I’m not counting on being sober enough to blog tomorrow: today is Pasiklaban at UP Baguio, and I have a Christmas party to attend, so I’m planning on getting drunk tonight.  It’s been a while since my last good drink: the last drink I had was a can of San Miguel a couple of days ago.  I’m missing out on the joys of hangovers.

   Really, I’ve missed out on a lot of fun this year: while writing my thesis was fun and all, I think I need to have a bit of the fun that there is in the bottom of a liquor bottle.  I deserve it: a lot of good has come my way for the past few days that I don’t think a blog entry, much less the copious flow of liquor, would jinx my good fortune.  For everything wrong that happened this year, there was always something right that happened.

   Nope, my fortunes do not come from fortune cookies enveloping dubious passages from the Confucian Analects.  I subscribe to Jean-Paul Sartre’s radical existentialism: my life is what I make of it.  I wouldn’t have the life I live and lead right now any other way, because I’m finding happiness in places I’d never thought I’d be happy from, and happy for.  Wiping off the sick smile on my face would require surgery.

   Yup, fortune smiles on Marocharim, who’s gonna get wild and drunk tonight, baby!

   I’ve been browsing some online forums (like this one and this one) and thought about baboons on the forest canopy: after a feed of bananas, some of them stoop down low to the forest floor to throw feces at other baboons.  Yup, between “Kapamilya” and “Kapuso,” you better strap on your seatbelts for civil war… or maybe take a side and throw feces, too.

   As a TV viewer, ratings do not concern me.  I don’t give… feces… about ratings.  What matters more to me is quality programming: the sad thing is that I often find that not in free local TV, but in cable channels.  I don’t know why our free TV channels are squabbling over ratings when their TV shows leave much to be desired.  On the one hand, you have broadcasts of sanctimonious TV current affairs reporting exemplified by graphic footage of bad chicharon on a Saturday dinner (GMA-7).  On the other hand, you have broadcasts of brain-dead reality TV contests revolving around graphic footage of drunken behavior (ABS-CBN).

   And then they squabbled on live TV on the matter of ratings.  I say, the hell with it.

   Really, it forces the question: is it about viewers, or is it about viewing habits?  Whatever happened to free, accessible information when you’re forced to have two choices?  Has it become a compulsory choice between two channels?

   It makes me kind of wonder: since when did I have room in TV executive boardrooms, as a viewer demanding quality TV?  They don’t call TV the “idiot box” for nothing: the viewer is effectively an idiot when it comes to the limited and forced choices he or she has for TV programs.  It’s a good thing we have cable: at least I don’t have to choose between two sucky, perverse, gratuitous noontime game shows that sow the seeds of indolence in all 7,107 islands of the Philippines that have aerials.  At least I don’t have to look forward to barbs being traded on weekend showbiz shows.

   But why bother?  TV executives don’t care about viewers.  They care about ratings, they care more about the other station than the TV audience.  It is propaganda at work: the hell with what people think or what people need, but what TV executives want the people to think, or what they want the people to need.  This is the reason why in any given sample of Filipino homes, the TV is on for 18 hours a day.  We are, for all intents and purposes of the phrase, a nation of idiots.

   The last straw came when another freaking YouTube video on the Wilyonaryo scam surfaced in the forums.  And so what in the blue hell does this - and the ratings scams - mean to me?  Short answer: nothing.  It never meant anything to me, because they were all obsessed by the ratings.

   I’ll tell you what you can do with those ratings: shove ‘em.  Don’t rate me anymore: don’t call me your lover, your family, your friend, whatever.

   Whatever.

   Last night, me and a few friends scored invites at a gala dinner sponsored by Shell Northern Luzon, held at the Baguio Country Club.  It’s a lot like a Hollywood buffet, without Wolfgang Puck, the caviar canapés, and Jack Nicholson.  It wasn’t bad… but as long-time Marochaholics would already know by now, I’m not at my happiest in corporate-sponsored dinners.  All four of us - me, Dette, Bep, and Bonnierick - were underdressed.  In our blue jeans and rubber shoes, we stuck out like sore thumbs in a sea of three-piece suits and evening gowns.

   As much as I’d like to write about the “Jingle Shell Rock,” I would rather have it that it never happened.  It’s like a bad hangover that ended up with a menopausal old woman getting pregnant by your seed.

   While I like to have my own fun at the expense of rich people, even I know when I’m supposed to feel a bit of shame in being underdressed.  Thank goodness that Dette’s family was there and registered all three of us boys for the event, or else we would have been booted out for being common folk in the same social strata as gas boys.

   Not that there’s anything wrong with filling up gas tanks, but when the waiter is better dressed than you are, you might as well wish you dissolved into the glass carafé that holds your water.  Or if you’re like me on a lucid interval, you would have approached the table with the most glamorous-looking people, unzipped your pants, and gave them a healthy helping of the bubbliest champagne from the very depths of your bladder.

   That’s for jacking up oil prices, bitch!  While I’d like to give the next ass a Belgian chocolate fondant from… uh, my ass, that wouldn’t sit (so to speak) too well with anybody.

   I half-expected that waiters would take up my order of binagoongang baboy and free soup, but I forgot that this wasn’t my usual fare from turo-turo: this was a buffet.  A snooty one where “bistek Tagalog” is “beef striploin” and “chopped bacon” is a misnomer for bits that come off a plastic can.  Because I’m not well-acquainted with dinner-table etiquette, I assumed that I should just take a little bit of food and not go back for a second helping.  Then we all realized that the buffet table ran out of dessert.

   Don’t get me wrong: I had fun… sort of.  Pictures will follow.