Beachy beachy

Day at the Beach by nikko1 featuring a stripe bikini

It's this blog's first summer! And because it's 38.4C outside (according to the news, that's the hottest this year yet) AND it's a Saturday, I decided I can afford to daydream about the beach.

Last year, I asked a bunch of parents where they love to go with their family in the summertime. While everyone said the beach, none of them chose Boracay. Why? Because it's not exactly family-friendly. Sure the water is blue, and the sand is fine, but the activities in Boracay cater more to the gimik-crowd: the ones who want to go partying and staying up all night.

Besides that, there's the beach fashion. Not family-friendly at all!

So...
High temperatures are no excuse to dress indecently. The truth is, you can stay cool without having to lounge about in your underwear (or their wearable-in-public fashionable cousin, the bikini). Just take a cue from the Polyvore set I made above. The trick to staying cool lies not in the amount of fabric (if it did, maxi dresses would be toasty) but in the kind of fabric, the fit of the clothes, and the color.

Some notes:
Cool fabrics
Cotton, linen, rayon let the most air in, making the clothes "breathable."

Cool fit
Loose clothing like big shirts and flowy dresses are cooler for summer because they don't cause chafing.

Cool colors
Anything that is not very dark or black is cool. You know that light is made up of different color waves. All objects reflect some light and absorb all the rest. For example, if a shirt is yellow, it means it reflects the yellow waves but absorbs all the other color waves. A red shirt reflects only red waves. But the black shirt reflects no waves, and that's why we see black. That means black shirts are the best shirts for trapping heat fast. And that's why more people like wearing white in summer.

If you really like dark colors, there's always stripes!
Image from themavenpost.com: Vogue Girl Korea, May 2011.

May these tips help you in your quest for dressing modestly in a season that encourages the opposite. Have a cool summer!

To see the Summer Sky
Is Poetry, though never in a Book it lie -
True Poems flee.
-Emily Dickinson

The pursuit of happiness

Last week, I found myself thrust into a conversation with somebody who was totally convinced that parents had no right to tell their kids, "You can't have sex till you're married." The idea was that kids have freedom and so can engage in any activity they want--meaning, when it comes to sex, parents are just supposed to toss them a condom or do something similarly "responsible."

Okay, deep breath.

The Painter's Family. Henri Matisse, 1911.

While it's true that parents can't make their kids' life choices for them, they have a responsibility to help their children make the right choice--the right choice being the one that will make them happy, whole and successful later on. That's what parenting is all about, and it begins on the very day parents become mommies and daddies. Parenting is not about controlling your kids so they only do what you want them to do; it's about working hard to raise them to be good, happy and independent adults.

That said, parents have every right to warn their children about the consequences of premarital sex, and to dissuade them from engaging in it. Yes, the decision is still the son's or daughter's, but that does not take away the fact that mom and dad's two cents matter.

One father I interviewed put it this way: "I tell my sons that premarital sex, like drunk driving, is a life-changing decision. You know that if you get drunk and you drive, you could wake up the next day recovering from a car accident, or worse, hearing news that you had severely injured or killed somebody last night, or worse still, you don't wake up at all."
 
It's the same big consequence for premarital sex: you know that if you engage in it now, you can find yourself a few months later having to give up school for the baby, having to marry the girl for the baby, considering abortion (!), or at the very least becoming completely emotionally attached to the boyfriend who decides to leave you anyway. Now, is this the way to pursue happiness?

Saying Grace. Norman Rockwell, 1951.

Like many good things, true love happens slowly. It grows as you get to know the person more in friendship, it matures as you also mature in mind and heart, and its progress is composed of many decisions that you make out of selfless love.

This is what our parents want us kids to discover, and as much as they wish to explain it to us, sadly, it does happen that the only words they are able to say are the misleading "That's bad," the explanation-warranting "Don't do it because I say so," or the rebellion-inducing "Huwag mong bahiran ng kahihiyan ang pangalan natin." (Ooh, the drama!)

It is difficult, but we have to learn to see the love behind the different permutations of those inadequate comments. We need to understand that while not all parents have the gift for words, the very fact that they're struggling with these words at all is proof of their love. It's up to us kids to repay that love with obedience.

"Where there is no obedience, there is no virtue; where there is no virtue there is no good; where good is wanting, there is no love, there is no God; where God is not, there is no Heaven."-St. Pio of Pietrelcina