The Mirror Blog

May 16, 2008

Other times, you would find me here

It’s Friday Nigh, Right?

May 10, 2008

I am drunk. The other week, somebody said that a tropical typhoon is going to beat up the city today. I am done with the stupid state board exam this morning, but where the hell is the typhoon? I just came home from a lousy bar, took in a bottle of beer and my stomach feels like a non-stick pan right now. To hell with all the exams of the world. This is really weird. The sun was all over the place today. Am I just getting confused because all the while I thought it’s going to be a rainy Friday night? The mother must be smiling jubilantly right now: her blackmail worked on me. How was I not stupid in falling into one of her hair-brained ideas and took the board exam? I need the typhoon right now. I swear to my father’s grave I could spit on the exam paper!

It’s not a matter of question now whether I passed or failed the exam. I was blackmailed by The Mother to take the exam, what more can be derogatory? I took the bait, and hell was I naive. Now passing it is The Mother’s entire problem. My failing it is her entire fault. That problem was mine for two harrowing days, not to mention the incalculable dim hours that precede as I watch the moon kissed the sun, and the great pretense of answering the exam problems at the point of Pollock abstraction. My beer belly is heavy with madness. Damn this alcohol. I need a typhoon, I don’t care what name you got.

I am drunk, and I didn’t really want to take the board exam. I didn’t want to fucking take it because it’s useless, and it’s moronic. I am so over myself and I am so arrogant.  Believe me, I really hated the board exam. Right now, I smell like a concoction of a fermented coconut sap, and brown tropical fruit called chico. I never really get The Mother every time she whines when I tell her I don’t have plans to take the state exams before. I am discriminating. I have a graduate school to go to this September. And I would tell her the licensure has no weight on what I would be doing in the next few years, first because I would be in a foreign country and that I don’t have plans on working here, in tropical third-worldness. Besides, I hate our government, and the government gives those exams.

And what the hell did come to me? That I suddenly swallowed all the mushiness of my angst and gave in to The Mother’s blackmail? Sometimes I would like to believe The Mother is doing a social experiment on me. I am the guinea pig and the guinea pig is submitted to take an exam without the guinea pig’s approval (of course). But prior to this, the guinea pig was made to run on a cartwheel, in the laboratory, to stress the poor subject to do all else but prepare for the exam. The mother has a way of telling the guinea pig to do everything she wants. The guinea pig can only whimper.

I so hate the board exam, I so hate it I just want to get more drunk than I am now. What I am now is terrible. I think it’s going to rain tomorrow.

The Missing Nakatsu

May 6, 2008

  Nakatsu, my man-wish, is missing in this picture. Can someone tell me where he is? (Click photo for larger image)

Oh, America…

May 2, 2008

My New York Times e-line subscription has been biting virtual dusts ever since, but over the last weeks, with the absence of cable television, reading e-NYTs have become a preoccupation. The sudden penchant for e-NYTs was bore out of my interest with the on-going melt-down of the US economy, largely because I am a fan of US (blame pop culture, not imperialism), but more importantly because I want to track down the domino effect this event will provoke on other states including my poor country. 

And truth to tell, a melt-down is a melt-down. Think Kilauea lava flow, or Chernobyl disaster. The plummeting of the US economy transgresses political subdivisions. It has scraped anything its hands can handle on its way down. It has perpetuated financial trouble even to Les Ulis, typical rich suburban French village where people are relatively cut above financially than the rest of the world. Baguette, an ubiquitous bread in France have risen four times as fast as the salaries of the common folk, giving the privileged French people a run for their money. So you can only think what this has to say to less competitive, derelict Philippine villages. 

The US economic crisis is a complicated process, there’s macro and micro views and a shit load of social theories to explain the whole thing. Of course, I am in no position to discuss about it. Fact is, I don’t know anything about economics other than after watching the psychotic movie A Beautiful Mind (John Nash is cool). Besides, I nauseate at the thought of Economics— real people become somebody’s statistics, somebody’s statistics turn into someone’s target market. But you slack at the thought of numbers, and still nobody absolves starving people running on dirty streets, FREE TIBET, underpaid factory line workers on grieving shifts, dying wards of AIDS because of inept health system, FREE TIBET, ignorant kids deprived of basic education, Jack and Jill fetching murky water because of lack of political responsibility to tap and provide resources to village. FREE TIBET. You get the drift. 

But going back to the imperialism US Economy nose-dive, I learned from one of my bosses that the limbo was instigated by the demise of real estate industry. The US government failed to appraise the escalation of developers, consequently of real estate projects, creating a market with an excess of supply. A friend who just came back from the US confirmed this, saying that since nobody seems to be investing on real estate, in effect no one buys houses anymore, the tendency of the market is to underrate its value, pinning down costs of production more than lack of sales, thus imminently turning profit to loss. “Ghost houses” refer to unsold, thus unoccupied houses. They are plenty all over, my friend said, and they are so cheap. 

The first question that came to mind was: why the hell did Americans build too many houses when nobody will buy ‘em? 

Megalomania is an obsession with doing extravagant or grand things. Not so rare for Americans, eh? Which keeps me thinking: if houses are cheap, then why is nobody buying them? What happened to the consumerist Americans of the Westinghouse days? 

In this scenario, the problem answers the question. A lot of factors have brought American economy to its sorry state right now. A close friend who works for an American IT company said that three months ago, 400 Americans were ditched out of their company’s payroll after the company decided to outsource IT yuppies in Asia. Four hundred white heads with monthly salary of $2,000 in exchange of one hundred Pinoys/Indians for $400 per month is not a bad trade after all. I saw in the TV that BPOs have taken its toll in the American market, leaving a lot of Americans jobless, or professionally mutilated. In times like that, one can only afford to spend so little. That explains why plausible investors scamper away from investing, especially on secondary needs, because just like Russian roulette, one can never be too sure of the next trigger. It might be your job lay-off, or oil-price hike, or food famine. So who said globalization only mars weak economies? 

What affects America affects me. And no, Brooke White has nothing to do with this. I just feel that we have a very austere time at this point of our history. I always thought that as the world becomes more developed, things like these cower to the backseat. There are problems which are 21^st century by nature, and I was just a little disappointed that the world is worrying on a problem that once belonged to the early stages of Industrial age. America is looking forward to another bleak time reminiscent of the Great Depression in the 1920s-1940s, and that is not so cool. 

What is cool is if its Jason Castro and David Cook on the finals. FREE TIBET! 

In France, when you can’t afford a baguette anymore, you know you’re in trouble

- Anne-Laure Renard said while doing her shopping in the wet market of Les Ulis, France