Snacking

8:23AM

I am so struck by how different our lives are, between a first-world developed country like the United States and ours, a third-world backwater republic called the Philippines.

I regularly monitor the tech beat, you know, just to keep up with what’s new in the world, and I am often amazed by the kind of world-crushing problems Americans regularly complain about. Like what internet-connected automated locks they should pick for their front door, or what dishwasher with the best all-around features they should buy, while we here worry about simple things like how to put the next meal on the table.

So I am very, very amused to happen upon this sad sack story about a First World Problem on an American website called Apartment Therapy. The post is entitled “Getting a Roomba For The Holidays? Learn From This Family’s Poopocalypse.”

In short, this family’s Roomba was set to automatically clean the house at 1:30AM every night. Little did they know that sometime during one night, their dog had pooped on the rug in their living room. As a result, their Roomba had run over the fresh poop and then went on its merry way cleaning the whole house in the night while they family was asleep. And spreading the shit all over.

To quote Jessie, the hapless home owner:

It will be on your floorboards. It will be on your furniture legs. It will be on your carpets. It will be on your rugs. It will be on your kids’ toy boxes. If it’s near the floor, it will have poop on it. Those awesome wheels, which have a checkered surface for better traction, left 25-foot poop trails all over the house. Our lovable Roomba, who gets a careful cleaning every night, looked like it had been mudding. Yes, mudding – like what you do with a Jeep on a pipeline road. But in poop.

Then, when your four-year-old gets up at 3am to crawl into your bed, you’ll wonder why he smells like dog poop. And you’ll walk into the living room. And you’ll wonder why the floor feels slightly gritty. And you’ll see a brown-encrusted, vaguely Roomba-shaped thing sitting in the middle of the floor with a glowing green light, like everything’s okay. Like it’s proud of itself. You were still half-asleep until this point, but now you wake up pretty damn quickly.

And then the horror. Oh the horror.

So, first you clean the child. You scrub the poop off his feet and put him back in bed. But you don’t bother cleaning your own feet, because you know what’s coming. It’s inevitable, and it’s coming at you like a freight train. Some folks would shrug their shoulders and get back in bed to deal with it in the morning. But you’re not one of those people – you can’t go to sleep with that war zone of poop in the living room.

So you clean the Roomba. You toss it in the bathtub to let it soak. You pull it apart, piece-by-piece, wondering at what point you became an adult and assumed responsibility for 3:30am-Roomba-disassembly-poop-cleanups. By this point, the poop isn’t just on your hands – it’s smeared up to your elbows. You already heard the Roomba make that “whirlllllllllllllllll-boop-hisssssssss” noise that sounds like electronics dying, and you realize you forgot to pull the battery before getting it wet. More on that later.

Oh, and you’re not just using profanity – you’re inventing new types of profanity. You’re saying things that would make Satan shudder in revulsion. You hope your kid stayed in bed, because if he hears you talking like this, there’s no way he’s not ending up in prison.

Then you get out the carpet shampooer. When you push it up to the rug – the rug that started it all – the shampooer just laughs at you. Because that rug is going in the trash, folks. But you shampoo it anyway, because your wife loved that damn rug, and you know she’ll ask if you tried to clean it first.

Then you get out the paper towel rolls, idly wondering if you should invest in paper towel stock, and you blow through three or four rolls wiping up poop. Then you get the spray bottle with bleach water and hose down the floor boards to let them soak, because the poop has already dried. Then out comes the steam mop, and you take care of those 25-ft poop trails.

And then, because it’s 6am, you go to bed. Let’s finish this tomorrow, right?

The next day, you finish taking the Roomba apart, scraping out all the tiny flecks of poop, and after watching a few Youtube instructional videos, you remove the motherboard to wash it with a toothbrush. Then you bake it in the oven to dry. You put it all back together, and of course it doesn’t work. Because you heard the “whirlllllllllllllll-boop-hissssssss” noise when it died its poopy death in the bathtub. But you hoped that maybe the Roomba gods would have mercy on you.

Wow. Wow. But serves you right, you coddled, spoiled first-worlders with your fancy Roombas!

More about this hilarity from Jessie’s Facebook Page.

8:28AM

I was rewatching Adele: Live in New York City this morning, and I noticed a curious thing: whenever the footage switched to a combined shot showing Adele in the foreground and a large video monitor showing the live concert in the background, I found myself unconsciously watching the video monitor instead of the more accessible, vibrant foreground of the actual concert.

Eh? What the hell?

I remember catching myself doing the same thing in actual live concerts, and have to consciously remind myself to watch the actual damn show happening right in front of me instead of watching it on a monitor. I didn’t pay an inordinate amount to go to a live show and just watch television in a concert hall, dammit.

I think this is a consequence of our incessant media watching that it’s become an ingrained and unconscious habit to turn to a video monitor and watch when one presents itself. Even when it’s doing a redundant function such as providing better visuals of a live concert to the cheap seats far in the back.

It’s not as if I can help it. It’s an automatic response, a Pavlovian reaction. I don’t even think about it, I just do it. It’s a function of the current technological stage we’re living in that we unconsciously watch a video monitor whenever there’s one around, regardless of the situation or environment at that time. It’s so deep-seated as to be a fundamental instinct.

We have to remind ourselves that there’s a time and a place for everything, and when the actual reason for the video coverage is happening right there, in flesh and blood, breathing and thinking and reacting, singing and dancing and acting, we need to watch that actual thing instead of watching reproduced pixels and phosphors on a bright screen. When the actual thing is long gone, or the actual thing is not happening in front of us and we don’t have easy access to it, then that’s the time we consider watching the footage on video.

So there.

Wala lang. Just ranting.

10:22AM

Ever since I had my stroke in late 2009, memories of certain random things have been hazy at best, non-existent at worst. So my memories of the Marcos era and the little parts I played in it are unreliable, but some stick out clear as a bell.

My clearest memory is from September 1972, when I was 10 years old. Martial Law was just declared that Thursday. We were living in a house in BF Homes Novaliches, and as were decades from the social connectivity we have now and we mostly kept to ourselves (we also didn’t listen to the radio or watch TV much), we weren’t quite privy to the news until the following Monday. I remember that very clearly.

My dad was a military officer on leave then when Martial Law was declared, and as such, was absent from work. We only found out about the declaration four days later, and he was worried he’d be considered a deserter and be court-martialed and locked up. Thank God nothing came of it.

I also remember the whispered rumors and undercurrents of worry at the time, when journalists, critics, dissidents and enemies of the Marcos regime were being taken in the night, locked up, tortured and killed. But being as young as I was, it was like a distant worry and I didn’t really pay it much attention and went on with my life.

As I grew up I became more aware of the trouble, and I as entered college, I joined the protest movements and became a minor member of the UP Student Council. I became close friends with some of the notable protestors and activists of the time, like Lean Alejandro and Malou Mangahas. I joined demonstrations and marches and all that. I remember a lot of us were rounded up, and some just disappeared, never to be seen again. Those were scary times.

Admittedly, I was partly there because of the need to belong to something, but mostly because I also believed in the cause. How could you not? When I got into the job market after college and the mother of major demonstrations occurred in 1986, I was on EDSA with the masses, and we finally overthrew the dictator and his corrupt regime.

Now, 30 years later, after languishing in a refrigerator for years, that bastard’s long dead corpse was secretly buried in the Libingan ng Mga Bayani, facilitated by our idiotic new president and allowed by our esteemed but unfeeling Supreme Court. It is an honor he certainly does not deserve, and people are up in arms. Some people at least.

In this country, people’s memories are short, and they have allowed the dictator’s family to continue to hold top positions in goverment, much less prosecute and convict them for their family’s many heinous crimes against us.

Many don’t care about what went down in the LNMB last Friday. Protests are happening all over, yes, but I suspect that won’t really last long, and pretty soon we’ll all carry on as if nothing had happened. Again.

I sincerely worry about the Philippines.

8:31PM

America had to chose between a hard-working woman and a buffoon. They chose the buffoon today.

The most powerful man and leader of the free world is a sexist, racist, know-nothing, raging idiot who says and does whatever is in his head. Donald J. Trump is POTUS for the next four years.

And Rodrigo Duterte is POTRP.

I’d be laughing if this wasn’t dead serious.

What the hell are we going to do now?

3:39PM

This goes to show how messed up online shopping can still be in this day and age.

Last Monday, Oct.31, I ordered a hot air popcorm maker from Lazada. They promptly responded with a text that said my order has been received, and to expect delivery anytime between Wednesday, Nov. 2 and Saturday, Nov. 5. Ok, that’s well and good, and well within expected parameters.

So I patiently waited and went about my daily business.

Yesterday morning, Friday, Nov. 4, it was delivered, after a text from the delivery man saying he was on his way to the house. And so it went.

But yesterday evening, I got an email from Lazada informing me that my order has been processed and was on its merry way to be delivered tomorrow (which is today, Saturday) and to please expect the delivery guy at any time then.

Ok, so I put it down to a problem where Lazada‘s email is just delayed, and they mistakenly sent it to me yesterday instead of the day before, Thursday, when I was expecting their customary “Thank You” email.

This morning I got a text telling me my order has been dispatched and would be delivered sometime today. Hmm.

After lunch, I get another text telling me that my package was definitely on its way, and that I could track it on the internet with the provided tracking number. Thank you for purchasing from Lazada again.

This was all for a package I already received the day before.

Look, I don’t really mind the crossed signals as long as I get my package on time. But can’t they get their act together?

Come on, Lazada, it’s such a simple thing.