Caustic Thoughts

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

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.

New Year Potty

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I was thinking I’d write something wise and inspiring for Christmas and the New Year, something filled with such beautifully constipated words that you’d have no choice but to hail me as the next great religious cult leader. But alas, my dreams of world domination and wealth beyond my capacity to count would have to wait for the next season. I’m stumped. It’s not just because I’m nearly incapable of thinking of pink cotton-candy-cloud puffy positive thoughts. It’s not even because my writer’s block has grown into a brain tumor. I can’t write right now because I can’t think. I can’t think because I’m potty training my daughter.

The New Year is fast approaching and she will soon be three years old so I was thinking that it’s about time she knew where real shit should go to. Sadly, I am the one who is swiftly learning that shit does happen in life— the real kind that smears on floor vinyl, stains every fiber invented by man and gets into your nerves. It’s a good thing my poor father-in-law is an ace at wiping poop off floors. Otherwise I would have wept over the offending deposits until they got up and walked off by themselves.

If I think hard about it though, I feel as if my daughter is indirectly teaching me something. It’s like she’s telling me, “Other kinds of shit happen in life ma. Chances are, some of them will happen to you next year and they don’t always go down the toilet like you want them too. You’ve just got to learn to wipe and disinfect.”

Sigh. Of course, that’s exactly what this little cute tyrant is telling me. I can just make out the words of wisdom if I listen closely to her broken syllables and her nervous weeping.

What I want to tell her in response is, “Bless you my child. May you have a potty full of shit this year and may all your potty contents go down the toilet.”

I wish all of you the same this year.

Little Carolers

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I remember when I was young. We didn’t get to hear carolers every night but when we did, the singers were often well rehearsed. Even the simplest and littlest carolers knew every letter of their songs even if they sang them off key.

It’s a little different now. Sparsely clad little carolers come in droves. They sing in a hurry, as if they were running in a formula one race track during an actual race. Their words are as devoid of feeling as their bare feet and on top of that, they sing so off the mark that it’s hard to tell which traditional song they hauled up and murdered. Oh, and they don’t make the slightest bit of sense.

I didn’t mean that figuratively. You’d think they were singing in Klingon but there’s actually no telling which alien species kidnapped them and forced the garble into their minds. Here are my favorites so far:

Jingle bells, jingle bells, jingle all da way. O wat fine it is to right in a one halls open sway hey…

Joy to da whorl the whorl is come let er receive erning. Let every part prepare im roon and eber da watusi and eber da watusi and eber and eber da watusi…

My original theory was that the songs are an alien invader’s way of subtly and incomprehensively hypnotizing human listeners. Then again, I think there are far more logical reasons why our little carolers have evolved into horrific, senseless, tone deaf parakeets. Here are my two main theories:

1. It’s possible they can’t understand what they’re supposed to sing because they can’t relate to any song with Santa in it. They just can’t imagine how a man in a fur-trimmed, blazing red suit can survive in an infernally warm country. Besides, Filipino hospitality aside, suspiciously dressed night lurkers are eyed as potential burglars or worse, pedophiles who are candidates for mauling. There are also no chimneys to squeeze through in tiny houses and the nearest people have been to snow is the ice on the fridge.

2. Our little kids never took the time to learn their songs right because they could go to bed with just saline solution in their stomachs again if they aren’t quick about harrassing one household after another.

It’s terrible. I don’t mean the carolers and their songs. It’s terrible that there are signs of the times even during Christmas.

*Photo credit: Bigfoto

Gender Toys

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It’s getting harder to shop for toys for my kid every year. It’s not just because every single cheap toy that we average earners can afford seems to come with a bonus service— free lead poisoning. Actually, I used to play with cheap, lead-coated toys when i was a kid and look at what that made me— insane and loving it.

Although I still do worry over the paint messing with my child’s cells and making a better monster out of her, my real problem is the issue of gender toys.

My daughter loves playing with cars, action figures and basketballs. We didn’t teach her that. She does have at least three feminine dolls that she has so neglected that dust has now made dreadlocks out of their hair.

I don’t think there is anything wrong with my daughter’s toy preferences but my blood boils over when people call my attention. Society says girls should play with little tea cups and anatomically impossible dolls in pink tutus.

I was wondering, if my daughter absolutely refuses to host perpetual tea parties for rewinds of Ken and Barbie’s wedding, preferring instead to fight crime with Batman and Robin, would that make her any less female? Would she suddenly forget that she doesn’t have balls and insist that she can grow facial hair just as well as her father?

Honestly, I’m afraid that society’s stress on gender toys might confuse her about what she really wants for herself. She can grow up preferring to be a member of the third gender but I want her to make that decision not because people told her she wasn’t a normal girl.

Believe me, I’ve been there. For a time I thought I wanted to be a guy just because I played with G.I Joe and Voltes V until I met my husband who could spit farther than me, looked more manly than me and shared my passion for little katana-wielding plastic toys that could bend their knees and arms. So then I wanted to become a girl because he liked girls who liked boys and not girls who liked girls and would compete with him for the attention of other girls (whew!).

I want my daughter to know that she can still be female if she wants to even if she likes racing cars and shooting hoops. But gender toys are a reality so I would have to deal with that. At least my daughter likes pink over any other color. Maybe I can just buy her pink wheels and Barbie with a pink broadsword.