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?

Those discount cards make a lot of sense, but I don’t understand why Gloria Jeans should offer EYP cards instead of free wi-fi.  Nothing against e-Yellowpages, but come on!

I get to see Benj of Atheista.net every once in a while carrying a special Atheista-branded shirt, and Jester with his floppy hat, and almost every blogger these days carrying a calling card.  So in the interest of jumping into the blog branding bandwagon, I decided to narrow down my options into some ways to advertise my blog to the masses during blog get-together’s:

• Corpse paint. I once suggested to Jester that I wear death metal corpse paint.  Scratch that, it’s a bad idea.
• Calling cards. I’ll get around to making a calling card of my own in the future.  Besides, it makes me feel like my dad.
• T-shirt. Which is what this blog entry is all about.

Being too much of a cheapskate to go to CD-R King to buy a proper mouse, I decided to break out my Photoshop skills with the touchpad of the Marocharim Writing Machine.  I came out with a rather nifty design concept for my official blog shirt using some Photoshop brushes sourced from somewhere:

With all that said, my sister’s friends will airbrush a shirt for me (I hope at a reasonable price) and have it ready for me next week come WordCamp Philippines (because they ran out of WordCamp shirts and I don’t have PayPal yet).  Said shirt has a sucky design because I don’t have a proper working mouse.

Great.  I finally have a brand.  I’ll still be cursing on live streaming video.

It’s been a while since I last ate off a lunch box was a full decade ago.  Back when the portrait of Erap Estrada hung at the front wall of I-Gardenia, we all had to eat some form of packed lunch.  “Lunch” is too heavily loaded with gourmet connotations; I don’t care how much your mother loves you, but she won’t slave over a hot stove at 3 in the morning preparing cordon bleu. Lunch, for many students, involves some form of torta:

• Tortang talong
• Tortang Ma-Ling
• Tortang corned beef
• Tortang giniling
• Tortang hotdog

Under threat of being taunted as the child of a pauper, you’d disguise this unappealing hunk of fried egg on top of a block of cold rice to be something more gourmet, something more sosy that would appeal to your desire to be friends with your wealthy classmates.  The word is, of course, “omelette.”  Tortang talong becomes an “aubergine omelette,” which it’s not.  Ma-Ling, whether made with the flesh of pigs or chickens or horses or rats, would be made much more “class” if you called it “SPAM” or “Hormel.”  It’s either you throw your lunch away at the trash can, give it away to some poor wretch on the streets.  Or you explain your predicament to your mom, who spent 10 minutes slaving at the stove preparing your lunch.

I felt the same way with Nutribun when I was a kid.  Apparently, a moron decided that a potato-flavored bun can add some weight on your bones.  I don’t know about the next kid who had a Nutribun, but I have nothing to remember it buy except a bad taste in my mouth.  Worse is when you have to take a Nutribun and two glasses of Sustagen from the two giant plastic-faced mascots of Susie and Gino.

I was reading last week’s papers when I came across a news item where, in a conference in Baguio sponsored by Innabuyog-Gabriela, mothers in Abra and Kalinga are complaining about the unpalatable nutritional monstrosity called the “Vitameal.”  Vitameal is apparently a nutritional supplement/cereal drink made from healthy nutritious legumes.  Mothers and teachers are all up in arms over this more nutritious alternative to Yakult.

In case you don’t know what legumes are, think of beans.  Think of a cereal drink made of beans.  You think Marian Rivera will still be “byoo-ti-pul” after drinking that?

Which is why I like to add “nutrition” to my growing list of advocacies, if only because I grew so concerned about my back pain being related to an extra pound I carry as a paunch.  I’m gonna go lie down.

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…