A Friendly Reminder.

Just in time for the new Spider-man movie: to insure promptness, your friendly neighborhood webslinger needs a little encouragement.

The Slut Button.

Britney punched it. Christina Aguilera punched it. Abby Viduya, Maui Taylor, and Rica Peralejo punched it. The Olsen Twins are old enough to punch it. There’s talk (mostly between the wife and myself) on whether Hilary Duff or Lindsay Lohan will be the first to give in to the urge, to press… the slut-button.

I imagine the slut-button is housed in a top-secret maximum security location: behind the "O" in the Hollywood sign, perhaps, or locally, somewhere in Kris Aquino’s lingerie closet. If your career expiry date starts to make its presence felt when you’re at that precious age of eighteen, maybe all you have to do is book an appointment with the button, get there with your agent, and push.

They have good reasons for pushing. The considerable male demographic of slavering Internet geeks and pimply teenagers reliably fork over the cash to watch former teen cutie-pies lose their innocent act and bare all. It’s the ultimate male fantasy (next to three-ways with hot Swedish twins… so I hear). All over the Internet, countdowns to hot underage female stars’ 18th birthdays are all the rage. (The Olsen twins, the first prominent subjects of this strange Internet obsession, just turned 18, uneventfully, it seems.)

Pervy? Oh god yes. And there’s good money to be made, milking the desires and wallets of teenagers and misanthropes who, ironically, have the least chance of scoring with their dream underage muffin. Good to know when your cuteness has run its course, and it’s time to resort to stronger stuff. It’s an impulse that’s been around as long as movies have been made. Which leads us back to the slut button. Last I heard, Anne Curtis was seen skulking around Kris Aquino’s front gate...

Today’s Homily: Cultural Catholic.

Just before I flew back from Singapore, Nette and I thought it would be a good idea to go back to Church. Having nowhere else to go on Sundays, I found myself driven to my knees, specifically the leatherette pews at Our Lady of Perpetual Succour.

Being Catholic, I discovered then, was like knowing how to ride a bicycle. You never forget the right response, the right time to stand, kneel, and sit, and the rationale behind some of the more obscure rites. If you’ve undergone the crucible of Jesuit Catholic education as I have, you wouldn’t forget, either, even if you’ve wandered far from the fold. As I have.

Indeed, I am as far from the shadow of the Church as is humanly possible, if one were to judge from a practicing Catholic’s POV. I do not go to Mass. I can read Bertrand Russell and Richard Dawkins without flinching. I cannot utter the Nicene Creed with sincerity, though I can say it in my sleep. I oppose the Catholic Church’s intervention in the Philippines’ political life, particularly in the fields of birth control and the media.

But you cannot totally undo a Catholic upbringing, at least not without some serious psychic damage. One might say that the vehemence of some evangelicals against many Catholic shibboleths comes from a continuing (and vain) attempt to shake off the baptismal waters. I cannot fight a lost cause; I cannot wholeheartedly say that I am not a Catholic. St. Ignatius is still my personal hero; his Prayer for Generosity still gives me goosebumps. My life is littered with Catholic icons, Catholic truisms, Catholic stories – some of which still ring true, even if the words "I believe in God, the Father Almighty" don’t.

I am a cultural Catholic. There, I said it.

"We are cultural Catholics," writes Anna Quindlen, a practicing Catholic and feminist. "Catholicism is to us now not so much as a system of beliefs or a set of laws but a shared history. It is not so much our faith as our past."

A past that’s both a blessing and a curse. The Jesuits have blessed their more conscientious students with a rich understanding of the faith – along with the implied freedom of choice, like Eve before the snake, to prefer insight over obedience. I cannot reconcile current Church-sponsored misrepresentations of population control with my fervent belief that a family has the right to control the size of their brood. I find it abhorrent that the Church seems to be going out of its way to reward the guilty in the pedophile-priest scandal. I feel disgusted with the Magisterium’s censorship of conscientious Catholic clergy. I have a visceral emotion against these things, the kind that gets under your skin, especially when these run contrary to a lifetime of Catholic instruction.

Yet Catholicism defines who I am, down to my defiance of the Catholic hierarchy which I believe often strays from the original Christian ideals of charity, generosity, and love. I used to think I hated the Church, until I realized that you cannot hate your past – only come to an understanding with it, and perhaps forgive, forget, and go your own way. I have only gone a little way towards that understanding, which may explain why I haven’t fully gone my own way yet. I cannot say I believe in God, yet I still went to Cana with my fiancee, married her in a Catholic Church, and may yet agree to be buried in Catholic rites.

If it sounds confusing, let me say this: I have ceased to look for certainty in the Church, her leadership, and her creeds. I look for a sense of history and continuity that my Catholic upbringing demands. In an uncertain world, I believe this is the best I can hope for. I am a cultural Catholic, which means I believe in my history though my future may lie elsewhere.

Sense of place.

I woke up in a different bed today from the one I got out of last Saturday. Last Saturday’s bed was different from the one I got out of last January, which in turn was different from the bed I woke up in on the same day five years before.

My real address has changed far more often than my online address: my reliable Hotmail account is still the same it’s been since 1996, but I’ve been making the rounds of different residences – and different countries – since then. Xavierville. Tandang Sora. Singapore – Bukit Batok, Grange Road, Bayshore Park. Then back to Tandang Sora, with a month’s respite in a neighbor’s house while we were having ours renovated. The constant moves have made me a sure hand with large cardboard boxes, packing tape, and the nuances of fitting odd-shaped objects into compressed spaces. Minnette has filled in the gaps in my packing knowledge; our glassware has made the trip intact thanks to her practical wisdom (and her Internet research), though I worry that the shattered ceramic mask she unwrapped yesterday may have slightly dampened her confidence.

I’ve switched addresses more than most people switch jobs. Not that it’s an entirely negative thing; I’ve learned to base my sense of place more on the people who matter to me, instead of the walls that bound my night’s rest. I haven’t been as flighty with the people I hang out with, the family I call (all the way in Davao City, a place that a tiny part of me still calls home), or the person I wake up next to. Ten years after college, I’m still downing beer with Mon and Peejo; nine years after my first interview with my boss and mentor Dennis G., I’m still producing radio scripts in his studio; five years after really getting together as a couple, Minnette still begins and completes every day of my waking life.

Yet I don’t really have a home base, don’t really have a psychic center where I’ve built up a good store of memories. Xavierville might have been it – this is where Nette and I first lived together, where Abu first crept his way into our lives, and it was close to where we went to school and met – but my parents needed the money from its sale more than I needed the nostalgia.

So here I find myself, the veritable vagrant of Quezon City. I’m learning to make my home in the middle of Tandang Sora, where tricycle drivers park on the sidewalks (what little there are) and where the next door neighbor is a creepy Born-Again Christian who claims to be wealthy beyond measure at one moment and wants to borrow money in the next. The place has its charms, yes, even counting the creepy next-door neighbor – who else could the wife and I bitch about when we’re settling down to bed? And as long as it’s still the wife I see the first time I wake up, still Abu who pokes me insistently in the mornings for his daily walk, then why would I want to call any other place home?