This is Just a Test, Right?

I really do not like standardized tests.  I do not perform well with them because sometimes my panic unhinges me.  I know the solutions.  I know the answers.  But I get this blank space in front of my eyes that I will myself sometimes to plunge into it and hope never to return and never to find out my disappointing results.

I hope I do well though, Lord knows, I prayed the novena to St. Jude Thaddeus, the patron saint for lost causes.  I asked my friends and family to pray for me....knowing fully well that prayers only work if you do your part, at least in this case, studying for those exams in order to be taken in university PhD programs.  

I just find myself frustrated over having to relive those horrors of word problems and quadratic equations.  The last time I dealt with algebra was the last millennium.  And here I am, step 2, to get in that PhD program only to be set into the crests of integers, parabolas, geometry and how long will June and Daisy take for them to meet if they started at two different points but moved in different speeds.

I am saying to myself that aside from hard work, there has to be higher machinations of "justice" intertwined with "luck" for me to get this.  Though, I have to emotionally prepare myself on the probability that I will not get the PhD for art because of quantitative reasoning.  

So here I am watching the last moments of the last episode of Six Feet Under to tell myself that life is bigger than this.  Although, I would love to have Claire's artistic exploration and personal transformation into a substantial artist, too. Did she take that quantitative reasoning test as well before she got in the art program?

Size Matters

A mentor is urging...more like forcing me to go bigger scale.  Funny, because as a political cartoonist, my panel is what I have to work with.  I guess any blank space is still intimidating, whether small or otherwise.  But I keep telling myself that.  A bigger canvas/panel would mean more space for me to "fill out" with details, or worse, have me extend my gestures in art.

I am mostly comfortable with smaller drawings, but a 6' x 6' canvas??? And seven of them in total?  Jesus, take the wheel....or take the paintbrush.

nostalgia as self-defense

There are time when I really want to quit Facebook mainly because it is a timesuck and toxic as well.  I post my political commentary over there as a receptacle for the words that I use for my comic strips. With the proliferation of fake news, and idiots with internet access, the comments sections are usually a daily evidence of the collapse of civilization.

Then nostalgia provided to be a salve for many.

A facebook page catering to the Titos and Titas of Manila (Uncles and Aunts of Manila) which predicates the older adult set, typically too young to be really old, and too old to be really young....it is like an online oasis for people from the tail end of Generation X and the Xennials.  For the past few days, membership has raked in by the tens of thousands.

The posts consist of going through the memory lane.  There are hilarious posts of old commercials from the Philippines.  The ones that I like are those posts of campy television and toys.  The FB page proved to be so active that it has truncated my algorithm and has flooded my FB feed with post after post of nostalgia.  One of my friends quipped that this page is so great because it has effectively erased the toxic political posts from his wall.

Though there are the usual "my generation is better than your generation" posts, the increasing popularity is a testament of many Filipino netizens' exhaustion of the current Facebook daily screamfest of political posts.  The internet which was supposed to be a great source for emancipation and information has now been co-opted into the devious machinations of state-sponsored propaganda and fake news. This has made the Philippine online landscape (if there is such a thing) to be rancid.  But I have to be "there" to be able to get my information for my political comic strips.

But, yes, it gets enervating.  So this FB page of late 20th Century nostalgia is a new addiction for many people my age.... many people are uplifted with the memories of a past they deem to be better than the present, that the young generation now will "never know" how it was to be in "our glory days" which makes the older people (us) "different" in the contemporary youth culture of brash materialism and oceans of selfies and hashtags but a little sense of actual human interaction. (Of course I find this assessment problematic).  

It also shows some fissures in the collective narrative.  Many posts consist of upper middle class Manila, something I did not experience at all.  I did not experience going to a Jollibee when I was young because Jollibee opened in Cebu when I was in high school.  I did not have lazy Saturday afternoons at National Bookstore growing up because the only book store I knew of was Book Nook, a small hole in the wall shop of secondhand books at the basement of an old mall in Cebu.  Which is a danger of nostalgia because one assumes your past is the same as others. 

Personally, I think nostalgia is pleasant but dangerous, just like soda.  Perhaps this is why as a matter of personal preference, I always see nostalgia with wariness.  Nostalgia just like history, both operates with distinct points of view, but nostalgia tends to edit it under a lens of rose colored filters, whereas history, or at least the history I prefer, looks at the past as interconnection of river systems of blood and violence which therein flows lessons that we should have learned.