Today Mar Roxas was elected President of the Liberal Party. He promised to bring the LP to victory in 2010. This signals officially the start of the 2010 presidential election. Everybody is saying it is still three years away. But hello!? It is only less than 900 days away! Mar will run under LP. Manny Villar will run under the Nacionalista Party. Loren Legarda will run under the Nationalist People's Coalition. Lakas-Kampi (or is it Lakas OR Kampi) has no candidate so far. Noli de Castro ran as independent senator in 2001 and under Lakas-CMD-NUCD in 2004, but still has not gotten the complete trust of the coalition, a trust strong enough for him to be its official standard-bearer. Will one of the opposition presidentiables move to Lakas and run under its party? As I have said, I think Erap Estrada will run as President in 2010. His intention seems to be to "united" the opposition. So the opposition better unite, as one, or else Tatay Erap will run again. By the way, I att...

I am inviting all of you to the book launching of Ladlad 3: An Anthology of Philippine Gay Writing (Anvil Publishing). The launch will be held on December 1, Saturday, 5 pm at Bestseller's Bookstore, 4th floor, Robinson's Galleria, Ortigas, Pasig City. There will be a book signing, singing, dancing, food, and drinks. Please come to the launching of the book series that helped kick open the door of the LGBT movement in the Philippines. See you there -- and spread the word.

It is raining, and then the sun is shining, and everything is hilong-talilong (higgledy-piggledy?) I have a column in today's Philippine Star, the Young Star section. You may go to www.philstar.com I write for the Arts and Culture section every Monday, but since they said my readers are young (like my kumare Jessica Zafra's), I should also write for Friday. Well and good. Because 70 percent of the voters are young, it is good to have a headstart with the young and the literate. Woe to the candidate who disses the so-called youth vote. I talked to one of them, a presidential wanna-be, who said the youth does not vote but only stays in Starbucks. I said, excuse me, more like Jollibee than Starbucks. He also said the youth do not read. Of course they do, but shorter books, thinner volumes, words scrawled in cell phones, in the Internet, in the blogs. Those who ignore the youth do so at their own peril.

I said it a month ago and I am saying it again: Erap might run as President of the Philippines in 2010. Again. If not him, then his proxy, his son Jinggoy, would do it. Erap might run to unify the opposition, since they say there are so many people who want to run as president. I do not think there is something wrong in announcing your plans to run for a position in an election to be held three years from now. The campaign for the next elections begins a day AFTER the last election. And why do you have to be coy about your plans? Be coy only if you have an IQ below sea level, or have dirty hands, or lack fabulousness and poise.

This week, I will finish checking my students' final exams and papers. Also, I will finish writing my final two papers for my Ph.D. Then everything is done. I can now review my Spanish for the language exams. And review, as well, for the comprehensive exams in Literature. But more enjoyable, for me, is the return to writing. Ladlad 3 will be launched late November in Bestsellers, 4th floor, Robinsons Galleria. I have proofread the pages of Rampa: Gay Essays. I have made a final draft of Philippine Gay Dict: The Uncut Version. And the cover for The Best Philippine Love Stories anthology is now being done. These are backlogs. Future projects: to compile all my Tagalog prose (stories and essays) into a book, and then all my English short stories into another book. Then defend my novel, which is my creative-writing dissertation, so Anvil can go ahead and publish it. They have accepted it for publication last year. Why am I doing this? Because we need more Philippine books to fill those...

I am moving my blog from www.notphantomvoters.blogspot.com to this new name. People told me I should put my name and that year when I would be running again for elections. 2010. It seems so far, but it is less than 900 days away. And as we speak, or as you read these words in cyberspace, alignments are moving. Standing shakily on soggy soil, political alliances in this country have never been firm, to begin with. When I finally ran as an Independent Congressman in the elections for District 3 of QC, I got lots of offers: to run under this or that party, or to accept this or that set of "incentives" (read: bribes) for me not to run anymore, since I was the front runner in the surveys. Like flakes of dandruff on my shoulders, I just brushed them away, ran, and lost. I thought I could return to my old life as a teacher, but no! As we speak now, or as you read this blog entry, I am getting calls and emails and text messages from this or that politician, asking for a meeting, an ...