THE MARTINI EFFECT

by Doreen D.L. JoseI

T is a lovely spring morning and Dr. Nelson, the lecturer in Technology and Communications, is no longer talking Greek to us. By now, our second semester at the University of London's Center for Media Studies, my classmates and I finally understand all things digital as well as analog. We're now into cellular and mobile personal communication and Dr. Nelson is explaining how the digital revolution is leading to a true convergence of all communication networks--computer, wired, and wireless-such that in the end there is going to be just one network. The information society. The martini effect. The what? Syu-Chin. the Taiwanese girl raises her hand and asks Dr. Nelson. The lecturer is taken aback by this. He looks us over one by one, each of us shaking our heads in turn. Instead of explaining, he says we can consider it as a possible essay topic: "What is the martini effect and how will this be brought about?" I guess it's not a very lovely spring morning after all.

MY boyfriend Roy seems to he flirting with the other girls in the mailing list that has us both as members. I don't want to imagine how he must be behaving in chatrooms. Funny, the thought of his virtual life frightens me so. It's probably because I just finished the case study: "The Internet as a playground where more and more people are migrating." Roy and I used to meet at IRC's #filipino channel in the first months of our separation until I realized that I was spending way too much time online and this was affecting my performance as an overseas graduate student. I explained this to him and he said he understood. So we've kept ourselves to e-mail and the occasional long distance calls ever since. It's only been a year, but it's like I don't know him anymore. I learn more about his life now from our egroup. "I can't help missing the old republic of two we used to have," I e-mailed him once. "Nothing to worry about," he said, "that republic still stands." Checked its flag lately? I wanted to ask, but it would just be a waste of bandwidth. Redundancy is all very fine, even necessary in face-to-face communications, but e-mail is a different terrain. Even my mental picture of him has faded to a blur. I asked for his pictures recently and the jpg files he sent me as e-mail attachments showed him with shoulder-length platinum yellow hair. He exuded a look of self-consciousness that wasn't there before, probably because he took the pictures himself with a digital camera. He'd started growing his hair before I left for London. He'd started losing himself in cyberspace at around that time, too. Do I have a right to complain? I left him to follow my dream, didn't I? But I shouldn't be thinking of this right now. I have work to do.

DEAD STARS by Paz Marquez Benitez

THROUGH the open window the air-steeped outdoors passed into his room, quietly enveloping him, stealing into his very thought. Esperanza, Julia, the sorry mess he had made of life, the years to come even now beginning to weigh down, to crush--they lost concreteness, diffused into formless melancholy. The tranquil murmur of conversation issued from the brick-tiled azotea where Don Julian and Carmen were busy puttering away among the rose pots. "Papa, and when will the 'long table' be set?" "I don't know yet. Alfredo is not very specific, but I understand Esperanza wants it to be next month." Carmen sighed impatiently. "Why is he not a bit more decided, I wonder. He is over thirty, is he not? And still a bachelor! Esperanza must be tired waiting." "She does not seem to be in much of a hurry either," Don Julian nasally commented, while his rose scissors busily snipped away. "How can a woman be in a hurry when the man does not hurry her?" Carmen returned, pinching off a worm with a careful, somewhat absent air. "Papa, do you remember how much in love he was?" "In love? With whom?" "With Esperanza, of course. He has not had another love affair that I know of," she said with goodnatured contempt. "What I mean is that at the beginning he was enthusiastic--flowers, serenades, notes, and things like that--" Alfredo remembered that period with a wonder not unmixed with shame. That was less than four years ago. He could not understand those months of a great hunger that was not of the body nor yet of the mind, a craving that had seized on him one quiet night when the moon was abroad and under the dappled shadow of the trees in the plaza, man wooed maid. Was he being cheated by life? Love--he seemed to have missed it. Or was the love that others told about a mere fabrication of perfervid imagination, an exaggeration of the commonplace, a glorification of insipid monotonies such as made up his love life? Was love a combination of circumstances, or sheer native capacity of soul? In those days love was, for him, still the eternal puzzle; for love, as he knew it, was a stranger to love as he divined it might be. Sitting quietly in his room now, he could almost revive the restlessness of those days, the feeling of tumultuous haste, such as he knew so well in his boyhood when something beautiful was going on somewhere and he was trying to get there in time to see. "Hurry, hurry, or you will miss it," someone had seemed to urge in his ears. So he had avidly seized on the shadow of Love and deluded himself for a long while in the way of humanity from time immemorial. In the meantime, he became very much engaged to Esperanza. Why would men so mismanage their lives? Greed, he thought, was what ruined so many. Greed--the desire to crowd into a moment all the enjoyment it will hold, to squeeze from the hour all the emotion it will yield. Men commit themselves when but half-meaning to do so, sacrificing possible future fullness of ecstasy to the craving for immediate excitement. Greed--mortgaging the future--forcing the hand of Time, or of Fate. "What do you think happened?" asked Carmen, pursuing her thought.

"I supposed long-engaged people are like that; warm now, cool tomorrow. I think they are oftener cool than warm. The very fact that an engagement has been allowed to prolong itself argues a certain placidity of temperament--or of affection--on the part of either, or both." Don Julian loved to philosophize. He was talking now with an evident relish in words, his resonant, very nasal voice toned down to monologue pitch. "That phase you were speaking of is natural enough for a beginning. Besides, that, as I see it, was Alfredo's last race with escaping youth--" Carmen laughed aloud at the thought of her brother's perfect physical repose--almost indolence-disturbed in the role suggested by her father's figurative language. "A last spurt of hot blood," finished the old man. Few certainly would credit Alfredo Salazar with hot blood. Even his friends had amusedly diagnosed his blood as cool and thin, citing incontrovertible evidence. Tall and slender, he moved with an indolent ease that verged on grace. Under straight recalcitrant hair, a thin face with a satisfying breadth of forehead, slow, dreamer's eyes, and astonishing freshness of lips--indeed Alfredo Salazar's appearance betokened little of exuberant masculinity; rather a poet with wayward humor, a fastidious artist with keen, clear brain. He rose and quietly went out of the house. He lingered a moment on the stone steps; then went down the path shaded by immature acacias, through the little tarred gate which he left swinging back and forth, now opening, now closing, on the gravel road bordered along the farther side by madre cacao hedge in tardy lavender bloom. The gravel road narrowed as it slanted up to the house on the hill, whose wide, open porches he could glimpse through the heat-shrivelled tamarinds in the Martinez yard. Six weeks ago that house meant nothing to him save that it was the Martinez house, rented and occupied by Judge del Valle and his family. Six weeks ago Julia Salas meant nothing to him; he did not even know her name; but now-One evening he had gone "neighboring" with Don Julian; a rare enough occurrence, since he made it a point to avoid all appearance of currying favor with the Judge. This particular evening however, he had allowed himself to be persuaded. "A little mental relaxation now and then is beneficial," the old man had said. "Besides, a judge's good will, you know;" the rest of the thought--"is worth a rising young lawyer's trouble"--Don Julian conveyed through a shrug and a smile that derided his own worldly wisdom. A young woman had met them at the door. It was evident from the excitement of the Judge's children that she was a recent and very welcome arrival. In the characteristic Filipino way formal introductions had been omitted--the judge limiting himself to a casual "Ah, ya se conocen?"--with the consequence that Alfredo called her Miss del Valle throughout the evening. He was puzzled that she should smile with evident delight every time he addressed her thus. Later Don Julian informed him that she was not the Judge's sister, as he had supposed, but his sister-in-law, and that her name was Julia Salas. A very dignified rather austere name, he thought. Still, the young lady should have corrected him. As it was, he was greatly embarrassed, and felt that he should explain. To his apology, she replied, "That is nothing, Each time I was about to correct you, but I remembered a similar experience I had once before." "Oh," he drawled out, vastly relieved.