Popular mechanics for high school mutations

MANILA, Philippines - I have this theory that your body goes through puberty in its teens, and the mind goes through puberty in your twenties,” Zach Braff told Spin magazine in the wake of his coming-of-age film, Garden State. It’s a smart-assy nugget of wisdom that reeks of back-ended infantilism, the kind that you get from wayward souls in transit to man-childhood, something that you’ll also see in Judd Apatow’s raunchy dork-o-ramas. But once you start preparing your work clothes for an eternity behind an office desk, the ghost of high school’s acne past settles in quick: Suddenly you’re still that new kid in school and the whole world is a jungle freakshow.

John Hughes nailed adolescent themes in his films, and his hip modern counterpart Marc Webb, who cut his teeth in typical angsty-teen videos for My Chemical Romance, Yellowcard, and Hoobastank, gets to set hormones amok in The Amazing Spider-Man, the latest big-screen incarnation of the angstiest of all comic book superheroes, Peter Parker. Factor in the chaos of high school and this whole confused superhero set-up becomes a playground for themes that matter more when you’re about to make a nosedive down the corporate ledge.

Angst And The Moral Compass

Webb uses the reboot as an opportunity to flesh out Peter’s one distinct characteristic: he is a superhero with the morals of boy. He uses his powers like any teenage boy would, playfully testing it to beat up thugs. With this immense power in his hands, he is hemmed in by choices. But like any erupting crisis at this age, it all comes down to the ties that you make with the people you keep close. Peter may be a superhero but adolescence quite often feels like a life sentence, where every day is the apocalypse and every bad decision has the potential to swallow you whole. And becoming a web-slinging, masked crusader doesn’t exactly help either..

Social ineptitude also becomes a rite of passage at this stage. At an age when exploration signals the germination of a life-long role, a sense of communal oneness is an integral part of your moral compass.This is why cliques become survival tactics—no matter how awkward things get, you're assured that someone is there to dust off and pick you up.

Yours Truly, Madma

It’s this amazing sense of a collective bear hug that welcomes the followers of Marvin Salazar’s advice blog, Yours Truly, Madma. The blog went live only two months ago, but it’s becoming one of the most visited Pinoy blogs mostly because of its caustic mix of humor and wit. There’s also an infectious warmth that exists in the comments section. The whole blog (madmacarta.wordpress.com) becomes a rabid forum where Marvin, or Madma as he is known in the blog, initiates the hyperactive commentary, and anyone who pleases can chime in afterwards. It becomes a nutjob of a classroom set-up where the resident Ate Charo gives comfort to the weary; the e-pals and the know-it-alls follow suit to give their two cents worth, which may or may not push the problematic person to the road of enlightenment.

Yours Truly, Madma was born out of Marvin’s desire to give online lurkers a bottomline-type of discussion and Louis CK-type of posturing, only from a gay and Filipino standpoint. An alumni of the UP Repertory Company, Marvin’s earnest desire to entertain has yielded a crop of topics that wouldn’t be out of place in an open forum: love triangles between close friends, relationship problems, and even sexual dilemmas. It could probably be the careful selection of posts that would get the highest hits and interesting replies from the blog’s resident echoseras but it’s refreshing to see a corner of the Internet that echoes the values that once thrived among the rickety desks of your high school.

Youth In Revolt

It’s astonishing how issues that we thought we ditched in our adolescence continue to plague us until we’re well into our adulthood. I guess the word “young” may still be the most enticing part of “young adult” but its allure certainly allows us to approach life with the same amount of enthusiasm and fear that we had as we took on the bizarre time in our life when everything seemed glorious and possible. It’s great to be drunk on youth.

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