Alam na!

Netnet Camomot

THERE’S this guy who loves to say, Alam na! Always suspecting the other of doing bad things. Or at least things that are not favorable to him. He doesn’t say it to your face but through texts. Doesn’t even dare say it through phone calls. There must be something more meaningful in texts so that they have become the most reliable means of communication for him.

In person, though, he can be more cruel as he threatens to punch your face but ends up punching the wall instead each time he doesn’t get what he wants. If only what he wants is the same as that of the Davao City mayor who seems to have only the best goals for his city.

But not all men are as avid in adhering to selflessness. The guy who demands for what he wants right here, right now, and texts “Alam na!” if there’s a slight delay–like one second–is a guy who can be as impatient as the Davao City mayor but without the goal of driving away criminals from his city.

Instead, the punching guy invites people to join his sessions–no, not political sessions such as that of the Cagayan de Oro city council where majority of the city councilors tends to reject anything that the city mayor wants for CDO. The punching guy prefers shabu and drinking sessions where he can have delusions as the best Pinoy this country could ever have.

Unlucky is the person whose life is always threatened by “Alam na!” and facials, er, punches by someone whose priority in life revolves around illegal and even legal substances. A legal substance zooms to an unlucky result when it’s alcohol.

I once asked a psychiatrist why it’s difficult for alcoholics to quit drinking. And he said, because it’s available here, there, and everywhere. No need to hide behind locked doors for a bottle or a shot or a case. As in, a case of bottles and shots. The neighborhood’s sari-sari store has many kinds of alcohol for you, and they’re not exactly limited to rubbing alcohol. And there’s the convenience store which my youngest bro now calls as the mall since that’s where Cagayanons tend to hang out, you know, to see and be seen.

Christmas is the season when there’s more drinking, and of course the craving for pulutan which is a drink’s favorite partner. If only the number of calories of each drink could discourage people from indulging. But no drinker would even dare count calories while gulping down one shot after another. Once the alcohol has hit his brain, good luck na lang if he could still count from one to ten anyway.

A drunk person morphs back to his pre-school days as he tries to fathom the world through his hazy and tunnel-vision view. Even the names of his fellow drinkers could be forgotten: Unsha gani imo ngalan, kinsha ka, nganong kaila man ka nako? If it’s 5 am, the drinking hasn’t stopped yet, you’re a few years shy of 50, and you’re a woman, there’s definitely something  wrong with that picture.

For me who doesn’t drink anymore, being awake at 5 am simply means I’m still busy working or writing. But I should be sleeping before that, at 4 am, to lessen the perception that I’m now a workaholic, for I don’t work hard at all. It’s more like hardly working.

There are people who are awake by 5 am so they can start walking and exercising at 5:30 am. And there are people who go home at 5 am after a night spent with alcohol. Life is kind of like that–it gives you choices and one of them could be the meaning of time to you, say, if 5 am is the beginning of another day, or the end of one.

For others, though, the day may start at 6 am so they can exercise at 8 am and reboot their meal plan after the previous day where the calorie intake increased by 50 percent, thanks to an unplanned afternoon snack and dinner. The snack was OK–a veggie salad with, hmmm, a dressing made by Julius Caesar. Hehe. The dinner was not–it was a Christmas party where the norm was to try each food group on the buffet table, a food-tasting activity that added back the four pounds already lost in the last one and a half months. Gosh. Four pounds in one night? How is that possible? Could be water, eh?

Well, this is why it’s possible: a potluck dinner where everyone brings a specialty which could be the recipe he’s known for, the recipe he has experimented with but it’s still yummy anyway, or his favorite food that he ordered from his suki resto or caterer. In other words, everything on that buffet table is a must-try. Even latecomers who arrive after dinner also have specialties that inspire you to check out the buffet table again.

Christmas is the time to drink, eat and be merry for tomorrow you drink, eat and be merry again. Thus, you’re now convinced that the best way to lose weight is to have absolutely no social life at all. You should avoid office parties, family reunions, and class reunions, in order to prevent your present and former batches of fats from having their own reunion.

Christmas is never the time to go on a diet. You’ll be lucky if you can maintain the weight without gaining a single pound. Besides, going to and from your health club can be stressful with all the traffic from the bukid to downtown. But since you need a daily reminder to follow meal plans, you go to the health club and write this column while in the car. And there’s the new set of muscle pains for thighs that were awakened after more than two weeks of no exercise. If you continue to be absent from the gym, you’ll keep on returning to square one. Hay naku. Eat pa more.

Weight loss is about the food intake. If you exercise without dieting, you’re merely replacing what you have eaten. Now, if you’re eating more than the calories lost through exercise, then you’ll still gain weight. I guess anyone above 13 knows that but is always in denial of the facts of life.

But when you’re young, who cares about diet and exercise? I remember sitting on a curb outside a discotheque–heh heh–at the ungodly hour of 6 am. We were then working for a multinational firm whose shuttle bus would leave the city proper at 6:30 am. We were too drunk to notice that the sun had already risen and we should be preparing for work by then, when an officemate suddenly became sober and reminded all of us about work. We all rushed to our respective houses and I could not recall anymore how we managed to reach the office by 7:30 am when work would start.

Hangovers are a waste of money for the company whose payroll budget doesn’t distinguish between who’s performing well and those whose performance is merely…Oh, well. The CCTV doesn’t reveal much, eh? As long as the employee faces the computer monitor, it’s presumed he’s working. Although he could be playing Candy Crush. Or sleeping with drool rolling down his drunken face. The wise boss who can’t be fooled, will raise his eyebrows, though, and say, Alam na!

Like the meal plan that you have to follow daily, there should also be a plan on how to fool the boss and keep him from saying, Alam na! Otherwise, the CCTV may reveal everything, including your Candy Crush score.

As for the guy who loves to tell you, Alam na!, when in fact you’re behaving like a saint already, you should be the one telling him, Alam na!