New week

The root canal is finished, thank heavens. We are now checking those blasted final-exam papers. Bribery, bribery, bribery everywhere. I remember Jose Rizal's El Filibusterismo: corruption has to be over-ripe, for the fruit to burst out of its own volition. We are on the way. What would the next scandal be?

The Task Force Pride met last Saturday, to get things going for the Pride March set for December 8, Saturday, Malate, Manila. Also the Task Force Melbourne Outgames met, a meeting I unfortunately failed to attend. But I want to go to Melbourne again -- the city with the four seasons in one day!

I will ask the help of friends to make my blog more visual, more eye-catching, more--

Ladlad 3 is now being printed. I am finishing Philippine Gay Dict: The Uncut Version. I have already submitted the corrected proofs of Rampa: Mga Sanaysay.

In the works: a children's short story, a draft for a book of personal essays or creative nonfiction or whatever you call it now.

The thing to do is to keep on writing, even if the whole country is going to the dogs. Or has gone to.

Root canal and final exams

Tomorrow I will visit the dentist for the third -- and final -- time. Being an Aries, I told my dentist to pull that painful tooth out and throw it to the garbage bin. Instead he said, "Ay, you will have a fake one if we pull this out," so he began a three-day series of root-canal chuvaness. Painful, to say the least. But what I didn't like was that I had to take Ponstan. That nasty pain reliever would scar your kidneys and affect you when you are old.

But wait, I am already old, at 44. So when would it affect me?

I will begin checking the final exams of my students -- five sections -- today. Good luck to them. And then, I am also writing two papers for my PhD in English Studies at UP. After these two papers, I am done. Language exams next semester (Spanish) and comprehensive exams, too (total of eight hours). Then in April, dissertation defense: a novel I finished writing in 2001, when I had a Fulbright grant in Rutgers University in New Jersey. Other schools might be Ivy League, but we had a good basketball team.

Like that school on Taft.

Danton Remoto begins his blog

Hello, I have finally, on my own, joined the world of cyberspace.



Today, while waiting for my students finish their final exams at the Ateneo, I looked to my left and saw "thisisnotadebate.blogspot.com" Hmmm. Those were the exact words of the Ateneo VP, Achoot Cuyegkeng, when she talked to the students and a few teachers about the proposed Ateneo dress code.



Then I remembered the exact words that the former (oh, how I relish that word) former Comelec Chairman Benjamin Abalos told me to my face, during one of the Comelec hearings early this year. Ang Ladlad, of which I am chair, was applying for party-list accreditation, and the man with the driest face in the world told me: "But you have no national constituency. You are just phantom voters!"



Voila! Now, I told myself, I have a name for my blog.



Everybody who pissed me off in the last elections are going down the drain, literally and metaphoricallyl. The Malacanang official who was so aghast at my running under Ang Ladlad at at my running for senator, is sick and had to quit the Cabinet. Next came Mr. Abalos. I know who would be next.