I was rummaging my notes when I found an illustration of the French painter Millet’s painting “The Man With The Hoe”. It is a picture of a laborer standing in a field and leaning forward in a resting position on the handle of a grubbing hoe. This is actually one of my favorite paintings for it drew not just my attention but my sympathy as well I actually made a short story out of it. It was a shocking picture of a tired laborer “not much intelligent-looking and human than the beast of fields”.

I was also reminded of Gainsborough’s “The Blue Boy”, a painting from Rococo Art which is the extension of Baroque decorativeness beyond classical restraint. It was the bourgeoise art, the art of the elite. Even history tells that there is a complicated arrangement of society into various orders, that there is a manifold gradation of social ranks even before the earlier epochs. In ancient Rome we have patricians, knights, plebeians, slaves; in the Middle Ages, feudal lords, vassals, guild-masters, journeymen, apprentices and serfs. All of these social classes are also manifested in literature and art.

Whenever these random associations come into mind, thoughts of myself and where I stand in my society score upon my consciousness. I was born to a family which I consider as belonging to the working class. My father is a DENR (Department of Environment and Natural Resources) employee while my mother is an elementary public school teacher. Both had to work hard and even hold sidelines in order to support me and my three other siblings. The four of us broods are all getting our education from public schools. I am already in college and as what is basically expected from me, strives to do good with my acads in order to graduate on time and acquire immediately a job. Being the eldest, I am supposed to have a job right after stepping out of school and carry out the unwritten laws of a breadwinner.

I am on my 3^rd year in the BAE Major in Creative Writing program now, and honestly, I am still figuring out where this degree will take me. What I’m trying to say is that we don’t get hold of our destiny, we might sink or swim. Who would like having those 4 years of sleepless nights and damn papers in college get wasted by slumping your butt on the couch and be an 85-pound bum someday. We are taught in school things that we can use in facing the real world, and what I mean here is the survival in the industrial and economic blunders of reality. Most of us make their exodus to other countries to seek their fortune, to find wealth. This only holds true to Marx’s assertion that we are left no other bond between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous “cash payment”. It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of Philistine Sentimentalism, in the icywater of egotistical calculation (Marx).

I am really hoping that this passion I have for writing would take me to certain heights and basically let me earn money from which I can support my family and do whatever I want. And I would certainly sing: It’s all about the money/ It’s all about the dum dum du du du dum / I don’t think it’s funny / To see us fade away / It’s all about the money /It’s all about the dum dum du du du dum..