SKIRMISHER

My father and maternal grandmother are from the fishing town of Unisan, Quezon. But that doesn’t mean it’s my place of origin. Most Filipinos today say that they’re from this and that province but the truth is, they never grew up there; they just spent summer and Christmas vacations in their folks’ place of origin.
Thus, Friendster is [...]

…is so tricky if you’d ask me, a person who has never had his own computer all his life, who’s still feeling his way into the world of web technology.
Uh-huh, humiliating as it may seem, I must confess that I’m not too familiar with Internet-related terminologies and other techie stuff.
I don’t know what a bandwidth [...]

A PILIPINO is convincing a FILIPINO to become patriotic… 
PILIPINO: We must get rid of Spanish words from our native languages!
FILIPINO: And why is that?
PILIPINO: “Why” is a stupid question. Haven’t you learned anything from your history class? It is but a folly to retain Spanish loan words in our languages when it was Spain who destroyed our identity!!!
FILIPINO: Oh. [...]

There are books that for me are so terrific I just couldn’t find the courage to finish reading them. I don’t know, maybe it’s out of some absurd respect for what I think are great things. Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things, for example. Or Joseph Heller’s Catch-22. You can quiz me about how [...]

I was speaking with a girl some weeks ago, and the conversation made a turn toward teenage angst and suicide. The girl was young and had many personal issues; she’s one of those who had the habit of being sad and hopeless all the time, which was crazy because she had much going for her [...]

“I have to take a dump,” Jessie whispered.
“What? You mean, now?”
Jessie winced; I saw desperation in his eyes. It made me shiver. It made me mutter to myself, Oh, shit, indeed.
This was in third grade. Our teacher, who was heavy with child and terribly cranky, was introducing a new math concept that required us to [...]

There’s this guy, let’s call him Knopf, who was running on the info superhighway Bill Gates used to call the “Interweb” back when he didn’t think something like Netscape could actually hack it. Back in those innocent years the Web was nascent and Gates treated the jerks who took the Web seriously as nothing but [...]

“What did he do?” the Guidance Counselor asked my teacher.
My teacher, let’s call her Miss Suni, simply said, “He stabbed his classmate with a pencil. The victim’s bleeding in the clinic.”

The Guidance Counselor stared at me from head to foot. She stared at the strip of Bandaid on my knee, at my shabby white uniform. [...]

Six years ago, I didn’t bother attending my own college graduation. I just didn’t care. I went straight looking for a job because at the back of my mind, I was intrigued and curious about how somebody like me would fare in the “real world.” I already had a vague idea: maybe I’d last two [...]

“The first rule of the platoon is you don’t ask questions about rules.”

This was not a scene in Fight Club, and I wasn’t Tyler Durden. This was summer of 1987, and I was speaking to a bunch of kids younger than myself. It was already months after I saw Oliver Stone’s Platoon, and I couldn’t [...]

When I was in fourth grade, I was a small, weak kid. I was the sort who looked like I was begging to be tied to a post and fed to ants. One look at me, and you’d know here’s a kid you could kick without fear of reprisal.
There was indeed somebody who was bigger [...]

I’ve invented something that could instantly kill living things. And I’m only eight.

It’s amazing, I tell my friend. He gapes at what I’m handing him.
His runny nose has already made a permanent yellow-greenish pair of mucus canals from his nostrils to his mouth, and there are times I wonder how it must taste.
It instantly killed [...]