We chat! We converge! We click!

A color on a canvas can be beautiful in itself, so it has been said. However, the artist excels not by slathering one color across the canvas but by positioning it between contrasting or complementary hues to allow the original color to derive richness and depth from a milieu of unlike colors.

Room 2 of Cebu Tambayan, one of several chat rooms on Yahoo Messenger, is a beautiful canvas in itself that is even made livelier by hues splayed and splattered by a community of online chatters speaking their minds through the keyboards with their spontaneity vis-à-vis the opposing force of repression and the principle of action-reaction. With the interconnectivity comes a niche for methods such as injunction-disjunction and induction-deduction adopted in the exchange of conversations shared by chatters of diverse orientation, who poured in tints to produce the one color of chat life.

At Cebu Tambayan 2, chatters are composed of a motley crew of beauties and beasts, the honest and reliable, the trickster and heel, the comic, the gross and weird, the conservative and perverts, and of course the "tweeners" - or those who simply border or are in between.

At times, one could cluck a tongue at the absurdity of this whole enterprise happening 24/7 when online chatters in the guise of anonymity converge at this specific virtual room, as CT2 becomes the most democratic venue for expression one can ever find. There's no one who can control it (except stations that do have operators-administrators, say IrCQ and MiRC). What's more interesting at YM is who's trying to control it.

There is now the game of the forces of repression to control operating versus the creative impulse to express. Most relationships created on cyberspace are seemingly doomed to fail as diversity - though offering the lavish colors of romance and the wondrous design and texture of conversations on virtual village - offers small space for unity. Oftentimes, the chat room becomes a battlefield rather than a sanctuary of peace, a war zone rather than a pagoda of prayer. Most of the time, discussions go overboard and maniacal rather than the upholding of civil relations and diplomacy.

But even when such become hurting experiences to sensible online chatters, grand eyeballs end up like a commodity being craved for by those hooked to the hypnotic spell of this computer peripheral device christened "mouse".

The GEB of real time chatters at Yahoo's Cebu Tambayan 2 (CT2) last August 6 held at the Boy Scout Camp, Capitol Hills was a gigabyte of poetry personified in people who took time to converge from as far as Germany, Singapore, Boston and Saudi Arabia, Manila, Butuan City, and Iligan City. At the Boys Scout Camp, I met up-close and personal the rest of those who share with me the same passion - simply_jessie (Jeserie Redondo - moderator of our CT2 yahoo group), smilekopermi (Susan Padua-Albo)kim_pang_ga (Karina Immaculada Apale), potatored (Rex Edward Apale), labod_sad (Agnes Abellana), nyhavn (Arnel Aranton), femme_fatale (Lyra Faye Baynosa), micro_cheat (Maranatha Illustrisimo), venyang_waffa (Venice Gonzales), torch (Hector Luzon), alain (AJ Cabardo), vanes_mae (Edna Schell), lloren_74 (Emily Cadutdut), gotonitz (Domingo Untal), ugly (Vilma Bongo West), joan rodarodz (Joan Roda), liza_anne_for_u (Lilibeth Flordeliz), highlight (Alexander Listones), rbyan (Randel Bryan Ebrada), inot (Antonio Cortes II), misty (Rearlyn Buctot), zastful_19, suplada_gamay, druglord and boy_berig.

The CT2 crowd of online chatters who find delight in the amazing sense of interconnectivity the virtual world provides with just a click of the mouse gathered for real to strengthen the bond already started with the institution of SCQ yahoo group or the Senior Chatters Qualified. The GEB bannered the theme: "We chat! We converged! We clicked!" A plethora of chatters that are either cruel or compassionate, weird or conventional, bully or kindhearted, stupid or brilliant, gross or comic, pervert or angelic, the youth or the not-so-youth, the kind, creative and sensible met and played games, did some teambuilding activities, sang songs via the videoke system, swam at the pool and ate dinner together, barhopped, chat with web cam, and slept together at this inn, serving from minute to minute affection in bear hugs, mwahs and tsup-tsups! CT2 peepz have already passed that stage of facing virtual calamities just like flooding wherein nasty chatters just key in a flashflood of messages obviously to create mess. Some can now laugh at being at the mercy of booters who kick chatters out of the rooms using booting softwares. We also encountered spats with chatters who are just there to piss others and or annoy with their unsolicited green jokes or invitations for sex chat. After all the trouble, SCQ did pull through with the GEB - and successfully at that!

By the way, Pinoy and Pinay chatters working out of the country who got the heart to share their blessings for the gathering sponsored the CT2 GEB. Big thanks go to egomez in Norfolk, California; tobeb in New Jersey, ugly of singapore, pinay2care of germany, atlantic_express of the UK, joe_millionaire; doisneau_ethnies (the GEB was dedicated to him), mr. anonymous, zhimpee of florida, summerscent of singapore, and pacs8 and gotonitz of Boston, Massachusetts. Special thanks also go to SFO4 Bernardo Cortes del Mar of the Bureau of Fire Protection with Cris Comendador for facilitating the teambuilding activities, to Alo Catering Services for a smorgasbord of gastronomic delights able to feed the proverbial multitude, to Bryan Sacmar for the transportation, to the videoke service, to the printing shop that made our shirt designs "sport-able" (the attagirls and the whattamen never looked that great! smile!), to Fountainhead for such a lovely cake, and above all the Almighty for making great things possible.

Real time chatting or online chatting is beautiful and invincible in the new age. Like poetry, it seeks to intertwine justice and the arts to find the stability of truth. Matter of fact is, truth at the chat room is very elusive. The GEB provides a space in space for one to decipher whether one is a person or a myth. The event comes with the realization that when you click that person at the other end of the line, you will know he or she is for real because he or she doesn't go overboard with this privilege of chatting in the guise of anonymity.