Natamaan ka na ba ng lumilipad na billboard?

Only in the fucking Philippines...

It's been a hell of a past two weeks for moi.

***

Of course, we were all gang-raped by Super-typhoon Milenyo, 'di ba? Ngunit ang kuryente ay bumalik sa amin five days later. If I'm not mistaken, Merville was one of the last areas to get power back.

The winds also knocked over two trees in our garden, which wrecked our water pipes, so wala din kaming water for a while. Ang saya-saya.

***

I was thinking how this storm reduced everyone to the same level, walang mayaman, walang mahirap. There was something almost nice about that, in this deeply-divided, status-discriminating country of ours. We all had no power, no gadgets, no water, and we all had to find non-technological ways of amusing ourselves. In my house, we spent time:

- reading by candlelight,

- dusting off board games and playing them,

- rediscovering the joys of Uno and Pusoy Dos,

- and listening to mindless DJ prattle inbetween songs on the battery-powered radio.

***

But if you've been reading the Inquirer, then you'll know my above statement is not entirely true. They had an article about how the "rich" hied off to hotels and such to wait out the blackout. I should know, some of my neighbors did just that. And some of my other neighbors had noisy generators going relentlessly. Meanwhile, we sat in darkness, tsk tsk.

My parents didn't have to suffer as much though; my mom was in Thailand during the storm, and my dad met her there a few days later. Then the two headed off to Paris, business daw. My dad caught a few days of the blackout but then he escaped na rin. So they were cooling off in the City of Lights while I was melting away in the City of Darkness. Exciting, hindi ba?

***

This just shows you what Meralco is doing to our money. My dad pays at least P12,000 a month for electricity, and I'm sure everyone in Merville pays around that much. And I'm also sure everyone in Metro Manila pays something approaching that. Meanwhile, we've now seen how weak the material they use for their posts are, and the fact that they've invested no money in an emergency response system. Hello? What's the first thing that goes out during storms? Power, 'di ba? You'd think that a power company in a country that gets hit by at least twenty typhoons a year would have some kind of contingency plan. Meralco obviously doesn't. So where's all our money going? Fucking thieves.

I feel an angry letter coming on...

***

And ah yes, the billboards. The country recoils in horror, but only after people get killed. Belated response, as usual. When did we consider a total log ban? After all those people got killed in that landslide. When are we taking action against billboards? Again, after people have been killed. How sad.

***

Some genius suggested we locate billboards at street level and use them to hide slum areas. It's just like what my subdivision is doing, building high white walls to hide the, shall we say, less affluent community right outside, on the access road heading into Merville. Even the tricycle area has been hidden behind a wall. Apparently hindi dapat makita ang sasakyan ng mga walang kotse. How Marcosian. Imelda used to build walls to hide slums back in Martial Law days, because we had to promote only "the good, the true and the beautiful," or some such crap. You want slums to disappear? Feed the poor. Give them access to dignified employment and education. Don't fucking hide them and hope they go away.

***

I saw this article in the Super!-shitty Inquirer Super! condemning billboards. I didn't waste time reading the whole thing but the gist was (what else?) that billboards are ugly and dangerous and should come down. Hello? E sino kaya ang laman ng mga billboard na 'yan? Edi the writers and models and pretty-kuno see-and-be-seen people who appear in the Inquirer Super!, hindi ba? Mga hipokrito. You all shouldn't be condemning billboards. You should be apologizing to us for them.

***

And of course, even though the power's back, I'm still not fully connected to my world. The blackout meant I had to keep my phone off most of the time, to save on battery power. The few times I had it on, it was useless. Down ang Smart. The day the power came back, my phone line was cut (and as of this entry, it still is. Papa is kind of pissed over my P2,500+ bill hehe). So, if you also count the days of no power and signal, my cellphone has been handicapped for more than two weeks now. When the power came back, wala naman cable at internet. Although even if we had internet access, it would have been useless. I believe the computer had an allergic reaction to the blackout and crashed, tsk tsk. We had to wait for the parental units to return before we got it fixed.

And did I mention I had to start work in the midst of this hellstorm?

***

Yes, ang lolo mo ay gainfully employed na. I'm one of the new residential social workers at the Virlanie Foundation. Though my work's been pretty fun so I'll save my kwentos for a more cheerful post.

Now bugger off.