MussoLOLen is Always Right! |

I know he doesn’t mean to, but Ale can make me feel like such an asshole sometimes. Maybe it’s the insane cultural differences, but there are times when talking to him makes me feel like I don’t deserve to consider myself Marxist. Or “human being” for that matter.

A lot of it has to do with the fact that I have maids. Well, not me – my family does. I’ve done a lot of crazy things in my lifetime and he never batted so much as an eyelash when I told him about those. But when I mentioned that we have maids in the house, he was so shocked that had to interrupt our conversation to tell his parents about it.

“So what do you do at home if you don’t do any chores?” he asked me.

“Ummm…I work. I go online. I play guitar,” I mumbled.

I know that in Europe and the rest of the Western world, nobody has maids in their house unless they’re really really rich. Over here, it’s normal for most middle class families have at least one maid in the household. Still, I never realized how much I have in common with a spoiled brat until he started explaining to me how weird it would be for him to have someone clean up his room, cook his meals, and do the household chores for him.

Ate Diding and Ale

What made it worse for me was when he kept asking me all these questions about the helpers who live in our house two days ago. Stuff like how old they are, if they have any kids. All I could answer was an, “Umm…I never really got around to asking them.”

“So you don’t talk to them? Even if you live in the same house?”

“Not really. I like to keep to myself. Besides, just because you live with someone doesn’t mean you have to talk to that person.”

“Honey, I know that, but I don’t know…if we had maids in our house I’d probably talk to them a lot.”

Yeah, that made me feel like a class A asshole all right.

The funny part is that I can’t justify why I need any maids around because I’m the type of person who can live with clothes all over my bed and survive on canned food and restaurant leftovers. Okay, maybe it’s nice to have someone make your meals for you when you’re a real dunce in the kitchen (or when you’re just plain too lazy to ever get around to learning how to cook). But…is it really that hard for us to do our own cleaning and cooking? I know that people here need jobs and stuff, but a job where you have to do stuff people can very well do on their own is starting to sound more and more wrong to me. Also, I’m having so much difficulty trying to find a reason why I find it so hard to strike up a normal conversation with our maids. I’m chalking it up to the fact that I’m not really a sociable person unless the mood strikes me, but I’m afraid that the real reason for this might be that I still cling to a few more classist attitudes than I thought.

I <3 a man who can cook.
Because I can’t tell a frying pan from a wok.

Right now Ale is making dinner for us downstairs (spaghetti ala-something something), where “us” is my parents, my sister, and the maids. When we were talking about cooking dinner last night, he asked me if the maids could join us at the dinner table. I couldn’t have been more shocked. My family and the maids, all eating at one table. How totally awkward and inappropriate is that? But worse than the awkwardness was this tidal wave of shame that hit me the moment I thought that.

So I guess if I were him I would totally dump me right now, but mebbe he’s waiting til he gets back to Italy to do that. :\ And I really don’t have much of an appetite right now but it’d be a shame to let that food go to waste. Dinner tiem.

It’s true what they say – once you get bitten by the piercing bug, you’re going to want more. And more. Until your body resembles a pincushion and most of genteel society avoids you like the leper in Jerusalem during whatever year Jesus was born.

It’s been over a year since I got my eyebrow pierced, and exactly a year since I got my inverse navel done. In between that time period I got an industrial piercing that semi-freaked out my mom (and which she made me remove after its refusal to heal in three months), and a tongue piercing that REALLY freaked out my parents. I didn’t intend to tell them about the tongue because I knew I could have gotten away with hiding it from them. But despite how “scary” I look with metal through my eyebrow I’m really quite a nice daughter, so I let them know that I had metal through my tongue. I expected them to chalk it up to pre-graduation jitters like they did with my eyebrow but nooo. It got so bad that my mom stormed into my dorm room the next day to give me a lengthy lecture on why a tongue piercing unhealthy and unpleasant and overall bad. When I insisted on taking my chances on the health risks, she told me that my dad refused to see or talk to me until I remove my tongue piercing.

I took out the barbel the next day.

I’ve been itching to get something new on my face as a way to mark the new year, so I asked my mom if I can has a side lip piercing. Unsurprisingly, she said no, but I wasn’t about to drop the issue without a fight. When I asked her why not, she gave me the following reasons:

If I get another facial piercing I will be avoided like the lepers in Jerusalem during whatever year Jesus was born.

“Facial piercings will attract weirdos and will drive decent people away,” my mom said. I argued that I’ve been a weirdo magnet even before I became a pincushion. As for “decent people”? Bah, “decent people” are quick to judge. Just because I have facial piercings doesn’t mean that I spend my spare time shooting heroin and doing everything that moves. I’m willing to bet a lot of money that I’m probably more moral, honest, and generous than all those goody-two-shoes type boys and girls who go to church every Sunday. Besides, if I ever decide to sell my soul to the materialist corporate world again, I can just get rid of the piercing before the job interview.

She does have a fairly valid point though. Assuming that I had a boyfriend who comes from a conservative family, he’d probably dread the day where I have to meet his parents. (Which is not to say that I’d allow myself to end up with someone who’d be ashamed to introduce me to his parents. I’d skewer his nuts with the barbel I used for my tongue piercing before he could ever get ashamed of me.) Girls who have lip piercings aren’t really the type you can take home to mom. Traditional Filipino parents like those girls who are meek like mice and who can’t live their own lives because their own parents won’t allow them to do what they want. I have a sneaking suspicion that if I weren’t my mom’s kid, she’d probably tell her children – especially the sons – to stay far far away from me as possible.

“I just don’t like the way people will treat you if you get any more piercings,” my mom explained.

Silence as I imagined all the looks women and little old church ladies will throw at me if I add more metal to my face. That look of horror mixed with disgust and curiosity as to what would drive such a pretty girl to “ruin her face” like that.

Everyone will think that my parents are bad parents.

“Trust me, it will break our hearts to see you with a lip piercing,” my mom said.

Nothing makes me give in and shut up like the guilt card.

“Not to mention the gossip that we are bad parents,” she added.

I couldn’t think of anything to say.

I’m not sure why old school Filipinos would come to the conclusion that whatever I do with my life is a reflection of how well (or how badly) my parents raised me. Maybe it’s our close family ties and the big say parents have over their childrens’ lives, even when their children are old enough to think for themselves. Maybe Filipinos still believe the Freudian theory that all adult neuroses are caused by parenting mistakes. In any case, I’d hate for anyone to think that I turned out “wrong” because my parents dropped me on the head as a baby.

Of all the bullshit things to teach children about life, none is more false than “It’s your inner beauty that counts.” Whether we like it or not, people will judge us by our appearances and will judge us harshly when we deliberately choose to cross the line between what’s acceptable and what isn’t. Even the West hasn’t gotten rid of stereotype that people who have piercings and tattoos are criminals or mentally unsound. I was slightly offended when a friend from the US thought I grew up a lot because I hadn’t gotten a weird hair color or a new piercing in months. (Since when was wanting to experiment with the way you look a sign of immaturity?) I’d probably get a lot worse than that from people here if I get any more metal on my face.

The thing is, it’s easy for me to be zen about the weird looks from strangers and the inevitable “What have you done to yourself? Bakit mo sinira mukha mo?” from conservative relatives. I really couldn’t care less about what other people think of the way I choose to look. What I do care about is preserving my relationships with the people who matter and making sure I do nothing to damage what we have. My relationship with my parents included. While I’d never allow my parents to make important life decisions for me, like what career path to take or who to marry, they can have their way with the little things. And if never getting another piercing makes them happy – well, so be it.

I still maintain that a lip piercing gives me 1,000 hotness points though.

“Perhaps in twenty years, Filipinos will become more progressive and open-minded about piercings,” my mom said, as though trying to make me feel better.

“Fine,” I grumbled. “I’ll get another facial piercing when I turn forty. At that age, I’m pretty sure nobody’s going to think I got my lip pierced because you toilet-trained me the wrong way or whatever.”

“Go ahead. But you’ll probably have your own kids by then, who’ll police you and ask you to stop trying to act like a teenager by getting all these facial piercings.”

Bah.

A conversation I had with a friend tonight gave me an opportunity to find the words to explain why I desperately want to leave this country in the quickest way possible. I don’t care where I end up, or how I get there. I just want out.

I cannot stand Philippine society. I cannot stand how strong class discrimination is and the fact that norms that operate within those classes exist and will continue to exist. I hate that everyone I know knows everyone else, and there are always people watching you, waiting for you to fumble, fall, make a complete ass out of yourself, or do something scandalous. I hate that if I commit a serious crime, I’m probably going to get away with it because my friends know people or my family members know people who can wipe my slate clean. Which is not to say that my family is all-powerful and influential in this society. But we’re fairly bourgeoise. Which means that I’ll most likely get away with a lighter sentence than if someone with no connections and no influence got into the same sort of legal mess that I did.

In college, I would roll my eyes every time a professor talked how we all have the capability to end corruption and end poverty. BULLSHIT. Corruption and class division has been around since the Spanish era and it will continue to exist because that’s part of our culture. That’s who we are. It’s more convenient to collaborate with the conquerors. It’s more convenient to steal the taxpayers’ money and to kill off your enemies than to be honest about your votes and keep your paws off the cash. It’s more convenient to use your connections to get away with murder. And not only is it convenient–it fucking saves the family name as well. Which is not to say that I personally condone that. I despise corruption, I do. But once the average person is in a position of power, in a place where they can get away with anything, morality goes flying out the window and they cheat, steal, kill, and get away with it. I’m willing to bet any amount of money that there will be at least one person from my university who will turn out to be the kind of manipulative leech, despite the values that the Jesuits tried so very hard to instill in us. But I would probably lose that bet anyway because that person’s public-relations people will probably make him/her look like an all-around good guy, and the journalists who try to find out the truth about him will be murdered in no time.

I swore this to myself once and I’ll say it again–I will not marry a Filipino. It’s not a race thing, it’s a cultural thing. Because if I marry a Filipino then I’ll marry into his family–whose in-laws will probably look down on me because I’m not rich enough or sociable enough or pretty enough or for whatever reason associated not with who I am as a person, but the class or family I belong to–and I’ll marry into his connections, and I have to be nice to all these powerful people who can save my ass from jail and god knows what else. I have to retain a certain image to uphold the glory of the family name. I will not stand for that crap.

I want to live in a place where I’m completely anonymous, where family names and backgrounds don’t mean shit, and where people are valued for the work they do and their moral integrity instead of the number of powerful people they know. I want to live in a place where people couldn’t care less about what I do with my life, where people won’t gossip about my personal relationships and the people I’ve screwed over and the people who screwed me over.

I suppose some would say that I’m a horrible person for being aware that our country’s society is shit and instead of getting up and trying to change things, I want to get the hell out. I don’t feel like a horrible person, though. I’m not the asshole killing off political enemies, or stealing from the pork barrel. This is my reaction to the reality I see. Philippine society won’t change, at least not in my lifetime. And I want to live my life the way I want to instead of wasting my time fighting a losing battle.

*ducks flying tomatoes*