Hair Relax
I studied for 16 years in an institution run by nuns. I worked for nuns for another 3 years. In all my 19 years with nuns, it was only last year that I learned of the truth behind the veil. I was told by a lay insider that underneath the veil lay short, short hairs. Not poodle trimmed hairs but unevenly cut strands of untreated hair. Nuns apparently keep their hair short and unremarkable because hair is a symbol of vanity.
Home Sweet Home
I’ve said it before. There is a practical function behind the Filipino’s tendency to keep close family ties. By nature, we really do value family but I think there is also a social reason behind this. Because we live in a poor country, we each need other people to survive. Families help individuals survive economically. Living with my in-laws despite my being vertically and horizontally grown has allowed me to survive.
I Would Like to Thank My Sponsors…
Entertainment talk shows and variety shows are a staple in the
More Politics Anyone?
I’m starting to hate writing about government politics. It’s not just because my posts with politics in them are the least noticed. It’s also because politics, in any language, is distasteful, distressing and depressing. I’m sure some of those who drop by to read my blog feel the same.
As much as I would want to spare all of us from having loose bowels or fits of nausea, I feel it is my duty as a citizen to give an update on what the elected circus freaks are doing.
1. This week, the Speaker of the House lost his seat and, not surprisingly, has bitten the hand of the Ewok that fed him. After having had his seat taken right from under him, De Venecia is not taking things sitting on his rump on the house floor. He has spoken about the festering corruption in the Ewok’s palace. Beware oh short one, he knows the skeletons in your closet by name. I would have wanted to say, “Bravo De Venecia,” but his performance and stunning oratory are four years and millions of dollars too late. Do we even have to wonder why? Yung mag wawander pa, talagang slow!
2. Jun Lozada apparently has a story that does confirm that the First Gentleman and former Commission on Elections chief Abalos did get their hands mired in the anomalous $329 million broadband deal. While I am writing this piece, a certain scary administration senator with a foreign accent is banking on the power of her hard to understand vocabulary and atrocious diction to confuse people and discredit Lozada.
Are your bowels still intact? More importantly do you even care?
*Video credit:1piso/T.V. Patrol
Buy Me, Me, Me, Me
There are worse things than death. Apparently, one of them is being a writer in the Philippines. Be a journalist and expect to disappear into another dimension or to have a shorter lifespan than your 90-year old diabetic grandmother. Be an online writer and expect to wring your brains dry for the cost of a meal a day. The worst fate however is reserved for the serious creative writers, many of whom have to rely on the mercy of their long suffering parents and relatives for their meals and whose talents are largely met with a “Huh?!” by the uncomprehending public.
Two Filipino authors in my reading list seem to confirm the sad state of books and book writers in the Philippines. Conrado de Quiros says writing books in the Phillipines will only earn you enough beer money. Bob Ong also says in one of his books that it would take a good Filipino author 3 years to sell at least 1,000 copies of his books. To survive as a writer in the Philippines, you need to have a full time job you partially hate, be an enterprising businessman or have a face as thick as the telephone directory so you can live on donations from people who constantly mistake (or not) your pensive mood for hunger.
I must confess, despite my claim of wanting to work again as the head of a corporate firing squad, I have this subdued suicidal wish to one day become a great book writer. By “great” I could mean great as in popular great or great as in, “I feel great but I am dirt poor but that’s okay because I am an intelligent artist who will have her rewards in the after life granting that the Filipinos in heaven or hell are more inclined to read books.” If one of my evil friends becomes a supervisor in hell, I will ask him to make reading my books a requirement.
Of course, that’s even granting that I have talent at all. How can you tell if you have talent to justify making a career suicide for the sake of art? How can you tell if you’re not the only one who thinks you’re talented? How can you tell if your mother isn’t bleeding her pension fund dry just to buy 1,000 copies of your work?
While you are helping me answer these questions, do drop by the local bookstore and help me support our great (popular and “I feel great”) writers. Buy their books and get a bonus freebie– improvement of the dwindling national collective intellect. Here are only some of these great authors:
1. Bob Ong
2. Pol Medina, Jr.
3. Jessica Zafra
4. Ambeth Ocampo
5. Conrado de Quiros
6. Cristina Pantoja-Hidalgo
7. – who, if she finds out more than ten people think she has enough talent will publish books entitled: Memories of Sanity, Save Me From Extinction and I’m Going to Die Poor Because I Think I’m an Artist; What’s Your Excuse?
Pamalaye
Last week I had the pleasure of experiencing a dying Filipino custom for the first time and all because I have this rare ability to smell food 10 kilometers away. Actually, I just happened to drop by a friend’s house and was happily surprised that her table had been richly laden with all of nature’s goodness as well as all of its evil—the kind that kills your heart after pleasuring your taste buds.
*Photo credit: download-free-pictures.com
Let’s Vote In
We Filipinos are known for our ability to band together in the snap of a finger for a common cause. In recent years, that common cause has been to provide the most number of votes to Filipino contestants in international vote-in contests. That’s the secret why Filipino contestants always win something be it the first prize or the Ms. Photogenic award. That’s also why some international contest organizers know better than to go for a vote-in format when there are Filipino contestants unless the contestants talk dirt about the country and prefer sushi to adobo. Haha.
Rumor has it that the victor in the recently concluded Austrian Musical Die-Show, Vincent Bueno won because of the legendary Filipino people-text-together power. Bueno is a full Filipino who was born in Austria. He was the only Asian in the contest that was Austria’s glitzier answer to American Idol. Instead of pop songs, contestants had to battle it out by performing theater songs that required more vocal and stage prowess. Votes for the contestants came from the residents of European nations. Bueno was said to have gotten 67% of the final votes.
Of course, the rumors are just rumors but I can just imagine every single man, woman, teen, child, cat and dog with Filipino blood living in Europe sending in thousands of votes for Bueno. I can’t deny though that from my point of view, he does seem like he deserved to win. Who am I to disagree when I can only squawk while the guy can spin on stage and sing at the same time, get wet with water while performing and not slip or croak, sing and dance while apparently not breathing and sing in theater and have six pack abs?
Yes, we who don’t know a flat from a minor definitely think he’s a sensation but I wonder what real theater experts think.
*Video Credits: ronny1988FAK1911
Singing for Biscuits
It’s official. ABC has lost the Idol franchise to GMA. What was once known as Philippine Idol will now be renamed Pinoy Idol so that the media Goliath, to which ABC never even stood a chance to begin with, can stake a claim to churning out the first Pinoy Idol, the winner of Philippine Idol being now reduced to being the first and only Philippine Idol. So there is now a difference between being Filipino and Pinoy? That’s just absurd (or is there a rule that you have to change the contest name if it changes networks?).
For as far back as anyone can remember, Filipinos have always been regulars at singing contests. The smallest communities would have annual events where contestants would croon on crepe paper decorated stages and vie for the grand prizes—cans of biscuits, gallons of all you can drink orange juice, packs of imported soap and bragging rights.
I was in the central part of town last Sunday and got a rare glimpse of this nearly extinct part of Filipino culture. Kids, mostly from the lower sectors of society, were lined up dressed in nearly ancient Sunday clothes their mothers might have worn before them. From the way they nearly busted the speakers, I could tell they were all intent on bagging whatever pack of goodies was at stake. Unfortunately, the contest that would have drawn crowds in the past was probably only attended by the contestants’ direct family members who didn’t mind going home without their ear drums.
People who would’ve been there if there had been no Big Brother “senseless night” probably now prefer the regular contest fare that media giants try to shove down our throats. With a little advertising and a lot of hype, Filipino singing contests are now also contests on who has the most friends, who has the least clothing, who can scream the loudest and who is the most pitiful. Yes, in contests these days, you need to be pitiful and to be pitied to actually bag the first prize even if your middle name is Notalent, Outoftune, Copycat or Secondchoiceifididntlookhandsome. The real winner is actually whichever network would rather send the whole nation into the arms of mediocrity than lose their ratings.
The worst part about our modern contests is that many of us are only a quarter proud of some of the real talents who actually win just because they don’t belong to the network that we watch (in the Philippines the last five words is roughly the same as the network that has fooled us the most). This is why we now have a would-be Pinoy Idol who isn’t the second but the first and who is apparently of a different species than our Philippine Idol.
Sigh. Maybe it’s just me but I do wish we could have those old biscuit contests again when we were a young, simple and uniformly proud nation that had friendly T.V. networks that didn’t fight over ratings.
*Photo Notes: That’s my mother in that photo. She was quite the winner back then. She probably ate too many cookies and drank so much juice that her genes mutated—the same ones she passed to me. That’s why I’m nowhere near as sociable, cute and huggable as she was. 🙂
Puppy Dog
A friend once told me that if he had been Hitler’s father and he had known that his son would turn out the way he did, he would have (ahem, excuse me) done the “ACT” all by himself instead of with his wife (you get the drift, don’t you?).
I wonder what Hitler’s parents would have done if they had known who Adolf would grow up to be. Would they have taken his life even before he was born or would they have allowed him to be born and changed his environment or the way they raised him instead?
I used to be a staunch supporter of the nurture theory—that adults are more a result of how they were raised and of the influence of their environment (that’s like saying you have my parents and the world to blame for the plague that I am to you; Hahaha). I’m beginning to think though that nature, our genes, does have as much of a hand at influencing who we become.
At this point, I would like to divert from my usual depressed, bitter self to look into the brighter side of things—that side where Barney teaches the Care Bears to sing family-oriented songs in a ghastly way. Seriously, there are just some things that can soften not just the hardest of hearts but the more tragic cynical and sarcastic ones too.
On the first day of this year (when we Filipinos got another excuse to stuff each other with too much food) our pressure cooker blew up in our kitchen. That resulted in a near Jackson Pollock cow oil masterpiece getting imprinted right on our kitchen wall and ceiling. My husband got a share of the rare abstract work on his skin because he was standing in front of the pressure cooker when it blew up. You can imagine what he was doing then; he was the one cooking because people get sick when I cook. Since he had second degree burns, he had to sleep on the floor near our bed so he wouldn’t accidentally rub his ointment-coated skin on me and our daughter.
Our two year old daughter who had always slept beside us since she was an infant couldn’t keep her eyes off her father. After a long time of just staring, she took her stuffed toy, puppy dog, and placed it on her father’s stomach.
I could only stare at her in disbelief. My daughter never sleeps without her puppy dog. I asked her why she did what she did. She explained in her usual simple talk that she wanted her father to have her puppy for the night because he was sick. She had trouble falling asleep the whole night but she never took her toy back.
That just blew the caps off my jaded heart and my bladder full of bile. Of course we try to teach her to be a good kid but never specifically to do such things. I was expecting she’d exercise her right to be a tyrant at least until she turns three.
A counselor once told me it is only at around three that a person’s moral self, his ability to determine right from wrong and his ability to understand compassion, develops. How could my little daughter know that her dad needed her puppy dog that night? If I never forced her to give up what was most valuable to her, then she probably did it out of her own accord because she has some innate goodness that can either be nurtured or redirected.
I suppose all of us have that seed of innate goodness. Maybe Hitler had it too but then he could have digested it out of his body or others did that for him. I wish the good seed could just grow no matter what.