[Lindale]

Funny how it happens to me, my dad is very much like a Gandalf the Grey with short hair due to office regulations... and my beloved ex and the hairbrush incident a Gollum matter.

My dad is the gandalf of my life. From the temper to the wisdom.

"Consuelo ano ka ba bakit ang tanga mo!" [Consuelo why are you stupid?, something like Fool of a Took! to me]

And then we'd discuss justice and death penalty, Marxism and getting what you worked for, destiny and how chance and fate and personal urges and your own choices are your life, everything, man. Recently during the Manila Peninsula stuff in our country we had a long argument about the politics and justice of this land that included thinkers like Plato, Machiavelli, Nietzsche, Rizal, and some of our own local writers like Amado Hernandez. Sorta like a history and lit course with his commentaries, really.

Another answer of mine is my ex. Not a ready answer, unlike my dad. My ex was, in a sense, one hell of a ride wiser than me, the little kid so intent in taking Philo courses and all sorts of books from Tolkien to Plato to the South Americans to whatnot to improve her thinking. He's three years my senior, and when we met I thought he was like a Tolkien character because of his long hair that reached six inches below the scapula. He has no beard, thank God!

He's my gandalf and my smeagol if I'm gollum. Gandalf, well, he has stuff in his head that I've never heard in others of our age--there were times, many times, when I thought he sounded like my dad. Even now, I am still amazed that his opinions, a twenty-year-old's opinions, are comparable and even worthy of my forty-something dad! He likes his philosophers, Patrick does. From Plato to Kant to Machiavelli to Nietzsche (his favorite) to the Eastern thinkers whose names I can't spell.



Anyway, we got separated, because I got a scholarship nearer my parents' place, and there he still is, continuing his degree in the university up in the northern mountains where I met him. From what he tells me, and what my friends tell me anyway, he's got no one new, and it gladdens me somehow that he still sends me words that we used to whisper in our strictest privacy and a little help whenever I see the name Jacques Derrida in my reading list.


And from what I've heard, he's go t his hair cut because of joining some fraternity, how sad for his hair that reminds me of Eol. Too sad for his hair that earned him the Black Legolas title in our archery class!