Asian Journal- The Filipino-American Community Newspaper

"The happiest people don’t have the best of everything… They just make the best of everything that they have."

—Author Unknown

(The article below is a personal favorite.)

I SKIM and scan FWD messages when I can. I’m not big on forwarding stuff, leaving that for others to do. I still prefer personal one-liners. Communication has become efficient, almost done by rote, and sometimes borders on the cold and impersonal. I still don’t enjoy being part of a network to be used for someone’s purpose or agenda. There’s a stubborn part of me that rebels and chafes at becoming part of a statistic or used for a purpose to advance someone’s agenda. We’ve all become easy targets for privacy intruders. Nothing seems sacred or private anymore. There’s more than enough out there in the public records to fill a dossier on anyone with an SSN. We are living in the Information Age and the currency we trade in are bits and bytes of information. It’s like living in glass houses these days. There’s too much transparency and I am becoming resentful. No wonder our sense of mystery and awe at anything in this life is fast eroding. That is why I regard social networking with a bit of trepidation and suspicion. And frankly, who’s got the time? I am probably one of a vanishing breed, always itching to get out of the virtual world and into the real world of doing things, creating, fixing, cooking, gardening, making memories and connecting personally and laughing until my sides are nearly split. By choice, I am offline and often unwired on the weekends. My personal motto these days: LOG OFF AND LIVE.

There’s so much living yet to do: so many recipes to try, seeds to plant, topiaries to shape, weeds to pull, walls and blank canvasses to paint, places to see, photos to shoot, plays to watch, games to play, puzzles to solve and mysteries to unravel, books to read, people to meet, goals to achieve, skills to learn and courses to take, stuff to give away, stories to write, naps to take and a thousand and one more things to feel, see, touch, taste, hear and soak in before the end game. With all that’s in the past, life still feels like a tabula rasa —lots of living to do, so little time. Sigh.

It doesn’t help that the virtual world encroaches. If you spend even only a few hours on the internet each day, then you are a de facto active, living, breathing denizen of Cyberville, part of the audience of the world stage. Witness Susan Boyle’s instant global fame in the audition of "Britain’s Got Talent," which has over 50 million hits on youtube in a matter of days. What we see is a frumpy, dowdy old maid from Scotland who lives alone with her cat, a complete unknown, wowing the judges, even snarky Simon Cowell and pretty much the skeptic audience and the rest of us in Cyberville. By her plaintive song, her magnificent singing and just by being true to herself, the world sat up and took notice. How many can do that these days? Boyle has become somewhat of a phenom for our times, which prompted one wag of a British publication, to ask the question of our obsession with sexy, good looks: "Is Susan Boyle ugly or are we?"

Personally, I am rooting for her and every Charisse Pempengco, every Arnel Pineda and every phenom who whacks us out or our smug ways and wows us via the great equalizer and media decimator —youtube. I am hoping fame and fortune don’t change their core beings overly much. If we permit it though, the virtual world can usurp reality. We tend to spend inordinate number of hours glued to the screen. We’ve seen how the last US election played out over the internet and how the new rules for power, money, media and political gamesmanship are all being rewritten right before our very eyes. God forbid a chilling scenario for one megalomaniac individual with a lust for power and omnipotence, to muster enough resources and harness the power of the web to shape minds, move people to action and rule the world by Blackberry or iPhone. China foresees this and similar to its effort to stave off the incursion of enemies in its domain during its long history by building the Great Wall, it is doing all it can to firewall, censor, block or neutralize this unstoppable force, particularly youtube, with a cadre of internet police. The threat is real.