Balikbayan, pt. 1

Filipino immigrants always return. Like an annual ritual, they come back regularly to family and familiarity. For American-born Filipinos, they are brought along for the pilgrimage by their parents. I could call it a rite of passage, or an exposure to one's roots, but it's a part of Pilipino American culture that has many different meanings and indications for many different people. Some hate going, some never see more than their Lola's house, and some go every other summer.

For me, it had been at least 12 years since I last set foot on Filipino soil. As the years went on, another trip to the Philippines became more and more inevitable. You could only go so long without visiting. So it was decided that in the summer of 2007, that we would spend over one month immersed in the Philippines. We wouldn't just be visiting family and hanging out in the province. We would also see the sights, from the tourist destinations to the historical landmarks that defined the country's history.

It's been three nights here in the Philippines. I'm enjoying it, but it still a little bit daunting to think that I'll be away from the familiar routines for over a month. It has been, and will continue to be, much more than a vacation.

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Review | Scales Always Find a Way to Level Out

Bright Eyes is, sometimes, my favorite band. It depends on when I'm asked and who asks me. Either way, they're up there and untouchable in my mind. I first heard of them from a friend I talked with through the internet. I finally heard them when browsing through my sister's plethora of MP3s on the family computer. They were the gateway band that led me to the wide, wide, world of independent music, a huge source of enjoyment in my everyday life. Just the amount of money this band has led me to spend on the genre -- damn. It was definitely life changing in many ways, and it feels great to claim that.

Back then, I had never heard arrangements so interesting & layered, or lyrics so moving & well-crafted. Every night, I laid down with my CD player under my pillow listening to these tracks. I was in awe of how well someone could say exactly what they wanted to in a song, yet still have it rhyme & fit the structure of the song. It was supernatural. It was someone speaking the language of songwriting so fluently that it was stunning.

Their latest full studio effort, Cassadaga (cah-suh-day-guh) , is just about to be released. Advanced copies & pre-orders have already reached the hands of their many fans, and reactions are leaning to one side: the bad side. The band has taken a turn for a more traditional country western/folk/americana sound. Gone are the introspective, moving, and maybe even whiny songs meant purely to express something for the sake of staying sane. In their place are extroverted, political, protest songs constructed for inspiring action, not navel-gazing.

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Essay | Joining the Work Force

"You look really tired," she said.
"Yeah. I am," I replied as I proceeded down the steps.

I didn't even look at the stranger's face. I hoped her remark didn't mean my exhaustion was obvious. I hoped she just had a sharp sense of perception, because no one wants to buy candy from a weary-looking seventeen year old.

So, candy, right? Selling candy at stadium events was probably my second job ever. Mostly at the local Home Depot Center for LA Galaxy & Chivas USA football (read: soccer) games. Oonce I got to work a Coldplay concert in Irvine, where we weren't even allowed to sell inside the actual venue, but those opportunities were few and far between. The gist of the job is that you lug a heavy tray of candy for hours, walking up and down stairs, around well trafficked areas, selling your wares.

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Essay | The Farm

In Middle School, I used to walk home every day around 3:00 PM. I would look down at the floor while I dragged my hand along the chain link fence. Sometimes I would look up to make eye contact with the chickens and move on.

Did you know there were chickens in my Middle School? Probably not, because this conversation has never come up before. But there were. There were chickens, a couple of cows, some peacocks, and a handful of pigs. I may also remember an ostrich, but they may be an invention of my imagination. You know how unreliable memory can get, randomly inserting awkward, flightless birds into places where there were none.

The point is, we had a farm. I don't know why in the middle of the city there was a farm attached to a middle school. I would be very interested to know who came up with the idea. Maybe they thought it would make an interesting juxtaposition -- the concrete city and the fenced in farm animals. Or maybe they were passionate about bringing horticulture education to kids while they were young. Perhaps everyone was required to propose a change to the school, and this person simply thought of the first thing that came to his or her mind, thinking no one would buy it.

Regardless, it was there, it was a farm, and it didn't fit with the rest of the school/neighborhood/city/zip code. It was the location of the Horticulture class, which was undoubtedly the least popular class in school. It was the dirty, smelly, crap-infested bottom of the barrel. The class with which teachers would tell their students about in hopes of frightening them to be good students.

"Be sure to register on time," they would warn. "Or else you'll get stuck in Horticulture!"

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Essay | Childish Things

All memories fade over time, but the ones from my childhood that seem to be best preserved are those of the games we played.

They were always these simple things we did to pass the time while we were growing up. Digging holes, for example, was a daily source of fun. There was this little spot of dirt in front of our small house, where grass didn't grow, that my sister, my cousins & I would take a small shovel and, well, dig. The point? I'm not really sure. I think maybe we were trying to pretend we were at the beach and making sand castles. I remember turning cups of dirt upside down on bricks. Maybe that was our way of dealing with the fact that we never go to the beach, the way other kids would throw confetti in the air and pretend it was snowing.

When I still lived in the same house as my Lola & uncles, my sister and I played with my two cousins down the street with similarly makeshift versions of actual games. We had no basketball court or, even, a basketball. Instead, we used a rusty shopping cart and a volleyball in the backyard, where there was no pavement to even dribble. It fulfilled it's only purpose, which was to keep us busy for one afternoon

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Essay | Laughing and Writing

As an extremely late social bloomer, I'm finding that a sense of humor is important, useful, and completely difficult to utilize properly. I've been thinking a lot about comedy lately, it's something that I consider important to my person, but it was definitely not something I was inclined to. I've tried to examine what my sense of humor derives from, and it may be consistent exposure to David Letterman at a very young age.

That last sentence makes him sound like he's radioactive.

What I've been thinking about recently is their significance and how hard they are to pull off. First, look at commercials. The most successful ones, the ones that everyone remembers, are usually the funny ones. The ones with the amazing special effects, yeah, people will talk about those too. But if you're an ad executive, what's cheaper? A good joke that fits in 30 seconds, or 30 seconds of CG? These are ideal to advertisers because something about humor is more appealing to the human being than any other emotion. More than sadness, more than happiness, more than anger. Even socially, there is nothing more useful than the ability to come up with humorous zingers. If you're funny, people will remember you.

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Essay | Felt, Not Heard

I took up the bass guitar on almost a whim. It could even be described as an accident. My sister bought a bass to join a band, and soon dropped out of it, leaving the big dumb thing without a home. It was offered to me, and I took it. Despite this very unserious origin, it is now one of my hobbies that I am determined to make something of. It is one of the few things that I actively aspire to be great at someday. Other hobbies or skills stagnate after a while, when you're satisfied with your level of expertise, which is usually mediocre or good. With this, though, it's one of the few things that I dream of being able to keep doing until fluency.

Of course, I'm nowhere near that right now. I don't think I can even justifiably call myself good yet, not while I'm still trying to properly understand how to utilize scales and barely getting the slap-n-pop technique right. In fact, I found out just a few days ago that I've been doing pull-offs wrong for two years. It's like learning you've had your pants on backwards since the 1st grade.

What attracts me as I study the bass guitar is its interesting role in the typical band: It is the anti-spotlight. The lead singer gets all the face time, and the guitarists get the crazy, easily discernable riffs and mid-song solos. The drums are the loudest, and any extra instruments have a novelty factor. The bass, it seems, is necessarily hidden and cannot draw attention to itself. If you've ever wanted to play the thing, chances are that someone's related to you a common, tired, saying: the bass should be felt, and not heard.

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We Will Pay For Everything

I've been worried about money since I was 8 years old. Mostly, it comes from a long-running fear of poverty, but I can't trace where that originates. Maybe at a particularly impressionable age I saw my first developing world charity donation hotlines, one of those Sally Struthers commercials, and that ruined me forever. I say, "ruin" because my paranoia and discomfort with having less than stellar security has often caused me unfounded stress, even as a miserable little child.

It's always just felt so heavy. As a small child, sure, I could be spoiled and ask the world of my parents. But when something clicked and I became motivated more by fear and less by desire, I started to tame my wants. I never asked for clothes, I didn't purchase much more than a $12 paperback book once a month. New toys and video games would come out, and I would tough it out as a 9 year old and learn to just deal with the longing. I was the only kid without a SNES, PlayStation, and later, a PlayStation 2. I wouldn't have been in that console generation at all if my friends hadn't pitched in to get me a GameCube for my stupid birthday.

As the most financially concerned child in the world, I was even worried about the things my parents bought with their own money. They brought my sister and I along for one of their biggest major purchases: a brand new, dark green Saturn. It was nerve wracking and I didn't understand any of it. The dealer told us the price, and a vague whining noise fell out of my grimaced face. My parents had to explain that this was just my thing. I worried about money. It was funny.

At one point I even invented a new economic system. I told my dad in sister my idea of a world where the means of production were owned by the government, who could evenly distribute it on, like, a weekly basis and we could all have the base level needs. Turns out it already existed, and it was called communism, and my dad said it didn't really work.

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An Aside From Home

I'm home. The TV is on tonight's network news, and I'm typing away at my laptop on this makeshift desk/dinner table. The reporter is doing a piece on a new website where girls can write about guys who cheat on them, thereby warning other women about him. They go from person to person in some fancy Los Angeles bar asking seemingly random people for opinions, and I wonder what the point of this piece is. Perhaps it's time filler, or perhaps I'm just being grumpy  because my house has been cut in half and I have to shimmy around piles of stuff to get to my room.

My house has been reduced to about three rooms because the entire downstairs is being slowly torn apart by a crooked subcontractor who isn't getting the cabinets and counter tops as soon as he promised. The walls, the floors, everything's been ripped out, exposing either the planks that used to be walls, or the dusty cement below. Everything that was once down there (dozens of blankets that filled our storage, entire racks of coats, some pieces of furniture) has been crammed in every nook and cranny upstairs. This includes my room, which basically leaves my bed as the only place to sit, what with the center being occupied by our old kitchen.

Luckily, it will most likely be done by the end of the month. March the 31st -- The day I'm going back to school. Meanwhile, the Kahlua/Kilusan line is having some kind of group dinner back in Riverside, hopefully having lots of fun. It is one of those times where you miss out on some joy, so to deal with it, you sit in the weird uncomfortable melancholy of your home and blog about it. That's what blogs are for, right?

This is going to be my Spring Break when I'm at home -- or at least some semblance of it.

Essay | Biomusicology

When I was in elementary school, the first music I listened to was whatever my older sister and friends liked: Early 90s rap and R&B. That meant Boyz II Men, 4PM, Blackstreet, Ini Kamozi, Aaliyah, Skee-Lo and other names swallowed by time. I hated rock music because no one else listened to it, even in the mid-1990s when Nirvana blew up. I grew up in an industrial suburb with a 10% white population. Accusing someone else of listening to KROQ was an insult.

Some time around the turn of the century, the interesection of Dragonball Z and Linkin Park in culture made alternative rock, nu metal, and whatever label you wanted to use okay for kids to like by high school. I had morphed into a much more captivated KROQ follower, with bands like Something Corporate and Finch and occasional punk bands like Jughead's Revenge on my Winamp playlist.

Then, one night, I was going through my sisters MP3s on the family computer in high school one day and heard Bright Eyes and Cursive. It was like nothing I had ever heard before. Everything was raw and powerful and bare, songs like “The Martyr” or “The City Has Sex.” I remember wanting to burn a CD right away so that I could listen to it in bed instead of sleeping. Today it may sound cheesy and oversensationalist, but that's what it felt like at the time to an impressionable 16 year old.

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