Fats, Vitamins and Minerals

Few days ago, we went to the post office to visit our postmaster (who will be retiring in a year) and post some letters to friends. And because we were quite hungry, we decided to have lunch in he canteen.

I always dread eating out because good affordable food (nutritious and real food - that is real vegetables, meat, fruit drinks, etc., rather than processed foods or meals pumped with artificial flavors and seasoning) is becoming harder and harder to find.

It wasn’t easy getting anything to drink either, since I’ve been trying to avoid bottled water and the customary filtered tap water or water fountains are no longer available. Maybe next time, we should bring our own water …

So we ended up eating artificially spiced food and drinking something called “Fit and Right.” The drinks were Del Monte company products and supposedly has L-Carnitine that help the body burn fats. Oops! I thought, that would be the last thing I need.

I decided to keep the plastic bottles to check the chemical ingredients out on the Internet. We passed by my mom’s house and there was Alwin with a new trick up his sleeve.

Alwin now has this new “recycled shop” where he sells products made from junk. He showed me a price list of products in the shop and said that if I bring my own junk I can get 5 pesos discount.

Since I was carrying two plastic bottles, I easily qualified to being Alwin’s first victim. And Trevor the second: I asked Trevor if he could give Alwin 30 pesos for the two plastic bottles that Alwin will transform into tanks.

It will take at least 2-3 days for the tanks to be finished, Alwin said, but that evening, he rang up and said the tanks are now ready.

So we picked up the tanks and here they are.

Not bad, I thought. One of them even had front wheel suspension.

Anyway, I will check out the Del Monte’s “Fit and Right” ingredients shortly. The product recommends drinking three times a day, and that together with good food and exercise, one is bound to become “fit and right.”

I guess if one really had good food and adequate exercise then a bit of chemicals from junk like “Fit and Right” shouldn’t do too much damage, whilst keeping the huge multinational company fit and wealthy!

We arrived in Baclayon in the afternoon of May 19. I was tired but Trevor insisted that we go to the baluarte. It was just a short wal from the homestay. Along the way I remembered, of course, this is not at all the same as metro manila, this is Baclayon and the air is much cleaner.

At the baluarte, the sea and the sky showed off their calm power. Tears welled in my eyes and a lump rose to the back of my throat. Why? Perhaps a feeling of desperation and anger at humanity’s destructive abilities.

Then I saw Camiguin - for the first time the island was clear of cloud or mist and she bathed vividly under the afternoon sun. I almost didn’t recognise her.

“The ears of a cuddly stuffed toy!” I told Trevor.

We stayed a month in Baclayon and those ears never showed up again.

We were on our third week in Baclayon when I learned that Becky passed away. I learned rather late, two days after, thru a text message from her daughter.

That explained to me why, on the night after she passed away, I got woken up at 4:30am. The aircon mysteriously turned itself on and then after about two minutes, turned itself off again. I asked Penny if there was a ghost in the homestay, and she said no.

Perhaps it was best that my last memory of Becky would be the happy, irreverend Becky. We visited her at the office in April, when her sister and brother-in-law arrived from New Zealand.

In pain, but Becky was so happy to be visited by friends and family, and so happy to be working on Vern’s book. She especially savored when I first introduced her to Trevor, the first thing I bragged was “marunong nang gumamit ng tabo yan!”

Here is a photo I took at the baluarte on our first week in Baclayon. The sea can be so calm it is like a flat sheet of glass. Two weeks later Habagat arrived and changed the face of the sea. Every low tide the sea becomes an open field of “fruits” for picking. Once I saw a group of boys who come to swim, dip their fingers in the water and make the sign of the cross before diving in.

Goodnight, Becky. We miss you.

Or was it hopeless but not helpless?

Whatever an old news report on the crisis in Germany actually stated (as far as Trevor could remember), those were reflective of my own sentiments as I deleted the entire Korakora Proyekto website and - a few weeks later - resurrected it. Thus, the new Korakora Proyekto.

Some two months earlier, Indi asked if she could include Proyekto in a study “of the practice of civil society media by artists and technology experts as citizens and media activists.”

To me, it was initially an encouragement to keep Proyekto going. Later, it became a challenge to shut the whole thing down and re-think.

Indi mentioned James Hamilton’s proposal for possibilities for alternative media to move away from mainstream media’s patterns of consumption:

• strive for an everyday, spontaneous, non corporate mode of organization that requires little if any capital outlay;

• should be part of other realms of life instead of divorced from them;

• should erase the division between producers and consumers and become popular means of cultural organization and exploration instead of individualised media products to consume. (Hamilton 2000: pp 370-371)

Recently, I realized that these are similar to what corporate and mainstream media networks have been doing since the “Web 2.0″ propaganda, and the 1999 Clue Train Manifesto that gave the old corporate firewalls new ropes for turning even the most resistant or isolated of people into (hyperlinked) markets. What happened was that civil society (and similar) tactics got hi-jacked by the very elements that civil society itself was trying to critique, oppose or open alternatives to.

Again, this reminds me of the old Chinese adage, if the wrong man uses the right means, the right means turn out the wrong way.

The reincarnated Proyekto is not a media activists tool anymore nor does it operate in the context of advocating communications and media democracy. With “peoples of the earth” now migrated to markets and consumers, communications and media democracy merely hyperlink them. What I need is a medium (a language) to protect myself from this global anathema - an antidote to distortions of the mind: if it is true that language deceives us then maybe at least language-making may allow us to lay the land to see where deceptions and distortions lie.

Helpless but not hopeless? Will see …

Obviously on the Inquirer website, advertising is much more important than newscasting.

An unbelievable barrage of commercial garbage accompanies news on the Inquirer website.

On the GMA website, they’ve done it better: newscasting is advertising.

A very insensitive clumping together of a highly sensationalized boxing event and a tragic explosion (currently being linked to the government) in Glorietta Mall in Makati City.

A truly tasteless and insulting clumping together of news (and supposedly investigative reportage) on the recently concluded elections, the verdict on ex-President Joseph Estrada plunder charge, and women in bikini called “Bataan Beauties.” [1]

Incidentally, I have just seen a relevant quote from KG Pontus Hulten’s “The machine as seen at the end of the mechanical age” (1968) as cited by V. Papanek (Design for the Real World, 1970):

“The production of articles that nobody really needs, but which occupy the ground floors of all the big stores, is one of the many outward symptoms of something basically wrong in a world of overproduction and undernourishment. In order to control overproduction, without going through the intricacies of selling the product, it becomes necessary for a willfully destructive war to be going on permanently somewhere. Today, the world is spending over $150 billion per annum on the actual or potential destruction of lives and property, as compared with the capital transfer from rich to poor countries of about $10 billion per year - including a large share for military aid.”

The quote describes the link between mindless consumerism (created by professional market and motivation researchers, mass communication and media, and advertising and design) and war, poverty in the world.

But today, not only is there an overproduction of useless objects, there is also the overproduction of useless (redundant) information to keep its distribution currency afloat. And as demonstrated by the Inquirer and GMA news websites, media which has lost contact with its social and moral responsibilities contribute to this global cancer by trivializing if not sensationalizing as entertainment the socio-political issues that continue to assault and plunder the Filipino people and the world.

As a result, we have the undernourishment of the minds of people even (and especially) in the richest and most powerful countries in the world.

According to UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Louise Arbour, poverty is a key cause of human rights abuses worldwide and states must make every effort to ease inequalities.

I think that there is something quite not right about this. What if we imagine for a moment that poverty is the EFFECT, rather than the cause, of all the human rights abuses wreaked worldwide, especially by the rich and powerful countries?

So it is quite sad that so many people with presumably good intentions cannot think anymore of the true implications of things such as the UN calling on everyone to “take part in a 24-hour “Stand Up and Speak Out” campaign against poverty.” So many people with presumably good intentions find enough comfort in the belief that if they watch television and see the house-mates in Big Brother House light a bonfire against poverty, or donate money to such causes, then they are doing their part in supporting the cause.

So many people presumably with good intentions have become so confused by the complexity of the relationship between overproduction and undernourishment that they turn to consumption and entertainment as a religion. Artists and media, in turn, supply the soothing balm of mindless entertainment-cum-religion.

In the early 60’s, more people seemed to be aware that the root cause of suffering and inequality in the world is the military-industrial complex. However, as this complex became wider, deeper and more ubiquitous, the less that people became aware especially as they too profited from it.

Hopefully, the minority who still have enough intelligence and sensitivity to know will live to see them impending collapse of this complex.

[1] As of October 31, 2007, GMA News have changed their news banners - “Carnage in Makati” is now clustered with the more serious “Erap Plunder Trial” and “Women of the Peninsula” is now clustered with more trivial news such as the Paquiao boxing match and a university-wide basketball game.

Hopefully, I am now on my way to recovery. It was a very difficult three weeks and being plagued by a different sickness each week. After the flu, were four nights of painful sinus pains.

Friday the 13th I managed to feel better enough to go out and see a doctor. (Earlier that day, a hospital maintenance staff fell down the elevator shaft and died; quite a freak accident). I phoned the Caritas health insurance to get info for the nearest EENT doctor. This is the first time I’ve used the health insurance program, and the first time I’ve ever had health insurance. It was my partner who got it for me.

There is a state health insurance system (PhilHealth) as government is mandated to provide all citizens of the Philippines with the mechanism to gain financial access to health services (the Philippine National Health Insurance Act of 1995). However, of course, government cannot provide for the health care of the entire population, and thus efforts by the private sector to assume part of the responsibility have been undertaken. If I am not mistaken, private insurance companies in the Philippines are one of those few sectors allowed to be completely foreign-owned and to operate in the country.

Also, in the 90s, health care was devolved from national to local government. Cooperatives have also instituted “health micro insurance schemes” for areas where commercial health insurance is not possible because of the costs as well as applicability when it comes to remote villages in the country. These schemes aimed to provide some level of health insurance through the social capital of the community-based health care.

In 2002, sources of expenditure for health in the Philippines was:

State insurance (5%)
Out-of-pocket (46%)
Government (38%)
Private sources (57%)
Private insurance (2%)
Others (9%)
-From “Health Micro Insurance in the Philippines The NATCCO-SEDCOP Experience”

Although I taught 8 years at state university, I never became a permanent employee - my appointment was simply renewed every year. I was taxed, of course, and, when I got promoted in 2000, paid contributions to the Government Service Insurance System (GSIS). But I never got health insurance. Also, I needed to be paying contributions to GSIS for at least 15 years to qualify for any benefits and pensions when I retire. But the way things actually were with teachers have not been very encouraging, with all the horror stories that retirees tell about claiming their pensions … Family members who served in government all their lives (and not teaching at state university!) had better experiences when they retired.

Anyway, at least I did not have to pay expensive doctor’s fees last Friday, although the antibiotics did cost a lot (nearly PhP1,000 for 14 tablets). At the drugstore, the sales clerk asked if I wanted to buy all 14 tablets indicated in the prescription, and I said yes. I had to and did not want to risk missing a tablet - if I did, that would make the bacteria resistant to antibiotics.

The woman in front of me in the queue took an awfully long time because she was having such a hard time deciding which drugs she would buy first with the money she had (apparently not enough to buy all the drugs she needed). That broke my heart, to see how expensive drugs were for most people… she bought the other drugs but didn’t get the fever tablets for her kids anymore. I suppose she could use the medicinal plants abundant in Manila if she knew how to use them to treat fever. That’s what Noemi, our cleaning leady at the apartment, does - when she was down with flu she took “lagundi.”

There’s plenty of lagundi growing in the communal garden here around our apartment blocks. Girlie, the maintence woman, has a small hut in one of the gardens and all around here were growing the lagundi, as well as a male and female papaya tree, and a small horseradish tree. All these have medicinal uses.

In my mom’s house, we now have plenty of oregano. They’re used for treating coughs. However, they’re not as common as lagundi because they are a bit more difficult to grow.

Anyway, with the medicinal plants, we could deal with simple ailments like fever, stomach upset, cough, etc. But treating more serious ailments like TB and other pulmonary and cardiovascular diseases (which are quite prevalent in a city of so much pollution) require expensive drugs. I believe Thailand, India and Brazil have defied huge phramaceutical companies in order to lower the cost of drugs by producing if not importing generics. The cost of drugs in the Philippines is one of the highest in the world and I hope this changes very soon.

In the meantime, in the effort to shift to the Euro (if not keeping the budget deficit down in the EU), many East European countries have changed their health care systems: imposing fees on doctor’s visits, fees on prescriptions and emergency services, fees per day in hospital, slashing drug subsidies, terminating their free drug program, and opening the health insurance system to porfit-making companies.

I guess this is how countries are dealing with globalization and health care. In the context of the EU and for many East European countries, the state of health care since the end of the Communist era means the re-thinking of the value of money (vis-a-vis the value of life) within the globalized economy. Obviously, cutting the EU deficit is more important than universal access to sound health care systems, just as paying foreign debt service and budget for military and defense is more important here in the Philippines.

When I e-mailed Hung Hsien that I couldn’t go to Taiwan next month because of poor health, he told me not to worry about the Wikimania conference and that “health is everything”. At another digital art conference in Taiwan in 2004, it was usual to get a greeting of “good health.” Quite true, what is all the work and all the income if one is unhealthy?

However, in the world of globalized economies, money is wealth and health is valuable only insofar as it is one of the exploitable commodities. What a tremendous shift of values it must be in Eastern Europe as those contries’ policy makers cut down on social welfare to race to the Euro … Politicians say that people have to start paying for health care so that they would not overuse medical services and to force people to be more considerate about the money they are spending. According to politicians, the change in East European policy is good for people who have been used to not paying for health care in the past … so the politicians are telling us what is supposedly good for us by asking us to cut down on health care and spend more.

Two days ago, my partner and I finally managed to visit the resort and restaurant farm called “Cambridge” just across our subdivision here in General Santos City. Our target was the pool.

My accomplishment for that day was getting my eyes open under water. I can’t swim at all. Although I play around in water, I have an irrational fear of water since I was a teenager, perhaps after the experience of being thrown over by strong waves that jumped behind me while I was standing waist deep in a beach in Cavite or Lingayen, Pangasinan (I cannot remember anymore exactly where it was). Anyway, the feeling of getting your head thrown under water and salt water getting into your nose and mouth, and being in darkness flailing your arms and legs around trying to grab onto something solid, was not a very pleasant one. (A feeling called “drowning”).

However, I have since many months ago, with my partner’s encouragement, decided to learn to overcome this fear and learn to swim. We were too tightwad to enroll in a swimming class so I felt that I could probably learn on my own. Besides, this is probably the best way since the pressure of learning to swim in a swimming class would only reinforce my fear and refusal to learn.

At least once a month, we pay a visit to the public pool at our housing in Quezon City, and for the past 5 months I’ve been observing my body and mind’s behaviour towards the presence of water.

Our landlady is terrified of water and swimming and I can understand what seems to be an irrational behaviour, saying “no” and “no” and “no, no” to each invitation “to swim”, “it’s fun”, “I’ll teach you”, “it’s safe.”

The behaviour is towards the unfamiliar and the (as in my case) unpleasant. So getting used to the water again first is important - knee deep, waist deep or breast deep, whatever one feels comfortable in.

Anyway, after each visit to the pool, the realizions of a water-bound environment build up: when your head is under water, don’t breathe in; when your head is above the water, you can breathe in; it’s easier to float with your head down; if you can see under water (a motivation to open your eyes), it is easier to try to swim towards a target; kicking your legs can help keep afloat and in motion; waving your arms can do a similar thing. So, swimming is simply a synchronization of such logical actions/reactions to a water environment.

According to my auntie’s auntie (who was then around 90 years old), all students were required to learn swimming at the university after the Titanic disaster. When I went to university in the 80s, that was no longer the tradition for a long time, and so I took up tap dancing, social dancing, and camping for physical education instead. The only contact with water there was for drinking, cooking and bathing.

But I do like water a lot despite an earlier bad experience. And I suppose the logic of water is just too obvious to impose an irrational fear and loathing of it. The power of water has its own inacessible logic too, the power to both give life and take life, such that it is easier to accept that expert swimmers who insist on swimming at the beach or sailing off to sea on a Good Friday will drown than it is to accept that our landlady has an irrational fear of water.

Perhaps Tuesday, we’ll go back to Cambridge for swimming. Too bad Lion’s Beach is too dirty. However, Alma told me that it had gotten so much better. The problem really is complicated since the city market is also there. But getting the balance right between human life and the life of the environment has got to be possible without degenerating into fencing off the entire beach area by buying everyone off and building an expensive beach resort. It is possible to get that balance at the individual and small community level as evident in the difference between the careless littering around our housing area in Quezon City and the rather clean environment here in Purok Malakas, Barangay Lagao, in GenSan.

Woke up early today, around 6AM. Below is a photo I took of Edward last night. I have just finished one side of a crocheted bag and have started working on the other side. It’s based on a pattern called Princess Louise, from a book called Corticelli Lessons in Crochet, Also a Few New Designs for Knitting, Book No. 1. Florence, Mass.: Corticelli Silk Mills, 1916.

I noticed last night that I don’t breath normally and my shoulders hunch when I am working (or when I am excited about something, such as reading through the pattern instructions). I suppose I’ve always worked this way but never really noticed the pain it causes until I stopped doing too much work (especially after I stopped teaching in 2004). The resulting pain is chest pain that can get rather horrible. I hadn’t really realized it was the combination of shallow breathing, irregular (rather fast) heart beat, and hunched shoulders (almost like a tight spastic position of the upper body).

Now that I am aware, the next step is find a remedy to this problem. I must have been working like this for so many years that it has become like an instinctive process. Perhaps most workaholics are like this …

It’s past 3PM now.

Last night, I set up another website, this time Fortun’s Urban Gardening, maintained by my partner. I suggested that maybe he could also maintain “Maria’s Procedural Cooking” - in which I could contribute some recipes. I suppose George could contribute some jams and jellies recipe in Fortun’s UG website.

The Priscilla Book on Irish Crochet is astonishing. Now I am downloading their Yoke book. I am curious since it has patterns for Maltese crochet (hairpin lace). I would really love to be able to develop the hairpin lace crochet better.

I already got Beeton’s book on Needlework, which is also available through Project Gutenburg.

Curious about Isabella Beeton … from the Wikipedia entry:

Isabella (nee Mayson; 12 March 1836 – 6 February 1865) was born at 24 Milk Street, Cheapside, London. Her father, Benjamin Mayson, died when she was young and her mother, Elizabeth Jerram, remarried a Henry Dorling. Isabella was sent to school in Heidelberg,Germany,where she became an accomplished pianist. Afterwards she returned to her stepfather’s home in Epsom.

And, Mrs. Beeton couldn’t cook but she could copy.

Isabella Beeton was only 21 when she began cookery writing. Her first recipe for Victoria sponge was so inept that she left out the eggs. Seven years later she was dead. How did she come to write the seminal book? “The answer is she copied everything,” Hughes said.

It took Hughes (Beeton biographer) five years to track down the recipes which she discovered had been brazenly copied by Mrs Beeton, almost word for word, from books as far back as the Restoration.

But Hughes says we should not necessarily think badly of Mrs Beeton. “Although she was a plagiarist, she was adding value. She was an extraordinary innovator.” Mrs Beeton had the radical idea of putting the ingredients at the start of the recipe. She also came up with the thought that it might be a good idea to write how long something should be cooked for. …

Actually, this somehow reminds me of our own local MOD Magazine and Women’s Home Companion. Both are weekly women’s magazines. I remember seeing them in our old home in Manila in the late-70’s and early 80’s because my auntie was a subscriber. When we moved to Quezon City in the mid-80’s, my auntie still had the magazines.

MOD started out in the early ’70s as the pioneer teenage magazine called Sixteen, which easily became a hit among campus teeners. But soon, these sixteeners grew up, left the campus, and started to become homemakers and career women. Thus, with them, Sixteen grew into Sixteen’s MOD Filipina which first came out in March 1974.

Nine months after, on December 6, 1974, the magazine came out in the 11″x13″ format titled Sixteen’s MOD Filipina, with then 20-year-old Babsie Chuidian, a Liberal Arts and Tourism student of Assumption, gracing the cover.

On October 10, 1975, the magazine first came out as MOD Filipina with Eva Abesamis, a Tacloban lass who was training director of a top savings bank in Manila, as Cover Girl. The magazine was now focused on the woman, her family, career and the world she lives in.

The publisher of MOD is Atlas Publishing Co. Inc. The company was first owned by the Roces family headed by Don Ramon Roces who appointed his daughter, Carmen Roces Davila, as president of the company.

In 1996, the company was sold to the Ramos family, the family behind the National Book Store chain. - MOD history from http://www.mod.com.ph/all_about_mod.htm

What was funny about these magazines was that they didn’t really contain much original content. Most were re-published from other English-language, mostly American magazines and books. At the end pages of the magazine are installments of passionate love stories written by popular novelists, and Reader’s Digest-type of true-to-life drama like “Stranded!” or “I was raped!” The magazine contained household tips, recipes, bits of news, horoscope, gardening, fashion and make-up, etc. Being a young girl and then teenager, I remember collecting their installments on handwriting analysis and physiognomy.
In the past 6 years I noticed they have started re-publishing texts and photos accessible through the Internet.
I suppose MOD and such similar magazines as Women’s, Miscellaneous, Mr. & Mrs (or was it Ms.?) did become a training ground for many local young women writers, insofar as they were allowed to contribute more or less original content. And because the magazine did have a wide audience (it wasn’t so expensive then for a weekly magazine), feedback from readers created that valuable relationship between the young writers and their readers (or fans, to some extent). I remember reading Jessica Zafra in one of those magazines, as a regular writer of a column with a growing fan-base, before she became the Zafra who writes books.

Anyway … these magazines have not gotten better, to be honest - they got worse. Homemaking intelligence (ala Beeton) has degenerated into celebrity gossip (local and foreign). Too bad.
Well, back to the crocheting.