A study of the after-school species

I was at the heart of an unnamed resistance, it seemed. As I sat hunched over a low table in a tiny café, the discussion of the group of 20-somethings nearby assuming a tone that struck me as conspiratorial, it felt as if I was biding time in a post-apocalyptic encampment of some sort. Appropriate that the café, called Manila Collective, was within the self-governing alternative nation of Cubao Expo.

Close to sundown without the usual hordes of off-beats mothing about, the conglomeration of shops outside were either closed or aloof to the barren street. And further, beyond the confines of Cubao X, was what the people within this café were up against: what was known, archaically, as The Real World.   

The café is where I had agreed to meet Alice Sarmiento, amid a group of mutineers behind what could be considered soul survivalist reading for the post-college set: a webzine called New Slang.

“Originally, we wanted some sort of zine project, growing up in the ‘90s with this whole subculture,” Alice says of those small-circulation publications prevalent before today’s blogs and RSS feeds. But pricy printing led to the online alternative she and fellow founders Paolo Cruz, Jaton Zulueta and Marla Cabanban launched in January. “It turned out all right, though, ‘cause we had a lot more creative freedom.”

Lit For The Listless

As the namesake of that era-defining song by The Shins, New Slang delineates its readership pretty well. Those you’d expect to have been affected by indie movie Garden State, the pop-existential oxygen tank for obligation-overwhelmed kids in which the song was used memorably (the scene where Natalie Portman gives Zach Braff an electric come-on by insisting he slip on her headphones). Cue The Shins’ despondently sung chorus and bam, out comes what is arguably the symbolic birth of this generation’s propensity to share. (Later, to over-share.) That it was set in a hospital waiting room may have alluded to the limbo that world-and-work-weary young adults (represented by Braff’s character) eventually occupy.

Which brings us to the shared slices of sincerity posted on New Slang. Its creatively free staff wants you to click on and scroll through these downloadable mix tapes, essays, and stories — on one’s wayward relationships, awkward years, or inward feelings about the future (as Cabanban waxes about in “The Paradox of Growing Up”) or lack thereof (in “Apocalypse Later” by Juan Miguel Sevilla).

With the variety of views, some pause during these fast times. Maybe a chance to revisit what mattered before that first-job fallout; before your series of unfortunate encounters with humanity (a whole issue on Douchebaggery!); and the quandary of working to survive while watching your soul die — just another casualty of the self in this age of urgency. Most especially at an age — a quarter of your life, usually — where keeping it real despite the rules of The Real World seems the only recourse.

The resistance may sound futile but the Internet has afforded the editors of New Slang possibility. “You can play more with the medium,” says Marla emphatically, the sparkle of a nose piercing acting as playful punctuation. “And we started this because we were looking for that sort of writing. That sort of theme-based nonfiction is hard to come across. You look in magazines here and it’s all fluff.”

Alice leans in closer so as to assert a point. “Yeah, we couldn’t find it in the lifestyle sections of newspapers — sorry,” she coos, seemingly oblivious to the irony that a newspaper is featuring a group that chooses to dismiss its lifestyle component.

“It was kind of distressing at the start na everyone didn’t know how to write a paragraph, didn’t want to write a paragraph,” Jaton admits of the group’s tendency to stray from the constraints of conventional first-person lifestyle pieces, including that fixed lottery on who gets to be read. “We wanted to create a community of like-minded people to produce the things that we wanted to read. Sometimes, someone will come up and you know they have something to say, they have a story to tell.”

Heedless honesty is the currency traded by those who’ve been hazed by their after-school existences. By your mid-20s, you should have a few stories to swap detailing the erosion of personal mission statements. Passion in work, for instance; straining your eyes over countless Excel files like Alice has, paying her dues via vision lost; or just getting paid meagerly for what you know you’re good at like Marla once did as a graphic design agency drone. After your ideals’ run-ins with inequities in work or love, the realizations gained can make for good stories of redemption, as what comprises the self-aware fodder that gets posted on New Slang. What you’d typically share over beers or in coffee houses like the one we’re at.  

Art That Imparts

The over-sharing is important, especially for a generation that voraciously communicates but is starved for actual connection. And while the webzine’s “Show and Tell” section pries new perspectives open on the all-too-human condition of being a 20-something, actually showing and telling fosters a warmer kind of comradeship among the “like-minded” that Zulueta speaks of. 

Grade School for Yuppies (GSY), a monthly session of storytelling, was thus established, starting out as an event to launch the webzine but with its real-time counterpart of topic-guided open mic. Its first classroom was Blacksoup, a Teacher’s Village art café that would round up reminiscences dug up by the prompt “My first time to…”

“I think for the first one, people were kind of caught off-guard,” says Jaton of initial reactions to “first-time over-sharing,” spanning Ala Paredes’ “first kiss” as demonstrated by slides of dino licking from Land Before Time to a random visitor’s “first crap at the venue’s restroom.” “What’s interesting is at the start, we just wanted people to come together pero as it went on, nag-evolve na rin yung medium.”

After a second go at Vinyl on Vinyl, another gallery tucked within Makati’s The Collective, the latest GSY was held last month at the Ayala Museum. With a full A/V setup for slideshows and the class’s best attendance yet, the prompt “Because we should never forget that…” ended up a marathon of 10-minute lectures, from subtle NGO rah-rahs from the head of wear-with-care initiative Rags2Riches to the more anthropological, delving into a study of Igorots. A gem, however, was JP Cuison’s tale of how Ang Tatlong Pusa, the children’s book he wrote brimming with cat-on-cat cruelty had been outright rejected by publishing houses. “He was reading it in a Kuya Bodjie voice,” Alice delightedly recounts, indicating Cuison’s performance as the sort GSY give gold stars to.  

The lesson here is that from the experiential exhibitionism of others, you can either learn or be liberated. And that amid quarter-life ennui and today’s cursory communication, telling — and earnestly so — is indeed living, no matter the medium. “I guess part of the sensibility is that even if New Slang is a digital medium, we’re using it with an analog heart,” says Paolo, waving what could be today’s motto. 

“The recurrent theme with us is that we like getting involved with things that matter to us and at the end of the day, what do you have? Stories,” says Marla, as if consoling me in this refuge for recovering yuppies. “I live for the inumans I have with friends, catching up with each other, talking about our dreams and values, and if you can package that in a non-cheesy way that can entice and interest people, then why not?” 

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To peruse nonfiction you probably won’t find in this paper or enroll in the next Grade School for Yuppies, log onto http://new-slang.com/