Caustic Thoughts

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

Female Issues

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Don’t wear a bad dress or a good one backwards if you’re not Angelina Jolie.

If it weren’t for this dress’ brand tag and the two lines in front that I took to mean “This side up” I wouldn’t have known front from back. I don’t like dresses but I had to get one for a family affair. My fashion consultant, a.k.a. my husband, who is also my makeup and footwear adviser (I hope he’s not gay), picked this one. I suspect it’s because this is the one that can hide my convex curves best.

The dress was only the first hurdle. There were a hundred other things to think about— hair, makeup, shoes, accessories, dead skin cells, constantly forgetting to sit with my legs crossed, etc. For most of these I figured I just needed some Gatsby, extreme facial exfoliation, ancient baubles from Jack Sparrow’s chest and an appointment with a Halloween makeup artist. My only real great problem was the footwear. Would my dress look best with Nike or Addidas?

I kept an old pair of heels (clearly for emergency purposes) in a box along with other things I’d rather forget. Because I was certain rubber shoes would be treated like an atrocity, I had to take out the heels for a test walk. Shortly after, a trail of fine white powder started following me. Oh yeah, that’s right. Like a lot of other things you bury for three years, earth friendly sandals decompose. The fine powder was parts of it joining Mother Earth.

Of course I had to get a new pair. My first order of business was to ask the sales clerk if I could swap my pick for a pair of sneakers if I came to my senses in a day or two.

Problems solved.

Not really. Despite the ingeniously designed dress, the facial diamond peeling and the new sandals, there was a great deal of pain, discomfort and feeling like fish out of water. The dress clung on sweaty skin, the makeup artist made me look like a cheap walking undead movie extra and the heels felt like weapons of mass destruction, massively destroying the muscles in my legs.

I can’t believe any female can be feminine and be entirely comfortable.

Losing the Battle with the Bulge

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You can’t hold a gym LIABLE for any losses including the loss of self-esteem due to the lack of results.
I wish I could hold someone or something liable for my infinitesimal progress at the gym and my waning interest in hammer curls and reverse crunches. I wish I could blame it on my instructor’s total lack of concern over my Herculean struggle to repetitively lift 4 lb. dumbbells or on the gym’s ancient electricity-free equipment (I strongly suspect they inherited these from Fred Flintstone), but I can’t.
My failure to fit the clothes of yore is entirely my fault. You see, I can endure displacing my bowels with 15 straight sets of ab exercises but I can’t stand having to park my brain for a few minutes to run on a treadmill.
I can’t survive with my brain on screen saver mode. It constantly needs to have something to process. I try to process the images of the aero dancers in front of me into useful pieces of information, but all I can think of is me on that dance floor looking like a limp cow in a herd of gazelles.
I need to learn to mentally shut down or I will lose the battle with the bulge.

As If Taal Volcano Wasn’t Good Enough

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IMITATION is the sincerest form of flattery, only if it’s done in good taste.

More than a week ago, news spread of Governor Vilma Santos’ idea of putting a Batangas Hollywood-like sign over Taal Volcano. That was really just in time for Halloween. It scared the peanuts out of me. That’s scarier than The Exorcist on a perpetual play loop.

Seriously, more netizens found it hilarious, hence, the avalanche of ridicule. A few days after the announcement, the more graphically skilled stone throwers created their own mock ups to… well, mock the proposal. My favorite is this one by Darwin Dela Cruz.

Darwin’s idea is a lot more appropriate to allocate tax money to than Gov. V’s.

In her own defense, Gov. V says people are overreacting. The proposal is still up for discussion, but really, the fact that they even thought about it…

V’s defenders were quick to say the sign will help boost tourism. I don’t know about travelling to places just to see signs (unless it’s the Hollywood sign) but if I were to visit Taal Volcano, I would go there with the intention of seeing the volcano, not some sign!

The Link Between Men and Beef

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BAD ADVERTISING seeks to appeal to the inner moron.

What do men and beef have in common? Nothing, except maybe they’re both bad for your health when taken in excess, which makes me wonder at the association made in a fairly new ad between the two disparate elements.

In the ad, young men, who (not so accidentally) are either half Filipino or were born in western countries, play football on a green field against a backdrop of grazing black cattle. At first you’d wonder, are they advertising the cattle’s impending death by football or are they suggesting these chiseled men are bred like cattle? Then you realize, what they’re really saying is that Angus beef is superior to the local variety just as these nearly foreign looking men are superior to the pure native stock.

Oh but wait, who got the Golden Boot for his excellent performance in the Long Teng Cup? Wasn’t that the short, brown, homegrown Chieffy Caligdong? I’d like to see small brown cattle and Chieffy in that ad!

Pirates Know Their Synonyms

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Study your synonyms so you’ll know how to say things in a way that won’t get you into trouble.

Jan and I were in the mall when he asked me for another word for “transformers”. I thought, was that even a legitimate word? I was stumped. He showed me the answer sitting on a toy shelf. Wow, these pirates get brighter by the day. Now they know enough synonyms to ride on a trademarked hit without getting themselves into trouble.

Then again, they won’t ever get into trouble here even if they used the actual trademarked word and maybe just changed “T” to “Z”. I’ve never witnessed the law against piracy enforced in this city. I don’t know if there is a Philippine law against toy piracy but there is one against media piracy and merchants still sell in broad daylight, beside or across police stations. If DVD pirates have nothing to worry about, then more so their synonym-wielding pals in the toy niche.

Speak English Softly

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We give birth to Filipinos so we can raise them to speak a foreign language and work for other countries. 

In my kid’s old school, the English speaking area is also the silence zone. They should have been more explicit and just labeled it the English mime hall. But really, I would have preferred to speak Filipino in my own country, thank you.

In other schools, English speaking campaigns are stricter. Students are not only required to ditch their native tongue for a foreign one, they’re also punished for failing to do so. The general intention of these campaigns is well meant. Educators think that forcing Filipino kids to learn English will open more employment opportunities and produce more Ms. Universe winners.

Sadly, these aggressive campaigns have proven detrimental to our mastery of our own national language and regional dialects. I’ve known straight A students who’d rather do algebra upside down than recite in Filipino. The grandson of Filipino hero, Ninoy Aquino, no less, sits across his mother in a milk commercial and babbles in wonderful English, asking his mom to translate two simple Filipino words he does not understand.

It’s true. Knowing English can put you at an advantage. I should know. I work for an Australian company that pays well, but I still think our children should be bilingual in equal degrees. Otherwise, we’d be nothing more than a factory of workers for foreign companies.

For the record, I had higher grades in Filipino than in English. To this day, I still confuse gerunds with gerbils and adverbs with a torture device.

Now On To Some Unpleasant Business

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EXERCISE is a lot like paying taxes. It’s an unpleasant experience.

Yes, I am trying to lose weight and attempting the near impossible task of getting my muscles toned. Although this isn’t really for aesthetic reasons, I must say that’s not entirely a bad idea. I’ve grown so big I now look like an over eagerly packed spring roll in my old pants. I now sadly share my husband’s waistline, and occasionally, his pants.

But the real reason why I have to struggle to stay fit is because my blood sugar levels are high, my cholesterol levels are high and I am highly susceptible to diseases with names that sound like they were invented for a Harry Potter prequel. I wish they’d said I was high in methane, but no, it had to be those things.

I probably won’t be buying the Ab Rocket anytime soon though. Imagine putting out a great deal of effort to exercise and it’s the waiter who slims down.

Can You Say Cease and Desist?

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STALKING
is an act perpetrated by fairly educated individuals who don’t know the meaning of “cease and desist”.
Aw shucks, lucky fan! I’ve only gone crazy over cartoon characters. I’ve sent tons of fan mails to my super favorites but Lion-O, He-Man and Batman haven’t once replied to me yet.

Again, Why Blog?

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A PERSONAL BLOG is like an exhibit no one wants to visit.

That may or may not be true. Your mom, brothers, sisters and maybe 20 other relatives can pack your gallery. It does, however, take a great deal of work to maintain readership even among those loyal to you because they had no choice in having you for a blood relation. So why blog at all?

This was originally a personal blog. Surprisingly, I once found a small audience for it outside of my family, a handful of individuals in varying shades of jadedness, with the same level of acidic insanity. I lost a lot of my readers when life got in the way. The realization dawned that money, not words, feed babies. For many online wordsmiths, money is hard to come by.

I don’t think I’ll ever really quit though. I like it here because I don’t have to struggle and give up who I am to survive. I don’t have to pretend to be anything and there is certainly no requirement to save the world.

Call me selfish. When every other blogger wants to make a difference, I want to keep this small space for my personal mental therapy. Anyone looking for a case subject for a psychology study is welcome to dive into this spontaneous morass from a self-confessed nut case.

Incidentally, during my bouts of lucidity, I do try to save the world too in other virtual spaces not in danger of getting tainted by my cerebral drippings.

From Aseroh With Love

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I’m a blog addict. The invisible player in my head starts playing “Singin’ in the Rain” when I start customizing themes, widgetizing sidebars and activating plugins, but navigating blogging platforms is the farthest I can go. When techies start going on about PHP, JavaScript, Pearl, MySQL and such, my eyes glaze over. Computer was, after all, one of my subjects of doom in high school.

That’s why when my host started emailing me about backing up my own databases, I dismissed him as a relic from the Tower of Babel. Unfortunately, my inability to decipher tech speak led to me nearly getting killed by a virtual tsunami.

Over the weekend, my sites were stripped clean, hundreds of pages, thousands of visitors, thousands in income, gone with a click of a mouse. The perpetrator who took away three years worth of hard work left his calling card on one of my homepages with the obvious advice, “You must be better next time.”

A thousand thoughts raced through my numb neurons, most of them gibberish, but I had the energy to at least wonder why hackers do what they do. My friend says there are white hats who stick warning notes on poorly secured servers. The black hats are the ones with motivations that are harder to figure out.

Caesar had a reason for crossing the Rubicon. Superman had a reason for going against good judgement and wearing briefs like a highlighter over tights. Heck, even Robert Pattinson probably had a reason for agreeing to portray a one dimensional character in perpetual need of a bath. So why, why, why are there black hats who just break things?

I was a kid who lost a lollipop over the weekend. I wonder if the one who took it is happy now.