This is an old trick that you can do with Winamp or CoolEdit: look for a plugin that can lower the song’s pitch, and any “girly” song would sound like it was sang by Boyz II Men.  This works especially on Monica’s “Angel of Mine,” Tamia’s “Officially Missing You,” and Selena’s “Dreaming of You.”  Lowering pitch has been a rather lingering obsession with me: I get a ton of laughs whenever I lower the pitch of Christina Aguilera’s “Reflection.”

   Which brings me to ask: why isn’t there a group of male singers/dancers who dress in revealing outfits and sing songs that are thinly-disguised sexual innuendos?  Like, lowering the pitch of songs sang by The Pussycat Dolls?

   I’m not gay: it’s just the subject of intrigue for me.  The Viva Hot Men once exemplified this, and ended up singing “Pandesal.”  We almost had it done with Jordan Herrera, if not that he’s now doing that rather epileptic-looking warm-up in “Pinoy Mano-Mano: The Celebrity Boxing Challenge.”  I’m talking about men demanding you to loosen up their buttons… baby.

   My idea for “The WoofyDog Men” is technically the male version of The Pussycat Dolls: a male burlesque group, a band of macho-dancer type singers who do The Backstreet Boys’ folding-chair routines half-nude.  Dances where pelvic thrusts are the norm.  Such an idea will go over the gay community.

   I was thinking about many ways to earn P20,000 courtesy of the “Extreme Papaya” contest in “Pilipinas: Game KNB?”  I’ve narrowed my long list to three options.  I could do any one of the following for P20,000:

• Fire Papaya: Set myself on fire dancing “Papaya;”
• Chicken Papaya: Have a chicken dance the “Papaya;”
• Sex Papaya: Do the “Papaya” while having sex.

   They’ve done everything with Urszula Dudziak’s “Papaya:” the Silent Drill team of the Philippine Military Academy just did the “Papaya” for their routine, inmates in a Visayas prison just won P20,000 for doing the “Papaya.”  It begs the question: how extreme can “Papaya” get?  Boy, Edu Manzano didn’t know what he unleashed upon the world.

   “Fire Papaya” is, for all intents and purposes, extreme.  I’m not talking about Rachel Lobangco’s Micronesian fire-dances: I’m talking about dousing yourself in gasoline, setting yourself ablaze, and do the requisite dance steps of the “Papaya.”  Now that’s work P20,000.

   As far as “Chicken Papaya” goes, I had some problems trying to narrow down my list of animals that could dance the “Papaya.”  I thought about dogs, but that’s too obvious.  Cats, too, are obvious choices.  My list included horses, worms, snakes, butterflies, cows.  Pigs are cute, but they can’t dance.  Sheep, maybe, but that’s even cuter.  Now chickens dancing the “Papaya…” now that’s an idea.  After all, both fowl and fruit have to establish a good rapport by the time they get dunked into the pot for a tinola dinner.  Besides, “Fish Papaya” is a bit, well, gross.  Especially when you actually have to eat it.

   Which brings me to the best/worst idea for an “Extreme Papaya” video: why not do it while having sex?  All 45 positions of the Kamasutra are possible take-off points for dancing the “Papaya:” you can take any sexual position and dance the “Papaya.”  Why stop there: why not have a 30-person orgy and do the “Papaya” in the middle of mass orgasm?  Again, don’t get me started.

   In the interest of humor, “Youth Suicide” is the name of a Wrestling Society X wrestler famed for throwing himself off 25-foot ladders and into thumbtacks and explosive ring props.  However, for this entry, I’d like to talk about a different sort of youth suicide: young people killing themselves before they reach the prime of their lives.

   Awhile ago, I talked about a recent suicide by a 12-year-old girl at Cabinet Hill, Baguio City.  The latter half of this year has been rife with youth-related suicides: Mariannet Amper of Davao City, a boy who committed suicide in Iloilo under the influence of rugby, and various hangings.  Rather than of the kind of suicides consistent with the depressing lyrics of Fall Out Boy and Hoobastank, these are suicides that are of a different nature from teen “emo” phases: there seems to be a prevalence of depression among the youth today.

   This article, haphazard as it may be, attempts to ground youth suicide into a framework: a social-anthropological one.  Here, I attempt to make sense of suicide from a different perspective outside of blogging commentary.

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Boring sociological brouhaha

   Emilé Durkheim, considered by many to be the father of sociology, was also one of the first to study suicide scientifically.  In his work Suicide, Durkheim distinguishes between four forms of suicide:

• Egoistic suicide: results from too little social integration, where suicide is committed because of having little in the way of social support mechanisms;
• Altruistic suicide: results from too much social integration, where suicide is committed because people are willing to sacrifice their own lives for others’;
• Fatalistic suicide: results from overregulated, unrewarding lives (i.e., slavery;
• Anomic suicide: results from problems in integration like the inability of societies to provide for needs (acute and chronic economic anomic suicide), or the inability of societies to provide for adaptation (acute and chronic domestic anomic suicide).  (http://durkheim.itgo.com/suicide.html)

    Suicide, at least given this framework, is not caused or done solely by the individual: the value of Durkheim’s sociology (perhaps even its limitation) is that it frames social events and phenomena from and into the social world.  For the lay person reading this entry, it is already possible to assume that youth suicide is by and large anomic: for example, Mariannet Amper’s suicide was an acute or chronic economic anomic suicide.

   But while we can chalk up a lot of youth-related suicides to the inability of social institutions to provide for needs, surely something else outside of institutions has to be a cause for suicide.  If you asked me, from the structural-functionalist framework of viewing things, the social structure is composed of social agents: think of Lego blocks creating a tower of Legos.

   My newfound knowledge and appreciation for psychoanalytic theory leads me to a probable cause for suicide: the human psyche itself.  I’m fairly new to psychoanalysis, so right now, my firmest grasp on the matter is more towards Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (BTW: they’re not “psychoanalytic” per se, they critiqued psychoanalysis) as opposed to Sigmund Freud or Jacques Lacan.

   The psyche being the Lego blocks in the tower of Legos, we need to consider the human individual: Deleuze and Guattari, in Anti-Oedipus, write that the individual, being a desiring-machine, works only by breaking down (this holds true for every machine).  This breakdown can cause many in the way of what Deleuze and Guattari call “neuroses:” while I’m not sure if suicide is in the text, I’m sure that it is a manifestation of it.

*     *     *

   It’s clichéd, but the reality of youth-related suicide (or suicide for that matter) is that it is not caused by a single factor: instead, it is caused by a multiplicity of factors.  There is no central cause to youth-related suicide: consider the MySpace suicide, among many other Internet-related suicides for that matter.

   I’m not saying that suicide is an event without a cause: all I’m saying is that because we cannot trace suicide to a single pool of causes that are easily addressed, there’s really no way to prevent suicide.  It is possible to alleviate the effects of suicide-causing factors so as its effects would not be so prevalent, like more jobs and a common social understanding for the lesser among us.  But as far as preventing something that has been with modern society since day one, it’s not possible.

   “Vicious cycles,” says my friend Rhon.  I just hope that’s not it for a problem I don’t really know how - or where - to start solving.