consider, you find love for the first time. Everything is great. Birds sing in the trees. Sunshine illuminates your whole world. Chocolate raindrops fall from the sky. Then it ends. You are plunged in a depression worse than anyhting inflicted by subprime mortgage and speculative capital run amok. Eventually, after splurging or consuming large amounts of alcoholic beverages or whatever is necessary to cheer you up, you get over it and move on. But suddenly one day, it all starts again. The sun pulls its shutters back, the birds go back to their places and a chocolate rain cloud is hastily dispatched to your location. And just as suddenly, it ends.

An endless cycle of beginning and end. That's what this all is. We wake up everyday not because we really want to but because there's just nothing damn better to do. But maybe, just maybe, if we can set aside some time, despite being completely immersed in this sorry excuse for a life that we are in, to looking for something, or even someone, with the potential to make this pathetic existence bearable, then it's almost as if we already found a way to actually make this pathetic existence bearable, even if we just hope.