S T I L L L I F E

from ch i na w ith

love

P E R S O N AOCTOBER 2014

A GRANDMOTHER’S TALE OF JAMES BOND, WAR, AND WOE

LETTER FROM THE EDITORConversatio

TRADEMARKpeople’s choice

LANDMINE MOVIES

POPULUS

THE EVOLUTION OF ME

WHAT’S IN A NAME?

THE PHILOSOPHY BETWEEN HEARTACHE AND INSPIRATION

Spotlight

FROM CHINA WITH LOVE

T a b l e o f C o n t e n t s

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GALLERIA

PREMIEREILLUMINAIRE

OFF THE DEEP END

Dianne De Guzman

KristineMarquez

Writer PhotographerLayout artist

STAFF BOX

PatriciaChong

editor

STAFF BOX

PatriciaChong

TamieTuason

JovyLim

businessmanager

editor PhotographerLayout artist

LETTERfrom

theEDITOR

A life is often like a Jackson Pollock painting. From afar, it looks like an absolute mess, strewn with splatters and shapes and colors, without definition, and without focus. Your eyes don’t know where to settle, and the very idea of chaos is perhaps the only true thing you remember as you move on to the next masterpiece – you’re surrounded by them, after all, and Pollock’s work will never be your taste.

Now, imagine that you are locked in a room full of Jackson Pollock paintings. No, wait – imagine that it’s a ginormous museum of them. You are forced then to sit on a bench (covered in paint splatters, to remind you of where you are), and you (have no choice but to) turn to the closest painting and stare; read the placard about him, his life, and his inspiration. And stare some more. And as you take a moment to sit and to look closely, you begin to see the finer details and their unity. The cha-os around you becomes still, and every painting comes to life.

Because that is what each painting (life) is: something so charged with emotion and so filled with stories that it is blurred until the moment you take to truly look at it. We are surrounded by Pollock paintings, and when we take the time to learn and to see the touch of every stroke and imagine the force behind every splatter, we learn to acknowledge that all things are complex and simple at the same time: Whether we like it or not is entirely up to us.

PERSONA celebrates people (in all shapes and forms) in all their complexity, and our maiden issue is named “Still Life” – zooming in on the details and stories that make people who they are at the precise moment they are viewed. That snapshot becomes all we know of that little universe of meaning, and we live with the fact that there is more, and it is our choice to pursue it.

Stories and snapshots make up all we know about real-life still life – and they re-mind us of what people have overcome, broken or whole or happy, but indeed, still alive.

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CONVERSATIO

TRADEMARKb y D i a n n e D e G u z m a n a n d J o v y L i m

TRADEMARKb y D i a n n e D e G u z m a n a n d J o v y L i m

PANGARAP, PUSO AT PELIKULA

Isang mag-aaral ng midya, si Jericho Aguado ay hindi maitatanging may matinding pagmamahal sa pelikula. Mga kwento ng buhay at pangarap ang kanyang ibinahagi sa atin upang magbigay inspirasyon at kaalaman tungkol sa sining na kanyang kinahuhumalingan.

Q: Ano sa tingin mo ang mga katangian na nagpapaespesyal sa iyo mula sa ibang tao?A: Hindi sa different. Siguro may mga kapareho rin ako pero sa tingin ko hindi madalas yung kapag may gustong gusto ka talaga, gagawin mo ang lahat, left and right, wawasakin mo ang lahat para lang makarating doon. Iyon ‘yung kind of determi-nation ko, gagawin ko lahat basta maabot ko lang ‘yung pangarap kong maging cinematographer.

Q: Bakit mo gusto maging cinematographer?A: Unang-una, ayoko kasi noong dati tinatanong ako “anong gusto mo maging paglaki mo?” Nag-eevolve ‘yun eh. Noong una, gusto ko lang maging

part ng midya, tapos gusto ko na maging filmmak-er, tapos gusto ko nang maging director. Kung hindi ako nanonood, nagbabasa ako tungkol sa cinema. Kung may kausap ako, nabobore ako sa kanila kung hindi tungkol sa movies o kaya kung kausap ko man, gawin nating “cinematic”. Kaya ko gusto ‘yun kasi ang dami kong nakikitang magan-da na nangyayari sa paligid, parang ang sarap nilang ikwento sa mundo visually.

Q: Ano ‘yung nararamdaman mo towards film?A: In general, well, ‘yun ‘yung passion ko. Hindi pa naman ako nakakagawa ng maraming filsm at videos, pero gusto ko kapag gumawa na ako ng sobrang grand, at least polished na, nakapagbasa na ako, alam ko na yung rights and wrongs para kung ano man ‘yung kailangan kong iimprove, mapopolish ko pa siya and yung films kasi, ma-gandang way of communicating things. Kapag sa film kasi, kapag nasa sinehan ka, mas intimate ‘yung experience, kaya sobrang mahal ko ang mga movies.

Q: Maaari mo na bang masabi na ito na ang panghabangbuhay mong career at passion?A: Career, hindi ko alam. Kasi baka mamaya ma-matay ako, tapos hindi ko matuloy pero gusto ko kapag namatay ako, ito ‘yung ginagawa ko. Passion, for sure. Ever since Grade 7 naman, hindi na nagdie down ‘yun. Feeling ko life-long passion siya. Madami nang tao ang nagdaan sa buhay ko, kaibigan, kabarkada, pamilya, pero hindi pa rin nagpapass away ‘yung pagkagusto ko sa mga pelikula.

Q: May isa ka bang pinakapaboritong peliku-la o genre ng pelikula?A: Walang isa on both accounts. Ginagawa ko ‘yun dati, kasi ako ‘yung tipo ng tao na mahilig guma-wa ng lists pero minsan kapag nililista ko, parang: okay, ilalagay ko ‘to sa number one pero bakit siya nasa number one? Siguro sa favorite films, palagi kong pinipili ‘yung may puso. Magmention tayo ng isang favorite kong film: Tree of Life ni Terrance Malik kasi yung puso niya, nakakarelate ako. Lahat ng pelikula may puso, unless na padeep sila or something. ‘Yung puso, kakabit siya ng lahat ng aspects: scriptwriting, cinematography, lahat lahat na. Kapag tumitibok ‘yung puso, nakakapagsupply siya ng dugo doon sa iba pang aspect.

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WEST COAST REPRESENT

Raised in the good ol’ US of A, Jason Baylon ooz-es an all-American-boy aura while also looking like your average Filipino teenager. He shares his story on how he left a place that he called home and moved to a country that he barely remem-bers.

Q: Why did you move to California in the first place?A: They (my parents) had a bit more money at that time, so they moved there for opportunities. They thought that it would be best for their career, and better for me and my sister if we moved to the States. Later, they would realize that our life would be harder to maintain there, so we had to move back here.

Q: What was it like the first time you moved there?A: Well, I got bullied a lot. We lived in a very ghetto neighborhood in the beginning. Majority of the kids in my elementary school were black, there were at least two whites, and I was the only Asian kid there. I used to hate going to school. My parents didn’t like the neighborhood as well, and it took them time to realize what was happening in my school, so we moved after they figured it out.

Q: Where did you guys move next?A: Los Angeles. SoCal. We live just 30 minutes away from the beach. I loved it there. I was really happy. I moved to a new school, and most of the people there were Asians or Mexicans. Well, there were white and black people as well, but at least I didn’t get bullied there. It’s funny because people some-times think that I’m Mexican.

Q: Why did you move from California to the Philippines?A: Family stuff. My dad was offered a job here in the Philippines, and he felt that we were going to be more secure here than in the States because the economy there was pretty bad at that time. We also had family here and my parents missed home.

They’re a bit patriotic like that.

Q: Was it hard for you to leave the States to move back here?A: Yeah, of course. I left everything there. My friends, my girlfriend. I actually didn’t tell anyone that I was leaving. It was already two months in my first year of high school and we had to leave. I just disappeared. When people would ask me, “Hey Jason, what’s the homework for this subject?” I’d usually just tell them that I don’t know or I didn’t get the question. I don’t like goodbyes, which sucks cause during that year I was really happy.

Q: Do you plan on going back to the States in the future?A: Yeah, I’m actually saving up for it now. It’s actu-ally funny because my girlfriend is saving up to go here to visit me, and I’m saving up to go back there. I was really happy in the States, but that’s probably because I haven’t been anywhere else. I really like the food here though. This is the only place I know that serves sweet spaghetti. In the States, spaghetti is usually a bit sour, kind of like Italian pasta. Ψ

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PEOPLE’S CHOICE LANDMINE MOVIES>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

The X-Men Series: Gay RightsThat’s right. The directors, screenwriters, and even Magneto have said it. Marvel’s mutant superheroes have never been

accepted by society, receiving much the same treatment as homosexuals today with so many protests and biases

against them. Iceman’s parents even ask if he’s ever tried “not being a mutant” after he “comes out” as one. William Stryker

sends his mutant son away to Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters thinking that it would “cure” him, only to find

out that everyone in that school is a mutant, with Professor Xavier putting his foot down and saying quite clearly that

“Mutation is not a disease.”

Spirited Away: Child ProstitutionA children’s movie that turns out to be about child prostitution? Those who’ve seen other Miyazaki films wouldn’t be surprised: the renowned director himself has come out to say that he chose the story to reflect how the world was much like the sex industry. From this, dark theories have sprung, and among them is that Chihiro represents the children being forced in the prostitution. It wouldn’t be farfetched: For one, we’ve got Yubaba stealing her workers’ names just as many prostitutes adopt stage names, and how Chihiro is forced to work in the bathhouse to save her family. Ap-parently, in Japan, workers in the bathhouse are actual-ly referred to as bathhouse prostitutes.

Robocop: The Life of Jesus ChristAn archetypically good, crime-fighting man is

killed and is resurrected as an archetypically good, crime-fighting robot. Ring a bell? Well, if you re-

place “crime” with “sin” and “robot” to “Lord,” then you’ve got a director-confirmed allegory for the life

of Jesus Christ. We’re not kidding. Robocop goes through many trials, all of them intended to paral-lel Our Lord and Savior’s. Have a look at that scene

where Alex Murphy is tortured: it’s a Messiah-ed up metaphor for crucifixion.

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LANDMINE MOVIES>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

Spring Breakers: TemptationEat. Sleep. Rave. Repeat. The chant of Generation Y. In this day and age, one cannot veer away from the temptations

the world has to offer. Spring Breakers is a modern indie film that showcases the temptations of this generation. Further-

more, a popular fan theory is that the film is an allegory of temptation in the biblical sense. Spurred by director Har-

mony Korine’s quote, “When I was a child, the temptation to sin was always a romantic option. This romantic option lead

me to the cinema, a place where sin was welcome.” It cer-tainly seems plausible. If the preacher at the start of the film

doesn’t ring a bell, then who could go wrong with a lead named Faith? If you took a shot for every reference to temp-

tations, hell, and angels, you’d have passed out hours ago.

So many movies in the world, so little time -- especially when you can come out of any given one with your mind blown to lit-

tle bits. Some films turn out to be landmines: seemingly simple until the director confirms some kind of crazy speculation that

turns out to be true, be it theory or allegory. Here are some of the best examples of these, hand-picked by the staff of Persona.

Drag Me to Hell: Eating DisordersDrag Me to Hell might seem just like another of Hollywood’s a dime-a-dozen horror films, complete with demon-posses-sion, seances, and curses. Who would have thought that it actually touches on the subject of eating disorders? It’s no-ticeable how all throughout the movie, Christine is notice-ably pale and remarks of her overweight past are hinted at. Let’s not forget how every haunting scene has something to do with eating or vomiting (who can forget that scene that you-know-what falls on top of her at a wake and boom: vomit). Even the antagonist seems to have the symptoms seen in people suffering from eating disorders!

The Wizard of Oz: The EconomyWhile the much loved children’s story of the Wizard of Oz may seem like fantasy at its best, underneath the Emerald City and the yellow brick road lays a story of the American economy. Crit-ics from all over have barked that the entire story is an allegory, with the iconic yellow brick road representing the gold stan-dard during the 1890s, the scarecrow representing the farmers who were badly affected by the deflation, and the tin man rep-resenting the factory workers who (much like the tin man) lost their jobs. Even Dorothy’s silver (ruby for the movie adaptation) shoes, which turned out to be the solution to her problem, is likened to the adding of silver to the currency. Ψ

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POPULUS

THE EVOLUTION OF MEby TAMIE TUASON

“No more facades, no more pretending, just me.”

THE EVOLUTION OF MEby TAMIE TUASON

“No more facades, no more pretending, just me.”

I met this guy during a po-litical party’s Junior Core trainings. He was quite shy and timid because he was relatively new in our circle

of friends. I guess it’s normal to be like that when you’re around a new group of people. But as time passed by, we got closer and closer.

Eventually, he earned my guy-best-friend badge, which I never thought I could give to anyone. We seem to never run out of stories to tell. Most of these stories were as interest-ing as my farts and our pasts to as boring as what I ate that day. I never thought I could be that close to a guy. Heck, I’m closer to this guy than I was to the guy that I dated years ago. I mean, we’re so close that he’s even seen me without make up,

and that is a big thing for me.Before I get to that, let me tell you a little bit about myself. I grew up in a conservative fami-ly. In high school, sure, I went to parties – birthday parties. There was a midnight curfew with an occasional push to 1am, and that was it. Not many open parties because those things scare me and I didn’t want to be caught by my parents going to those things. You could say that I’ve always been the ‘good girl’ in my parents’ eyes.

Third year came and it was all different. I met a guy and we hit it off. Man, did I catch a big one! Handsome, smart, well-off, football varsity: he had a very accepting family and my parents’ approval – he was the envy of all other guys, and theideal guy of all other girls. He

was gentlemanly and extreme-ly kind (and when I say this, the word ‘kind’ is an understate-ment for this guy. It was to the point that I made all the deci-sions and he just followed me, no matter what!).

So, all was well. Great even. But, little did I know, the world flipped. You know when they say ‘there’s a rainbow after the rain’? It seemed irrelevant to me. The rain came after the rainbow. Dates became less frequent, texts became shorter and less interesting, and con-stant conversations turned to something of a chore.

It was safe to say that we were drifting apart, but he still held my heart. I broke up with him because I knew that it was something that had to be done.

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He let go so easily, while I cried and cried and, you guessed it, cried some more.

That experience made me so weak and insecure about my-self and I have carried that over until a point. I even heard that his best friend told him “Why are you even with that chubs girl?” BOOM! There went my self-esteem. With that, I built my walls so high that whoev-er tried to break it down just broke themselves trying.

“Strong, independent woman” was how I dubbed myself, but others saw it as having a heart of stone or even heartless. I’ve accepted it, believed it even. I have accepted that I was a heartless person and no one could ever break me. I closed all my doors to everyone, especial-ly my best friend who has been courting me for over a year.

As time went by, my will grew weaker and weaker. And the unexpected happened; I even-tually fell for my best friend. It made me realize that I didn’t have to pretend to be someone I’m not or cannot be. Falling for him doesn’t mean that I am weak: it just means that I am open to having him in my life.

That insecurity that I used to have broke because of him. He challenges me each and every-day. He made me who I am. I am now who I am, who I want to be.

No more facades, no more pre-tending, just me. Ψ

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What’s in a Name?by Patricia Chong

POPULUS

“A million stories, or so we’re told by one with just as many names and titles for herself.”

What’s in a Name?by Patricia Chong

“A million stories, or so we’re told by one with just as many names and titles for herself.”

From the cradle to the desk, I’ve been called a thousand names. There’s the standard Patricia for those who’ve known me

for too long or too short a time; the Patricia Anne Chong from my legal documents; Anne for that one Vietnamese girl I met at an International Youth Day Summit; Titay for all of those relatives who last saw me when I was less than three feet tall. These days, I’m called PaCho, a name I made up out of my first name and my surname – if only to separate myself from the thousands of Patricias in Ma-nila, let alone this planet.

A name like Patricia is an un-happy one when you’re put into a traditional classroom with 40 other girls in the same uniform, the crisp white blous-es starched, and the navy of the jumpers dark. The teach-er would need only start off with “Pa—“ before Pat, Pa-cem, Patrice, Patricia, and I all whipped our heads to listen intently for the next few sylla-bles.

PaCho is a great name, if I do say so myself – much easier to tell apart from Pat, Patty, Tricia, and Trish, all of which I’ve al-ready been called or miscalled.

There were times, however, that I was called a lot of oth-er things, none of them even resembling my first name. In the end, they came to resemble titles. One such name was Hannibal. This was not as in Hannibal the saint, but Hannibal “the Canni-bal” Lecter from The Silence of the Lambs. But oh, I was harm less, and it was all in good fun: When other people would tack on “or else” to the end of their joking threats, I’d use “or I’ll eat you” or recite some recipe with which I could use their bodies as an ingredient.

Like I said, all in good fun.

But my threats became heavier, more like half-truths, as time went by and the Shakespear-ean Festival in my high school rolled around with all of our

final exams. We were tasked with taking King Lear, shorten-ing it to twenty minutes, and performing it.

It had been fine, at first. I was just a scriptwriter. And then assistant director. And in a horrible twist of fate, director: the girl who originally had that position had literally taken off for Japan for the entire rehears-al period and even the perfor-mance.

My reign of terror began in her absence – I picked at imper-fection, reprimanded the idle, and demanded a lot from the cast and the team. There was even one time that I screamed at members of the chorus. Fear and intimidation thrived with me as I dragged everyone down the nine circles of the In-ferno to join me at the bottom.

And thus, I baptized myself as Satan.

That isn’t a joke. Satan and Hannibal weren’t too far apart, I thought – and it was a way of

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keeping myself in check once I’d realized just how terrifying I could be. Soon, “Satan” had become an endearment, if that were ever possible. My rep-rimands became lighter, and my insults soon consisted of people being dishonors to their mothers, their fathers, their brothers and sister, their ances-tors, and their cows.

And so I became Asian Dad.

The nicknames pile up: When I was tasked to give a speech in class, pretending to campaign for class president, I marketed myself as supreme dictator of

the universe: I became the Dic-tator. When I made the mistake of going online while I had a fever and posting rather em-barrassing comments about my being a singing narwhal from the ocean blue, I became the Magic Narwhal.

A lot of people don’t realize how important their names are, or how it’s beyond an identifier or some symbols on a docu-ment. Names are a lot of things: the expectations put upon you by your parents, the rela-tionships that you’ve had with different people, the memories that were made by you and no

one else.

Names are stories, and they are facets of yourself that make themselves known in the dif-ferent lives you’ve led and the different personalities you’ve met. And as you grow older, and the gem is cut once more to spruce up its shine, there will be more names for you to have and people for you to be.

As for me, I’ve got plenty of names, a lifetime’s worth of them. Satan, PaCho, Magic Narwhal, or Hannibal – I’ll take them all, and all the ones to come.Ψ

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spotlight

by Patricia Chong

“But I don’t like the stories that are just love, love, love. I like action because there’s something happening, and the stories are interesting. There

can be love too, but that can’t just be it.”

From China with Love

There is a house in Pasay City, swallowed by the grit and noise of the streets. To its left lies a canteen where men

bet on horse races and throw their lost hopes to the ground; to the right is a badly-painted Toyota always parked too close to the red gate.

Beside them, the house is white, clean, and unassuming. Enter it, and the first thing you will hear is gunfire. The noise is turned up as loud as it can go – and followed up by a huge explosion. Before the LCD tele-vision sits an old wheelchair, and atop that, an even older grandmother, her silver hair cropped short.

“You’re home already, huh?” She’ll ask you: Her voice is ac-cented, but still ready and able to swear at you up and down in English, Filipino, and three

kinds of Chinese. “You’re early.”It doesn’t matter if you are early (and you aren’t: you’re home an hour later than usual). She will turn back to the spectrum of stories on the television before her: those of travelers, lovers, widows, mothers, workers, and refugees – her favorites would be about men blowing things up and shooting at each other.

Marina Chong, my very Chinese grandmother (complete with kung fu shoes and a distinctive aiyaah!), has had a love affair with action movies lasting over 70 years — and really, she may as well have lived in one too: She was a war refugee from the Second Sino-Japanese war and is a survivor of the Second World War, the Japanese run-ning her and her family out of China to here in Manila.From the province to Hong Kong, she and her grandmother travelled by night, when the

Japanese air force couldn’t see them and open fire, and passed through a swamp, where the mud was waist-high and the grass stood even taller. From Hong Kong, they rode a boat to the Philippines.

“I arrived in Manila on Janu-ary 1, 1940. The same day the next year, it was declared an open city. All you could hear that morning was the Japa-nese’ boots – clack. clack clack on the street. No one would go out: We’d just peek out the windows,” she says all this mat-ter-of-factly over dinner. You only live twice: My lola began one life in China and moved on to another in Manila.

It was while the Rising Sun still lorded over the Philippines that my lola took up Marina as a name at the prompting of a schoolteacher, and it was around this time that she saw

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her first films, black, white, and flickering. Her parents owned a canteen across the Depart-ment of Justice, and her mother would close down the restau-rant on Saturdays and hustle them to Ongpin to see Chinese silent films.

“First, they’d go chuhchuh-chuhchuh – you don’t know what they’re saying. And then the next thing, dialogue. We’d go from chapter one to chapter two to chapter 24. [They were] old stories about monks. There were good monks, and then bad monks that would turn you over in Shaolin temples. The Chinese musketeers discov-ered them and burned down the temple,” she describes with relish.

A fateful beginning to her love affair with action movies – and to the drama unfolding as the American liberation went underway. The bombs fell over Manila, and one shell cost her father his entire arm. For sev-eral weeks, she hid and slept beneath his bed in the men’s quarters of the Philippine General Hospital. When her mother had to leave them to find Robert, my lola’s younger brother, she left her alone with a bayong of raw rice, saying “If you’re hungry, just take some and chew. You will survive.”

And she did – she’d die another day, if it was the last thing she did.After the Americans had re-claimed the city, she saw her first talking picture: “Thirty Seconds over Tokyo”, the story of the American’s first bomb raid against Japan. That world

was not enough, and she be-gan watching more and more action films on the balconies of a cinema that a friend owned: Among them, Alfred Hitch-cock’s “North by Northwest”, and Gregory Peck in “The Guns of Navarone”. Along the way, she discovered more genres, with Ingrid Bergman and Hum-phrey Bogart in “Casablanca” at the gateway.

“But I don’t like the stories that are just love, love, love. I like ac-tion because there’s something happening, and the stories are interesting. There can be love too, but that can’t just be it,” my lola says.

It wasn’t until a certain man with a golden gun and a license to kill came along that my lola really found movies she liked. “My first James Bond film was Dr. No at the Capitol Theater in Escolta. It was just an ordinary picture at the time. Not a lot of people saw it, but I did, and I re-ally liked the idea of espionage,” she explains.

Besides her husband, James Bond was probably the greatest love of my lola’s life. She spent two hours in line with her hus-band just to see “From Russia with Love” when it came out in the 60’s, and had a lot of her own adventures alongside his: her full-time occupation went from student to clerk to kinder-garten teacher to secretary to baker to tour guide, travelling all over the Philippines.

When asked which one film was her favorite, she will only say this (very vehemently): “All of them.” This is, of course, in con-

trast to the fact that she likes to pretend that Daniel Craig’s James Bond doesn’t exist.

“Sean Connery was the macho type. Roger Moore was more of a gentleman. Daniel Craig? What does he have? He’s ugly and he can’t act,” she says.

Despite this, my lola has the complete set of the movies in her DVD cabinet, along with those of Dirty Harry, Jack Ryan, and countless other heroes, and she watches them all whenever she can, along with Chinese period dramas and “NCIS.” All of these, she watches over and over again from her wheelchair: she hasn’t been able to walk by herself in years.

Like clockwork, she will wake up at 7am to read the newspa-per out in the garden, and will spend the rest of the day in her room, finding a quantum of solace watching her films again – the entire house turns into a warzone: there is the deafening rattle of gunfire, a bomb going off, shattered glass, roaring fires licking at wood, skin beating skin, and men screaming pro-fanities.

In the aftermath, the screen will go black, and there will be only one survivor, only one iron lady for whom tomorrow will never die.

Codename: Marina. Her real name?Well, for your eyes only: Kuan Ying.And like all names, hers has a meaning:

Heroes.Ψ

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some of my grandmother’s favorite DVDs

GALLERIA

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29

the philosophy between heartache and inspiration

by kristine marquez

“I keep on asking myself, is he really worth it? Or am I just wasting my time? But then again, you can’t stop the world from spinning just as you can’t stop a heart from loving.”

POPULUS

the philosophy between heartache and inspiration

by kristine marquez

“I keep on asking myself, is he really worth it? Or am I just wasting my time? But then again, you can’t stop the world from spinning just as you can’t stop a heart from loving.”

“I keep on asking myself, is he really worth it? Or am I just wasting my time? But then again, you can’t stop the world from spinning

just as you can’t stop a heart from loving.”

A collection of thoughts and heartbroken musings fills a small blue notebook yellowing at the edges. But there isn’t just a single story to be told in that blue notebook. More than that is a journey of self-discovery underneath the curly scribbles. A realization that not all heart-breaks are bad, for they might just be blessings in disguise.

Almost every teenage girl knows that feeling of butter-flies in her stomach – brought upon by a glimpse of a certain boy. I grew up in an all-girls school that had recently start-ed accepting boys. As a result, there were 32 girls and only 5 boys in our class. We silly girls

would pine after them (it was only after graduating that I realized how low our standards had been), and to be liked in return was to gain Queen Bee status: The other girls would adore and backstab you. It was like Elizabethan court, full of intrigue and gossip, cleverly hidden from the watchful eyes of stern nuns. Two years into high school, our teacher assigned us a new seating arrangement. Unfortu-nately, I found myself between an over-hyped class rep and an overachieving, basketball-ob-sessed boy who achieved a cult following among the girls. To say the least, I was first unim-pressed with this James Dean wannabe.

But it was hard not to join the bandwagon of girls who wor-shiped him.

It wasn’t “at first sight.” I never expected it, after all; and what

does a 14-year-old know about love but the stuff in fairy tales anyway?

The four years that followed were a series of unfortunate events.

The rest of that year was hell. Imagine sitting next to the stuff of your daydreams every single day, passing notes and checking each other’s papers. It was a struggle to make sure my handwriting was perfect and my answers intelligent, prompting my career in the jungle of overachievers. Every morning, I made extra sure that my uniform was decent, hair tamed and teeth clean, with a smile plastered to my face.

Behind the smile, a thunder-storm of emotion was brewing, because I knew that he would never like me as I liked him. Cliché, right? That year he was linked with one of my pretty

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one of my favorite snow globes

grade school friends.

Apart from that, only three peo-ple knew of my dilemma: my two best friends and a common friend of ours. It was that com-mon friend who suggested I turn to my writing as way to lib-erate myself from all the pent-up emotion. It worked back then, and even more so now.

A little blue notebook began as commentary of how he was that day – was he sweet, or did he ignore me? Little details like how he always fell asleep dur-ing Filipino class and how he borrowed my post-it notes.

Though I was still feeling the brunt effects of unrequited love, I was happy being friends with him.

If only our second year had passed without much incident. It was one of the single most humiliating experiences of my life. One of my friends, Ana* the Nosy, decided it would be an excellent idea to proclaim in a crowded hallway that I was crushing on a senior: his broth-er. But I wasn’t.

The year passed in cold silence.

It was only after that that I noticed that every particular situation equaled inspiration. From a year of being his seat-mate sprouted countless of scribbles I turned into poems. I was even able to complete the NaNoWriMo challenge.

I never told him how I felt and our story closed with nothing: but I didn’t come out emp-ty-handed. My shelves are filled

with notebooks of ideas and other cringe-worthy, vomit-in-ducing, mushy collections of my thoughts. I don’t regret four years of unrequited love. I don’t see it as wasted time: I chalk it off as experience.

In the span of four years, my life’s philosophy changed. I learned that love doesn’t al-ways turn out as we hope, that there are more endings than happy-ever-after. It wasn’t easy, mind you.

Now, I still see him sometimes and I feel nostalgic, remem-bering my four year ordeal. But there is no regret or bitterness – I can truly say I’ve moved on.

Sometimes I find myself look-ing back at all I was able to pro-duce in my four-year one-sided love affair with He Who Shall Not Be Named. Sometimes I find myself reading all the sto-ries and poems I wrote, things that were published in our high school newspaper. And from there come feelings of remorse

and humiliation overshadowed by euphoria, a sense of accom-plishment and purpose.

Emily Dickinson once said that “a wounded deer leaps the highest,” and many more have said that the greatest artists had sad, troublesome back-stories to inspire their greatest works.

Well, my story isn’t as tragic or even that extraordinary. It’s just a story of a girl, who fell into love that went unreturned, but was able to come out with a greater prize she didn’t even know she yearned for.

So now? I’ll just keep on writ-ing.Ψ*All names were altered to protect the identity of the people involved.

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me writing in one of my journals, my extensive handwritten journal collection

ILLUMINARE

There are thousands of names in history textbooks, each marking off the cou-rageous, the kind, the evil, and the martyred. They are remembered for their power and their significance -- here, we remember some for their

insanity.

OFF THE DEEP END

OFF THE DEEP END

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Emperor Caligula(AD 12 - AD 41)

The infamous third ruler of the Roman Empire. Though he began his rule very popular with the people, he fell ill and came out a completely different man -- the nature of his rule after this is uncertain, due to rumor and bias having forever clouded the line between fact and fiction. He named himself a god, referring to himself as one even when meeting other politicians, and soon began to dress up as vari-ous gods and demigods, including Mercury, Venus, Apollo, and Hercules. He is even referred to as Jupiter in some public docu-ments. In response to a soothsayer telling him that he had “no more chance of becoming emperor than of riding a horse across the Bay of Baiae”, Caligula ordered hundreds of ships to be put to-gether to construct a temporary floating bridge stretching over two miles across the bay, and rode his favorite horse, Incitatus, over it while wearing the breastplate of Alexander the Great. He loved Incitatus so much that he had a house built for it, complete with a marble stall and an ivory manger. He later attempted to appoint the horse as consul, one of the highest positions in the government, to prove that anyone could be in the Senate because no one in the Senate did anything anyway. He was assassinated before this could come to fruition. More stories include (but are definitely not limited to) Caligula’s literally rolling around in piles of money and drinking precious pearls dissolved in vinegar, ordering his legions of soldiers to gather seashells in their helmets during military campaigns in the Rhine and Britain, and having random spectators in the Col-iseum to be thrown into the arena to fight lions when he was told that there weren’t enough gladiators. One of the wildest of these rumors is of Caligula having incestuous relations with his favorite sister, Drusilla, and that he impregnated her; he is said to have later disemboweled her to remove the child, who he believed to be a demigod.

Olga of Kiev (890-969)

So far, we’ve had stories about people in power going crazy and staining their own reputations. They can go stand over there, while over here, we’ve got woman who’s been dubbed by Orthodox Christianity as St. Olga, Equal-to-the-Apostles. To others, however, she might just be known as that one rule who took revenge way too seriously. Let’s go back in time. Princess Olga was married to one Igor of Kiev, who ended up being murdered by the Drevlians. At the time, her son was too young to rule, so she took over in his stead until he became an adult. She was known as a very capa-ble ruler -- so far, so good. And then the Drevlians (see: people who murdered her husband) tried to make her marry their prince so that they could take over the Kievan Rus. As you can imagine, she said no. Just like today, some men don’t know what “no” means. The Drevlians sent twenty men to convince her to marry their prince: in retaliation, she had them buried alive. Olga then sent a message that she did, in fact, accept the proposal, and asked the Drevlians to send her their best ambassadors to accompany her to their land: all of whom promptly died when she locked them in a bathhouse and set it on fire. Later, she walked right into the land of the Drevlians, supposedly to have a funeral feast for her fallen king: while the guests were drunk on the wine, she had about five thousand people killed by her soldiers. That wouldn’t be her last ordered massacre, however. With all of the higher-ups out of the way, Olga decided to deal with all who remained. The survivors begged for mercy and offered to pay her for it, and so she returned to the country in order to gather tributes. When Iskorosten, a town, refused to pay her, she asked that each household present her with only a dove as a gift to call it square. She then tied burning sulfur and paper to the legs of the doves and sent them back home. There wasn’t a house left standing. All those who tried to es-cape were caught. Some of them were killed, while others were made to pay the tribute. There were, however, a few that she gave away as slaves to her followers. We’ll leave you with a few lines from a hymn Orthodox Christian tradition: “As one who enjoys the Tree of Life, you remain eter-nally incorrupt, ever-glorious Olga.”

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Erzsebet Bathory, the Blood Countess (1560-1614)

She’s been called a lot of names in the past: a devil worshiper, a practitioner of dark arts, the most vicious female serial killer in history, and a vampire. But the line between fact and fiction has blurred over time for this enigmatic noblewoman, and her story has been exaggerated over accounts -- until now, the complete number of her victims hasn’t been verified. And though the rumors of the Bloody Countess drinking and bathing in virgin blood has been proven more or less false, there are still a lot of things that she did, enough to classify her as a historical crazy. Elizabeth Bathory came from a powerful family that ruled Tran-sylvania in the 15th century. She had a troubled childhood, hav-ing bursts of aggression and tantrums. At 14, she got pregnant with a servant’s child and was forced to hide to avoid scandal. A year later she married Count Ferenc Nádasdy, a renowned warrior with a cruel streak.

It is in Csetje Castle, her husband’s wedding gift to her, where her sadistic activities took place. Some of such activities in-clude: cutting and decapitating her victims, biting their breasts and other body parts, flaying and burning, sticking needles in their bodies, pouring honey over a naked servant girl and leav-ing her to be swarmed by bugs. Elizabeth’s victims weren’t just limited to servant girls; she was also reported to have tortured daughters of the local gentry who came to her castle to learn etiquette and abducted some others. Her legendary youthful appearance and vanity inspired the tales of her vampire-like attributes which solidified her name in national folklores. She was accused of murdering hundreds upon hundreds of young girls, most of which was lured to work at the castle and never came back. Proven guilty, she was confined alone in a bricked room to die and her 4 accomplices burned at stake.

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Emperor Nero (A.D. 37-68)

If you thought that Caligula was an isolated incident in Rome’s Julio-Claudian dynasty, you were wrong. Meet his nephew: one of the only other Roman Emperors who have ever even remote-ly challenged Caligula’s spot at the top of the ladder of infamy. This says something, indeed -- though Nero’s story is about as hazy as his uncle’s. Let’s have a few facts before rumors: During his time as Emper-or, he murdered his own mother, his first wife, and allegedly, his second wife too. Not only that, but he ordered one of his gen-erals, Corbulo, to commit suicide, and employed the first serial killer in history, a lovely lady and potions master named Lo-custa, to assassinate other people. He was a known prosecutor of the Christians, who were only a small sect at the time (look who’s laughing now). Here’s when the rumors begin. Some accounts would have it that Nero was a complete tyrant, and hated Christians so much that he allegedly had them covered with the “skins of beasts” and torn apart by dogs and left to die. Or alternately, nailed to crosses. Even better: burned alive, serving as some pretty illu-mination at nightfall. He is most infamously known as the man who fiddled while Rome burned in a great fire -- with some rumors saying that he started it himself so he could rebuild the city center. But then again, you have to wonder how a man who might not even have been in the city could be playing an instrument that hadn’t even been invented yet. Tells you a lot about hearsay, doesn’t it?

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