Goodbye P910i
I got my Sony Ericsson P9109i from my then-coworker Ejay in the last quarter of 2005. He had just bought the phone himself, hardly two months old, but he had found a cellphone that he liked better. Perhaps if Ejay had not wanted to give it up I would not have bought the P910i, but we were at the point of our careers when we needed a phone that was also a PDA, and this was an opportunity for me to buy it for a lot less money than I would have shelled out at a mall.
I lost that same cellphone last Friday, December 11 2009, after four years of constant use. It was stolen from my backpack as I was walking across the Estrella pedestrian overpass. I was an easy mark for the zipper gang, I suppose, regularly walking that route at least 5 days a week.
The phone has seen better days. I had already removed the flip because it was broken, and was using the onscreen keyboard and virtual flip for text entry. There was even a time when the jog dial didn’t work anymore, but I found a shop that could repair it, of all places, in Masbate. I had vowed till death do us part with this phone, and I guess this loss was its death.
But not quite. The thief, whoever he is, is still using the SIM card. The number is 0921 9866 989. I can’t recover it because I no longer have the card backing, having had that number for the past 2 years or so. Feel free to send it any junk text that you can think of. 
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.
Walking the walls (part one)
In this era of manufactured homes, there seems to be little worth in old historical buildings, at least for the Philippine Government. I am seeing old landmarks being torn down to make way for progress as in malls and parking spaces for them. The old Sky Room on Taft avenue was torn down to make way for — nothing.
This is the Intendencia. It stands just outside the wallls of Intramuros in Manila. Wars, earthquakes and fires have caused this building to be finally abandoned, although traces of restoration can be seen within the wrought iron bars.
This is one of the buildings within Metro Manila whose fate seems to be to die forgotten and in decay. The same fate seems to await the Metropolitan Theater on Plaza Lawton. The facade of the old PNR station facing Plaza Dilao in Paco, the old GSIS and Veterans Buildings are soon to disappear, because they are old and perhaps should give way to newer, bigger, more modern buildings.
The developers of the old Luneta Theater on TM Kalaw however, seems to be retaining the old facade and are building a new edifice inside it. This is more to my liking, if the building itself can no longer be saved because of age.
If this can be done to the Luneta Theater I don’t see any reason why it can’t be done to other historical buildings in the city.
Newer is not always better.
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