The Book Matched The Cover

A book titled Iago’s Brain In Igor’s Body Through The Eyes Of Edvard Munch.

Did I mention Mata Hareh probably looks like Mighty Man’s sidekick Yukk inside his doghouse minus the heft and lovableness and decent eyesight and loyalty and inferiority complex?  Well she does. 

In a nutshell, my mother went soft and Mata Hareh pulled a fast one and then we played cops.  I’m still pissed off, generally at everybody involved in the mess.

What have I learned?  I hate lecturing my mother (and my mother hates being lectured by me). I hate employing people (boy, that’s a new way to look at the Big Heads, huh).  I’ll probably ixnay the next personal reference by DSTS’s neighbors.  And we’ll never hire another esthetically-challenged nanny for our kids again.  Hey, if most of them are going to be rotten inside, might as well do the corporate thing and get one who represents well.

It’s Animal Farm, and I’ve just turned Farmer.  Happy holidays.

Addendum

And I can’t see my stupid blogs!  I haven’t seen my stupid blog for three months!  I can’t comment on my blogs!  I can only log in the control panels, but I can’t see my blogs!  I can’t see my favorite blogs, my friends’ blogs, any bloggy thing.  Because many blogs are from the Dark Side!

Even Moleskinerie and Notebookism, those happy places for shiny happy people whose only crime is to obsess over using DSTS: overpriced,low-quality faux-leather-bound esthetically utilitarian and fun-to-use notebooks, is blocked.  It’s up there with BBC and Molotov Bombs 101.

%*&#^@!  #&%$^+!  ^%$@!*|!!!

There.  I feel much better now.

A Big Time, Beijing-Sized Suck

Yesterday evening. The day before the opening ceremonies of the Beijing Olympics. Little Spud’s nanny teleports to my side.  “Ati!  Wala na namang segnal ang teveh!” 

I rush to the TV set and check.  It’s not that we did not have a signal exactly; the box scans for channels then displays: Load.  On the TV screen, I am prompted to enter a password.  What the eff is this?!

“Pateh ba teveh nelalagyan na den ng lud?” asks Little Spud’s nanny, as I explained the problem to her (she insisted on a play-by-play).

Little Spud’s nanny is a tiny woman without a smidgen of inferiority complex who’s quite adept at collecting and sharing scandalously distorted gossip.  She has a lazy left eye that gives me a bit of disorientation whenever I talk to her; the other eye prefers to focus on cute men.  I shall call her Mata Hareh. 

Mata Hareh sometimes amuses me.  Other times, I want to wring her neck.  But this time, we’re united in the anticipation to watch the opening ceremonies of the Olympics.  Mata Hareh is pissed because this year was her first time out of the country and in China, ever, and we have the Olympics happening in China and we can’t even watch the Olympics?  In China?  The country that gave us visa hell because of the surge of foreigners who had the moolah and time of day to see the 2008 Olympics LIVE or stage “Free Tibet” protests??!!  Even in her own little world, it does not make sense.

“Nageng ganyan na yan kanena pa, kagabe hende naman ganyan, de ba nanood pa tayo ng debbedeh?”

Yes, I thought to watch a DVD of the teen flick, Stick It (it says here, “From the makers of Bring it On…“), the night before, to… I don’t know, psych us up for the competitions?  And I’ll be watching gymnastics because I’m curious to see how this batch will fare with the new scoring system – which will consider difficulty of artistic and technical elements in addition to ticking off points for mistakes – that debuts in time for Beijing 2008.  Brief segue: I wonder if Stick It had a hand in addressing this apparently long-standing complaint on gymnastics’ scoring system the way Bring It On repackaged cheerleading as a serious competitive sport in today’s pop culture?  Who’d have thought cheerleading cheering cups could become international events? Is cheerleading Olympic material, even?  Getting back, yes, Stick It was a fun show to psych us up for the Olympics.  In fact, we were so psyched, we became anxious about not being able to watch the Beijing extravaganza; talk about bad timing.

But other than the usual hooking up the DVD player and turning things off after, I didn’t do anything else to the stupid tuner.  I’ll also mention that all menus on the TV set is in Chinese, and I doubt I’d ever get interested learning putting in passwords and stuff even if I sleepwalk.  It’s a TV, I watch the news and DVDs with it.  That’s it.

And so the next day, today: I call the TV service center after work.  Our landlord owns the TV, among other furnishings in the house.  Except for the Internet connection, all services — cable TV, water delivery, gas, electricity — have been previously set up, and things ran smoothly most of the time.  We once lost the signal two months ago, and that was because we weren’t familiar with the payment system or the service routine then. 

An operator has a technician call me back, and I describe my problem to him.  “We don’t put in passwords to the box, that may have been your doing,” he tells me.  Mata Hareh tells me she neither pressed anything out of the ordinary on the remote, nor did she have a sudden urge to baby-proof me from the Korean channel. 

“I don’t know how to do that, and this never happened before in our three months in this apartment,” I reply. 

Mata Hareh and I eat our last meal for the day at 7:30.  “Seguru hende na sya dadateng?” 

7:45, the doorbell rings.

It’s the guy who set the TV for DSTS.  He’s baby-face-ish and pleasant to talk to, not all growly and abrupt, and he’s like, what’s the prob?  I show him the TV and the Load prompt.

Baby Face whips out another card reading, signal boosting, whatever-you-call-it box (and they think I’d bother programming a password, like, shyeah) and confirms, “Yes, you did not input that password, I think the box is not functioning correctly, don’t talk anymore…” when I attempted to make a point, “… we have no time to lose.”

And so he changed boxes and turned on the TV and switched to the CCTV channel et voila.  A three second countdown to the Olympics… commercials. 

“Official time is 8:08 PM,” he informs me.  Seriously, without the one-child policy, having eight kids seems like a good idea around these parts.  I thank Baby Face and he wishes us a nice evening watching the opening ceremonies.  I figured he’s hurrying because he wants to watch from his place, too.  Indeed, if you step out on the veranda, you’ll hear other apartments tuned in to the same channels.  The whole country is tuned in to the same channels.  While CCTV is the sole broadcaster of the Olympics in China, several channels apparently will broadcast the CCTV frequency.  I don’t know if I got that tech bit right, but you get the idea — it’s like a special product launch commercial that airs in 50 different channels simutaneously.

And so after the hundred twenty seven commercials from the government and all those Olympics sponsors, we finally get into the opening ceremonies and we were just about to ooh and ah over the amazing light shows and fireworks displays when the box blinked (Mata Hareh: “Aaay!”).

The box scanned channels, and then it’s back to normal. I press the buttons to resume viewing the cable channels.  Cool, I thought.  Maybe it was just kind of rebooting or something.

Only this rebooting glitch repeated every 10 seconds. 

I call Babyface; he doesn’t answer.  Perhaps it’s official policy to take orders from his switchboard crew only.  I call the TV service again. I describe the new problem, and midway she concludes, “this repeats ever several seconds, correct?”  So this is a routine problem for them.  “We’ll try to send someone to check the problem, but this may carry over to tomorrow morning, I’m sorry.”  That sucked.  Yes, a 9 PM TV service is itself a miracle, but dudes, we’re in China.  Where anything is possible.  And it’s the freakin’ Olympics opening ceremony rumored to cost billions of Renminbi and featuring everybody from Zhang Yimou and Tan Dun to Sarah freaking Brightman!

We put up with the stupid reboots, rescans and pressing buttons for a while, but we were also concerned about maybe damaging the remote and the TV.  “Kaka-enes, ha,” Mata Hareh clucks my sentiments aloud.  She thought the boys from Iceland were impressive and was looking out for Gloria Arroyo in the presidential bleachers (“Paano kaya sya makeketa ng mga Penuy pag daan nela?”).

At past 9 PM, I am really neither dressed for nor in the mood for calling on the neighbors.  And the Little Spud is sleeping.  What, we drag him with us?  Leave him behind?  Even a temporary mania has its limits. 

I call DSTS, who is back home chilling with his boyfriends after work, to dump my frustrations to.  Hey, you don’t watch TV most days of your life already at this age and the one day you have a hankering for TV watching, you get denied.  This is anger management session material!  He consoles me that tomorrow will have a lot of reruns going on (It’s not the same!).  In turn, I managed to convince Mata Hareh to watch a Sharon Cuneta-Robin Padilla film from a compilation DVD that DSTS purchased from Carriedo.

Meanwhile, I decided to put my searching prowess into action to look for a live feed online.  The prominent yield: 

CCTV is the sole broadcaster of the 2008 Beijing Olympics!

Great.  I press the button aaaand…

Sorry, please install our CCTV media player. 

Press.  Button.  Daggit.  Installed! 

Press again, aaaaaaaand…

Sorry, broadcast is limited to the Mainland, Hong Kong S.A.R. and Macau. 

I am in the Mainland, you stupid prompt!

I log onto the Chinese version of the site.  Aaaaaaaaaaaaaand…

Sorry, please install our CCTV media…

This is really getting old. 

Press, press, press.

Press again.  AAAAAAAAAAAANNNNNNNNNNNNNDDDDD?????

Sorry, due to the statutes governing the agreement to broadcast the opening ceremonies live, you cannot view the live webcast online at this moment.

I.

HATE.

Media in China.

Looking For A Squeegee

Okay, I know they mean well, and appreciate the concern and sentiments and all; most are genuinely solicitous, too.  I’m also all for politeness and civil things the parents nagged about and stomped further into the consciousness through Values Education? 

But every day?  I mean, how do you respond the same way to the same people, every time, when they zing you with, “Are you pregnant?”  Obvious ba.  This one’s a favorite: “Are you still pregnant?” What the hell kind of question is that?  And the necessarily polite small talk openers amended for my benefit like, “How’s the tummy?” automatically accompanied with mostly unauthorized pat-pats from the same people at work, at the same time of the day, every day? 

“Oh, fine, fine.  Still gravid like when you asked me exactly twenty-four hours ago, and of course, it comes with the occasional queasiness and back spasms to enjoy that I believe I also mentioned?  But thanks for asking again.  Looking forward to tomorrow.  Excuse me, I need to pass out more gas.”

I’m highly tempted to bolt especially when the pat-pats come from acquaintances who are practically strangers.  Don’t they know familiarity, when not really familiar, breeds contempt?  My mother is all for good manners and right conduct, but my tolerance level is not all that.  Now, more than ever.  If DSTS were to describe me in a word, he’ll promptly say, “Abnormal.”  I also once worked without much distress under a department that was proudly autistic amidst the sunshiney people who frequent the stupid pantry in the office, which, just our luck, was right beside our cubies.  And contrary to Aunt Bebop’s reverse psychology of yore, I’ve always liked Oscar better than Big Bird… there was an elephant in his can,  how cool was that?  And his catchphrase, “Scram!”  It’s still a great word, and it’s very handy right now. 

Before, at least there was this filter in place that somehow managed to pass off sarcasm and condescension as what I hoped were ambiguously polite replies to general inanities.  The filter also dampened the freaky effects of touchy-feely things suddenly imposed on me — sorry, but I really feel weird about people who dispense them in copiousness even if they don’t really rate that high on the touchy-feely meter?  But on good days, I just kinda suck them up because it’s not worth disrupting world peace in exchange for such little warfreak impact.  The energy fuelling that filter, however, is now occupied with other things like mass production of progesterone, getting creative with migraine combinations, and rechanelling my calcium intake away from my own bones — and so, it couldn’t possibly care less about others’ feelings, which are really nothing more than feelings right now. 

It’s not like I made a habit of copping every woman’s fundus when my own uterus was unoccupied, and the things I deployed were always different, I think, like “Do you take milk formulas or pregnancy supplements?” or “Please, for the love of Keanu, don’t name the baby Alfalfa Ingus,” so I’m pretty sure I’m not being whipped by the laws of karma. 

Should the stupid questions and invasion of personal space stop, I can return the favor, you know.  In the near future, I’ll refrain from bursting into unsolicited, non-stop prose about what genius the spawn of Jill will be — that is, unless the kid’s really a genius; then I’ll be asking you for contacts who can train her how to enslave humankind and rule the Earth for the advancement of the species in thirty years or less — or boring you with how the kid grew an extra micrometer just the other day, and the day before that.  Neither would I want to do a Kris Aquino (please, Lord) and foist delightfully mundane things such as standard mucky procedures concerning a preemie and the details of his baby poop onto the unsuspecting everygirl.

In fact, I’ll probably attempt mind melding to fortify defenses for when the kid will come to find self in contact with saccharinely corrupting but nonetheless inevitable and very necessary outside influences from friends, relatives, and strangers alike — what DSTS insisted was normalcy, and what I know as the perpetual social system that distorts a child’s basic knowledge of good and evil:

“Aren’t you adorable?! Yes you are!”

“Don’t spank na, Jill, the kid’s just being rudely cute!”

“Want me to give you this candy?  Makes your cavities grow bigger!”

“Give me a kiss muna!  Oh, go on… don’t mind sticking your lips to the latent and active mutant acne plus the day-long toxic sebum spouting from my pores…”

“Sing ‘Eensy, Weensy Spider’ with matching wiggles for us, just because our vapid, grown-up amusement demands it!”

“Why don’t you audition for Starstruck like my Bonbon did?”

Now if only I had this tee, I’m all set until then:

So Long, Big Daddy

I have the most thoughtful boss in the world:

Phone rings.  I pick up.

“Hello.”

“Hi, Jill, this is [Big Daddy].  How ya doin’?”

“Oh, hey.  If clueless about what’s happening with the hush-hush things that are supposedly ongoing with good progress while generally maintaining an air of cool and talking to customers and publication contacts as if things are business as usual is fine… then we’re fine.  And yourself?”

“I’m cool.  Supercool.”

“That’s great.”

“By the way, I’ve resigned.”

“Hum?”

“I just thought to call you up and tell you ’cause they’re gonna make an announcement by e-mail any second now… and I just don’t want you to be surprised or anything.  And thanks for editing my resume.”

 

See?  Thoughtful.  Bring out the keg.