Then I got my wings, and I never even knew it
When I was a worm, thought I wouldn’t get through it.

- Marilyn Manson, “Wormboy”

What do Marilyn Manson songs, the Catholic Church, and potted meat have in common?

Yesterday, the Philippine Daily Inquirer reported on a priest who opened - literally - a can of worms.  One of the attendants in the San Carlos Seminary opened a can of Spam Lite Meatloaf and found that the potted meat was full of vermin.  Today, the reports mention that Hormel, makers of the potted meat, consider the unfortunate incident “rare.”  Not lightly fried and made into a sandwich ingredient - or whatever they do with the stuff at the Spam restaurant at SM Megamall (if it’s still open) - but rare.  Au jus, au naturale, straight off the can.

I kind of wonder if the priests and brothers in the seminary were thinking having Lobster Thermidor au crevette with a mornay sauce served in a Provencale manner with shallots or aubergines garnished with truffle paté, brandy, and with a fried egg on top and Spam.  Certainly not worms.

Let me be (I hope) one of the first Filipino bloggers to congratulate President Barack Obama.

Awhile ago, many of us took notice - and rejoiced - when Barack Obama won the US Presidential elections to be the first African-American to lead the nation.  It was a culmination of an obsession and a fascination of that occasional season where we, non-Americans, delight and revel in an election and a right that isn’t ours.

Sen. Ed Angara, who put geopolitics into play, may have articulated the message best: Barack’s mother was from Hawaii, Sen. John McCain was detained as a prisoner of war in Vietnam, so the vote has a lot to do with Asia.

The “message to the world,” as Ding Gagelonia points out at FV - and with the same appreciation and admiration expressed by Pat Mangubat - brings out something sad… but then again, true.

I’m not anti-American, but I am a non-American.  I do not have the same Constitutional rights given to an American citizen to vote every four years for an American President.  Yet as the world rejoices over the victory of President Obama, I’m a bit more pensive.  As a non-American, what exactly do I have at stake with this milestone in American history?

Nothing.

There’s a certain fascination - sometimes even bordering on epal - on non-Americans like myself to make a big fuss about what the international community has at stake with a US Presidential election.  There have been many questions asked to both Obama and McCain over the course of the 2008 US Elections by us non-Americans: what’s their policy on outsourcing?  How will they improve foreign relations with other countries?  What’s their favorite color?  What’s their stand on reproductive health?  What will they do on their first 100 days in office?

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Cafe Veniz, 5:06 PM

We sit together
The mountain and I
Until only the mountain remains.

- Li Po, “Alone Looking at the Mountain”

They say that where you’re from says a lot about who you are.

It’s been months since I’ve been home, and a lot of realizations have passed since I was last here.  In the beginning, I thought that I would never leave.  There will always be steady employment in the ESL schools and the call center industry, if I really wanted to.  There will always be a roof above my head, dinner on my table, and clothes on my back, without me ever having to leave.

There’s a lot about Baguio that I never wanted to leave, which is why I ended up crying when the bus made its first stopover months ago.  Maybe the emotions came from a 23-year-old young man who, for the very first time in his life, will live independently.

In eight months of working my ass off, I realized how much I depended on the mundane-ness of everyday, taken-for-granted situations just to get through life.  For my first few months in Manila, I longed a little too much for what I already had, not what I can have.  Granted that Manila is not the land of infinite opportunity, but it’s there that I found a career path that was not available to me had I stayed here.  Yet even with that said, there’s only so much sentimentality that kept me from shedding tears when I did come back home.

Even for just a few days.

Man, it’s cold here.

As some of you may know - and if you read Filipino Voices - I am engaged in a rather heated meeting of the mind-and-empty-vacuous-skull… a debate… I don’t know what to call it anymore, with The High Priest of Smokes.  What was supposed to be an argument on the basis of things important to us has degenerated into an absolute embarrassment.

Now this not FV, and not the Jester-in-Exile’s debate thread; this is my blog.  I believe that for me to properly address this issue, it is important for me to look at things objectively.  Why would HP obsess himself with refuting every single one of my points to the point of near-speechlessness and stuttering?  Why does he spend sleepless nights calling me names and calling me “Mr. Marocharim?”

After a few cigarettes, a trip around social network sites, and e-mails, I became a wee bit depressed.

A leisurely download festival, and skipped dinner, and a couple of cigarettes later, I finally figured it out:

The High Priest of Smokes is in love with Marocharim.

That is… ABSOLUTELY BRILLIANT!

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Because my job requires me to use bullet points… I’ll get to full-on entries tomorrow.

• Jen Llarena gave this blog a whole new different name in her blog: “The Marocharim Experience.”  Note to Jen: keep it. I like how it sounds.
• Today on Google Analytics: I have successfully “greened” every single nation on the European continent except Austria and Switzerland.
• The number one search term that makes people read TMX: “emo.”
• Reliable sources tell me that the impression I make at the office is that I’m an extremely shy nice guy who walks as if he’s going to fall over.  I walk, you decide.
• I have a new toy: a Samsung d760 digital camera.  Corporate self-mutilation does not go unrewarded.  Now time to take pictures of hot women.
• Over at An Apple a Day, Pantene is sponsoring a blogger’s party next week at Taste Asia, SM Mall of Asia.  I need a hair treatment.  I’m the 100th registrant, which is freaky.

Well, that’s it… I only have five minutes to do this.

Surprisingly, this is not petiks Sunday.  I had to write some stuff, and I was fresh off an impromptu session at Eat My English (Metrowalk, Ortigas) with some of my friends.  I’ve been Alt-Tabbing between Word, Yahoo! Messenger, GMail, and yes, Plurk.

What the hell am I doing on a rainy Sunday working, I have no idea.  But to sum this non-petiks day up:

1. It’s a rush job anyway, but I always find it hard to rush an article (facepalm).
2. The Chairman just told me that my 366-page tome/paperweight is now available at the school library, and is actually being read by people (facepalm).
3. Over at PlurkLand, I seem to still have my (ahem) issues with the… nice, cashier/barista at yesterday’s meet at Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf, Gateway (uh, Jen… balikan natin, LOL)

So to make the best out of petiks, I decided to make two - yes, I’m not bored enough to make a lyrics translation, two - avatars of how I would look like dare I appear in The Simpsons or on South Park (hats off to Elaine for the Simpsons thing):

Let’s start with my Simpson-esque visage:

In the interest of making a joke, my Simpsons doppelganger looks like Diether from that old Mike Myers sketch, “Sprockets.”

Not funny?  I know.  But I rue the day that I’ll find a woman who’ll marry my Springfield clone looking so… metro.  (I would say gay, but I don’t want to end up defending myself all over again much to the ire of haters and frenemies who think I’m gay.)

Which says more for my evil South Park visage:

This picture has been my IM avatar for quite a while now… I guess it captures my Dasein. I would have liked added a few weapons here and there, but a child-murdering stray Manny Pacquiao-hating Sodomite antichrist-spawn like myself (snigger… time for Google to do its work) does well with a South Park character worse than, say, Mr. Hat, Damien, or even Saddam.

This day is so not good.  I expected Nadia Montenegro and Cristy Fermin to bitchslap the living heck out of each other.

I’m sure that “Direct to the Point,” or is it “Straight to the Point,” on IBC-13 is a fine social and political commentary program, although I’m not so sure about the giant finger of the mustachioed host pointing to the unwashed, uninformed masses crossing to the Quezon Avenue MRT Station.

It scares the shit out of me.

Nothing screams “punditry” more than the classic finger-pointing pose: I can imagine the likes of Ted Failon, Mike Enriquez, Manolo Quezon and Ricky Carandang pose like that on print ads for their respective TV programs.  Finger-pointing gives you an air of authority and reputability.  You have to be taken seriously.  To be perceived as a no-nonsense public service program host, you either fold your arms over like Clark Kent, or point your finger like Kent Brockman.

On more finger-pointing news, it seems that the UAAP Finals between the Ateneo Blue Eagles and the De La Salle Green Archers was caused by a “dirty finger” incident involving Archers forward Rico Maierhofer.  In a September 26 article by the Philippine Daily Inquirer, Coach Franz Pumaren defended his star player by saying that the gesture was a play signal, not an offensive gesture.  An incensed Pumaren saw the conclusion of the two-game sweep as “the worst officiating ever seen in the Finals.”  You have to give it to the Archer fans for the “sore loser” bits thrown around the Intarnets; if you’re going to lose the most prestigious college basketball award, you should lose it in a better way than having a man down just because of a finger-flickin’-good moment.

It’s hard to make a point with your big toe, so you have to “finger” the point every now and then.  Whenever I gesticulate, I prefer to “hand” my point.  I use a lot of flowing hand-motions, or I gesticulate with my cigarette (or other props, like a rolled-up newspaper, a can of Coke, a spoon and fork, a pen, or whatever is at hand).  Besides, my fingers are not exactly manly enough to do a competent finger-pointing gesture.  I’ve been known to employ a lot of offensive gestures in public, though:

• The middle finger (the old reliable)
• The Shocker (I heart this insult, so I use it very sparingly)
• The Bras d’Honneur (also called the Brazilian Banana or the Gest Kozakiewicza, so offensive that even Bayani Fernando managed to sneak it into his giant “less than one thousand pesos” tarpaulin banners all over EDSA)

On one last note: when I was a kid, penis size was measured through a guy poking his index finger through a piece of folded paper.  If you’ve seen my fingers before…

Simon, the business manager of the client we’re working for, is here in the country for a vacation.  One of the things he was looking forward to while he’s here include visits to some tourist destinations, historical places, and – much to my surprise – a cockfight.

In case you didn’t know, I love cockfights.  There’s nothing that can get the blood pressure and testosterone levels going than watching two cocks getting it on, fighting for supremacy over a muddy brown ring.
I’m talking about roosters, you pervert.

I’ve been to cockfights before, and yes, I’ve gambled a few small bills here and there.  The tupada (cockfighting arena) breaks families better than it does wallets.  Every Filipino family has at least one story of a relative who became addicted to sabong. You’ll never hear the end of cockfight stories in family reunions, like Uncle Procopio gambling away money for dinner, or how Mang Ding got beaten up by a group of thugs at the tupada, and ended up with a limp for the rest of his life.  Cockfighting is considered a social evil by many politicians, although I’m betting that at least half of the male members of Congress have owned at least one fighting rooster.  Yet for everything wrong about a cockfight, the sport – or ritual, whichever comes first – appeals to sadistic people like me, who know our chickens right.

A neighbor of mine keeps his roosters not in a coop, but at the other end of the street across his house.  The animals are tied to a bamboo stake dug into the ground, and protected from the elements by a wire cage.  Cockfighting is a very cruel sport; not just because of an injured or dead chicken at the end of a bout, but because of the many ways cockfighting aficionados use to imbibe courage upon the animals.

How to make your chicken a warrior of the avian kingdom is a debate in itself.  Take my own family, for example.  An uncle of mine believes that you can make one brave, fight-winning chicken if you expose the animal to the elements and to the dangers of stray dogs.  My dad’s theory of chicken courage comes with raising the animal with other overly aggressive alpha-cocks.  Yet another uncle believes that the only way that you can make a rooster fight is if you feed him with steroid-infused grain – pampatapang – specially formulated for cockfighting.  Yet all of them agree that the proof of the chicken is not in the ring, but perception: sharp eyes, long feathers at the neck, strong legs, a short comb, and wattle redder than strawberry soda.  A fight-winning chicken must look like a Spartan soldier, not an Athenian boy-lover… so to speak.

The tournament is usually held come Good Friday, election season, or come the town fiesta.  The cockfighting derby itself is a lot like the Stanley Cup playoffs, except for the hockey sticks and players who know Wayne Gretsky from “Pro Stars” and stats printed at the back of NHL collectible cards.  There are cockfighting arenas that look and smell professional, but the bulk of illegal cockfighting rings reek of spilled rum, cheap cigarettes, and chicken dung.  The effervescent aroma of aged, dried chicken shit gives the place an air of ancient Rome; instead of gladiators at the Colosseum, you have pumped up chickens pecking and scratching and clawing the crap out of each other.

The powerful, ammoniac smell of chicken poop does a good job of hiding other shitty smells in the arena: horseshit from the barangay captain who runs the joint, the crock of shit that is the town mayor who is at the front row, and the bullshit from fixers who may have already rigged the fights before you kissed your roll of twenty peso bills goodbye.

A small knife is taped up or tied to one of the legs of each chicken, presumably as a weapon.  Then the kristo, the incorruptible exemplar of consummate sportsmanship that he is, starts the fight.  Here’s where the fun starts.

It takes a while before the two chickens start pecking the living hell out of each other, but you can smell blood in the air.  Chickens are generally peace-loving creatures – cowards, at that – but there’s something about a steady feed of Thunderbird that turns the lowly creature into the animal world’s equivalent of Philip Salvador.  The long feathers in the chicken’s neck rise up, the animals start hopping up and down to intimidate the other, and all hell breaks loose.  It’s a lot like professional wrestling, or a Jean-Claude Van Damme movie: stunts, flips, pecking, and finally, stabbing.

Unlike the “Kumite” tournament dramatized (or invented) in Bloodsport, or maybe even WrestleMania, cockfighting is not a “fight-to-the-death.”  From time to time, the kristo enters the ring to check if the other chicken is still alive and able to fight.  Unlike his omniscient, omnipotent heavenly counterpart, this “Christ” cannot raise a man – much less a chicken – from the dead.

Most losing chickens are often incapacitated, and are nursed back to health by the losing owner or handler.  Sometimes, the damage is far beyond recovery, so the chicken is slaughtered and eaten.  I never had the chance to eat a fighting cock, but I am told it’s quite tough, chewy, and tastes “like medicine.”  Methinks it’s from all the chicken-pumping chemicals in the feed.

Is it brutal?  Is cockfighting a disgrace to Filipino culture?  Does the battle between two animals that are generally considered cowards of the animal kingdom destroy family values?  I have no idea.  It’s not barbaric at all.  Aggression is a very natural animal characteristic, like gambling is for men.  You can take any two animals (capybara, porcupines, moose, even earthworms) and they will end up fighting to the death.  It’s a lot like bumfights, pit fighting, and vale tudo for the animal kingdom.  Guys will always gamble on it anyway.

Although I doubt if Simon will ever look at a chicken the same way again if he does see his first cockfight.

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”

ADDENDUM, Sept. 14, 2008: Angela Stuart-Santiago wrote yesterday about Senate Bill 2464, a.k.a. the new anti-obscenity bill.  So I kind of figured that this post is my little act of waving my private parts on that wank-rag of a censorship bill.

In Yahoo! News oddball reports today: Hong Kong TV news reporter Chiu Yu-Kit, former news reporter for Asia Television, was arrested for masturbating naked while he was alone on the top tier of a double-decker bus. Chiu got caught on July 31 by a police officer who was jogging past the bus, and saw him standing on a seat naked, facing a window. Chiu’s defense: he was only trying to “release his stress.”

I think you know where I’m going with this…

Before you start cocking your eyebrows, I think that the man is, in fact, thinking straight. I’m sure that there are many other ways to relieve stress, but 99% of men out there will agree with me that masturbation is a great stress-reliever. Sometimes you need get a grip on reality, make the needed strokes, and gush forth about the strains of daily life. You know what they say about life: you have to give it that extra inch… so to speak.

Although I don’t recommend taking off your clothes inside a bus, and jack off like your life depended on it.

What makes me wonder is why Chiu took off all his clothes just to indulge in the pleasures of the flesh. Or how he did it: the crazy hurly-burly of being a Hong Kong TV news reporter shoving microphones in the face of famous people all day can get really taxing. I’m sure that the One-Handed Pump didn’t do it for the guy, and I’m certain the Stroke-and-Pull did not do it either. If you’re going to take off your clothes and masturbate on top of a double-decker bus while standing on a window seat, it’s a choice between the Slap-Trap-and-Roll, the Spit-and-Shine, and the old reliable 7-10 Split would do nicely.

If you do need to masturbate in public, the norm is to keep your clothes on. Like put one hand in your pocket. Or open your fly. Or there’s the expert level: jiggle your leg (with what leg… it depends on how your penis hangs). I guess Chiu must be so stressed out that he decided to take off all his clothes and (oh boy) play Guitar Hero.

It also makes me wonder how stressing Chiu’s job can be. I can think of many stressing jobs in the Philippines alone that can blow the minds - and the nuts - out of people. It takes a bit of perversion to figure out how many commuters at EDSA would be so stressed that they’d take a page off (among other things) the Chiu Yu-Kit Book of Public Masturbation:

• Call center agents taking the inbound-outbound account
• Sales personnel bagging the groceries
• Computer technicians starting the boot sequence
• Accountants balancing the reports
• Maintenance personnel doing the sweep-and-mop routine
• SEO specialists building the links
• Writers checking if the pen is indeed mightier than the sword (I just had to put that in).

At least we know now why the people on the bus go up and down, why the money on the bus go ching-ching-ching, why the mommy on the bus says “You’re so sweet,” and why the daddy on the bus says “I love you.” The babies going “Waah-waah-waah” and the children saying “Let’s play games” don’t count.

* * *

On a side note, I’m getting so sick of David Cook and “Always Be My Baby.” I think the guy should reprise another Mariah Carey hit, like “Honey” or “Heartbreaker.”