Archive for September 20th, 2008

Missing the Scent of Pines

Missing the Scent of Pines

It’s been a while since I’ve been back home.

Last night was standing room at the bus from Ortigas to SM Fairview, so I decided to do the polite thing and make my way to the back of the bus.  Air-conditioned “goodness” is completely relative; the vents were pointed directly at the back of my head.  The cold breeze and antifreeze was literally killing me.  The pine-scented cardboard tree dangling above my head didn’t help much, either.  Pregnant woman to the front of me, old woman to the back of me, guy to the right of me, conductor to the left of me.  Into the mouth of Hell, rode the hundred passengers.

Do the man thing, I thought, and decided that I might as well die from exhaustion, suffocation, and intoxication from automobile refrigerant.

When the bus stopped near the Baliwag Bus terminal at Cubao, there was a vacant seat for me to occupy.  The soonest I looked out the window, I saw the Victory Liner terminal, with a bus bound out to my hometown: Baguio City.  The smell of pine that still lingered on me was nothing compared to what home had.  Home, where the pines were real, where there’s no standing room on jam-packed buses, where I didn’t have to distract my loneliness and despair with lots of work, and a mad chase for deadlines.

I came to Manila to fulfill a dream, to make something out of my life… and to a certain extent, I realized them.  As much as I want to spend the rest of my life writing in Baguio, there aren’t too many opportunities for me there outside of ESL and call centers.  Here, I was able to be a writer, I was able to be a journalist, I was able to be many things that I could never have dreamed of if I stayed there.

Yet even fulfilled dreams make way for new ones.  Now, I dream of places like UP Baguio, which is still the best place to have a cigarette regardless of no-smoking policies.  Or Good Taste Restaurant, which serves the best damn chicken dishes in the world.  Or Cafe by the Ruins, where their flavorful teas always taste better with a side of basil bread and herb cheese.

Or Cyberfritz: or as I call it, Experiment Headquarters.

Session Road.  Harrison Road.  South Drive.  The azucena at Comiles that warms both body and soul.  Coffee at the small nooks at Pacdal, right after a good feed of bibingka on Christmas Mass at St. Joseph Parish.  Fabulous indigenous dishes – or even bulalo – not at the dank all-too-notorious place right behind the 3H bus depot, but at the dangerous-looking streets of Sumulong and Jacinto: Sagada Lunch, or the ones between Orion Hardware, the massage parlors, and the gay hairdressing shops at Shoppersville.  The blood-sauce made famous by the elder Balajadia at the Slaughter Compound, where you would eat in full view of the Iglesia ni Cristo across the road.  Where “Chapparal” was more than myth, it was a very real legend.

And yes, my home in Brookside; my comforters, my stuffed animals, my books, my family.

Seven months ago, I took the 2 AM bus out of Baguio, and I never had the opportunity to take the 2 AM bus out of Cubao and back to Baguio.  There aren’t too many opportunities for me to go home knowing that the opportunities on my plate are things that bring me a step further and higher from the prospects of teaching ESL or taking calls half a world away.  A single-minded desire to be a writer has, in fact, made me one.  But at the expense of spending time at the place I love most, with the people I love.

I guess all of this sentimentality – OK, emo – comes from the fact that Baguio isn’t my adopted home, nor is it the place that I think or feel to be home.  I was born there 23 years ago, and I lived 22 years of my life there.  I lived – and if I have my way, I’ll die – in 2600.  I suppose I miss Baguio so much because it’s a genuine feeling of loss, mujo; at best, I’m a transient here in Manila.  Two hundred fifty kilometers up there, I was home.  I lorded over the mountains, I ruled over the steep slopes.  I was home.

There will come a time that I will be back home.  I don’t know when, and I don’t know how long I’ll stay there.  A visit, maybe, or even for good.  Until then, I’ll write… and I’ll pick these words tonight at the next big show.  Shooter Jennings… I used to listen to his songs back there.

Until then, I have pine-scented car freshening cardboard trees to remind me of who I am.  And where I came from.

September 20, 2008 0 comments Read More
Phono no Aware

Phono no Aware

To the Japanese, the crucial emotion of life is mono no aware: transcience, empathy, a pathos towards the fleeting and the temporary.  (In a word, emo.)  Yet there’s another crucial emotion that deals with the transient, the empathic, the fleeting, and the temporary.  It’s a neologism I call it phono no aware.

Phono no aware is simply the act of making yourself look important because you receive calls on your cell phone every hour, on the hour.  You don’t have to be important, you just have to come across as important.  Like everything in life, perception is reality.  But let’s not make this too sociological or too highfalutin; I’m just trying to make a point.

If you work in Eastwood, Ortigas Center, or Makati, you try to make an impression that you’re a winner, that you’re pretty much successful in everything you do, that the plebians who work at MiniStop are simply serving their superiors.  The truth is, you’re pretty much a wage-slave like everyone else.  With at least three differences:

  • You work across the street from the headquarters of multinational corporations (in my case, San Miguel Corporation).
  • Your office happens to be in the multinational corporation itself, but it’s just a space being leased by the owners of said corporation to make more money (say, PBCom Tower).
  • You do work for a multinational corporation, which is essentially a BPO outfit that happens to work with corporations abroad (duh).

Again, perception is reality.  These realities does not have to exist to you, nor do you have to acknowledge them.  You’re lucky enough to be in goddamn Ortigas, for chrissakes.

Anyway, now that you’ve successfully duped yourself, it’s time to dupe other people.  When you work in a “multinational corporation,” you’re three things: a winner, a person worthy of respect, and completely indispensable.  Never mind that you’re a loser, an asshole, and that you can be fired like everyone else; all you need to do is project an image of success, respectability, and invincibility.  Here’s where phono no aware comes in.

Now how exactly do you make yourself look important?  Doctors have stethoscopes, nurses have white suits, and journalists wear those funny-looking khaki vests and big-ass ID’s that say “Media.”  Yup, props: something that not a lot of people have.  Or do they?  How exactly could you make yourself look like a busy, important person who is above Skype-using peons and the quota serfdom?  Business suit?  Striped shirt?  Salvatore Ferragamo look-alikes?  Watch?

Nah… try this:

  1. Get two cellphones.  One should be cheaper than the other.  The more expensive phone should be a slider or a clamshell model.  It doesn’t have to be genuine.
  2. Put cheaper one in your left hip pocket.
  3. Make more expensive phone ring (get someone to call you, sound off the alarm, just as long as you make it ring loud enough for people to hear).  When you do answer the call, snap your phone out.  Make it seem that you’re above these cheap candybar phones everyone has.
  4. Receive call.  But not without standing up, leaning against a wall or a post, putting your left hand in your left pocket.
  5. While you’re receiving your call (the call can be legit, or you can pretend to speak to “someone” on the “other line), gesticulate.  Be animated, but try to look professional.  Try leaning on your right shoulder to keep your phone from falling while you text someone on your other phone.  Check your watch.
  6. While you’re doing this, talk REALLY loud.  Disturb your officemates.  Annoy the people behind you on the MRT.  Make it appear that you’re so important that they feel insecure or irritated by you.  Talk to your phone while you’re ordering lunch or hailing a taxi.

That, my friends, is phono no aware. Chances are, anyone working in corporate Manila knows people who do this.

Note: Read Erving Goffman, “The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life” and Horace Miner, “Body Ritual Among the Nacirema”

September 20, 2008 0 comments Read More
Weather the Storm

Weather the Storm

To go or not to go to the Philippine Blog Awards tomorrow… yours truly is a sort-of-finalist in the “Best Personal Blog” category, where I won’t win anyway given the stiff competition (now just because I wrote “stiff” doesn’t mean that I’m responsible for the corruption of Filipino moral fiber).  Anyway, I’ll just go there to see if I can get free stuff.  One of the sponsors of PBA 2 (blog awards, not basketball conference) is Havaianas… which brings me to a rather interesting story… nah (i.e., if you’re from UP Baguio, you probably already know).  But I won’t dwell on that.

The Warrior Lawyer (I have an “it’s-a-small-world-after-all” syndrome with Atty. Butch) has an interesting post about the panic of 2008, where he outlines some of the interesting signs of a global economic rupture… or Rapture… whichever comes first:

  • The collapse of Lehman Brothers
  • The sale of Merill Lynch to Bank of America
  • The American International Group (parent company of PhilAm Life) being bailed out by the US Federal Reserve
  • The rapid decline and sluggish recovery of the Philippine economy (just this week, the peso fell to a 16-month low against the US dollar, closing at P47.20 to the dollar)
  • The global credit crunch, and the possibility of overseas Filipino workers’ remittances not being enough to cope with an international financial crisis.

If the President is to be believed, Filipinos are a lot like boxers… or drunkards in an English pub.  In the words of Chumbawumba: “I get knocked down, but I get up again, you’re never gonna keep me down.”

News of crisis, especially economic crisis, can get very worrisome; for all intents and purposes of a doomsday prophecy, if the US continues its economic downward spiral and does not figure out a way to arrest it, the lot of us will be out of work.  Yet it begs the question: are we seeing the collapse of the globalist imperialist-dominated economy?

Over at Tonyo Cruz’s blog, there’s an interesting statement written by the International League of Peoples’ Struggle (ILPS).  Then again, as much as I’m “progressive” (I don’t like labels), I have to disagree with the prophecy of collapse.  What we’re seeing and reading in the news right now, IMO, is the Great Depression 2.0 (some may say XP, but I’d rather call it Great Depression Vista).  Accelerating economic deterioration?  Yes, but like Filipinos, capitalism is a fighter.

I don’t subscribe to capitalism’s Facebook fan profile or its Friendster account (I don’t have Multiply), but capitalism is more robust and more adaptive than it was during Karl Marx’s time.  To me, the response to the global financial crisis is a wake-up call to the failure of this capitalist model.  I don’t know what changes will take place in the theory and practice of capitalism, but the current global (OK, maybe American) financial crisis is just a historical cycle.  One day it’s down, the next day it’s up.  We’ll never know.

September 20, 2008 0 comments Read More