It’S All About Something

By Alexander Villarasa M.D.

This engrossing anthology, ranging from unrequited love to the big bang and quantum mechanics, promises something to get lost in and remember.


Alex still continues to find fulfillment with family and life, devoted to children patients, traveling, playing golf, singing, dancing, and doing civic projects in his hometown, Palm Springs, California, which has voted him one of its one hundred top doctors for seven years now.

As to writing, the muse will always be with him.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Dec 12, 2017
• ISBN: 9781543469271

Book preview

COPYRIGHT © 2017 BY ALEXANDER VILLARASA.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CONTROL NUMBER:   2017918148

   ISBN:           HARDCOVER               978-1-5434-6925-7

                        SOFTCOVER                 978-1-5434-6926-4

                        EBOOK                           978-1-5434-6927-1

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

Rev. date: 01/08/2018

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CONTENTS

Preface

Sunrise, Sunset

Shepherds of the Wind

Angels and Other Strangers

The Death of Liberalism

Empiricism and Human Destiny

The Age of Treason

On Leadership

The Duality of Consciousness

Obama’s Abominations

A Prayer

Streets and Remembrances

The Soul Provider

Alcatraz Revisited

The Unity in Duality

From Psychoanalysis to Psychobabble

The R Word

To Fay or Not to Fay

Gentle on My Mind

The Old Country

Family Triumvirate

The Audacity of Faith

Destiny’s Child

Dr. Ben Carson and Snowflakes

The Doctor as Patient

Crossing the Bar

Random Thoughts

Nature Dunnit!!!! Really?

T. rex and the Dodo Bird

Two Cuts and Two Jokes

It’s all about something is a mantra than can blow our mind.

It comes even when we are busy doing life’s daily grind.

Friendship is a something that is truly one of a kind.

From sunrise to sunset, it is absolutely the ties that bind.

Add kinship to the mix, and you have a levitating delight,

One that is highly more lucid and luminous to our sight.

When the time comes to go gently into that good night,

We will never go astray because the path is oh so bright.

Leaving behind the atoms of a materially attuned existing,

Our souls never look back to a world with so much suffering.

But then perhaps with a tinge of regret we keep on sighing,

Because we never quite realized that life is all about something.

Preface

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I was tempted to title this, my first attempt at book writing, It’s all about God-Man-Universe and Me. My wife remarked it was a bit over the top, so I reconsidered. Then I remembered Jerry Seinfeld’s mantra of his sitcom, It’s all about nothing. I thought it was somewhat tongue-in-cheek because the characters were actually dealing with issues related to interacting and interlocking relationships. I would argue that there is always something about relationships, personal or otherwise. Thus we have the title, It’s All about Something.

One area of human relationships that involves a lot of interacting and interlocking is friendship. Nowadays, with one touch of a button or click of a mouse, social media has made friendships easier to do or undo, for that matter. But that’s not the kind of friendship I am referring to. With social media, yes, there could be a lot of interacting and interlocking, but not the ones that delve deep and lead to long and ultimately meaningful friendships.

Offhand, I have to tell the readers that I am a rat. I was born in 1948, so according to the Chinese way of horoscoping, I entered this world in the Year of the Rat. Rats, as per this unique Orientalist perspective, are very creative and honest, spend money freely, and are friendly enough but rarely make long-lasting friendships. This describes me to a T. I suppose it was just a matter of time that some kind of generic and short personality description would finally nail me to the wall, and with not a whimper of protest, I would say, Guilty as charged.

For one thing, I am not very good at remembering names, which becomes very awkward in most social settings and not at all very conducive to starting a friendly conversation. It takes me a while to warm up, and the initial cool mist evaporating from my every pore becomes off-putting to most, to the point that I have been labeled a snob. I would say inordinately so.

There never is any intent on my part to snub anyone. When being introduced the very first time, my natural inclination to someone is to gloss over his or her name, and it is not until my interest is piqued by the other person’s skill at drawing me into the conversation, either with his or her innate charisma, intelligence, or both, that I start to warm up and fast.

During my early and even late childhood, I could not remember a particular person that I could consider worthy in the way I generally perceive other people. I suppose, at that stage in my life, the only thing that mattered was the family I was blissfully a part of. Early adolescence (high school) opened up to some intriguing but inchoate possibilities; however, the four short years of high school was not really conducive to forming the solid and stable bonding for any friendship to last longer than those four years. Late adolescence and early adulthood (all eight years of both premed and medical school) was long enough for a few strong bonds to incubate and then hatch and grow into full-fledged meaningful friendships. Now years later, despite the long distance measured in time and space, those friendships remain because the interlocking and interconnecting bonds have not been broken.

Marriage, of course, is the strongest bond there is between two people, and if that bond has not been strained irrevocably and irretrievably, then your partner (in my case, Nenette, my wife of forty-four years) becomes your very best friend ever. The mutual loyalty, understanding, belief, and trust in each other becomes the glue that makes the friendship the ties that bind.

So to Nenette, my wife and friend, and to the result of our friendship, our children—Nikki, Allan, and Leigh—I am happily and lovingly dedicating this book.

Sunrise, Sunset

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From birth to death, time consumed, space construed,

To encompass the gamut of life’s utter perplexities.

But then what memories could be so easily subdued

Than the ones that are not etched in complexities?

The year 1948 is marked because it is the year I was born, specifically in the month of October. People born in 1948, a Year of the Rat according to the Chinese calendar, are characteristically creative and imparted with great spirit, wit, alertness, flexibility, and vitality. Men born in October are the best of the best, as per the inscription on Michael Jordan’s shirt, which he was shown wearing in a photo posted on a website peddling the shirt online. At some point in this narrative, I will have to disagree with some of the above description, most especially with Michael Jordan’s best-of-the-best scenario.

The sunrise of my life on October 6, 1948, was for sure not heralded with trumpets blaring my arrival. I became the youngest member of the family by default because the baby boy who came after me one and a half years later was stillborn and the next baby after him did not make it beyond late infancy when he died of meningitis. Eleazar was his name, and I still remember his face even now. I also remember thinking at the time, in the simplicity of my toddler’s mind, that I would be his best friend when he grew up.

My childhood could only be described as linearly smooth, unhindered by heavy family drama and untouched by severe family dislocation and disruption. The stability of family life could only be traced to my father’s ability to provide a secure and comfortable nest and to my mother’s tranquility in her approach to child-rearing.

My older brother, Margarito Jr., who was then in second grade, initiated my introduction to schoolwork at age five and a half. One day after school, he came running to my mother to tell her that the local elementary school was opening another class in first grade, and he thought I should enroll right there and then. My mother asked if I wanted to go to school, and without hesitation, I said yes.

Elementary school was fun all the way through sixth grade because, aside from the learning, there was the playing. There were a few episodes of bullying. One I still remember happened in fourth grade when a classmate who was seated behind me kept poking my right elbow with his pencil. After several painful pokes, I stood up, grabbed the heaviest book in my desk, turned around, and threw it in his face. A slight commotion ensued, and when our teacher asked me why I threw the book at him, I said he was poking my elbow and I couldn’t stand the pain any longer. He made a stern look on his face, smiled, and explained why God is an all-forgiving deity.

I entered high school at age eleven and a half, one of the youngest in my class. At the time, American Jesuits ran the school, Ateneo de Naga, in Naga City. It was—and still is—one of several schools named Ateneo sprinkled all over the Philippines run by Jesuits, but now mostly by Filipino Jesuits. The four years of high school went so fast, but not necessarily without their share of fun, despite the heavy academic imposition for which Jesuit institutions are known.

Thankfully I was spared the load of having to learn Latin, which a few of my classmates were mandated to do because they were in the honors section. We learned algebra, trigonometry, geometry, physics, biology, social studies, music, history, religion, English, and Tagalog. Tagalog is the Filipino national language, which is not the dialect that we in the southern part of the main island of Luzon, the Bicol region, learned to speak.

The only extracurricular event, aside from sporting activities, that I still recall vividly was a near-drowning incident a classmate and I were involved in during a whole class excursion in our third year. We went to a nearby resort with a large swimming pool. I learned how to swim in early childhood when my older brothers and sisters would go on picnics close to the local river. So when we took a dip in that pool, I knew what to do.

Unhappily my classmate did not. When I was wading from the shallow part of the pool to the deepest part, he tagged along, not knowing that the water would become deeper at some point. At the point when he could no longer walk, he grabbed on very tightly to my shoulder and then to my neck. I wasn’t able to maintain my balance, and we went under. He continued to hold on to my neck tightly, which prevented me from swimming. I gasped for air each time our heads broke the surface. This continued until one of our teachers saw what was happening and swam toward us, pushing us both to the side of the pool, which we held onto for dear life. Thankfully we didn’t lose consciousness, but on the ride back home, we were both coughing badly.

A different kind of trauma happened during my second year in high school. Our elderly biology teacher was explaining photosynthesis when my mind wandered off and I started to gaze into the distance, daydreaming. The teacher probably noticed this initially but did not seem to be bothered by it when, some five minutes later, he saw me still daydreaming and not listening to his lecture. He became very upset, shouted my name, and told me to come to the front. I promptly did, and when I stood in front of him, he slapped my mouth and then told me to go back to my seat. I felt some pain, but not severe. After class, my classmates told me to report him to the principal or my parents. I said no, remembering perhaps the advice in elementary school four years before about forgiveness.

The transition from high school to college—the premedical course at the University of Santo Tomas in Manila, some 350 miles north of my hometown—was made much easier by my cousin who had been studying premed at the same university for two years. I just followed his lead and consequently did not experience any traumatic events during my first few months truly away from home. The eight years that followed, from the four years of premed to the four years of medical school, were hectic enough that there was just no time for almost anything else but constant study and preparation for quarterly exams.

One of the activities I recall with great fondness was when I joined a fraternity called Beta Gamma Phi. Being a frat neophyte was an experience I would never forget, especially since I contributed to its spiritual underpinning by writing a prayer we called the Betan Prayer. It’s now a must that all the fraternity members memorize the prayer and say it with great appreciation on what it is to be a Betan.

Years before, when I was in third grade, my father, during one of his intermittent breaks from his work on the farm, asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up. I immediately answered a doctor. He laughed and asked why. I did not have a ready answer, but thinking about it when I was already deep into my first year of premed studies, I realized that the reason was that, when I was in second grade, I would flip the pages of the obstetrics book that my oldest sister Leticia brought home during her nursing school days.

The book showed a lot of drawings and illustrations of the position of a baby during the different stages of labor and delivery.