I am a Filipino. I was born in Argao. The place has yet to be swayed by civilization and advancement or exploitation perhaps.

In that southern part of Cebu, Philippines, houses are situated beneath green slopes, mostly concealed under a lush shade that seems to have existed long before my great-grandfathers. My own home lies up the field, a kilometer or so away from the town proper and across meadows.

With the existence of online technology, who isn’t into blogging? Many of those who are spending hours in the web are most likely maintaining online sites where they write anything they do, from protesting on the streets to commenting on the recent calamities to crying from heartbreak to sharing hobbies and shopping list, to even the daily weather condition.

A quick googling will reveal that a blog is the newest form of journalism with a reverse chronology, unfiltered content, comments, links, a relaxed attitude, and appropriated text. It is a short cut for a web log, a place where you can cover your own event and present it in an informal tone you want. A blog is your rants in a journal that is made public and readers post comments online.

I write about national issues and also about touching lives. This is about two of my Filipino friends, Sharon and Mimi.

The oil-rich Saudi Arabia became Sharon’s home right after her college graduation. As an entertainer in a foreign land, money fills her purse with no trouble at all when she belts out her songs like no other could. Today, she is as rich as the country she is working in.

Mimi’s talent has brought her to a far away place. I knew it the first time I saw her twist her waist gracefully in a local dance competition. Precisely so, she boogied herself to Japan. For money and family, she dances with pride.

November formally lands boiling over with questions on faith in God. Since I had written a couple of religious stuff in the previous issues of this paper, I rummaged through one of the products of my early glorious moments at writing and thought of publishing a non-sequitur-like entry such as this.

Action without faith, is it enough? To do good and not evil; is it a guarantee of getting a place up there in the vast kingdom of God?

They say it is easy to be among the millions who are rejoicing in the heavens. They say that a place has already been set for us – a place surrounded by God’s infinite goodness. But can the grace be granted to those who are unprepared and undeserving individuals?

“You are qualified to win the daily lotto, to join please text back……”

I suspect that the number of text messages sent daily is growing very rapidly anywhere around the world. As per estimate, the sent rate is hundreds of billions per annum. With its wide coverage, text messaging has been the target of spammers, and text spamming is becoming a bigger problem than e-mail-based spam.

For over a year of owning a phone in the U.S., there were only few instances that I received text spams from the network provider. This is in contrast to what David Lazarus said in his article for the San Francisco Chronicle that millions of SMS spams are circulating already in the U.S., of which younger cell phone users who send the most text messages are usually targeted. What’s more, many cell phone subscribers face the double whammy of having to pay 10 cents for every text message received, whether read or unread, solicited or unsolicited.

How to live life happily? Most often, I’d get suggestions like: make a contribution by working hard in a work you love; be in the know and intelligent; gather a surplus; love your family above your friends, your cellphone, your dog, your career; and progress in the firm and gain high title and salary, stock options, benefits. Everyone I know agrees: this is life’s joy.

However, happiness is not at all about being paid, or living in luxury, or getting wealthy, or having a blue-collar job and finding a partner. I am more convinced that happiness goes beyond any human reason.

Brown-colored skin. That’s what I have. No trace of yellowish or white tints in me. Only pure brown, like I was baked to perfection, so to speak. With both parents having the lineage of the locally-bred mature generation, the product is a no more than a similar-looking life form. To translate it into percentage of blood, I am 100% Filipino. Although grandparents claim to acquire a certain fraction of blood from the Spanish conquistadores, there is no trace of that declaration evident on me. If there was indeed truth to that, I am inclined to believe that huge mosquitoes that linger in the Philippine forests had already sucked what insignificant amount of foreign blood I had.

The pureness in me makes me ponder at how life would look or feel like had I been a son of a foreign national, say American national. In my country, there is some sort of partiality towards mixed blood individuals because they look much better than the normal, local-looking Indios. Lighter complexion, lighter hair color, sharper nose tip, curved eyelashes, thinner lips, reddish checks, well-defined chin, taller than average, pleasant foreign accent – these and maybe hundreds more set the foreign breeds apart from us.

Do you know the stories behind your old photos? I just looked at mine and, yes, I do.

There’s one good reason why this week I metamorphosed into an archaic-photo enthusiast.

A short meeting with a fellow Filipino in Brookings weeks ago got me into thinking to scan my old pictures and salvage them from further wear and tear. Each photo in her stack of albums, she insisted, carries brilliant stories of long ago that should not be expunged simply through waning and yellowing. In as much as she wanted the photos to be reinstated to their original grandeur, there was nothing so much she could do but to clean them from lizards’ debris, having been concealed in the filing cabinet for quite a time.