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.”

No, I’m not talking about one of my favorite drinking spots at Metrowalk (never mind that it’s noisy and queer, but they have cheap beer… and the best sisig in the city of Pasig… hey, that rhymed).  I’m talking about the English language.

I do remember that almost a year ago, I participated in a certain blog writing contest which won me this domain… which begs a revisit.

I remember a piece at the Baguio Midland Courier written by a schoolmate of mine back in high school – Conviron Altatis, if I’m not mistaken – where the youth were exhorted to learn and master the English language.  While I could hold my own in written English, I have problems with spoken English.  I still have something called tardive dyskinesia.  While I can speak straight English without a hitch, my speech is still pretty much slurred at some parts, so I can’t hold my own at a call center.

As usual, it takes a worse problem than mine to put things into perspective.

Owing to some financial setbacks, a friend of mine had to apply for a job at a call center.  The problem was that she had an accent problem, and she admits that she doesn’t have a good command of the English language.  In a call center, you’re paid as much for the quality of your English as you are paid to take bullshit from anonymous customers half a world away.

So she didn’t get the job.

I’m not a very introspective person; I don’t ruminate over the many grand and profound implications of something.  Besides, I only have one stomach.  Yet it kind of makes me think a lot about language.  If I remember my linguistics correctly (and here we go…), the linguistic tradition exemplified by Ferdinand de Saussure puts primacy on spoken language (la parole) above written language (la langue).  Later on, Edward Sapir and Benjamin Whorf put forward two corollaries to this assumption:

1. For something to have a rudimentary linguistic significance, it has to be grounded on experience.
2. Any experience can be committed to speech, whether it’s an utterance or a word.

Jacques Derrida argued that the question here is not a matter of primacy but of difference, but I think that I’ve already invoked one too many theories off the top of my head.  What I do need to point out is that in the real world, nobody gives a rat’s ass about what takes primacy and precedence over the other.  It’s all about utility, sensibility, and practicality.

Like a lot of things in life, things can be summarized in two simple bullet-points:

• If you’re paid to write, written language is more important than spoken language.
• If you’re paid to speak, spoken language is more important than written language.

Well thank you, Mr. Stating-the-Obvious.

Don’t get me wrong: I have nothing against the necessity of mastering the English language.  While it is the language of imperialist capitalist predators that prey upon the oppressed proletariat (…yeah…), it is the language that pays bills for your typical call center agent.  English is no longer a language that gives you a competitive edge: it is a language of survival.  Yet it is not kikay-coffee-shop-I’ll-drink-absinthe-even-if-reminds-me-of-urinal-cakes English that makes this survival possible, but proper English. American English.

Do I have a problem with it?  Yes.  It’s not because we should enforce nationalistic fervor by speaking in Filipino, but because the imperative of English does not produce people who are competent with the language.  Learning English cannot be rushed; you’d be surprised at how many call center agents speak in a kind of English that grates on the inner membranes of your spinal cord, or write in a kind of English that will stop short of reducing your brain into a throbbing medulla.  Instead of learning the language, most people who work at the call center industry are forced to learn mechanical phrases for sales and tech support.

“Globally competitive?”  I don’t think so.  What we need is a comprehensive, “down-there” study of the applications of proper English, whether it’s conversational or formal.  It’s not the call center agent’s fault that the word “actually” is mispronounced, much less abused as a conjunction and an interjection.  This task must be shouldered by the Philippine educational system; not for the sake of making more call center agents, but for the sake of being truly globally competitive.  Or heck, even for the sake of propriety.

I know it sucks, but that’s the way the world works.  You don’t blame the agents, much less engage in a blame game.  You go after the weaknesses of the structure.

Suffice to say, the suckiness of it can be summed up not in bullet points, but in three words: English, or perish.

I used to hate Ortigas before, but now I’m finding it the funniest, most ridiculously absurd place in the world.  When it comes to ridiculous absurdities, you can count me in as a fan.  Most people tend to add some semblance of glamor or prestige into their otherwise mundane and pointless roles as cogs in the wheel of a system they have nothing to do with, but got sucked (or suckered) into.

There are at least two ways that I know of to accomplish this much-needed (pardon the term) psychological blowjob:

• Understatement: Call yourself a “worker” even if you wear a collared shirt to work, and you don’t belong to a union.  For us in the content writing industry, it’s to call yourself a “corporate slave.”  Understatement has a lot to do with some degenerative personality disease.
• Overstatement: Make your job seem glamorous or interesting.  For call center agents, it’s calling yourself a “sales representative,” “customer service representative,” or “technical support representative.”  It’s to put yourself on the same plane as a politician.

I believe that no other method can bring the ego to a mind-blowing multiple orgasm than calling the place you work something else than it’s supposed to be.  Now that I started the sex metaphors, it’s like having sex, and by the time you’re about to… become one with Atman, so to speak, you groan (men) or moan (women) someone else’s name.  There’s “Eastwood City:” for all intents and purposes, it’s a complex of buildings crowded in some tract of land at Libis, not a “city” per se.  Or Makati, pronounced as “Mah-ka-ry.”  And of course there’s my Borg Cube: call Ortigas “Ehr-tee-gess.”

I’ve been in “Ehr-tee-gess” for a long time to profess that a lot about it revolves around completely necessary pretentions.  No matter how expensive your cellphone is, no matter how nice your clothes are, and no matter how many coffees at Starbucks you drink, you’re bound to eat at Hong Kong Style Noodle, and get the buy-one-take-one deals at Angel’s Burger.  I can sometimes do the Vulcan mind-meld with some of the pa-kikay types right behind Saint Francis who, on a good day, would don those big-ass shades, pretend to be Anne Curtis, and discreetly feed themselves with what we aura-interrupting plebians feed ourselves anyway.

Those big-ass shades also come in handy when:

• You don’t want to be seen riding the MRT (you either don’t have a car, or your parents decided to sell or dock your Toyota Vios until such time that gas prices roll back down to P30)
• You don’t want to be seen passing through SM Megamall B (because you’ll be passing through a supermarket, and you’d rather pass by EDSA Shangri-La)
• You don’t want to be seen smoking Winston Lights (because you don’t know that you can get the more sosy cigarettes at a cheaper price but you only know 7-Eleven and Mini Stop)
• You don’t want to be seen carrying a brown envelope to apply at some random BPO (because you’d rather be seen working at more cushy office jobs at “Mah-ka-ry”)
• You don’t want to be seen working from any other place outside San Miguel Corporation (none of us are good enough for them anyway)
• You don’t want to be seen walking or crammed into an FX (refer to first bullet point)
• You don’t want to be seen, period.

I know it’s not funny.  So?

Pain is overrated.  Rage is overused.  Somehow, “painful rage” is not the accurate phrase for what I’m feeling… for what I’m visualizing.  My obsession has turned from reconciliation… to retribution.  My focus has changed to another person… to a single-celled soulless prokaryote, a parasite - a virus - who must be purged from the gene pool with a simple act of extermination.

Romance is not the motivation here, but disgust, a misanthropy towards a certain excuse for a person who represents a monstrosity, a man possessed, and must face what lies beyond life.  Death, perhaps, has its own continuity.  It begins with suffering.  It begins with a realization of humanity not in emotion, but in nerves, in pain receptors… in blood.  The essence of our humanity, but what makes us so inhuman after all.  Revenge, in a way, is a good substitute for justice.

When you hurt somebody, you know… you have to anticipate pain, not of guilt or of turmoil but of pain… excruciating pain.  A reminder that the pain caused by force and duress is not resolved or repaid through inaction, but through force and duress… amplified.  A bruise will have to be repaid with blood, and a broken heart will have to be repaid with a broken bone.  The flogging of the spirit is repaid with the flogging of the body; we commensurate a tortured soul by torturing a body.

It makes perfect sense; when you do not act like a human being, you have to be reminded of it…

I usually don’t take the MRT whenever I go home from work.  I’m usually not in a hurry to do anything, and I suppose the extra expense of taking a city bus is well worth it.  For one, there’s a better chance for me to have a seat on the long commute from Ortigas Center to Commonwealth.  For two, a window seat in the chaos of rush-hour traffic gives me a good, long look into a world without high-rise office buildings and the pretentiousness of office workers from “Ehrr-tee-gess.”

There’s also laziness; eight hours of sitting down, interrupted by a few cigarette breaks every now and then, tends to take away your ability to negotiate that flight of stairs that leads up to Shaw Boulevard station.  Climbing it reminds me of when I was a kid at Lourdes Grotto, where I managed to knock myself out to a semi-conscious state because I sprinted halfway up the steep stairs leading to the statue of Mary.

I take the buses bound for SM Fairview.  With my weak eyes and lack of coordination, it gets a bit tricky to board the right bus at exactly the right time.  Drivers always seem to be in a hurry to load and unload passengers, especially at non-designated “informal” bus stops.  A few times I end up boarding the wrong bus, bound either for Novaliches or for Monumento.  At least, there’s always Trinoma to look forward to.

The bus itself is a world of paradoxes.  You would think that in a time of fuel crisis and low wages, people would board the ordinary bus.  Yet there’s a certain indignity in riding them, where you rub shoulders with sweaty men in undershirts who work harder than you do, yet get paid much less.  The few extra pesos spent in an air-conditioned bus with on-board DVD is a small price to pay for a small comfort, even if you do have to stand up and cram out front at the aisle.

Any bus that plies the EDSA route will inevitably stop at Cubao.  If Dante were alive, he would be aghast at the almost hellish world that lies beyond the paradise that is Gateway.  The iron fences erected by the MMDA do little to discipline the crowd moving to board the buses from the entrance of Farmers’ Plaza, who push and shove to make the most of standing room.  As if by some unknown sin, a worker at Cubao bound for Fairview is forced to pay dire penance, unless some unknown soul gives up his or her seat because he or she lives either at Timog or East Avenue.

It’s also in Cubao where the business of “ticket inspection” takes place.  Some man or lady boards the bus for the sole purpose of tearing up bus tickets.  I’ve been told that this is a “5-6” operation, although I think that it’s more of a way to prevent “1-2-3.”  Whatever the numbers are, they’re written on a sheet of paper.  God knows, in the form of this stern messenger with glasses, “Judas” not pay.

The conductors, inspectors, MMDA traffic people, and bus drivers are not the only people entitled to make a living off a bus at EDSA.  From time to time, especially at the stop in front of Robinsons’ Galleria, there will be some vendors who distribute a small slip that tell you they’re handicapped working students who support their education selling macapuno or dried mangoes.  Not having a sweet tooth, but irritatingly polite, I return the slip with the promise that I’ll buy a few treats if I can afford them, or if I’m looking for sugar.  In both cases, I don’t anyway.  My redeeming qualities as a human being are extremely limited.

The other important enterprises in EDSA rush hour traffic are bottled water and peanuts.

Paranoia sometimes gets the best of me when it comes to water; while the bottle looks mouth-wateringly chilled, I sometimes suspect that the bottles are filled and refilled with tap water.  I have no problems drinking from a faucet; that is, provided that I know where I’m drinking water from.  You kind of suspect something wrong when the bottle is sold to you at the ridiculously cheap price of ten pesos.  You start to imagine (and in my case, hallucinate) about dysentery, cholera, or bad diarrhea at three in the morning.

The peanuts, I cannot resist; resistance is futile when you’re offered “mani,” in more ways than one.  Fried garlicky salted peanuts remind me so much of “Manang Mani” back in UP Baguio, who would absolutely have no problem with my rather outlandish (yet appetizing) requests of bagoong alamang added to my purchases of turnips, green mangoes, and yes, peanuts.  It takes skill, strength, and balls to board buses while you’re carrying a plastic bucket full of peanuts or cashew nuts.  Lately, the loose associations of iterant bus-hopping vendors have taken to wearing numbered orange shirts, which remind you a lot of prison.  You think that one of them have finished a sentence, but is a former inmate and charter member of Sige-Sige Sputnik.

The billboards are different.  I’ve always had this preference for the driver-side window seats, where I could see a lot of those billboards featuring Anne Curtis.  It’s completely remote (and it’s a head-slap moment), but I sometimes wish that I was a showbiz fanboy blogger just to get that one entry done featuring a dinner conversation with Anne… but I end up talking to politicians about politics.  I’m not complaining, but come on!  Although I do have to admit that there are some angles of Ruffa Gutierrez that are alluring, I still find Claudine Baretto more beautiful than Gretchen, and I still nitpick with my showbiz-aware friends about how Judy Ann Santos looks when she “dared to get wet.”  Perhaps it’s very… “Ploning…” but that’s just me.

I sometimes wish I could learn a better lesson from all of this; that those profound and meaningful things happen to me on a daily basis every time I board a bus at rush hour.  Well, not really, except that hour-long commutes, with all its quirks, teach you a lot about perspective.  You view these stills of chaos, searching for those inspirational – perhaps even emo – things that you could blog about and preach as a lesson in life.  But really, there’s nothing you learn there anyway that you don’t already know.  Things like “fleeting moments,” “time is gold,” “transience,” “look both ways.”

These days, I don’t dwell in the emo, the profound, or the philosophy of bus riding pace Heidegger.  There’s that all-important valuable lesson you get from riding buses: “Don’t jump off the bus while it’s moving, you crazy-ass motherfucker.”

Over some random instant messages, me and Tonyo both agree that wi-fi is beneficial, if not important, for blogging.  I’m still pretty much an Internet cafe blogger, but I managed to leach 15% wi-fi connectivity with a can of Pringles.  I still find wi-fi blogging to be rather obnoxious, if not irritating; it works for people like me who are on the go (although sometimes I wish I had an ultraportable like an Asus EEE instead of a fullsize laptop), but I can’t help but give myself a kick in the ass every time I’m forced to multi-task.  Right now, I’m eating dinner, checking e-mails, wondering why StatPress doesn’t work, and pissing myself off.

The kick in the ass part is rather simple.  I was against oppressive forms of capitalism and imperialism in my younger days, and here I am doing the following things:

• Eating at McDonald’s
• Using a laptop
• Writing in the English language

I know it’s a narrow-minded way to put things into perspective, but when you’re pissed off and harrassed from a lot of corporate wrist-slashing emoness, well… it sure beats hypocrisy and excuse-making by a long shot.

At least I’m not in a coffee shop.

Shoutouts go to my colleagues at FilipinoVoices.com, the brainchild of Nick, for being voted as one of the top 10 emerging influential blogs of 2008.  My apologies have to go to Jeanette Toral; this writer-freelance-journalist-self-proclaimed-rockstar-self-ascribed-stand-up-comedian has, in a live video stream of the event, said “ass” six times and came this close to saying the F word.

Whatever.  By the way, see you at WordCamp Philippines 2008.

Next on The Marocharim Experiment: a lengthy entry on outsourcing and cigarettes.