I still have few more years to sort what my next move would be. Moving out of the family home was the first step to establish my financial independence. After that would be a career review. Do I still see myself working hard in the same capacity and company? Or would I even consider making a 180-degree change – like embarking into an eat-pray-love kind of journey?

Never been this scared.

But the reality speaks far from these ideals. People make mistakes everyday, and that includes marrying the person you thought was the best.

The annulment in the Philippines is an almost useless tool in settling marital disputes. Simply because of the price tag and selectivity it carries. Only people who could afford it gets the annulment, making it a privilege of the upper class. But what about those majority who couldn’t afford it? While it serves the purpose of discouraging marital break-ups, people who are at the bottom of the social strata remain helpless in their situations until death do them part.

That kind of suffering is not called a virtue, but stupidity. Women and children are given a first taste of hell by living with someone who subject them to unimaginable forms of abuse. Our records reek with stories of philandering spouses, battered wives and abandoned children.

So leave that holier-than-thou attitude to the church altars and wholesale life insurance salesman, and realize these things:

- That families have already been BREAKING UP for the longest time. We’re too afraid to admit to society that certain unions are failures.

- Children are SENSITIVE. They can feel if something is not right between mom and dad. If you think that you can shield your children from your marital problems by pretending that everything’s ok, you are deceiving yourselves. THEY KNOW.

- Not all children who grew up in broken homes end up to be losers. In fact, there are far too many who became successful because they understood what it was like to live with almost nothing.

- A STRONG-WILLED single parent can raise kids ALONE and make them better individuals later on

- Most abandoned families suffer in poverty .

Find it weird that every time I get a chance to watch TV and hop on TV5, Willie is there making another speech. And so I listened to what he had to say while tempted to call the network to cut the chase, go to the point and ask if that would be his last. While he was so engrossed in his monologue, a long history of his personal battles in defense of the poorest of the poor, I fell asleep.

Today I learned he went on leave after advertisers pulled out their support from the program.

What did we learn from this?

- With or without a job on TV, Willie has already amassed a fortune enough to keep him alive until retirement. And he can afford to hire all kinds of lawyers – Texas truck accident lawyer, the Fortun brothers, or even the one who succeeded in freeing Hubert – to defend him. So please, he is not kawawa.

- The poor remains. But nothing is written on stone, so there’s hope to be better. I mean, richer.

- The reason why there are Willie’s out there is we allowed them to grow fat to feed our fantasies and give us garbage. Lesson to the advertisers: It’s not all about money. Think values. Think reputation.

- Amazing to find that there are still people out there who want to see this country improve.

Very good.

So not to be bitter about it, I made a short survey in my FB to see how people would react to the news and what every lotto winner should remember when the money comes in like a deluge.

- Everyone wants “balato”
- Some crooks will kidnap you and ask for ransom
- There’s truth to the saying “easy come, easy go”

The best way is to be quiet about it and think – a lot. If you can, go abroad undetected. Invest wisely. Keep your life very simple.

So blame the candy holiday to these sweet guys of Cleveland, Ohio who in 1922 came up with a brilliant way of selling their candies, with some dose of charity – remembering the unfortunate and cherishing the goodness of having friends and families. It wasn’t so bad after all, despite the fact that until now Hallmark remains to be the culprit behind every weird holiday celebrations. Who knows, even the most trivial stuff like rubber stamps might get itself a place in the calendar.

They can now pack and have their Branson vacations, and leave family planning in the hands of the couple and the state. Oops, here’s the funny thing. What makes these celibate bishops credible speakers of family planning? Unless Father Damaso is alive and still kicks ass.

We’ve been like hostages of the church for centuries, dictating how to run our lives based on the rules set by the Pope who they deemed infallible. They have invaded our minds, then our bedrooms. Not that everything they said was bad, but there are matters that also require common sense. Example, we can no longer allow couples to procreate irresponsibly like it was in the post-Holocaust era. This country today is already overpopulated and majority of us live below poverty line. Our resources and opportunities are diminishing as a direct result.

Fathers, we have lost most of our agricultural lands to house 90 million people. Is it any wonder why we import rice these days?

Support the Reproductive Health Bill.

Venus Raj’s “major major” was actually “minor minor” compared to the degree of suffering other contestants have to endure. Now, this brings one “major major” issue back to the table: why not get an interpreter and let our Pinay beauties speak in Tagalog?

The insistence of our local pageant organizers to conduct Q&A’s in English may be good, but it limits a candidate’s ability to express herself well. Why the unwanted pressure? Being a country with the third largest number of English-speaking citizens in the world does not mean that we do speak the language well. Some of us never really had an access to quality education and grew up learning English from the television sets. Others grew up in an English-speaking community but can be as dumb as anyone else. The ability to speak in English should never be equated to intelligence.

Beauty contestants are judged based on their beauty, character and brains, but not the language. South American titleholders of Miss Universe have always been aided by an interpreter, a practice no one took against them. They were able to share their thoughts well without looking stupid. Why not do the same to our own local candidates who are not comfortable expressing themselves in an alien tongue? After all, no one really expects our beauty contestants to be grammatically correct.

Bekimon has been around for quite some time. Some of my friends, those who made a living selling pharmaceutical products, insurances and bcbsnc plans, speak it with ease, and I have eventually acquired a few words as well, like “mudra”. But no one has officially “christened” it until now. Classic examples might hit you home: kalerki, junakis, chorva, ma at pa, anda, jowa, chenes, itich, etc. Try checking out Angelica Panganiban and John Lapuz in the movie “Here Comes The Bride” and you’ll get a pretty good bekimon material there.

How it became another language I don’t know, but gays and most women everywhere have been using them. Bekimon came from the words “becky” or “beki”, gay speak for “bakla”. It is used like a secret code among gays living in a homophobic society.

Prof. Jesus Federico Fernandez, former chair of the Department of Linguistics of the University of the Philippines, gave a brief lecture on how “bekimon” is formed in 9 ways: “paglalapi” (adding of suffixes), “pagpapalit ng tunog” (changing of sounds), use of acronyms, “pag-uulit ng salita” (repeating words), “pagkakaltas” (shortening a word or phrase), “katunog” (sameness of sound), “paghihiram” (borrowing from other languages), and “pagbabago ng kahulugan ng salitang hiniram” (changing meanings).

At the time of this writing, an online bekimon translator is already in place. We’re evolving.

Venus Raj may have lost her bid to a Mexican beauty, but her “Major major” became yesterday’s hottest topic online. Let us not forget that Venus still succeeded in making it to the Miss Universe Top 5, despite the pressure of having to deal with Monday’s hostage drama that ended in tragedy.

I was 18 that time, a newbie and probably one of the four or five female illustrators who broke into the male-dominated world of comics illustration. There I was introduced to Redondo’s works. The artist was so admired and emulated by most people I had worked with. We found ourselves students of his realistic art style and learned so much about the tremendous attention he paid to detail. Such high regard bordered on the fact that his was simply a case of raw talent completely devoid of software manipulations that have defined so much of this generation’s artistry, like a person’s fascination to carb blockers. He was one of the best pencil-and-ink guys.

Thank God for the Internet. Otherwise, I would not have known Redondo to be an Ilocano born in 1928, a would-have-been architect (but the call of comics illustration was so hard to resist so he eventually left Mapua) and the man behind the illustration of Mars Ravelo’s series “Darna” in the 50′s.

Palos, Diwani, Gagamba and Tagisan ng Agimat were some of the works he made in collaboration with his brother, Virgilio. Some of his works were also published various local comics. In 1953, an American film outfit, MGM Pictures, commissioned him to do a comic book preview of the movie “Quo Vadis”.

In the 70′s, a friend helped him establish contacts with the editors of Marvel and DC Comics. Later on that decade, Redondo started doing work for the following titles: House of Mystery, House of Secrets, Rima, The Unexpected, Conan the Barbarian, and Weird War Tales. He also took over Swamp Thing from Berni Wrightson. A Dutch organization hired him to do illustrations of the Bible. In 1977, he was commissioned by Far Eastern Broadcasting Company (FEBC), a Christian radio station, to do a painting for them. In 1979, he received the Inkpot award bestowed annually by Comic-Con International.

Nestor Redondo (1928-1995) and and his agent/friend Ed Noonchester at the 1982 San Diego Comic Con (today called Comic-Con International). Photo courtesy of Alan Light.

Most of Redondo’s works later on in his life were for various Christian comics, having been a born-again Christian in the early 80′s. Redondo passed away in December 1995, just a month before he was to deliver his lecture in the 1st International Christian Comics Training Conference in Tagaytay in January 1996.