BUGS & BYTES,
In Bigger Prints

Table of Contents

 

Section I
PROLOGUE, EPILOGUE, IKLOG (O MANOK?)

1 The Egg

2 Hatsing! (Bless Me)

3 Arthropodic Wisdom

4 Dear Decision Maker

5 Letters To The World

6   A Pain In My Head

7 Something Happened On My Way To School
8   A Discourse on The Grand Laws of the Universe

9 Black or White

10 Bayanihan in Jeddah

11 Chair of The Interim Board

12 Breakaway Telephonic Existence

13 The 'R' in Mrs. Regis

14 One City, One School

15 Eggs Breaking

16 PESJ History

17 The Chicken Fence

18 Believing The Man

19   My Own Version of The Jolo-Caust

20 My Sister's Version

21 The Rifle Guitar

22   Cat Stevens Unplugged

23  Landing on D-Day

24 The Great O-O-Os of the Late 20th Century

25 He Kept On Stumbling Over Chickens And Eggs

26   The Renaissance of Tilapia Farming And The Likes

27   The Saga Continues

28   The Pigeons In Our Lives

29 The Essence of Education

30   A School Is A Home

31  Gentle Fire From The Qur'an

32  At The Threshold

33  A Brief Discourse On Dancing

34  Being First

35   At The Edge of Light-Blue Metallic

36   Grappling With The Colossus

 

Section II
BUGS & BYTES
In Bigger Prints

The Power To Be
Excerpts from B & B Vol. 1 # 1

Of Crabs & Men
Excerpts from B & B Vol. 2 # 2

PathWalks
Excerpts from B & B Vol. 2 # 2

An Inability To Understand
Excerpts from A Speech by Prince Charles,
B & B Vol. Vol. 3 # 1

'Educating Miriam'
Excerpts from A Case Study of A Philippine School,
B & B Vol 3 # 2

 

Section III
BABEL RISING

A millennial short story

 

A Glossary of Pilipino
(& Near-Pilipino) Terms
Wondering what iklog is?

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Prologue, Epilogue, Iklog (O Manok?)
Copyright © 1999 by Said Sadain, Jr.

1   The Egg

It was the egg of an idea. Some people will term it, the germ of an idea or the sperm of an idea, depending on which side of the egg they are looking at. Blessed with my long, Al-Baik chicken-eating days in Saudi Arabia, I prefer to call it an egg.

Sometimes, I call it a bug too, considering that I am into serious enterprise resource planning (ERP) and Year 2000 (Y2K) computing these days.

I am Filipino, just as Nur Misuari of the MNLF/ARMM/SPCPD took the oath of being Filipino when he assumed governorship of the ARMM, and Martin Nievera of TFC is Filipino. I am Moro, just like Lapulapu and Hashim Salamat, famous liberation front fighters, are Moros. I am Muslim, just like The Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques King Fahad ibn Abdul Aziz and Malcolm X Malik Ash-Shahbazz are Muslims.

I am a human being, not a computer, so I have to warn you about a lot of fuzzy and sometimes illogical logic coming your way as you go deeper into the book. But just like any other author who thinks he is writing the next great masterpiece, the Book of the Decade, nay, the Book of the Century, I urge you to read on.

This is not a book about religion, or about politics, or about entertainment. Unlike Martin, I am not a singer. And for the most part, I am not a revolutionary, much more a king or a governor. I am more of an evolutionary: without the 'r', that is. This is a book about creative evolution.

I evolved from my father’s past from one of the distant, unknown islands of the Sulu Archipelago, Tapul. For a while, one of my college buddies kept on calling me The Tapul Man, although I prefer to reserve that title for my father, who actually grew up in Tapul before marrying my mother and raising our family in the Jolo Island.

I had the feeling that my ancestors used to throw sticks and stones at the sky to fathom the mysteries of space and gravity. I throw computer mouse devices against the false ceiling these days.

I grew up in Jolo, not having seen Tapul Island at all. Neither did any of my nine other siblings. I am the second in the brood, which, as will become clearer to you much later, is harder than being first.

My features are regular: brown eyes, black hair, aesthetic brown body, meaning 5'4.5" and not fit for basketball. My wife, Liza, still swears to this day that when she first saw me in the upper rungs of the UP College of Engineering theater, she thought I was wearing a dimly glowing halo over my head. However, eighteen years of marriage and four children later, she now tells me on a good day that she could not see that halo anymore. But maybe, she would say, it was more like that maudlin Titanic scene between Rose and Jack, Rose looking up at Jack as her raft was being lowered down the side of the condemned ship. My wife now realizes that those nimbus lights were in fact distressed signals.

I tell my wife that she should not get too carried away by the movie. After all, it was just a neat, grand way of presenting a likely Peeping Tom theory of why RMS Titanic scraped into the iceberg.

I am not an actor or a movie director, of course.

I could be your everyday, next-door neighbor, so do not give me the oft-repeated crap about my being so different from the others. I am only different in the sense that you are also different from anybody else. You are one-of-a-kind, distinct from your twin sibling, if you have one, or even from your friendly clone who could be breaking fast with you over chicken and egg and coffee in the future.

 

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