YoungBlood

Posted on Friendster, July 2006

It has been my dream to write something for YoungBlood, the area of Inquirer for the youth under its Opinion section. I admire those people who were gutsy enough to share their stories which never failed to inspire, made me laugh, and most of the times, allowed me to see myself being in their shoes. There were stories which sent me bucket of tears and there were instances that they were too magnificently-written that I felt the urge to send it via the internet to all my contacts acknowledging the author of course and the source of the article ( I will later receive the same article in the email for a couple times, over the years, and coming from countless sources). When you read YoungBlood, you will realize that.."Hey, I am not alone! There is someone out there who is feeling what I feel and experiencing what I am going through in all aspects of life. Though I have not had the chance to acquire the 2 YoungBlood books, I've read them in their entirety by borrowing them from friends. Last week, I read an interesting article in that section which rekindled that desire to have my share of contribution in that paper. But then, I had mixed feelings. To submit or not to submit? --that was the gruelling question. I mustered enough courage to call the department which handled all submissions and asked some questions. The lady at the other end of the line was gracious enough to answer all my queries. She reiterated that if I want to send an article, I better be quick as I am nearing the not-for-YoungBlood-anymore age, hahaha. I told you, I should be submitting one for HighBlood but I will be the youngest contributor then :) There was a limit for the characters as well (6500 characters including the spaces). I hinted if I can send one which has been earlier published in a blog site ( wow, dami ako ma su submit niyan!) and the answer was a no. (I emailed the paper for the same set of inquiries and I was surprised with the fast response- the same words the lady told me over the phone) . Youngblood should be the launching pad for the article. Well, I anticipated that answer. I thought of re-wording, paraphrasing and updating some of my blog entries and voila! I have a finished product to give them! Nevertheless, I thought about that as some kind of cheating so I scrapped the idea. One thing which halted me from pursuing the plan was that I have to give them my full name, current position and current employer. There are instances though that you can use a pen name and have your name be held in anonymity but there would be a valid reason behind that. However, I am not yet ready with the idea of seeing my name publicly in a national broadsheet -- including its online edition ( naks, feeling mo naman, pipiliin talaga article mo ha?). I realized that it's better this way -- to have my thoughts be read within the Friendster boundary. It's more low-profile. I am toying the idea of creating a Blogspot account (reason: High Availability, hehehe).

Goodbye, YoungBlood! I am not saying that you should not pursue your dreams. You should! You must! However...sigh***There are dreams which will just remain as that...dreams. Nevertheless, we can re-package those dreams to fulfill their primary goal. I believe that I may not have my stories be read by the entire archipelago or the WWW community via YoungBlood but I can still touch lives thru people who take time to read my simple-but-from-the-heart entries in this area.

Enjoy life :)

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