Nevergirl’s

I’m not sure why I get invited to speak on the subject of How to Write Better (yes, all caps; and yes, it’s intentional; I know how to capitalize, you dolts!) Sure, I had a weekend column in Sunstar Cebu when I was 19 and a bi-monthly column for The TicTac (a General Santos City-based community paper) when I was 17, but that was only because Sunstar editor Noel Villaflor and GenSan-based brainiac Elmina Rayah Dizon found me cute (in the same way that bacteria is cute under controlled environments). The truth is, anyone who pays me to write is bound to get gypped. I do not write better than anyone. I do not write better, period. As a matter of fact, I do not believe people should write better because writing better than an aunt, seatmate, or cat

1. turns people into drama queens.
2. makes people really arrogant.
3. increases the odds that I would come across writing so difficult to read I grow tumors going from one paragraph to the next.

You see, writing isn’t a skill or a talent. It’s an affliction. It’s an affliction because it usually comes with a colorful imagination, a tendency to over-dramatize, the urge to get up in the middle of the night (or just before the rooster does, or in the middle of sex) to write something down, and the amazing ability to get very highly paid, very poorly paid, or not paid at all for work done (and yes, you would be better off gunning for health care jobs because no, staring off into space with a glazed look in one’s eyes is not considered compensationable labor).

Parents, if you love your children at all, do not encourage them to write. Set them straight as soon as you possibly could. Go buy a bat, wave it in front of your child, and say, “I’m not sending you to a good school just so you could become a prostitute, a druggie, or worse, a writer. You better not want to be a writer, child, or I’ll beat the verbs out of you.”

I wish my parents had beaten the verbs out of me.

If they had, I wouldn’t now constantly have bags under my eyes. I would never stay awake at night worrying I may have misused a punctuation, and people will actually talk to me on Facebook without apologizing for a missing verb or semi-colon, or both. I wouldn’t be writing letters to my bed, lungs, or PayPal balance. I also wouldn’t be wishing for terminal disease, heartbreak, an outbreak, or for a serial killer in the family just because it makes interesting material.

The worst part of it all? No one in the family goes into coma after hearing me mutter “Be still, chair!” because they’re used to it!

So please, if you love yourself, do not be a writer. Do not allow anyone in your family to be a writer. Do not go to a workshop I’m giving, too. Do yourself a favor and lead a full life. Go out and get a job that doesn’t allow you to lounge all day in your jammies. Go out, make friends, and stop raiding the fridge for food and metaphors. Trust me on this one: you do not want to write better. You do not want to write at all.

Unless, of course, it comes bursting out of you.

Can you people stop worrying about Mendoza and the kung fu of the Hong Kong community for a minute, and answer a very important question? Are shrimps really just huge insects?

I have always maintained that shrimps are nothing more than insects, in the same way that a cockroach is. No, this isn’t bitterness over being unable to eat shrimps because I’m allergic to them. Look at shrimps, people! Do they look cute to you? Useful? Adorable? Harmless? More to the point, doesn’t this deepwater shrimp look like it could be a relative of the cockroach?

Photo credit: Colorado State University

If diners were to be served a freshly killed, piping hot cockroach, I’ve no doubt they would run straight from the restaurant to the nearest police station, retching and itching to file charges. Yet people pay atrocious prices for shrimp, despite the fact that it has the FIVE biological qualities of an insect, specifically: (more…)