Sins of rumor

Netnet Camomot

 “YOUR love is like the sun/That lights up my whole world/I feel the warmth inside/Your love is like the river/That flows down through my veins/I feel the chill inside.”

If that’s now your LSS––last song syndrome––it means you’ve watched “The Love Affair” and is now convinced that Dawn Zulueta is a good actress. She was the one you would notice in her confrontation scene with Bea Alonzo, somehow proving that in Catholic Pinas, the wife always wins. There’s no divorce here, married people are bound to stay together till someone snaps and realizes that s/he would rather be with “you’re the one that I can’t wait to see/With you here by my side I’m in ecstasy.”

Which brings me to this conversation I overheard in a resto: What’s the difference between fish and fish finger?

Hmmm. Ang fish finger naay finger? Hehe. But I guess it could never be “buti pa ang fish pini finger, yung ibadiyan, hindi.”

Before the MTRCB––Movie and Television Review and Classification Board––censors this column, we better move on to whales that get caught in fishnets and would ask people to free them. Once they’re free, they would then wave their fins and dive in and out of the ocean to express their heartfelt thanks.

Some people, on the other hand, won’t even recognize your A for A-fort in helping them. They use, misuse and abuse your kindness and generosity, and then forget about you once they have found other people to use, misuse and abuse. Napakasakit, Kuya Eddie.

A friend, whom I guess is now the central bank of Cagayan de Oro, has had her share of people who take advantage of her generous heart. But she has learned to accept that as part of a central bank’s weather-weather lang existence.

Those of non-central-bank means will have to work harder, or buy lotto tickets, or collect coffee sachets which they can throw into drop boxes while hoping to win the grand prize of P3 million, or shop at the weekend sale of the city’s only uptown mall where the ultimate raffle prize is a car. That last one was already drawn at 10pm on Sunday, an event that we opted to wait for after having finished filling up the raffle tickets at 9pm. We went back to the resto where we had an early dinner and ordered breakfast that could feed the whole barangay, which did not exactly stop us from having breakfast the morning after. Oh well.

The only raffle draws I had been to before were those sponsored by our Jaycee chapter and Rotary club. But last weekend, there I was at the Great Taste White regional raffle draw at Limketkai Mall on Saturday, and SM CDO’s three-day sale raffle draw for the Suzuki Grand Vitara on Sunday night. Two in one weekend.O my gas. Raffle pa more?

When the winner of the car was about to be announced, I said, Say the city first. Well, it was Iligan City. Not Cagayan de Oro where we happen to live, so we didn’t even care to listen to the name of the winner. Haha.

Sometimes we wish for a miracle, like a winning raffle ticket, to be our savior. There was a mountain of entries for the Great Taste White regional draw, and a big tambiolo for the SM raffle stubs. The chances of winning were way much slimmer than the opportunity to be a billionaire in this corner of the world.

Yes, billionaire. A Pinoy could morph from a street parliamentarian to a billionaire politician, without proof of having at least one legitimate humongous business to justify that moolah, if he has the nerve to forget about the ideals, principles and values he fought for way back when. His alleged source of income: the national treasury. Or the city treasury. The kind of money that’s easy to spend because it’s not hard-earned and there’s no legacy or inheritance to take care of. All it takes is the power of the pen. Signature, anyone?For government projects, government budgets, government appointments. With the signature allegedly fed with millions of pesos for it to run smoothly above the line.

And he’s now campaigning to be president of Pinas. Since all the grafting and corrupting and plundering cases against him have the word “alleged” attached to them, he claims the allegations are political in nature and are of course not true, you know, the sins of rumor which may not be funny even for people with some sense of humor.

Meanwhile, there’s the other presidentiable trying to morph into Sen. Miriam Santiago as he delivers pickup lines such as this: “I wish the LMP were an airport and I’m an airplane so that wherever I go, I will land on the LMP.”

Land on the LMP? My thoughts are now being censored by the MTRCB. By the way, LMP is the League of Municipalities of the Philippines. If you’re a guy and you’re landing on them… O my gas.

Anyway, he was invited to speak at an LMP meeting in Davao where he tried some pickup lines, a talent that Santiago’s fans could now believe is possessed by no one else but her. He should try some other tricks. How about juggling?

Or he can bring along his wife to his campaign sorties and sing, “I am all alone without you/My days are dark without a glimpse of you/But now that you came into my life/I feel complete/The flowers bloom, my morning shines/And I can see.”