RADYO HYPO

I posted here is a new widget. It features a live sound from my Stickam account, Radyo Hypo. I feature ABS-CBN’s DZMM especially TAMBALAN: Failon at Sanchez! Also, I am going to feature some Philippine radio stations that will be available online with live streaming. Designed for Filipinos around the globe.

I could also broadcast my favorite hits using a DirEttore Radio Automation Software. If you want to request songs, just email me at hypotenuse.eccesignum@live.com.

Sometimes in Our Lives

Valentine’s Day is fast approaching. Most people are happy about it and some people are not.

Why I am not surprised?

Sometimes in our lives, we experienced too much pain and at times, hatred to someone we cared and someone we loved, someone so special that we can’t afford to lose. Sometimes we just don’t understand why we have loved at all and make our hearts broken into pieces. We may feel traumatic or lost the desire to love again. Yet, we still live through each hurting days and get back on our feet and prepared to love again.

How can we mend our broken heart? A question that was so common, but nevertheless, we have no answer for it all. We just suddenly found ourselves in love again, but to what extent does we needed to be in love in order for us to survive again? Some questions we don’t really know if it exists if we are high in love and in pain.

We are in love in an unexpected day or way. We found out that the person we are with is worth loving. But are we prepared also to be hurt after the love has gone? More questions are coming out needed to be answered, but we just can’t, for love is a very confusing game to play, if it is a game of course.

Love can be deceitful, yet love can make us younger. Why deceitful? I don’t know the answer, but for what I see, love can make you a better person even if you do a lot of crazy things, but without it or if it disappeared, it brings out the worst of you and can make you even crazier.

Nobody can identify the science behind love. For some, love seems to be the perfect reason to have sex or make love. Some people say that love is just a feeling brought by pheromones. Nobody really seems to know why people get in love and hurt. These two factors I think are needed to be included and explained clearly in a science class if only it won’t be considered as an idiotic idea. That is why people don’t know what to expect if they are really in love and then get hurt.

Some people may ask why there are people are lucky in love. Again, we don’t know the real reason behind it, but in my opinion, if some people have not experienced being hurt because of love, then that person is not a perfect lover. So for me, to be in love and to be hurt, you will become a stronger person, you can adapt to any situation and you will become a more loving person. That is just my own idea.

Happy Valentine’s Day.

All Eyes on Haiti

After the events that shook the Philippines on the later part of 2009, which left the rich and poor residents moist and the country in state of calamity, we set our eyes on the carribean and see the little country called Haiti. Another third world country in state of shock after the January 12 earthquake.

According to Wikipedia, Haiti means Land of HIgh Mountains, is a Carribean country and the only Francophone independent nation in the Americas. Aside from Canada, Haiti designate French as their official language. Also, Haiti is the first independent nation in Latin America, the first post-colonial independent black-led nation in the world and the only nation that gained independence succesfully becauseof the slave rebellion. Besides of being the poorest country in the Americas, it is also the least developed.

Why the world focused on Haiti after the devastating earthquake? If you watch any news programs from several news organizations in the world, especially in North America, most of them have this so called “Telethon for Haiti”. Everybody is trying to help the people of Haiti after most of them or millions of them were left homeless because of the magnitude 7.0 earthquake one of the deadliest in 200 years. Not only it collapses the country this disaster led them to economic wreckage. Their sign of hope, the presidential palace, was also severely damaged and rebuilding the country will be impossible without the help of foreign nations.

Why did I wrote something about Haiti? Not because it is the latest nation to be popularized by a disaster, not because it has the highest hits on search engines, but because Haiti, like the Philippines are trying to survive and move on after a calamity. These two nations also share similarities in history books.

I only got interested in Haiti after I learned about the earthquake. It was mentioned in the TV series “Heroes” and “The Big Bang Theory”, but I never bothered to read something about this country. I learned that most news organizations like CNN are having telethons to help the victims of the quake. I asked myself, “How come they didn’t have this programming when the Philippines was hit by a series of typhoons last year?”. At first I thought it is unfair, but I deliberately told myself to search for a better reason why Haiti is a nation we should be supporting in their dark times and that is the reason I researched about this country and learned that Haiti is indeed a country to be provided with great help. Everyday indeed is a learning experience.

The similarities of these two third world nations? Okay, I will only deal with one historical data. Corruption. President Ferdinand Marcos, his wife Imelda, and their cronies were accused of stealing money from the Filipinos between 1965 and 1986, so was Haiti’s President Baby Doc Duvalier, his wife Michelle, and three other people are believed to have taken $504 million from the Haitian public treasury between 1971 and 1986. Another similar events is that The Philippines was recently hit by a series of typhoon in the later part of 2009 while Haiti was struck by earthquake in the early part of 2010.

Haiti has nominal Gross Domestic Product of 7.018 billion USD in 2009 while the Philippines has 166.9 billion USD in 2008 making the Philippines the 47th largest in the world.

Happy New Year!

I just want to wish everyone a Happy New Year! I am busy  this week and the past weeks that is why I have no blog entry. I’ll be back as soon as my new material becomes ready.

And So This Is Christmas… An OFW Christmas

I am an OFW and Christmas will always be different if you are not in your native land. Although you experienced snow, one of the symbols of Christmas, it will never be the same as what you’ve grown and loved for most of your life: Paskong Pilipino!

I’m stuck in a snowy Midwest in North America as a Nurse and it will be my second Christmas without my family. It is a sacrifice that I have prepared for most of my entire Nursing carreer. I’ve experienced celebrating Christmas at work back home yet I still felt the warmth and spirit of of the Yuletide season, but here abroad, its never the same. It is not a joyous celebration and you’ll always be alone, sad and tend to sleep as early as possible so that you would not really feel lonely… or if you tend to celebrate in a bar or something, you sit in a lonely table just for one.

The more the season’s get near, the more lonesome you get. Besides the ever lonesome coldness of the air outside, is a struggle within yourself that Christmas is not the same as what you’ve used to. There would be no more gift exchanges and parties till the wee hours of the morning. No fireworks outside your window sparkling and lighting the depths of the night. No loud music playing on your neighbor’s homes and no sharing of food with your ever disliked neighbor (because Christmas is time of forgiveness).

During this time of the Holidays, sometimes you tend to be “Scrooged” up because you are a little bit depressed. You tend to dream that you’re with your family. You may receive a phonecall from loved ones backhome, but it does not settle the score. You may feel a little uplifted, but after you hang up, you’re once again “Scrooged”

I tend to dislike Christmas earlier, because it tends to give a depression that I couldn’t control. Missing your entire family that you could kiss and hug at the stroke of midnight, your friends that would simply text a message saying “Merry Christmas” and the noise of Christmas in the Philippines.

And so this is Christmas… my Christmas of longingness and sacrifice, an OFW Christmas. I hope that the following year, I could spend a normal Yuletide season for I’ll never make loneliness a normal Christmas.

 Merry Christmas to All and a Peaceful New Year.

{I wish this would be a little bit longer but I ran out of ideas because I am writing this the way I had it in mind –grayscale}

What If I would be a superhero? Then I would be the short-tempered superhero!

One cold evening at about 11:00, I went outside wearing only my peejeays and my black Beatle T-shirt. My body and soul is full of anger and my blood is pumping through in my brain. There was an urge, a very bad urge. I got high with hatred and mistrust, I am standing in a cold snow-filled neighborhood waiting for someone to come. Someone who wasted my patience.

I admit I have a very short temper.

When my patience has been burnt out, that is the time when everything in me is starting to acknowledge the presence of hate, of unforgiveness, of an attempt to summon the spirits that are waiting to be called and maybe the urge to inflict pain to someone who deserved to receive the wrath coming from within me.

My patience is not that long anymore. Little by little it got consumed by an energy that I, myself didn’t knew where it came from. Maybe all the pains that I have suffered in this world have been the source of why that patience is no longer recognized by mind.

My anger seems to burst so fast and I couldn’t control it. My heart is pumping with so much blood that my body couldn’t even handle, but I am surprised, when it reaches my brain, there is a decision to end the anger by an urge to inflict pain to someone who is worthy to receive it.

Yet I am not a shitheaded animal. I maybe an asshole in my own right, but I will never ever do crazy things that would put me in incarceration. I could still think and use my brain to decide what is good and what is evil, it’s just like a spur of the moment!

Through this journal, I can manage and control whatever evil is living inside me. As long as I am in control, no one  is ever gonna get hurt…

I got spawned, that is what I felt right now. I  don’t like it when I get mad! It’s not safe for everybody and it is not safe for me as well. I am not your typical superhero.

{note: This is a work of fiction. My imagination just stimulated my brain to do it… any resemblance from real events, is purely coincidental.}

Star ng Pasko

(Lyrics by: Robert J. Labayen Music by: Marcus and Amber Davis)

Kung kailan pinakamadilim, ang tala ay mas nagniningning

Gaano man kakapal ang ulap, sa likod nito ay may liwanag

Ang liwanag na ito nasa ating lahat, may sinag ang bawat pusong bukas

Sa init ng mga yakap, maghihilom ang lahat ng sugat

Ang nagsindi nitong ilaw, walang iba kung di ikaw

Salamat sa liwanag Mo muling magkakakulay ang Pasko

Salamat sa liwanag Mo muling magkakakulay ang Pasko

Tayo ang ilaw sa madilim na daan, pagkakapit bisig lalong higpitan

Dumaan man sa malakas na alon, lahat tayo ay makakaahon

Ang liwanag na ito nasa ‘ting lahat, may sinag ang bawat pusong bukas

Sa init ng mga yakap, maghihilom ang lahat ng sugat

Ang nagsindi nitong ilaw, walang iba kung di ikaw

Salamat sa liwanag Mo muling magkakakulay ang Pasko

Salamat sa liwanag Mo muling magkakakulay ang Pasko

Kikislap ang pag-asa  kahit kanino man

Dahil ikaw Bro, dahil ikaw Bro, dahil ikaw Bro ang star ng Pasko

Salamat sa liwanag Mo, muling magkakakulay ang Pasko

Salamat sa liwanag Mo, muling magkakakulay ang Pasko

Ang nagsindi nitong ilaw, walang iba kung di ikaw

Salamat sa liwanag Mo muling magkakakulay ang Pasko

Ang nagsindi nitong ilaw, walang iba kung di ikaw

Salamat sa liwanag Mo muling magkakakulay ang Pasko

Ang nagsindi nitong ilaw, walang iba kung di ikaw

Salamat sa liwanag Mo muling magkakakulay ang Pasko

Dahil ikaw Bro, dahil ikaw Bro, dahil ikaw Bro ang star ng Pasko.

A Day to be Remembered

29 years ago, a musician who just wanted to go home to be with his family and rest after a hard day’s work was shot just outside his Dakota apartment in New York. He was a former Beatle simply named John Lennon.

During my stint as a college student (maybe mid-90’s), me and my high school buddy met somewhere in Pasay City, Philippines. It was All Saint’s Day.

TRIVIA:

In the Philippines, All Saint’s Day is together celebrated as All Soul’s Day every November 1.

Anyways, back to our topic, I spent the Halloween in my friend’s apartment and got up maybe around noon of November 1 after a few bottles of beer the previous night. I don’t have hangover or something, but the mid-afternoon sun gave me a headache.

It was semestral break and we didn’t went home to Roxas City for a vacation, but instead we bonded together to have a Metro Manila adventure. There was a cemetery near the place where he lived. So we ate lunch, as I remember, we bought 12 oz. of Coca-Cola and a recycled bread called “pudding”. That was our lunch or we may say brunch! We don’t have enough money to buy real lunch for it was vacation and no allowance being sent to us.

A little after three in the afternoon, we ended our lunch. Yes, if we were together we just talked and laughed about the things we said and done back in our highschool days.  We never noticed that the time was ticking so fast. For us, time doesn’t exist. We were living the “Einstein way” that was what we were.

So we took off to the cemetery and his cousin (who was also a buddy from highschool) came along. And we were three! Then we went inside the cemetery and we were looking for namesakes of our highschool classmates and schoolmates. It was fun though. And the human traffic inside the cemetery was not different in the province where we came from. We also bought candles as our prop.

Then we get tired after three or four hours of walking in and out the area. We went home walking to my buddy’s apartment and his cousin took a jeep home to his own apartment to spend the night with his other relatives near Baclaran.

So we decided to grab a beer or two before we called it a night. We didn’t have had anymore money so he asked a friend in the store to help us out and just list the bottle of beers that we got and we will pay it off when our allowance arrived. Then because of my friend’s good credit standing in that sari-sari store, we were allowed to have a little celebration of a Philippine tradition. We were also given some food by his beloved neighbors.

If you will ask me why the introduction is about John Lennon? Here we go. When I came to my friend’s house on the 31st of October, I brought a back-issue of MOJO magazine which I bought before the first semester ended in Booksale, and I showed it to him. We were listening to RJ 100.3 fm and they were airing a whole day of voting on who was the best, Elvis or The Beatles. So to put our candles into good use, the centerfold was a picture of John Lennon wearing a white shirt with a New York word printed on it, we let the magazine stood infront of a big rock which was already there sitting outside my friends apartment. We were sitting on the floor just at the door of the apartment and watching the little candles burn infront of the photo of John Lennon and we dedicated that day as John Lennon’s Day because November was the month that fell between his Birthday (October 8th) and the day he died (December 8th).

We had fun that night and we tried to do it again the following year. That time, we had his cousin to celebrate with us and it was the last time we had a John Lennon’s Day. we wanted to expand it along with our friends for the next year, but we were already busy. Sometimes, not all things happen as they planned. I think the following year, my friend got married with his college sweetheart and so does his cousin with one of our classmates in highschool.

Every year that passed by, I hardly forget to remember the things we did that day. It was one experience that we surely will never forget. There were still times when we meet that one day, we will celebrate another John Lennon’s Day or take a road trip which we really dreamed of if only we got a car. Yes, some members of our so-called brotherhood had managed to take a road trip a year ago, but its different if all of us will be there. Lastly, we hope that one day, we will have a group picture that everyone in the “gang” will be present.

{Bloggers Note}

This was supposed to be the first entry to this blog, but since December 8 is the day the city where I came from celebrate a feast in honour of the Virgin Mary and also a death anniversay of John Lennon, so it was replaced in favour of my being a citizen of Roxas City. Anyway we just want to tell everyone about our past experiences using the image og John Lennon while we were tipsy and groggy… see yah again… grayscale out!

Sinadya sa Halaran 2009!

Today is the feast of Our Lady of Immaculate Concepcion. If you were born in Roxas City, Capiz, Philippines, then you knew that this is an important date. It’s Roxas City and Capiz’s answer to Cebu’s Sinulog, Iloilo’s Dinagyang and Aklan’s Ati-Atihan… it’s Sinadya sa Halaran Festival!

 It was a long time, a very long time that I have last experienced this event. I wanted to, but sometimes it’s hard if you are far from your birthplace. Sometimes, it’s the money that really kept  me away. If I have time to go home, it’s either a month before the event or months after the event.

I still remember the excitement as we were all going to the exhibits inside the Villareal Stadium. Excited to see my projects being shown to all the people who were visiting my school’s tent. Yup, I graduated in Capiz Institute of Technology (now known as Capiz State University) and the yearly exhibit was what our “shop” was always preparing.

The festival was celebrated separately then. It was called only “Halaran” Festival (which means “offering after harvest”) every first week of October and the Sinadya Festival (which means celebration) every December as part of the Feast of the Virgin Mary. The Halaran Festival was celebrated by the whole province while “Sinadya” was for the city. Because of huge budget in celebrating two festivals in  a year, the Province and the City Governements merged the festivals, hence it became” Sinadya sa Halaran”… the city and the provincial governments share the expenses in giving the people and the world a first class celebration. “Sinadya sa Halaran” is the only the major festivals in Western Visayas that is not dedicated to the Sto. Nino, but for the Virgin Mary, while in Bacolod City they have MassKara Festival that is dedicated to the people of the province which they celebrate every October (few weeks after Halaran festival in the 80’s to the 90’s).

The only factor of Sinadya sa Halaran Festival is that they are not as mainstream as what Iloilo, Aklan, Cebu and Bacolod has. Although their were  lots of sponsors behind the festive Sinadya sa Halaran, it is not widely known in the entire country not event the world. Correct me if I am wrong, but I asked a lot of people if they were familiar with “Sinadya sa Halaran”, and they mostly gave negative feedbacks. They always associate the province of where a huge number of “aswangs” came from.

Although most of them maybe joking, but it hurts! When the ”Aswang festival” was celebrated twice by the City of Roxas, the popularity of the “Aswang Festival” was more mainstream than “Sinadya sa Halaran”. Too bad it was cancelled on its third year, because I was scheduled to go home and experience what the festival was all about, but I was too late.

The “Aswang” festival has potential though, on bringing in more tourists into the city. Even where I worked before in Manila, my co-workers showed interests in planning their next year to take part in the “Aswang” Festival.

Nevermind what the religious sector will say about the celebration, its just part of what the Halloween tradition is. It does not mean that we lost our faith.

Sometimes, we had to celebrate what our city is popular to. We may hold again two festivals in a year because after all, “Aswang” Festival was privately-operated, and it still create and help our city becomes a first class city. Dont let our city to be nailed as second class city.

I hope we had a very nice Sinadya sa Halaran this year and I am hoping that I would be able to go home and enjoy once again what Sinadya sa Halaran feels and also Diwal festival which follows the Sinadya sa Halaran. Diwal festival or The Roxas City Seafood Festival is held to commemorate and promote the resurgence of the Angel Wing Clam or “diwal”, which neared extinction until protected and cultivated in Roxas City, and this is the celebration of why the city is worthy of the name,

“The Seafood Capital of the Philippines”!