The Pumpkin and the Easter Bunny
Went to the mall today to pick up a few groceries, a few hours after Typhoon Santi decided he’d slapped enough trees and pulled the fronds out of coconut trees. I was expecting to find the mall deserted, but since the power was out in most parts of the city, everyone and his cousins thought the best thing to do would be to hang out at the mall.
In fact they not only hung out, they came with their kids dressed in costumes ranging from the so-so to the outlandish, to join the mall’s Halloween event. Some wore off the rack assemblies, I think I saw one dressed as a Oakland motorcycle accident lawyer and a couple who looked like bloody mummies.
There was a time when November 1 and 2 meant going to visit our departed relatives wherever they may be interred. These days it means loitering in a mall with your kid in tow dressed like a walking car crash victim, begging treats from the owners and the general public.
November 1 in the Philippines is All Saints Day. It meant going to church (when I was small I did go) and praying for our dearly departed. Now the malls say that we should go the American way and celebrate Halloween, with all the attendant competitions and activities related to that peculiar American holiday.
I don’t think the ordinary Pinoy in the mall concourse knows that Halloween started out as All Hallows Eve in northern Europe thousands of years ago, and brought into America by immigrants. All the ordinary Juan knows is that Americans celebrate Halloween by dressing up in costumes and going trick or treating. Little do they think that trick or treating in the Pinoy context is actually teaching a child early on in his life the joys of extortion.
All in the name of commerce and the creation of the need for a product where there previously was none. The Pinoy is the perfect target for such marketing strategies, we who so idolize the American that we play basketball despite our average heights, and celebrate Halloween though we have no idea why.
Now don’t get me started about the Easter Bunny and egg hunts.
Refusing to grow old
There are anti wrinkle creams, whitening creams, exfoliants, metathione, medicines meant for one thing and used for another because it just happens to have a side effect that is cosmetically useful. With all the vanity products available in the market these days, it is obvious that people are being made to think that looking old is bad, and that tight skin at age sixty and beyond is something to which all women should aspire.
What’s wrong with looking one’s age anyway? Is there really an advantage to looking young even if you’re not an actress dependent on your looks for your living? Have all these beauty products on the market today been made to cater to women’s vanity or have they been invented, as most consumer goods are, to create a need for this commodity in the aid of commerce first and foremost, and vanity a far second?
I’m just rambling, mind you. For someone who uses makeup only about once or twice a year and even then sparingly, all this preoccupation about prolonged beauty and youth just escapes me.
Ouch!
Dental discounts in the Philippines are virtually unheard of unless the dentist is your relative. And even then you only get a discount on services, not on parts. However, dental hygiene seems to be taking a back seat to dental reconstruction, and quite a few dentists are now also into reconstruction and beautification. I seem to see more and more kids wearing braces than I did several years back, and gone is the belief that only kids with pliable gums can benefit from braces. Apparently adults in their twenties and older can too.
Whois your diet adviser?
The problem with diet pill review sites is that you’re really never sure if regular ingestion of Leptovox will really help you lose weight or not. How do you know that a review site is actually an honest review site or just a marketing site in disguise?
What I usually do is look at the whois data for the website’s domain name. Usually a whois will tell you who registered the domain and the most basic contact details such as a mailing address and a phone number. A site like the Online Whois Tool can help in this regard. My rule of thumb is if I can’t see the name of the person who registered the site, then I won’t be able to trust the site.
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