At the moment

Netnet Camomot .

THE solution to Cagayan de Oro’s flood challenges can be found through Google. Even our Facebook news feed has posts and videos of what other countries are doing to make their cities and towns flood-free. Perhaps it’s time for CDO to discover if it can afford and maintain any of these infrastructures and measures because, well, if not now, when?

Here’s what the city can definitely not afford—to sit down and simply say, Ay, baha na pud. And the Cagayanon, who’s now stuck in that flood, replies, Ay, lagi, baha na pud. That’s Communication 101 in the 21st century.

When “Waterworld” was shown way back in 1995, Sendong was the farthest thought from a Cagayanon’s mind. Limketkai Mall was still a toddler then at three years old. Can you even recall what you did that year? It was only in December 2011, 16 years later, when Sendong hit the city that the Cagayanon finally saw what a “Waterworld” could mean.

Climate change is here to stay until… Wait, let’s sing this na lang: “Do you know where you’re going to?/Do you like the things that life is showing you?/Where are you going to, do you know?”

Still, birds chirp when it’s sunny, frogs croak when it’s raining, and the tuko hops from one house or tree to the next. CDO does have places where the Cagayanon can make muni-muni while bingeing on Netflix, which I’ve stopped watching so I could read books. Oh. Correction. More like this one book I’ve been reading for two months now and I’m still on page 58.  494 pages more to go. Yay!

People will eventually learn to live with climate change since their motto is, If you can’t beat them, join them. There are people who do tend to surrender to the powers that be, such as the Philippine Daily Inquirer (PDI) finally acceding to Senate President Tito Sotto’s request for them to remove the Pepsi Paloma articles from their website. But PDI does have a reply to your paki-explain: “The articles on the Pepsi Paloma case are currently under review and are unavailable at the moment.”

So, it’s an ATM—at the moment. It could change the next moment, kind of like the tuko hopping from one venue to the next.

For social media, however, #ATM can be dangerous to one’s health. It broadcasts your whereabouts. Adopt the habit of posting after the party, event or occasion when you’re no longer there.

We, the young once, survived for several decades without social media. Now, we’re communicating through Messenger, Facetime and e-mails, and only use the phone part—calls and texts—of our phones when we’re not online.

We grew up without smartphones but with non-smart phones that made us appreciate patience as a virtue as we waited for the rotary dial to go back to its home position. Sometimes we did force that dial to return to home position when patience was not our preferred virtue.

And then, there was the party line, which may now sound like a thin line of white powder on a table at a party. Or the millennial is probably thinking that’s the same as a conference call.

The stereo used to be this huge cabinet in the living room, next to the equally huge television set and piano. For now, only the piano’s size has remained the same since Spotify and Netflix can be accessed even through the smartphone that can do almost everything. These updates in technology will hopefully help the hoarder if ever she decides to switch to minimalism.

Facebook, another technological whatever, has not exactly simplified our life. Try calculating the number of hours you waste there. You could have finished writing, er, reading a book with that same length of time.

Homescapes, Gardenscapes and Wordscapes are not time-wasters, though, since they’re, hmmm, educational. Any experience is always educational—live and learn.

Senate President Sotto must have had his share of live-and-learn moments, too, especially with the Paloma case. If only there’s a time machine that can bring him back to the ’80s. But there’s none, so, he requests PDI to help him change that part of his history.

CDO must be feeling the same—to return to the olden times even way before the ’80s when it could have planned its zoning well.