Thoughts on valentines day

Is it time to fall in love again? This question occurred to me over the weekend. The boy in the house (who has had a girlfriend since last year) was asking about how to get to Dangwa (the depot for fresh flowers in Manila) and about prices in general of valentines day gifts and I could not relate. In the college where I teach, I scheduled a major examination on Valentines Day (and warned students that failure to show up would result in dire consequences). Bah! I was in SM window-shopping for a new backpack and I found the valentines day displays cheesy and tacky. I have become the valentines day equivalent of Christmas’ Uncle Scrooge. Nooooooooooo!

Not that Valentines Day was ever a big deal in my life the way Christmas or Good Friday is. And please do not get me wrong, I am not exactly heartless. I can be romantic when the situation is ripe for it. I think my problem is something similar to performance anxiety - I can not be romantic on cue. For me, valentines is best spent with friends in as normal an environment as possible. And up until two years ago, when careers and tempers started to get in the way, this was how our barkada celebrated valentines – as a group taunting couples (never mind if there were couples within our barkada).

Yesterday, I caught Kris Aquino on television being serenaded by two men (James Yap and Boy Abunda) with that song that goes "you will always be beautiful." I am not a Kris Aquino fan and I can not relate with her "If it can happen to me, it can happen to you too" logic. For one, she is Kris Aquino and whatever happens to her, good or bad, is not just the same when it happens to somebody else. But there was something between her and James Yap that appealed to me – a kind of innocence and naivete.

And that really got me into thinking that these are crazy times that we live in. There are so many things in the world today that simply do not make sense. Perhaps falling madly in love and doing crazy things in the name of love just make so much more sense than politics or economics or social justice.

So by all means, lovers out there, get crazy, get madly, wantonly, giddily in love!

Happy Valentines.


Comments

Sean Saba said…
Happy Valentine's Day, Bongie!
As always, I wish you the BEST of LUCK in LIFE, LOVE, & LUST!
Sorry, I'm not there to guide you with your love life...LOL
7:47 AM
Bong C. Austero said…
Happy valentines, sean!

Oo nga eh...i am missing out on your dr. wow and dr. holmes expertise.
2:48 PM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Open Letter To Our Leaders

Dear Tita Cory, Senators, Congressmen, Businessmen, Media people, Leftists, and all Bleeding Hearts Out There: I am angry. And I know that there are many out there who are angrier than I am for the same reason. And that reason is simple. I am sick and tired of all you guys claiming to speak for me and many Filipinos. I feel like screaming every time you mouth words about fighting for my freedom and my rights, when you obviously are just thinking about yours. You tell me that the essence of democracy is providing every citizen the right to speak his or her mind and make his or her own informed judgments, but you yourselves do not respect my silence and the choices I and many others have made. In other words, your concept of democracy is limited to having your rights and your freedoms respected, at the expense of ours. I am utterly flabbergasted that you still do not get it: we already responded to your calls, and our response has been very clear - we chose not to heed your calls to go t
Read more

Farewell, Victor

Image
This is my column today. Renato Victor Ebarle Jr. was at the prime of his life; barely 27 years old and just starting to build his career in human resource management. At the time of his death, he was recruitment manager of the Hotel Peninsula Manila. To say that he still had the whole world ahead of him sounds like a cliché but those among us who actually knew him, those among us who were aware of the kind of passion he had for life and for his work, people like me who had the privilege of having been consulted by him on many professional matters, know this with a certain degree of certainty. I was Victor’s professor in three major subjects when he was in college. In each one of them, he sat at the first row, which said a lot about the kind of person he was. Professors know this for a fact: Bullies don’t sit in front of the class where they cannot annoy anyone. I was his thesis adviser and he and his team spent a whole academic school year trying to break new grounds on the question o
Read more

A pathway towards better clarity of the issues on RH Bill

I have been very, very busy lately. In addition to helping manage a merger between two financial companies on top of my other jobs (managing human capital development initiatives in a major bank, teaching, writing, social development work, etc), I also had to manage a national conference with 1,500 participants. I have not opened all my emails in my yahoo account for weeks. I tried to weed through the tons of emails today and found this gem, forwarded to me by a colleague at the De La Salle - College of Saint Benilde. I don't know who the author is. There are still points about this analysis that I dont agree with, but I think it is a fairly comprehensive take on the issues. Thus, I am reprinting it here. I do agree with many points of the analysis. In particular, I agree that the way to move forward is to focus on agreements and to conduct the debate in a civilized, sincere, and ethical manner. Reproductive Health and the Catholic Faith: The Lagman Bill and the Catholic Moral Tr
Read more