Progress

Somehow, I am learning. I have finally started to extract lessons from my previous experiences and from all the repetition so that I won't repeat myself again. This is supposed to be good.

Then how come I don't feel any better about myself? It's like growing means I have to stifle myself from being too kind or too nice or too giving. I mean, that's what I've learned; I can't give myself away for free. I can't let anyone take me for granted because I'm worth more than that. This is supposed to be good.

Now, when I want to be a caring person for someone I love, I need to stop for a moment and ask myself the implications and consequences of my actions. I need to question my motivations and consider whether or not kindness is a "good" idea. This is supposed to be good.

I am growing up and starting to let go of my unrealistic romantic expectations. I am becoming a mature adult who knows that some things are more important than my feelings. I am learning that opening up to another means I run the risk of being taken advantage of, not being understood, or not being appreciated as much as I would hope...and that risk is becoming less and less worth it.

This is supposed to be good. My life is supposed to be better now.

My Funny Brown Pinay

Tonight, I finally got the chance to see a jazz artist I've been wanting to see, Charmaine Clamor. I like her not just for the novelty of her being Filipina, but because she actually incorporates her Filipina identity into her music.

If you heard my Pil-Grad speech, then you might remember I said that to be an advocate of our community, all you have to do is be aware of who you are and your influences in whatever you do. And I think Charmaine Clamor is a great example of a person who has done just this.

Take this video, which is her rendition of the classic tune, "My Funny Valentine". The song is originally about a person who is not pretty in the typical sense but is still beautiful. In this version, "My Funny Brown Pinay", the lyrics now take on a different meaning, expressing the struggle of Filipina women in a white-dominated society.



She has released three albums, all three of which I now own. If you wanna hear more, just let me know, and you can have a listen.

Doing us both a favor

Sometimes, not acting is the best thing to do. Please don't mistake my lack of response as hostility. I still care about you, but you know as well as I what will happen as soon as we see each other again; don't fool yourself into believing it will be different this time.

I know what I want. Maybe someday, you'll figure out what you want. And if it turns out we want the same thing, then that's when you should call me. That would be nice.

Song Scribbles

Every now and then, I'll be sitting at my desk and something inspires a song lyric or idea in me. I then proceed to scribble these ideas on whatever paper I have lying around. Most of these ideas end up turning into nothing, but I thought I'd share with you the latest scrap of paper made into victim of my words:


In case you can't read my handwriting, I've got three ideas here:

Sighs vs. Take breath away
Why am I here again?
I know how this story ends; I've been here before.

Science vs. Romance (2)

In my previous post, I claimed that love is not an entity in itself but rather a label given to a set of emotions, thoughts, and experiences. A dear friend of mine responded by saying that love is in the action, in the doing. While I do not totally disagree, I still find the need to reconcile our points of view, and this post is my attempt to do so.

I agree that action is an important and essential aspect of love, and it is what makes love beautiful. (Remember my first post and "I'd find a match" vs. "I'd have a match"?) Yes, it is true that I cannot be loving someone if I am not expressing it.

But if action is the definition, not a result, of love, then several questions emerge.

There have been times in my life where I have had strong feelings and emotions for another, but I was not able to do something about it (e.g. didn't like me back, no opportunity, already in a relationship, not looking for a relationship, etc.--hell, most of the time, it was my own hesitation and fear that has held me back).

Does that mean that I wasn't experiencing love? Were my feelings any less real because they weren't manifested to the other?

These are the same questions I ask myself whenever I remember that nothing changes when I don't act on my feelings. It's as if I didn't have the feelings in the first place...as if they were irrelevant and didn't matter. And that's a thought that drives me to tears, thinking that my emotions just aren't valid.

So I will maintain that love is a label because I know what I have felt regardless of whether or not I acted on these feelings.

But to reconcile these perspectives and incorporate the importance of action, I think that it is necessary to distinguish feeling love from loving. To use another basketball analogy, if loving is a jump shot, then feeling love is, well, a good look. When you get a good look, you feel it all over and you know it...whether or not you take the shot is another thing.

Science vs. Romance

I chose this Rilo Kiley song for the title of this post because it's about the same conflict I've been having in my own mind for the past few weeks...the conflict between my romantic self and my realistic self. So I thought it would be nice background music for this post while I share my newest thought that reconciling these two halves of myself inspired:



I think the thing that drives me the most crazy is that I believe in (or want to believe in) love so badly despite never really having experienced it. As with most things in life, seeing is believing, right? So believing in love requires so much faith on my part that it's almost like a second religion to me...my religion of love.

Now, in order that I don't go totally insane about this blind assertion, I have to rationalize my experiences and rationalize what I believe love is...my way of proving to myself that love exists using logic because logic is pretty much all I've got.

Paradoxically, what has brought me the most peace so far is the conclusion that love, in itself, does not exist.

That's right, what I have realized and what seems true to me is that love is not feeling itself; love is a label we attach to all of the emotions that a person feels toward another. To quote Before Sunset: "What is 'love' if it's not respect, trust, admiration?"

You see, defining "love" as a label rather than an emotion means that each individual is able to decide whether he or she is experiencing love or not. Now of course I know that we cannot simply choose to be in love or not; it's rarely as simple as black and white which is why there is always so much confusion about love.

Yet the peace that I find in this definition comes from the empowerment that I feel because of it. Love, in this sense, is not some external entity that we must seek out. It's not some force that we pull out of the ether or even something that we have to "earn" out of another person.

Love is in each of us already. I already have all of the emotions and the feelings and the thoughts that make love so wonderful. It is just a matter of being with a person and combining those feelings with a set of experiences, compatible personalities, and chance circumstances.

So I find peace knowing that love is already in my heart, just waiting for the right combination.

You may or may not agree with me; but this is what keeps me sane at the moment.

Bellarmine College Prep 2005 Valedictory Address

As I was going through the files I have collected over the years, I came upon my transcription of my high school's valedictory address. Now that I am a college graduate, I think it is interesting to see what was said and look at it through my perspective which I have broadened over the past four years. I still think this is one of the better graduation speeches I have ever heard as it contains an effective mixture of personal experiences, motivational challenges, and humor. So without further adieu, here is Jonathan Weed's speech:

Members of the administration, faculty, staff, family, friends, and members of the class of 2005:

I have a dirty little secret. The truth is Bellarmine has encouraged a dangerous path in my education. It has enticed me to take Latin. As a result of what many of you would consider my unfortunate affiliation with this dead language, it pains me to say that I found myself unable to write my valedictory address without referencing the Latin origin of the word "valedictory."

Okay, here it goes. "Vale" means "goodbye" or "be well." "Dictum" means "speech." Ta da! All right, so perhaps that etymological revelation wasn't as an effective speech writing device as I had hoped. But in examining the words' classical components, I was struck by the sheer simplicity of its meaning. A valedictory address is a speech to say goodbye. It's a speech to tell you all to be well because for all I know, I may never see you or Bellarmine again.

What a sobering thought! We are here today, fundamentally, to say goodbye to Bellarmine, Mr. Sullivan's ubiquitous calls to 113, cross dressers coming out of Mr. Alessandri's science fiction class, and most importantly, the morning prayer to "Gad" that's not going to be a part of our daily routine. Those things will no longer be a part of our daily routine, but what I have come to believe is that that part of Bellarmine doesn't matter.

What, you say? What happened the last four years doesn't matter? Well, we certainly have much to be proud about. Our class has forged a tradition of excellence in athletics, academics, and extracurricular activities that will certainly shine on for quite a while, at least in our own memories. We won't forget Dean Constante's B-E-L-L-S cheers, which prove that he believed, too. We won't forget the October 29^th last minute touchdown against Saint Francis. We won't forget our excitement as Brandon Williams goes for a kill on the volleyball court, as they win their sixth CCS championship in eight years. We won't forget the best golf and baseball teams this school has ever seen. We won't forget an athletics program with the most division titles in the Bay Area. We won't forget a speech and debate team which won the prestigious UC Berkeley Tournament for the first time in a decade. We won't forget a robotics team that's the second best in the world. It's clear that something special has been going on.

Our class has also witnessed some of Bellarmine's most profound changes. Father McFadden's last pupils graduate today. And Coach Ray, Father Alender, graduates today with us. September 11^th, 2001 was just weeks after we joined the Bellarmine community. We saw the arrival of a new dean, a new name for Hedding, and even the advent of a new seven-period schedule. We were the first to see The Laramie Project and the Gay-Straight CLC. Our class saw Cool Hand Luke with Mr. Orr. Oh, well so did everyone else. Fate has made our class a class of the future.

That's why I say the past four years don't matter. Well, sure they do in the traditional "learn valuable lessons and make new friends" sort of way. But to say that these experiences define Bellarmine is preposterous. We are Bells not because we went to classes here. We are Bells because of what we will do with the classes we have taken here, with the people we've met, and the skills we've learned. We are not Bells because of yesterday; we are Bells because of tomorrow.

Remember the "Graduate at Graduation"? Those proposals don't exist just so we can all feel good about ourselves at the end of our time here. I didn't know this before, but it turns out that in 1981, Jesuit high schools in the United States crafted a mission statement based on five tenets of a successful human being: religious, loving, open to growth, intellectually competent, and committed to doing justice. But Bellarmine, ever committed to doing something different, up and added a sixth point to their stated goal. A Bellarmine student should pursue leadership growth. If we are to be considered ready for this day, according to Bellarmine, we must be willing to pursue new challenges and opportunities, not just rehash old ones. Religious, loving, intellectually competent—there's no time for Bellarmine to influence any of this anymore; either they've succeeded or they haven't. But the "Grad at Grad" doesn't stop there; it proposes a goal for the rest of our lives. It explicitly states that growth, not stagnation, must be the primary theme of the years to come. It states that a Bellarmine student must spend not four years but the rest of his life finding opportunities to put his skills into leadership action.

What I am trying to say is that if all Bellarmine has given us are these four years of fun, it has failed us. But I don't believe it has. I think Bellarmine has done exactly as it said it would. It has given us the foundation we need for the next sixty, seventy, or eighty years. In ten years, when he's the owner of a professional sports team, Dan Couch will name them the "Bells" so he can still say "Go Bells!" to everyone he meets. In twenty years, Nick Schwartz will bring sixteen boxes of fruitcake to work not because he's fighting on the side of the seniors but because he's fighting on the side of the poor. In thirty years, people will still mistake Mr. Connom for a student. And Michael Stapleton, now inexplicably a democrat, will not be writing yearbooks but daily briefings for the president of the United States. In forty years, Nik Matani will proclaim, "Win out!" not when he wins a debate round but when he wins another trial for an indigent client. And in fifty years, looking like Father Wade, we will meet here for our golden reunion and recognize that the spirit of Bellarmine acted in more than just four years of our lives.

There's an old Christian hymn which runs, "They'll know we are Christians by our love." Well, I hope they'll know we are Bells by our love, by our strength, and by our character. I hope that they'll know we are Bells by our convictions. We don't need to win Who Wants to be a Millionaire? as one Bellarmine graduate did or win Survivor as a Bell almost did to prove our worth. We just need to use our brains and our brawn in a way that helps others first, not ourselves. Look at JW Knappen—he attended classes here for only a short while, but we are proud to call him a Bell because he has shown all of us what "service leadership" really means. We gave him a standing ovation at the awards ceremony not because he got a 4.0 or got into a good college but because he, perhaps more than any of us, knows what it means to be a true Bell.

Yes, I hope that they'll know we are Bells. I'm sure they will.

I can't resist a bit more Latin; I promise it will be brief. When the Catholic mass used to be said exclusively in Latin, the priest's lasts words to the congregation were "Ite missa est," which loosely translates, "Go, it is the sending forth." At the end of every mass, like the one we shared Thursday night, we are challenged to bring what we have experienced to the outside world, to live church outside of church, so to speak. I like to think that the phrase, "Go Bells!" uttered at the end of virtually every Bellarmine prayer, serves the same function. It's not just an encouragement to succeed during the day but also a call to bring the spirit of service, brotherhood, and compassion to everything we do. It's in that spirit that I would like to leave you today. Bells, it is the sending forth. Remember, for all we've done here, for all the fun we've had, the important bit is just beginning.

In proper Bellarmine fashion then,

Have a good day everyone, God bless, and go Bells!