Exploits of a City Dweller

If your curiousity is piqued by what transpires in a car with three females who’s only clue as to how to arrive at their destination is to head south, look no further.

*Note: Story based on actual conversations. Names changed to protect the privacy of those involved, especially the ones who stowed away unbeknownst to the folks.

Post-it Queen: What exit do we take from SLEX?

The Walking Herbicide: Not sure. Walter said the Batangas Pier is 15 minutes away from CALABARZON…Wait…Isn’t that short for Cavite, Laguna, Batangas, Rizal and Quezon?

Post-it Queen: Oi!!

The Walking Herbicide: How shockingly specific.

Beached Bear: Look at all those pretty plants! I want one!

The Walking Herbicide: **makes coughing noises**

Beached Bear: Oh yeah…I forgot I live with you. And I’m going to be gone all of next week.

Post-it Queen: Poor plants!

The trio, lost at an intersection somewhere in Rizal, decide to pull up at a gasoline station to ask for directions.

Beached Bear: You better tone down the English or we might get mugged.

Post-it Queen: (quite defensively) Whaaaat?!

The Walking Herbicide: Can you say Kris Aquino?

At the gas station:

Post-it Queen: Kuya, lost kami. Paano ba papuntang Puerto Galera?

Gas boy looks flushed.

The Walking Herbicide: Paano po papuntang Batangas Pier?

Gas boy points to his left and says Diretso lang po. A paroxysm of repressed laughter emanates from the passengers of the vehicle. They drive off.

Beached Bear: (in a mocking tone) Kuya, lost kami?! What was that?

Post-it Queen: I figured the usage of the word naliligaw might give them ideas considering we’re all girls.

Beached Bear: And employing the phrase Kuya, lost kami won’t?

Later still…

Post-it Queen: I hope we can find our way back. I forget landmarks almost instantly.

The Walking Herbicide: Shoot!! We forgot to leave the bread crumbs along the way.

Beached Bear: If I ever make a movie, I’ll use that as the trailer’s punchline.

Two hours later while driving down Star Tollway…

Post-it Queen: I used to keep track of all the dead cats I pass on the road.

The Walking Herbicide: You keep a road kill tracker? Interesting!

Silence. They pass the Nth yellow sign that announces the presence of SM Batangas somewhere in the vicinity.

Beached Bear: Did you notice that the more we drive, the greater the distance is between us and SM? Back there it was 65 kms, now the sign says 71.

The Walking Herbicide: Maybe SM Batangas is mobile. It runs away at the sight of approaching humans.

Post-it Queen: Weird signage! Why do they feel the need to advertise to people who are 80 kilometers away?

Beached Bear: You think that’s bad? On a trip to Bicol, I noticed a sign that said Jollibee 120 kms.

The Walking Herbicide: Extremely bad news for someone dying of starvation.

After 4 gruelling hours, they arrive at the Pier. Upon Post-it Queen’s request, I am including the directions to the Batangas Pier from Manila to avoid any of you suffering the same fate:

At SLEX, take the Calamba Exit. Follow the highway straight and turn right at Star Tollway. At the Santo Tomas Exit, turn left and then go straight until you hit water. Ignore the mountainous terrain and the baffling arrows that point you at some random direction they feel is cool. There is a Pier at the end of that long road, I swear.

Jess, our 17 year old quasi-resident, was tellling me about this dream she had. I was in it and so was Mae (the technical support haranguer). We were all in the apartment together and there was another kid there who we apparently introduced to her earlier. In the dream, they went to school together and but the other kid was only on her best behaviour when we were around. An apparent attempt to get on our good side and have Jess booted out of circulation. She was obviously perturbed by it for some reason. Several emotionally-charged adjectives were hurled across the room to embellish the storytelling. Then out of nowhere… Am I going nuts or is that the Richard Clayderman Lovingly Yours Helen theme song playing in the background?!

For a minute, I thought she was going to break into tears.

To avert the fiasco, I told her that if she ever has a dream like that again, she can change everyone’s appearance to the porcelain-skinned, chinky-eyed Oriental look and have our lips move unsychronized to the actual words being uttered. And right at the end she can have us all run through a field of yellow daisies in slow motion.

A full-on Korean telenovela dream. Wicked.

I read somewhere that the rise in popularity of freak shows at the turn of the last century was largely due to the emergence of the Industrial Revolution. More machines equals drastic decrease in manual labor equals more time to burn. I assume people who were so used to working 12 hour days would be hungry for entertainment when they find their schedules wide open.

Interesting.

If a hundred years ago, people diverted themselves largely with midgets and 5-limbed giants, what eccentric rituals do we have to alleviate extreme boredom?

Example given: Today I found myself browsing the bulletins posted at a certain website (Although quite obvious, I am not at liberty to specify as I have a sneaky suspicion you would pass off reading the rest of this entry and proceed to the bulletins. HAH! So there…), I noticed one post entitled Signs You’re In Love (translated from the original text linggo…What is it with kids today? Will it kill you to spell out the whole word?!). It was posted by someone I knew and seeing as I have a sly tendency to be inquisitive over the goings-on in other people’s lives, I clicked to see what it was about. For those of you who find hilarity in the idea of me getting curious over common-variety mush, reserve your chuckles for when I make my point. So the first paragraph of the bulletin read something like this (in all caps, mind you): IF YOU DO NOT REPOST THIS YOU WILL HAVE RELATIONSHIP PROBLEMS FOR THE NEXT 5 YEARS!!!

What does that mean exactly? How can I have problems with something synonymous to saying Snuffy Snuffleupagus lives in my backyard? (not there, sweety… not there. Oh and one more thing, I don’t have a backyard!) Or does the clock on the “curse” really start ticking when reality runs amuck and I do get into a relationship?

Some people actually get a kick out of sending “threatening” chain letters in the form of electronic fortune cookies. I get bombarded with these everyday. This most recent one claims to obliterate my chances at a happy relationship should I choose not comply with it’s request… Such lofty threats for something that’s not even within ballpark range of it’s intended target.  Or as Melanie Marquez would have it: Don’t bark at me, I’m not a tree!

It’s a toss up over which behaviour wins today’s bizarro award: finding mirth in watching misshapen humans or sitting in front of a computer screen sending out imprecations to the online masses.

Humans are a comical bunch. I wouldn’t be surprised if there are intelligent alien lifeforms tuned in to Earth, if only to use us as a sort of 24/7 intergalactic Comedy Central. At least we won’t have to worry about War of the Worlds ever happening. They’d be bored out of their minds if we get annihilated.

Here’s an observation I made as a kid and still find viable as an adult: It almost always rains on Black Saturday.

Why is that?

The funny thing is, yesterday was one of the few times that it didn’t. It rained on Good Friday. How anticlimactic.

Instead I found a tall pilar of dark cloud mushrooming from the horizon in the east. As we made our way to lunch, I noticed no one else seemed to care. People just went about like it was nothing. Well, it gave me the willies. It reminded me of Mordor with Sauron’s evil eye doing a searchlight scan of the landscape. However, thanks to Jessica Zafra insightfully describing Sauron’s eye as a glowing vagina, it will never be the same for me. I don’t think Peter Jackson will be that pleased either.

Nevertheless, I went through a mental succession of theories of what it might be. Is it a portent of the world’s impending doom? Is the Marikina Valley really a large dormant volcanic crater that, until today, has allowed us to carry on with our precarious lives blissfully unaware that the entire time we’ve been treading on a ticking timebomb? Or has God chosen that day (quite appropriately) to come down and sweep up his chosen ones leaving the rest of humanity to crash and burn?

Then a firetruck zoomed across Katipunan. It’s a fire. A stark reminder that despite my boredom, I should stop half-expecting disasters of Biblical proportions to occur just to cure the monotony of my day.

After lunch, we took a walk across campus to get an unobstructed view of the mushroom cloud’s source.

Witness the highlight of my gossipmongering misadventures.

To those of you who remain unconvinced, here’s what I perceive to be the best line in the movie Juno:

Oh, and she inexplicably mails me a cactus every Valentine’s Day. And I’m like, “Thanks a heap, Coyote Ugly. This cactus-gram stinks even worse than your abandonment”.

Classic.

It’s climbing my personal chart of “Greatest Comebacks Written for Film”, sitting pretty on top along with this bit from the animated film Robots:

Fender: I told you not to talk to strange men.

Piper: I talk to you. What can be stranger than that?

Honorable mention is this scene from When Harry Met Sally:

Sally: The story of my life isn’t even going to get us out of Chicago. I mean nothing’s happened to me yet. That’s why I’m going to New York.

Harry: So something can happen to you.

Sally: Yes.

Harry: Like what?

Sally: Like I’m going to journalism school and become a reporter.

Harry: So you can write about things that happen to other people.

Sally: That’s one way to look at it.

Harry: (all in one breath while chewing a mouthful of grapes). Suppose nothing happens to you. Suppose you live there your entire life and nothing happens and you never meet anyone and you never become anything and you die one of those New York deaths where nobody even notices for two weeks until the smell drifts out into the hallway. (He then spits grape seeds out the window.)

Scriptwriting. An art that has not even so much as breathed in the direction of many local mainstream moviemakers. They’ve only managed to recycle lines that we’ve had to listen to for the past five decades. I guess it’s not that essential since one can still satisfy audiences with antedeluvian circa “The Three Stooges” slapstick comedy.