Coming home
The PAL flight from Busan to Manila was full.
Fewer than dozen of us were Filipinos. The rest of the 160 plus passengers were Korean.
At the check in counter, we asked a young Filipina in the queue what she was doing in Korea. She was a singer in an all-Filipino band, who asked to leave earlier because she couldn’t take the 5 pm to 5 am schedule.
She reminded me of two Filipina singers we enjoyed listening to at the basement-bar of our hotel. Carol Anonuevo of the Unesco Institute for Lifelong learning in Hamburg told me that the band play six sets a night. They had powerful voices and sang English covers well, but they started drawing Koreans into the bar only when they learned Korean well enough to sing contemporary Korean pop songs.
Ambassador Preciosa Soliven of the Unesco National Commission tried to strike up a conversation with two Koreans at the line. “Are you going to the Philippines to learn English?” she asked. One shook his head; the other did not even understand the question. Asec Tita Inciong of DepEd whispered: “They are probably going to set up a business, like the other Koreans, using Filipino dummies.”
Just before the plane took off, I received a text message: “When are you coming home? We need to design the workshop for all general managers of electric coops. Fr. Paking wants the GMs to look at it as survival sessions.”
While waiting for our luggage at the Centennial airport, another text message: “We need your support for UNORKA and TFM farmers camped at the Department of Agrarian Reform.” And a reminder about a meeting with the bishops for the National Rural Congress.
I looked forward to finish reading a book I left behind – Fooled by Randomness, which is worth a couple of blogs. It’s written by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, an iconoclastic Lebanese mathematician-philosopher who makes his living as a financial trader. The book has the intriguing subtitle: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets.
The blurb describes him as someone who has “devoted his life to immersing himself in problems of luck, uncertainty, probability and knowledge.”
He can not emphasize enough the need to avoid being distracted and fooled by “noise” and miss the “signals.” One consequence is his decision to avoid reading newspapers and even watching TV, most of which he considers “noise.” He has choice put downs directed at analysts and commentators who see connections and causalities on hindsight, and fail to consider the role of randomness.
Lying in bed, I tell Girlie of what I read long ago, that Richard Burton relished lying in bed, holding hands with Elizabeth Taylor, and just talking into the night.
Another text message wakes me up late in the morning: “DAR Sec. Nasser Pangandaman promised to resolve the farmers’ cases today. Instead, the UNORKA-TFM camp out has been violently dispersed. One has been rested, and 20 injured. Please help.”
