Society

Jan and I were in the mall when he asked me for another word for “transformers”. I thought, was that even a legitimate word? I was stumped. He showed me the answer sitting on a toy shelf. Wow, these pirates get brighter by the day. Now they know enough synonyms to ride on a trademarked hit without getting themselves into trouble.

Then again, they won’t ever get into trouble here even if they used the actual trademarked word and maybe just changed “T” to “Z”. I’ve never witnessed the law against piracy enforced in this city. I don’t know if there is a Philippine law against toy piracy but there is one against media piracy and merchants still sell in broad daylight, beside or across police stations. If DVD pirates have nothing to worry about, then more so their synonym-wielding pals in the toy niche.

Some people set a thin line between vanity and good grooming. For example, I’ve been given the advice that before applying for a job, one must pluck one’s eyebrows and apply makeup because these are components of good grooming. That’s news to me. I grew up in an environment where anything beyond washing one’s face was considered vain. Yeah, for the nth time, I had lots of nuns in my BFF list.

I still don’t “groom” myself very well despite the good advice of other friends who don’t hang out in cloisters. The last time I put on makeup was five years ago when co-workers convinced me that the only way for customers to take me seriously was if I painted my face.

I’ve also aggressively refused to pluck my brows. The clerk I was with yesterday convinced me that I made the right decision. Whoever “groomed” her gave her a perpetually surprised look. She probably realized the magnitude of the disastrous grooming session and decided to grow out the plucked parts so now she has something akin to stubble on the wrong part of her face.

I must admit, it was a lot easier not to care about my looks when I was younger. Seventeen years of lack of sleep, lack of exercise, and regular McDonalds fixes have joined forces to ruin my skin quality and create dark continents under my eyes.

The dark circles around my eyes are the hardest to ignore. They’re like the hole in the ozone layer. They grow larger every year. Fellow online workers who share the same look are considering putting up a Panda Look-Alike Society. Why pandas and not raccoons? Because we now also have the girth to match pandas, thanks to our bad eating habits and sedentary work.

A few weeks ago I thought I found the solution to the negative evolution of my facial looks. I bought a product that promised to take care of the 7 signs of skin aging in just 7 days. The product ad said nothing about doing cartwheels or replacing my daily diet with generous helpings of grass so in the guise of scientific testing, I gave in to my sudden attack of vanity and bought it. Seven days later, I looked like I aged 7 days.

Perhaps the product only works for folks who don’t get exposed to the sun, who sleep 15 hours a day and who thrive on wheat sticks. For the rest of us regular folks we only have three choices to look good: pluck eyebrows and put on makeup; live healthy lifestyles and look for golden flowers to sing to like Mother Gothel.

I still refuse to pluck my eyebrows so I’ll try exercise next week.

I’m sure Wikipedia has the long, convoluted, partially correct answer, but since four years of college and another four years of trying to decipher Google’s Terms of Service have damaged my brain, I am now incapable of understanding definitions beyond “Duh”.

Sometimes I get the impression that marriage is a legally binding agreement that allows individuals to demand that their partners, who have future plans of hiding from obligation in the Swiss Alps, listen to the now classic song “Financial Support” by Kevin Federline. Those who actually have partners who cooperate fully may alternatively use their documents to gain express access to their rights and benefits and to those of their children, financial or otherwise, from legal institutions.

That inaccurate definition is the result of two decades of watching friends and family hit their heads against marriage contracts that have the physical attributes of paper but the internal qualities of concrete. I’m certain that if I said that in one of my six theology classes in college, I would have never been given my diploma.

Quite recently, this simplistic perspective has expanded a bit thanks to Vilma Santos. In one of her movies she complains to her partner that the reason why he is compelled by his parents to provide for their needs first rather than hers is because his parents bank on the fact that they aren’t married. That implies that if they were married, she would have had the right to demand that she and their kids be the first in his list of concerns.

I pretty much put my ear against closed doors or watch quarreling neighbors with a popcorn bucket in one arm. I remember one woman very close to home echo a similar line, “Why do you always go home to your parents when they call for you? Don’t they know we’re married?”

Actually, the couples I know fight in very public places where they prefer to spill their guts and all the gory details of their disastrous unions. What I gather from them pretty much verifies the truth behind Vilma’s lines.

So that means I can now turn to my husband and demand that aside from surrendering his wallet, assets and die cast car collection to me, he is now required to prioritize my demands because we have a marriage contract. Sweet.

My husband and his pals have a base idea of what a typical wife is. Arms akimbo, the typical wife barges through the informal “social” gatherings of inebriated men, lets fly strings of verbal barbs and drags her man by the ear each time to get him home. The rest of the ruffians who witness such instances of utter and absolute humiliation, duck in various directions to protect their egos from the sting of the typical wife’s wrath.

I don’t fit the description. That’s why my husband’s friends love me too. The females in the typical category warn me of my folly. They say men need to be flogged in public so they don’t forget who their real bosses are. I don’t throw sharp words, breakable objects or facial contortions at my husband in public or in private because I’m too lazy. With two kids I don’t want to have to be the mother of a fully grown person.

The other night I found my husband tinkering with his phone in the dead of the night. Having settled on an inexplicably difficult mood (which I’d like to blame on hormones, Google, the president, Justin Beiber, the man on the moon or anyone/anything else other than myself) I asked him who the hell he was texting in the dark.

His jaw fell and the silence was long and pronounced. “Are you my wife? So what’s next? Are you gonna attend all my social events? Are you gonna stand with your fists up in front of my buddies?”

“When those things happen, my dear, you’d better worry that your real wife got kidnapped by aliens.”

Really, I just don’t know what came over me.

I heard from the grapevine that a very close relative of mine has declared his intentions to change his citizenship because he has grown tired of the Philippine situation. I am no longer in speaking terms with this relative because of this but I understand where he’s coming from.

Life here has almost become an exercise in futility and I’m starting to feel the hopelessness of it all. It’s not just last month’s failed hostage crisis resolution that has brought about this depressing perspective. It’s really more because of the rare glimpse I’ve had of the common man on the street.

Up until recently, I had a 15 year old nanny who lived with us. She went missing for a night and a day and I found her in her boyfriend’s house. She chose to forgo both her education and employment for him.

The girl’s mother is all thumbs up at the situation. The boy’s mother and grandmother have resigned themselves to it as well but are actually more disturbed about it. In an attempt to dissuade the girl, they’ve opened up the family’s history books. The boy belongs to a family of four siblings, all adults, none of whom have finished high school even if they could have. They are all unemployed and spend their mornings playing illegal numbers games and their afternoons playing dodge ball with cousins who are also unemployed dropouts. In the evenings the two male siblings get drunk, break bottles on the streets and land punches on whoever it is they currently have relations with. The girl is unfazed. She just wants to be with her man.

My jaw is still stuck on the ground. I cannot believe that there are people who are willing to live lives expecting manna from heaven, sulfur-laced goods from hell or shit from the gutters of the earth to survive. I cannot believe that any sensible being would choose to live such an existence even if a better one is within reach. I cannot believe that there are people so disgraceful that even their mothers completely renounce them.

My husband assures me I’ve been a witness to something real but that I haven’t really seen all there is to it. What I’ve seen is just a micro sample of bigger communities where there is nothing sacred and people rot in pits of apathy.

Aquino vows he’d rid the system of corruption but if everyday, hundreds of children are taught by example that it’s okay to live unprincipled lives, to strive for nothing, to compromise right for wrong, to take the easy way out, then each and every year, this country will still be in the hands of people who don’t care about the country, the greater good or their own souls. Six years from now, when Aquino steps down, we might just end up where we first started.

It’s still a good day to be Filipino though simply because we are and now is no different than any other moment when some talented countryman manages to wave the flag a little higher than usual. We have to start believing and creating situations where it’s good to be us because no official document from another country or an extensive cosmetic enhancement can erase racial heritage. We share the same story regardless of citizenship or appearance and our story will haunt us to the ends of oblivion.

We don’t need Aquino to make a dent on corruption. What we really need is a hard, bloody smack on the collective consciousness. That’s not Aquino’s job. It’s ours.

My husband thinks I’m beautiful. That isn’t too flattering though considering that his supreme standard of beauty is the female alien in James Cameron’s Avatar. Then again, I would probably have a shot at the Ms. Universe crown if Trump acknowledged the audacity of the pageant title and started inviting real otherworldly creatures to compete. If someone like my husband were to be a judge, he’d probably choose the 8 ft. sentient mollusk from Alpha Centauri besides me, the Na’vi representative, as a top contender.

There simply is no chance in my lifetime for Ms. Universe to be redefined and reformatted. I’d have to stay contended hanging around in my evening gown (i.e. nightgown), binging on my third bag of chips while watching nearly absurd vital statistics take on human forms and sashay in heels, the first inanimate object that will soon be convicted of involuntary manslaughter.

There is no bitterness in my system, mind you. My father drilled into my consciousness by the tender age of five that the pageant is like a great big cattle farm where the cattle are paraded, stared at and branded. By the time I grew up to be the shortest in my high school class, he assured me that he will forever be happy that I didn’t grow tall enough to join beauty pageants.

Neither am I particularly scornful of pageants. I like watching grown women tell the whole world how much they espouse world peace. So yeah, I will watch the pageant and enjoy it even if I find that creating “universal” standards for beauty isn’t fair.

I was all happy and ecstatic when we finally decided to live on our own apart from my in-laws. Even the impending birth of a second baby didn’t stop us. Armed with determination and a tummy that was the only thing larger than my resolve, I moved heaven and earth to get us an apartment. The tummy helped a lot because everyone seemed all too eager to help me get around. It’s been seven months and I wish I can say we made the best decision.

Like most Filipino communities, we live in one where people are always friendly and helpful. There are just some nights though when scenes jump right out of a vampire book and I’d wish I read Twilight. That would have been bearable punishment compared to the cold, clammy sweat I bathe in every time the friendly neighbors start drinking, bickering, breaking bottles and destroying private property.

I used to live in a place where the neighbors sometimes mutated at twilight too but I had nothing to worry about. They all still seemed to recognize me in their hairy, fanged conditions. That’s thanks to the many long years of friendship forged by countless beer bottles that my own pet werewolf (my husband) has had with them.

Without familiar faces, I find myself losing more and more sleep watching over my human children. I’d probably sleep better if I had a silver stake beside me but all I have is a short wooden stick that probably can’t even hurt a cat.

A friend once asked me, “So what do you prefer, living in a place not your own but where you’re good friends with the drunkards or in a place of your own but where the drunkards are strangers?”

Tough question.

I don’t like the idea of getting hired help. This is not because I am too finicky. I just hate the idea of hiring someone who has to stop going to school so she can work. I feel guilty that I seem to have an unfair and unfortunate advantage over someone. Hiring help here seems almost like enslaving someone especially since the wage for nannies isn’t enough to pay for a pair of Levi’s jeans.

I am in a rock and a hard place. It’s either I send her back home so she can go back to school or I stop working so I can take care of my kids myself. If I stop slaving over a keyboard my family will go hungry. So what will it be?

I wish I lived in a country where education is a right and not a privilege and where married moms with kids can work without having to hire out of school youth.

Because I live in the Philippines, I have never met or known of anyone who has a prenuptial agreement. When there are more poor people than ants, a prenup is a word encountered only in the dictionary. Which is why for me, the current development to the Tiger Woods drama is nothing short of strange.

Rumor has it that Tiger had a car accident because his wife, Elin chased him with a golf club and actually managed to smash his windshield. Rumor has it that Elin finally cracked after discovering Tiger’s extramarital transgressions. Rumor has it that Elin is now renegotiating their prenuptial agreement. The initial agreement was for her to receive $20 million after twenty years of marriage. Rumor has it that she’s asking for an outright payment of $5 million and $55 million more to stay with Tiger for two more years.

The numbers alone are staggering but what I find even more perplexing is how anyone can go down on one knee and ask for someone’s hand in marriage with a diamond ring and prenup papers. So much for, “I’ll love you no matter what.” This just supports the theory that romantic love is really a fairytale.