THE CAT is at it again.
From my desk, I espy the white cat sleeping on its perch: a pot of flowers with maroon petals.
Later, I see the cat has transferred. It is now napping on a pot of herbs.
Of all the cats that treat our place as a half-way home and diner, this white cat alone sleeps so unusually. Perhaps it thinks it is a plant, improved a little by way of four feet for hopping from pot to pot.
For a while, I thought the vegecat was a “he” until I saw it being sniffed at and then tailed by an orange Tom. Although I can’t be sure, the din he makes around her has me convinced that the white cat beds in a pot because there is no space for him to join her.
If I were reincarnated as a cat and had to bear a litter three or four times a year, I might also pretend to be a potted herb.
Reproduction and survival of the species inevitably came to mind last March 8, observed as International Women’s Day (IWD). When a male friend sent me an early morning text greeting, I was befuddled at first. Then I thought of my sons and wondered what I had, if at all, contributed in making them to be better, more empathetic and truer friends and partners of women.
More than two centuries of observance of IWD seems to counter Sigmund Freud’s theory that “biology is destiny.” Yet, typically, every IWD commemoration is accompanied by findings that the survival of future generations rests on the promotion of the quality of women’s life.
Investing in mothers is the only way to ensure children’s survival and well-being, points out the “State of the World’s Mothers 2006,” a report produced by Save the Children.
This US-based humanitarian organization releases with its annual report a Mothers’ Index, which ranks the best and worst places to be a mother and a child. According to the 2006 report, Sweden led other countries in Europe and Northern America as the best places to be a mother. Somalia and other countries in sub-Saharan Africa were at the bottom of the ranking of 125 countries.
The Save the Children highlighted that education and access to health care, specially family planning services, are factors that guarantee women survive child birth and their children live beyond the first month or year of their life.
In the Mothers’ Index 2006, the Philippines fell in the median. Improvements in the typical Filipina’s life-cycles were predicted, though, by a 1974 University of the Philippines (UP) Population Institute study that found life expectancy improved dramatically: in 1900, a Pinay was expected to live to the age of 25; in 1960, it was 52.5; and in 2000, it is expected to be 67.5.
The chances of the Filipina and her husband surviving to old age have thus risen. According to a March 7, 2008 Inquirer Research item, women in Central Luzon have the highest life expectancy (74.42 years) in the country, with those in Eastern Visayas having the lowest (69.79).
The same UP study found that infant rearing will be delayed and shortened substantially by 2000. “A woman's first grandchild arrived around age 39 in 1900, around age 42 in 1960, and will not arrive until about age 50 in 2000.”
According to the National Statistics Office (NSO), women also live longer. Life expectancy is estimated at 72.2 years for Filipino women and 66.9 years for Filipino men.
It has been noted in the 2000 population census that around 76 percent of the 2.6 million widowed persons were females and only 24 percent were males. Explanations forwarded for this is that Filipinos generally pass away before their wives while Filipinas are less inclined than their male counterparts to remarry after the death of their spouse.
In the NSO’s Family Planning Survey of 2001, nearly half of married Filipinas (49.8 percent) used contraceptives.
This survey of figures convinces me that, at least in this life, women in this country will not have to take to the pot.
mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ mayettetabada.blogspot.com/ 09173226131
* Published in Sun.Star Cebu’s Mar. 9, 2008 issue
Saturday, March 08, 2008
Saturday, March 01, 2008
Rocky mountain high
IN THE end, it was the children who saved us.
To find an address in the mountains of Talamban, we did the practical thing: asked directions.
Improvements on a spillway had made the usual route impassable except by habal-habal (motorbike improvised for commuting in the boondocks). Preferring to use the family car, we took an alternative route but had to ask around whenever the road forked off.
At the first crossroads, a smiling fellow revving his habal-habal engine tilted his head to indicate the left road. He told us to go “straight lang,” pursing his lips for emphasis.
Anyone who's been around knows that mountain paths hardly go “straight.” But since we were looking for a sitio known as Pulangbato (red stone), the sight of that winding ribbon of red earth made us think we were on the right road or, at least, heading in the right direction.
Soon enough, our path diverged with children going home from school. A few of them clung, as if sticky-limbed, to habal-habal drivers, but many of them walked home, if not by necessity, certainly by choice.
Slowed down by the twists and curves, we found ourselves watching the children. They chatted, joked. Many “wore” their rubber slippers on their hands, walking barefoot. We swerved to avoid two boys, checking out the caimitos (starapples) ripening in the roadside trees.
Another group stuck the thick, matted tendrils of the orcalla tree in their heads so it seemed that they sported dreadlocks. I laughed aloud at their creativity while wondering at the speed some aspects of popular culture are communicated.
When the road stopped twisting, we gained speed and left behind the children. But noticing that the ground was no longer a red shade, we checked our direction again with a man nursing a bottle.
He said we had strayed into the next barangay. Pulangbato was near the school, he said and waved the bottle in the direction we came.
Although dubious now about bottles, pursed lips and unconventional direction devices, we remembered the children and decided to return to the spot where our paths converged.
The children were still on the road. When the Rastafarian boys spotted us, they puffed their chests and strutted. In no time, we found the school and our destination.
The school had the shuttered, abandoned look these places take on at duskfall on Fridays. I wondered if it had a computer lab or even Internet connection. In many places of learning in the uplands, even a typewriter remains a hi-tech craving.
How did the Rastafarian boys know about the dreadlocks? Did they see Bisrock icon Budoy drive by on his big black bike? Most likely, it was a habal-habal driver or a local boy, cocky with tales from the city.
The deserted school came back to me again while I watched that night the TV coverage of the interfaith protest in Manila.
In places like Pulangbato, what information about the latest controversy involving the Philippine National Broadband Network (NBN) filters through? The NBN deal with the ZTE firm would have meant faster, more efficient and cheaper Internet connectivity for government entities and through them, the public. Who knows? Perhaps the NBN plans might have included schools, traditionally kept in the backburner of development plans.
With a computer lab and Internet connection, places like Pulangbato can introduce children to exploding worlds of knowledge. The Rastafarian boys, for instance, can google “dreadlocks” and learn what's really cool from Wikipedia: started by the poor of Jamaica to express the Rastafari movement's “Young Black Faith,” this 1930s hairstyle showed that the wearer lived in “dread” or awe of a higher being; hence, the term “dreadlocks.”
But as greed and corruption for the P15-billion NBN-ZTE deal seems to have leapfrogged over the country's technological leap, the Rastafarian boys and I will just have to rely on learning, perhaps through osmosis with habal-habal drivers.
mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ mayettetabada.blogspot.com/ 0917-3226131
* Published in Sun.Star Cebu’s Mar. 2, 2008 issue
To find an address in the mountains of Talamban, we did the practical thing: asked directions.
Improvements on a spillway had made the usual route impassable except by habal-habal (motorbike improvised for commuting in the boondocks). Preferring to use the family car, we took an alternative route but had to ask around whenever the road forked off.
At the first crossroads, a smiling fellow revving his habal-habal engine tilted his head to indicate the left road. He told us to go “straight lang,” pursing his lips for emphasis.
Anyone who's been around knows that mountain paths hardly go “straight.” But since we were looking for a sitio known as Pulangbato (red stone), the sight of that winding ribbon of red earth made us think we were on the right road or, at least, heading in the right direction.
Soon enough, our path diverged with children going home from school. A few of them clung, as if sticky-limbed, to habal-habal drivers, but many of them walked home, if not by necessity, certainly by choice.
Slowed down by the twists and curves, we found ourselves watching the children. They chatted, joked. Many “wore” their rubber slippers on their hands, walking barefoot. We swerved to avoid two boys, checking out the caimitos (starapples) ripening in the roadside trees.
Another group stuck the thick, matted tendrils of the orcalla tree in their heads so it seemed that they sported dreadlocks. I laughed aloud at their creativity while wondering at the speed some aspects of popular culture are communicated.
When the road stopped twisting, we gained speed and left behind the children. But noticing that the ground was no longer a red shade, we checked our direction again with a man nursing a bottle.
He said we had strayed into the next barangay. Pulangbato was near the school, he said and waved the bottle in the direction we came.
Although dubious now about bottles, pursed lips and unconventional direction devices, we remembered the children and decided to return to the spot where our paths converged.
The children were still on the road. When the Rastafarian boys spotted us, they puffed their chests and strutted. In no time, we found the school and our destination.
The school had the shuttered, abandoned look these places take on at duskfall on Fridays. I wondered if it had a computer lab or even Internet connection. In many places of learning in the uplands, even a typewriter remains a hi-tech craving.
How did the Rastafarian boys know about the dreadlocks? Did they see Bisrock icon Budoy drive by on his big black bike? Most likely, it was a habal-habal driver or a local boy, cocky with tales from the city.
The deserted school came back to me again while I watched that night the TV coverage of the interfaith protest in Manila.
In places like Pulangbato, what information about the latest controversy involving the Philippine National Broadband Network (NBN) filters through? The NBN deal with the ZTE firm would have meant faster, more efficient and cheaper Internet connectivity for government entities and through them, the public. Who knows? Perhaps the NBN plans might have included schools, traditionally kept in the backburner of development plans.
With a computer lab and Internet connection, places like Pulangbato can introduce children to exploding worlds of knowledge. The Rastafarian boys, for instance, can google “dreadlocks” and learn what's really cool from Wikipedia: started by the poor of Jamaica to express the Rastafari movement's “Young Black Faith,” this 1930s hairstyle showed that the wearer lived in “dread” or awe of a higher being; hence, the term “dreadlocks.”
But as greed and corruption for the P15-billion NBN-ZTE deal seems to have leapfrogged over the country's technological leap, the Rastafarian boys and I will just have to rely on learning, perhaps through osmosis with habal-habal drivers.
mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ mayettetabada.blogspot.com/ 0917-3226131
* Published in Sun.Star Cebu’s Mar. 2, 2008 issue
Wives’ tales
WHEN I first saw it, I had an electric jolt.
Nibbling the frozen chip of the chocolate dip coating a sundae I was not even supposed to be thinking of, I saw the distant neon-lit letters leap out in the dark: TARZAN BO.
Wow, I thought. Even given the street competition presented by rival bars on this Mactan strip, I wondered about the Neanderthal sensibility inspiring a bar name that implied its habitués, not just Lord Greystoke’s noble ape-man alter ego, had either strong armpits or weak noses.
But as the family car approached the bar, I realized that it wasn’t a weird variant of
English that was the culprit after all.
The letters on the nightclub’s façade originally spelled out: T-A-R-Z-A-N-B-O-Y. The last bulb did not just light up.
Up to now, that malfunctioning bulb has never been replaced. Except for a busybody like me, no one may have made a case of the darkened “Y.”
Or possibly, the vagaries of English don’t preoccupy the owner or regulars of such places. Correct spelling and clear meaning can hardly matter in a place that probably is too dark for reading, I told my husband one night. Do you see anyone bringing a book? he asks without taking his eyes off the road.
As the vanilla was quickly melting, I forgot to reply. What I had wanted to tell him was that I read in Sun.Star Superbalita’s Feb. 21, 2008 issue that Jinkee Pacquiao admitted to “Yes Magazine” that she is now going through the worst upheavals in her eight-year marriage to Manny.
Her husband is dubbed “Pambansang Kamao (national boxer)” for the acclaim and pride he has given the country for his ring victories. In the euphoria after one such victory over a Mexican foe, the buzz was all for hailing Manny as a modern-day national hero.
According to the Superbalita feature, Jinkee says she struggles with the womanizing and gambling of Manny. At parties and bars, she tries to be blind to her husband and his girls until she cannot take it anymore and goes to a corner to cry. Can one be a hero to one’s countrymen while being the lowest form of animal to one’s wife?
Boxing and basketball may be our country’s favorite sports, but it is hero-making that is actually our national pastime. Unlike others that tear down personalities as quickly as they build them up, we Pinoys have an elastic threshold of blind love for our idols, who fit better the mold of Erap the lover of women and the masses, rather than Mother Teresa the living saint.
In a country where even drainage systems hardly work but actors can become statesmen and statesmen opt to become actors, it hardly surprises anyone that our hopes for national transformation and moral resurgence is pinned not on processes and systems but on whistleblowers-turned-celebrities.
Senate star witness Rodolfo Noel “Jun” Lozada Jr. seems to repulse so far all the character-demolition attempts to discredit his exposure of the graft and corruption allegedly committed in the National Broadband Network deal.
In my books, Lozada passes at least one test: his wife wanted him back. Violeta Lozada filed a petition for the writ of habeas corpus in the Supreme Court after she learned the police and airport officials spirited him away upon his return to the country.
But more than the wife test, literature has a better standard for myth-building. More nuanced and realistic is the anti-hero, a literary character who resembles the villain but denies or suppresses heroic virtues. Which side prevails determines the tale’s end.
In time, our national pastime may encourage our anti-heroes to reconcile pleasing the crowds and treating one’s wife honorably. Let’s hope, for our children’s sake, that our hero-making matures from simply replacing busted bulbs to spotting mistakes in the dark.
mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ mayettetabada.blogspot.com/ 01973226131
* Published in Sun.Star Cebu’s Feb. 24, 2008 issue
Nibbling the frozen chip of the chocolate dip coating a sundae I was not even supposed to be thinking of, I saw the distant neon-lit letters leap out in the dark: TARZAN BO.
Wow, I thought. Even given the street competition presented by rival bars on this Mactan strip, I wondered about the Neanderthal sensibility inspiring a bar name that implied its habitués, not just Lord Greystoke’s noble ape-man alter ego, had either strong armpits or weak noses.
But as the family car approached the bar, I realized that it wasn’t a weird variant of
English that was the culprit after all.
The letters on the nightclub’s façade originally spelled out: T-A-R-Z-A-N-B-O-Y. The last bulb did not just light up.
Up to now, that malfunctioning bulb has never been replaced. Except for a busybody like me, no one may have made a case of the darkened “Y.”
Or possibly, the vagaries of English don’t preoccupy the owner or regulars of such places. Correct spelling and clear meaning can hardly matter in a place that probably is too dark for reading, I told my husband one night. Do you see anyone bringing a book? he asks without taking his eyes off the road.
As the vanilla was quickly melting, I forgot to reply. What I had wanted to tell him was that I read in Sun.Star Superbalita’s Feb. 21, 2008 issue that Jinkee Pacquiao admitted to “Yes Magazine” that she is now going through the worst upheavals in her eight-year marriage to Manny.
Her husband is dubbed “Pambansang Kamao (national boxer)” for the acclaim and pride he has given the country for his ring victories. In the euphoria after one such victory over a Mexican foe, the buzz was all for hailing Manny as a modern-day national hero.
According to the Superbalita feature, Jinkee says she struggles with the womanizing and gambling of Manny. At parties and bars, she tries to be blind to her husband and his girls until she cannot take it anymore and goes to a corner to cry. Can one be a hero to one’s countrymen while being the lowest form of animal to one’s wife?
Boxing and basketball may be our country’s favorite sports, but it is hero-making that is actually our national pastime. Unlike others that tear down personalities as quickly as they build them up, we Pinoys have an elastic threshold of blind love for our idols, who fit better the mold of Erap the lover of women and the masses, rather than Mother Teresa the living saint.
In a country where even drainage systems hardly work but actors can become statesmen and statesmen opt to become actors, it hardly surprises anyone that our hopes for national transformation and moral resurgence is pinned not on processes and systems but on whistleblowers-turned-celebrities.
Senate star witness Rodolfo Noel “Jun” Lozada Jr. seems to repulse so far all the character-demolition attempts to discredit his exposure of the graft and corruption allegedly committed in the National Broadband Network deal.
In my books, Lozada passes at least one test: his wife wanted him back. Violeta Lozada filed a petition for the writ of habeas corpus in the Supreme Court after she learned the police and airport officials spirited him away upon his return to the country.
But more than the wife test, literature has a better standard for myth-building. More nuanced and realistic is the anti-hero, a literary character who resembles the villain but denies or suppresses heroic virtues. Which side prevails determines the tale’s end.
In time, our national pastime may encourage our anti-heroes to reconcile pleasing the crowds and treating one’s wife honorably. Let’s hope, for our children’s sake, that our hero-making matures from simply replacing busted bulbs to spotting mistakes in the dark.
mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ mayettetabada.blogspot.com/ 01973226131
* Published in Sun.Star Cebu’s Feb. 24, 2008 issue
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