witandwisdom

It’s been two years since I resigned from my hybrid office/school job. In these two years however my former boss has continued to ask for my help on every single issue of the school paper. Actually, what she really needed was a club bouncer who would have made sure that the heads of the editorial staff rolled. I fit the job description closest.

I’ve been praying for an end to this hemorrhage-inducing publication work since five years ago. I do hope that this March issue will be my last. It’s not that I don’t enjoy working with concentrated capsules of hormones. Oh yes, I do relish forcing eager young Friendster citizens to write about socially relevant issues that they just can’t relate to or are not interested in. But I honestly think I’m losing my touch.

I made a major slip last issue. It was probably because I wanted to finally stop harassing the weepy, distraught printing press artist that I decided to release an issue that had not passed my rigid obsessive compulsiveness. Also, for a change, I wanted to be home before the clock struck late and before my taxi turned into a pumpkin. One thousand printed copies later I discovered to my horror that one of the feature pages contained a picture of a teen with his middle finger sticking out. I nearly fainted. The paper is the official publication of a CATHOLIC school!

The feature page in question contained an article about the emo culture. The article already raised a few of my internal eyebrows. That was mainly because I have a deep respect for emo musicians who take offense at their genre being taken for a cultural fad. But because I had lost the drive to punish myself, the staff and the printing press with my exacting tyranny, I let the feature pass and did not even notice the presence of the offending finger.

The solution to the finger problem? I was told that the publication moderator I was assisting told the other teachers to sit straight, pull their tummies in and start coloring over the finger in nearly all of the one thousand printed copies. They had no choice. How could you explain a finger in that position to a grade 1 pupil? I should at least have sent 3 in 1 coffee sachets to those dedicated educators.

I know I may be losing my touch not so much because I could no longer stand staring at every minute detail but because the whole emo issue really proved that I could barely relate with the kids of today. My former students and staff members used to say that they liked me because I understood their generation. Five years later, I can hardly understand the literal definition of emo culture.

For most of my life I was probably a good example of a member of today’s emo culture. I often thought of deep, dark, depressing thoughts and dressed daily in black which is probably why I once often wished aliens would just abduct me and put an end to my miserable perspective of life. During my time though, I was said to have had a condition that required the assistance of experts in bright, academic offices or of double servings of the latest self-help phenomenon. Now, a lot of kids actually enjoy being or at least seeming emotionally skewed. I must have been partially asleep these past few years and missed something.

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A recent post by Pinksoda, a fellow CDO Blogger reminded me of what my friends used to say, “Forget to take care of yourself and your husband will leave you someday.” I wonder if this is just a uniquely Pinoy sentiment or if others from around the world believe it too. Here, that roughly translates to, “Allowing yourself to get a waistline larger than your husband’s, six pack eye bags and arm flab only a mother could love will ensure that your husband will leave you for Bb Gandanghari.”

I guess my friends were worried for me. Although my bones tend to stick out more than my fat, I’m not exactly the kind of lady men would lay down their jackets on puddles for. You see, I used to look like a man. I looked masculine on purpose because I wanted to rebel against the conventions of femininity and the prevailing damsel in distress mentality that seemed so popular when I was young. Clearly, I preferred to be the distressing damsel.

I knew that my male look was a success because people called me dong, the local generic term for young boys and once, just for the heck of proving that I did not look feminine, I entered a mall’s male comfort room. There was no mass exodus of scandalized males. (No. I did not look at what they were doing in those urinals.)

I found out later though that even if I wanted to look feminine, I would still have looked masculine simply because I had no idea that there is a difference between male and female casual clothing. That’s what happens to teens whose heads are so far buried in the intoxicating clouds of literature. There is an absolute lack of awareness that outside, the world turns. My husband was the first to break the news to me that men’s jeans and women’s jeans don’t come in the same cut. He was also the first to teach me that I don’t have to dress like a man to seem strong.

My first office job temporarily put an end to my cross dressing days because I was required to wear clothing that no self-respecting man would’ve worm. I was also told to paint my face because the enemy (the boss or the client?) isn’t pacified by a naturally pale face filled with the battle scars of corporate stress.

Unfortunately, a recent salon mishap has forced me to return to my less engaging alter ego. I knew that I was once again lacking a feminine exterior because of an unfortunate run in with a KFC service crew. In KFC here, the counter crew no longer issue numbers to waiting customers. Instead, they write descriptions of the customers on receipts that are then passed on to the service crew assigned to deliver the delayed orders and the receipts to the waiting customers.

My description said that I was a girl in a blue shirt. The service crew passed my table several times and it never occurred to him that I was the girl in blue. Unless he was color blind, he must have missed me because he didn’t know that I was a girl.

I’ve asked my husband for his opinion. He says he prefers my androgynous, unpainted, unpolished look. It’s either he’s lying or he’s got weird taste in women. So tell me, can Pinoy men really love a woman who looks like half of a man?

I’ve been away from some of my online haunts lately. My momentum broke because the week began with a flood. Not the knee-deep flood that is the staple in expanding Philippine cities but the run for your life kind of flood that makes you wonder if the sins of mankind have yet again merited another Biblical Great Flood. This time, the story stars not a local Noah but the embattled conman or martyr (depending on your loyalties) from the people’s palace who came recently with a grin and matching relief goods.

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My blog is distinctly missing a Christmas greeting and it’s not because I’m Scrooge in the flesh. Despite appearances, I am a Christmas fanatic. I studied in Catholic schools where every year, traditional tableaux reminded me of whose birthday it was we were celebrating. For some strange reason, I was never chosen to play Mary, Joseph or one of the three kings. The closest I could get to a role in a school tableau was as donkey alternate.

My home situation contributed too to developing holiday eagerness. I grew up in Baguio where some houses, including our own, had chimneys. That and the cold weather gave my mom an excuse to to feed her kids the illusion that the Philippines was part of Santa’s itinerary. So I came to believe in St. Nick even if commonsense told me that Santa needed a century’s worth of Atkins or South Beach to fit through our non-western, slim, robber proof chimney flue.

So if I love Christmas so much, why don’t I have a post about it? I’ve been preoccupied with worldly, economic concerns. A few months before the holidays, a company beside my husband’s workplace announced that it would let go of all of its probationary employees. Of course, that was not pleasant news but that was still too far from home to cause me more than the expected distress at someone else’s misfortune. Two days before Christmas, my husband tells me they’ve all been put on forced leave. For daily paid workers, that’s some kind of “whoa!” That hit home.

No, we are not about to starve, but all of a sudden, the impersonal, intangible statistical figures on unemployment rates, inflation and falling stocks are singing carols at my doorstep. It may soon be my misfortune and not someone else’s. Today we lost the Christmas ham. Tomorrow we could lose the daily bacon.

That’s why Christmas almost flew past me. It’s a good thing I live in the Philippines. This is where even the dirt poor always have smiles to spare even when it’s not Christmas. This is the land of eternal smiles where worrying, especially during Christmas is out of place. It goes without saying that this is one of the countries where Christmas is most at home. No amount of economic crunching can detract from the collective happiness, the perpetual sense of family and the timelessness of His kind of love.

*Photo from Download Free Pictures

If there’s one thing in the Philippines that sprouts faster than weeds, it’s Jollibee outlets. It seems there’s always one in every corner. A little over five years ago, Cagayan de Oro only had two or three outlets around. Today, there are about ten of them with the newest having recently opened across Lourdes College. TEN! The number is enough to give you nightmares of swarms of giant yellow-orange bees out to get your pocket money and of thousands of chickens rising against chicken rights violations.