By Ruel S. De Vera, Associate Editor
Sunday Inquirer Magazine

THERE are just some words which are downright sexy. Not sexy in the sense that they connote physical urges, but sexy in that they capture your fancy and induce obsession. There are words which are just supple, with the sound they make, even if you have no idea what they mean.

I’ve had that kind of relationship with words for a while now. In the middle of reading or listening, I will encounter a word, familiar or unfamiliar, what I can’t quite forget. Often it is a word derived from foreign languages, but sometimes, it’s just a damn sexy word. A consonant flashes like a glimpse of an impossibly long, graceful leg. The curve of a surprise vowel is like a momentary image of a flawless neck. Some words stun even from afar, their very silhouette evoking desire.

One word I remember obsessing about for a while was “fusillade.” I fell for this word the very first time I read it. It means, according to the ever-dependable The New Oxford Dictionary of English, it’s “a series of shots fired or missiles all thrown at the same time or in quick succession.” I would often slip it into whatever I was writing at the time; it was harder to use in conversation since it was French and I didn’t actually know how to pronounce it. I do now: it’s fju:zi’leid.

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By Pennie Azarcon dela Cruz, Executive Editor
Sunday Inquirer Magazine

SOME people don’t scare easy. I’m not one of them.

If you were watching a horror movie and heard someone hyperventilating at the back just as the background music swelled to the inevitable horrific climax, that would be me. If you caught “What Lies Beneath” in a Makati theater and recall hearing someone squeal during that crucial bathtub scene, that would be me. That click of teeth biting cuticles into a bloody pulp during the “Sixth Sense” premiere? Yup, me!

Now you know why I don’t watch scary movies all that much; I don’t fancy having a cardiac just as the bug-eyed zombies catch their prey. I can imagine people discreetly kicking my prone body to hide it under the cinema seats while they relish the gory scenes that they’ve paid good money for. Even my kids would be annoyed. This is the best part and you have to die now?

Blame my yellow streak on a potent imagination fueled by generous doses of mythical monsters from Pilipino komiks, the “Gabi ng Lagim” TV series of the mid-60s and a succession of chatty househelp from the South who regularly threatened us with sanguine tales of kapres, aswang, manananggal and other local ghouls to get us to finish our food, take our naps and keep still. The Taong Tuod of Mars Ravelo’s Darna novels similarly haunted me years after they chased the townfolk of Barangay Puntod. Just when I thought I’ve wrestled them down to oblivion, they resurrected themselves in my dreams.

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By Ruel S. De Vera, Associate Editor
Sunday Inquirer Magazine

THE tenuous connection between All Souls Day and scary things gets even more muddled every year as the Philippines seems to move closer and closer to a Halloween that is American in almost every single way.

What has always been interesting is how TV revels in this by sending up their “scary” stuff. Remember the “Magandang Gabi, Bayan” Halloween episode? Spooky. The channels would also roll out their menagerie of Filipino horror films, including some very old and some very funny ones.

So let’s ask ourselves what are the ten scariest films we have ever seen. Take note, if I seem to be missing a scary movie on this list, it’s because I probably haven’t seen it. Horror movies seem to be the single most profitable genre now, so everyone is making them one after the other, especially Asian countries. I simply haven’t been able to watch all of them despite my best efforts. Plus, I try to tune out the Hollywood adaptations. You will also notice a preponderance of zombie movies on this list — that’s because I simply can’t stop watching them.

Here they are, in no particular order:

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By Pennie Azarcon Dela Cruz, Executive Editor
Sunday Inquirer Magazine

FOR the longest time, the concept of living in absolutely made no sense to me. As guys crudely put it, why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free? Yup, I thought smugly; living-in is for women so desperate to snag a mate they’d willingly give away samples of the goods to entice potential takers.

Until I got married.

Getting hitched is when you realize that you never really get to know someone until you’re actually living together. Eight years of dating, dining, and whining didn’t prepare me for my partner’s inner life and darkest secret. Nope, he’s not with the mob. Neither is he a cross-dresser, a werewolf, or a fan of Willie Revillame. A perfectly decent guy, he is also, to my horrified surprise, a pack rat.

Nothing ever gets thrown out. Not the old turntable missing its arm, not the chest of drawers that was falling apart, not the moth-eaten shirts already outgrown, stained or faded. Not the balding car wheels that we’ve replaced months back and which were probably breeding dengue mosquitoes. Not the rusty filing cabinet whose contents nobody was brave enough to examine, since it had once sat on fetid floodwaters for a week. For the longest time, it sat desolate in the backyard along with the car wheels and the turntable. In the library, occupying three glass-enclosed shelves, is a pile of 1950s book-bound Readers Digest that plays host to a whole colony of termites.

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By Ruel S. De Vera, Associate Editor
Sunday Inquirer Magazine

I REALIZE I’ve broached this somewhat in an earlier blog entry, but I think it is important to emphasize how books can have a second life.

Instead of just lying somewhere in your abode gathering dust or (worse) being used as appetizer by rats, books can begin a new journey, be appreciated by another person. Here are a few suggestions:

1) Give them to someone specific: Books can sometimes be valuable precisely because they are used–by you. When you give them to a friend, it is an act of affection for both the friend (only good friends would have his experience) and the book (precious enough to be given to someone who will take care of them). It is just a matter of finding the right book for the right person; blindly giving your books away is fine if the whole point was to be giving them to just anyone. Irrepressible readers can appreciate pretty much any book. But the closer the book to the nature of the recipient the better; cookbooks
for that aspiring chef, biographies for that friend in HR, and so on. Popular books like the Harry Potter or Twilight books work for pretty much anyone as long as they don’t hav e those yet. Your scribblings among the pages serve to make the book even more personal; do make the effort to write a dedication.

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By Ruel S. De Vera, Associate Editor
Sunday Inquirer Magazine

THERE’S an interesting buzz surrounding Lav Diaz’s eight-hour film “Melancholia,” which, it must be noted, is NOT being shown in Metro Manila. The MTRCB has, apparently, not been able to watch it and thus give it a required rating, even while the MTRCB chair Consoliza Laguardia denies it’s not because it’s too long. The buzz is interesting because Diaz’s film received the Orizzonti Grand Prize of Mostra 2008–yet we won’t get to watch it. The other buzz comes from the sheer amazement of people that someone actually made an eight-hour film. It boggles the mind for some. So we think of the longest movies ever made.

According to Wikipedia, Diaz’s film does not even come close to the longest movie ever made, the 27-hour long Chinese silent film “The Burning of the Red Lotus Temple.” The movie was released in two parts, in 1928 and 1931. One can only imagine there was not all that much to watch at the time in China, but I’m just guessing. There is a bunch of European films ranging from 25 to 5 hours or so.

Length isn’t always a bad thing. Many of the greatest movies made were long. In fact, there was often an intermission between the two parts.

The movie musicals even had an overture at the start. “Gone With the Wind” is over three hours long. So is “Lawrence of Arabia.” Running just under three hours are “The Sound of Music” and “West Side Story.”

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By Ruel S. De Vera, Associate Editor
Sunday Inquirer Magazine

I HATED school. From the very first day of Kindergarten when my mom had to drag me from the chair in front of the TV (“Sesame Street” was on) to the waiting school bus to the day I graduated from college, I hated it. And I hated college the most.

Work was revelatory for me. I savored working on my own, judged by the last and the next thing you did, and, most of all, I loved getting paid. In the back of my mind, it seemed weird to pay and be forced to work — in other words, like being in school.

I returned to school a year after working, but to teach, not to study. Ironically, I enjoyed teaching and got better at it (after the first years of being incompetent at it, of course). It had a lot to do with the fact that I could remember what I hated about my teachers — and tried to get away from that.

Going back to school for my master’s degree was something I kept juggling in my head. I always dismissed it because of the time and monetary constraints. It did occur to me that a master’s degree would be very useful in the teaching career — plus the MA toga is way cooler than the AB toga.

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