Caustic Thoughts

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.