Musing...

An essay: As a young university instructor, I once reflected on the blessings and challenges of my teaching career. Despite the absence of corporate perks, I found that there was happiness in my students’ success.
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By Philipina A. Marcelo


Avery Corman is the bestselling author of the novel “Kramer vs. Kramer,” which was made into a highly acclaimed Hollywood film starring the brilliant Dustin Hoffman and the extremely talented Meryl Streep in the late ‘70s. In the early ‘80s, Corman came out with another novel entitled “The Old Neighborhood”.

The latter novel unraveled the inner conflicts of a man whose ardent pursuit of happiness brought him to the apex of success in his profession. Rather than finding happiness, however, he found himself entangled in a web of conflicting emotions. He was gripped by loneliness so chilling that at a certain point he lost life’s meaning altogether. As he climbed the ladder of success, he met so many people but the nature of his job did not allow him to make personal connection with anyone. So that in one dark moment of his life, he found himself without a friend. He couldn’t think of friends he’s had other than those he left behind in his old neighborhood – a working-class neighborhood that he chose to turn his back to when he began his lonely journey to the top of the world where he expected to find happiness.

One of the most unforgettable lines in that touching novel by Corman was uttered by the narrating character, Steve Robbins. In the novel, Robbins was a successful advertising genius who, at middle age, was struck by a sudden realization – after twenty years or so in the advertising field, every single dream he had as a poor young graduate of a city college in the Bronx has come true. What was appalling about this realization was that his remarkable success did not amount to even just an ounce of happiness. Of his career, he lamented, “You give out little pieces of yourself and they come back in the form of good suits and good desk.”

Robbins, however, have forgotten how lucky he was in his career that aside from good suits and good desk, he also got a great window view from his office in Manhattan’s business center, a nice house in a classy suburb in New York, a flashy car, a gorgeous California beauty with an equally dynamic career for a wife, two lovely and level-headed daughters who grew up with the social grace he was too poor to know as a young man himself, four credit cards with sky-high credit limits, and countless frequent-flyer accounts with different airlines. He was regarded with reverence by his colleagues as the “conscience of the business,” the champion of “truth in advertising”. All this and being called one of the top five creative brains in the field of advertising in exchange of the little pieces of himself. Such glory left him with gaping emptiness, a void where happiness should have been. And, the higher he climbed, the farther happiness seemed to be. In the end, he gave up everything that he had worked for, including his picture-perfect family, and left the chaos and excitement of life’s fast lane. Later, he reconciled with himself and found peace. In the simplicity of his existence back in his old neighborhood, he found happiness.

It’s funny that musing about my own teaching career, Steve Robbins’ cynical summation of his accomplishments should come to mind. To be sure, my progress in the teaching profession is incongruous to that of Robbins’
The Royal and Pontifical University
of Santo Tomas - The Catholic
University of the Philippines,
founded in 1611 and ran by Dominican
fathers.in the exciting world of advertising. For one thing, I haven’t gotten good suits and good desk out of my job, not that I need them either. But I am, and wonderfully so, to a certain extent, happy. Another incongruity between Robbins’ job and mine is that giving out just little pieces of myself was never enough. Every single undertaking, even day-to-day undertakings in the Faculty, was accomplished with the heart, mind, body and soul poured in completely. A little less than this would mean half-baked output in the classroom that would not produce even the feeblest grain of accomplishment.

In my profession, the absence of heart, mind, body or soul in our daily work turns days into little blades that cut through the flimsiness of the conscience and alienate one from the sense of fulfillment: the building blocks of happiness. This happens when either the heart is in pain, the mind exhausted, the body ill or the soul lost. And since I, too, am human, I suffered from such inadequacies from time to time. Such inadequacies usually put teachers, like myself, in some dark, frightening mood where the don’t mess-up-with-me-or-I’d-summon-the-red-ink look would be written all over our faces. Sometimes, even when nobody dared mess up with us, we still summoned the red ink anyway! To some, it merely is a defensive pose to mimic control whenever pain or exhaustion or illness or sense of loss attacked. And yet, to some students, this is nothing but a despicable miscalculation of authority or lapse of judgment. In such cases, the battle between pride (on the part of teacher) and rebellion (on the part of the student) that we all know too well follows. In many cases, the red ink prevails! And, of course, it’s always a shame when the red ink triumphs because, more often than not, it simply means failure to explore all options. This emphasizes the necessity of having the heart, mind, body and soul poured in completely in our job’s day-to-day activities.

For so many teachers, myself included, this daily exhaustion of the body and spiritual faculties dims the light that illuminates our prospects as social beings. Our lives tend to revolve around the principal object of our attention: the students. The fire in our hearts is consumed by the desire to give them the best training they need. Their dreams become our mission, their idealism our inspiration that constantly strengthens our spiritual fiber, their youthful energy our source of strength. Sometimes we end up with only a tiny glow left for ourselves. A glow so tiny it’s not even enough to keep us warm in those cold evenings that ought to be spent with someone whose last names we shared. In other words, many of us end up running out of social options other than single blessedness. Although I do not prefer single blessedness, I do not see it as an entirely negative thing either. It is one thing to be a biological parent to one’s children, and it’s another to be a good “spiritual parent” for so many souls bound to become a lot of things. For those of us who are more fortunate to have learned to juggle the demands of our profession and a working home, the pressure is even greater. And yet, they stay, loving every minute of their time in the teaching profession.

In much broader sense, this brings us to the more interesting nature of our job as teachers. Unlike Robbins’ job, ours is not just a personal pursuit of happiness, it’s so much more than that. We lay ourselves to serve as avenues for our students in pursuit of their own dreams. Sometimes we serve as ladders through which students reach the height of their dreams. We could be steep or easy, but we’re always directed upward. Still students sometimes misunderstand us and see us neither as avenues nor ladders but rather obstacles that impede the accomplishments of their goals. Sometimes we give them good reasons to consider us as such, too!

Oh, yes, there are glorious moments, too. In fact, there are countless glorious moments! Although, “glory” in our job is not measured in the same scale as in Robbins’ profession, the effect is the same: sustenance. Robbins’ glory sustained his supply of good suits and the continuous influx of suckers who posed as friends, ours sustained the spirit. His glory bloated the ego, ours fattened the heart. The feeblest nod that signified understanding of knowledge revealed in a lecture, those little discreet smiles that expressed appreciation of our efforts, those awkward attempts for small talks that meant fondness, those quiet and sometimes cheerful greetings that implied respect, those advices sought that meant “we-believe-in-you” or “we-value-your-opinion,” all the little expressions of courtesy and thoughtfulness that seemed to quietly say “you’re-a-part-of-our-lives” – all this constitute the great reservoir of inspiration and personal glory that is simply immeasurable. They weigh the heart down with happiness! And after the tassel is finally shifted, friendship begins, and boy, what a flood of friendship it is, too!

Perhaps, this is the best thing about having very little material possessions, one become more appreciative of all the little “bonuses” here and there. And, in this profession, “bonuses” abound. Some people keep their treasures in exquisite ornamental boxes, I keep mine in a small cardboard box. My treasures are not those sparkling pieces of jewelry that are good for vanity, and yet, they too sparkle like exquisite pieces of diamond. My treasure is a bunch of business cards each engraved with my former students’ names. Some of them I don’t remember anymore, but they remember me! Sometimes, that elevates the feeling from mere happiness to joy, and what a feeling that is, too!

Steve Robbins found happiness in his old neighborhood, I am experiencing happiness in a place where I belong and where I seem to be needed. I have no great wishes from this place except for it to allow me to mellow with grace in its portals and not to be forgotten too soon. Or better still, not to be forgotten even when my own time is up.

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COPYRIGHT 1999 Thomasian Engineer (Author: Philipina A. Marcelo), the official student journal of the Faculty of Engineering, University of Santo Tomas, España, Manila, Philippines.

When worlds meet

An essay: A trip to Texas turns into an unforgettable tour of the wonders of science and the beauty of the human body.

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by Philipina Apresto Marcelo


For the past two years, I have been planning a trip to Dallas, Texas to visit very good friends who promised me a good time, good company… and lots of steak! Each time I attempted to book a flight after an agonizingly long thinking process, planning and budget optimization, a glitch in my schedule never failed to raise the red flag, or so I imagined, and I always ended up not going. Yes, I can be really boring like that. But last winter break, one friend’s incessant invitation, my desperate need to get out of Ithaca, a drop-dead plane ticket sale in Travelocity and an extremely high sugar loading made me book a flight in a heartbeat. Before fully realizing it, I was in Dallas-Forth Worth airport at eleven o’clock on a Friday morning “howdy-ing” my surprised friend who was so impressed by the fact that I am actually capable of spontaneity! Hah, I am not that boring after all!

Driving from the airport to my friend’s place, my hopes for a great vacation started to sag. Huge and flat, Texas is, perhaps, the least picturesque place I’ve ever been to. OK, I admit, maybe I’m not being fair to J. R. Ewing’s country ‘cause those disturbingly humongous water melons amidst the countless restaurant chains, Wal Mart outlets and churches are actually quite a sight to behold! They were like the formidable planet Jupiter staring you down menacingly, challenging you to eat them if you dare, which I didn’t! So, there you go… on my first visit, J. R. Ewing’s country was actually made exciting for me by genetically modified water melons. And that has absolutely nothing to do with my desire to become a food scientist. I know, that’s beyond boring… that’s sad.

Determined to make my first Texan vacation an unforgettable one, my friend took me to the “Body Worlds” exhibition at the Dallas Science Center on the first day of my visit. True enough, the “traveling exhibit” certainly helped my vacation-on-an-impulse such an awesome experience.

The Body Worlds exhibition was a fascinating walk through the inner workings of the human body. Human bodies and organs were preserved in a process called plastination, a specimen preservation technique invented by German anatomist, polymer scientist and licensed physician Dr. Gunther von Hagens. The process involves the removal of water and fats from tissue to prevent decomposition after death. These bodily fluids on which decomposition-promoting bacteria thrive are replaced with polymers in a two-step fluid exchange. First, the fluids are replaced by acetone, which is replaced with polymer solution by forced vacuum impregnation in the second step. The intermediate fluid exchange with acetone is necessary because of the chemical incompatibility of body fluids and the polymer solutions. Acetone is an apt intermediate exchange fluid because of its low vapor point that allows its complete removal from the tissues under vacuum condition during the forced impregnation of the tissues with polymer solution. The impregnation continues until each cell is saturated with the polymer solution.

Through the plastination process, human bodies were preserved to allow the observation of true-to-life spatial relationships among body organs in various real activity poses such as when a basketball player leaps to dunk the ball in the basket, when a teacher bends forward to write in the chalkboard or when a ballerina stretches her back and stands on her toes to make a graceful pirouette. Parts of the flesh were carefully sliced, without destroying the muscle grains, so they came off the bones intact to reveal the organs underneath while the plastinates are maintained in such poses. The plastinates looked like mannequins, but they are real human bodies and organs from human donors who believed in the cause of the Institute for Plastination (IfP) established by Dr. von Hagens in 1993 in Heidelberg, Germany. Through a contract with the institute, the donors – to whom the traveling exhibition is dedicated – donated their bodies or body organs on the event of their death. The plastinates are used by the IfP and other allied institutes in basic medical education, continuing medical research and in general medical education of the public.

A number of whole body plastinates were displayed on the exhibition floor. In many pieces, an upright body was sliced from the top of the head down to the feet into a series of thin longitudinal cross-sections and arranged like accordion, gathered at the feet, to give life-size pictures inside the human body. Viewing such amazing figures was very much like viewing the insides of a Swatch watch, a truly wonderful experience for those attempting to use logic in understanding the human body’s fascinating complexity.

There was an interesting plastinate of a man mounted on a plastinate of a galloping horse. Curiously, it was like looking at a decaying man on its decaying horse at first glance. And yet, on close scrutiny, one can see the tensions in a man’s body muscles as it rides a galloping horse. Some plastinates showed the amazing circulatory system of the human body, from the unimaginably humungous arteries down to the minutest of veins in the human eye in a maze of red threads. In such plastinates, the rest of the human body is stripped from the skeletal system, leaving only the circulatory system snaking around the skeleton.

Although, I walked around the exhibition floor overwhelmed by fascination, both from the exhibit pieces themselves and the intricacy of the process by which they were preserved, I found some pieces totally disturbing, especially those that showed defects and diseases, such as uterus and breast tumors as well as lungs enveloped in nicotine residues. Somehow, it scared me to think that it is not a complete impossibility to have those tumors in my own body. Perhaps, that was the other objective of the exhibit, to make people aware of how the perfection of their bodies could mutate into something absolutely scary with the onset of diseases that are otherwise preventable.

The last part of the exhibit featured the “beginning of life”. The body of a pregnant woman – lying on her side in a glass cubicle – her stomach opened to reveal the inside of her womb, greeted visitors through the makeshift door of dark blue curtains. Around the whole-body plastinate were preserved fetuses at different stages of maturity, mounted in little glass cases like flower bulbs about to bloom in springtime. The serenity in their faces, unadulterated by the harsh realities of life, and the purity of their little bodies were absolutely moving, they made my knees go weak.

The plastinate of the pregnant woman was, to me, the most amazing part of the exhibit – two lives in one body, captured beautifully and most amazingly through an artful rendition of science, obviously with as extreme a care as human’s wits allowed. I stood there totally enchanted, oblivious to the world around me. I stood motionless, not daring to blink, afraid that such magical moment would disappear if I did. The woman’s face, despite the plastinized flesh, was a picture of soft beauty and feminine bloom. The richness of her bosoms due to expectancy was very prominent. Her body seemed to come alive in glorious curves and ample volume of flesh, perhaps due to another life she carried in her womb, which her body cushioned in a way most natural for a mother protecting her offspring. The baby, crouched in its mother’s womb, was a picture of a small perfection of life. The fragility of its body curved in a ball of limbs and small head, enveloped in its mother’s womb, melted me with a totally engulfing awe, almost bringing tears to my eyes. There they were, two breaths in unison, a pure miracle if there was one. I stood there wondering what it was like to carry a baby in one’s womb, to feel a seed of life growing within one’s own body, to experience the surge of love most tender and affection most overpowering that plant the seed there, and the painfully beautiful experience of bringing forth a new life into this world. If only for having allowed me to experience the awesome emotion of such contemplation, my long delayed trip to Dallas was so worth it. I just know I will never ever forget that moment.

Reference: http://www.bodyworlds.com/en.html

Copyright 2007 LIKHA Literary Magazine, published by the Cornell Filipino Association, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY.

Breaking up, breaking down, breaking away

Fiction: A story of failure in love - coping with it and coming out of it with grace and a great hope to triumph when love comes the second time around.
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by Philipina A. Marcelo


I was trying to cheer a friend up who just broke up with her then significant other with a pint of Häagen-Dazs cinnamon dulce de leche and home service pedicure. A few months before that, I was sedating her with exaggerated sarcasm and made-up negativity because she was deliriously happy for being with him, her mouth was actually foaming! Hmm, on second thought, it must have been the Heineken.

The truth is her happiness seemed immeasurable, even for her closest shopping buddies. She came in to work in the morning, humming some sappy Carpenters song, saying hello to everyone and everything (yes, everything) she passed by. For a while, she didn’t need coffee to lift her up every morning, and she was a girl with an acutely caffeinated blood stream! I guess the inspiration he brought her was her stock of caffeine, and the most potent kind, too. She rose before sunrise and floated on cloud nine all day long. The tasks that used to be hellish for her at work, she pulled off without any trouble, at times even seemed to enjoy them. She found humor in other people’s meanness and ignored negative criticisms like simple bad jokes said by hopeless comedians with bad timing. She was so happy it was almost ridiculous!

She had so much energy, she could work all day and until late at night without losing her firm grip of details and high-quality output. All she needed was to be close to her laptop and type in senseless little things that got senseless little things for a response popping out in her messenger every now and then. She lit up with excitement each time a “ting” sounded off from her computer. The discreet smile that touched her lips as she typed in something in her messenger actually brought twinkle to her eyes. There was no disappointment from work and anywhere else in her life that didn’t get dissolved by that tiny little ting of a sound. Her hair seemed to shine and bounced with dazzling gleam. Her skin glowed beautifully, transforming her otherwise average features to a truly lovely look. She was a perfect picture of health and deep joy. She radiated positive energy around her that made people enjoy her presence. Although I was convinced she was in love, I kept administering her with a good dose of skepticism daily just to keep her from getting lost to the vulnerability of her happy state.

“It feels so good, so right,” she used to say in gasping voice. While others get consumed by the intensity of their desire to touch and be touched by their loved one, his touch ignited a fire within her that melted darkness into a feeling of reassuring warmth. Rather than chaotic ecstasy, she felt comforting calmness in his presence that made her lose herself in peaceful tranquility. “It’s such a beautiful feeling, I can’t even begin to describe it,” she said. And, she ran about happily in her blissful state.

Just when she started building her hopes for the future around his presence, the “tings” from her laptop started to come sparingly. And then they came in trickles, if at all. The twinkle in her eyes started to fade and she started to lose the spring in her strides. “He thinks we have nothing in common,” she explained more to herself than to anyone else. He stopped communicating completely, ignored her attempts to talk. No word, no comfort. Losing the inner strength that he brought, she fell ill. The color in her world faded until all corners turned sullen and grey. She lost the positive attitude so that every criticism at work stabbed like sharp daggers in her heart. And she reeled in dark misery. “How can it be possible that the one person who makes you the happiest is the same person who makes you the saddest,” she asked, and she wished there was an answer. She wallowed in grief until tears ran dry.

As she scraped the Häagen-Dazs container without an ounce of guilt, she reveled at how her newly cleaned toe nails started to take shape under that nail file – almost like a magic wand. She checked an array of nail polish bottles and nodded at the sparkly bronze color. As I began to cover her toe nails with the glittery but warmly colored nail polish, her eyes started to come alive as her lips took the shape of a tentative smile. After coating all her toe nails with the richly colored liquid, the tentative smile turned to a full smile, not quite radiating happiness nor bringing twinkle to her eyes, but it was a smile – a start. She sat back, held her feet up to admire her newly groomed toe nails, her eyes were almost sparkling. She blushed, almost glowed and she knew right there and then what the next move was – shop for new shoes!

She moved from one rack to another, trying on different styles and colors, checking them out in the mirror. As she flashed a truly happy smile in the mirror each time she saw a pair of shoes she liked, I knew then that she’ll be fine. She will come in and out of loneliness that’s for sure, but one day true love will come and she’ll be happy again. For now, maybe a haircut or a new hairstyle will make her forget the old girl whose world just fell apart, and see a new girl who is ready to face the world again.

“There you go, hon… the new you,” the hair stylist announced excitedly as she untied the protective cape. I looked at myself in the mirror, I liked what I saw. I stood up, gave my hair a gentle pat and paid my bill. On my way out of the salon, I caught a glimpse of the new me in the mirror. I smiled and whispered, “looking good, girl!” And with a cheerful wink at my reflection in the mirror, I walked out of the salon in my new pair of wedges that showed off my bronze coated toe nails. The wedges lent me a nice strut that almost spelled confidence as I walked out with a renewed courage to face the world again.