A MERRY CHRISTMAS TO ALL!

I'm sure you foresaw this entry, but no one I know (see links to blogs) seems to have done it yet. So, here's a post wishing all of you a merry Christmas.

Now that the year is almost over, I am tying up loose ends and doing a little reflection. However, I am beginning to feel that nothing really ends, it all just goes on and on. I try to make sense of things by organizing experiences into discrete little episodes, but maybe that's just me and what my little mind can contemplate. So here I am, thinking about my past, present and future, quite perplexed yet still holding it together.

The funny thing is, I can't imagine having it any other way.

Lion Dance of Love

I attended a wedding reception last Sunday in Makati, and the program included a very unusual number: a lion dance. I've seen some lion dances over the years, but I've never seen a dance at a reception before, so this was a first.

There were two lions, and since it was a wedding, they were depicted as "love" lions. So, I guess you can try imagining the routine. The two lions were in foreplay throughout the entire performance. Thankfully, there were acrobatic feats to break the monotony, like the lions jumping from one high place to another and standing on their "hind legs." It was quite entertaining, but i think they went slightly overboard with the "love" bit. At one point, the "lions" were sniffing each other and giving each other back rubs. I am well aware that these are mythical beasts played by two people in special costumes, but if you watch animal planet, you know what comes after the sniffing and preening. I don't mean to sound prudish, but I never thought of the lion dance in that context before.

Overall, I found the reception interesting. There was an effort to present the wedding reception in a different style. There weren't any doves, the poor birds with clipped wings that sit throughout the wedding only to be released into the glaring lights and some kid's eager hands. The program didn't involve tipsy uncles belting out karaoke songs. And there was the lion dance. I wonder what those inspired wedding planners are going to think of next - and how much the sponsors are going to pay for it.

I am the pilot

How sad yet hopeful at the same time.

Collective Guilt

After the flooding in Central Luzon, what just happened makes me think twice about specifying wood. The government will punish the illegal loggers, but how about those who use the wood?

The Dispossessed

I am now reading Ursula Le Guin's The Dispossessed. I would like to thank Yo and Hong for recommending this excellent author. The different worlds she created in the book are very detailed and interesting. I cannot help but interpret the different societies portrayed in this work of science fiction to be rather extreme versions of the ones we have had throughout history.

From my choice of reading materials as of late, I guess I am turning out to be a fan of both utopian and dystopian fiction and non-fiction. I wonder if this has anything to do with my chosen career or my favorite childhood pastime. I used to imagine entire cities of talking animals: rabbits, birds, etc. and often made up situations wherein the different animals interacted with each other in the form of comics and short stories. I guess people were too difficult to draw or maybe too real and complicated to make fantastic stories of at that age. Haha, the ideas I had then were pretty strange. Maybe too much David Attenborough and Looney Tunes in the morning.