The walls, the cellmate and the chair

ACADEMIC LEARNING FROM A FUGITIVE
Part III

All he had said was a big understatement.



Remembering "how they used to talk", I learned to appreciate the word "understatement" more. All throughout the four series, Michael talked and wrote in riddles, while the rest of his team were left to crack them up.

Inverted reading of bloshoi booze produces
numbers which are actually coordinates

BEHIND THE SISTINE CHAPEL TATTOOS


Cute poison, Ripe Chance: Woods, and bolshoi booze. Michael had seriously considered designing codes and scientific jargons to slip past the guard's suspicions and to divert and confuse the FBI's equally smart acumen.


1. His whole body tattoo obviously hides the penitentiary's blueprints, and their escape plans after breaking out.

2. Cute poison is actually a chemical equation he needed to produce a corrosive substance to destroy the infirmary's drainage path, their last door to open to get to the infirmary and escape through the windows.

Ripe Chance: Woods

3. Ripe Chance: Woods is not a storage facility in Oswego as what the police had thought: It should be read as RIP E. Chance Woods. This is the graveyard where Michael hid their clothes and passports to escape to Panama.


4. Bolshoi booze is not a place; it's a series of coordinates of a desert where Michael would meet Spanish colleagues he made a deal with in exchange for their escape plane.

First origami message sent by Michael
Rendezvous: Sundown Hot

HOW MICHAEL AND SARA USED TO TALK


1. Michael had also left Sara with Origami cranes bearing the message of their rendezvous after she was also chased by the Company. Michael used dots to keep the message hidden, which actually correspond to the letters of a cellphone. The message was: Rendezvous Sundown Hot, El Gila NM 6-3, meaning Sara should stay at Sundown Hotel in Gila, New Mexico at meet him at a certain place on June 3 (6-3).


2. In season two, chapter 15 entitled The Message, Michael and Lincoln sent a videotape to the FBI saying they're innocent, but deliberately used body languages elaborating a bad liar to keep the FBI distracted. Michael also left a message for Sara in the video in understatements, mentioning words from Sara's medical book leading to a place where she needs to hide and where Michael would call her.


3. Sara had announced a call for a "Michael Crane" in the receiving area of the hotel Michael had told her, referring the word "Crane" to the origami cranes he'd sent to Sara.


4. In season three, Michael had also called Sara and reminded her of "how they used to talk". Sara mentioned words giving clues as to where she was being held by the Company with Lincoln's son LJ. She said it was a "lost cause", which actually refers to the statue in Panama known as "The Lady of Lost Causes".

The Scylla card

BAD GUYS USE CODES, TOO


1. In season four, the Company were as equally smart. The General had codenamed the datacards as Scylla, and in the Mythology archives, Scylla is a six-headed monster Odysseus had to pass through his journey home and needed to sacrifice six of his men. When Michael and his team had already stolen a datacard in less than a day, they found out it was incomplete and realized Scylla actually consists of six cards.


2. The General had also sent an e-mail to all cardholders the team had hacked into one of the cardholder's (Tuxhorn) PDA. It was about an arrival in London but the team didn't found any meeting in Tuxhorn's schedule, and Mahone suggested the message was a code spelling the word SCYLLA, meaning the Company would have a meeting about Scylla.

The Scylla device

3. Michael had overheard the General talking about "power" in Chapter 6 of season four (Safe and Sound), and the word "bargain" when he went under (because of his terminal brain tumor). Bargain is actually a compilation of chemical element symbols B (Boron), Ar (Argon), Ga (Gallium) and In (Indium). Michael had told Sara about a certain theory that when one combines these elements in a specific way he would be able to produce a revolutionary solar power technology.

The Art of the Deal: Michael and Company agent Gretchen 

THE ART OF DEALS, SENSING FOES


One thing I also learned from Michael is the art of making deals, or better yet the art of acquiring heavier leverage to win the deal. The team had encountered a lot of business negotiations involving life-or-death decisions, some even required little time.


1. Breaking out a Company asset from the Panamanian prison (Michael had been imprisoned in Panama in season three) in exchange for Sara and LJ


2. Obtaining the Scylla device with little time to spare or else they would all back to prison


3. Sometimes they were able to lead the deal and at one point asked the General to let them go unharmed from the Company building or else they would kill his daughter held by Sara in another place.


I also learned to identify foes because of Michael's--and especially Lincoln's paranoia. They would often eye on suspicious-looking people and immediately identify if the civilians were actually Company men.

THE CLOUD OF POLITICS


It just occcured to me GMA had done the same strategy during her regime.


In Prison Break's season two chapter 14 (John Doe), one of the General's "pawns" ordered his liaison officer to set Florida on fire or make any important event on scandal just to cover up for the video made by Lincoln and Michael exposing the Company's secrets. 


I then remembered Ms. Josephine Bonsol saying GMA was the smartest president of the Philippines, and my Filipino teacher telling us how GMA lit the Sandiganbayan and Mindanao provinces on fire and explosions just to cover up her NBN-ZTE deals and Hello Garci tapes and Le Cirque expenses.


These serve me right: we can learn a lot more from villains, from motivated people, from fugitives who didn't actually want to be one in the first place.

The walls, the cellmate, and the chair

Part II

Worlds apart: same prison, different hellholes

True, we take a lot of things for granted, until we learn to look farther in the long run, and witness other people being deprived of the things we once thought everybody has.


1. Family, Friends, Foes

The father's tears: Lincoln behind bars with his son LJ

Maybe the second dumbest thing a villain can plan is to not have a family. It actually makes little sense when bad people say family will only be a distraction, an interference, a burden. From quite a number of movies I watched, I noticed family always serves as the best motivator and the only reason to commit the most unimaginable crime that is yet to be written in the Crime Library archives.


FAMILY: Law-abiding Citizen: After a father saw his wife and little girl raped and tortured to death, he seeks for "justice the system cannot obviously provide", and comes back for the worst revenge no one can believe to be possible: killing people with his own hands--even if he's behind bars.


John Q.: Not one father can accept he will bury his son long before his son buries him. As his son was diagnosed with cardiac arrest, he almost sold his house just to pay for the hospital bills after his insurance company won't pay for it. Getting a job and waiting for the monthly salary was not an option, and the last desperate resort came to John Q.'s mind: take a hospital hostage, until the apathetic doctors perform the surgery spelling both the loving father's and the son's life.


The same theme goes for Prison Break: Lincoln was all Michael had in the world, and the only family who stayed despite their "nature and nurture" differences. For the structural engineer, enduring the laser for his deceiving Sistine Chapel tattoos, getting his toes cut and fabricating another crime to get incarcerated for the second time instead were all simply "crosses to bear". As long as his brother escapes the electric chair he obviously did not deserve, Michael was always more than ready to suffer and accept the consequences.

The "papi" who never left: Sucre and Michael digging a hole for the break-in (series four)

FRIENDS: Measuring how far a friend would go also became one of the series' moral themes. While on the run, a lot of people Michael once thought  were "friends and allies" came and went even as fast as the speed of light. But amidst his efforts to "establish trust", two people remained: Fernando Sucre (Amaury Nolasco) and Alexander Mahone (William Fichtner).


This part also taught how friends should understand each other even without words. A lot of surprises shook the team in the third and fourth series when Plan A didn't go out so well, then Michael and Mahone would look at each other with the understanding of "Let's do plan B."

The backstabber: Don Self, extreme right (series four)

FOES: At most times our protagonists had no choice but to trust their original foes because a new set of villains is on the move. But the foe in this story is actually defined as those people too smart enough to impersonate as allies, then would stab you at the back after he got what he wanted from you.


In the end, those old foes even became part of Michael's "plan C's", and somehow offered the "luck" for the team when they needed it the most.


2. Freedom

Let's admit we look at it as more boring in real life than in meaning. Of course, it only gets boring when we don't want to get another dictionary to look for its definition other than "being liberated from our strict parents".


But for a bunch of paranoid fugitives, freedom was everything.


The team's hunger for liberty from being wrongfully convicted and the itch to come home were most seen in series one: the breaking out, and series four: the breaking in. A lot of strong temptations also clouded their minds in the long run (like when Sucre and Bellick were to stand guard and wait, and Bellick tempted Sucre to drive and escape from the team instead).


But the focus on closing the off-the-books deal and seeing official papers of emancipation never faded in Michael's "tumored" brain. At one point he condemned Lincoln, and even his girlfriend Sara about the latters' deal working with the Company in exhange of saving Michael's life. He was at the brink of death after being diagnosed with brain tumor, and the only way to save him was to bring him to special Company doctors.


Michael also taught me to look at the long-term consequences of one's actions, and to not linger and be contented much on the seemingly comforting achievements at present. Since series one, he only saw two things at the farthest end of the grim tunnel: freedom and family. All through out these two kept him going.


3. The art of being smarter

Michael scammed them all.


It must truly be an insulting, and probably the brightest plan to deceive your team: you tag them along at first, then eventually dump them to your traphole, because after all, other members of your team did not certainly deserve rightful freedom.


Adopting the practical and realistic principles of a communist mind, this situation actually highlights the one being smarter; the one who knows the plan. After all, if you're a mere soldier of the army, you would most likely stay either as the contractor, the bait, the additional burden, or the dumb ugly duckling desperately keeping up with Mother Goose.


It probably looked like convicts walking in a pitch black tunnel and they even had no idea what's waiting for them on the other side. But the cruelty of each one's survival was not much of a sympathy issue: it was mainly about trying to be smarter than everybody else to escape as far as the Pacific. And not even that, it was more about being the mastermind of the escape plan.


I remember my mentor Ms. Josephine Bonsol giving a lecture about being "parrots" and riding along the "bandwagon" of the social community. I've finally understood what she meant when she indirectly taught us about the consequences of always following our friends' whereabouts and scandals and routines, and idly wanting to stay as the "buyer" and not the "innovator".


For eight fugitives on the run, with husky but swift guards and dogs at their heels, they had no choice but to rely their trust to the structural engineer who started it all. Somehow it's a very dangerous thing to believe a man with a complicated and mysterious mind; it's like jumping into hell not knowing what's waiting for you below.


We may never know how worse the scenario would get when we continue to be mimes and parrots because we "think" it's the right thing to do. After all, there is no such term as the "right thing"; it only becomes right according to us and according to what the majority says about it.

The walls, the cellmate, and the chair

First of three parts

The world behind bars

Home and family will always be the last journey.


He became America's most wanted fugitive for one reason: to save his only brother he never thought would be a stranger after all.


Paul T. Scheuring's Prison Break series generously opened me to the world behind bars, where convicts haunt and hunt each other, play basketball involving a deal of chomping down the losing team's lunch, riot at most times and replace the guards' horrid and loud "night head counts". All these are considered as norms of the prison walls, while a certain "Fox River Eight" worked at Prison Industries, dug an escape tunnel, collected horse poo (to lay off scent) and bleaching chemicals to make the most historical break-out of the century since John Wilkes Booth.

Michael Scofield: Structural engineer, fugitive

Michael Scofield (Wentworth Miller, Residet Evil 4) is a structural engineer looking at a successful future with his principle of "connecting things". But out of nowhere, and where the story originally started, he was already looking at a five-year jailtime at the same prison his rogue brother, Lincoln Burrows (Dominic Purcell) was condemned to the electric chair for killing the president's brother.


Coincidence? If it was, Michael was stupid enough to join his brother and see him endure the excruciating pain of the penitentiary's power supply running through every neuron in his body. But it was more than coincidence; he had obviously planned it.

What could you possibly see beyond that Sistine Chapel tattoo? THE ESCAPE

To surpass John Wilkes Booth's record of tasting freedom for only 12 days until he was caught and sentenced to death, maybe Michael should need more than just memory and uncertain Plan A's to smoothly break his brother out and disappear in Panama. He realized no matter how genuine and smart he was, he could never store Fox River's blueprints in memory alone--much less if he's looking at a scheduled death sentence of his loved one. Theoretically he should have a MAP WITH HIM unseen enough to pass through the prison guards (who are thieves as well). And there was only one way to do it: TATTOOS. 


Eventually the story evolved into a political conspiracy of The Company, a group of high-ranking people of America trying to invade Asian countries' economies and profit by rebuilding it. Their top secret plan and the "Future" they hold are all encrypted in cards called Scylla, with data distributed to six cardholders. 

Michael and Lincoln's father, Aldo Burrows, once worked with The Company but resigned a few years later when he found out how insane its objectives are and deliberately investigated it, offering a threatening security breach after he'd discovered piles of political conspiracies.


Smart as he was, he laid low from The Company's radar and kept on searching for lost and tangible evidences. But the mouse trap the Company made him was irresistible: and that's where it all started with the trouble for the Brothers Grimm.


Lincoln, in his early years, was engaged in a lot of fights and eventually to drug business. From there the Company found an inside man, and fabricated a fake murder of the President's brother with all planted evidences leading to Lincoln.

For a father trying so hard to stay his children out of his own problems, the verdict was heartbreaking. With Lincoln being sentenced to the electric chair, it would definitely make him get out of his cave, take the Company's bait and save his innocent son.


The first series alone is more than enough for dumb delinquents and convicts to learn how to plan, recruit, steal, deceive and break out, while it gets better with every chapter. And what I've most importantly learned from Prison Break are what every human being has long taken for granted since the beginning of time...


to be continued

The keyboard: mom's new typewriter

Now it's her turn to prove what she got.


I found it amusing looking at mom typing on the keyboard with two fingers, while constantly asking me how she would insert numbers and place kiddie borders for her school reports last night. Back when we were in Grade 3, mom would strictly lock us up in the dining area, Computer books wide open, until we memorize the positions of the letters in the keyboard using our fingers. I and my twin sister Jillian had found the Computer lesson so difficult we itched to go out and play badminton instead. Frankly, I never practiced placing my four left fingers on the A-S-D-F keys and my four right fingers on the J-K-L-; keys, even though I mastered where each finger is assigned. 


And just last night, looking at mom while she carefully placed the cursor to where she desperately wanted it to be, I laughed and told her how she almost made us cry just so we could pass our Computer practical tests back in the days. She flushed and said now it's her turn to be the student and receive all our snide comments (but of course, not anything personal) on how slow she types while using two fingers. We mocked her in laughter because she even got a list of "steps on how to save", etc. just so she could remember how to do them.

Typing should be easy for her, I suppose, because we also had this old typewriter we used for writing formal letters and short book reports many years ago. From this, it suddenly struck me how fast time has gone by, and it awfully felt like yesterday when we still played with the typewriter's ink ribbon and wasted all the bondpapers and typed with a lot of bad errors.


Until then, what any typewriter or keyboard will always be remembered for are the words and the sentences and the stories it has shared to the world.

"Look ma, I made a prototype of a rocket out of macaroni"

Someone just made the dull day a special one.


Baked macaroni was the de luxe cuisine for the day. There was no particular occasion noted on our calendar, and apparently we perceived mom as a city lady practical enough to prepare easy and "instant" dishes. Somehow that may be rational because she feeds five mouths, and works six days a week involving loud, stressful and sugar-fed elementary students. But lately I've noticed she's been planning on "special" dishes every weekend.

Wolfing down my mom's sweet, pasty macaroni dessert coated with quickmelt cheese after lunch, I remembered how young Gru in Despicable Me tried hard to make his mamma proud. He had always wanted to be an astronomer, and had constantly bugged his mom about his space rocket's progress. Even until he successfully launched a real rocket out of his "macaroni prototype", his mamma seemed to have a hard time finding more comforting and inspiring words other than "Eh".

I then reflected on how lucky I am to root from decent genes and ancestry, where a mother chose to not break away from her original family because of selfish desires, a father promised himself to quit his vices right after he saw his premature firstborn alive, and a grandfather taught his children to live a simple but productive life. Gru wasn't lucky enough as I am and didn't have much choice either, and I thought about how I sometimes took advantage of the one thing I once thought everybody has: a real family.

Until then, I may also despicably engage myself in building my own dream prototype out of macaroni shells, and without the thought that my mamma would only say "Eh".

When the past is buried in chocolate chips and mallows

I never wished to bring dead memories back to life.


Apparently, Goldilocks brought me back to both bitter and sweet memories with its  DOUBLE DUTCH ROLL. My ever-audacious sister Ate Nadine surprised us with another mouth-watering treat the day after I practically woke the rest of the household that midnight, when I saw our names on the online list of UPCAT passers (also my twin sister Jillian).


Ate Nadine even thought we were visited by robbers and akyat-bahay gangs because of my rare wild screams.

As I munched on the chocolate chips and the equally choco-coated marshmallows hidden at the core of the delectable sponge cake, I bitterly remembered how my crush back in Grade 6 used to give me packs of chocolate Kisses. Reminiscing all those tangible things he gave me made me ponder how stupid and naïve I was back then.


Surviving my high school days with "Flawless Unity" at the current decade, I've learned to be objective and indifferent enough with customary high school tensions namely peer pressure, puppy love and suicidal depression. I've also been taught by Ms. Josephine Bonsol to stop being like everybody else, and instead look for the things unseen and the questions neglected by many.


Until then, I'm looking forward to taste another of Goldilocks' sweet cake creations in the coming days, and without much social stress after finally being emancipated from high school politics and anxieties and zombie-like routines.

http://www.goldilocks.com.ph/products/bakeshop/cake-rolls/37/page/2

Check out www.goldilocks.com.ph for more heavenly and delightful cakes we certainly all have a memory with.


You can also register to keep updates with the latest of Goldilocks' innovations at http://www.goldilocks.com.ph/join

"I love it when a plan comes together"

We better hit our stupid books--they don't hit back. But does it also mean we better give up our old toys (when puberty says hello), because they won't give up on us?

Mr. Potatohead and Jessie definitely won't agree--at first. After all, toys are for playtime, and all they "live" for is to be played with forever. We cannot blame them when Andy won't play with them anymore.


Obviously, from a "humanities" point of view, Toy Story 3 talks about loyalty. In real life it is somewhat parallel to the concept of true friendship among people. Even Albert Einstein said something about being a true friend, when he's rarely there but definitely on the worst days of his friend's life.

I also personally admire how Woody's (and even Buzz's) plan came together in Toy Story 3. I would always remember Mr. Potatohead dropping off his parts and sticking them into a plato wrap dough, then I would reminisce on how a lot of things I planned either turned out worse or didn't happen at all.


But then I've also learned plans will always go wrong at one point, and that's when we need to IMPROVISE (like how Woody, the space aliens, and Bullseye made another route to avoid the patrol trucks, and how they hid in a bucket when Big Baby almost caught them).

My sister Ate Nadine claimed it was laudable for Pixar not to make a Toy Story 4, after leaving Woody with Bonnie and not taking him to college with Andy. They were not greedy enough to franchise another movie, as Toy Story 3's ending definitely left a teary, dramatic goodbye all of us children who once had toys will remember forever.

"You guarantee it, huh?"

The makers consequently donated Woody's lessons on never giving up, and equally when to give up.

"Did you fix Buzz?"

And I just love Jessie and Buzz's Spanish dance!

Stealing the moon for my mamma

"There is only one problem. YOU."

"I just want my mamma to be proud of me."


Who's any better audience than our parents? Somehow desperately getting his mom's attention made despicable Gru take the last despicable resort: to be a world-famous (yet amateur) villain.

Too amateur, but smart enough to recruit naïve orphans selling oatmeal cookies. The plan was perfectly insulting for his fellow thug: his girls would safely knock on Vector's door--sharkless and torpedo-less--unknowingly sneak out Gru's robot cookies and help him steal his slice of fame.


And inevitably after stealing the moon and marking his global popularity as the worst villain, he'd had finally made his mamma proud.

Young Gru: Look, Mom, I drew a picture of me landing on the moon.
Gru's Mom: Eh.
Young Gru: Look, Mom, I made a prototype of a rocket out of macaroni.
Gru's Mom: Eh.
Young Gru: Look, Mom, I built a real rocket based on the macaroni prototype.
[Fires rocket]
Gru's Mom: [holds her breath in amazement for a moment] ... Eh.

Despicable Me is certainly one of those "nurture" upbringings, where would-be-delinquents-and-crooks were initially molded by negligent parents, rated and horror movies, and an equally despicable environment. Gru's last resort was rational enough: we saw him as a kid, and did all remarkable scientific breakthroughs and made his good dreams come true. But then thinking his mother could never say more inspiring words than "Eh", maybe doing exactly the OPPOSITE would help.

Maybe being a villain would help him gain the affection he longs for.


THE STORY OF GRU'S SHADOW


I would never forget what kuya Cho-u (son of Ms. Josephine Bonsol) told me one day: we can never really say a person is too angelic and good-hearted, or too horrid and repugnant he's better off not being born at all. He said a person's character is like the principle of light and shadow: when one steps closer to the light (proving his 'good side'), his shadow (bad side) is equally sustained.

Same thing for villains closer to their "shadows": they inevitably acquire a better side and better heart. Kuya Cho-u said our state of being good and bad are equal: how good we are is likely how bad we are.


Therefore it is of no surprise bad people may at one point dramatically gain a change of heart, also considering they had their own harmless and desperate reasons why they've become one.


Ol' Mr. Gru was despicable enough, stealing smaller versions of the Statue of Liberty and eventually the moon. He was practically an old dog too invulnerable for new tricks.


But the trick perfectly worked for him, all right.

"And now he knows he can never part
from those three little kittens that changed his heart."

Three little kittens sure changed the big unicorn's heart, and Gru never even thought being a father was a more perfect way to make his mamma proud and say better words like, "I'm proud you became a good father to them. Maybe even better than me."

Prisoners of our own identities

Dev Patel as Prince Zuko

Honor. Glory. Redemption. HOME.


It's not a surprise that Avatar fans first hit the spotlight to evil Prince Zuko in M. Night Shyamalan's The Last Airbender, knowing very well that once-deprived face of Slumdog Dev Patel.


But on the Nick series alone, we've all perceived the one-good-eyed Prince of the Fire Nation as the obsessed, desperate, undying villain of our young airbender Aang. And at some angle, practically led the Avatar series to reproduce into four books.


This is not a new eye-opener concept anymore: villains are/were also victims themselves. They are jailbirds of notorious felons, namely negligent and despicable parents, hereditary and defective genes, and inevitably influential natures.


Theodore "T-Bag" Bagwell, a rapist, a fugitive and a life-for-six-counts-of-murder convict in my favorite series Prison Break once said, "We are prisoners of our own identities." He never thought how right he was.


Fire. Anger. Grit. HIS FATHER'S LOVE.

These kept him going.


What the rest of us tend to let go are their stories. Until then we can never really say we understand and accept bad  and mentally-troubled people unless we've known what they were reallly made of.

Violent. Hopeless. Condemned. ALONE.


At some point, maybe they've also asked themselves. Maybe they still undergo some "confirmation period" whether they are inevitably a big mistake of the world or not. Maybe they've also desperately looked for someone to clarify this madness going on within them.


Maybe they've also wanted someone to save them.


We may never know, because we don't want to.

Rescued for the nth time

Somehow I consider 2011--and any New Year--as a personal redemption.


Before this year ended, I would always shout under my breath that I'm nearly over those intolerable school projects and the 1:30-bedtime routines and the intoxicating dull classroom days.


And finally, I'm only a jeepney away from escaping high school! How I've always wished a time machine to be invented so I could quickly get past those four dreadful years. I'm only three months away from mentally getting over peer pressure, adrenaline-stimulated depression and zombie-driven hours of homework and lessons.


But then I'd also be pleased enough to realize that such cherished moments, out-of-classroom trips, minutes with older and smarter people, and those horrible embarrassments would all remain as MEMORIES, NEVER TO HAPPEN AGAIN.


I believe this truly defines what every event, incident, accident and phenomenon is all about: they will never happen more than once. That's the best part and the one thing I would somehow always thank for.

To my mentor Ms. Josephine Bonsol, who've shared more knowledge to me than what a teacher can ever teach to a student. Thank you for being my nanay.


Thank you to Gemma for always being there and for understanding my eccentric behavior. And also to Cedric for frequently updating me and always sitting beside me to share a talk.


I'm finally saved from the year that was, and for the nth time. All I can pray for is that things this year will turn out for the better, and will either start or end for the best. God bless 2011.