IF you’ve been following this column the past weeks, you will notice this little Tuesday space we have here has become a sort of repository of my experiences as an expectant father. I didn’t know that until last Sunday, when I bumped into fellow Sun.Star Cebu columnist Mayette Tabada at the mall.

“I follow your baby blog,” Mayette told me. Baby blog! That disturbed me, because I was expecting her to say, “Since when did you start thinking you’re the marrying type?”

Then it hit me. What a disservice this column has been to you, my dear readers. As a columnist in this paper’s Opinion Section, I am supposed to give you my expert’s opinion on what’s going on in the world around us: Libya, Japan, New Zealand, Joavan “The-Son-Of-God” Fernandez, The Fall of Sharon Cuneta, The Showbization of Philippine Football, and Justin “What-Have-We-Done-To-Deserve-Him” Bieber.

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CHANGE your profile picture to a cartoon character from your childhood and invite your friends to do the same. Until Monday (Dec. 6) there should be no human faces on Facebook, but an invasion of memories. This is a campaign to stop violence against children.

But we’re sorry to tell you that you can’t use Pinoy cartoon characters because they are so ewwwww. You are the children of this generation with Justin Bieber as your cultural icon, so please don’t use anyone from this list called “Insoymada’s Top 10 Pinoy Komiks Characters:”

1. Kenkoy–Tony Velasquez’s Kenkoy is the first komiks superstar. This hilarious portrait of the Filipino, trying but always failing to keep up with his American mentors, was born in the Liwayway comics in 1929.

When you say, “I so love my BF because he is so kenkoy,” you now know where the word came from. And you jejemons out there, Kenkoy’s been there, done that with his trademark lines like “Halo, how is yu?”, “watsamara” (what’s the matter), “dats oret” (that’s all right), “nating duwing” (nothing doing), “okidoki” (okeydokey), “lets tek ewok” (let’s take a walk), “is beri nesesari,” and “bay gali.”

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This has kept me busy the past weeks. Tsinelas is finalizing a proposal for the construction of a Community Resource Center in one of Cebu City’s remotest barangays – where children go to school on empty stomachs, where classes stop when there’s fog because it grows dark and there’s no electricity and it’s impossible to read, where no elected city hall official has ever set foot, fuck you!

tsinelas has lots of plans for the area… and i don’t mind living there the rest of my life because there’s plenty of preskong utanon and bisayang manok, fuck me!

(photos by CHERYL BALDICANTOS)

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My mother was my teacher in grade four. It had nothing to do with grade school politics. I just grew up in a town where the sons and daughters of public school teachers automatically qualified for grade this-and-that section 1. And besides, my mother had been handling the class even before I was born.

Mother sometimes referred to the class as “grade four section fast-learner,” although a mispronounced ‘f’ could spell horror to a child with a keen sense of what it meant to be left behind in a supposedly future-oriented curriculum.

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When that little boy swam across the Hilutungan Channel, I wasn’t surprised. The sea is that boy’s habitat. My research showed that the boy had gills. His parents, both sharks in their past lives, built an aquarium for him so he would grow up to become an adopted fish-boy of a city denied of land-based heroes. Now, little boys who read the news are taking swimming lessons to become world class eels someday.

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All you want to do after a long weekend teaching grammar to barrio kids and playing the same old tired songs with your band in a remote town in Leyte is sleep the long ride home. You wish there’s only you in the boat as you snuggle in your seat at the economy class (concert organizers love to book you in the economy when you’re too tired to argue that your talent deserves at least a tourist accommodation). Then you realize it’s a Sunday — everybody’s going home on a Sunday. So you brace yourself for one crowded ride.

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WHEN we were kids, little toughies in the neighborhood, flowers symbolized everything boys were not. Flowers were a girl thing. We didn’t want to be seen near anything that resembled a petal or smelled sweet.

Once, my friends followed me to the backyard, worried if I was out to gather gumamelas, only to find out, to their relief, that I was sniffing lomboy leaves to check if they were dried enough for smoking. Flowers separated us from the girls and we were careful not disturb this delicate balance of nature.

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