Vol. 01 Sendong on One Side

On a personal level, Christmas this year has been pretty much the same. UCCP Cantata on the 24th, swift dinner of little talk defying the conventions of Noche Buena, early morning of the 25th spent without gifts or fake kisses or heartless hugs. A family as laid back but sincere as ever.

The main difference this year is that a huge portion of my city looks like a flattened biko, and people are milling about under bridges and city streets looking for all the world like scarred survivors of a civil war. There is no water running through our pipes, and I think in other parts of CDO there's no electricity as well. Grocery shopping has become a matter short of life or death, and volunteering might as well have been declared a trending topic for helpless, helping youth. Sendong has transformed this year's Christmas into an affair of hushed-up panic.

Because I live on top of a hill, my family was mercifully spared by the storm. Some of my friends were not as lucky, however, and I can only be guiltily thankful I don't know anyone who's passed away or gone missing because of Sendong. For a technical account of the damage, kindly check this memo released just minutes ago: NDRRMC Update on "Sendong" (Washi).

I wrote this because I wanted to share the more eccentric side of this year's Christmas. My friend and her family are staying at our place while they're waiting for the water to come back so they can scrape the mud off their floors, so it's really been an interesting holiday. To start:

1. I have seen more fire trucks in the past two weeks than ever before. Only one of them, it must be noted, bore the sign for the CDO Fire Department. I saw one sent over by Bukidnon, another by Balingoan, and the others, I forget. The one from CDO stopped right in front of my house to distribute water to the people in my street. [There really are perks when you live right in front of a fireman.] Watching my neighbors, even ones I didn't recognize, carry pails back and forth from their homes with smiles on their faces, I thought I saw the perpetually-touted Filipino trait of bayanihan. That scene was definitely postcard-worthy.

2. I've developed dandruff. It would be an exaggeration to say we've got absolutely no water, but it wouldn't be right to say we have enough to provide luxurious, bubble-enhanced showers for everyone. So. I've only been showering as soon as I start to smell. [Gross, but well.] For the past three days, too, I've been wearing nothing but dresses, when in the past I lived on jeans. Dresses are flimsy, you understand, so washing them doesn't require much rinsing. Thus...

3. My Arashi converting skills need practice. Because I have three girls living with me for an indefinite period of time, I thought up a plan to entertain them by possibly getting them hooked to my hobbies, the most prominent one at present being Arashi. Their first day here, I fed them about 20G worth of Ninomiya Kazunari and Ohno Satoshi. They've seen 5x10 and Letters from Iwo Jima. But they are not hooked. They do not seem to be hook-able. As revenge, I refuse to sit down for more than ten minutes to watch any of their Korean distractions. Must concentrate. JPop. JPop. JPop.

More next week.

Overwhelmed

My German professor asks this one day: “In the Philippines, do your parents have a say about when you’re supposed to get married? Or how you’re supposed to get married? Say, if you parents tell you that you have to marry this person, would you have to?”

The class answers in the negative. A lot of head shaking occurs.

Professor: “But if your parents tell you that you can’t marry a person, you wouldn’t marry that person?”

The class nods. And everyone looks at each other, realizes a strange collective predicament, and laughs nervously.

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The funny thing about the Filipino culture is that there aren’t a lot of unbreakable standards. There are a lot of traditions and superstitions, but most, if not all, are subject to the preference of a fickle general public. At least, from how my Gen X brain sees it.

I was born in 1991, a decade or two after the OFW phenomenon brought back – in figurative balikbayan boxes – ‘alien’ ideas from overseas. Growing up, I read only English novels and spoke English 80% of the time. (Because I was in school 80% of the time, hanging out with friends who fancied the Cartoon Network, Goosebumps, The Babysitters Club, etc.) I swear I could hear Japanese songs playing out in the radio of my childhood. I can still sing Pizzicato Five’s Sweet Soul Revue and Globe’s Feel Like Dance – in garbled Japanese, of course. Although I studied Philippine History as an educational prerequisite for graduation, I can’t express in detail – more so with passion – the lives of del Pilar, Mabini, etc. In fact, I’m probably better at tracing the genealogy of Potterdom’s Malfoy Family – a true shame, since that clan’s but fiction.

When I matured – I daresay – it became common for people my age to get pregnant, to get someone pregnant, to get married early, or to work in a call center even when they didn’t want to. It became so common, in fact, that such stories – which started out as whispered news bits shared in the most innocuous of places – became fodder for dinner conversations with mere acquaintances. Something like, “Oh, by the way, Y is seven months pregnant. Saw it on Facebook. Seems she’s getting married this weekend.” And the reply goes, “Oh, good for her then. I hope she’s happy. Can you pass the soy sauce, please?”

This is not a condescending rant. At least it is not meant to be. Just because I have a degree, am not pregnant, and am not fearful for my financial future doesn’t mean I am putting my own lifestyle on a shop display window. This is simply an observation. The petty rambling of an overwhelmed 20-something in Manila, during an era of change so constant you don’t even notice it. I can name more talents from Johnny’s Entertainment than I can enumerate senators of the Philippines. I don’t know the latest updates about GMA’s health, but I have heard that Robin from How I Met Your Mother apparently can’t have kids. I don’t really know why my country doles out days off work, but I don’t complain because that only gives me more time to waste on Tumblr with other fangirls scattered all over the world.

Is it my fault I’m clueless, overwhelmed, and passive? Perhaps. It may be the fault of my parents’ generation, but its own ignorance can’t possibly be what it wanted for itself, right? In any case, I’ve always thought my situation ordinary. I wonder how many people out there realize the same about their own lives. Or existence, whichever.

on my half-assed work ethic

better late than half-assed

... is what I like to tell myself when I procrastinate. See, I believe creativity comes from sudden inspiration, that you can't just sit and write a good article, that you can't just wait for the right image to appear on your head and flow out of your brush. It's a sick, skewed, abhorrently twisted line of thinking, I know, but for the longest time, it has been a way of life for me.

I had always known I was lazy and selfish. When Ondoy ravaged Manila and kids my age where active in relief operations everywhere? I was in my dorm room, engaged in activities so inconsequential I can barely remember what they are. Now that Haiti's a disaster zone - and that's putting it mildly - I'm writing a blog entry about me, me, me. Woe to me.

I guess the point of this rant is, right now, I make myself sick. Although I had always been numbly aware of my piss-poor, halfhearted performance in everything, always getting things done, but rarely getting things done as well as I would had I poured in TOTAL effort, that fact never bothered me. Reactive all the way. Sean Covey's eyebrows would rise way up till the high heavens upon seeing me on a typical day.

So yes, I make myself sick. I wish I could feel things. I wish I could get angry at politicians who steal people's money, I wish I could cry over the loss of several thousand lives due to successive earthquakes worldwide, I wish I could worry enough about my future to study more than ten minutes a day outside class. Damn it. What is wrong with me?