a promdi's MRT woes

I used to fear speed; I remember shutting my eyes throughout my maiden flight and hypnotizing myself on my first MRT ride. In time though I had to lick my MRT fears if only to increase malling time when in Manila.

In my recent trip however, the MRT had come to mean endless queuing, thus giving me a reason to shun it anew. For instance: to get a passage card I had to line up; to enter the passenger bay, again I had to line up; yet again, I had to line up to exit. And mind you, the snaking lines crisscrossed each other on the limited space, baffling me as to which line led where.

One time during rush hour, I joined a queue that got me to the ticket booth longer than it took eternity to end. Then to my shock, the ticket girl said she was only accepting exact fares and that if I could please line up again in the next booth. Whaaaaat???!!!

Going to the tail end of another kilometric line, I grumbled: Why not let the makeshift stalls sell MRT cards like they do with cell cards? Promdi transients like me won’t mind paying extra for the hassle it will save us.

Finally clasping a smiling Ate Glo, I lined up and fed her to the machine. As I walked toward an area in the terminal, I saw mainly women passengers. I was about to ask where had all the men gone when a girl pointed to me the waiting area for male commuters. So the MRT had turned gender sensitive! I was quite impressed, but then I saw women milling about the male zone.

As the train wailed from a distance, everybody moved to the edge and poised to hurl himself inside once it stopped and the door hissed open. Sandwiched between warm bodies and forever wary of pickpockets, I had one hand clasping my cell phone and another, my wallet. As the crowd surged forward, I turned buoyant, letting the human tsunami wash me aboard where, packed like cigarettes, we traded sweats and breaths.

Certain after a while a pickpocket couldn’t do his trick no more than I could shift my weight, I put my hands on my face to ensure it wouldn’t get swapped in the hubbub. But I must say this: For all those times that I took the perpetually crammed MRT, no one ever reeked of underarm odor or screamed theft.

At Shaw Boulevard I got off, lined up, fed Ate Glo again to the machine and exited---- but where? Faced with stairs and walls, I was clueless on where to go and whom to follow because people went in all directions. Take it easy, I told myself, to get out of this station, I simply have to take the stairs going down, right? Wrong! At the Shaw Boulevard Station, first you have to go up twice then go down before you could get out of the terminal. Whew!

I then headed for SM Megamall in a polo shirt that was so crinkled it looked like a bull had used it for a diaper. I’m not complaining but what you gain in MRT time, you lose in poise and style.

Retracing my steps to the MRT terminal three hours later, I jiggled once in a while the coins in my pocket, the exact fare going home. But up there, I was astonished to see that the supposed express line for “exact fare only” was longer by half than the rest. Ha-ha. Extreme mind conditioning makes people funny!

It was 9 PM and the crowd hadn’t thinned out much. Thinking that about this time gender lines were no longer hallowed, I went to an area where the crowd was relatively sparse. But then the train arrived and the usual mad scramble ensued.

Elbowing my way inside, I latched my hand on the rail to gain space and balance. It was only later when I realized I was being bumped from all sides by fleshy orbs. I looked around and saw, pressed close to me, women in various stages of pregnancy. Coyly, a woman smiled and pointed to me a sign on the wall that read: FOR PREGNANT PASSENGERS ONLY.

As the MRT door swished and shut me out, I wished I had stuffed under my shirt everything that I bought.

GSIS eCard, anyone?

As the GSIS eCard hoopla rages on, you, a GSIS member from Surigao del Sur (SDS), become a casualty of a system that all your friends think is a study in chaos. But first things first.

You understand that the GSIS needs to streamline its present system; you understand the GSIS when it says that the eCard is the way to go because it serves as your ID card in all your GSIS transactions; you understand that the eCard can be used as an ATM card and a debit/credit card to pay for goods and services at retailers or suppliers worldwide who accept it. What you don’t understand however is why you are subjected to these pointless troubles.

To get a GSIS eCard in Davao City, you need to have an enrolment form duly approved by your governor. When you leave, your eCard holder officemates warn you about the hellish experience and give you some survival tips. It’s already the first week of February and for sure the system has improved, you say.

You get off the bus in front of SM Davao at 4:00 in the morning. At the east wing, you see people milling about, others sitting on the gutter. You are correct in thinking that these people got there shortly after midnight. With them, you wait.

A mad scramble as the GSIS team arrives; hands jut, asking for priority numbers. Just when you have wormed your way, you’re told to go to the other side where Surigaonons are supposed to line up. You look around for some signages to guide you. Nada.

Using a megaphone, a man shouts for everybody to toe the line, but the crowd is deaf. Holding your priority number, you ask the megaphone man. It’s line five for SDS, he says. The lines criss-cross but you find your way and queue. Wanting to chat, you ask the woman in front of you if she’s from SDS. She says no. You scratch your head as she points you to the right SDS line which is two rows to your left. Going to the tail end of another long line, you look around for some signages. Again nada.

It’s past 6:00 AM; the lines snake from the SM door to the other corner. The man with the megaphone shouts some instructions but you can’t hear him.

SM does not open until 8:30 and so the crowd moves, shifts and grumbles. The sun comes out and you have nowhere to hide because the thin trees cast their shadows against the SM wall. Sweat beads at your temples and you feel your knees shake. Sitting on your heels, you secretly thank God for not giving you kidneys the size of lanzones, or else.

For hours you alternately hear nothing but complaints from restless people and the screams of the megaphone man repeating the same instructions.

When SM finally opens, the people are almost ballistic and the megaphone man has gone hoarse. Serves him right; instead of verbal instructions, a simple idiot board would have saved him and you some troubles.

All hell breaks loose at the SM entrance where the crowd is so dense that every square meter of floor space has 10 people in it. To you, it feels like crossing the Red Sea without Moses.

You try to get ahead but you’re helplessly stuck. As the human tsunami surges this way and that, you coast along without people realizing you are not moving under your own steam.

The situation turns death defying at the second level of SM where, on the narrow hallway, you are packed like cigarettes. Faced with the horrors of claustrophobia and asphyxia, you palpitate. People inch their way from opposite directions, ducking barricades, human and otherwise. There is plenty of shouting, mostly from the GSIS men. But above the din of irate voices, the megaphone man reigns supreme as he swears and screams.

You’re number 36, but it’s taking so long for you to get served, making you wonder if all that queuing early in the morning is for naught! Grumbling, you swap practical suggestions for a no-brainer systemic failure on the part of GSIS. It’s all a matter of providing process flow information through signages that people can read from a distance, others say. Ironically, GSIS hangs tarpaulin streamers that don’t help like the one that says, “Tapos na ang maligayang araw nila.” Again it makes you wonder if GSIS is referring to you and your tribulations.

Another hour passes before you enter a dungeon where you are to sit on conjoined chairs, the better to treat you to a slow game of musical chairs as you move nearer to being served by one of the unsmiling six encoders. From here, it’s a 2-hour waiting game for you.

As you sit there imbibing the funny smells of your fellow GSIS members, a thought hits you: What’s the point of all this?

You didn’t ask for the eCard system, the GSIS did. So it must be incumbent upon the GSIS to make everything a breeze to you. But no, the GSIS encumbers you with an awful system while robbing you and the national and local government units with precious resources. Quickly you do some Math.

The Civil Service Commission says that SDS has 8,842 filled up government positions. Because you are all given three days, on official time, to process your eCard in Davao City, the government loses man-hours valued at P7,957,800 (8,842x300x3 days), assuming an average daily wage of P300. And because you are made to bear the Tandag-Davao-Tandag bus fare of P600 and the cost of food and accommodation pegged at 300 a day, all of you must shell out a total of P13,263,000. In short, SDS incurs P21,220,800 just for its employees to have an eCard. Multiply this amount with the total number of provinces and cities and you end up with a figure neat enough to buy all the paintings of Juan Luna!

You are told that Mindanao has only Davao and Cagayan de Oro as processing centers because it’s risky to bring the equipment to the provinces. But as you sit there, you inventory the equipment: a computer set, a webcam and a smaller-than-a-fax-machine biometer designed to take your right and left index fingerprints. Why, you say to yourself, even SSS and LTO are using them in SDS.

It’s past noon and your stomach growls as you watch others nibble at some crackers. You stare at the tarpaulin that has the GSIS begging your indulgence for the inconvenience. Playing tricks, your mind changes the meaning of GSIS to “Great Suffering Inside SM.” In spite of your famished self, you grin.

By the time your photo is taken, you’re worn-down that you don’t recognize yourself on the computer monitor. You request for a reshoot and get none.

At two in the afternoon, you’re finally done. And on your way out, you see another GSIS tarpaulin that says: NOW YOU HAVE THE POWER! In reflex, you look at your eCard and get mocked by your worst photo ever. You run to the rest room. And there you puke.

(p.s. mental pervert intends to submit this to the philippine daily inquirer.)

cell phone as a weapon of sexual perversion ( R-18)

Then: “Hon, what flavor is your condom?”
Now: “Hon, what model is your cell phone?”

You. Yes, you, Ethel Booba prototype. You have become paranoid---what will all this hoopla about sex videos. All too suddenly, you regret having egged him to replace his 3310. Or was it 5110?

Foreplay to you has taken on a new dimension. Now it’s you who undress him, making sure that no phone cam is wedged between his bushy armpits or tucked into his filthy navel or taped on his burgeoning love handles. As you grope him, you wonder if there’s a phone small enough to pass as cavities. Or in-grown toenails. Or tonsils.

He complains about all this fuss. You persist, nay, insist! Finally, you lie down beside him, only to bolt up after something that glints in the ceiling crosses your peripheral vision. A hidden phone cam? But you tone down just as fast, knowing there is no way he could stick it there because earlier you made sure to enter the room ahead of him.

You make love. And wriggle. And moan. And ever so excruciatingly, you open mouth. Then you remember your Fil-Am cousin telling you about this gum-thin cell phone. Like a frog zapping a mosquito, you shut your mouth in a snap. What if in the white heat of passion, he slips it into your mouth and you, in turn, swallow it? What if the next day, you watch in horror all your entrails, including a cirrhotic liver and a busted appendix, being dissected on national television in a show that has nothing to do with human anatomy?

You shudder. Whether from the burning thought or blinding orgasm, you don’t know. All you know is you need to go back to basics. Like buying him a fax, perhaps?

Opppsssss...

Because lucid interval comes to a mental pervert few and far between, this blog also does.

a mental pervert decides to blog

Now, this is perverse. Just when my pseudo-writer friends have stopped bugging me to blog, here I am. Indeed, only fools don’t change their mind.

I first toyed with the idea of calling this “Inspired Madness.” But I found it a tad too clichéd. I wanted something that would give my blog a kick, a punch. But it was something I couldn't quite pin down. So I slept on it. When I woke up, an idea snapped.

Lunacy fascinates me. Why, I don’t know. Is it for the fact that my mother's middle name is "Luna?" And/Or that my maternal lola died in a lickhouse in Manila?

Madness, what perfect alibi. When you're insane, you can write about anything without pain of libel or censure. (Don’t you smell Catch 22 here?) And even if you massacre every English composition rule there is, or even if your subject and your verb are the grammarian equivalents of Tom and Jerry, your stern English teachers can only salivate by the wayside, gritting their teeth because they can’t touch you with their ten-foot pole red of a pen. Really now, that’s utter freedom!

But then again, you have to have a sense of accountability in everything that you write, even just an iota, if only to show some respect to your voyeurs, I mean, readers. Besides, your carefree life as a mental pervert can also be boring, so you need a lucid interval, a psychotic break. Even if invariably you find the real world much, much more chaotic.

Lucid interval is that space of time between two fits of insanity, during which a person is completely restored to the perfect enjoyment of reason upon which the mind was previously cognizant. That, in a perfect way, is the essence of this blog.