Nothing Follows

NOTHING FOLLOWS

These are the last words you will ever see as a bar examinee... and though you don't think much of it then, you do now... and you can only pray that this is a statement of no consequence -- a non-prophetic lexical blunder that was never intended to articulate your fate.


How do you reconcile a duty with a dream? I'm just figuring this out right now... and it's no fun at all. As much as I hated the academic part of being in law school, sudden post-bar freedom [abandonment] is no fun. Is this life? Pay the bills, then die? Maybe. For some of us, maybe. But I'm still figuring this out. 


No vacation for this one. There's just too much to do. 


Thank you to everyone who gave their time, mind and muscle to support us during one of our darkest times. The bar exam is no joke. No freakin' way. But we were standing on the top of a giant's head... and this was probably enough to pass those eight tests.


Thank you to the Ateneo Law School BarOps. To my dearest friends in the AHRC, to my fellow bar examinees who served as my primary mutual support group, to my AHRC Batchmates who made their appearances and gestures of support. To my immediate family who was there throughout the whole ordeal, and my extended family who believed in what fortitude I had left to spare. To my bandmates and friends in the music business who gave me their own brand of sick but vital support. For all your prayers, financial and moral support, smiles, text messages, emails, hugs, kisses, taps on the shoulder, jokes, insights, wake-up calls, sleepless nights and all your generous sacrifices, thank you, everybody. 


The bar exam is a spiritual and humbling experience. I thank God for it and for everyone who was part of my experience. 


I love you all. Forget the damn lawyer's oath... I personally swear to every one of you that I will never abuse this power should I be deemed worthy of it.


See you all in the real world soon.

A Bill of Rights for Songwriters & Composers

Created by ASCAP, the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers 

Original post at:

http://www.ascap.com/press/2008/0417_billofrights.aspx

Just as citizens of a nation must be educated about their rights to ensure that they are protected and upheld, so too must those who compose words and music know the rights that support their own acts of creation. Without these rights, which directly emanate from the U.S. Constitution, many who dream of focusing their talents and energies on music creation would be economically unable to do so – an outcome that would diminish artistic expression today and for future generations. 


At this time, when so many forces are seeking to diminish copyright protections and devalue artistic expression, this Bill of Rights for Songwriters and Composers looks to clarify the entitlements that every music creator enjoys. 

1. We have the right to be compensated for the use of our creative works, and share in the revenues that they generate.
2. We have the right to license our works and control the ways in which they are used.
3. We have the right to withhold permission for uses of our works on artistic, economic or philosophical grounds.
4. We have the right to protect our creative works to the fullest extent of the law from all forms of piracy, theft and unauthorized use, which deprive us of our right to earn a living based on our creativity.
5. We have the right to choose when and where our creative works may be used for free.
6. We have the right to develop, document and distribute our works through new media channels - while retaining the right to a share in all associated profits.
7. We have the right to choose the organizations we want to represent us and to join our voices together to protect our rights and negotiate for the value of our music.
8. We have the right to earn compensation from all types of "performances," including direct, live renditions as well as indirect recordings, broadcasts, digital streams and more.
9. We have the right to decline participation in business models that require us to relinquish all or part of our creative rights - or which do not respect our right to be compensated for our work.
10. We have the right to advocate for strong laws protecting our creative works, and demand that our government vigorously uphold and protect our rights.

_____


This is pretty straightforward, though some of the rights like #9 are against my stand. Nevertheless, it's a good start for ASCAP in clarifying the purpose of copyright law. 

Greed is the enemy of creativity.

- M.R. DY

Nothing More Than This

A day like this is never properly expected

You thought it might be a preview but it ended up to be the whole show

We never speak the way we did

We never felt the absolute silence in a dream

So bitterness turns bland

And bland disappears into the void

So there's nothing left but laughable regrets

Wasted emotional currency

And fears that turn out only to be child's play

There is no feeling as unbearable as the absence of it

No hunger more insatiable than none at all

And for this, I stop wandering in the same shiftless patterns

For this, I have to pay my dues

For all this, what we could have had is all we never will

Because it all stopped

Because it all became an affair of the mind

And mind you

There was nothing more than this

Farther

Nestled at the very center of my perception is all that I wish you to be, both the possible and the improbable

Names don't matter here because all I dream will be renewed day after day after day, 

disrobed and discolored, 

reversed and recovered, 

as circles never end

and cycles have no origin

And yes, perhaps it took the different gods six days each to create the world

But your Lady took only one to build mine

And some say they don't believe in evolution but they love you one day and murder you the next

So why not crank it up a notch?

And let us sit upon the lowest step of heaven to bask at the idealized view of the imperfect beneath even where we are

Distraught and peeled down to the layers we dare not reveal,

We see only the faces of past failures,

Nameless rejections to and fro,

We give and we take but never to rest the scales

And so life is that bitterest pill that I can't take without a stiff drink

Everything worth losing your consciousness to...

Everything worth dedicating your remaining days to... 

is a long shot

Culture massive dreams if you wish to live forever

Never forget this

It will take you farther

And her world is yours

And the world will know your names

The Great Undeserved

Just got home from my usual urban immersion... and as usual it felt great and terrible at the same time.


Anyway, I finally got to check my phone and there I saw a message from a friend who has been long absent: "Why do I have the feeling that I don't deserve the person I'm with right now?"


Talk about "out of the blue"... but I indulged:


"We deserve nothing. The best you can do is try and be content with what you have."


Indeed, we deserve nothing. Not our jobs, our significant others, our friends, our families, our material graces or our skills.


I went through five years of law school to learn these ideas of justice, equity, fairness and proportionality... but in the end, you realize that all these are just ideas and ideals of such artificial value and character that an extra ounce of critical thinking only leaves us befuddled and trapped in the place where were before: helplessness.


Fairness is not a naturally occuring thing. We never get what we deserve. It's either too good for us or not good enough. Absolute equilibrium is mathematically and realistically impossible. And so, we as free agents try to bridge the gap. We try harder... we work for it so that somehow, we might approximate the propriety of the web of rewards and punishments that orbit our lives.


When we were young children, we were taught to "make things fit". I remember this old toy of mine which had differently-shaped blocks and a plastic tub that had the corresponding hole-shapes on it. The task was to make the triangular block fit into the triangular hole and so on... easy enough right? And so we have been conditioned to understand exactness... to conform to these shapes and sizes and characteristics so that all may be well... problem is, we later learn to apply these assumptions to people as well. 


Whenever we see this less-than-presentable dude rest his arm around this lovely lady, an alarm immediately goes off in our head saying "NO!!!"... and we often rationalize it by thinking "He must have some killer wheels" or "He must be dynamite in bed"... and it never occurs to us that this mismatch is the most natural thing of all. We always think that pretty people should be with pretty people and the ugly should stick with the ugly... and so the shapes-and-holes exercise works wonders...


Is it fair? No it is not. But so is the rest of the world. Fairness is an abstract idea that keeps us in line. The Universe has been playing this joke on us all our lives and we don't even bother to question it. We are sucked into romanticism and other forms of mind-control and we use them to cope with the harshest form of reality: life is unfair.


Sure, we love hearing writers and musicians say that "there's always someone out there for every single one of us"... wrong! That's just bullshit, my friends. And you know it. Some of us have had 4, 7, 9, or even 14 relationships in our lives and we don't even give it a second thought... millions of people have lived up to the age of 40 or even 60 without ever knowing the touch of another's hand. The truth is that some people have all the fun... Some people die alone.


We love to dream... we love to hope... but one thing's for certain... it's all unfair... and our ever-changing perception of what's fair isn't helping at all... and as we grow older, our minds start to compromise and we lower our standards more and more that we end up with nothing worth keeping.


So what's there to do about it?


If you want something, just take it. Don't wait for the world to give it to you because it's not gonna happen. It's going to be unfair in any given case, so just take it. If you take it, it's yours... if you don't do anything about it, then maybe you just don't want it enough. If it slips away, then tough luck. You just have to deal with it. 


That's all there is to it. Justice will not find you. You just have to make things happen.

Two Timepieces

Originally published in the March 2008 Issue of ThePalladium -- in my column Legal Personality.


As a super-senior, I can't help but reach back into my immediate past to try and draw out a cumulative meaning that will somehow justify this long-overdue end. After years of leafing through thousands of pages of often-incomprehensible text and braving hundreds of hours of humiliation, terror and disappointment, I finally see the finish line in the short distance -- a sight that gets sweeter every day. And just as we were taught always to begin with the end in mind, it's equally important to end reflective of everything that had been. 


Roughly a week before I descended into the hell that was Intro to Law, my dad gave me an elegant wooden Ingraham table clock, and on its face was an inscription that read:

One Day at a Time

Help me believe in what I could be, and all that I am. 

Show me the stairway I have to climb,

Lord, for my sake, teach me to take one day at a time.

This is a prayer that I see twice every single day: Once when I wake up to prepare for the day and a second time as I wind up my affairs for the night. And it helped. It allowed me to take one piece of the puzzle at a time from the manifold parts of the law and reassemble them inside my head, albeit often with much difficulty. Law school has consistently pushed me against the walls of my own personal limits and I found myself repeatedly tearing them down just to make it through another exam—another semester—another year. I admit I was never as smart as my classmates. But by some grace, my academic destiny is all but complete. 


In any case, law school is not just a lengthy exercise in intellectual sadomasochism, but it carries with it gifts of immeasurable value. One such gift is an extension of our youth. Most of us have been attending school our entire lives, and these extra four years give us an excuse to delay growing up. It gives us a chance to keep holding on to our ideals and our innocence up to the last possible moment. Indeed, to the casual outside observer, a law class would appear to be nothing more than a group of older, better-dressed high school students in action. Even our professors encourage this through their comical antics and shameless commentaries while discussing constitutional concepts like Stop-and-Frisk or family case law like Chi Ming Tsoi v. CA. In spite of all the pain involved, law school can be quite amusing. It's one huge carnival –- an attractive nuisance, if you will. Law school teaches us to be critical of all things brought before us, and this philosophy is always attended with humor and wit. 


Another gift that law school affords us is the chance to clarify who we truly are. Many of us found ourselves in law school either because we couldn't get work that pays well enough or because we haven't made a career choice just yet. And long before even considering law school, we were writers, activists, artists, musicians, athletes and many other things that have nothing to do with legal education. To some people, law school is a reason enough to abandon these skills and passions for the much-needed additional study time. For others, this is simply unacceptable. These are the same people who join organizations in and outside school to find some semblance of normalcy in their lives—to say that law school is not the be-all and end-all of who I am as a person. We have law students who compete in sports or performance arts locally and internationally. We have writers who have penned brilliant pieces of literature, both outside and inside the legal spectrum. We have students who volunteer with charity organizations to work closely with and for the poor. All these is, to my mind, the Magis that we always keep hearing about: the more—the lingering discontent with the world and the corollary desire to always push it further towards goodness. Our character is built by the things that we pursue with fervor alongside the tests of academic life. 


In the end, there are many people to thank: our mentors, our friends and even those who just love giving us a hard time. They all build up our character. I was a legal tabula rasa when I entered the Rockwell campus and I will be leaving it dramatically stronger and wiser than I was then. 


Last Christmas, my dad gave me a beautiful silver Breitling wristwatch. I wear it proudly after several years of not having any watch at all and relying on my mobile phone for the time. This time, there were no inscriptions or prayers on its face. But I felt that it was my old man's way of saying "It is time." 


End with the beginning in mind.

Perfecting Death

Dean CLV once said that being in law school is like going to your death. You have to allow your old self to die in the process so that a a new you can rise from the ashes (or something to that effect... exaggerations mine). 


With one week of classes to go, I can't help notice that the final traces of the pre-resurrection ashes around me are being wisped away by even the slightest draft. 


Five years ago, here stood a man who was ready to enter a lifetime commitment and be a father. That man became broken, bitter and angry because of the loss of those dreams. His jealousy and hatred resonated throughout his little universe but he never said a word. The worst part was that he was already in law school. His grades had suffered a blow he would never recover from as everything was a mess inside him... emotional cancer had struck and there seemed to be no way out of it... and as the demons seemed to take everything from him, he prayed that he would be removed from this cursed place forever... this was not to be...


The heavens opened a window... one that would allow the man to expand his universe slowly so that the cancer would be isolated in the old areas... and so he took it... to escape what he has become with a hope of becoming something totally different. That window was called the Ateneo Human Rights Center... and this would soon become part of the triangle that was his new universe. It was here where he learned that the only way to start becoming whole again was to expel all that negativity. He focused more on what he could do for other people to distract him from the crashing tides inside him. Fortunately, he was never alone in this task. He found kindred souls and fellow lost spirits in the trenches. It was the summer of 2004 and the curing process was terrible and slow... but it it did happen... and because of this, he was not only healed but transformed into something totally different. He would stay for four more years, loving the work and the people involved in it. This was the work that blessed him with a chance to take his first trip to the West and shrink the world in his mind. This also helped him to find the greatest friends he could ever ask for in his life... and a continuing source of people of that same quality and caliber.


And in the process another window opened: The man started writing music once more. After having abandoned a dream for almost eight years, he just picked up his guitar and wrote what he felt. This became the second part of his current universe: Music. On that same summer of 2004, a more experienced musician friend came to Manila and called the man up... said he wanted to hang out. The man obliged and the talk turned into a jamming session after the man told his musician-friend about some material he was working on. In a single evening, the veteran and the rookie were able to record two songs of amazing quality on a beat-up PC. The rest is history, the band Sundown Caffeine would be born a few months later at a psuedo-Mexican bar in his hometown of Cebu City and the music would go on to be not just a source of amusement, but a viable career path for the two (not so) young men.


So what's the third part of the triangle? 


It's family. The past, the existing and the future. The beginning and end of all that we do and all that we work for. This is a point in time when such an elusive dream has to be cast aside, at least partially. You want your own family and your own home but you have to get there first... and though you keep repeating the words to yourself that "there's no rush"... you realize deep inside that you wont be in this waking world much longer and that your present family will probably outlive you by several years. Perhaps you've accepted that you end up dead without ever knowing that sensation. Perhaps living vicariously through your brothers and sisters will do the trick. In any case, this leg will have to be set aside... 


I've been walking on two legs for years... why should it be a problem now? 


A few days more and I will face my final recitation, my final classroom session, my final hours of detention in the necessary evil that is the formal education system.


CLV was right. My death is almost complete. Entering law school was perhaps the best mistake I ever made in my life. And if could talk to the me five years ago, I'd tell him to brave it out... because things are really going to be alright.


_____


And so it's time. 


I walk out that door with no regrets... only honest mistakes. 


And I will walk with two legs for now, if only to carry a steeled heart.


My death is almost complete.

The Morning Post

So you feel the alcohol and the smoke have settled down -- transformed into noxious colorless vapours -- your dreams that brought you close enough have been ripped open once more for the coming of the waking world. Water. More water.


The somber tones outside leave little doubt about where you are right now. The guitar cables are tangled and your phone's battery pack is screaming death.


Why fix what isn't broken? Why make carvings upon the clean smooth finish? Why complicate things that ought not to be when you're so close to the end? (an end).


Perhaps because I've lived a little too long without it. Time zips past you when you're not really paying attention. And this time it did and I wasn't. It dawns on you that as long as it stays out of your reach, it depreciates into mere memory, then history, then myth and finally a mere concept. How easy it is to dismiss other people's problems with parenthood statements and condescending "been-there-done-that" advice when you deal with mere concepts.


But it's not just some abstract concept that anyone can just master. There is no master. We are slaves because we submit our freedoms for its disposal. Is it a bad thing? Not really. The initial freedom to enter it and the sustaining freedom to dwell in it are always there. But along the road, we twist and tumble, we dive and lift off, we shape and mold, we change our course into a bleak grey area called compromise. Individuals die. And we see something ultimately more powerful emerge.


I am tired as I wake up. It's no concept. After the songs and lyric fragments that flood my mind and hard drive, I seemed to have lost sight of the very meaning of it all. Yes. Meaning. It's not truth that we search for because truth is amoral and inhumanly neutral. What we want is meaning. The type that gets you up when you don't want to. The type that makes you walk under the rain and look up and clench your fists as a smile curves up your face. The type that causes you be both impatient and terrified about the very next day when you know you'd just wake up sober again only re-enter the cycle of self-destruction.


It's not just a concept because it has to be necessarily trapped and incarnated by context. Particular who-what-where-and-when's surround you and you have to act within these parameters. And yes, it's inconvenient. Square one always is. It's full of anxiety and empty of confidence. How much truth are you willing to give and how much is enough so that meaning can be drawn from it without flooding another's life? How much unchange can you tolerate and how much of change can you offer? It freaks you out because you know in your mind that you will suffer -- and suffer again. But sometimes, the thanatos does come -- the human desire for pain and death -- and we embrace it... perhaps because death gives us a chance to mirror our lives and see that we don't have to do all this alone.


You need a walk. Think, though you grow sick of it. 


It's square one and you're in the context.