It's the last day of April and I feel like I'm going to miss the month. This year's has been a different kind due to La Nina-caused showers. It made the air cooler and the usually fierce equatorial sun during this time of the year bearable.
I remember being in Bangkok early in April last year and the intense heat I had to conquer just to maximize my visit. It was a special time in my life and it's funny how easily it was already a year ago.
I'm looking forward to May, my favorite month of the year in my childhood. Light rains start falling in the Philippines come May, and flowers start to bloom, and everybody gets a relief from the torrid March-April heat. May is also when the May flower parades of flores de Mayo happen. Most unoccupied little to teen-age girls look forward to joining this parade where you get made-up and dressed-up in special gowns.
Santacruzan, the bigger event, is normally prefaced by the flores de Mayo.
Wednesday, April 30, 2008
Monday, April 28, 2008
Grand pliè in second position
As I was clearing my wallet of all-important documents (pieces of paper with phone numbers, grocery and bank receipts), I chanced upon my scribbling on a little piece of scratch paper detailing where I should go to get my ballet gears. The information was from a staff of the Singapore Dance Theatre (SDT) who I inquired upon from months back.
A sense of gratitude washed over me as I realized how I have moved on from that point when I was just planning my move. Indeed, things happen in my seemingly boring life. I am now taking my Beginners’ Ballet Course with SDT and have actually gone to that store that I scribbled to get my first pair of ballet shoes.
I’m well on my way to my third lesson this coming Friday and I’m glad I did not quit after the trying first class (also considered the trial class) which rendered me immobile the day after. The second class seemed easier than the first, or maybe I just got better at the steps too. And according to my teacher, I do an amazing grand pliè in second position, even better than she does due to her short Achilles. Nothing could have made my after-office Friday night better. The call-out for my other mistakes did not matter anymore after hearing what she said. My perfect grand pliè in second position was a laurel in my crown that would never go away.
Ballet movements, like in Pilates, rely heavily on the stomach muscles. I have mentioned that I don’t have them strong and I feel truly excited about attending a Pilates class and deciding to attend a ballet class simultaneously. The combination is probably the therapy that my back has needed from long way back.
Ballet has interested me since I joined a jazz dance performance group. It was hard for me to catch-up with long-time dancers with dance class background and they made me feel like I needed to know the basics to be a better dancer. I noticed how much ballet movements are borrowed by jazz and how ‘finding one’s center’ seems very important in these dances. I was also often called out upon about looking down on the floor while I’m doing my floor exercises; and this made me realize the importance of maintaining the proper posture while doing the dance. Hence, I bore it mind that ballet is good in helping people with their balance and their posture. So far, my classes have proven such to be true.
So for people who are looking for means with which they can improve their posture and balance and who do not mind the rigors of dancing with discipline, I would say ballet is for you.
A sense of gratitude washed over me as I realized how I have moved on from that point when I was just planning my move. Indeed, things happen in my seemingly boring life. I am now taking my Beginners’ Ballet Course with SDT and have actually gone to that store that I scribbled to get my first pair of ballet shoes.
I’m well on my way to my third lesson this coming Friday and I’m glad I did not quit after the trying first class (also considered the trial class) which rendered me immobile the day after. The second class seemed easier than the first, or maybe I just got better at the steps too. And according to my teacher, I do an amazing grand pliè in second position, even better than she does due to her short Achilles. Nothing could have made my after-office Friday night better. The call-out for my other mistakes did not matter anymore after hearing what she said. My perfect grand pliè in second position was a laurel in my crown that would never go away.
Ballet movements, like in Pilates, rely heavily on the stomach muscles. I have mentioned that I don’t have them strong and I feel truly excited about attending a Pilates class and deciding to attend a ballet class simultaneously. The combination is probably the therapy that my back has needed from long way back.
Ballet has interested me since I joined a jazz dance performance group. It was hard for me to catch-up with long-time dancers with dance class background and they made me feel like I needed to know the basics to be a better dancer. I noticed how much ballet movements are borrowed by jazz and how ‘finding one’s center’ seems very important in these dances. I was also often called out upon about looking down on the floor while I’m doing my floor exercises; and this made me realize the importance of maintaining the proper posture while doing the dance. Hence, I bore it mind that ballet is good in helping people with their balance and their posture. So far, my classes have proven such to be true.
So for people who are looking for means with which they can improve their posture and balance and who do not mind the rigors of dancing with discipline, I would say ballet is for you.
Monday, March 3, 2008
Parallels between the Philippines and Thailand
Old article but I kept it because I started feeling a connection to Thailand (beyond Bangkok being a place to shop) only after the 2006 coup. Will discuss more in the future.
From: Asia Times Online
A Thai pointer for the Philippines
By Roby Alampay
BANGKOK - Ordinary Thais have been posing for pictures beside tanks and offering flowers to smiling soldiers, a strong signal that Thailand's bloodless military coup on Tuesday has been warmly received by the country's urban-based upper and middle classes.
Their new military leaders have assured the country that power will be restored to a civilian government within two weeks of the coup that deposed caretaker premier Thaksin Shinawatra. Under a timetable laid out by the coup leaders, new general elections should be held by October 2007, perhaps in time for a new democratically elected government to ratify a new constitution.
Before and beyond all that, however, Thais have also begun a process of soul-searching for their democracy. Underneath the celebratory mood that has embraced the military in Bangkok, there are questions and anxiety over what exactly they are thanking their generals for.
Interestingly, it is not only Thais who are keen to learn from their reflections. Filipinos, who are not known to stay in touch with Southeast Asian politics as much as they are deeply aware of US foreign policy, have uncharacteristically been following the developments in Thailand like genuinely concerned - or at least curious - neighbors.
On one level, "Martial law in Thailand" was a striking headline and a convenient news peg for Philippine reflection on September 21, the same day Filipinos observed the 34th anniversary of the imposition of military rule under the Ferdinand Marcos dictatorship. Beyond the date, however, the Philippines is watching Thailand because of the uncanny parallels in the travails of Southeast Asia's minority democratic states.
In particular, Filipinos see in the Thai saga much of what they had contended with under former president Joseph Estrada and the incumbent who replaced him, Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo. Arroyo's ascension to the presidency in 2001 after a "soft" military coup - backed by the middle class but resented by the majority poor who had elected Estrada - raised painful questions for Philippine democracy, and bruised the very notion of "people power" in the country that gave birth to the term.
Since then, questions over her government's legitimacy, charges that she and her family are corrupt, and the perception validated by Supreme Court reprimands that she had been flouting the constitution to weaken all opposition to her government have left Filipinos divided over Arroyo's full six-year term.
Like Thaksin, however, Arroyo actually won that term in open elections. Her party's majority control of Congress, in fact, has defeated all attempts to impeach her. Now she wants to amend the constitution and shift the Philippines to a parliamentary form of government, raising even more hackles because under current laws she is not eligible to run for re-election as president but conceivably could as prime minister.
After the coup in Thailand, many Filipino politicians are wondering aloud about the possibilities should the parallels be allowed to continue. It is clear that Thaksin's ouster is being welcomed by the powerful middle class, and perhaps even by investors, and the understanding that the coup had the blessings of Thailand's revered King Bhumibol Adulyadej has calmed the rest of Thai society - including, most notably, the poor and rural communities from which Thaksin derived his political base.
Abusing democracy
Thailand's Bangkok-based voters came to loathe Thaksin after five years in power because of widespread perceptions that his administration was unusually corrupt and greedy, and because his dominant Thai Rak Thai (TRT) party clearly had designs on installing a de facto one-party system in the kingdom. The poor, on the other hand, embraced Thaksin's populist policies that, among other things, gave them universal health care and debt relief, though without fully explaining how his government would pay for all these gifts down the road.
With this as a backdrop, a consensus had built that Thaksin was driving a wedge between rich and poor so as to entrench himself in power. He was forced by massive Bangkok-based anti-government demonstrations to declare snap elections this April. After massive irregularities, those poll results, which his party won with a diminished majority, were annulled and new elections were scheduled for November. The conventional wisdom until the coup was that Thaksin's TRT was bound to lose votes, but also that it would retain its parliamentary majority.
In other words, after last year's and this year's Thai "people power" street protests, the nullification of an election result and the dissolution and revamping of the country's Election Commission, Thaksin seemed destined to emerge again as democratically elected prime minister. But Thai society would have been further divided by a victory for the status quo.
Hence the coup that many in Thailand insist has provided a way out of the mess. But there is now also a clear ambivalence - as Filipinos felt in 2001 - over the fact that it took the military to break a political impasse. When it takes the army to move a stalled democracy, in which direction is society really headed?
Thitinan Pongsudhirak, a political-science professor at Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok, acknowledges that Thai democracy has taken a blow: "With the revocation of the Thai constitution, this is a 15-year reversal."
But democracy, he told a capacity crowd at the Foreign Correspondents Club in Bangkok the day after the coup, "is not one size fits all". He urged the Western world for "a more nuanced definition. I don't condone the coup, but it must be taken in a broader perspective."
That perspective includes the premise that Thai democracy is not merely imperfect; like that of the Philippines, it is deeply flawed. Both countries had emerged from decades of military rule with progressive constitutions, committing themselves to democracy and all its trappings: independent courts, press freedom, institutionalized checks and balances - everything to free their people as well as to impress the wider world, Western democracies in particular.
And yet Filipinos and Thais over the past six years could only concede that, among other things, the checks and balances weren't working. Elections weren't free of money and fair for all. The constitution is shot full of loopholes that elected politicians gleefully exploit. Corruption is getting worse, not better.
Thitinan says the problems feed into a vicious cycle of constitutional change, elections, corruption, public discontent, military intervention, and then back to constitutional change again. Through it all and at every stage, he said, "a sense of entitlement" fuels the cycle and corrupts every intervening player, be it the military, the opposition, the media, or even civil society. To break the cycle, he offered that this sense of entitlement must be defeated and that "we must not rely too much on constitutional change".
Back in the Philippines, oppositionists have seized on the Thai coup to rebut Arroyo's insistence that a shift to a parliamentary government will bring about stability. Clearly, they say, it is all messier than that. As outgoing Thai senator Kraisak Choonhavan poignantly put it: "Outsiders do not understand what we have to go through to fight an elected government."
It is a painful conclusion to reach: that the democracy you fought so hard to regain has been abused to the point that it is no longer recognizably different from what it ostensibly replaced. But when that conclusion is perceived to be unassailable, Thais ask, what choice is there to be had? It is the same question Filipinos have been asking for years.
Roby Alampay is a Filipino journalist currently based in Bangkok as executive director of the Southeast Asian Press Alliance. The article reflects his personal thoughts and commentary.
(Copyright 2006 Roby Alampay.)
From: Asia Times Online
A Thai pointer for the Philippines
By Roby Alampay
BANGKOK - Ordinary Thais have been posing for pictures beside tanks and offering flowers to smiling soldiers, a strong signal that Thailand's bloodless military coup on Tuesday has been warmly received by the country's urban-based upper and middle classes.
Their new military leaders have assured the country that power will be restored to a civilian government within two weeks of the coup that deposed caretaker premier Thaksin Shinawatra. Under a timetable laid out by the coup leaders, new general elections should be held by October 2007, perhaps in time for a new democratically elected government to ratify a new constitution.
Before and beyond all that, however, Thais have also begun a process of soul-searching for their democracy. Underneath the celebratory mood that has embraced the military in Bangkok, there are questions and anxiety over what exactly they are thanking their generals for.
Interestingly, it is not only Thais who are keen to learn from their reflections. Filipinos, who are not known to stay in touch with Southeast Asian politics as much as they are deeply aware of US foreign policy, have uncharacteristically been following the developments in Thailand like genuinely concerned - or at least curious - neighbors.
On one level, "Martial law in Thailand" was a striking headline and a convenient news peg for Philippine reflection on September 21, the same day Filipinos observed the 34th anniversary of the imposition of military rule under the Ferdinand Marcos dictatorship. Beyond the date, however, the Philippines is watching Thailand because of the uncanny parallels in the travails of Southeast Asia's minority democratic states.
In particular, Filipinos see in the Thai saga much of what they had contended with under former president Joseph Estrada and the incumbent who replaced him, Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo. Arroyo's ascension to the presidency in 2001 after a "soft" military coup - backed by the middle class but resented by the majority poor who had elected Estrada - raised painful questions for Philippine democracy, and bruised the very notion of "people power" in the country that gave birth to the term.
Since then, questions over her government's legitimacy, charges that she and her family are corrupt, and the perception validated by Supreme Court reprimands that she had been flouting the constitution to weaken all opposition to her government have left Filipinos divided over Arroyo's full six-year term.
Like Thaksin, however, Arroyo actually won that term in open elections. Her party's majority control of Congress, in fact, has defeated all attempts to impeach her. Now she wants to amend the constitution and shift the Philippines to a parliamentary form of government, raising even more hackles because under current laws she is not eligible to run for re-election as president but conceivably could as prime minister.
After the coup in Thailand, many Filipino politicians are wondering aloud about the possibilities should the parallels be allowed to continue. It is clear that Thaksin's ouster is being welcomed by the powerful middle class, and perhaps even by investors, and the understanding that the coup had the blessings of Thailand's revered King Bhumibol Adulyadej has calmed the rest of Thai society - including, most notably, the poor and rural communities from which Thaksin derived his political base.
Abusing democracy
Thailand's Bangkok-based voters came to loathe Thaksin after five years in power because of widespread perceptions that his administration was unusually corrupt and greedy, and because his dominant Thai Rak Thai (TRT) party clearly had designs on installing a de facto one-party system in the kingdom. The poor, on the other hand, embraced Thaksin's populist policies that, among other things, gave them universal health care and debt relief, though without fully explaining how his government would pay for all these gifts down the road.
With this as a backdrop, a consensus had built that Thaksin was driving a wedge between rich and poor so as to entrench himself in power. He was forced by massive Bangkok-based anti-government demonstrations to declare snap elections this April. After massive irregularities, those poll results, which his party won with a diminished majority, were annulled and new elections were scheduled for November. The conventional wisdom until the coup was that Thaksin's TRT was bound to lose votes, but also that it would retain its parliamentary majority.
In other words, after last year's and this year's Thai "people power" street protests, the nullification of an election result and the dissolution and revamping of the country's Election Commission, Thaksin seemed destined to emerge again as democratically elected prime minister. But Thai society would have been further divided by a victory for the status quo.
Hence the coup that many in Thailand insist has provided a way out of the mess. But there is now also a clear ambivalence - as Filipinos felt in 2001 - over the fact that it took the military to break a political impasse. When it takes the army to move a stalled democracy, in which direction is society really headed?
Thitinan Pongsudhirak, a political-science professor at Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok, acknowledges that Thai democracy has taken a blow: "With the revocation of the Thai constitution, this is a 15-year reversal."
But democracy, he told a capacity crowd at the Foreign Correspondents Club in Bangkok the day after the coup, "is not one size fits all". He urged the Western world for "a more nuanced definition. I don't condone the coup, but it must be taken in a broader perspective."
That perspective includes the premise that Thai democracy is not merely imperfect; like that of the Philippines, it is deeply flawed. Both countries had emerged from decades of military rule with progressive constitutions, committing themselves to democracy and all its trappings: independent courts, press freedom, institutionalized checks and balances - everything to free their people as well as to impress the wider world, Western democracies in particular.
And yet Filipinos and Thais over the past six years could only concede that, among other things, the checks and balances weren't working. Elections weren't free of money and fair for all. The constitution is shot full of loopholes that elected politicians gleefully exploit. Corruption is getting worse, not better.
Thitinan says the problems feed into a vicious cycle of constitutional change, elections, corruption, public discontent, military intervention, and then back to constitutional change again. Through it all and at every stage, he said, "a sense of entitlement" fuels the cycle and corrupts every intervening player, be it the military, the opposition, the media, or even civil society. To break the cycle, he offered that this sense of entitlement must be defeated and that "we must not rely too much on constitutional change".
Back in the Philippines, oppositionists have seized on the Thai coup to rebut Arroyo's insistence that a shift to a parliamentary government will bring about stability. Clearly, they say, it is all messier than that. As outgoing Thai senator Kraisak Choonhavan poignantly put it: "Outsiders do not understand what we have to go through to fight an elected government."
It is a painful conclusion to reach: that the democracy you fought so hard to regain has been abused to the point that it is no longer recognizably different from what it ostensibly replaced. But when that conclusion is perceived to be unassailable, Thais ask, what choice is there to be had? It is the same question Filipinos have been asking for years.
Roby Alampay is a Filipino journalist currently based in Bangkok as executive director of the Southeast Asian Press Alliance. The article reflects his personal thoughts and commentary.
(Copyright 2006 Roby Alampay.)
Wednesday, February 20, 2008
Abs of steel
Mine is not.
I resorted to taking Pilates classes to keep fit and I was very much satisfied with my experience in my first class.
Pilates makes you sweat out without you having to move around so much which is good for the joints. The whole regimen makes you carry your body relying solely on your muscles. Tough but very satisfying once you are able to carry out the routine.
Highly recommended for everyone. Now, Pilates is sharing the top spot in my best exercises list with jazz dance. Try it.
I resorted to taking Pilates classes to keep fit and I was very much satisfied with my experience in my first class.
Pilates makes you sweat out without you having to move around so much which is good for the joints. The whole regimen makes you carry your body relying solely on your muscles. Tough but very satisfying once you are able to carry out the routine.
Highly recommended for everyone. Now, Pilates is sharing the top spot in my best exercises list with jazz dance. Try it.
Tuesday, February 5, 2008
Believe in dreams, they still come true
This morning I was talking to my seatmate about how I long to travel to Europe and how I don’t have the money to do such. If only, I said, someone would come up to me and hand me millions of dollars and tell me to use it to travel to Europe and more.
My seatmate was quite cynical. She thought I would have to give something in return for the money, like dirty favors.
I said that wasn’t my idea. The money should be given to me just because; out of something that I won’t need to know of. Jokes, if anything was needed in return, were the only thing I could give. To give happiness through my good jokes.
And then, a few minutes ago, I went to the Yahoo! Website and witnessed the news from Good Morning America about this certain couple who met a stranger in a restaurant who gave them a blank check. They were told to write any amount of money they would like. They didn’t think it was serious but went along writing $100,000 on it and then validated the check the following day anyway. It turned out that there was indeed money backing the check and that they had it for themselves. The only condition they had to fulfill was to use the money for acquiring a house, and to name their next baby after their benefactor.
I’m not sure if it was quite their dream to have a stranger come up to them to give them money for no particular reason, nevertheless, I saw my dream come true to them and I’m quite pleased to know that my idea wasn’t at all impossible. It can and it indeed happened to other people. Now if that benefactor can only come to me.
Incidentally, I just happened to think about listening to the Beatles’ Across the Universe this afternoon.
Jai Guru Deva Om (some say would mean Victory to God Divine or salutations to the guru)
Indeed. Amen.
My seatmate was quite cynical. She thought I would have to give something in return for the money, like dirty favors.
I said that wasn’t my idea. The money should be given to me just because; out of something that I won’t need to know of. Jokes, if anything was needed in return, were the only thing I could give. To give happiness through my good jokes.
And then, a few minutes ago, I went to the Yahoo! Website and witnessed the news from Good Morning America about this certain couple who met a stranger in a restaurant who gave them a blank check. They were told to write any amount of money they would like. They didn’t think it was serious but went along writing $100,000 on it and then validated the check the following day anyway. It turned out that there was indeed money backing the check and that they had it for themselves. The only condition they had to fulfill was to use the money for acquiring a house, and to name their next baby after their benefactor.
I’m not sure if it was quite their dream to have a stranger come up to them to give them money for no particular reason, nevertheless, I saw my dream come true to them and I’m quite pleased to know that my idea wasn’t at all impossible. It can and it indeed happened to other people. Now if that benefactor can only come to me.
Incidentally, I just happened to think about listening to the Beatles’ Across the Universe this afternoon.
Jai Guru Deva Om (some say would mean Victory to God Divine or salutations to the guru)
Indeed. Amen.
Monday, November 26, 2007
Lesson from Aristotle for me
To achieve success:
First, have a definite, clear practical ideal; a goal, an objective. Second, have the necessary means to achieve your ends: wisdom, money, materials and methods. Third, adjust all your means to that end.
Note to self: please listen and do.
First, have a definite, clear practical ideal; a goal, an objective. Second, have the necessary means to achieve your ends: wisdom, money, materials and methods. Third, adjust all your means to that end.
Note to self: please listen and do.
Saturday, November 17, 2007
If I were a Sesame Street character
Which Sesame Street Character Are You? | |
 | You are Elmo. You are lovable and ticklish, and always inquisitive. Sometimes, though, your excitement about the world can make you seem childish, naive, and occasionally irritating to others. |
| Find Your Character @ BrainFall.com | |
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