He looked leaner and hungrier then, though the hairline already hinted of things at ebb. The prosperous businessman's paunch wouldn't come until much later, more than ten years hence when he faced national television like one still not quite believing that all of it is not just a bad dream after all.
His name, so common, didn't register at first. A dupe of EDSA II, I've tuned out of Gloria gate long ago. Following its twists and turns is akin to to reading that greatest of newspaper spacefillers, the society page, Philippine politics being the biggest masquerade party in town where about 80 percent of Filipinos are just mirons looking in on the cavorting.
The so-called whistleblowers who surface from time to time are the occasional gatecrashers whose integrity are therefore not unimpeachable.Jun might be the exception, although I must admit to a certain personal bias.
It wasn't until a friend reminded me of Net Curricula, one of the meantime projects in my salad days, that Jun's face popped out from the haze that is my memory of people and places older than five years. What jogged my memory was the same goodhumored set about what is otherwise a nondescript, lab rat's face.
Perhaps I associate the good humor with what is by far the most vivid, if not the only clear personal memory I have of Jun. He's the type who would notice what the girls crossing the path of his car is wearing and then pay an oblique compliment by rhapsodizing on the beauty of the Philippine scenery.
I also have a aftertaste of a certain quixotic flavor in Net Curricula, which I think he undertook on an entrepreneurial dare after making his mark in the corporate IT world. It was not an unpleasant lingering in the tongue.
I wouldn't know what the years have done to Jun or whether I am such a very rotten judge of character after all. But if I'm not that off the mark, Gloria might not be able to stall anymore until 2010 because finally, someone might have decided to break up the party for good instead of just gatecrashing to get some of the spoils. (Photo courtesy of GMA News)
