tattletale.

18 February 2014

carabao-ing the jeepney

"Please move! i need space for one more! there is space for one more, i see it!" the jeepney dispatcher barked at the weary passengers.

So i barked back, "Am i gonna be charged 1-peso promo fare for this or what?"

the dispatcher forced a smile and said that nobody's paying one peso. there is still more room.

in this place where public transport remains to be the main mode of transportation of the working class, there is always more room for the 25th potential passenger of the 20-seater jeepney. never hang by the rear side of the jeepney. never mind if they had to take the scaffold seat called "extension", never mind if it is a lady carrying 5 bags of groceries and a child infant. there is always room for more somehow. and somebody's gonna volunteer to hold that infant child for another, all the time.

what is quite amusing though is that the passengers seem like it. they seem to welcome every more passenger that tries to get in, despite the apparent passenger overloading. i know, what were they thinking, right?

the dispatcher barks and like choreographed dancers, the seated passengers moves all-together in the same direction, squeezing their bodies into tiny balls along with their 10,000 kilos worth of groceries, making room for one more. and then another, and then another. and when there's none left, another would volunteer to her lap.

"let me take your child while you hold on to the rear rails of the jeepney."

WHAT? shit, no. why would a parent even do that?

and he does hands over his child. to a stranger. who then happily takes on her role as part time sitter-in-the-jeepney while others happily pitches in cooing the child who appears quite confused of all the attention she's suddenly getting, and for being on the lap of a stranger.

but in the months i have been here, riding through this chaotic choreography, everyday, for five days, 4 weeks in a month, 12 months in a year, i tried to make sense of all the bumping and the squeezing and the accommodating that every one seemed to be happily obliging themselves with, every one except me.

you see, in small communities people do help each other. because you see, in a community that has not had the paranoia that are cars and overspeeding, filling the jeepney to the brim is treated more like public service than business.

"Come, come, Inday. We have room for you! Don't wait for the next one or you're not gonna make it before dark!" says an over-concerned citizen to a student checking if there was still space. and the girl gets on the jeepney. a swing to the left, a swing to the right, a bark from the dispatcher and magically a space wide enough to accommodate 1 roberto's queen siopao appears, and off we go.

It's the same thing, the way they treated bikers and biking. if you're utilitarian (meaning non-fred speed, helmentless, non-cleated, non-stravafied, and definitely non-MAMIL), people don't give you shit. even if you are a girl. because bikes and work and farming are as normal, as necessary as shitting. you don't come to the toilet lycra'd and helmented. you bike and you work. or walk. bikes gets you everywhere and every one knows that. when they get to their farms they don't go bragging it all to facebook that they BIKED to work, because duh, it's as normal as shitting, y'know.

so jeeps. jeeps are treated like carabaos, the beast of burden. it seems that people in the country have not divorced themselves from the idea that a piece of metal junk like the jeepneys are nothing but motorized carabaos and carabaos are safe animals to ride on. y'know, like you just jump onto the back of the carabao and off you go. then you see a mate and you ask him to hop along and then off you two go, on the back of the carabao. and then you invite some more and off you all go until you feel that it's already cramped and you have to stop inviting people in, OR that the carabao suddenly grunted, a sign that he's had enough of the weight and you can stop telling people "come hop right in." yes, that's our jeepneys. And yes, they do grunt. the engines grunt when the load's too much. and people do not seem to mind, not even the driver because y'know, he has to get these people to where they're going.

so jeepneys. in the rurals. never dangerous. more like beast of burden carabaos always happy to serve its boss.

12 February 2014

wednesday sunny day

Charlie: You can’t just torture someone ‘cause you think they’re guilty.

Frank: Oh, don’t give me that liberal bullshit!

17 January 2014

Also, list: 2014 resolution

since we are on the topic of list, i'd like to share my new year's resolution, a list in itself.
as you can see, being a really good planner i did what every aspiring good planner should do: i made a very SMART list. SMART isn't just anything, it's the magic mnemonic for specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and time-bound. i could also make that better by making it SMARTER, adding evaluate and reevaluate but one year i think is too short to be smarter so i'd better stick to just being SMART.

1. Quit my job. I know. This one might not be very SMART and a little difficult to attain. There is a big possibility i'd fail in this but i'll keep the list handy just in case I forget. I've been trying to make up reasons why having a full-time job is the key to happiness but apparently it isn't. studies show that women/mothers are happier without a full-time job. It's true. Apparently, devoting one's life to motherhood keeps the depression at bay. Proof:

See! Women who quit their work are happier than billionaires! That makes me so depressed now. I'm totally doing life and motherhood wrong. Also, a mother without a job saves the household a lot of income since the mother can do what five nannies and 10 household helps can do. imagine all the savings.I couldn't sleep thinking of all those money that could have gone into my children's college fund. i'm so guilty now.

2. Eat more greens. Yeah, i was vegetarian for a while when i was still without children. then son came and all he wants to eat are abodo and pork chops. i felt compelled, even if i know it was very very wrong (just think of all the animals we are killed for this steak!), to serve him these pork, the meat dishes every time. Then i lost my mind and went on with the killing spree by eating the meats alongside my meat devourer son. But I've since "moved" (i am constantly moving, like a hummingbird, or like a bike because bikes need to constantly move so the rider does not fall) to my mother's house i was opportuned with the best things, like my mother's magic garden that sprouts all kinds of greens imaginable. With that, i have no other reason not to eat more greens. if only i could muster doing some actual picking but yes, that has to happen yet. maybe i should change it to "pick my own vegetables" or "bring more greens to the table" because "eat more greens" is just too presumptuous. it presumes i already have my greens at the table and that all i have to do is actually eat them. but i don't and i also rarely cook 'cause I like to spend my day doing nothing and that is why there is a big possibility of my children ending up wasted and that is why my dogs are dying of cancer.

3. Stop biking. Biking's totally made me crazy last year. i think it is the root of all evil so I'm gonna stop doing it for now and see where it gets me. so far i haven't touched that torture device for several weeks now and I have never felt this great in my life! Biking is evil. Biking is masochistic and people who love to see other people biking are sadist. biking makes for a sado-masochistic society! it makes total sense. People pedaling on two wheels are menace to society because they destroy the very thread that binds this society together, which is morality (because they are sado-masochistic). biking is immoral and it is my goal to shoot every fucker i see on bike. oh wait i don't own a gun. Maybe i should just run them over. but i don't know how to drive. I will ride a jeepney and pay the driver 10 times more than what he earns for every fucker on a bike he runs over. Yes, that is what i am gonna do.

4. Take care of my dogs. On my way home yesterday there was a dying dog in the middle of the road. he was hit by a speeding jeepney, 2 cars ahead of us. when we passed by the dying dog, a fresh pool of very red blood was just forming. i almost cried in the jeepney but i stopped myself because it's not right to be emotional in public. then i came home to find our family dog, the best dog in the world, lying by the stairs leading to the main door, wagging his tail like he was asking me to pet him. i never pet the dogs since i had children because both kids are weak in their lungs. but i didn't have my young son at that moment with me because i am an irresponsible mother and i left him with some stranger again, like i always do; i had the chance to come and pet our herniated favorite dog. I saw that one of his balls was slightly larger and misshapen (in addition to his hernia) so i touched it. it felt "lumpy" than the usual and it doesn't move when i poke it. I mean, the balls didn't move which is weird because balls are supposed to jiggle the way a water balloon jiggles when you poke them. But i could be wrong. how would i don't? i don;t have a fucking pair of balls. So i touched my dogs balls (wait, that doesn't seem to sound right) and it felt like there was an avocado stuck inside the scrotal bags. Then I concluded he has testicular cancer and he might die soon. I decided i could devote time to taking care of him. Well, probably after i quit my job. and run over the fuckers on bike.

5. Throw away my old eye make up. I already did. and bought new ones. so this is a success and for that i would like to end this post.

FIN.

16 January 2014

Listing down and actually buying stuffs you're not supposed to consume

~~Listing down and actually buying stuffs you're not supposed to consume~~ ~~Stuffs you can consume if you throw away doctor's prescription~~ Forget it; you're the healthiest human alive.

so i said lists are cost-effective tools that can ultimately change your life for the better or for something worse-R--but mostly for the better unless you're afflicted with OCD and you continually obsess over the #4 that you failed to make to happen but then that is not my problem anymore. it's time you saw a shrink, i guess.

this is generally how my desktop stickies look like. these are my work lists. my daily things-to-do. that pay. I have a separate list for things-to-do-that-do-not-pay, and for things-to-do/buy-to-burn-all-the-money-i-earn-doing-the-list-of-things-to-do-that-pay. those buying lists are normally handwritten, haphazardly/impulsively and immediately thrown away to the land of forget-it-even-happened after it has been done, so i could get rid of the guilt ASAP.

since we were on the topic of buying, I would like to explain that i am not a shopper. i usually do not shop for my things. my mother does it for me--if she remembers so. So if i needed clothes or shoes or stuffs for very important things (read: work) i just dig into her closet and pay her for whatever's worth her things that I just declared mine. that's how our mother relationship works.

the buying part i am good at though is grocery shopping. i love shopping for food although this sort of belies me because i remain skinny as hell (but no, never underweight), despite the fact that I am practically an emotional grocery shopper. but it wasn't really like that. when i was poor I never went grocery shopping. I wait for my mother to bring me food from our plantation back in the mountains and that's what i fed my kid. if no food come then no eating was done. but that's like a long time ago. i am my own person now meaning i buy my own food and i have the purchasing capacity powerful enough to buy food from the imported canned goods section and not feel guilty about it (except for the poor local farmers whose produce i practically leave to rot for every can of non-local stuff i buy).

i like to buy "fresh" milk. pasteurized milk here is expensive. i mean, when i was poor i didn't buy them because i couldn't make them last for a month. it's not that i couldn't because in reality, they wouldn't. I bought powdered because i could stretch the shit out of it by super-diluting it with water and by dumping diabetic-inducing volumes of sugar and the thing is good to go. It could give me enough energy to last for a day even if i skipped lunch because i didn't have lunch money. So i now buy pasteurized liquid milk, because i now have more than just lunch money. these cartons of liquid milk only last like five days, max. however, while consuming so much of it, i wasn't aware that there is such a thing as adult lactose intolerance. but there is and that's what i've been starting to have since i've consumed these liquid GMOs. so i can't drink it anymore unless i super need it for my constipation. but i still buy it because i like buying milk. i could actually take it off my list but i couldn't. the temptation is just too hard to handle.

i also like to buy sausages with weird names, mostly words i can barely pronounce. they are also expensive. i can like buy 10-years worth of poor people's food with just 10 kilos of those unpronounceable sausages. but i like to buy them and i like to eat them. but i can not really eat them. i mean, i can eat them and forget about the results of my blood work. or i can just feed them to my children since they still have three decades ahead of them before they start worrying about blood work and shits. Actually they are never included in my list, at least not all the time, because there's no need to. i go on auto-pilot when i pass by the sausage freezer and then they just surprise me when i get home. (oh no, did i sleepwalk again to the frozen food section?)

and cheese. also expensive, even the run-of-the-mill mass-produced ones because basic filipino meals do not include italian cheeses so understandably, spending like 2-kilos-worth-of-fish on cheese for no reason (so just you could eat a french baguette margherita in the morning because just so) is just irresponsible. but my children love baguette margherita. but also, i am not supposed to keep on eating cheese. i once consumed a packet of grated parmesan while passing time looking after my sleeping infant child, the second of the 10 dozens infant children i am looking after. it's almost tragic. so, i am an emotional-parmesan-consumer kind of person. i have no life.

so by now you would know that what i am saying is, the capacity of the person to pay for things she wants to eat (possibly) increases as she gets older but the possibility of her actually consuming those things will continue to decrease as she ages. that's the saddest fact i just learned, experience-wise. So if i grocery-shop by my age, i shouldn't even be shopping in the big grocery stores. i should just start my own garden and harvest want i SHOULD be eating, the cost of it is nil. unless you find compulsion to buy your lot to do your hipster urban gardening. but that's another story.

sheesh.

i don't even know why i am talking about food. i'm not even a food blogger.

FIN.