FN Blog - Seven heads are better than one!

About five or six years ago, I ended a serious relationship and, as is expected of any neophyte 20-something, spent a few weeks just hitting the bottle. (Pero ika nga ni Amy Winehouse sa kantang “Rehab”: Look, hindi ako alcoholic…BROKEN-HEARTED lang ako!)

Anyway, so one night, I was beyond sloshed. Going home, my vodka-aided sense of better judgment suggested, “Why don’t you just take public? It’s not even one o’clock…sayang cab fare!” So I hauled my plucky ass onto a bus heading south.

The bus zoomed down SLEX, and a few minutes later, came to a halt at my exit, Alabang. I got down, watched the bus zoom off, looked around me…
…and realized that I WAS IN SUCAT.

It was one whole exit before Alabang, I’d have to just wait for another bus then, to finally touch down.

To those unfamiliar with SLEX, the term Sucat intersection is a misnomer of Kirstie Alley proportion. It’s a vortex of big roads and inner streets that all converge into one splat of asphalt where it seemed to make the most sense to put the toll gate. It’s anarchy perfected. You’ve got both motorists and pedestrians not really quite knowing where to look, when to go, when to stop… And since everybody’s careful when negotiating Sucat, you don’t have swervers or jaywalkers, which makes the thoroughfare serendipitously self-regulated.

Anyway, waiting for the next bus, my legs were starting to give way…I was in a skirt and knee-high stiletto boots, and all I wanted to do was hit the bed. It was getting late and the volume of traffic had greatly thinned out…SLEX was practically empty save for a random car driving up the toll gate. I decided to crouch on my heels from a serious case of ngalay. With my arms crossed and elbows on my knees, I rest my head on one arm.

Now, the thing with being sloshed in the middle of an asphalt vortex, is that one tends not to realize that she’s doing this in the middle of the highway. A few minutes later, from what apparently was a cat nap, I heard a gaggle of young takatak boys hovering above me… “Magpapakamatay yata!” one whispered to another. They discussed further who among them should talk me out of ending my life. So I stood up and, well, I guess I mumbled something about “Hindi ako magpapakamatay, naghihintay lang ako ng bus…” They weren’t convinced. I paid them no mind and remained planted in my spot…so did they. Finally a bus came and I sort of inched toward it. The look on their faces was priceless: “Is she gonna get on the bus or in front of it????”

Finally got to my stop. But my misadventures with alcohol and public transpo do not end here. From the bus stop, I had to take one jeep ride to reach my village (where I eventually cabbed it from the village gate to my house). So I pounded the pavement to the jeep stop. And just as I alighted a Sarao in my skirt and knee-high stiletto boots, I heard the teenage barker shout “MMMMMMMMMMystikaaaaaaa!”

Natawa ako…hindi ko na nakuhang maasar.

And that’s basically why I heart Manila. I could go on and on about it being home to me, what wonderful quaint little tourist delights abound, the wonderful treasures you’ll find under heaps of metropolitan trash, how it’s just charmingly third-world kitsch…because Manila is all that. And yes, it’s also polluted, chaotic, dangerous, corrupted, self-destructing, undisciplined, and at times just downright exasperating. But it’s got a sense of humor that makes you just slap your forehead and chuckle in the midst of all its chaos…hindi mo na makukuhang maasar.