No Eggs for My Birthday

March 2014

I heard that here in Dumaguete, the locals, especially the young ones, have an unusual way of greeting a person celebrating his birthday. They crack a raw egg on the celebrator’s head!

I’m turning a year older this March, and it will be my first time to mark the occasion in this city. My chance, though, of having an egg cracked on my head is nil. I’ll be twenty-nine, no longer young enough to horse around or to be at the receiving end of a prank. I’ll be missing out on a messy yet surely memorable local tradition. I’m not worried, however. Turning a year older for me is a good thing. Aside from the fact that it is a futile effort to hold on to youth, there are things to be happy about in being not so young.

As I get older, I get to know myself more and I get to know more what I want. In my teens and early twenties, I wanted to do and be anything I could. I wanted to cramp my life with activities. I was not very sociable, however, so I’m not referring to partying all night, joining sports competitions, or any of those bucket-list stuff, such as ziplining in Lake Sebu or doing something naughty in a tent at the peak of Mt. Apo. I was into learning. I felt that I was wasting my time if I was not spending it learning new things or learning more about the things I already knew. I read a lot, and I couldn’t read enough. I also watched documentaries and classic movies and surfed online for hours on end. I didn’t really enjoy what I was doing. I was doing it because I was afraid that I might not be able live life to the fullest if there was one area of knowledge I knew nothing about.

I acquired information for the sake of it, and gradually I lost the desire. There is nothing specific to which I can attribute my change of behavior, except maybe to maturity. As I got older, my focus turned from trying to learn everything to studying only the things that make me tick. Now I only do the things that I enjoy and I believe I’m good at. Where before I had an opinion on everything, and I’d voice them every chance I’d get, now you seldom hear me arguing with someone, especially when the subject is politics or religion. I share nothing but selfies and personal updates on Facebook.

It’s not that I’ve become jaded or indifferent. It’s just that my concerns have been narrowed, in a positive way, I believe. Before, when not reading or writing, I’d rant to people around me how lenient my college instructors, how unfair the school administrators, how corrupt the Philippine government officials, and how dumb George W. Bush (I told you, I’m not so young anymore) were. Now I worry myself with these questions: Am I being a good son to my parents? Am I a competent employee? Am I doing my responsibilities as a graduate student and as a teacher? Am I doing my simple duties as a Filipino citizen?

I still know enough about what’s happening in the country and the world. I even joined the “Million People March” against pork barrel when I was still based in Cebu. But I want to spend more time improving myself and contributing to my immediate vicinity than “fighting the system” or hewing a Utopia out of our struggling country.

My memory now is no longer as sharp as it used to be. I remember that when I was sixteen and in first year college, I interviewed six gay students for an article in the campus publication. They narrated to me how they came to terms with their sexuality. Each of them practically shared with me the summary of his life. I didn’t have a tape recorder, and I stored everything in my mind while jotting key words on a piece of paper. When I wrote the article a day or two after, I simply told their stories word for word. I remembered every detail clearly.

Now I sometimes fail to relay accurately something that has been said to me even just moments earlier. I notice that when quoting someone, I often start by saying, “If I remember it right . . .” or “I can’t recall the words exactly, but I think . . .” The weakening of my own mental faculties has taught me to give weight not so much to words as to the feelings that go with them. Or perhaps it is the other way around. I am no longer keen on memorizing, on capturing spoken words in their exact form and order, because getting older has taught me that there are more to communication than just the words. I am no longer a campus journalist that must report statements as they are uttered. I am a human being that understands that words are mere approximations of another human being’s thoughts and feelings, that the greater context or a twitch of a facial muscle reveals so much more.

My birthday celebration this month, here in Dumaguete, will be as predictable as it can be—heavy meal with friends followed by lots of beer, hours of talk on literature and, if we get drunk enough, an aimless stroll under the acacias along Rizal Boulevard. The friends I’ve gained here, mostly young writers, will be mocking me for being almost thirty and not yet having a book or a Palanca. But definitely there will be no cracking of raw eggs on my head. Again, I’m too old for that. I’ll be missing out on a unique local tradition. I’ll be missing out on a lot of things that come with youth. And I’m not worried. I am older, and contrary to what many people dread, life is fuller, happier, and in a lot of ways better.