10,000 Ripoffs

 

Masil and I entered the theater with so much good vibes. We were certain that 10,000 BC was going to be the best movie of the year! I mean, the trailer was awesome and the posters were brilliant.

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The movie started with a narration from an old man with a very gloomy voice. Somehow, I thought that it was a bad sign. But I readily dismissed it. I mean, the movie’s from the makers of ID4. I loved that crap.

Anyways, so there’s this one village on top of the mountain where people who look really really good live with people who look really really bad. They all have dreads and they speak funny English [They killed mother! We rest here!]. We see a young boy who falls in love with a girl with blue eyes. He swears true love to her. With the north star as his witness. The movie doesn’t specify how humans 10,000 years ago express their emotions. But apparently, they have perfected the art of hugging and kissing the forehead. 

Enter the village’s Old Mother – a decrepit fashion guru who lacks charisma and character. She lives in this bone house with the rest of the villagers who are lazy enough to build their own houses. D’Leh – our movie’s hero – doesn’t even have a house. Anyways, Old Mother lives a very boring existence by being able to predict the future and get nosebleed just by daydreaming. She predicts that a four-legged demon would soon ravage the village and take her people to a very sad place Apocalypto style.

The villagers decide to forget about her predictions for a while and focus their attention on hunting. They decide to drive a bunch of mammoths [which look eekily like that big guy in Ice Age] into a trap. Our sissy hero accidentally kills one mammoth when his spear gets stuck in a rock and the mammoth literally dived into the cute little stick to die.

As a result, hero gets the white spear – a totally useless spear which is white. This same spear has a special rib-like casing which looks really awesome but is still very useless.

Enter the four-legged demons. They’re humans – with freaky hair - ON HORSES! Woohoo! What a let down! Anyways, maybe the juicy bits are yet to come.

The demons ravage the village, kill ONE mother – reason enough for his son to feel heroic – take 5 or seven men a la Apocalypto, and – TAHDAH – kidnap our hero’s blue-eyed love. Our hero is conveniently sleeping a few hundred meters away from the village wearing only animal skin even when it’s freaking snowing during the attacks.

<Apocalypto: Kidnapped members of Jaguar Paw’s tribe>

What My Father Wore

Share lang nako. The best one I’ve read!

 

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What My Father  Wore
By Bret Anthony Johnston

     What my father wore embarrassed me as a young man. I wanted him to dress like a doctor or lawyer, but on those muggy  mornings when he rose before dawn to fry eggs for my mother and me, he always dressed like my father.

     We lived in south Texas, and my father wore tattered jeans with the imprint of his pocketknife on the seat. He liked shirts that snapped more than those that buttoned and kept his pencils, cigars, glasses, wrenches and
screwdrivers in his breast pocket. My father’s boots were government-issues with steel toes that made them difficult to pull off his feet, which I sometimes did when he returned from repairing air conditioners, his job that also shamed me.

     But, as a child, I’d crept into his closet and modeled his wardrobe in front of the mirror. My imagination transformed his shirts into the robes of kings and his belts into soldiers’ holsters. I slept in his undershirts
and relied on the scent of his collars to calm my fear of the dark. Within a few years, though, I started wishing my father would trade his denim for khaki and retire his boots for loafers. I stopped sleeping in his clothes and eventually began dreaming of another father.

     I blamed the way he dressed for my social failures. When boys bullied me, I thought they’d seen my father wearing his cowboy hat but no shirt while walking our dog. I felt that girls snickered at me because they’d glimpsed him mowing the grass in cut-offs and black boots. The girls’ families paid men (and I believed better-dressed ones) to landscape their lawns, while their fathers yachted in the bay wearing lemon-yellow sweaters and expensive sandals.

     My father only bought two suits in his life. He preferred clothes that allowed him the freedom to shimmy under cars and squeeze behind broken Maytags, where he felt most content. But the day before my parents’ twentieth anniversary, he and I went to Sears, and he tried on suits all afternoon. With each one, he stepped to the mirror, smiled and nodded, then asked about the price and reached for another. He probably tried ten suits before we drove to a discount store and bought one without so much as
approaching a fitting room. That night my mother said she’d never seen a more handsome man.

     Later, though, he donned the same suit for my eighth-grade awards banquet, and I wished he’d stayed home. After the ceremony (I’d been voted Mr. Citizenship, of all things), he lauded my award and my character while changing into a faded red sweatsuit. He was stepping into the garage
to wash a load of laundry when I asked what even at age fourteen struck me as cruel and wrong. “Why,” I asked, “don’t you dress ‘nice,’ like my friends’ fathers?”

     He held me with his sad, shocked eyes, and searched for an answer. Then before he disappeared into the garage and closed the door between us, my father said, “I like my clothes.” An hour later my mother stormed into my room, slapped me hard across the face and called me an “ungrateful little twerp,” a phrase that echoed in my head until they resumed speaking to me.

     In time they forgave me, and as I matured I realized that girls avoided me not because of my father but because of his son. I realized that my mother had slapped me because my father could not, and it soon became clear that what he had really said that night was that there are things more important than clothes. He’d said he couldn’t spend a nickel on himself because there were things I wanted. That night, without another word, my father had said, “You’re my son, and I sacrifice so your life will be better than mine.”

     For my high-school graduation, my father arrived in a suit he and my mother had purchased earlier that day. Somehow he seemed taller, more handsome and imposing, and when he passed the other fathers they stepped out of his way. It wasn’t the suit, of course, but the man. The doctors and lawyers recognized the confidence in his swagger, the pride in his eyes, and when they approached him, they did so with courtesy and respect. After we returned home, my father replaced the suit in the flimsy Sears garment bag, and I didn’t see it again until his funeral.

     I don’t know what he was wearing when he died, but he was working, so he was in clothes he liked, and that comforts me. My mother thought of burying him in the suit from Sears, but I convinced her otherwise and soon
delivered a pair of old jeans, a flannel shirt and his boots to the funeral home.

     On the morning of the services, I used his pocketknife to carve another hole in his belt so it wouldn’t droop around my waist. Then I took the suit from Sears out of his closet and changed into it. Eventually, I mustered the courage to study myself in his mirror where, with the exception of the suit, I appeared small and insignificant. Again, as in childhood, the clothes draped over my scrawny frame. My father’s scent wafted up and caressed my face, but it failed to console me. I was uncertain: not about my father’s stature – I’d stopped being an ungrateful little twerp years before. No, I was uncertain about myself, my own stature. And I stood there for some time, facing myself in my father’s mirror, weeping and trying to imagine – as I will for the rest of my life – the day I’ll grow into my father’s clothes.

Consti

I reached USJ-R at around 5:45 today. Yeah, late. My Consti class starts at 5:30 – with Judge Singco coming in at exactly 5:35. So, I was basically ten minutes late.

On my speedy cruise up (four steps at a time), I missed one step and banged my right shin. The pain didn’t register right away that I continued running up the stairs until I reached the landing in front of the library. There, I muttered “Giatay” and sat on the floor. I swear I almost blacked out. Perting sakita gyud diay intawn.

When the pain eased a bit, I continued running up the stairs until I reached room 308. I peeked through the glass opening on the door and true enough, Judge Singco was already there. Sitting in front of her, were the zombie-looking first year Law
students. When I saw one classmate’s life-less face, I remembered that it was ‘oral exam’ day. State Immunity and Suffrage. No wonder he looked like he was in a coma.  Oh
fuck!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

With all the courage I could muster, I went in and tiptoed to my seat. When I reached my seat, my seatmate, the class president herself, was busy praying to the gods. It turned out that she, just like me, wasn’t able to do advance readings. The first student sat down after a pretty impressive show of memorization prowess. He was able to answer all the questions except for the last one which I felt, even Tutahkamen couldn’t answer even if he asked all of Egypt to help him research. While Judge Singco was busy choosing the next index card to pick, my seatmate was also busy saying “Please Lord, not me!” over and over again. I looked around and the people, except for
those really bookish few, were either hyperventilating or were not breathing at all.

“Lim”, Judge Singco finally said.

And as my seatmate, yes the class president, was about to stand, the word “Pisti” escaped her lips. LOL.

“Yes, Judge”, she said. Looking all confident and brave.

“Tell me about the Absentee Voting Act and the status of immigrants as far as voting is concerned”.

The Seatmate’s answers were incorrect. Judge Singco’s eyebrow raised up to the heavens and her eyes ignited. She raised one final question – which incidentally, in a frantic page-scanning frenzy, I found the answer to. When Judge Singco finally told The Seatmate to take her seat, she was near tears. Instinctively, everyone went back to playing pretend and everyone in the room, was reading something.

“Romarate”, Judge Singco said.

F*ck!

I tried to appear composed when I stood up. I kept praying that somehow, she would ask me that last question that I know that answer to. Fingers were crossed. Then, in what could only appear to me as fate’s cruel, cruel, cruel joke, Judge Singco, asked entirely different question.

“Your family has been tilling this government-owned land for, say, 100 years. And you want to get the title of the land. Can you sue the government for the title?”

For a moment, I just froze. I didn’t know the answer. No idea at all! Zero. Nil. Nada!
In a desperate attempt to save my self-worth (and ego), I asked Judge Singco to repeat the question – although it wouldn’t change the fact that still don’t know the answer to her question.

“When you file a case against the government, will it prosper?”, she asked again.

“Yes”, I said.

“Yes?”, she asked with eyes literally blazing this time.

“Yes”, I said again.

“Are you sure? Explain to me the maxim “The state can never be sued without it’s consent”, she continued.

The earth trembled, the floor opened and everyone started screaming.

“Eat me, cruel Earth!” I cried.

BLACKOUT

I couldn’t remember what happened next.

But the moment, I came to, everyone was ready to leave the room.

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Pagbasa na lagi. Bisag malibang, basa!!!!!

Englishero/a

ENGLISHERO/A

I don’t know why but everytime I hear someone speak in English in the most unlikely places, and in the most unexpected times, I cringe. And I cringe and twitch when I get an affirmation that THAT someone works for a call center. I mean, I have nothing against call center people. God, I got lots of friends who work for call centers. The only difference, maybe, is that my friends, who work for call centers, know when and when not to speak in English. At least most of them do.
I was in ayala and I saw this dude with an ID tag of one call center. From his conversation with a Metro Ayala guard, I found out that he wanted to leave his bag so he could pee. The guard suggested that there was a package counter on the ground floor. The guy erupted into an all-english world-lashing. The poor guard just blinked a couple of times.

Un-cool guy: “The customer is always right. How dare you say no to the very person who pays for the clothes that you are wearing now? You might as well know right now that we, as customers, have unwritten privileges. Think about that. ” Then he walked away.

I knew what he wanted the guard to remember – Never mess with a good English speaker!

Duh! He was trying too hard to appear as a ‘deep’ and intellectually capable individual. He wasn’t. And I wager that he isn’t.

The fucker! Not only was he an a-hole, he was also an impolite and proud slimy bastard! Like the guard understood what he just said! Hilas tong animal ay! Mura rabag gwapo! Pirti bayang bati-ag nawng’s giatay!

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I was ‘trapped’ one fateful day when I had to spend four hours on that van with a bunch of noisy and rowdy call-center people. The group was so noisy that, I swear, I rolled my eyes, for like a million times. It seemed to me that that group was celebrating the fact that one of them lived in Colorado for like thirteen years. Yehey! Like I care!
They should have rented out a van or something for themselves and speak all the English they want!
Everytime the dude on my right delivered his punchlines, I would turn to my right just in time to see the old lady sitting beside me, roll her eyes. Ahak!

Honestly, I don’t know if they do this to ‘practice’ or just because they use English at home or at any social intercourse. Or maybe to show off!

Yeah, yeah, I don’t speak and write good English. That’s fine. You can probably find hundreds of grammatical errors in this post. But to tell you, speaking in English even if it’s uncalled for DOESN”T MAKE YOU WAY COOLER!!!! I’m not saying DONT DO IT. Just wanted to say na kapag hindi kailangan, magtagalog or magbisaya na lang sana!

Girl one: Are we there yet?
Me: (The van’s still moving! Duh!)
Guy one: No. But we’re still in Alcantara. Dudes, look here. Count the lamp posts on the road side. That should be 137 or 152 by the time we reach another municipality. That’s how small this place is.
Me: (Duh! Like we don’t already know!)

And besides, there were only 105 lamp posts! I was counting. What a jerk!