fear and spanish men

“The only thing that keeps you from doing what you want and being happy is yourself. It’s fear, and it comes from the inside.”

"You can only hold me accountable for what I say or do at the moment I say or do it."

“Me gusta acariciarte”

“Eres una diosa”

“Hombre misterioso”

SANTI

TERRIFIC PEOPLE QUIZ

Terrific people supposedly are those who make us smile, laugh, stimulate our interest, accept us for who we are, make us feel good about ourselves. Applicable to the more general term, "friend" (vs. "lover" or "significant other"), I was surprised to see the following guidelines for spotting the terrific people in our lives--

TERRIFIC PEOPLE QUIZ

Behavioral reactions:

3) Do you have the urge to hug, kiss, touch, and show affection freely to the person?

4) Are your affections reciprocated?

8) Does the person unselfishly go out of his/her way for you or try to please you?

10) Do you feel that you smile more and look your best whenever you are around that person?

Communication Reactions:

5) Do you speak to each other in kind and loving tones?

Physical reactions:

3) Do you like the way the person looks, dresses, sounds, and smells?

4) Do you like the way the person touches you?

* * *

Terrific adjectives:

Healthy Honest Humorous Imaginative Independent Integrity In the moment Joyful Kind Leader Level-headed Limitless Listens well Knowledgeable Loving Loyal Manly Meditative Moral Motivating Noncritical Not blaming Not complaining Accepting Accomplished Active Affectionate Ambitious Animated Assertive Aware of others Balanced Bold Brave Brilliant Calculated risktaker Calming

Charismatic Charming Childlike Classy Committed Communicative Compassionate Concerned Confident Conscious Consistent Creative Credible Curious Decisive Diverse Elegant Energetic Enterprising vs. entrepreneurial Enthusiastic Expressive Flexible Focused Full of life Generous Genuine Goal-oriented Gracious Grateful, appreciative Happy Hardworking, reliable Helpful Not destructive Not gossiping Not judgmental Not self-righteous

Not victimlike Nurturing Open emotionally Organized Passionate Patient People person Playful Real Respectable Respectful Responsible Satisfiable Secure Selfless Sensual, sensuous Sexual Simple Smart Socially aware Spiritual Strong Sweet, tender, thoughtful Gentle Trusting Trustworthy Values Warm Well-groomed Well-spoken Zest for life Uninhibited Unpretentious Unsuspicious Up-front

Imposible es...

Imposible es solo una gran palabra utilizada por hombres debiles que encuentran más facil vivir en el mundo que les ha sido dado, que explorer el poder que tienen para cambiarlo. Imposible no es un hecho, es una opinion. Imposible no es una declaración, es un reto. Imposible es potencial. Imposible es transitorio.

IMPOSSIBLE IS NOTHING.

Adidas, "David Beckham series"

Life of Pi

…atheists are my brothers and sisters of a different faith, and every word they speak speaks of faith. Like me, they go as far as the legs of reason will carry them—and then they leap. (28)

When it (diminishing flight distance) works, the result is an emotionally stable stress-free wild animal that not only stays put, but is healthy, lives a very long time, eats without fuss, behaves and socializes in natural ways and—the best sign—reproduces. (40)

All living things contain a measure of madness that moves them in strange, sometimes inexplicable ways. This madness can be saving; it is part and parcel of the ability to adapt…(41)

…animals don’t escape to somewhere but from something…animals that escape go from the known into the unknown and if there is one thing an animal hates above all else, it is the unknown. Escaping animals usually hide in the very first place they find that gives them a sense of security, and they are dangerous only to those who happen to get between them and their reckoned safe spot. (41)

Socially inferior animals are the ones that make the most strenuous, resourceful efforts to get to know their keepers. (45)

…the moment the girls become possessive, the moment each one imagines that Krishna is her partner alone, he vanishes. So it is that we should not be jealous with God. (49)

First wonder goes deepest; wonder after that fits in the impression made by the first. (50)

But once a dead God, always a dead God, even resurrected. The Son must have the taste of death forever in his mouth…Why would God wish that upon Himslef? Why nto leave death to the mortals?...LOVE! (54)

Jesus—a pedestrian god (56)

If you take two steps towards God…God run to you! (61)

deathbed leap of faith (64)

one fine day

In Italy, just living—the talking, the shopping, the cooking, the eating, the family and all that goes with it—actually consumes a whole day.

asleep

Yo-shi-hi-ro is like this giant ball of energy, you know—I just couldn’t keep my eyes off him. I’m not just talking about some sort of physical energy. The thing I felt was something that came bubbling up from inside him, you know, something that will never run out, something extremely intellectual. I feel like just being with him makes it possible for me to keep hanging, turning into something new, like I’ll be able to make my way to someplace really far away, but in a way that’s totally natural.

When exactly did I give myself over to sleep? When did I stop resisting…? I used to be so lively, I was always wide awake—but when was that? So long ago it felt like ancient times.

Sarah, from “Night and Night’s Travelers,” from Asleep by Banana Yoshimoto

pain and courage

Pain and fear of pain, finally, are the necessary conditions for courage. Creative achievement may seem solitary, even peripheral to society, but there is something genuinely heroic about it. And from an evolutionary perspective it is they who most fully embody that form of heroism which gives force to the whole human project: the heroism of the seeking mind. It is perhaps this sense of heroism that makes creative endeavor so uniquely enjoyable, that justifies all the pain.

Robert Grudin, “The Grace of Great Things”

walk out

“When you’re in the studio painting, there are a lot of people in there with you. Your teachers, friends, painters from history, critics…and one by one if you’re really painting, they walk out. And if you’re really painting, you walk out.”

Audred Flack

on being original

No one is truly original: “We always worry that we are copying from someone else, that we don’t have our own style. Don’t worry. Writing is a communal act…We are very arrogant to think we alone have a totally original mind. We are carried on the backs of all the writers who came before us.”

Natalie Goldbery, “Writing Down the Bones”

kundera: unbearable lightness

“Must it be? It must be! It must be!” Beethoven

…he realized it was only a matter of chance that Tereza loved him and not his friend Z.

…There were, in the realm of possibility, an infinite number of unconsummated loves for other men. (34)

Vertigo…something other than the fear of falling…the voice of the emptiness below us, which tempts and lures us. It is the desire to fall, against which, terrified, we defend ourselves. (60)

“I’ll undress them for you, give them a bath, bring them in to you…” she would whisper to him as they pressed together. She yearned for the two of them to merge into a hermaphrodite. Then the other women’s bodies would be their plaything. (62)

…doing a stranger’s bidding is a special madness. (66)

She had never been ambitious out of vanity. All she had ever wanted was to escape from her mother’s world. Yes, she saw it with absolute clarity: no matter how enthusiastic she was about taking pictures, she could just as easily have turned her enthusiasm to any endeavor. Photography was nothing but a way of getting at “something higher” and living beside Tomas. (70)

In spite of their love, they had made each other’s life a hell. The fact that they loved each other was merely proof that the fault lay not in themselves, in their behavior or inconstancy of feeling, but rather in their incompatibility: he was strong and she was weak…But when the strong were too weak to hurt the weak, the weak had to be strong enough to leave. (75)

While people are fairly young and the musical composition of their lives is still in its opening bars, they can go about writing it together and exchange motifs (the way Tomas and Sabina exchanged the motif of the bowler hat), but if they meet when they are older, like Franz and Sabina, their musical compositions are more or less complete, and every motif, every object, every word means something different to each of them. (89)

“Noise has an advantage. It drowns out words.” And suddenly he realized that all his life he had done nothing but talk, write, lecture, concoct sentences, search for formulations and amend them, so in the end no words were precise, their meanings were obliterated, their content lost, they turned into trash, chaff, dust, sand; prowling through his brain, tearing at his head, they were his insomnia, his illness. (94)

At the moment he penetrated Sabina, however, he closed his eyes. The pleasure of suffusing his body called for darkness. That darkness was pure, perfect, thoughtless, visionless; that darkness was without end, without borders; that darkness was the infinite we carry within us (Yes, if you’re looking for infinity, just close your eyes!) (95)

Excerpts from “The Unbearable Lightness of Being”
by Milan Kundera

God of small things

Arundhati Roy, a young production designer from India and author of “The God of Small Things,” writes with refreshing precision...her work is an invaluable reference file for writers.

phrases and excerpts below:

* * *

May in Ayemenem is a hot, brooding month.

nights are clear but suffused with sloth and sullen expectation (1)

walls, streaked with moss, had grown soft, and bulged a little with dampness (1)

hopeful yellow bullfrogs cruised the scrummy pond for mates (2)

leaf-strewn driveway (2)

In those early amorphous years when memory had only just begun, when life was full of Beginnings and no Ends, and Everything was For Ever, Esthappen and Rahel thought of themselves together as Me, and separately, individually, as We or Us. As though they were a rare breed of Siamese twins, physically separate, but with joint identities. (2)

…Anyway, now she thinks of Estha and Rahel as Them, because separately, the two of them are no longer what They were or ever thought They’d be.

Ever.

Their lives have a size and shape now. Estha has his and Rahel hers. (3)


The queer compassion of the very poor for the comparatively well-off (3)

Zebra crossing

It’s true (and must be said)… (5)

Dark blood spillinf from his skull like a secret (6)

…the world had other ways of breaking men. They were already familiar with the smell. Sicksweet. Like old roses on a breeze. (6)

Only Rahel noticed Sophie Mol’s secret cartwheel in her coffin (6)

The sharp, smoky stink of old urine (7)

Then he tapped her breasts with his baton. Gently. Tap, tap. As though he was choosing mangoes from a basket. (8)

Rahel could smell the sheaf of bus tickets and the sourness of the steel bus-rails on the conductor’s hands. (8)

Damp monsoon air…swollen cupboards creaked. Locked windows burst open. Books got soft and wavy between their covers. Strange insects appeared like ideas in the evening (9)

Still, tea-coloured puddles

The way memory bombs still, tea-coloured minds (10)

…it had been a gradual winding down and closing shop. A barely noticeable quieting. As though he had simply run out of conversation and had nothing left to say. Yet Estha’s silence was never awkward. Never intrusive. Never noisy. It wasn’t an accusing, protesting silence, as much as a sort of aestivation, a dormancy…(10)

…over time he had acquired the ability to blend into the background of wherever he was—into bookshelves, gardens, curtains, doorways, streets—to appear inanimate, almost invisible to the untrained eye. It usually took strangers a while to notice him even when they were in the same room with him. It took them even longer to notice that he never spoke. Some never noticed at all.

Estha occupied very little space in the world. (10-11)

He never bargained. They never cheated him. (11)

…the fact that something so fragile, so unbearably tender had survived, had been allowed to exist, was a miracle. A bird in flight reflected in an old dog’s balls. It made him smile out loud. (12)

He began to look wiser that he really was. Like a fisherman in a city. With sea-secrets in him. (13)

The banks of the river that smelled of shit, pesticides bought with World Bank loans

The new, freshly baked, iced, Gulf-money houses built by nurses, masons, wire-benders, and bank clerks who worked hard and unhappily in faraway places. (13)

Estha would walk past, not rude, not polite. Just quiet. (14)

Kochu Maria, the vinegar-hearted, short-tempered, midget cook (15)

The Loss of Sophie Mol stepped softly in the Ayemenem House like a quiet thing in socks. It hid in books and food. In Mamachi’s violin case…It is curious how sometimes the memory of death lives on for so much longer than the memory of the life that it purloined. (16)

As permanent as a government job.

She was in jeans and a white T-shirt. Part of an old patchwork bedspread was buttoned around her neck and trailed behind her like a cape. Her wild hair was tied back to look straight though it wasn’t. A tiny diamond gleamed in one nostril. She had absurdly beautiful collarbones and a nice athletic run. (18)

…he didn’t know what that look meant…somewhere between indifference and despair. He didn’t know that in some places…various kinds of despair competed for primacy. And that personal despair could never be desperate enough. That something happened when personal turmoil dropped by at the wayside shrine of the vast, violent, circling, driving, ridiculous, insane, unfeasible, public turmoil of a nation. That Big God howled like a hot wind and demanded obeisance. Then Small God (cozy and contained, private and limited) came away cauterized, laughing numbly at his own temerity. Inured by the confirmation of his own inconsequence, he became resilient and truly indifferent. Nothing mattered much. Nothing much mattered. And the less it mattered, the less it mattered. It was never important enough. Because Worse Things had happened. In the country like she came from, poised forever between the terror of war and the horror of peace, Worse Things kept happening. (19)

So Small God laughed a hollow laugh, and skipped away cheerfully. Like a rich boy in shorts. He whistled, kicked stones. The source of his brittle elation was the relative smallness of his misfortune. He climbed into people’s eyes and became an exasperating expression. (19)

…rubbing the thick, frothy bitterness out of an elderly cucumber. (20)

The silence sat between grand-niece and baby grand aunt like a third person. A stranger. Swollen. Noxious. (21)

They were a family of Anglophiles. Pointed in the wrong direction, trapped outside their own history, and unable to retrace their steps because their footprints had been swept away. He explained to them that history was like an old house at night. With all the lamps lit. And ancestors whispering inside.

‘To understand history,’ Chacko said, ‘we have to go inside and listen to what they’re saying. And look at the books and the pictures on the wall. And smell the smells.’ (52)

…‘But we can’t go in,’ Chacko explained, ‘because we’ve been locked out. And when we look in through the windows, all we see are shadows. And when we try to listen, all we hear is a whispering. And we cannot understand the whispering, because our minds have been invaded by a war. A war that we have won and lost. The very worst sort of war. A war that captures dreams and re-dreams them. A war that has made us adore our conquerors and despise ourselves.’

…‘We’re Prisoners of War,’ Chacko said. ‘Our dreams have been doctored. We belong nowhere. We sail unanchored on troubled seas. We may never be allowed ashore. Our dreams never big enough. Our lives never important enough. To matter.’ (53)

…he told them about the Earth Woman. He made them imagine that the earth—four thousand six hundred million years old—was a forty-six-year-old woman…It had taken the whole of the Earth Woman’s life for the earth to become what it was. For the oceans to part. For the mountains to rise. The Earth Woman was eleven years old, Chacko said, when the first single-celled organisms appeared. The first animals, creatures like worms and jellyfish, appeared only when she was forty. She was over forty-five—just eight months ago—when dinosaurs roamed the earth.

‘The whole of human civilization as we know it,’ Chacko told the twins, ‘began only two hours ago in the Earth Woman’s life.’ (53-54)

While other children of their age learned other things, Estha and Rahel learned how history negotiates its terms and collects its dues from those who break its laws. They heard its sickening thud. They smelled its smell and never forgot it.
History’s smell.

Like old roses on a breeze.

It would lurk for ever in ordinary things. In coat-hangers. Tomatoes. In the tar on the roads. In certain colours. In the plates at a restaurant. In the absence of words. And the emptiness in eyes.

They would grow up grappling with ways of living with what happened. They would try to tell themselves that in terms of geological time it was an insignificant event. Just a blink of the Earth Woman’s eye. That Worse Things had happened. That Worse Things kept happening. But they would find no comfort in the thought. (55)

The sculpted hollows on either side of his taut, beautiful buns. Tight plums. Men’s bums never grow up. (93)

‘D’you know what happens when you hurt people?’ Ammu said. ‘When you hurt people, they begin to love you less. That’s what careless words do. They make people love you a little less.’
A cold moth with unusually dense dorsal tufts landed lightly on Rahel’s heart. Where its icy legs touched her, she got goose bumps. Six goose bumps on her careless heart. A little less her Ammu loved her. (112)

Splay-footed, cautious (124)

Fetid garbage

Squelchy, sucking mud of the exposed river bed

The History House (where map-breath’d ancestors with tough toe-nails once whispered) (125)

…smelliness, like other people’s poverty, was merely a matter of getting used to. (126)

the uninitiated

labeled with edifying placards

While fathers played sublimated sexual games with their nubile teenaged daughters (127)

…there are things that can be forgotten. And things that cannot—that sit on dusty shelves like stuffed birds with baleful, sideways staring eyes (129)

mock dismay

The slow ceiling fan sliced the thick, frightened air into an unending spiral that spun slowly to the floor like the peeled skin of an endless potato (132)

A stainless-steel tray of boiled needles (133)

…her baby thought he was the Pope. He smiled and waved and smiled and waved. With his penis in a bottle. (139)

children’s whole-hearted commitment to life (165)

She was beautiful. Old, unusual, regal.

Blind Motor Widow with a violin. (166)

Kochu Maria was wary of other people’s versions of the outside world. More often than not, she took them to be a deliberate affront to her lack of education and (earlier) gullibility. (170)

Battle for Manila

What follows is an historical account of the death of the city we call home. Should be interesting to get my hands on Jose Maria Bonifacio Escoda's "Warsaw of Asia: The Rape of Manila."

UPDATE on 29 January 2008: Received 2 comments from Prof. Escoda dated October 2006, stating corrections to statements attributed to him by the Philippine Daily Inquirer in an article published in August 2005. Apologies to Prof. Escoda for not calling attention to the said corrections sooner. See "comments" at the end of this post for his full message.

* * *

Battle for Manila reduced 'Pearl of the Orient' to rubble

First posted 02:07pm (Mla time) Aug 14, 2005
By Karl Wilson
Agence France-Presse

THE BATTLE for Manila lasted just 28 days. When it ended on March 3, 1945, over 100,000 civilians were dead and the city known as the Pearl of the Orient reduced to rubble. Six months after street-by-street fighting and US bombardment had leveled the once-proud city, the stench of rotting flesh still lingered in the capital, according to those who survived the ordeal.

"The destruction of Manila was one of the greatest tragedies of World War II. Of all the allied capitals only Warsaw suffered more," wrote American historian William Manchester. Benito Legarda, who was 18-years-old at the time, said the Japanese forces occupying the city since January 2, 1942 went out of their way to make life unlivable once they realized the US military was advancing to recapture the city.

"They dynamited bridges, destroyed utilities and murdered civilians... There was no excuse for what took place in Manila in those 28 days... none at all."

Tales of men, women and children being rounded up and shot, mutilated, raped, decapitated or bayoneted by Japanese troops paint the period as one of the darker episodes in the closing chapter of World War II.

By the end of 1944 the tide had turned for Japan and its conquest of Southeast Asia. On October 20, General Douglas MacArthur, the Allied commander in the Far East, invaded the eastern Philippines in the biggest land and sea assault of the Pacific war with nearly 200,000 men and 700 ships. MacArthur, who had vowed "I shall return" when he abandoned the Philippines for Australia more than two years earlier, waded ashore -- twice, the second time for the benefit of the newsreels -- to tell the people of the Philippines in a radio broadcast that he had kept his promise. At the same time the US navy with her allies took on what was left of the Imperial Japanese Navy in the biggest sea battle in history, the Battle of Leyte Gulf.

For MacArthur it was a race against time to Manila and Luzon where thousands of American soldiers had been interned since the surrender of US and Filipino troops in May 1942. University of the Philippines historian Ricardo Jose said the Americans surprised the Japanese when they attacked the city from the north on February 3, 1945.

"The Japanese destroyed all six bridges that crossed the Pasig river which divides the city north and south and began torching the Chinese quarter and the old business district of Escolta," he said. "Basically the city had to be taken building by building, street-by-street. It was hand-to-hand in some quarters, tank and artillery bombardment in others. "What made the fighting difficult for the Americans was the fact that many of the major buildings were connected by tunnels. So when the Americans thought they had cleared one building and moved on to the next the Japanese would pop up again and attack them from the rear."

After 28 days, on March 3, the last Japanese resistance collapsed. Figures as to the military casualties vary enormously with estimates as high as a total of 22,000 dead. Jose said some 1,000 Americans died, 4,000 were wounded with more than 8,000 Japanese dead. "Most of the garrison was wiped out in the fighting," he said.

"There was no white flag surrender. The fighting just stopped when the last pocket of resistance had been cleared. Thousands of Japanese civilians that were brought in to run the country were taken prisoner along with Japanese troops who had surrendered.

"As for Manila, it was in ruins." Much of the damage was caused by the US bombardment, Jose Maria Bonifacio Escoda says in his book "Warsaw of Asia: The Rape of Manila."

"Not all buildings were destroyed by the Japanese and not all the massacres were perpetrated by them. Much destruction and many deaths were caused by American bombings from the air and shelling by artillery." He says Filipinos were often mistaken for Japanese and were shot by American troops or strafed and bombed by their pilots Augusto Dariana of the National Historical Institute said much of the blame for what happened in Manila was placed on general Tomoyuki Yamashita, commander of the Japanese forces in the Philippines.

"Yamashita had pulled out of Manila in December 1944 well before the massacre began," he told Agence France-Presse. "He left strict orders that the city be spared and for all troops to leave Manila saying it could not be defended. "The real butcher of Manila was Admiral Sanji Iwabuchi of the Imperial Japanese Manila Naval Defence Force who disobeyed Yamashita's orders and decided to fight to the bitter end. He was killed in the battle."

Yamashita was executed in February 1946 following a trial in which he was accused of "violating the laws of war for failing to control his troops."

"There is a lot of conflicting views of what happened in the lead up to the Battle for Manila. It is true Yamashita had withdrawn to northern Luzon ahead of the American troops," Jose said.

"But it is clear from the records the Japanese had no intention of leaving Manila and had dug in for a long fight fortifying the city and its approaches. Most of these troops were under the command of Admiral Iwabuchi."

Killings took many forms
Legarda said the rape of Manila was committed by a desperate Japanese army staring defeat in the face. "The killings took many forms. Sometimes they shot civilians or bayoneted them to death. Some were beheaded. Sometimes families or groups were herded into buildings and blasted with hand grenades. Women were raped and sliced with bayonets from groin to throat and left to bleed to death in the hot sun. Children were seized by the legs and had their heads bashed against the wall. Babies were tossed into the air and caught on bayonets. Unborn fetuses were gouged out with bayonets from pregnant women." Although his immediate family were among the lucky survivors, Legarda said one of his uncles and a cousin were beheaded by the Japanese.

Like many who survived, Legarda has written extensively about his experiences growing up during the occupation of Manila and its subsequent destruction. In his book "Occupation 42" he includes eyewitness accounts to some of the atrocities that took place.

One was Hungarian ballet star Paul Szilard who described how from his hospital bed he heard a strange "squelching" sound coming up from the street. "To his horror he found it was the sound of bodies being run over by Japanese vehicles," Legarda said.

Edgar Krohn was just 16 when the battle for Manila began. "I guess we were luckier than most. Our family remained together but others were torn apart in the chaos that followed," he recalls. Born in Manila of German parents, Krohn said: "Despite the alliance between Germany and Japan we were granted few privileges. The Japanese didn't like anyone who was not Japanese.

"I remember seeing one man, his stomach sliced open by a piece of shrapnel, sitting down in the street trying to put his intestines back. "You tried to survive one day at a time. You dodged the bullets and hoped the building you were seeking refuge in was not bombed.

"Terrible atrocities took place all over the city. I will never forget one night in the building opposite there was a woman screaming. The terror in that scream has never left me. It was horrible. We were told the woman was being repeatedly gang raped by Japanese soldiers. Next morning her body was thrown out on to the street."

Krohn said a dispute between his father and a landlord probably saved his family.

"On February 10, 1945, some 200 to 300 Filipinos including some Germans and Spanish had gone to the German Club on San Luis Street in Manila's Ermita district. They had gone there because they thought it was safe. "Some sought shelter in an air raid shelter under the club while others waited inside."

Krohn's family stored their possessions at the club but that afternoon had gone to visit an old apartment that had been ransacked to see if anything was left.

"About noon a platoon of Japanese marines cordoned off the club premises and started killing everyone in sight. They murdered people inside the club, including Germans, and fired their weapons into the air raid shelter. Then they poured petrol into the shelter and set it alight. "Those who tried to escape were gunned down ... only 10 survived the massacre," he says.

Today in the old walled city of Intramuros, between Manila Cathedral and the San Agustin Church, a bronze sculpture mounted on a black granite slab by artist Peter de Guzman stands in memory of those who perished in the city. It is a stark monument full of painful imagery. At its center is a woman carrying a dead infant representing the Philippines, the child being a symbol of lost hope. A female figure next to her depicts a rape victim. The figure of a man shows despair and confusion. At the woman's feet are the bodies of young boys symbolizing the country's lost youth.

But for many young Filipinos today the events that took place in Manila 60 years ago have little significance or impact on their lives. Every day hundreds of young Filipinos queue up outside the Japanese embassy in Manila for visas to work in Japan. But for older residents, like Krohn, the nightmare has never left them.

"You can never forget what it was like," he says.
"You can't erase it from your memory."

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