What 2010 gave me

I was going to join an essay writing contest with a whopping P3000 Sodexo (?) GC prize, with the theme, What is the most important thing 2010 gave you. Quickly, me and Romy White thought about the type of essays people are probably going to submit, stuff that would basically announce to the world that in their hollow, middle-class chests, a heart beats, and in their Carpal Tunneled limbs, a hand that gives.

My first thought was 3000 is a lot of CDs, around 6 or 7. So I set aside work to write my pretty stupid idea for an essay about how I’m grateful finally for MP3s and technology in general. I would have said that I’m grateful to 2010 for finally giving me the epiphany that technology is good, that it makes people lead better, convenient lives. But I thought the society of writing geniuses that run the contest might misinterpret the essay as incorrect or just plain stupid, and that I’m missing the point of it since it’s quite clear that one is supposed to write about a heartwarming, modesty or charity-driven Chicken Soup type of essay, which I just don’t have the persuasion powers to pull off.

I would have also said that I’m grateful to 2010 for giving us one of the best Kathy Griffin Specials, Whores on Crutches, her funniest since Strong Black Women. But it’s too much of a giveaway.

Finally, I thought too of saying that Robyn’s Body Talk albums is 2010′s most precious thing. I want to implore everyone to download it since it’s one of those albums they don’t make available in CDs in 3rd world nations, and I think it is really so good. You really, really should hear it. It’s the best. Do you remember 90s singer Robyn? Do You Really Want Me Am I Really Special and Show Me Love? It would have been so gratifiying to win P3000 GC at its expense by saying at 500 words or less, about how much I wanted to give 2010 a blow job for giving birth to Body Talk.

I probably would have gotten away with something about how 2010 gave me the realization that music hoarding is not good and then segue into how hoarding and owning many material things is not a good state of being but then it would have been just as bullshitty as the MP3/technology epiphany horseshit.

Actual human-filled events happened in 2010 including weddings, (two, one that is corked so hard and one that was such a spectacle in all sorts of fashions), illnesses, special gifts (as in Apple special), human kindnesses done to me, really annoying things done to me, death of a friend’s loved one, heart attacks, heart conditions of friends’ families, actual feelings felt for family, etc, etc. These were all important to me and I want to relish or pick life lessons off them but 2010, it also made me realize how incapable I am of assigning importance to what really makes life meaningful, illegal downloads or people. It’s a tough choice so maybe it’s best not to submit them for scrutiny, yes? Yes.

‘And then the Yuletide season, Brandt my friend Brandt — Christmas — Christmas morning — What is the essence of Christmas morning but the childish co-eval of venereal interface, for a child? — A present, Brandt — Something you have not earned and which formerly was out of your possession is now in your po-ssession — Can you sit there and try to say there is no symbolic rela-tion between unwrapping a Christmas present and undressing a young lady?’

Brandt bobbed and mopped, uncertain whether to laugh.

Meek is weak

Why meekness never works for me:

1. I end up getting the worst stylist in the salon. Yung tipong mabagal maggupit kung bading yung stylist, or mabaho kamay kung barberong straight. The situation varies. Pwedeng mamadaliin ka since muka kang totoy or kung bading, chichikahin ka nang walang humpay, lalo na kung nagmamadali ka.  The fastest way to a man’s pocket is through his ego.

I think it has a lot to do with how I look. I look like someone you can fool easily and I blame it on the genes sometimes.

2. I just lost my phone last month in a restaurant where I eat often. I left the stupid phone for 5 minutes and it’s gone. I KNOW it’s the waiter who got it, I smelled it from the way he told me ‘Wala po akong nakita sir.’ Sinungaling amputa. If I were a bigger person, I could have scared him, he would have never attempted to steal my phone. Or maybe not, but it never hurts to be bigger. It’s Just A Phone, I know.

3. I get the feeling sometimes that people don’t take me seriously. Ok lang naman. There are pros and cons to that. If they don’t take me seriously, edi wag.

4. I get approached by marketers of all sorts of products: insurance, credit card, condo. Lahat naman inaapproach for those things kahit mukang macho. But I have a story.

I went to Megamall one time. Bibang girl approaches me and asks if I have a credit card. I told her yes, she says ok, you get a free movie pass blah blah, don’t worry we won’t sell you anything, said like those very annoying UNICEF people in underpasses, except this girl is in MEGA MALL, so she told me that seemingly reassuring line in such a.. Megamall marketer kind of way. Sorry if that smacks of arrogance, it’s just that what I’m implying about Megamall’s level of sophistication is the truth. Not that I’m the height of classiness myself.

So I went along with her and I endured her agent convince me to attend a session which I have no doubt in my being, is going to be a pyramid scheme bullshit or insurance sales pitch.

I got duped by her because she was so good in her job. I almost envy her. She got me to sit with an insurance seller all because I was convinced I was receiving free movie passes. She appealed to my, I don’t know which thing it is someone appeals to if someone needs to sell someone something, but she did just that. She asked me where I studied and she tried to guess if it’s in teneyo or lasal which should be flattering because, I told her no, then she asked me if I’m Chinese since I have Chinese eyes, asked me where I work, dropped another flattering remark, and then she tried to drop all these bullshit remarks that I got so charmed by her it got impossible to get away from her because I was won over. Such a loser.

10 minutes into that sad, sad affair and I knew I was in for a disastrous, awkward situation, but I didn’t have the guts to get out of it because… I’m meek. Or mahina ang loob. From watching American’s Next Top Model, I kind of learned what constitutes lousy personality so I know now how lousy mine is, because I have nothing to say to people most of the time, and I never want to put people in situations where they’ll be forced to endure my company, hear my obvious comments about them like ‘Ang aga umuwi ah!’ – a joke I keep repeating to a certain someone who thankfully never gets annoyed hearing it over and over again because I have nothing to say to him and to people in general. I say this all the time so it’s not self-pity, it’s truth. So I was giving it my all to this girl who I hoped would get rid of me already since I’m being me which is 100% boring but no, she wouldn’t let me go and she wouldn’t since she was going to sell me something. She was a creep and I was the fool who stuck with her.

5. Taxi drivers take you for a fool. For a fool! Actually you don’t have to be meek to be victimized by these vicious creatures BUT imagine if you look and act meek, how much more incorrigible they are, how much more vicious.

6. Waiters ignore you. Unless you look like a Daddy, a Tito or a sosyal person with his friends, TGIF hoes and their ilk won’t bother with you, middle class-looking, unassuming person since you’re likely going to order Chicken Fingers lang! It doesn’t happen all the time though. Thank God!

Sometimes it pains me to consume luxurious things but it’s December, it’s desire month. Consume disappointment consume disappointment consume desire, round and round it goes!

7. Salespeople, those whose help you actually need, look annoyed when you ask for help.

This is maybe why I’m arrogant to call center people, because I can’t be seen and they can’t tell from my voice if it’s a huge person or a small person with a huge personality deficiency.

Why bother

She wondered why someone would bother to write that; but then, “Why bother” was never a question you could ask about more or less anything on the Internet, otherwise the whole bunch of them shriveled to a cotton-candy nothing. Why had she bothered? Why does anybody? She was for bothering, on the whole; in which case thank you, MrMozza7, for your contribution, and thank you, everybody else, on every other website.

Juliet, Naked is all the epiphany I ever needed to realize that blind worship is kind of sickening and corny, and that I don’t really know much about the things that would normally send me into a fit of fanaticism: Anne Rice, Jeff Buckley, Mariah, JD Salinger, and just about every book, movie or music I ever held any opinion of. I drool over these ‘entertainers’ and with no small measure of know-it-allness. It’s annoying and needless and still I persist even though the pointlessness of it is becoming more apparent the more I do it. Honest! Indeed, it is never a question of ‘why bother’. It’s in fact not just ‘why not bother’, but ‘why not bother lengthily’? So it is with a renewed outlook that I will leave the Nick Hornby awe articulation to the betters. Or not.

Annie and Duncan are a childless 40-something couple who spent the last 15-plus years together in an uneventful fishing town. They’ve been together not out of all-consuming desire and passion and love but out of comfort and familiarity. Duncan, obsessed about a certain has-been rocker, is responsible for anchoring the relationship in a muck. His is the kind of obsession that gets less cute as responsibilities grow and as the reality of age gets more palpable. He watches art films, reads books, listens to Pitchfork-favored type of music, and sees himself as such, as a cultured bloke. He is also single-mindedly obsessed about a Jeff Buckley-esque rocker who made exactly one album in his career but which is supposedly great, as considered so by music snobs.

His better half is Annie, all but deprived of her better years, having stuck with an obsessive.  Tucker Crowe, the Jeff Buckley, is the obsessed over. His record label releases a Sketches for My Sweetheart the Drunk Disc 2-like recording called Juliet, Naked, a raw version of the great album, Juliet, which he has drooled over for years. Duncan, being a slobberer, writes a lengthy, praise-y review of the album on a fan site, causing an uproar within the site’s smallish populace. Incensed over this refreshed obsession, Annie writes a diss review of the album which is 80% objective and 20% spiteful. Her relationship, all 15 years of it, has revolved around a has-been’s music and she is not going to pander again to what she thinks is an inferior version of a classic. Tucker Crowe reads her review, e-mails her in appreciation, Duncan flips.

Nick Hornby onto annoying know-it-alls, music obsession, and music know-it-alls should be a guaranteed barrel of laughs, but this is unexpectedly kind of sad. The relationship is so hopelessly resigned to compromise: two people sticking together because of middle-ageness and for lack of will to do something else. Duncan is sad.  He’ll save his Tucker Crowe bootlegs before even thinking of rescuing Annie should their house catch fire. As usual, Nick Hornby writes so excellently about music. He has very sharp ear for Internet dialogue, about how opinions get manufactured and traded in fan sites and blogs. He’s probably one of those celebrities who Google themselves to death, so he knows net noob behavior, from the worshipping to the commenting to the ALL CAPSing of probably a meek’s sole means of being heard. Juliet, Naked is a sly commentary on the Internet culture. I liked it a lot but the ending felt rushed.