Society

It’s been two weeks and my writing job order is still stuck on reproductive health or should I say the total lack of it. Now it seems my prolonged encounter with descriptions and images of disease-infested reproductive organs has successfully squashed my appetite for—EVERYTHING. More importantly though, it has also finally convinced me to visit my gynecologist three years after she told me I was due for a pap smear.

The images that have turned my stomach inside out have finally convinced me that reproductive cancer is not the way to go, at least not in the Philippines where instant deaths (like instant noodles, instant juice and instant white skin) are infinitely preferred over expensive languishing. Yep, a quick heart attack or getting swatted on the highway is a whole lot better.

The doctor’s visit was hardly pleasant. My undignified position on the clinic bed made me feel like a cockroach on its back about to be stuck with needles and torched dead by a 4 year old sadist. Nonetheless, the seemingly endless swabs and poking were far better than the pitter patter of cancer cells. My doctor says I’d have to bear the indignity over and over again for as long as I live. Married women, she says, are at great risk of contracting sexually transmitted diseases and the HP virus that could cause cervical cancer.

I don’t think though that married women are the only ones at particular risk anymore. If the figures are right, 25% of sexually active teenagers in the U.S. have STD. One in four get STD infections every year. Among women in America, gonorrhea is most common among teenagers 15 years old and up.

That kinda ruins the seemingly pure young adolescent love that we so often read about or see on the Disney Channel. Imagine a boy with just a hint of his first facial hair about to lean over to kiss his first girlfriend when the car stereo suddenly spits out a tune that eerily fits “gonorrhea” when you say it in singsong.

Should my third world sensibilities be shocked, alarmed, agitated? Does this prove beyond a reasonable doubt that man isn’t a better philosopher than beasts under the sway of the pleasure principle? That’s as far as I dare go about what I think lest I be pelted with sticks and stones by both the prudish and the liberal alike. Besides I’ve already strayed too far from my musings on feeling like a cockroach.

*Image credit: Powerbacks

What is the Filipino dream?

There is no simple way to answer that. But I suppose for millions of Filipinos, the Filipino dream is nowhere near the American dream. The Filipino dream is not about getting fine slices of success, achievement, self-actualization and doing exactly what you want in life.

For countless Filipinos the dream is simple. Most of our countrymen just want to have the right pieces of the food pyramid on the table for a change instead of just rice and instant noodles. Most Filipinos just want a small, tidy bungalow in a nice community that isn’t under a bridge, over a canal or within mounds of trash that in the Philippines are homes to both mice and men. For people who may never have tasted a candy-coated spoon, much less a silver one, the dream is simply to wake up from the nightmare of poverty.

That was probably the idea when Marilou Ranario and thousands of other Filipinos left the country. Now Marilou might just hang for that dream. Before that, she has to endure more days in a country that’s warmer than the Philippines but colder than Iceland.

I suppose though that the solution to our chronic problem doesn’t just lie in waving placards in front of embassies and thick-faced politicians. We are part of the problem that has driven Marilou to Kuwait. If we don’t set our own marbles straight, many more will hang for the Filipino dream. The rest of us will probably suffer worse fates than dangling from a noose.

Some decades ago, people wondered why the French did not suffer as much from heart ailments as other people from other countries do. This is despite the fact that the people of France consume legendary palatable delights oozing with cream and fat—the main ingredients to heart disease. They called this the French paradox.

Experts believe they have solved the mystery behind the French paradox. The French do not suffer as much from heart problems as other people do because they customarily consume red wine together with their rich food.

I wonder if some experts can solve the Filipino paradox too.

My mother-in-law has been a staunch carnivore all her life. Since the time she sprouted her first set of milk teeth until today, the major, if not the only significant component of her diet has been pork meat with generous fat margins on the side. She consumes tremendous amounts of these everyday usually with a bottle of cola. She is so in love with pork fat that if she had limited funds she would move heaven and earth for a taste of pork. She is a few years shy of sixty and she has never had a stroke. Every year, she is given a clean bill of health.

We also have male neighbors aged 30-60 who also eat loads of pork. On top of that, they also frequently siphon the beer supply of the local store until it’s as dry as the Sahara. They will stop drinking only when pigs start to fly.

I believe my in-law and neighbors aren’t the only ones who regularly feast on pork and alcohol. Every weekend, our city holds what is known as the night café where stalls that stretch through a couple of blocks all sell beer and grilled pork in abundance. That doesn’t include the numerous bars, restaurants and cafes that all serve death in dishes and mugs.

I wonder why my beer and pork loving friends haven’t had heart attacks and liver diseases yet. Maybe there really is such as thing as a Filipino paradox.

About a week ago I was invited to a a former student’s 18th birthday party. In the Philippines, that is uniformly called a debut. That invitation was probably one of my biggest problems of the year. I was thinking of not attending for two reasons. First, I have a legendary dislike for formal stuff and second, my feet are shaped like Wolverine’s claws and don’t fit well in those expensive straps of leather they call formal sandals. I either end up walking like a constipated duck or destroying the footwear before I can take a single step.

I still ended up attending but I defiantly wore jeans, a black top and heavily fortified sandals that looked more like those worn by Leonidas’ 300. Fortunately, a bunch of my former students, who didn’t give a damn if I grew a beard to boot, invited me to their table. That practically made me the only adult at the “kid’s” table.

Naturally, like every adult in quarter life crisis (a.k.a. trying hard teenager), I enjoyed my night with the kids. The food was great and the birthday girl was perfectly engaging. Enjoyment aside however, the event has yet again sparked a long dormant question in my mind. I wonder if Filipinos know why we celebrate debuts or why debuts were originally celebrated in the first place. If parents knew what they were for, would we still have debuts?

In the past, debuts for female French and English aristocrats were a sign that the debutantes were ready for marriage. It was also an indirect way of “selling” the ladies to the eligible bachelors present. This was done to secure favorable and strategic marriages since women of noble birth at that time were mere pawns used to secure alliances, power and money for families and countries.

Whenever I tell people this story, they invariably say that debuts in the Philippines are different. They are meant to signal a woman’s maturity and independence. This is coming from people who support married children with kids staying under their roofs.

Of course, my former student is quite intelligent. I have no doubt she knew exactly why she wanted a debut.

I, however, also know exactly why I fervently hope my daughter will not want to have a debut. No, its not about the sandals this time.

My family and I were at the mall yesterday. We had no choice but to be there. The mall has everything we need including a much needed respite from the oppressive heat. Lately though I’m beginning to think that suffering from prickly heat is a much better ordeal than being haunted by thoughts of explosives.

The story about the bomb that tore through three stories of Glorietta 2 is still on every news program and broadsheet. Yesterday the news said that nine had died. Today, the morning news said the number had risen to 11 with close to a hundred still suffering from injuries.

While the government is busy discreetly defending itself against allegations that the explosives were taken from military supplies, some of us mourn. I may not know the people who died but somehow, their imagined personal stories fill me with misery. It is the touch of personal tragedy that has become more poignant in this story. Somewhere out there is a family without a father, mother, son or daughter. It could have been my family.

To be honest, I am selfish. I would love to die quickly any time soon so I can stop trying to live better and failing at every attempt. It’s a different story though if someone I love has to leave ahead of me. That would make life unbearable. Yesterday at the mall, I made sure I was always beside my husband and baby. In a horrible, twisted kind of way, I was thinking that if a bomb exploded, we would hopefully die together.

This is sadder than anything I’ve ever known—the feeling that you can’t live life. In the Philippines it’s not just poverty that’s stopping us anymore. These days it is also well-founded fear. Somehow, our people have become both materially and internally impoverished.

The members of my biological family never had a night life so I never knew that there are creatures on earth that can stay up 20 hours a day spending more than half of that time transfusing alcohol into their veins. I have only fairly recently learned of their existence and I have discovered that in their eyes, I am the mythical creature. Where the heck have I come from? Have I never heard of beer and clubbing before? Ummm… no.

I never drink with these new friends of mine because I can’t. I’m allergic to beer so I am often reduced to being called a guest relations officer (GRO) and to listening to their growing insanity. Of course, I don’t appreciate their chauvinistic manners but I stick around because it’s amusing to hear men sob about their life stories, the same ones I can easily record with a mobile phone and use to blackmail them.

You won’t believe that men, who look like Jim Carey but feel like Sylvester Stallone, actually have so much drama in their lives that they’d probably make some cash if they sold their life stories to a TV drama scout.

My favorite generic tale is about the nagging wife waiting at home with an ax or the verbal equivalent of it, ready to slash her husband’s pride (or his manhood) into half. The stories of daily married life are all almost the same. The wife has no job, stays at home all day and still expects to get all of her husband’s wages. The poor unfortunate husband has no other recourse than to refrain from coming home, preferring instead to drown his sorrows in a pool of fermented grain.

I don’t know if the stories are true but if they are, I wonder why they ever married their wives. They can’t use the excuse that the women changed as soon as they became wives. I personally know that SOME of these women have always been clingy naggers whose favorite pastimes were to read their boyfriends’ phone inboxes and react to every female name in them. I would expect that the guys knew that. So why did they still get married? Maybe there’s another version to the popular generic tale I haven’t heard of before– the one where the husbands are the villains.

*Photo credit goes to Vener, one of my UNMARRIED online buddies who also loves fermented grain.

“Where?” he asked.

“There,” I said, pointing at a seemingly microscopic detail in front of him for the umpteenth time.

He squinted at the monitor in front of him and then looked up at me with eyes that looked like they had sunk two inches into their sockets.

I checked the time. It was 9:00 p.m. and we were barely halfway through. I looked at his half imploring eyes with my bloodshot ones. “I don’t care if you can’t go home to your pregnant wife tonight. You have to finish this before 10 even if it kills you!”

***

When I left my last job as a school publication moderator, I thought that I had finally seen the end of my printing press days. I seem to belong to such a rare breed though that my old employer has had no choice but to ask me to resume my old hobby of shamelessly terrorizing students, meticulously going through mounds of teenage angst-ridden compositions and obsessively looking for minutely misaligned text. The above transcript is an example of me breathing down the neck of a hapless printing press artist.

To be honest, there is nothing like the stress of trying to beat a deadline. I must admit though that I have always enjoyed and secretly welcomed the adrenaline rush of publication work. Incidentally, the pay isn’t really too bad.

I remember my first attempt at moderating a school publication. On top of my basic salary, I also received extra payment from the school for every issue released. Surprisingly, the first printing press I worked with also offered me a 10% rebate which, in my inexperience I promptly refused. The printing press tried to assure me that it was not a bribe but I was too scared to even touch the money. I later learned that transactions with other printing presses also often include hefty rebates for moderators.

***

By the way, I still don’t accept personal rebates. I let my students use whatever rebates we get as a working fund. Not everyone agrees with me and some even call me a fool for refusing easy money like that. They say cash rewards are a fact of life in most business transactions. In fact, my husband who works for a company says his colleagues also get rewarded in different ways by contractors and suppliers.

My experience made me think of transactions in a larger scale. If small fish like me get “bribed” so easily, that means big time fish do too. That means a certain former mayor who has denied ever receiving anything in exchange for a grossly overpriced public market project and the COMELEC official who has also denied receiving anything for another overpriced but shelved deal may really have been offered some rewards. I don’t know. This is just me thinking. I’m a virtual nobody but I have experienced being technically “bribed”. How much more those bigwigs? Positions of responsibility really do require exceptional self-control.

I am fast becoming a delinquent blogger but I have not lost interest in blogging. In fact, I would love to be a full time blogger if only it could earn me more cash. The thing is, I would probably earn more if I played a harmonica on the sidewalk with a rusty can in front of me than by blogging. I’m not about to play instruments and do somersaults in the streets yet, but I’m beginning to think that’s not such a bad idea compared to what I’m doing now.

The reason why I can’t blog so often anymore is because I currently have two jobs with a third job fast approaching. No, I have no plans of self-annihilation or death by fatigue. Neither do I have delusions of gold deposits and a Swiss bank account. For some in the Philippines, working two eight hour shifts is not motivated by ambition but by survival. Yes, I am driving myself insane with work so I can send my daughter to school and myself to a mental institution.

This kind of reminds me of the government computation made this year that said that a family of five in the National Capital Region could live on a monthly income of P8,254 ($184.44). I suppose my husband and I could abandon our pursuit of cash and live on the estimated income as long as we refrain from buying clothes, eating anything else other than noodles and sending our child to a good school. Incidentally, I am still infinitely better off than a lot of Filipinos. The World Bank said earlier this year that 15 million Filipinos attempt to survive on $1 a day. Wow! That’s something else even I can’t imagine.

I had so gotten used to the idea of moving around everyday with the help of gasoline that I had forgotten that there will come a time when the world will eventually run out of sources to get our present kind of gasoline from. Yes, fossil fuel from which we get our gasoline will not last forever and the Arab nations will soon have dry oil wells. This is probably why the search for alternative fuel resources like biofuel has been stepped up one notch.

Rumor has it that Zubiri, one of the senators of the Philippines, is a staunch supporter of developing biofuel. This is why during the conflict in the recently concluded senatorial elections, my husband hoped Zubiri would win over Pimentel. I have since shared to my husband though that this seemingly environmentally friendly alternative energy source has a dark side.

While I was doing a writing project I discovered that biofuel may yet again be another manifestation of our race’s destructive capabilities. Today, Indonesia and Malaysia combined supply more than 80% of the worldwide demand for biofuel. Because of the great demand for it, a large part of both countries’ forest areas have been cleared to make way for palm plantations that are one of the sources of biofuel. The result is another drastic damage to the delicate balance of nature.

The destruction of forests has displaced the orange haired lovable apes we know as orangutans. Many of these harmless creatures have been brutally killed, injured or left to face the future prospect of starvation. Today, international groups like the Orangutan Conservancy to which the pictures on this post are credited, struggle to save, protect and promote the existence and propagation of orangutans. Unfortunately, there are now only a mere 60,000 of them left in Borneo and Sumatra.

It seems we humans have a way of destroying things wherever we poke our fingers into. My husband says Zubiri will be supporting other efforts for creating sustainable sources of biofuel aside from using palm oil. Let’s hope that this time we don’t end up destroying anything else.

Last week, Jarius Bondoc, the journalist responsible for partly exposing the anomalous National Broadband Network deal started receiving death threats. Sigh. His experience is another example yet again of why you shouldn’t be caught holding a pen or a tape recorder in the Philippines. Here are my other top reasons for avoiding the field of journalism.

1.) The Facts

In a country where politicians each have storage bins of alternative faces, excuses and reality based fairytales, the facts are never what they seem. Write a story today and expect to have to write a contradictory account the next day. Search for the NBN deal online for example and you are sure to get thousands of updated and revised stories enough to fill the days of a prisoner on a life sentence or enough to kill the brain cells of top political analysts.

2.) The Distinction

There is nothing like reading your name on your first by-line and knowing that thousands of people around the country are either using your words to incite sedition or wrap dried fish with. Of course, in the Philippines, this is not the only form of distinction that journalists can hope to enjoy. Hit hard long enough and you might just find your face pasted on a black cardboard with red letters that say M-I-S-S-I-N-G or D-E-A-D.

3.) The Excitement

Sure. Journalists get to rub elbows with the most distinguished international personalities. They also get to be on the front row of the most important world events. Filipino journalists however also have the added excitement of anticipating whether yesterday’s short message sender will really be waiting at the entrance to the office with a .45.

4.) The Pay

Well I suppose journalists who work for national outfits really do get reasonable salaries. The majority of provincial journalists however, who get killed more often probably even don’t have enough cash to buy coffee and cookies for their wake.

5.) The Reaction

Yes, the Filipino public is outraged but so many journalists get killed every year that the expressions of shock after hearing of another death has become similar to a prerecorded tape that gets shown after every fresh killing.

Well, it’s not a pleasant scenario which makes people like Mr. Bondoc all the more admirable. Let’s hope he can dodge another bullet.