Angel Locsin, God, and Johnny Depp

First, I should not be watching Captain Barbell, then Majika, then I love New York. But my mother is a certified Kapuso and while she watches this series of Fantaseryes, I do the dishes, fold the wash, and sweep the floor. I can’t be in any other place but where my mother is. (…well I Love New York is a kind of fantasy also. How come Baste can last in New York without working? Does he really think he can last long with his winnings? But this is dollar country. I am amazed at how Marvin and Jolina are able to sustain the slow pace of their love-lives in this fast city. Where’s the magic here? How can their situation be so unreal?)

Sometimes i feel as if I am missing something in the larger world.

House work is after eight PM when I will have finally decided that I can’t stare another minute at my word processor. I actually welcome the change in my encode-translate-edit routine because I need to exercise my legs somehow. The major exercise I get is when going up and down the stairs to get water or juice to drink. I should walk every day before sitting down in front of my computer for hours but although my "spirit is willing, my flesh is weak," and it’s too difficult to wake up at 4AM everyday now that I sleep after twelve. Why four AM? Why not five or six or seven? Walk after five and smoke hits your lungs. And where do you actually “walk” in the City?

I try the plaza, and am still walking around it at least three times a week In the mornings at around 6:30, there are already too many people in the Batangas City plaza. A bunch of health buffs regularly do their aerobics here (more or less 50 to 80 people). In their twenties and fifties these weight conscious adults could be government employees or after-stroke victims and active retirees who believe that a dose of perspiration will give them more productive days. Sometimes, I join their routine, but I easily get tired and dizzy doing the dance steps.

There are at least five high schools which are walking distance away from this place. Almost all jeepneys unload their passenger students in the plaza. While brisk walking I keep bumping on teenagers who mass on my side of the street.

Lazy strollers park themselves on the benches and sometimes, I get shy when they watch me stop near the benches to do my pre and post walking stretch.

Devout Catholics come out of the church and buy flowers and stroll meditatively on the pavement, and I do a zigzag around them as I walk-run, run-walk.

This is the only active lifestyle I can boast of today, after I’ve certified myself as a translator. I should have anticipated that I would be chasing the hours away right here at home, where by 8 AM I should be punching on my keyboard already to finish a book that has many difficult paragraphs like this one:

“Father, Son and Spirit are one single God, yet each of them is from all eternity a person, a distinct center of conscious selfhood. God the Trinity is thus to be described as ‘three persons in one essence.’ There is eternally in God true unity, combined with genuinely personal differentiation. There is distinction, but never separation. Father, Son and Spirit – so the saints affirm, following the testimony of Scripture – have only one will and not three, only one energy and not three. None of the three ever acts separately, apart from the other two. They are not three Gods, but one God. The Spirit is God within us, the Son is God with us, and the Father is God above or beyond us. Just as the Son shows us the Father, so it is the Spirit who shows us the Son, making him present to us. It is in and through the Son that the Father is revealed to us: “I am the Way, the Truth and the Life: No One comes to the Father except through me” (The Orthodox Way by Kallistos Ware. Pgs 30-33)


Go on, translate this and experience the challenge. How do you translate "distinct center of conscious selfhood?" How about "essence?"

I am hoping that I can finish this one major task on hand in time to watch Superman, and Pirates of the Carribean. Because what I truly miss is watching “real” movies. I need to ogle at larger-than-life images, to get carried away by the fast convoluted plots of the bigger-than-life reels, and to be blown out of my wits by the crazy imagination of the magic-weavers behind the big screen.

Hopefully, I can do this soon, or I'll faint.