Aids

When I was in prep, the john was always my first stop in school. I always had to go before starting classes. I was such a tense, shy and insecure kid that every morning, I would get butterflies just thinking of school. Even if I already pooh-ed before leaving the house, my stomach had to relieve itself for the second time.

As a kid, I was not wise enough to carry my own tissue paper.

I can never understand why in my school, you had to ask tissue paper from the teacher. Why can’t they just leave some in the restroom?

Can you imagine the total humiliation I would be facing if I stopped my teacher, asked her, in front of my classmates, that I needed some tissue paper? Being caught in a situation like that can mean year-long teasing from classmates.

So, luckily, there’s art class and all those free packs of art paper. I loved using dark colors – red, brown, black, violet, etc. The toilet doesn’t flush in my school, and if anyone saw those dark colors in the toilet bowl—that’s my work of art.

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I don’t want to be caught anywhere without tissue paper. I carry tissue paper in my car and if needed be, in my bag or pocket.

With tissue paper at hand, all I’ll ever need to worry about is a clean toilet bowl. But here in Manila, that would refer to the malls and private offices, never public toilets. I dread public toilets, especially the ones found at government offices. Just in case I need to go and I don’t have a choice, I will probably cover the entire bowl with tissue paper and I won’t sit, I’ll squat.

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Talking about malls, I can never understand why some big names in the industry such as SM and Robinsons are so cheap. Why can’t they provide free tissue paper? Compared to the billions that they make in a year, how much will it burn them to provide this freebie? It’s all about the money than the customers for these people.

(Side note: SM also has the worst men’s urinals in terms of privacy. The urinals are so huge and chunky that they throw a guy approximately 12-15 inches off the wall. Second, there’s no divider between urinals. Can you imagine how awkward it is to pee there? Just a split-second glance to your left or right shoulder or arm can expose, in all its glory, another guy’s private part! I don’t want to see that and I certainly don’t want strangers seeing mine.)

I also don’t believe in charging a customer php15-20 to get better looking restrooms and amenities that should have been free in the first place! Thumbs down to Shangri-la and middle-grounders!

Kudos to Rockwell and Eastwood!  Thank you for thinking of your customer’s hygiene concerns. Thank you for providing free tissue paper and clean toilet bowls.

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When I visited my relatives in the US last year, I had the worse case of irregular bowel movement. Since we were going around a lot and I was not really sure when my stomach will be dropping a bomb, I packed a lot of tissue paper.

It turned out that I wouldn’t be using them at all. From west coast to east coast, I literally pooh-ed everywhere. But the amazing thing is, wherever I went: a cheap isolated town restaurant, shopping malls, interstate gas stations, isolated inns, and even restroom stops in the desert, there were clean restrooms and I can’t believe it, tissue paper!!!

If people ask me what makes the US a first-world country, I’ll probably say that wherever you go in the US, there’s always a clean restroom and lots of tissue paper waiting for you.

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On Love and Pooh

Parokya ni Edgar:

Torpe: O sige, tatawagan ko na (dials the number of his crush)

Tatay ng crush: Hello.

Torpe: Hello, pwede pong makausap si girlie?

Tatay ng crush: Ah, si girlie, tawag ka ulit, tumatae!

I once read somewhere that people who tend to have problems keeping their balance, meaning, they stumble and lose their footing a lot, may need to examine if this is a physically manifestation of their lives being out of balance.

Being out of work early last week, I decided to watch a movie to past the time. And I certainly got a similar “message” from a romantic flick, “Ready to Launch”. In the movie, the lead guy, who refuses to leave his parents’ house despite being over 30 yrs old gets into outrageous and unthinkable disasters. Throughout the movie, he finds himself attacked by supposedly harmless and human-friendly animals (ex. a dolphin, a chipmunk, etc). At first he doesn’t have a clue to what was happening. Then it keeps happening again and again and his friends pointed out to him that maybe nature was sending out signs that there must be something wrong in his life, an imbalance, something that attracted all of these weird accidents. Obviously, he needed to realize that he was overstaying in his parents’ house and second, he was denying his love for the lead girl. When he finally had an epiphany and made changes to his life, the attacks stopped.

Of course the movie had to be humorous, thus, the extreme approach to convey this simple truth. But I think this is an undeniable fact — the universe sends out signs. Whenever we are face with crossroads or important decisions to make — the universe always sends out signs to help us. Always.

Is there really a way to know if you’re living your life in balance with the universe and the powers that be? Yes, of course. Knowing that we have a problem is not the problem. We know what frustrates or disappoints us about our lives. Things that basically, make us unhappy, prevent our growth and happiness. But figuring out how to solve these problems, what paths to take can be difficult. This is where signs are supposed to help us.

But, that’s where the movie and real life differs – reading the signs can be a problem. It’s not a linear thing and it doesn’t happen overnight. Some signs can be as glaring as the summer sun, the solutions as unmistakable as the problems the signs are pointing to. But that’s probably true only ten percent of the time. Most are hard to decipher.

If it happens to us, how can we learn to read the signs loud and clear and know what those signs are pointing us to do?

Well like most people in this planet, I am also struggling to read the signs. Sometimes I get it, sometimes I don’t.

When I pray, I always say, “Lord, can you please send me signs where I’m supposed to go?” I joke around saying that God probably doesn’t hear my prayers because 90 percent of the time I usually don’t get a clue as to what to do.

But that’s not the whole truth. I need to admit that maybe its because I am also blinded by my own ego, that even if He probably sends out all kinds of signs, I am too caught up in my own wants and desires that I miss the signs.

Maybe being able to read signs has something to do with openness. Being able to let go of expectations can be the hardest part — we often expect signs to point to what we actually want to happen rather than what should happen.

Maybe, we also tend to think too much. Because we are too anxious and impatient when it comes to solving our problems, we tend to rush the process of discovery. We become too alert, reading too much into everything that happens to us. Besides, I think the universe operates in the simplest ways. I think if the universe is trying to send us signs; it will communicate with our spirit in the simplest and most obvious ways. You’ll just feel it in your gut. Ahh, there’s the sign.

And furthermore, since we live in modern times, skepticism gets the best of us. It can’t be that obvious! But how many stories have we heard where hundreds of people found what makes them happy through following seemingly coincidental leads or events in their lives? Don’t you think that the universe has enough intelligence to be able to have its ways of communicating to you? Its not mystical, pure luck or coincidence and it can happen to anyone.

I believe reading signs is a skill, it is not something that a few have while most don’t. And like any skill in this world, it takes a little training to make it part of our problem-solving kit. It does however take certain things into account – openness, patience, and believing that the universe will conspire to help you (paraphrasing Coelho in the alchemist).