Caustic Thoughts

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

Changing Times

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I was getting rid of some memories the other day when I came across the cheer dance picture of one of the high school batches I was a publication moderator to. It reminded me of a few lines from Dodgeball, one of my toddler’s favorite movies (yes, she takes after her mother and is a fan of the game of “…degradation, violence and exclusion”).
In one of the scenes, Vince Vaughn’s character, Peter, helps Justin Long’s character, Justin get detached from a weight lift machine.
Peter: What are you doing with all that weight anyway? It’s dangerous.
Justin: …It’ll be worth it when I make it to the cheerleading squad…
Peter: …You wanna make it to the chearleading squad to prove to a girl that you are not a loser?
Justin: Yeah. Why?
Peter: Nothing. High school’s changed since I was a kid.
Yes, I do remember those days when the cheering squad was only just a quarter step above the losers’ circle. No, I am not so old as to remember pom pom girls in long white pleated skirts and long-sleeved sweaters that made them look like medieval virgin maidens. I do however remember those days in my school when students were segregated into two mutually exclusive groups— the athletes and the cheerers. 
In my time, if a girl couldn’t suck it up and play hard ball, she’d have to cheer instead or fail physical education. It didn’t help that the administration banned all forms of props and costumes. There was nothing between our naked faces and the hissing crowd. Some of us geeky, introverted ones who couldn’t hit balls smaller than an elephant felt like we were culled from the elite (i.e. we felt like rejects). It also made us feel like illegal immigrants. The more enterprising among us, annually migrated to mouse holes to escape from mandatory cheering. I pretended every year to be sick with some unknown disease that was similar to the bubonic fever.
Since then, high school has indeed changed. Now, kids actually audition for the chance to dance, scream and roll over the gym floor. Some of them really do cry if they don’t make the cut. That’s just… (groping for words)…amazing!
I wonder what else will change in the high school of the future. I heard water girls and pick-that-ball boys are becoming all the rage.

Hair Relax

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I studied for 16 years in an institution run by nuns. I worked for nuns for another 3 years. In all my 19 years with nuns, it was only last year that I learned of the truth behind the veil. I was told by a lay insider that underneath the veil lay short, short hairs. Not poodle trimmed hairs but unevenly cut strands of untreated hair. Nuns apparently keep their hair short and unremarkable because hair is a symbol of vanity.

There seems to be some truth about the link between hair and vanity, or as some people put it, the existential right to look good. These days, the most popular Filipino salon services are hair relax and hair rebond in which vertically challenged hair strands are whipped down to limp obedience. These services cost anywhere between a days wages to a month’s salary but women, members of the third sex and those of undetermined genders still line up for them.
I’m not sure but I have a feeling all my years with nuns have influenced my hairstyle preferences, or my lack thereof. My hair is either pulled back in the same style as those worn by Filipino women past their prime and sanity or cut androgynously short. I only had my hair treated twice in my entire life. On the first occasion, I had it stretched because the service came free with my hair trim. The second time was two days ago when I had it relaxed. Like a fool, I had fallen for the hairdresser’s sales talk and tried to convince myself that I had willfully consented because I had pitied him for his obvious desperation to bag a customer. Maybe I was partly convinced when he told me that my hair wasn’t any nicer than a string of frozen beans.
It was then that I realized that there are far more painful things than being treated by a gynecologist. There is nothing relaxing about a hair relax! Halfway through the procedure my scalp felt like it was being peeled away by a Sioux Indian who was practicing his first scalping. I was convinced that the chemicals had seeped into my skull and blood-brain barrier and caused even more damage to my already scattered gray matter.
The worst part was that I couldn’t tell right after whether my hair looked more like Snoopy’s ears or an ancient Egyptian wig. As one of my students put it, I could pretend to be Cleopatra. My husband just has to comb his hair to the front to look like Marc Antony. Our kid is already too much of a tyrant not to resemble Cleopatra’s son, Caesarion. If we lived 2000 years ago, we would have looked like royalty. Right now, I just look like a cross between a beagle and a dead queen.
I need to find out which is more fashionable, a shaved head or a veil.

Home Sweet Home

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I’ve said it before. There is a practical function behind the Filipino’s tendency to keep close family ties. By nature, we really do value family but I think there is also a social reason behind this. Because we live in a poor country, we each need other people to survive. Families help individuals survive economically. Living with my in-laws despite my being vertically and horizontally grown has allowed me to survive.

I am more fortunate than others because I do not have blood-sucking in-laws who do not mind my obvious lack of marbles. To foreign eyes, this Filipino way of life may seem like mutual parasitism especially for some unfortunate foreigners who marry into families that make them feel like dispensers of state benefits. In my case, my in-laws have only really provided me with the rare opportunity to learn how to care and share. 
I am still my parent’s daughter though and their value of independence, at the expense of mutual survival and family affection, is stronger in me. Although I appreciate the family aspect of Filipino culture, I still feel the desire to call my own shots. Hence, my current search for my own house. As things are going, I might as well have dug a burrow and called it home.
The most affordable option in one subdivision close to the city is a structure that is only 20 square meters large in a 40 square meter lot. I’ve been to farms with pig pens bigger than this. You can forget about interior divisions too. The kitchen, living room and dining area all share the same space. The worst part is that one wall is also the wall of your neighbor. That means your neighbors can practically smell how much your laundry stinks and hear every syllable above a whisper. It’s like having your very own wire tap. 
Surprisingly, this wholly unattractive package will cost me P11,500 (+/-$287) a month for fifteen years! That’s more or less an entire month’s salary for an average earner. Sure, I can afford that if I don’t eat, drink, bathe and sleep for 15 years!
There are more affordable options in subdivisions in forsaken nooks that are miles away from work, school and civilization. Affordable houses in these areas are made by filling pre-fabricated slabs with cement like filling a waffle machine with waffle mix. A few years ago, several of these houses in one village took it upon themselves to take a ski ride down the slope over which they were built and land on the houses below in a heap of rubble and an assortment of rejected appliances from Japan and Korea.
It’s depressing that many Filipino families simply can’t afford decent homes. I think I’ll go dig my burrow now.

I Would Like to Thank My Sponsors…

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Entertainment talk shows and variety shows are a staple in the Philippines. If you watch any of these shows, you would notice that they all share one distinct feature that is uniquely Filipino. I’m not talking about the high class circus acts where the performing animals belong to the highest level in the animal kingdom and who are uniformly inclined towards airing out their privies, eating habits, mating practices and prey decapitation techniques. I’m talking about the part where the hosts shove Kleenex to a bawling guest who just lost her husband to a plump Lolita as a way of discreetly telling her to get a life so they can move on to thank their sponsors.

Yes, it seems it’s only really in the Philippines that most talk shows have a long “I would like to thank my sponsors…” segment. One show has so perfected the art that they have set aside one minute for every host to thank sponsors. A large digital clock ticks from behind where all the viewers can see it as they listen to a barely coherent list of eyewear, make up, wardrobe and liposuction providers. If they poured out a torrent of expletives, I wouldn’t have noticed.
In true Filipino talk show fashion, I would like to take a minute to thank a couple of entities. I would like to thank Roberto Cavalli for my eyewear, Kate Torralba for my gown, my mother for my underwear and the discount cosmetic surgeon underneath the overpass for the six pack abs he buried even further under all my fat. Kidding aside, I would seriously like to thank a couple of people, mostly my friends and the limited few who have discovered my insanity and genius at the same time.
Thank you Zkey for the wonderful blog award you gave me. “This 5-Star Blog Award is given to a blogger whose blog is of highest classification.A blog of excellence in the following criteria:- content, design and style, informative and accommodating.” In a similar gesture, I would like to pass on the award to other people who have great blogs. This is for you Uri, Pepe, Rocky, Jugu and Beaple.
I would also like to thank Nostalgia Manila for making me last week’s Nostalgia Bloggista. All those who wonder what I look like can take a peek at my cute self two decades ago when I had an excuse to be adorable and before I got the rings under my eyes and the hollow space in my chest.
My one minute is done.

More Politics Anyone?

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I’m starting to hate writing about government politics. It’s not just because my posts with politics in them are the least noticed. It’s also because politics, in any language, is distasteful, distressing and depressing. I’m sure some of those who drop by to read my blog feel the same.

As much as I would want to spare all of us from having loose bowels or fits of nausea, I feel it is my duty as a citizen to give an update on what the elected circus freaks are doing.

1. This week, the Speaker of the House lost his seat and, not surprisingly, has bitten the hand of the Ewok that fed him. After having had his seat taken right from under him, De Venecia is not taking things sitting on his rump on the house floor. He has spoken about the festering corruption in the Ewok’s palace. Beware oh short one, he knows the skeletons in your closet by name. I would have wanted to say, “Bravo De Venecia,” but his performance and stunning oratory are four years and millions of dollars too late. Do we even have to wonder why? Yung mag wawander pa, talagang slow!

2. Jun Lozada apparently has a story that does confirm that the First Gentleman and former Commission on Elections chief Abalos did get their hands mired in the anomalous $329 million broadband deal. While I am writing this piece, a certain scary administration senator with a foreign accent is banking on the power of her hard to understand vocabulary and atrocious diction to confuse people and discredit Lozada.

Are your bowels still intact? More importantly do you even care?

*Video credit:1piso/T.V. Patrol

Buy Me, Me, Me, Me

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There are worse things than death. Apparently, one of them is being a writer in the Philippines. Be a journalist and expect to disappear into another dimension or to have a shorter lifespan than your 90-year old diabetic grandmother. Be an online writer and expect to wring your brains dry for the cost of a meal a day. The worst fate however is reserved for the serious creative writers, many of whom have to rely on the mercy of their long suffering parents and relatives for their meals and whose talents are largely met with a “Huh?!” by the uncomprehending public.

Two Filipino authors in my reading list seem to confirm the sad state of books and book writers in the Philippines. Conrado de Quiros says writing books in the Phillipines will only earn you enough beer money. Bob Ong also says in one of his books that it would take a good Filipino author 3 years to sell at least 1,000 copies of his books. To survive as a writer in the Philippines, you need to have a full time job you partially hate, be an enterprising businessman or have a face as thick as the telephone directory so you can live on donations from people who constantly mistake (or not) your pensive mood for hunger.

I must confess, despite my claim of wanting to work again as the head of a corporate firing squad, I have this subdued suicidal wish to one day become a great book writer. By “great” I could mean great as in popular great or great as in, “I feel great but I am dirt poor but that’s okay because I am an intelligent artist who will have her rewards in the after life granting that the Filipinos in heaven or hell are more inclined to read books.” If one of my evil friends becomes a supervisor in hell, I will ask him to make reading my books a requirement.

Of course, that’s even granting that I have talent at all. How can you tell if you have talent to justify making a career suicide for the sake of art? How can you tell if you’re not the only one who thinks you’re talented? How can you tell if your mother isn’t bleeding her pension fund dry just to buy 1,000 copies of your work?

While you are helping me answer these questions, do drop by the local bookstore and help me support our great (popular and “I feel great”) writers. Buy their books and get a bonus freebie– improvement of the dwindling national collective intellect. Here are only some of these great authors:

1. Bob Ong

2. Pol Medina, Jr.

3. Jessica Zafra

4. Ambeth Ocampo

5. Conrado de Quiros

6. Cristina Pantoja-Hidalgo

7.   – who, if she finds out more than ten people think she has enough talent will publish books entitled: Memories of Sanity, Save Me From Extinction and I’m Going to Die Poor Because I Think I’m an Artist; What’s Your Excuse?

Pamalaye

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Last week I had the pleasure of experiencing a dying Filipino custom for the first time and all because I have this rare ability to smell food 10 kilometers away. Actually, I just happened to drop by a friend’s house and was happily surprised that her table had been richly laden with all of nature’s goodness as well as all of its evil—the kind that kills your heart after pleasuring your taste buds. 

Unfortunately, strangers were blocking the way. I was told that the obstacles to my happiness were my friend’s boyfriend’s family members. I had stumbled upon a pamalaye, the part of an engagement where the parents or family members of the groom formally ask for the bride’s hand in marriage. 
Apparently, among traditional families in the Philippines, wedding arrangements are discussed in between mouthfuls of insanely superfluous food. In the past, the man’s family solely sponsored the food.
My friend’s pamalaye was obviously organized hurriedly. If it had been planned and announced I would have known better than to show up salivating. I later learned that my friend’s decision to marry faster than you can say I-hate-your-cooking-future-mother-in-law was not because of temporary insanity but because she was already three months pregnant. In the Philippines of long ago, a situation like this would’ve ensured that the couple could officially choose their mode of death. They could die by clan firing squad, cord-free bungee jumping or social stigma.
These days, there is less disapproval over getting pregnant out of wedlock and getting married because of it. Since I don’t want to turn this post into a morality issue or a venue for comments on why you hate your mother-in-law, I would just like to leave my readers with a few questions to mull over. 
1. Is it absolutely necessary to get married if you get pregnant? There is no divorce in the Philippines. What are you going to do if you find out your husband likes guys better or is an escaped inmate of a mental ward?
2. What can you say about enacting a law that will make family member background investigations mandatory before couples marry? Marriage in the Philippines is also is a form of social survival. You don’t marry an individual; you marry families, cousins, the in-laws of in-laws and their pets.
3. Do you agree that you shouldn’t get pregnant if you are not emotionally or financially ready? Would you volunteer not to get laid– ever– to avoid pregnancy?
By the way, you might want to know that:
1. At least six out of seven of my guy pals who got married just because their girlfriends got pregnant are not happy. They frequently sing the line, “Regrets, I’ve had a few….” in dark videoke bars and then choke and switch to another song.
2. I didn’t get pregnant before I got married. I can almost hear you say, “So what?”
3. There was no traditional pamalaye before I got married. I had no idea there was such a thing because I lived under a western imperialist’s rock. I told my mom I would marry, or else…
4. My daughter’s life is hers. She can decide to get pregnant out of wedlock if she wants to as long as she made a conscious decision to do so OR she and her boyfriend have paychecks that can rival the Sultan of Brunei’s OR they can work harder than underpaid, overworked third world production workers. Her boyfriend must also be a good, clean, respectable man and not the spawn of the Alien and the Predator.

*Photo credit: download-free-pictures.com

Let’s Vote In

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We Filipinos are known for our ability to band together in the snap of a finger for a common cause. In recent years, that common cause has been to provide the most number of votes to Filipino contestants in international vote-in contests. That’s the secret why Filipino contestants always win something be it the first prize or the Ms. Photogenic award. That’s also why some international contest organizers know better than to go for a vote-in format when there are Filipino contestants unless the contestants talk dirt about the country and prefer sushi to adobo. Haha.

Rumor has it that the victor in the recently concluded Austrian Musical Die-Show, Vincent Bueno won because of the legendary Filipino people-text-together power. Bueno is a full Filipino who was born in Austria. He was the only Asian in the contest that was Austria’s glitzier answer to American Idol. Instead of pop songs, contestants had to battle it out by performing theater songs that required more vocal and stage prowess. Votes for the contestants came from the residents of European nations. Bueno was said to have gotten 67% of the final votes.

Of course, the rumors are just rumors but I can just imagine every single man, woman, teen, child, cat and dog with Filipino blood living in Europe sending in thousands of votes for Bueno. I can’t deny though that from my point of view, he does seem like he deserved to win. Who am I to disagree when I can only squawk while the guy can spin on stage and sing at the same time, get wet with water while performing and not slip or croak, sing and dance while apparently not breathing and sing in theater and have six pack abs?

Yes, we who don’t know a flat from a minor definitely think he’s a sensation but I wonder what real theater experts think.

*Video Credits: ronny1988FAK1911

Singing for Biscuits

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It’s official. ABC has lost the Idol franchise to GMA. What was once known as Philippine Idol will now be renamed Pinoy Idol so that the media Goliath, to which ABC never even stood a chance to begin with, can stake a claim to churning out the first Pinoy Idol, the winner of Philippine Idol being now reduced to being the first and only Philippine Idol. So there is now a difference between being Filipino and Pinoy? That’s just absurd (or is there a rule that you have to change the contest name if it changes networks?).

For as far back as anyone can remember, Filipinos have always been regulars at singing contests. The smallest communities would have annual events where contestants would croon on crepe paper decorated stages and vie for the grand prizes—cans of biscuits, gallons of all you can drink orange juice, packs of imported soap and bragging rights.

I was in the central part of town last Sunday and got a rare glimpse of this nearly extinct part of Filipino culture. Kids, mostly from the lower sectors of society, were lined up dressed in nearly ancient Sunday clothes their mothers might have worn before them. From the way they nearly busted the speakers, I could tell they were all intent on bagging whatever pack of goodies was at stake. Unfortunately, the contest that would have drawn crowds in the past was probably only attended by the contestants’ direct family members who didn’t mind going home without their ear drums.

People who would’ve been there if there had been no Big Brother “senseless night” probably now prefer the regular contest fare that media giants try to shove down our throats. With a little advertising and a lot of hype, Filipino singing contests are now also contests on who has the most friends, who has the least clothing, who can scream the loudest and who is the most pitiful. Yes, in contests these days, you need to be pitiful and to be pitied to actually bag the first prize even if your middle name is Notalent, Outoftune, Copycat or Secondchoiceifididntlookhandsome. The real winner is actually whichever network would rather send the whole nation into the arms of mediocrity than lose their ratings.

The worst part about our modern contests is that many of us are only a quarter proud of some of the real talents who actually win just because they don’t belong to the network that we watch (in the Philippines the last five words is roughly the same as the network that has fooled us the most). This is why we now have a would-be Pinoy Idol who isn’t the second but the first and who is apparently of a different species than our Philippine Idol.

Sigh. Maybe it’s just me but I do wish we could have those old biscuit contests again when we were a young, simple and uniformly proud nation that had friendly T.V. networks that didn’t fight over ratings.

*Photo Notes: That’s my mother in that photo. She was quite the winner back then. She probably ate too many cookies and drank so much juice that her genes mutated—the same ones she passed to me. That’s why I’m nowhere near as sociable, cute and huggable as she was. 🙂

Puppy Dog

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A friend once told me that if he had been Hitler’s father and he had known that his son would turn out the way he did, he would have (ahem, excuse me) done the “ACT” all by himself instead of with his wife (you get the drift, don’t you?).

I wonder what Hitler’s parents would have done if they had known who Adolf would grow up to be. Would they have taken his life even before he was born or would they have allowed him to be born and changed his environment or the way they raised him instead?

I used to be a staunch supporter of the nurture theory—that adults are more a result of how they were raised and of the influence of their environment (that’s like saying you have my parents and the world to blame for the plague that I am to you; Hahaha). I’m beginning to think though that nature, our genes, does have as much of a hand at influencing who we become.

At this point, I would like to divert from my usual depressed, bitter self to look into the brighter side of things—that side where Barney teaches the Care Bears to sing family-oriented songs in a ghastly way. Seriously, there are just some things that can soften not just the hardest of hearts but the more tragic cynical and sarcastic ones too.

On the first day of this year (when we Filipinos got another excuse to stuff each other with too much food) our pressure cooker blew up in our kitchen. That resulted in a near Jackson Pollock cow oil masterpiece getting imprinted right on our kitchen wall and ceiling. My husband got a share of the rare abstract work on his skin because he was standing in front of the pressure cooker when it blew up. You can imagine what he was doing then; he was the one cooking because people get sick when I cook. Since he had second degree burns, he had to sleep on the floor near our bed so he wouldn’t accidentally rub his ointment-coated skin on me and our daughter.

Our two year old daughter who had always slept beside us since she was an infant couldn’t keep her eyes off her father. After a long time of just staring, she took her stuffed toy, puppy dog, and placed it on her father’s stomach.

I could only stare at her in disbelief. My daughter never sleeps without her puppy dog. I asked her why she did what she did. She explained in her usual simple talk that she wanted her father to have her puppy for the night because he was sick. She had trouble falling asleep the whole night but she never took her toy back.

That just blew the caps off my jaded heart and my bladder full of bile. Of course we try to teach her to be a good kid but never specifically to do such things. I was expecting she’d exercise her right to be a tyrant at least until she turns three.

A counselor once told me it is only at around three that a person’s moral self, his ability to determine right from wrong and his ability to understand compassion, develops. How could my little daughter know that her dad needed her puppy dog that night? If I never forced her to give up what was most valuable to her, then she probably did it out of her own accord because she has some innate goodness that can either be nurtured or redirected.

I suppose all of us have that seed of innate goodness. Maybe Hitler had it too but then he could have digested it out of his body or others did that for him. I wish the good seed could just grow no matter what.