Could I ever be happier than now?

‘Write something else,” said her friend. “Everyone knows your field is public governance. Must you continually write about it? Write about something else!”

“All right,” she answered. “I will write about happiness.” And so, while on the plane from Nagoya to Toronto, she wrote by hand on the back of the airline menu.

Happiness. What age is the happiest in one’s life? When she was 17, she was graduating magna cum laude from the university. She was the bunso of her indulgent barkada. She sang in the choir, led the College Quiz Bowl Team and nonchalantly collected straight As. As a church youth leader, she visited prisons, called on the sick and spoke in youth conferences.

She was bursting with life and promise. Old age was a far-away country. Oh, how distant and how old 20 years seemed to be! Standing on the edge of a glorious tomorrow, she asked herself, “Could I ever be happier than now?”

Then she discovered UP, nationalism and England. What freedom! Demonstrations. All-night discussion groups. And music, always music. This time she sang political songs in lieu of church anthems. Joan Baez, Simon and Garfunkel. “Bayan Ko.” “Bandilang Pula.” The transition to activism was effortless.

When she was 29, she fell rapturously in love. He had seen her pictures in newspapers when he was abroad. She was on top of a jeep, streaming hair longer than her micro miniskirt, waving a red flag while her companions rammed it against the gates of Malacañang. He looked for her when he returned to the Philippines. She took one look at him and asked herself, “Could I ever be happier than now?”

She had two sons. The eldest boy was born while she was hiding during martial law. They lived in a hut surrounded by toilets. Huge flies flitted around as she sang lullabies. For the first time, she fell very ill.

The second boy was born soon after she surfaced from hiding. It was December. Like Mary and Joseph, she and her husband walked to the nearest private hospital because there was no room in PGH. She fell sick again. Her colleagues from her home college raised money to bail her out of the hospital.

There she was, covered with coal tar and wrapped in plastic from head to toe.

The two sons were watching TV when they caught sight of an impossibly beautiful blonde girl on screen. “Kamukhang-kamukha ni Mama,” exclaimed the older to the younger boy. The latter nods in agreement. Bloated, swollen, and in pain, she asked herself, “Could I ever be happier than now”?

Now, she is 66. As they say, “Been there. Done all that.” She still sings in the choir as first soprano. She rereads her favorite books and repeatedly watches movies she likes, to the amusement of her sons. She eats whatever she wants, to the despair of her doctors. She keeps her friends of 50 years, and goes around with former students who have become friends. She has not stopped discovering new challenges.

And she is still at it. Activism, that is. Only she can’t clamber on top of jeeps. In the middle of something new and exciting, she asks herself, “Could I ever be happier than now”?

It is bittersweet happiness. How much longer can she go on? How many more years before the singing voice falters? How much longer will her ears register the magnificence of a piano concerto, the soaring heights of a tenor’s voice or a lyric soprano’s high Cs? Yes, how much longer can the heart bear so much excitement, so many thrills, victories and defeats?

But what age can be better than 66? Many times she is so happy she feels she is breathlessly standing on the edge of more tomorrows, with life’s many wonderful secrets still awaiting to be revealed. Eighty years old is far, far away.

Happiness is one’s age. Now.

The Sona and the true state of tax revenues.

On July 23, the President will deliver the State of the Nation Address. Within 30 days after the Sona, she will send the proposed 2008 budget to the legislature. The calculation about tax revenues will form a major component. After all, how can one have a budget of expenditures without the corresponding tax and other revenues?

For two months now, the Department of Finance has been wrangling with the former commissioner of the Bureau of Internal Revenue over the calculation of the deficit. The latter claims that projections for revenue collections were overstated. The former denies it. The credibility of the 2008 budget will depend on whether the 2007 revenue targets are being attained or not. Who knows the answer?

So what’s been said about committees that gives them such a bad reputation? For starters, a wag calls them “a group of the unfit appointed by the unwilling to do the unnecessary.”

‘Write something else,” said her friend. “Everyone knows your field is public governance. Must you continually write about it? Write about something else!”

For a stock-market investor, few things are as frustrating as being unable to get shares of a really hot IPO. Especially if everyone else you know was able to buy and you are the only one unable to participate in the IPO’s meteoric rise.

It has been an open secret that the national government is losing hundreds of million in taxes every year due to spurious claims against tax-credit certificates (TCCs) granted to oil companies in order to cushion the high cost of oil importations, and to protect oil companies and importers/exporters who use oil substantially in their manufacturing process.

Early this year, a rash of reports about the safety of Chinese products cropped up in a number of countries the most prominent being the “pet-food” scare in the United States and farm-raised seafood in Europe.

Science and technology are slowly moving up the political agenda in many developing countries. Politicians don’t want their countries to be left out of the global knowledge economy, and are realizing that science can contribute to virtually every field of public policy.