I’m a jeans-shirt-jacket fellow, although you’ll never see me wear a suit of white.  I just happen to like black and grungy-themed shirts, and I feel naked without a jacket.  Yet if there’s anything I hate more than hip-hop attire that you would expect to see on a man with multiple circumcisions, it’s the get-up of the emo loser kid.

So pardon me while I play to the role of an asshole.

To look well within the stereotype of emo-ness, you have to build up your look.  It’s not about what music you listen to on your giant CDR-King earphones connected to your pissant 128 MB Starmall MP3 player, but what you wear that makes you a perfect example of the decay of Filipino mass culture.

One of the things I don’t understand about emo fashion is that stupid-looking Kevin Federline hat.  I always thought that emo was about that Quixotic struggle for unrequited romance and the ennui and angst that comes with it, but what’s up with the fedora?

Do the emos have a one-up on us when it comes to free open-source software?  Do the emos wear those big-ass headphones to hide the fact that they’re listening to the off-sync beats of K-Fed (or was that Fed-Ex) singing “Popozão?”

I do not know, but I doubt you’ll be listening to The Red Jumpsuit Aparratus, Sunny Day Real Estate, or Saosin (how they come up with these names, I do not know) while looking like a reject backup dancer for a K-Fed music video.  If you get rejected for that, and still manage to end up being rejected by a girlfriend that was never yours to begin with, then maybe you do have the right to do some wrist-slashing, or whatever it is you emo kids do.  Last I checked, this country is still a democracy.

Being a 23-year-old fogey, I also do not understand scarves.  There must be a semiotic quality to it, something poetic like, “I hate myself for losing that girl, so I’m going to eventually tighten up this scarf and asphyxiate myself because my life is not worth living.  Said scarf, though, was made popular by more than a couple Filipino broadcast journalists:

Abner Mercado: Host of “The Correspondents,” Mercado was said to wear this scarf as a form of public identification.

Ed Lingao: Former host of “The Correspondents,” Lingao used to wear a sniper’s cloak when he was covering the Iraq war in behalf of ABS-CBN.

Is there something remotely emo about journalism?  Hmmm… a change of career plans is necessary.  Maybe a really itchy scarf is a very good option for a cilice, that you’re hiding goiter, or you’re warming up the vocal cords for a gig in front of a couple dozen 21st century beatniks who stare at urinal cake sugar cubes dissolving into something that passes for absinthe.

I suppose that if you’re stuck listening to Led Zeppelin, The Sex Pistols, Cypress Hill, and Rage Against the Machine, you don’t really understand a lot about emo wear.  Like those skinny jeans: are they supposed to crush your testicles, or did you in fact neuter yourself with rubber bands?  Self-mutilation is a big part of emo, and I suppose doing the capon routine on your own… cock, would be a much more cathartic alternative to disposable razor blades.

You’d get it once you get hold of a couple of rubber bands and a barbecue stick.

If you’re wondering where I am, I’m at McDonald’s.  I have a full view of KC Concepcion’s posters for BAYO, and a full view of my least-favorite species in the animal kingdom: Homo sapiens sapiens.

I have zero fashion sense: I’m just a jeans-shirt-jacket fellow.  The only way I know how to “spice up” my usual non-fashionable self is when I wear boots, which are very impractical when you’re aboard the MRT and you’re walking from the Shaw Boulevard platform to Ortigas Center.  However, my jologs fashion sense had me developing a rather keen eye for the fashion sense of other people.

Like Makati City party girls who wear ultra-short miniskirts and shorts even if they have ensaymada dough for legs.  Or old women who think that glutathione makes them look less like Jason Voorhees… although they look like Michael Myers.  Leatherface, even.  Rather than make women look like movie stars, glutathione and whitening agents have the opposite effect.

And then there’s the fashion sense of fathers everywhere: the collared, short-sleeved polo shirt.  Nothing speaks more of corporate fatherhood than wearing a Lacoste polo shirt, jeans, and leather loafers.  I think the inventor of the Daddy-Do should be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for changing the way we look at fatherhood in general.

Or that annoying trend of today, Abner Mercado’s abel Iloco scarf.  I don’t know what’s up with that, and I certainly don’t know what’s up with emo kids wearing it with their skinny jeans and Paramore t-shirts.  Then they take pictures of themselves at comfort rooms at Gateway… I just hope they don’t go to Recto.

Which begs the question… who the f**k is Paramore?

   My friend Erik said that if I’m going to really settle down at Manila, I have to get a haircut.  It’s not the first time somebody told me to cut my hair: just about everybody tells me that I have to get a haircut one way or another.  Here are some of their best reasons:

• Employers are reluctant to hire long-haired men, on the assumption that they are either drug addicts or government rebels;
• The weather is often too hot that long hair is impractical;
• Nearsighted people and convenience store cashiers often mistake me for a flat-chested woman, and;
• I look better with shorter hair.

   I couldn’t really make a good defense for having long hair, so I decided to have a haircut today: my first haircut in over two years.  It cost me P190 and small talk with an openly gay hairdresser.  It is, after all, Chinese New Year: one should enter the new year with a fresh outlook and some much-needed changes.

   I don’t know about the feng shui of haircuts, but I was quite disappointed looking at how much of my hair was cut out by the hairdresser.  Worse, almost every customer was looking at me with those sick smiles on their faces.  I think it was a slow day for business: I entered the salon with hair over a foot long, and ended up with a completely different hairdo.  To use the term loosely, it was revolution on my scalp.

   Kung hei fat choi!

   One of the reasons why I’m very tentative about cutting my hair is because I don’t want to be mistakenly labeled as “emo.”  Because everything you see and read in the Internet is true, I took an “emo test” in a Friendster survey and found out that I’m 90% emo.  Consider the evidence weighed against me:

• I love the color black.
• I always sit at the corner.
• I like listening to metal rock (sic) music.
• I have a lot of problems with my life.
• I’m not much of a loud person.
• I don’t talk much.
• I don’t have that much (sic) friends.
• I barely have fun.
• I barely go out with my folks or friends.

   Save for a single “emo-defining” characteristic - that one side of my hair does not cover one of my eyes - I am, by virtue of this very scientific survey, 90% emo.  Hmmm… is this the kind of defaming survey that could have me sue somebody for P15-million, and make me run 60-second TV ads demanding “the truth?”

   I can dispute “emo” claims leveled against me just fine.  For one, I don’t listen to emo music any more than I should: I’m through with my Lifehouse phase.  In fact, I have memorized many of Willie Revillame’s songs in “Wowowee,” and I sing along to it.  No self-respecting self-mutilator will ever sing “Sayaw Darling,” let alone dance to it with all the bravado of a lower ape with pronounced prognathism (my Anthropology training suddenly paid off).

   For two, if I ever cut my hair emo-style and wore checkered clothing, I would look more like Senator Ping Lacson.  Now that I wear urban cowboy boots, I’d fit more in the general category of a longtime Baguio resident sans the betel-nut chewing (pardon the stereotype).

   Trust me, I’m not emo.  I eat emo people for breakfast.

   My good friend Thea posted a comment in my Friendster account asking if I was the one she saw at Nevada Square.  I also happened to see Abel, and perhaps the whole of UP Baguio’s Debate Society and some members of the University Student Council.  It sort of begs the question: what in the heck was I doing at Nevada Square?

   Anyone who has been in Baguio lately would know that Nevada is the destination for drunken debauchery.  While I am known for consuming copious amounts of alcohol, I don’t do my drinking in nightclubs.  “House music” strikes me as porno music, and I don’t take too lightly to glowing balls (so to speak).  Besides, I’d rather sit down with drunken men in a sari-sari store than to squeeze myself (so to speak) at La Cuna.

   My good friend Ian also sort of “caught” me there, and asked if I was a regular there.  A regular?  Do I go to the University of Nevada earning my Bachelor’s Degree in Alcohology?  Nope: for one, I find their prices atrocious, and the blue-ness of Bedroom is nauseating.  Looking at scantily-clad clubbers also gets stale after the first few minutes of discreet ogling.

   I’d rather sit down on an easy chair nursing a bottle of Jack Daniel’s, doing my Al Pacino impersonations.

   For the first time in four years, I’m back to wearing boots.  But they’re not combat boots: they’re dress boots.  Black suede-leather boots.  Boots for the modern, fashion-conscious cowboy.  I suppose I should dress up in my leather pants, one of my black shirts, my trench coat, my Harley-Davidson bandanna and my cowboy hat, and be the dystopian version of Clint Eastwood in the 1992 Academy Award-winning film, “Unforgiven.”

   Outside of money (the gift that keeps on giving… in more ways than one), the boots were part of my Christmas gifts this year.  In the beginning, the idea of wearing boots appealed to me, and I looked forward to breaking them in today.  But unlike new shoes, new boots need more in the way of getting accustomed to.  It has a pretty high heel for a man’s shoe, and there really isn’t a lot of freedom of movement for your toes given that the shoe tapers toward the front.  And because it’s a leather boot, breathability is out of the question.

   There is an upside to wearing boots, though: it makes ass-kicking a hell of a lot easier.  With my pointy boots, I can deliver podiatric sodomy to my enemies better than any ordinary shoe.  And once you get used to boots, they really ain’t that bad because they correct your walking motion.

   So the next guy who crosses The Zone will literally and figuratively be brushing my boots with a toothbrush.

   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.

   It’s easy to get around a problem surrounding the lack of your favorite cigarette: you look for a substitute.  In the absence of Marlboro Lights, there’s always Winston Lights or Marlboro Reds.  The same is true when it comes to drinking… or is it?

   Two summers ago, when I spent the summer term at UP Diliman, me and a few friends from the boarding house decided to drink a round of beers to celebrate the end of my exam.  I didn’t know much about Manila, so I expected that they drank the same kind of San Miguel Beer I was used to guzzling here in Baguio.  It was a relatively rural area (the irony of it), but the nearby stores didn’t carry SMB.  After a few stores - and a trip to MiniStop - we finally got San Miguel.

   For the non-alcoholics, it’s a different sort: back in those days, I literally had to train myself to drink RC Cola.  Here in Baguio, there’s no such thing as “not Coke:” you’d have to be a lowlander to appreciate Pepsi.  Coke Sakto was just about as far as the Coca-Cola continuum will go in that neighborhood, where the nearest Coke-selling place was the soda fountain at CASAA.  The soonest I got to the bus terminal on my way out of Manila, I drank Coke to my heart’s content.

   Nein.  So the Germans say.

   I just got reminded by my mom that if I have any plans of getting travel documents in the way of passports and visas, I have to cut my hair.  Somehow, many of my relatives are quite concerned about my hair length.  It’s paranoia by syllogism:

• I have long hair.
• I’m from UP.
• I used to be an activist of the street-rallying kind.

   It’s not that I’m afraid of having a haircut: when I took the summer term at UP Diliman a couple of years ago, I had a haircut.  Some of my friends were very nanghihinayang that I cut my hair when it was so long, shiny, and fell in a neat cascade almost to the small of my back.  Now my hair is below shoulder-length: it’s still too long by conventional and conservative standards.

   For all intents and purposes, I used to be very vainglorious when my hair was longer.  I oiled it myself on a regular basis, used handfuls of shampoo and handfuls of conditioner (not the all-in-one kind), and even went so far as to have it cellophaned once.  When pesky lice infested my hair, I took the burning sensations of Kwell, had my hair ironed, and then went to a hair spa a month later… all in the effort of ridding my locks of the parasitic vermin.

   Now that I have shorter hair - and figured out the cost of my vanity - I stopped giving my hair the kind of attention I don’t give my romantic prospects.  The truth is, you don’t have to go to a hair salon to have good hair: you only need to give your hair an extra oomph of shampoo.  Soap, surprisingly, works fine.

   But I don’t know what haircuts have to do with travelling abroad.