Couple of years ago, I had a friend, who, having good looks, assumed that, to win a girl, there’s hardly any need for courting. “Natural lang naman na ‘pag pogi ka, babae na ang lalapit sa’yo (It only seems natural that when you’re looking good, girls themselves gravitate toward you)!” I had no doubt, especially that he literally had every reason to boast, to have known the untold number of relationships he’d had, which, apparently, he had all taken for granted.

On prom lately, I didn’t really understand why some seemed to be, at first, very reluctant to appear just because they thought their partners were too horrid to match them. One even blathered sarcasms practically all night as to whether or not the fineries really befitted the color of the skin, height, who they were in general. I suppose it would have been disastrous should the ones whom he told “Woe to her man, she’s Barney’s human counterpart,” or, worse, “The exaggerated application of makeup made her look like an inayusang tuko!” know about it.

Beauty plays a vital role in the process of attraction that sometimes we subsume it as the primary basis, instead of emotional compatibility, to choosing whom to sort out in the end as a potential partner. As my confidant puts it, “Attractions in men are in the eyes only, one percent of many things [as criteria].”

So if your eyes were your sole sense to perceive someone as worthy to be adored, then you’re more than likely to end up committing yourself to a taken-for-granted relationship, without considering other factors which are far more important than physical appearance. It’s like saying, since your girlfriend dances a la Marian Rivera or is as hot as Paris Hilton, you’re willing to risk enduring to death no matter how intolerable her vices are to you. Love is blind, if only because you have given up everything for the love of your sassy girl who has broken your heart a million times now. Love is blind because you still insist it even when you have received a slap in the face or it has been screwed on your head that you’re too ugly to be loved by an international. Love is blind because even if time and again you have learned the girl you met via text, who had sounded very friendly before you met at Martinis, cannot bear to live with you on account of your paper-flat nose, you keep on pushing.

Love is blind, indeed!

Sometimes, determination is a plus, especially when someone you run after demands proof to attest how much you are willing to sacrifice. But if the only reason of your determination is her to-die-for lips which are the exact copycat of Angelina Jolie’s, that’s no virtue, if you ask me.

On the other hand, is there such a thing as soul mate? Many believe it is true, especially to some, who, after finding love elsewhere, still ended up to whom they once called balyena, or butiking Pasay, or, in the extreme, butete! In the end, when beauty alone fails to satisfy what a lasting relationship requires, or when you discover, after all, that your girlfriend is not at all adorable, or when compatibility begins to employ emotional stress, we realize that a real partner is not ever determined by physical package or other surface veneers that are as always taken into account.

Well, in my experience, I find myself making after someone in school, whose physical substance is not even a proportion of that of the girls I admired before. On occasion,  a friend asked me what it was about her that I loved, given that she’s neither sexy nor pretty, adding that she looked like a bespectacled bamboo tree. “It’s just that,” I answered, shrugging my shoulders. That gave me enough reason to say love has to be superficial.

Is technology all for academic betterment? How it has made learning easy is any more readily felt, but the fact that it has surfaced as among the major causes of issues upon issues in the education bureau proves it arguable. What must be the reason underlying?

            Back in high school, everything was behind the times, except you managed to understand your writing implements were a guise of modern. Cellphones, as one of my schoolmates lamented, were “as illegal as drugs,” yet it could have ranked as the most common act of disobedience were the teachers made it a point to check at us. In the beginning, I didn’t see why they had to institute privation over our mobile handsets, especially during what museum curator and author Brian Horrigan defined as the “virtual golden age of Science and Technology,” let alone why they seemed to minimize our internet usage. But then, life is a matter of living and letting live and in one way or another we learned that texting at the back row—or the front row, as long as you could appear as though you weren’t detached from the discussion—is as good as being completely absent. What’s even worse was how computer junkies we had become that most truancy cases were attributed to the LAN game Dota All-stars, with violators going as far as saying “Ibagsak ang edukasyon, ipangDota ang baon.” Does this mentality attest improvement?

            Sometimes, I am swayed to believe that betterment of grades in the presence of our most advanced methods doesn’t hold true because, really, do you consider yourself brilliant when, being in the know, you didn’t even exert harder effort than “copy-paste” when you were tasked to pass an essay? I doubt it would be satisfying if I were to say it has divined my values for the better when in fact I was screamed at on account of snapping a picture of myself in our English class. I don’t think it would be satisfying still if I were to say it has made me more studious when I’m too glued on my Facebook account or too busy fiddling with my PSP to leaf at my book during spare time at school or at home. But have I relayed the worst-case instances we have had so far?

            Once, my mother innocently asked me a very practical sort of math, which at first I thought was ridiculously basic. I rather didn’t think of an answer, telling myself commonsense would have it. But unexpectedly, she took my silence to mean I was taken aback. “Daig ka pa ng grade 2” she said, flashing an insulting smile at me. “Calculator gusto mo?”

            But then at some points, she was right. More often than not, children are  better if not literally in terms of mental faculty, be it in employing it. True, it’s as basic as 9 into 63 and it would be quite an insult should we, the older, deal with it, but how in the world would it be a valid excuse? As always, trying is better than not trying at all, but in this age of push-a-button-and-there-you-go, who would deny it’s way easier to grope for a calculator every which way than muster the least of our brains to do ourselves justice?

            My greatest fear is that, because technology is ever organic and the sophisticated growth of Science tends to man’s pursuit of effortlessness, someday we might as well consider thinking old-school, saying “It’s digital age, what’s the point of thinking when computers will do it for us?” or, worse, “You need not send me to school, robots are here to secure us a place in the sun.” If artificial intelligence could supersede the human brain, Jose Rizal would probably regret the day he said “Ang kabataan ang pag-asa ng bayan.”

            So it turns out the more we become elaborate, the more aggravated becomes our irresponsibility. Technology has made me any more aware, as much as you do, of what machines are for. But chances are, the outcome remains otherwise should we use it otherwise.