Caustic Thoughts

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

There’s a Fly in My President

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Noynoy AquinoA couple of weeks ago Archbishop Oscar Cruz revealed that two powerful groups (distributors of political steroids, no doubt) have decided to flex their well-oiled, influential muscles and kick President Aquino off his seat. My eyeballs rolled involuntarily when I heard that and as I struggled to regain control of my organs, the distraught Pinoy in me whispered, “Here we go again.”

Cruz says Aquino’s incompetence has diminished his cutie points considerably. Well, in the seven months he’s been on the helm, lives have been lost, justice has been denied and the dumb have grown dumber. Also, the belt-tightening has grown so extreme that I now have the waistline of a waif. Two more inches tighter and I’ll qualify as a supermodel.

I wonder who they think is a better fit. The last time we raised our hands and complained, “Waiter, there’s a fly in my president,” we got served a chipmunk with a penchant for the shiny baubles in our coffers. Sadly, those who complained a second time to the waiter were thrown into jail. Apparently, exchange policies for tarnished presidents are valid for only one swap.

I don’t think we’ll ever get one who owns a magic stone he can swallow to turn him into a caped champion of the masses who can drag goons to limbo by their nose hairs, make oil companies drop to their knees, force politicians to do the public a favor by drowning themselves in their own dirt and whip the trash in the Pasig River into gold. For now, all we have is this president who seems to be losing the loyalty of his hair follicles and who might be having a hard time grasping the full scope of his work; but would you really rather have another economic genius with itchy palms?

What is Marriage?

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I’m sure Wikipedia has the long, convoluted, partially correct answer, but since four years of college and another four years of trying to decipher Google’s Terms of Service have damaged my brain, I am now incapable of understanding definitions beyond “Duh”.

Sometimes I get the impression that marriage is a legally binding agreement that allows individuals to demand that their partners, who have future plans of hiding from obligation in the Swiss Alps, listen to the now classic song “Financial Support” by Kevin Federline. Those who actually have partners who cooperate fully may alternatively use their documents to gain express access to their rights and benefits and to those of their children, financial or otherwise, from legal institutions.

That inaccurate definition is the result of two decades of watching friends and family hit their heads against marriage contracts that have the physical attributes of paper but the internal qualities of concrete. I’m certain that if I said that in one of my six theology classes in college, I would have never been given my diploma.

Quite recently, this simplistic perspective has expanded a bit thanks to Vilma Santos. In one of her movies she complains to her partner that the reason why he is compelled by his parents to provide for their needs first rather than hers is because his parents bank on the fact that they aren’t married. That implies that if they were married, she would have had the right to demand that she and their kids be the first in his list of concerns.

I pretty much put my ear against closed doors or watch quarreling neighbors with a popcorn bucket in one arm. I remember one woman very close to home echo a similar line, “Why do you always go home to your parents when they call for you? Don’t they know we’re married?”

Actually, the couples I know fight in very public places where they prefer to spill their guts and all the gory details of their disastrous unions. What I gather from them pretty much verifies the truth behind Vilma’s lines.

So that means I can now turn to my husband and demand that aside from surrendering his wallet, assets and die cast car collection to me, he is now required to prioritize my demands because we have a marriage contract. Sweet.

Senior Power

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I distinctly remember the power of pregnancy, not the “life-changing, awe-inspiring realization of true womanhood” kind of power. I mean the power to cut through lines and attract free unsolicited assistance anytime, anywhere. All I needed to do was exaggerate the difficulty of carrying the biological basketball in front of me and even snatchers gave me a free pass.

Last month, I witnessed an even greater kind of power, the power of senior citizenship. My mother despite having hidden her real age in a top secret, maximum security facility, finally gave a clue to the number of corrupt presidential terms she’s had to live through.

She is at least 6 decades old. The senior citizen card she keeps in a special red flip case proves she passed the application to the exclusive twilight club. Amazingly, her age was an advantage for us when we were in Cebu. We used her like a charm. Everywhere we aimed her at, we got great deals. How did she do it? Aside from discreetly making her eyes glow red in front of service crew, she flashed her ID card like a police badge and exerted her power of discount!

In instances when cashiers declared ignorance over the procedure for processing senior citizen discounts, my mother said the magic words, “I’ll report.” Those that actually cared for their employers suddenly gained the exemplary research abilities of doctorate degree candidates and found out how to work the calculator.

When we left, my mom was still having a blast with her badge but she did have one issue and she asked me to blog about it. Apparently, some who get shown the senior badge kick, scream or put up a fight.

Cebu’s water district is subtle about it but they seem to be succeeding at discouraging some of the more arthritic seniors from jumping through hoops and loops to get price cuts. Ma says, showing the senior ID isn’t enough. To get the discount that’s mandated by law, she’s required to submit a number of documents and a photo of herself holding a recent newspaper issue.

Maybe ma should start using her laser beams.

Homecoming

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My Christmas gift to myself was a family trip to my hometown, Cebu City. A lot has changed. It felt like staring at a familiar friend’s new nose lift.

The city now has a subway. Although the sandwich of the same name seems longer in comparison, the tunnel did give the momentary feel of getting plopped into a high speed car chase movie sequence.

Then there’s the bigger, better Ayala mall and The Terraces. Standing at the center of Ayala Park with four floors of restaurants on one side and two more floors of eating establishments on the other can push your salivary glands into overdrive. Depending on your financial capacity, the experience might be akin to dying and preparing to enter the gates of food heaven or getting stuck in the lowest pit of hell, staring up at happiness you can never have.

Other structures have sprouted too around the city as if Jack made a career out of planting magical beans for infrastructure. Years ago when I left, the IT Park only had NEC and East West. Now it’s packed with towering steel and granite.

Of course, depending on your perspective, Jack doesn’t seem to always have a knack for recognizing perfect seeds. There’s the Crown Regency which my brother says looks like a façade for a giant videoke bar at night. One of its main claims to fame is its roof deck which holds the Sky Experience Adventure where they ask you for P550 to scare the heebie jeebies out of you.

With all the growth everywhere, there’s a flipside to everything. For three nights, my mother, without fail told us bedtime stories of how you could lose your life, limb and mobile phone in the city. Walking the streets solo is no longer recommended even in broad daylight because armed thugs, descended from those Twilight vampires no doubt, have developed some immunity for sunlight. Incidentally, my husband’s phone was stolen at twilight on our way to church.

Homes offer no guarantee of protection if you live in open, unguarded villages like my mom. My brother says our once peaceful village is now the shopping mall of thieves who have lost their manners and plunder even at noon.

You could also lose more than worldly possessions. My old Catholic school now surrounded by blinking neon lights and bars looks like an old, faded memory of quieter times buried deep in the subconscious.

As if to punctuate the whole mixed experience, my husband asked The Book of Answers at Fully Booked, “What should I do with my life?”

It answered, “No.”

When I make sense of that answer, I’ll make sense of what it felt like to come home to Cebu.

The Typical Wife

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My husband and his pals have a base idea of what a typical wife is. Arms akimbo, the typical wife barges through the informal “social” gatherings of inebriated men, lets fly strings of verbal barbs and drags her man by the ear each time to get him home. The rest of the ruffians who witness such instances of utter and absolute humiliation, duck in various directions to protect their egos from the sting of the typical wife’s wrath.

I don’t fit the description. That’s why my husband’s friends love me too. The females in the typical category warn me of my folly. They say men need to be flogged in public so they don’t forget who their real bosses are. I don’t throw sharp words, breakable objects or facial contortions at my husband in public or in private because I’m too lazy. With two kids I don’t want to have to be the mother of a fully grown person.

The other night I found my husband tinkering with his phone in the dead of the night. Having settled on an inexplicably difficult mood (which I’d like to blame on hormones, Google, the president, Justin Beiber, the man on the moon or anyone/anything else other than myself) I asked him who the hell he was texting in the dark.

His jaw fell and the silence was long and pronounced. “Are you my wife? So what’s next? Are you gonna attend all my social events? Are you gonna stand with your fists up in front of my buddies?”

“When those things happen, my dear, you’d better worry that your real wife got kidnapped by aliens.”

Really, I just don’t know what came over me.

The Look Of Greed

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My husband told me the other week that if you typed mukhang pera ka (loosely translates to: you’re a gold digger or greedy for money) in YouTube without the quotes you’ll get the face of the former Philippine president Arroyo. The clip with her face on it has dropped to the sixth spot today but it’s still on page one in YouTube.

Arroyo has it easy actually. I remember many years ago that if you typed miserable failure into Google, you’d get the then U.S. president Bush’s page on the first spot! Fortunately for Bush, Google came to the rescue and removed him from his perch before he started fermenting in rotten tomatoes.

How do these things happen?

The Arroyo clip is apparently one of only very few clips to which the phrase mukhang pera ka is associated with so naturally when you search for it, you get her. In Bush’s case, it’s all thanks to search engine optimization (SEO). Hordes of unhappy Americans simply banded together and linked to his page using miserable failure as anchor text. They figured they couldn’t just throw sticks and stones at the White House so they did it with virtual sticks, which, by the way, are perhaps now more damaging than real ones.

Incidentally, Google is still the biggest search engine and on the second spot is YouTube, which is actually also owned by Google. It’s nice to know world leaders are dominating the engines for search phrases.

Where The Money Is

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Technically, I failed lots of subjects in high school, those that formed the basis for profitable careers: algebra, physics, entrepreneurship, chemistry and, uh, P.E. (think Pacquiao, Nadal, Jordan, Woods). I was probably allowed to graduate either because I had top notch group mates who pulled my grades up or I had teachers who dreaded encountering my redefinitions of their subjects’ core principles for another year. I argued that x+y=depression and that entrepreneurship meant tricking your grandmother into buying female hair loss products.

In college, my interests remained largely unprofitable. I excelled in ancient history, art appreciation, sociology, theology, classical literature and community service. Instead of imagining enterprising ventures like my classmates I imagined riding the Starship Enterprise or living in castles in the air.

I’d probably be doing great if I decided to pursue a career in the nunnery but a contract signed before a judge has already made sure I’ll never escape the secular world with all its persistent concerns of making enough money to put milk in bottles and upstart kids to school. I badly need to educate myself differently. More importantly, I need to teach my kids to think differently before they follow my ship and hit an iceberg.

Fortunately, a fall into a rabbit hole has brought me into the world of internet marketing where everyday I get to sip tea with mad marketers who know where the money is. I just need to get more infected with whatever they have to get over the kind of upbringing that somehow makes making money so scary.

The UN Adventures

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United NationsOctober has been designated as United Nations month to the dismay of cash-strapped parents throughout the country. What used to be a thoroughly enlightening and character-forming event has now been reduced to expensive fashion shows that kids have to join to get good grades.

Merchants who can smell opportunity miles away have gotten a whiff of this potentially lucrative event and now sell a myriad collection of international traditional clothes. My own search led me to a rack at a local store with the following list of nations: Korea, Argentina, India, Mexico, Hawaii and Aladdin. I had no idea a new nation was recently born and named after a petty thief at that.

My troubles would have come to an end if I had volunteered my daughter to represent Aladdin but alas, she had to be Ms. Panama. None of the stores in the city carried Panama’s national dress so I ended up walking 1.5 km of a street dotted with seamstresses, showing each some dress pictures printed from the internet, as if I was looking for long lost cousins in the wrong side of the world. None of them would accept the complicated design for a pittance. They all said it was so difficult to sew that they’d only accept the task if I paid them my kid’s inheritance.

I finally found a seamstress who agreed to sew the dress for less than a fortune but I had to do the materials shopping. I came back a few hours later with 3 meters of satin. The seamstress looked at me as if to ask, “How could you do this to your own daughter?”

Apparently, satin would make her look more like a little bride, the bride of Chuckie perhaps, rather than a lady from Panama. I wanted to explain to the seamstress that I was born with a shortage of estrogen and couldn’t tell satin from cotton, wool or toilet paper but Britney Spears started singing in my head, “I’m not a girl, not yet a woman. All along I knew, I’m really half a man…” So I kept my mouth shut.

After three more hours of leg work and distress, I finally settled on 300 pesos worth of something, a.k.a. whatever. I next set out to visit my father-in-law to look for baubles to hang around Ms. Panama’s neck. He listened patiently to the story of the last few hours of my life and then he rolled his eyes and gestured to the windows. I blinked in disbelief. Fancy that, after all the stress and expense my pa had the perfect dress fabric hanging over his windows.

That settles it. Next year, my daughter will be wearing my pa’s curtains.

P.S. No disrespect is meant to Panama and the country’s national dress. The curtains are made of expensive lace that costs 290 pesos a meter. Of course, I do know Panama’s actual national dress isn’t made of lace but no one I’ve consulted knows what the fabric in the pictures really is.

Can’t Relate

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I was in the mall last week to watch my pre school kid’s class stage a teacher’s day show. For some reason, my little girl was left out of the program along with a couple of other seemingly irreverent classmates. She sat ogling the stage with envy and I thought, “Okay. I’ll teach her to aggressively seek inclusion next time.”

Then I saw the whole show. The core part of it featured kids in superhero costumes sashaying down the ramp like models. Two kids wearing the colored underwear that constitute female hero costumes were among them and I remember turning to my husband saying, “No, no, never will she ever set foot on that stage ever.”

I wouldn’t consider myself a rigid conservative (and there is nothing wrong with super hero costumes). I probably won’t wrap my daughter up in ankle length tablecloth when she becomes a teen or tape an alarm clock around her neck so she’ll know exactly when I want her to be home. It’s something else. Probably my sense of purpose.

For the first time, I came to appreciate how the nuns in my old school “raised” us. We had to go to school in a rigid color scheme uniform from head to foot. Any article of clothing or fashion that was in excess of what was prescribed earned us tickets to the amazingly frightening office of the guardian of morality.

On special days when there were school shows or presentations, when we were permitted to sport clothing outside of our dull, blue world, sleeveless shirts, short skirts and colored nails were still banned and costumes for shows had to cost less than a burger’s price tag or cost nothing at all. The shows themselves had to be so visually minimalistic that watching them felt like watching a fish in a round fishbowl that didn’t even have the courtesy of sand to adorn it.

We thought the nuns had a pretty devious recruitment process in place and we rebelled on the weekends with ostentatious displays of bad clothing. Apparently though, the nuns had more in mind than trying to recruit us to wear penguin suits. Now I see that part of what they wanted to teach us was to have a sense of purpose.

They may have been too extreme but their methods drove home a point. Most of what you do must be relevant and must have a pretty damn good reason behind it that adds value to your life or someone else’s. Stripping the frivolity that surrounds you is part of finding out if who you are and what you’re doing can stand solid enough to justify itself.

Going back to the Batcave and my girl’s super hero friends… Where was the purpose in all that? What was that for? Other than having put those kids up on stage so we could all appreciate their cuteness, there was nothing minimally relevant about it. To me, that day probably marked the birth of a handful of minds on shallow waters.

*Image by Crystaljingsr

It’s a Good Day to Be Filipino

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I heard from the grapevine that a very close relative of mine has declared his intentions to change his citizenship because he has grown tired of the Philippine situation. I am no longer in speaking terms with this relative because of this but I understand where he’s coming from.

Life here has almost become an exercise in futility and I’m starting to feel the hopelessness of it all. It’s not just last month’s failed hostage crisis resolution that has brought about this depressing perspective. It’s really more because of the rare glimpse I’ve had of the common man on the street.

Up until recently, I had a 15 year old nanny who lived with us. She went missing for a night and a day and I found her in her boyfriend’s house. She chose to forgo both her education and employment for him.

The girl’s mother is all thumbs up at the situation. The boy’s mother and grandmother have resigned themselves to it as well but are actually more disturbed about it. In an attempt to dissuade the girl, they’ve opened up the family’s history books. The boy belongs to a family of four siblings, all adults, none of whom have finished high school even if they could have. They are all unemployed and spend their mornings playing illegal numbers games and their afternoons playing dodge ball with cousins who are also unemployed dropouts. In the evenings the two male siblings get drunk, break bottles on the streets and land punches on whoever it is they currently have relations with. The girl is unfazed. She just wants to be with her man.

My jaw is still stuck on the ground. I cannot believe that there are people who are willing to live lives expecting manna from heaven, sulfur-laced goods from hell or shit from the gutters of the earth to survive. I cannot believe that any sensible being would choose to live such an existence even if a better one is within reach. I cannot believe that there are people so disgraceful that even their mothers completely renounce them.

My husband assures me I’ve been a witness to something real but that I haven’t really seen all there is to it. What I’ve seen is just a micro sample of bigger communities where there is nothing sacred and people rot in pits of apathy.

Aquino vows he’d rid the system of corruption but if everyday, hundreds of children are taught by example that it’s okay to live unprincipled lives, to strive for nothing, to compromise right for wrong, to take the easy way out, then each and every year, this country will still be in the hands of people who don’t care about the country, the greater good or their own souls. Six years from now, when Aquino steps down, we might just end up where we first started.

It’s still a good day to be Filipino though simply because we are and now is no different than any other moment when some talented countryman manages to wave the flag a little higher than usual. We have to start believing and creating situations where it’s good to be us because no official document from another country or an extensive cosmetic enhancement can erase racial heritage. We share the same story regardless of citizenship or appearance and our story will haunt us to the ends of oblivion.

We don’t need Aquino to make a dent on corruption. What we really need is a hard, bloody smack on the collective consciousness. That’s not Aquino’s job. It’s ours.