Caustic Thoughts

October 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.

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

When I was a little girl studying in a private school, our teachers used to ask us to bring all our books and notebooks to and from school every day. So I strapped on an extra large bag almost half my size. Before there was the fantasy character template of the pretty, goody two shoes, hunchbacked, provincial girl secretly carrying a sinister gremlin inside her hump that we seem to see so often on Philippine TV these days, there was me and my hump full of books. My mom says my gremlins were the reason why I shall forever be denied the chance to apply for jobs where 5’2” is a requirement.

My daughter doesn’t need to grow her own hump. Now, kids have Barbie and Batman on wheeled frames attached to handlebars to carry their books for them and make sure genes and not education are blamed exclusively for shortness.

When I was in high school, we stayed inside warm classrooms for nearly eight hours a day. Each classroom had a single ceiling fan. Each fan seemed to look browner every year. When our fan started to make weird noises, stories of students whose heads had been chopped off by the blades of a fallen fan started to circulate. That’s when asthma suddenly became a fad and a popular excuse to get permission to sit farthest from the fan.

My daughter goes to an air conditioned room where the only threat is the explosion of odor after twenty, small, sweaty bodies that had been out playing under the sun too long pile in. At least only the teacher has to get distracted. There are no thoughts of chopped heads to frighten the kids.

Yeah, my kid enjoys the comforts of wheeled contraptions and air conditioning. I hope that’ll mean she’ll learn a lot more to help her live better and wiser.

*Photo by Arvind Balaraman; www.freedigitalphotos.net

I now personally know of two people who never finished school but are earning thousands of dollars a month online. One of them earns more than a hundred thousand pesos a month, more than what one top corporate executive I know of earns. Both these new acquaintances of mine know of several others in their circles who earn even more. Their common denominator? They all know how to sell themselves.

Should I tell my kids not to go to college and just focus on learning how to sell? I know of an eight year old who already earns dollars online through some basic form of online marketing and a teen who’s asking his mother if he can quit school so he can focus on selling website designs online. The question is a dangerous one that I’m not willing to confront or answer now or ever.

But it’s tempting to get twisted.

I graduated at the top of my class but I’ve since learned that the only way I can make money out of my academic achievement is if I have my medal melted. That’s if it’s even made of real precious metal and if I can risk being labeled persona non grata by my alma mater.

I’ve never really been at the height of financial desperation. Parenthood though can make people transform in crazy ways. I haven’t yet devolved into an automated sales spiel dispenser but I’m beginning to think I need to have some marketing skills injected into me fast. I’d imagine that would feel like having a huge chunk of squid stuck in my gut. Aside from math, science, computer and physical education, high school entrepreneurship also felt like some esoteric alien discipline designed to cause digestive disorders.

I don’t have much of a choice but to devour the esoteric and hope my intestines are strong enough to digest it. Two cute, wide-eyed kids wake up every dawn beside me. They kiss me good morning before they scream for milk. The older one is about to go to school and unfortunately I don’t think the school principal will kiss me good morning before screaming for tuition fees.

I need to gain financial skills fast but I need to be kind to my digestive system. I’m starting off with the 8 Secrets of the Truly Rich by Bo Sanchez. So far I haven’t suffered from indigestion, diarrhea or constipation yet. So far, it’s the only resource I’ve ever come across that makes me feel like business, marketing and investing are Barney and Friends.

I still honestly think education is vital because it helps build character but I wish our schools could drill into us more the importance of financial wisdom.

I will make it. I can do this. I will succeed. I will not have my academic medal melted.