LOST SIGNAL

Nakakabuwisit kahit saan ako pumunta wala akong mahagilap na signal. Paiba-iba pang hand positions ang akin tinry, ( I tried) It’s very hard to write in taglish (tagalog + english combined) cause we have so many words that don’t really translate well in writing format, (I make things up as I go along, I like to get creative with my usage of words.)
Also my tagalog vocabulary is pretty atrocious, non-existent in writing, I can speak it well enough, fluent as fluent goes, with what i got i totally rock it,albeit the scope of my vocabulary is small enough to fit in your palm. I just recycle the same words over and over again, and always, I have to sneak in a few English words in there for added spice. It's not really a problem when it comes to verbal communication, it's just the writing that gets to me.

It’s not just me, I think I’m pretty much describing a small percentage of people here who fit this profile, the new generation of new people who's inherited a nation which is in a state of atrophy.

At first I thought, tagalog as a dialect doesn’t particularly lend itself well to eloquence/cadence/poesy. It doesn’t sound mellifluous when spoken, there are too many vowels in each word, we have way too many words that are littered with a’s & o’s but more a’s. Plus, it’s not expressive enough to communicate your ideas when you attempt to elaborate on them, not emotive enough when enunciated, it lacks nuances, the words lack inflection of meaning when put into different usages, there’s not enough adjectives in our vocabulary, and what about synonyms? Forget it!! it takes me ten minutes to scrounge up a synonym from my measly store. So naturally, I thought this was the reason, why, for the life of me, I cannot write a decent poem in tagalog. Right? eeekkkk…. Wrong. & Of all things, it took me a local fantaseria extravaganza, to realize this presumptuous mistake. I’m not gonna name that show, basta!!! But there’s a little dude in it that looks like a talking stump of a tree, me thinks, the producer of the show was trying to channel in yoda. But really, he looks like one of those wooden elves that you leave in your driveway during Christmas season to let people know you’re aligned with the holiday spirit. But they are pretty freaky…freaky..freaky.
Back to my main topic, honestly I don’t watch that show, just a few episodes, (less than twenty). I didn’t even see the beginning,
but something about the dialogue intrigued me. I have never heard tagalog spoken that way before. They would use phrases like "sa agricultura ng aking puso". Before I would think, you could only use that world in reference to cows and farming.
& also there was something about the syntax of the sentences in the dialogue that I found irresistibly charming. It sounded eloquent, it sounded cultured and graceful and original, probably the way Filipinos spoke tagalog in the olden days. My only recollection that stands anywhere near, but not really, not at all, (it's not even in the same vein) to this bygone world would be those black and white movies, that I used to watch once upon a time, starring: Dolphy, Chichay, and Gloria Romeo, not in the same movie, but my memory wants to make a special director’s cut.

So how weird it was to hear tagalog spoken in that fashion, & for the first time I think I perceived it in a new light, it was then that it occurred to me that tagalog does sound beautiful. At the same instance it dawn on me, that my ineffectiveness at using my own dialect in writing goes deeper than first suspected, I just don’t really bother writing tagalog poems all that much, cause trying makes me want to cry, i get stumped so easily. The last one that I wrote was that rain haynaku that appears here, come to think of it, that was mostly in english, Ambon just makes a cameo appearance. I find when I’m writing in tagalog, it’s a hit or miss, when I think of a word that I think is cute, I just run away with it, just get to the finish line, content be damned, let's keep our fingers crossed!!! The result… hhhmmmm…nevermind.