Libya is Not Really Libya, Preggy is not Really Preggy, Etc.

Preggy, one of my favorite Healthy people, comes home on vacation from Libya. He says life is good in Libya. It’s not exactly paradise but people are disciplined and they drive like mad men, not unlike Pinoys. That at least makes him feel less homesick. He gets on the road to get to anywhere and it feels as if he was just in EDSA, only much cleaner and with zero MMDA. In Libya, they’re not allowed to eat pork which should make him even healthier because pork is teeming with cholesterol and no cholesterol is ever good. In Libya, according to Preggy, people don’t care for baths. Not only are Libyans practical, they’re also God’s gift to Earth’s water reservoirs. Who cares for bathing anyway when one is in Libya? No one.

So far, Libya = 3, Philippines = 0.

In Libya, according to Preggy, you have to get a personal, made-for-citizen liquor license before you consume liquor.

Libya = -0, Philippines and elsewhere = 10.

If you’re male and in Libya and you adore women, it might interest you to know that you won’t see much of them because they’re covered from head to toe. Sometimes not even the toes. But you can see their eyes. But if you’re a gay man and you like touching other guys’ hands, Libya awaits you.

Libya & Philippines = even.

Preggy does not have immediate plans of returning in stinking Philippines even though the women in Libya are heavily and eternally covered, which is okay because he is not a pervert. He’d stay in Middle East heaven even if he’s unable to surf the web for porn because the Libyan government blocks anything and everything that is obscene. This is also good as blockage of pornographic sites greatly fosters a Christian character, which arguably is of no use when you’re in the Middle East.

I, on the other hand, ambition Bangkok. It’s prettier and much, much better than Pasay. But nothing will come of this ambition because I don’t have half the ambition, talent, perseverance, skill, patience and character of Preggy. I don’t even have half his weight and there’s no point in trying.

I just heard from an obscene, porno-loving friend that there’s a Channing Tatum strip video currently circulating the web. If I were in Libya I never would have learned this. Which would have been fine because I myself am not a pervert. I like that I’m able to live in a country that trusts its citizens’ judgment, that allows its citizens to discern between smut and great web discoveries.

What it’s Really About is Not what it says it’s About

In his book, How to be Alone, Jonathan Franzen had plenty of shit to say about TV and its evils and its disposability and its backhanded way of taking people’s attention away from the Better Activities, ie literature-making and more pointedly, novel-writing. If you work in the television industry or if you’re simply a true blue couch potato, you will hate him very much. But apart from his numerous and longish ruminations on various subjects that include American postal system, sex books marketing, smoking and TV segment pre-production, not a lot of the shit he so extensively wrote about in his collection of essays will interest you. But that is not say that you shouldn’t ever read him.

With the notable exception of privacy thievery and his widely publicized beef with TV’s undisputed queen of talk, you may actually be wishing, halfway through it, that the book be a self-help instructional on becoming alone instead. This is at least true for readers who are not crazy about America, or are from any Third World country, buy books from bargain bookstores, and readers who are immune to the intellectualizing of mundane topics.

On a side note, Franzen is the author who fell out of Oprah’s favor when the latter chose his great novel, The Corrections, as her official selection for her book club back in 2007. Franzen does seem like a jerk but his would-be Oprah Book Club book is truly Great, truly deserving of the National Book Award it garnered among all the other citations that it got. It is for me, the literary equivalent of the film The Royal Tenenbaums which ranks among my favorite dysfunctional family stories, along with that other great Dysfunctional Family story, Frannzy & Zooey and sometimes, Raise High the Roofbeam & Seymour: An Introduction. 

His perceived assholeness, not completeley unearned is clearly manifested here but he manages to signal to everyone that he doesn’t care for people who are already so convinced. And rightfully so because the man is smart and he has very interesting albeit show-offy ways of driving most of his points across. But on the subject of depression, Franzen nails it good and hard:

Even harder to admit is how depressed I was. As the social stigma of depression dwindles, the aesthetic stigma increases. It’s not just that depression has become fashionable to the point of banality. It’s the sense that we live in reductively binary culture: you’re either healthy or you’re sick, you either function or you don’t. And if that flattening of the field of possibilities is precisely what’s depressing you, you’re inclined to resist participating in the flattening by calling yourself depressed.

This essay collection is clearly not an instructional on Being Alone. It is instead a series of very long  essays that you get nuggets of other forms of How To’s and How Not To’s way  more interesting than being alone. And I do get that it’s Not a book on how to be alone although some parts of it I wished that it were. But it’s okay that it’s not because if you can’t sit through the entire thing, you can always switch to TV. But you most probably wouldn’t.

Wow

“Yaaann… eh di lumabas din ang tunay na kulay ng gago!! T*****a mo Willie! Ang yabang-yabang mo na talaga ngayon!! Mahihirap ang nagsasalpak ng pera sa bulsa mo para marating mo ang anumang meron ka ngayon.. tapos ganyan ka kay Tita Cory na MAHAL NA MAHAL ng mga Masa!! Ang sama ng ugali mo! Kung hindi dahil kay Tita Cory.. hindi mababalik sa mga Lopez ang ABS-CBN.. at baka walang ABS-CBN ngayon at wala kang trabaho! Bobo!! Kapal ng mukha mo!! Demonyo ka! Nabalutan ka lang ng konting salapi… eh nagbago na ang hugis ng ulo mo! May SUNGAY ka na!! Walang modo kay Tita Cory!! Mahal na mahal ng taong-bayan si Tita Cory at pati ng Simbahan.. at higit sa lahat ng Diyos! Kaya matakot ka sa mga binitawan mong salita!! Sigurado malaki ang karma nyan sa buhay mo balang araw! Babagsak ka rin! Sayang fan pa naman ako ng WOWOWEE.. pero dahil sa “RECKLESS AND CRUEL ATTITUDE” mo at ka-OA-an ng 3 hosts ng show mo (pwera si Valerie)…eh nawalan na ako ng ganang manood ng show mong yan.. cable channel na lang ang pinanonood ko!! Patay ka kay Kris pag nalaman nya yan.. for sure sasama ang loob no’n!”

-Mike

“BASTOS!”

-Ishmar

“TV stations should learn to sacrifice some of their programs to air a special coverage like Mrs. Aquino’s funeral which comes once in a blue moon.

This is a public service coverage and I hope Willie understands the decision of ABS to temporarily put aside his show.

Sa Eat Bulaga naman, the hosts there sacrificed their airtime to show support for Mrs. Aquino’s family.

When will Willie ever learn?”

-James Ty III

I got these from blogs with very emotional and very eloquent commenters. Sometimes it’s really so much better to let others speak. Hehe.

Yellow

I shouldn’t have to go to work tomorrow because Cory Aquino is to be laid on her final resting place and I want to witness it. But because I’m yellow, I’d definitely go to work. I probably wouldn’t work properly anyway but this is one national historical event that all Pinoys should be able to witness and understand the importance of. If you have not cared for anything that has to do with national pride and the like, now is a great time to start.  Grim as it is, Cory’s death sparked a nationalistic pride I didn’t know I possessed. It must be the fact that she’s such a great mother figure and I’m a mother person. I like moms. It feels good to be Pinoy at a time like this, when Ayala Avenue people go down from their air conditioned offices to salute RP’s finest mother and leader, unironically chanting Cory! Cory! Cory! A time when the skies made way for sun to shine in a heavily rainy day just so Tita Cory can safely and nicely pass the roads. I will go to work tomorrow like a true model corporate citizen but I will be with the millions of Pinoys who will grieve and who will quietly thank Tita Cory. For everything.

I’m Poor.

I’m very impressed with my rich friends. Unlike me, they’re not poor. I’m impressed even with the nouveau riche bastards who I’d normally be contemptuous of. One of the greatest lessons from my barista job was to never rile up the rich. What you should do instead is to stick with them and mooch. Don’t, under any circumstances, say shit about the rich because they’re powerful and they Google themselves comprehensively. An alternative tack is to maintain anger at the rich, and the world if you feel like it, and make sure to reserve the harshest bromides for the most deserving. For example, you’re a barista and you happen to instantly hate a customer for absolutely no reason. Don’t settle for sink water as Americano espresso diluter. Definitely go with industrial strength sink cleaner. It would murder them twice.

I have nothing of great value aside from maybe my imported and old CDs. The only time I feel rich is when I stare at them because collectively, they’re expensive. I’ve spent maybe about 35% of my mommy’s pension on CDs and this was at a time when I didn’t even have a decent CD player. The remaining 65% of the pension I spent foolishly. I’m the type who discriminates against locally printed CDs because locally printed ‘inlets’ are ugly.

Most of my imported CDs are obtained through dubious means though. I shamelessly asked certain people to send me them with the promise that I’ll love them more than anything I have ever loved. I lived up to this promise and took great care of the CDs and I may have taken better care of these CDs than I did the people who sent them. Actually, I do take care of things better than I do people so you can imagine how well-preserved my copies are of American Doll Posse and A Piano: The Collection by Tori Amos, Joshua Radin, Jack Johnson, Surfacing, Mirrorball and Wintersong all by Sarah McLachlan, Emblems by Matt Pond PA, Smilers by Aimee Mann, Speak for Yourself by Imogen Heap, Grace, Mystery White Boy and Sketches for my Sweetheart the Drunk all by Jeff Buckley and countless others. All that I truly love are contained in a very dusty shelf. All that I should have loved better are in some place else, far, far, far away.

Thank God for Torrent because now I don’t have to spend on CDs. I don’t even have to ask from people abroad because it’s pointless and because I am such an ingrate. I can’t ever show gratitude properly. What I’d do is I’d expand my PC’s RAM and download shitloads of albums. I would have asked stepmom to buy me Abnormally Attracted to Sin but I already have the digital version, along with Regina Spektor’s Begin to Hope and Far, Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ It’s Blitz, Alicia Keys’ discography, Vampire Weekend, Aqualung’s Strange & Beautiful, The Devlins’ Waiting and more. Never again would I ask for CDs. But I would ask for a Neutrogena Anti-Residue Formula pack-of-3 because I need it badly as my hair is falling out and my scalp has gotten extra itchy and extra bleedy. It’s $44.99 in Amazon and I can’t afford it because I’m so poor.

Smell This

Fuck Facebook. I haven’t read a single book since I got so attached to my mafia. I haven’t done anything progressive other than to do jobs, do heists, and buy properties and businesses. I constantly whine about my job but I won’t update my resume in Jobstreet and actually look for jobs rather than do Mafia Jobs.

In the first place, it’s getting very annoying there. A Facebook friend once updated his status saying something about FB people being very unmindful of what they share. He’s basically annoyed about people who Overshare but then again it’s a social networking site. You would surely have at least 1 or 50 or an entire set of friends who would very much feel the need to let people know that they’re Going To Sleep, are Very Tired, or are Soooo Happy, all of which equates to exactly one message: I Lack Attention. It is as how Holden would describe it, so putrid that you can’t take your eyes off it.

Patrick Suskind’s Perfume is the last excellent book I’ve read. I was instantly drawn to Jean Baptiste-Grenouille because we have similarities too disturbing to describe. I’m being OA and nothing about me is disturbing but really, we are the same. I, too, love to smell. And if I were as great, as shrewd and as manipulative as Jean Baptiste, I would definitely use this ability to kill. I’d kill and sell the scents I’d manufacture out of the bodies and sell them for profit. I really wouldn’t but I’d definitely try.

There are two sets of people whose scents I’m secretly (and disgustingly) depositing into my nose: elevator riders and gym people. It’s not as disgusting as it sounds. Like Jean Baptiste, I have such powerful smelling abilities. It’s just unfortunate that I have morning colds. But when my nose is snot-free, it really works. I would discreetly sniff an elevator person who would normally smell terrific and be just as thrilled in smelling the gym people whose odors cover the stink spectrum, ranging from pleasantly sweat-stinky and plain ma-anghit. It’s all pleasant to me.

Patrick Suskind has described lots, and I mean lots of scents, good and bad in this murder fairy-tale thriller. This Story of a Murderer isn’t so much a story of a killer as it is a guide book for smells you didn’t know existed. You know some of them but Suskind gave names and phrases to these smells. I didn’t care for the more pleasant smells such as lavender, rose oil and chamomile but am truly delighted to read about such smells as anal sweat, crotch fume and scalp scent. I forgot about most of these vividly described smells but they lingered in my odor-loving mind. Anal-sweat. Finally, I know what it’s called now.

Imagine being so great and so skilled in the act of smelling that you’re able to produce the best perfume France, and probably the world has ever known. Wouldn’t you throw yourselves at that person’s feet? I would. The French people did and with reason. Jean Baptiste, at the mercy of the French court had made the last and greatest smell and used it on himself not exactly in hopes of being acquitted but what happens instead is too good to spoil. He was let go by the court, yes but also, something else. The people of France engaged in a massive orgy, aAnd as with most orgies in fiction, the pope had to be involved. I have yet to read Patrick Suskind’s other books but if Perfume is any indication, his other works must smell really good too.

We’re lazy

I should just admit to them that I’m truly a moron by heart and by deed. That what I really aspire to is to sell hotcakes in Bangkok where everything is pleasantly spicy. That I might never progress as an average worker because me and the average 9-year old have the exact same set of ambitions, both in scope and intensity. Me and the nine-year old, we’re not even sure what we really truly want, except to sleep for hours, undisturbed.  And not face computer monitors except to facebook, para magpa-cool. What would get Us busy is to think about the best, most attention-grabbing status messages with which we’d immediately comment back should anyone find the need to actually give us the attention we crave. We’d spend hours blogging, we’d take our pagpapa-cool a step higher because we are at least aware that there is only so much time and devotion we could expend on facebooking and status-updating. We’d definitely feel the need to compose long essays about books that caught our fancies. We may be lazy but we’d read a lot.

BJ

I am working very hard right this very instant because I am a devout consumer of consumer goods. I would still consume and consume good after I get out of this antiseptic office. I get calls from credit card companies who are insistently begging me to get into even more debt. I want to say puking-ina nyo but I cant because my seatmate will hear me. Sometimes this is what working in a corporate environment amounts to. Work till you die. Work til you develop stress bumps on the scalp. Work and deal with credit card promoters. The sad thing is that I will work til the day I stop wanting to consume but I wont stop working because I wont die. I’ll just forever be hassled by Metrobank. I want to quit. I want to pull a Tom Mota. My whining goes beyond wanting to have a reason to say, ‘I want to pull a Tom Mota’. Sure, I quote a lot and it’s annoying and plastic-sounding most of the time, but I sincerely want to pull a Tom Mota, or an almost Tom Mota. I want to smash this HP PC into the window and hope it lands in the head of a CEO. But I cant because I have to leave by 6 because I Have to treat myself to a CD. Or beer.

Shelf life

Mine is the bookshelf of an absolute phony. The kind of phony who sleeps better at night knowing that the books sleep beside him, which in his own phony mind make him an impressive book collector. It is truly one of the most show-offy looking collection of books I’ve ever seen. I don’t even know why I do this, collect books and never read them again (with the exception of David Sedaris and maybe a few Bret Easton Ellis, and JD Salinger – for sure), and place them exactly where I sleep. Not exactly in the bed but very near to it. Needless to say, it’s an inconvenient arrangement as some of them tend to fall whenever I turn around the bed violently. In the first place, no one ever takes interest in anybody’s book shelf. My bookshelf’s really a substitute for things, body parts mostly, that I can’t improve. But no one’s impressed.

I remember going to the Read or Die convention and seeing what I thought was a first edition Coraline. I never cared for Neil Gaiman and it’s a puzzle to me afterwards why I ever asked the book seller if it was truly a first edition. I bought it and was only mildly heartbroken that it didn’t turn out to be first or second or even a third edition. If there ever was a hierarchy for a book’s value, the Coraline I got was definitely somewhere in the 20^th tier. Serves me right for being such a wannabe geek. I have a William Faulkner book squeezed in between Booksale-bought Augusten Burroughs and I just know that the Faulkner serves no other purpose than to decorate. I kind of thought that having Light in August, in Between Burroughs and Sedaris is impressively diverse. A stupid perception, of course. But it’s there and it’s going to be there until I find another highbrow book to replace it with.

I also thought that being the kind of person who owns Jack Kerouac’s On the Road is impressive. I could only come up with this conclusion:  I have exactly 5 shirts that I look good in and nothing else that makes me look impressive so this book shelf pimping must be my way of coping up with the very social need of a 24 year old to appear impressive. Are you bored yet? This sentiment bores me too. Maybe I gathered all those books not because I want to be super literate or super poor but because I want to live in my room forever. It might also be because I want to be the type of blowhard who casually quotes from unheard of literary works because my head would simply implode if I try to casually mention anything that happened in real life. But just maybe.

I remind me of the college kid in Catherine Crawford’s JD Salinger essay collection If You Really Want to Hear About It, who may or may not have brought JD Salinger’s Nine Stories at a frat party, and who may or may not have been reading the book unironically. Because really, what could be phonier than a JD Salinger book at a frat party. But then again, if you’ve encountered more than The Catcher in the Rye in the very slim Salinger catalogue, you’ll know that his books are pretty mobile. They’re these small, inconspicuous books that you’d have no problem bringing in clubs or frat parties, for when all the drinking and general craziness bored you. Like the college kid, I may be aiming for an effect. Something that sounds like Wow, You have the 21 Uncollected Short Stories of super author JD Salinger. You’re Very Impressive. But no, it never happens. Every time I direct somebody’s attention to the room and ultimately to the book shelf, I try to magnify their attention to them with the success rate of an umbrella salesman in a pleasantly cloudy day. And as Ms Crawford funnily puts it, I didn’t have the people’s vote as an interesting person, which is, I have to admit, one grand statement from a self-proclaimed uninteresting person. The People’s Vote? Have I really gotten that deluded? Don’t answer. Only smirk. But I’m fine with being uninteresting. And I love all those paper on shelves. I should just try to learn not to crowd David, Bret and JD with phony-ass authors like Kerouac and Faulkner. But if you think my books and book shelf are pretentious, examine my CDs. You’ll puke. And maybe phonily congratulate me for trying very, very hard.

Doctors are your enemies

They really are. My doctors are especially evil. Not really evil but just jerks. One poked my head with wooden popsicle sticks presumably because she just came from lunch and she didn’t want to lay her hands on anything aside from her panties. After the poking session, she obnoxiously told me that she couldn’t do anything about my hairy situation because it looks hopeless and because she’s a snotty bitch who’s too high and mighty to touch head disease-suffering patients’ heads. She then ordered me to buy expensive as shit treatment from her own clinic right after she crushed any hope of me being cured. Just when I thought I’ve heard the worse from her, she went on to prescribe expensive as shit antibiotics which is one of the best ways to prevent anyone from boozing. I have yet to know the dangers of disregarding that rule but I’d love to go back to her clinic, even sicker than I was there last, and make her feel sorry for not telling me not to drink alcohol while taking antibiotics, all the while puking at her feet because I’m fully aware that alcohol and antibiotics together will fuck your excretory and digestive systems and that puking and constant shitting are inevitable once those two systems are fucked.

 

But dentists are even worse. They are such money drainers. They’d sell you their soul if they had them by their clinics. They’d even have them in glass display cases. That’s a corny way to put it but I really think they would. Why was I ever born unperfect? This imperfection is highlighted by these set of random slightly yellow things that I call teeth. My main beef with these yellow things is that they don’t seem to like me very much which is why they move out. I only need one fake tooth to get me through this dental problem but about three doctors told me, all-knowingly, naturally, that I’d need to get braces, which I can have done after I get oral surgery in order to patch certain gaps, which is probably the correct diagnosis, but which would make an even wider gap in my ’savings’. I sometimes wish I lived in the 50s.

 

But not all doctors are bad. There are those who just happen to be very old. There was that one doctor who was sensible enough to consult from a book of drugs before she prescribed anything. She asked me lots of questions, not too dopey and it seemed normal enough so I went along with her. But then it felt like I was feeding her my own diagnosis. It’s a long and boring story but she didn’t seem able to deduce anything from all the shit from I’ve told her. She’s an old lady doctor who’s better off baking cookies for her grandkids who would all get sick because she doesn’t know how to bake. And then it’s her turn, doctor grandma to feel hopeless. Saying all these brings me to an undeniable conclusion: I’m sick because I’m mean.

 

I’m seeing another doctor from a better hospital. I’m crossing my fingers on this one because she’s supposed to be good. I don’t know why she’s supposed to be good but she should be. But I don’t know too how and why she should be. I was at her clinic and she actually made a bad impression on me already because she showed up 1 and a half hour late. I know. Who do I think I am? I’m Peter, if you really want to know. And Peter is really sick right now. But some doctors are sicker. Please wish me well.