Caustic Thoughts

Random funny thoughts with a taste of Pinoy and a hint of acid.

Too Old to Be Emo?

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EMO KidsIt’s been two years since I resigned from my hybrid office/school job. In these two years however my former boss has continued to ask for my help on every single issue of the school paper. Actually, what she really needed was a club bouncer who would have made sure that the heads of the editorial staff rolled. I fit the job description closest.

I’ve been praying for an end to this hemorrhage-inducing publication work since five years ago. I do hope that this March issue will be my last. It’s not that I don’t enjoy working with concentrated capsules of hormones. Oh yes, I do relish forcing eager young Friendster citizens to write about socially relevant issues that they just can’t relate to or are not interested in. But I honestly think I’m losing my touch.

I made a major slip last issue. It was probably because I wanted to finally stop harassing the weepy, distraught printing press artist that I decided to release an issue that had not passed my rigid obsessive compulsiveness. Also, for a change, I wanted to be home before the clock struck late and before my taxi turned into a pumpkin. One thousand printed copies later I discovered to my horror that one of the feature pages contained a picture of a teen with his middle finger sticking out. I nearly fainted. The paper is the official publication of a CATHOLIC school!

The feature page in question contained an article about the emo culture. The article already raised a few of my internal eyebrows. That was mainly because I have a deep respect for emo musicians who take offense at their genre being taken for a cultural fad. But because I had lost the drive to punish myself, the staff and the printing press with my exacting tyranny, I let the feature pass and did not even notice the presence of the offending finger.

The solution to the finger problem? I was told that the publication moderator I was assisting told the other teachers to sit straight, pull their tummies in and start coloring over the finger in nearly all of the one thousand printed copies. They had no choice. How could you explain a finger in that position to a grade 1 pupil? I should at least have sent 3 in 1 coffee sachets to those dedicated educators.

I know I may be losing my touch not so much because I could no longer stand staring at every minute detail but because the whole emo issue really proved that I could barely relate with the kids of today. My former students and staff members used to say that they liked me because I understood their generation. Five years later, I can hardly understand the literal definition of emo culture.

For most of my life I was probably a good example of a member of today’s emo culture. I often thought of deep, dark, depressing thoughts and dressed daily in black which is probably why I once often wished aliens would just abduct me and put an end to my miserable perspective of life. During my time though, I was said to have had a condition that required the assistance of experts in bright, academic offices or of double servings of the latest self-help phenomenon. Now, a lot of kids actually enjoy being or at least seeming emotionally skewed. I must have been partially asleep these past few years and missed something.

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Can You Love Half of a Man?

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A recent post by Pinksoda, a fellow CDO Blogger reminded me of what my friends used to say, “Forget to take care of yourself and your husband will leave you someday.” I wonder if this is just a uniquely Pinoy sentiment or if others from around the world believe it too. Here, that roughly translates to, “Allowing yourself to get a waistline larger than your husband’s, six pack eye bags and arm flab only a mother could love will ensure that your husband will leave you for Bb Gandanghari.”

I guess my friends were worried for me. Although my bones tend to stick out more than my fat, I’m not exactly the kind of lady men would lay down their jackets on puddles for. You see, I used to look like a man. I looked masculine on purpose because I wanted to rebel against the conventions of femininity and the prevailing damsel in distress mentality that seemed so popular when I was young. Clearly, I preferred to be the distressing damsel.

I knew that my male look was a success because people called me dong, the local generic term for young boys and once, just for the heck of proving that I did not look feminine, I entered a mall’s male comfort room. There was no mass exodus of scandalized males. (No. I did not look at what they were doing in those urinals.)

I found out later though that even if I wanted to look feminine, I would still have looked masculine simply because I had no idea that there is a difference between male and female casual clothing. That’s what happens to teens whose heads are so far buried in the intoxicating clouds of literature. There is an absolute lack of awareness that outside, the world turns. My husband was the first to break the news to me that men’s jeans and women’s jeans don’t come in the same cut. He was also the first to teach me that I don’t have to dress like a man to seem strong.

My first office job temporarily put an end to my cross dressing days because I was required to wear clothing that no self-respecting man would’ve worm. I was also told to paint my face because the enemy (the boss or the client?) isn’t pacified by a naturally pale face filled with the battle scars of corporate stress.

Unfortunately, a recent salon mishap has forced me to return to my less engaging alter ego. I knew that I was once again lacking a feminine exterior because of an unfortunate run in with a KFC service crew. In KFC here, the counter crew no longer issue numbers to waiting customers. Instead, they write descriptions of the customers on receipts that are then passed on to the service crew assigned to deliver the delayed orders and the receipts to the waiting customers.

My description said that I was a girl in a blue shirt. The service crew passed my table several times and it never occurred to him that I was the girl in blue. Unless he was color blind, he must have missed me because he didn’t know that I was a girl.

I’ve asked my husband for his opinion. He says he prefers my androgynous, unpainted, unpolished look. It’s either he’s lying or he’s got weird taste in women. So tell me, can Pinoy men really love a woman who looks like half of a man?

Just When We Thought…

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In my husband’s eyes, our daughter was showing great promise. For years, she watched mainly Batman and the Justice League; she preferred cars over dolls and she actually asked to have a Captain America figurine on her birthday cake even though Cinderella was right beside the man in star spangled tights.

To my husband, the unconventional taste of our daughter was something to be happy about. It’s like an assurance that she’d never grow up like other girls in frills and skirts, some of whom end up with huge Avon bills for daddy and long lines of salivating packs of testosterone at the gate. Then again, my husband was a popular kid in school so he doesn’t know that unconventional girls in school are the butt of all pranks and don’t fit anywhere, not even on the walls as wallpaper, leaving them to wonder if they were really alien babies switched at birth. Yes, weird kids pray every night for spaceships to come along and take them to a home where weirdness is the norm.

Fortunately (or unfortunately) there’s been a switch in our kid’s interests lately. After initially showing reluctance at watching singing mermaids, dancing chambermaids and effeminately beautiful prince charmings, she finally agreed to watch some of Disney’s fairy tales. Disney must have invested on hypnotic techniques because she is hooked and is now singing Under the Sea, not knowing that in reality it should really be Under the Oil Spill. Well, at least our kid doesn’t have to think she’s an alien and she can now relate to girls her age when they talk about the latest fashion in pink and baby blue.

Of course, there is a price for normalcy. It is now my responsibility to find a way to tell her that people don’t get married and run off into the sunset after meeting only once and singing to each other in chirping voices. People meet; fall head over heels over each other’s nice teeth, eyes, brains and pleasing personality; grow sick and tired of each other then either stab each other in the back or muster the will needed to crawl (after all that tiresome running) to that sunset together.

Then of course there are babies, rising costs of everything, unemployment and the husband’s former officemate with better vital statistics to think about…

Blog in ICU

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I’ve been asked why I bother to keep this blog. It’s obviously worth less than the time and effort it takes to maintain it. I am more likely to attract flies than rabid hordes of fans with it, although I think flies are a better option than contracting rabies.

My stubborn loyalty to my first ever crib online can probably be attributed to a flaw in my character. I can never let go of something I’ve begun even when my creation and I have become mutual parasites. But of course, being human, I prefer to paint my character in a better light so I have to create a nicer excuse for keeping this dead weight of a blog. I can always adopt the usual excuse and say that it is all for the sake of therapeutic self-expression, but I’d like to be original so I’ve deluded myself (like a virgin bride on her wedding night) into believing there’s something more.

My excuse has its roots in college. I used to be able to write in a way that would give my readers nosebleeds. Friends and teachers told me I had the potential to become one of those non-bathing, obsessive compulsive magnets of priceless (because they have no value in a pawnshop) literary distinctions, and then I graduated and reality took over.

True enough, all the jobs offered to me involved writing in some form but I was told not to write in a nosebleed-inducing kind of way because tissue paper prices were at an all time high and clients tended to balk at the idea of having to stock piles of tissue paper just to read my work.

If I insisted on writing my way, I had to become a literary writer instead. I was told though that in the Philippines, a literary writer can only hope for a comfortable life if she learned to write not just to induce nosebleeds but to induce hemorrhages, if she took more brain-killing higher studies and if she taught classes of fresh rebels who will make fun of her diction, her stone age fashion and her nose hairs for the rest of her monotonous life.

So I HAD to learn to write in a way that would not cause bloodshed of any kind, otherwise, I’d be the one shedding all sorts of body parts including my sanity for lack of financial resources. The end result is that I’ve forgotten to write in my materially unrewarding style.

This blog is an attempt to keep in touch with a small fraction of who I was as a writer before. But hell were they ever right. If crime does not pay, this pays even less.

To All the Customer Reps I’ve * Before

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I am sorry. If a head of state can use the same line and make an entire nation forget her less than sparkling trail of shit, I can say it too and be forgiven, right?

I know how difficult your job is. I once passed a call center screening but never reported for my first day of work after I got my first sample call from a fake client who sounded like the world was ending and it was all because of my inability to solve his problem. 
I know it’s never really your fault when my wireless internet connection decides to take a hike without permission. I’ve been told it’s really the fault of those tall, healthy Indian and mango trees growing around my house and the random blowing of the wind that just happens to blow more randomly on my antenna than on others. 
But for the sake of my reputation and credibility, I can’t afford to show more proof of my deteriorating sanity by shaking my fists at the wind and the trees. That’s why I indulge in my weakness of peeing horrendously when my bladder is full. I’m sorry that you are always at the receiving end. 
It doesn’t help that when you make me wait for 2-4 minutes your corporate song plays and the only lyrics I hear is, “Maghihintay ako (I’ll be waiting).” Is that some kind of hypnotic suggestion trick? I’m telling you it has the opposite effect on me. The longer I hear it the more vitriolic fluid gets stored in my bladder. Oh, and did I mention that I studied politically correct forms of mild hypnosis in college, the ones they called Marketing 101 and Counseling so I am predisposed to reject all forms of subliminal suggestions to have patience equivalent to the height of Mt. Everest. 
Don’t worry though, you’ll probably never hear from me again. Since I can’t change the fact that I live in a windy place with lots of trees, I have finally decided to ditch my wireless connection for a wired one that’s supposed to be resistant to winds and obstacles. The thing is some of my wired pals also complain about wired connections. Does that mean that I will probably have a new set of customer service representatives to * now? Oh bother. I hope they can get beyond the pitch and tone of my voice and recognize my subliminal message: I am soooo sorry.

Rising From the Ruins

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“It rained for four years, eleven months and two days… Macondo was in ruins. In the swampy streets there were the remains of furniture, animal skeletons covered with red lilies…”
—One Hundred Years of Solitude
Gabriel Garcia Marquez
At least five people have told me that they don’t like to watch the news because it’s always about depressing bad news. I’m sorry to say though that I have little choice but to write about bad news. My previous post was about the January 5 Cagayan de Oro flash flood. On January 11, another one hit the city. Since then, I had been holed up at home for five days while the rain poured and reminded us who’s boss and how easily politicians can be sent on wild hunts for donkeys to pin the blame on. 
 
The calamity is not the worst of its kind. For online workers like me though, the incident was the equivalent of not having been able to get into Noah’s ark. Days of electrical connections that are like Christmas lights (now you have lights, now you don’t) and wireless internet connections that get so easily blown out of trajectory like an emaciated dieter in a blizzard are like slow death by drowning. A few days away from the virtual world can lead to lost subscribers, customers, advertisers and gulp, those green pieces of paper we swap hotdogs and Starbucks for.
But again, I cannot— should not whine like a spoiled socialite who got an espresso instead of a macchiato by mistake. At least those were all that I lost (sniff*). Others have lost traces of their existence along with their wrecked houses. According to last Monday’s news, the number of affected families has risen to 13,000. As if to prove the veracity of the reports, more and more basketball courts (that are omnipresent fixtures in Filipino communities) have been converted to shelters. 
I should know better though than to worry too much over my fellow Kagay-anons. The top picture taken by fellow CDO Blogger Pangitster is not an image of people fleeing from the floods. It is a photo of people enjoying the flood. This, my friends, is a perfect picture of Filipino character even in the face of disaster. Hit this country with a calamity and a smile will beam right out into the world. 
I’d like to believe that this collective Filipino trait is not the result of plain simple-mindedness, or worse, idiocy. Some say jollity is simply a natural Filipino trait that defies explanation. I think though that the poverty, hardship and/or simplicity that have been forced upon us by the twin diseases of greed and corruption have rendered us immune to sorrow. Why should we sweat the big stuff when we always have so little to gain or lose? If we’d been rolling in the filth of ill-gotten wealth, we’d have descended into the pits of depression if we’d lost all that filth.
So while people did suffer at the heat (or cold) of the disaster, as emotionally captured by Titus Velez, we can only expect the Filipino Kagay-anon to rise again. 
*Photos by Pangitster of CDO Bloggers
P.S. The CDO Bloggers have been able to raise P10,000 in 48 hours through the help of bloggers, plurkers and tweeters from all over the country and the world. The money raised was used to buy goods for those affected by the flash floods. On the photo to the right are a few of the CDO Bloggers with the goods. We wish to thank all those who have helped us help those in need.
Since we are all aware though that con artists are everywhere, we would like to clarify that the official Paypal e-mail to which donations can be sent is jamgfx@gmail.com. All other requests for money made in behalf of the CDO Bloggers with other e-mail addresses indicated do not come from us.
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Hell Hath No Fury Like Nature Scorned a.k.a. the Great CDO Flood

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I’ve been away from some of my online haunts lately. My momentum broke because the week began with a flood. Not the knee-deep flood that is the staple in expanding Philippine cities but the run for your life kind of flood that makes you wonder if the sins of mankind have yet again merited another Biblical Great Flood. This time, the story stars not a local Noah but the embattled conman or martyr (depending on your loyalties) from the people’s palace who came recently with a grin and matching relief goods.

It’s tempting to blame the calamity on the entities in power, the same ones who regularly mount circus acts that are more astounding and convoluted than the acrobatic shows of the Cirque du Soliel. Unfortunately, not even Filipino trapos (traditional politicians) can make complicated rain dances that cause floods so they can display their beneficence, pocket disaster funds and chisel their names on the concrete projects intended to prevent disasters.
Of course, the old ones still believe in conspiracy theories and they suspect that the powers that be have been affixing their signatures in invisible ink on logging clearances. The younger theorists though tend to believe more in the effects of global warming. The Cagayan de Oro flood may very well have been our first taste of the nastiness of this new-fangled environmental mess. 
I once worked in an education institution that taught its students that global warming is, beyond doubt, real. I never knew until I read about Michael Crichton’s differing stand that some experts dispute the theory of global warming. Of course, if Leonardo DiCaprio says it’s real, it must be because I am female and he said so (that was a joke). 
The sad fact is, whether global warming really causes floods or not, these floods are likely related to the price of what industrialists call development, the kind that they enjoy. The ones whose homes were underwater for a day or disappeared with the water forever probably can’t appreciate anything. 
So while my initial reaction to our two days of no electricity was to scream that I would not survive without the internet, I’m not about to complain. Many of the thousands of affected families (5000 according to one report) have had to swim for their lives, contend with washed down snakes and sleep on cold concrete for days after the flood. Who knows where they’ll be sleeping next and what they’ll be feeding their kids when the relief from those relief goods run out. 
P.S. Is it just me or is the riverside balut maker’s hut missing? Where have all the ducks gone? I suppose there will be a shortage of unborn chicks for my drinking buddies to feast on.
*Third photo by Robstroy of CDO Bloggers

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Married to Google: My Blogging Tip for Domestic Bliss

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One of the most controversial statements that rocked the Pinoy blogosphere in 2008 came from socialite Malu Fernandez. For those who don’t remember or never knew about the foot in her mouth incident, this is what she had to say about blogging and bloggers:

“But blogging, aside from Perez Hilton and other big time bloggers (you know who you are) is for me a slacker job or a medium and pastime for lonely people to connect. Unless you’re in bloody Siberia or in a Gulag prison, try stepping outside your comfort zone and turn off the laptop or pc, you just might find some real live people to talk to instead of typing away in cyber space.” —Malu Fernandez in Manila Standard Today

Needless to say, her statement, name and reputation were all dragged into the virtual town square and beaten till blue. I participated gleefully in the beating but even at that time, I had no idea to what extent Fernandez had been mistaken.

A few months after the beating, I met a number of great Pinoy bloggers, the quiet, golden ones who get checks from Google every month but who are wise enough not to brandish their skills and earnings in plain sight. If they did, I bet Malu would have that foot throat deep by now.
I had no idea so many Pinoys enjoy secret success online. I wish I were one of them. This is no longer about the lure of unrestrained self-expression. I was never one to blog about the quality of my baby’s breath or my decade delayed angst to begin with. This is about finally finding something I would love to do for the rest of my waking hours without having to beg at the table or perform intricate article tricks for scraps from other blog owners.
I must admit that inspiration has driven me into blogging addiction. It had gotten so bad that at one point, it took an assortment of creepy, crawling critters that had accumulated over what they must have thought was my decomposing carcass to extricate me from the Matrix. I found out after waking up that clawed, canned goods-subsisting creatures in dreadlocks had replaced my husband and child while I was away.
But now that I’m done with nail clipping and hair grooming, I’m not about to volunteer for admission into a rehab or bloggers’ anonymous support group. I’ve decided to dive deeper into my addiction at least until after I have achieved blogging success or after the orderlies take me away.
I suspect though that much depends on how well I use the blogging tips I’ve learned last year. There were a lot of them but one lesson seems to stand out in my mind right now:
Be loyal to Google or prepare to be a whore or gigolo.
Google is like a domestic partner, the half of the relationship that holds the purse strings and the rewards that go with it. Get caught looking at the sexy competition and you will get publicly asphyxiated and stripped of your page rank and Adsense earnings till you and your blog are cold, naked and humiliated in the blogosphere public market. If one desires domestic bliss thou shall not overuse keywords, participate in traffic exchange programs and write paid posts. Google is a demanding spouse.
If, on the other hand, you take offense at Google’s lordship there is no stopping you or Google from filing for annulment. In this case, you’d better be prepared to sell yourself body and soul. Without Google, you’ll never survive with just one mistress or boy toy.
Now I have to decide if my blog will be a meek wife or a multi-talented adulteress in 2009.

Christmas Economics

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My blog is distinctly missing a Christmas greeting and it’s not because I’m Scrooge in the flesh. Despite appearances, I am a Christmas fanatic. I studied in Catholic schools where every year, traditional tableaux reminded me of whose birthday it was we were celebrating. For some strange reason, I was never chosen to play Mary, Joseph or one of the three kings. The closest I could get to a role in a school tableau was as donkey alternate.

My home situation contributed too to developing holiday eagerness. I grew up in Baguio where some houses, including our own, had chimneys. That and the cold weather gave my mom an excuse to to feed her kids the illusion that the Philippines was part of Santa’s itinerary. So I came to believe in St. Nick even if commonsense told me that Santa needed a century’s worth of Atkins or South Beach to fit through our non-western, slim, robber proof chimney flue.

So if I love Christmas so much, why don’t I have a post about it? I’ve been preoccupied with worldly, economic concerns. A few months before the holidays, a company beside my husband’s workplace announced that it would let go of all of its probationary employees. Of course, that was not pleasant news but that was still too far from home to cause me more than the expected distress at someone else’s misfortune. Two days before Christmas, my husband tells me they’ve all been put on forced leave. For daily paid workers, that’s some kind of “whoa!” That hit home.

No, we are not about to starve, but all of a sudden, the impersonal, intangible statistical figures on unemployment rates, inflation and falling stocks are singing carols at my doorstep. It may soon be my misfortune and not someone else’s. Today we lost the Christmas ham. Tomorrow we could lose the daily bacon.

That’s why Christmas almost flew past me. It’s a good thing I live in the Philippines. This is where even the dirt poor always have smiles to spare even when it’s not Christmas. This is the land of eternal smiles where worrying, especially during Christmas is out of place. It goes without saying that this is one of the countries where Christmas is most at home. No amount of economic crunching can detract from the collective happiness, the perpetual sense of family and the timelessness of His kind of love.

*Photo from Download Free Pictures

World Domination and Value Meals

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If there’s one thing in the Philippines that sprouts faster than weeds, it’s Jollibee outlets. It seems there’s always one in every corner. A little over five years ago, Cagayan de Oro only had two or three outlets around. Today, there are about ten of them with the newest having recently opened across Lourdes College. TEN! The number is enough to give you nightmares of swarms of giant yellow-orange bees out to get your pocket money and of thousands of chickens rising against chicken rights violations.

And they said the country is in economic distress. Apparently though, business must be doing great for Jollibee. We Filipinos just can’t seem to do without our value meals. A minimum wage earner will not hesitate to squander a good portion of his fleeting income for the tasty treats. That is even if Chickenjoy prices constantly threaten to send consumers into a coma and Yumburgers now resemble bald, thinning, receding hairlines. 
I must admit, I have a soft spot for Jollibee even if I like McDonalds better. I get emotional when anything Filipino rises to great heights (technically speaking, the founders seem to have strong Chinese origins, but the Jollibee characteristic taste is simply Pinoy).
I suppose it could only get better. Jollibee could be the next big tool in our bid for world domination, next to OFWs, TFC, and that infernal novelty song-infested noontime show. There are outlets sprouting outside of the Philippines. It’s only a matter of time before people from across the globe become infected with the urge to splurge on our value meals. Harharhar.
P.S. My daughter once said I look like Jollibee because of my generous rump. I wonder if that makes me qualified for mascot duty. 
*Photo taken from Sandy and Jasmine, my former students. These were my former publication staff members on their second childhood with Jollibee.