Butterflies

On the weekends, we spend a lot of time together. Yes, we spend every weekend together, but as most of you know, weekends are hectic.

A typical weeknight follows as such: I get home first and take care of the apartment and any clean-up left over from the night before. This includes washing dishes, just tidying up in general. I fetch her at her duty then have dinner together.

We talk about our respective days. We regale each other with funny stories about so&so and whatsherface. Then we eat, then we crash. Romantic, right?

So, we claim the weekends. It's our time. The time where we can just sit and talk for hours about anything on our minds. Where we can travel to anywhere we want and the grocery store and it feels like a mini-date. Where we can be as serious or silly as we want to be.

Everything feels better when you’re with your best friend.

During one particular talking sesh, she got to talking about regrets. As we talked and got past the surface of her regrets, we both sort of realized something. Having regrets is something that usually never goes away. You can apologize for your wrongdoing, you can forgive someone else, but sometimes the sheer act of letting go is what people cling to.

One sentiment she settled on, which we can all relate to, is regret about past relationships. Not the things we did wrong during those relationships, but for her at least, all the time and effort she spent on certain people only to end up burned in the end. How is that we ended up where we are after selling ourselves short for so many years?


I think it’s safe to say we all have had a relationship where we feel we put more effort into it than we got back out of it. And that is where the light bulb clicked. Our relationship works because we both put into it what we get out of it. The feeling of selflessness and the desire to do something for someone goes above and beyond because we never sit around wondering when our turn is. We never have to put in any extra effort because every effort we do put in is because we want to.

Every person we date is a slight variation of someone else. You’re together with someone for a time, you break up, and then the next person you date is fairly similar. It’s not surprising. We all have a type and certain attributes we’re drawn to. But if you feel like you’re stuck in a rut, it’s time to take a chance. It’s time to deviate from the normal path you were taking.

I recently gave the same advice to a friend who had a steady boyfriend but also had a crush on someone who was a good friend. She was confused about which person she should move forward with and as we talked, I asked her, “Is (crush) the same kind of person you’ve been dating in the past?”, to which she replied yes, he was. Her crush still lived at home with no change of that in sight, was not overly ambitious, and didn’t really want the same things my friend did in the long run.

When I asked about her boyfriend, her face lit up and she said, “He is completely different from any person I have ever been with before.” And to that, I advised, “Then you need to move forward with him and see where this goes. Push yourself out of your comfort zone…because you already know where the other path leads you.” They got engaged this month.

It’s just a reminder – every passing moment is another chance to turn it all around. Especially when after years, that person can still make you weak in the knees and give you butterflies. JMP

The End of a Streak

Did the streak just really end? Why did they choose Lesnar to end it? What happens to Taker now? Wasn’t there a better script? Wouldn’t it be cooler if HBK or HHH beat him? Shit! Why? How? What now? And Lesnar?!

The biggest news out of Wrestlemania 30 was undoubtedly The Undertaker losing his 21-match winning streak. The man who snapped the legendary streak was Brock Lesnar. Forget the momentous introduction by The Rock, Stone Cold, and the Immortal Hulk Hogan. Forget Daniel Bryan beating the odds.

The Undertaker lost.

I felt like Piolo Pascual in Starting Over Again. I deserve an explanation! I need an acceptable reason!

It was the kind of event that made you remember where you were, who you were with, what exactly you were doing, and how you felt right after it happened. Whether you were at home watching, or taking a “sick leave” from work, or in a meeting, or simply just checking through Facebook, the world sort of stopped. Fans felt their insides exploded. They couldn’t believe it.




I know I couldn't. I tried to resist going online, afraid that someone might post even a hint of what happened in Wrestlemania. I tried but failed. Taker’s streak flooded my Facebook, Twitter. The heart-sinking, head-turning, God-questioning news was everywhere. I couldn’t accept it.

Honestly, I didn’t mind Taker losing that much. It had to end someday. It was the way he lost and who he lost to that bothered me. I mean, I can think of at least 5 other wrestlers who deserved to end the streak. Anyone but Lesnar. Take away the current storyline and just think history wise; The Undertaker’s streak could have ended with HBK, HHH, Stone Cold, The Rock, or Kane. My point is that another legend should have ended the streak, someone who was the heroic or the villainous face of the WWE for his generation.

It’s like one of those Kung Fu movies wherein the Great Master wants somebody to finally challenge him, someone who deserves to stand on the same soil. That’s what I felt when HBK fought against Taker two years in a row in Wrestlemania 25 and 26. The last one even had a stipulation resulting in HBK’s retirement. I remember HBK's white hot pants. I remember HBK desperately trying to stand up when Taker just looked at him. In that moment, everyone knew who was going to win. I loved it when both men shook hands right after because they knew the gravity of the match and the history surrounding it. The Heartbreak Kid was going to retire and The Undertaker and his streak were going to live on. I could go further with HHH in Wrestlemania 27 and 28. The matches were so good that I even said to myself that if Taker lost, it would have been all right.

Maybe it was all a marketing ploy by the WWE. Maybe they needed to shake things up in a monumental way. Maybe they needed the fans to notice them again. Maybe it was even Taker’s decision to end it. Maybe he wanted to go on his terms.

Whatever.

Everyone will remember what they felt and where they were when the longest streak in sports entertainment ended. The Streak was over. It was like a knife piercing my gut. JMP

PDA (Public Display of Affection)

The writer that lives a life of leisure and nothingness inside my brain piped up with an idea about context being extremely important in the delivery of a message, so I decided to write an open letter to her. This serves two purposes; first, it allows the uninvolved reader see how we communicate, and at the same time, when she reads it, she’ll understand that when I wrote it, I did so with her in mind, and that it’s from the heart, and not edited based on trying to put together something that’s been “sanitized” for public consumption.

Dearest Babe,

I hope you’ll either forgive my indulgence of the urge to write this in an open forum, or you’ll not consider this a public display of affection, which I know you’re not fond of. I think letters like these are important to a relationship, a way of laying all my cards on the table in a very straightforward manner.

The past months have been wonderful — it’s been a long time since I was in a relationship this comfortable, and yet still exciting and interesting. I know it’s not “perfect” and that we have our communications gaps, but it’s also reassuring that we’re able to work on those gaps together, and that we don’t let issues fester and become problems.

You’re what I’ve been looking for — that rare combination of smart, funny, and great looks, with a fireball personality. It’s not just the generalities, either. There’s things about you that I can’t help but love and remember — the way we fit together when we’re just doing absolutely nothing . Your cranky mornings, even if they are the antithesis of mine. Your laugh — the first time I heard it, I thought of Matthew Perry in Friends talking about how he missed his ex-girlfriend’s laugh, the way “she laughs with her whole body.” Better still that the first time I witnessed it was when I verbally tripped over my own feet on our first date.

You know that I love you, but I think it’s important that you have that reinforced from time to time in notes like these, and that I tell you why I feel the way I do.

I love you.

Yours,
JMP

Coming Home

Coming home after months or even years away is hard because the people you are coming home to only know — and thus expect — the you that left. This is true for the college kid who is still teased by his family about his sloppiness, his pizza-only diet, or his C’s-will-do work ethic, despite the fact that he actually worked fairly hard to get his act together while living on his own. This is true of the 20-something who is still referred to by her mother as a Prima Donna, regardless of the fact that she just spent 18 months living out of a backpack. This is true of anyone who has ever come home to find that the people there no longer see them as they see themselves.

There is no one to blame here but the game-changers that are expectation and time. We can’t help that we left as the people we left as, or that the people we said goodbye to screenshotted us in their minds, remembering our carefree manner, our insecure smile or our constant refusal to do the dishes.

But time, almost by definition, changes things. This, incidentally, is probably a good thing. How many people do you know that, if asked if they wanted to be exactly the same in two years, would say yes? Probably not many. Furthermore, what was the point of study abroad or taking a promotion in a new city or backpacking Asia if you weren’t going to let it change you in some way?

For better or for worse, few escape time. Time is a potter who takes the already-drying pieces we are as 20-somethings, composed of a certain shade of clay with a determined grit, and molds us slightly, sometimes gradually and delicately changing the structure of the entire piece. Sometimes time smooths out a previously jagged edge. Sometimes time is over-ambitious, and in attempting to pull a vase out a bowl, renders the clay a bit too thin in the middle. Sometimes that thin clay even tears.

But no matter what, the wheel keeps spinning and rarely does the clay just sit there untouched. As we get older, the clay begins to harden in the air, and the alterations become increasingly difficult. The miracle of damp clay is that it cannot shatter.

And so we come home, molded by time and the experiences it offered. We come home, in some way altered, to the people we have left with a screenshot of our former selves; an expectation of the person we were.

Coming home is hard because, in many cases, the people we come home to will want to understand. They will beg for stories, and their eyes will dart back and forth between ours as they listen. They will ask the right questions at the right moments.

But, intent as they may be in wanting to understand (“Tell me everything. No seriously, I mean everything”), they weren’t there when that handsome once-a-stranger clumsily nudged the lego house that was your heart off of the coffee table. They weren’t one of the friends down on their hands and knees searching for the scattered pieces in the dust under the couch. They weren’t there as you tried to reassemble the structure, but struggled, as no step-by-step instruction manual could be found.

They didn’t experience these things with you, despite your subsequent Skype sessions and the emails that had half as many words as Anna Karenina, but they will experience the way time and circumstance have changed you. This is not necessarily a good or bad thing, but it is a reality that we are often under-prepared for.

Coming home to someone, due to the familiar culprits of time and expectation, is even harder. It’s so hard that it’s almost like the occasion warrants some sort of peremptory message, something that tactfully conveys the thoughts that insist on playing tag in your head when you can’t fall asleep at night. The ones in which you blurt out something like this:

“Listen, it’s not that I’m not really excited to see you, but I think we need to maybe manage our expectations a bit. We haven’t seen each other in what will be 14 months. We are 5,000 miles apart. We haven’t spoken face-to-face in over a year. You’ve romanticized me, and I can’t blame you. It’s impossible not to airbrush someone’s flaws when you are infatuated with the idea of them from a distance. I’ve done the same to you. This is not to say it couldn’t work out, but simply to point out (to both of us) that it might not. We’ve changed. So let’s do ourselves both a favor and press reset on our expectations, because I don’t want either of us to be kept up at night by the idea of someone who doesn’t exist anymore. That being said, please know that I look forward to meeting you again.”

None of this is to imply that leaving your “home” for months or years at a time inherently weakens or destroys relationships, but sometimes it will. Remember that high school friend you got coffee with a year after graduation, only to discover that you actually had nothing in common besides chemistry class and mean girls to gossip about? Relationships like that, based on nothing beyond a common experience, may start to disintegrate, and perhaps you should let them.

The converse of this is that the people you feel just as connected to after months or years of geographic distance, after all the circumstantial things you had in common (location, classes, workplace, the team you were on, the people you had to talk about) have fallen away, these are your people. These are the people who will give a toast at your wedding; who will be drunk with you on your 40th birthday. This is your home team.

I like to joke that if you want to know who your real friends are you should disappear for a year and see who is still there when you get back. I say this laughing, but in reality, few things could be closer to the truth.

Coming home is hard, because managing your expectations of people is hard. Coming home is hard, because changed people mean a changed relationship; an altered dynamic. Coming home is hard because explaining the events that changed you, perhaps in a few dramatic hours or days, is hard. Coming home is hard because you see yourself every single day and may not even realize that you’re different until you don’t quite manage to fit back into your old role. Coming home is hard because often some of the places you used to occupy have been filled — by new best friends, new love interests, a new social dynamic. Coming home is hard because you’re expected to pick up where you left off, when in reality you’re miles away from that spot.

Coming home is hard because your family isn’t perfect. Your mother, despite all the effort she put into raising you, is probably still over-bearing or slightly (highly) irrational. Your father, in spite of all of the support he has provided you, may be just as critical as you left him. Your cousin might still be losing his war with alcohol; your aunt might still be wrestling with divorce papers. It will be just as difficult as it has always been to be with people 24/7, to see them through their nastiest moods and that annoying way they always talk with food in their mouth.

Coming home is hard, but coming home can be also be wonderful. Coming home means your mom’s famous brownies, your little brother’s sorority girl imitation, and drinking port with your dad. Coming home means that park you used to drink in, it means the the bed you’ve been missing for months. It means people that have had you counting down the days until you could hug them. It means someone, perhaps the officer that checks your passport upon arrival or the woman who has worked in your neighborhood 7/11 since you were a kid, saying “welcome home.”

Coming home is hard, but it’s worth it. JMP

The Thin Red and Blue Line

The foot of Chino Roces Bridge offers a remarkable if not revealing dichotomy of the history of this place. There are the ever-present barbed wire barricades meant to keep out a seemingly never-ending horde of protesters who have taken issue with almost everything under the sun. During the rumble years of the NCAA, it was like the Maginot Line; it was meant to prevent rival schools from unwanted intrusions. Yet conversely, the bridge was designed not to keep the people in but to send them to and fro. The road sign at the foot of the bridge confirms this: Avenida and Divisoria to the south, Sta. Mesa and Makati to the east, and the US Embassy to the west. Again there’s the dichotomy -- if the demonstrators were kept away from Malacañang Palace’s doorstep, there was always that long-accused edifice of imperialism along Roxas Boulevard where they could vent their lung power. But the bridge is there to send off the graduates of the schools of the area to supposedly greener pastures.

Next to Malacañang, the words of the prophets lie inside those Benedictine walls of San Beda College. There is pride in here – you can feel it as soon as you step in. There too, is a rich history written with the names and deeds of famous alumni on its sanctified halls, in its literature, and in its awe-inspiring trophy room where the one and only Crispulo Zamora Trophy stands as the centerpiece.

Should you sift through the trophies or even The Bedan, you will see how intertwined this school’s history is with an erstwhile foe that has long since left the U-belt for the sprawling lawn of Loyola.

The early Ateneo-UP rivalry dissipated when the latter left to form the UAAP with UST and NU. As the Blue and Whites took control of the cage crowns, the Red and Whites (teams were then called by their colors) announced their arrival by matching Ateneo every step of the way and it was a white hot rivalry.

As it was written by a Bedan sportswriter in 1946, “One very commendable feature about these Ateneo-San Beda games is that despite the intense rivalry, the games are very clean. The Ateneans are good sports. For them last Sunday’s double header must have been a hard one to drop. We know what that feels like. But there was no whimper or complaint. They have shown that they can win and lose.”

A couple of decades after that was written, that statement would have been untrue for it was the increasing violence that bedeviled not just between the two schools but also the league that saw both bolting the NCAA.

After an Ateneo win, one player was allegedly have said, “The Lion is not dead. It only has been tamed with the Eagle riding majestically on its back.” When San Beda turned the tables on its foe, the reply was just as telling: “The Lion was seen walking regally chewing the last bits of eagle flesh in its massive jaws with blue feathers flying in the sunbeams.”

The two schools interchanged their own three-peats in the 1930’s and later got in each other’s way time and again en route to more glory. Ateneo was stopped by San Beda in its attempted three-peats in 1955, 1959, and 1978 while the former returned the favor only once in 1953.

There was drama in the rivalry. The Red Lions’ very own Bonnie Carbonell and Lito Bangoy were from Ateneo De Davao and were earmarked for Loyola until a run in with a Jesuit who wasn’t too enamored with the attention that athletes got. And the two made the Loyolans pay for the snub in a grand way. They took the ’52, ’53, and ’55 cage crowns with the latter culminating with the awarding of the Zamora Trophy.

Before the ascension of Loyzaga as the Golden Age of Philippine basketball’s star, there were the feats of Ateneo’s Luis “Moro” Lorenzo. During the game’s infancy in the country, Lorenzo’s 33 points in one tussle were deemed to be an unbreakable and unattainable record until Loyzaga arrived. And as San Beda romped through the field seemingly unbeatable in the big matches, the giant-killing Blue Eagles of 1953 with Frankie Rabat, Mike Littaua, and Rusty Cacho felled the Red Lions in what many Ateneans of yesteryear call perhaps the greatest team to wear blue and white. “You don’t understand who Caloy Loyzaga was,” venerated Ateneo Sports Hall-of-Famer Ding Camua who played in Ateneo’s ’61 champion team and is currently the Manager for Pharex’s PBL team. “He was a cut about everyone else. He was like a god yet we showed his mortality that year.”

Upon returning home from the 1954 World Basketball Championships in Rio De Janeiro, Brazil, a contingent of Bedans met Caloy Loyzaga, Tony Genato, Pons Valdez, and Rafael Barretto at the airport. The Philippines placed third in the competition and the National Team returned to a heroes’ welcome yet the first thing Loyzaga asked his Red Lions’ teammate Carbonell was, “So tell me, how did you lose the (1954 NCAA) championship to Ateneo?”

“My friend,” greeted Carbonell as he clasped hands with then dubbed ‘the Great Difference*.’ “We were waiting for you.”

Loyzaga, third in the tournament in scoring, led the Philippines to a third place finish in the tournament, the highest an Asian team has ever reached.

The late Poch Estella went to Mendiola for primary and secondary education before he moved to Ateneo for college. There he battled first Pons Valdez then Loyzaga inside the paint. Ramon and Bobby Rius, the scions of Bedan great Arturo (whom they affectionately nicknamed “Lulli”) played for the late 1960’s Ateneo teams that ended with the title of ’69. Every time one of the Rius brothers touched the ball, they were booed mercilessly by the Bedan crowd. The sons of Caloy Loyzaga, Chito and Joey both went to Loyola for their elementary years before transferring to Mendiola. While in AteneoGrade School, Loyzaga found himself teaming up with Steve Watson but the two would later meet as opponents in the title games of ’77 & ’78.

The exodus of the fabled Red Cubs to schools like Ateneo, La Salle, and UP would continue as San Beda floundered after its departure from the NCAA in the early 1980’s. It didn’t help when later Coach Orly Castelo began an aggressive recruiting program from the provinces and other schools that only further disenfranchised its high school players. The bleeding only stopped after its alumni decided to ensure that their players within its walls.

After the 1978 win over La Salle, it was a 30-year wait for San Beda. There were the painful and harrowing misses of 1991 and 1996. And had PCU’s Beau Belga had the presence of mind to dump the ball in the post to teammate Gabby Espinas who scored earlier on the defensively-challenged Yousif Aljamal, the waiting might have been longer. After endlessly waiting to exhale, the Araneta Coliseum exploded in song and tears. 

In recent years beginning with the off-season tournaments, San Beda and Ateneo have seen each other on the court once more. For today’s generation, that doesn’t mean much except that each is another foe to be conquered. But history, tradition, and bloodlines have a way of seeping into the fore. The presence of several former Red Cubs in the Ateneo varsity has not gone unnoticed either.

Already there the whispers that San Beda would like to move its athletic teams to the UAAP once it is accorded its “university” status within the next two years. And the whispers are getting louder. Should that happen then it’s almost the entire original cast of the NCAA when it was founded way back in 1924. The only missing school would be the University of Manila that is currently plying its trade in the rival NAASCU. Maybe then the UAAP should reclaim the name of “NCAA.”

Think about it, the red and white versus the blue and white. Heck, the green and white are there too. JMP

Characteristics of a Healthy Relationship

Since college basketball is still on leave, I decided to write an article about relationships and life. 

Healthy relationships with friends are the icing on life’s cake. But it is not easy to form one, especially if you have not been surrounded by healthy relationships in the past. The exciting news, however, is that healthy friendships are a win-win situation. Standing together, friends can encourage each other to do amazing things in life. By understanding the characteristics of a healthy relationship, you can begin to improve and build new friendships.

Open Communication :

People in healthy relationships communicate openly with one another. They give more than just a daily update of events; they talk about personal issues in their lives.


Balance :

Relationships can often end in a train wreck when one person gives and the other only takes. But don’t fall into the trap of comparing every little act of giving and expect it to be countered by an equal act from the other person. Friends in a healthy relationship should simply enjoy giving without expecting something in return, and that goes both ways.


Compassion :

The main ingredient for all good friendships is compassion—when you truly care for the other person's needs as much as your own.

Honesty :

People in healthy relationships are open and honest. They do not hide things of importance from each other, even if it makes them uncomfortable. Lies and cover-ups undermine trust, which is the foundation of a healthy relationship.



Faithfulness :

When life gets hard, best friends don’t hit the trail running in opposite directions. They stand by each other through thick and thin. They are true to their word and follow through with things they say they are going to do. Faithfulness in a friendship is imperative, especially when tragedy or hard times hit.


Respect :

Everybody has expectations, which sometimes are not fulfilled. Maybe you and your friend have opposing viewpoints on an issue. This does not mean you need to part ways. On the contrary, people in healthy relationships learn to respect each other's ideas and opinions.


Conflict Resolution :

Friends need to learn a healthy process of dealing with differences. This involves listening and healthy communication. For example, never say, “You always …” or “There you go again with …”. It’s always better to listen carefully, ask clarifying questions, and use appropriate “I” messages like, “I feel hurt when that happens because …” or “I feel as if my opinions aren’t being considered when …”. Nobody can argue with your perceptions and feelings. Learn which battles are worth fighting, and which ones are not worth the struggle.

Fun :

Friends in a healthy relationship are good at getting things accomplished together, but they also know when to set work aside. They like doing fun activities together, or simply sharing a laugh.


Forgiveness :

Forgiving others does not mean inviting them to trample over you time and time again. It simply means that you put the past behind you and hope for better things to come. If one person continues to deliberately offend the other, repeatedly expecting forgiveness, it might be time to end the relationship.


Be Yourself :

Forgiving others does not mean inviting them to trample over you time and time again. It simply means that you put the past behind you and hope for better things to come. If one person continues to deliberately offend the other, repeatedly expecting forgiveness, it might be time to end the relationship. JMP