Rage against what?

Netnet Camomot

THERE are times when my sis jolts me out of ennui. For example. Someone has lost weight, and she says, Maayo unta pati iyang ego gigamay pud.

Hahaha!

No, not igo. Igo is Cebuano for hit, enough. She said ego which Urban Dictionary describes as, “The part of you that defines itself as a personality, separates itself from the outside world, and considers itself (read: you) a separate entity from the rest of nature and the cosmos. Perhaps necessary for survival in some evolutionary bygone, in modern times it leads only to (albeit often disguised) misanthropic beliefs and delusion.”

Yup, I know that you know what ego is, but I love quoting Urban Dictionary whenever I can’t find my Merriam-Webster and Garfield Dictionary.

But I don’t need a dictionary to find the meaning behind most memes such as this: “In the end, only three things matter: how much you loved, how gently you lived, and how gracefully you let go of things not meant for you.”

Wise words from Buddha. Well, the meme accredited them to Buddha, and it’s now my spring-cleaning mantra: to gracefully let go of things not meant for me.

On Monday night after working on some requirements for a government agency, a cabinet’s contents became the focus of that spring cleaning. Whoa. Lots of garbage in there. Why did I even keep them? Since recycling helps improve the environment, I saved the blank parts of formerly important documents, for future use as scratch paper.

No, you don’t scratch your a** with that paper.

Scratch paper is for… Well, you know what it’s for.

I’m the type who uses paper to its utmost limits. Much like the way my maternal grandma would wound scratch paper around a pencil stub until the latter’s lead finally quits and refuses to be an instrument for writing.

My maternal grandparents succeeded through hard work, perseverance, and valuing the possessions they had without allowing themselves to be consumed by material things. If they were alive today and saw us buying things, Lola especially would slap our hands and order us to go home and appreciate what we already have.

They had small closets in their room for the few clothes they had. Clothes which they would have repaired unless they were comfortable wearing them as is. Their daughters gave them cloths which remained unsewn and stored in those closets. They also gave Lola slippers which she never used, preferring to wear the ones that were also begging to be repaired. They didn’t buy unnecessary things. Instead, they saved and invested their money. And they didn’t travel. They stayed home and worked.

They had a simple life that we may find impossible in this complicated world we now live in, as complicated as having three phones, with at least two of them able to do everything, if only it can also cook my most favorite kare-kare. It was not so long ago when we waited for a Jurassic phone’s rotary dial to finish turning before turning it again for the next digit in a four-digit landline number, unless the party line was still stuck with his kilometric phone call.

Nowadays, there’s Facebook and its Messenger which is morphing into a text-and-call necessity, including that for holiday and birthday greetings. Try counting the number of Christmas greetings you received through text—yup, texting is slowly morphing into an antique feature. Even Cagayan de Oro-based friends now call me through Messenger, and when I miss their calls, I have to reply with, Sorry, I wasn’t online.

I’m not online 24/7. Only 23/7. Hehe. So, if the Messenger call was made in that one offline hour, please accept my most sincere apologies.

Still, thanks to Messenger, you can now work while video-chatting with family and friends who are abroad. As you compute the total taxes due for the first month of the year, they’re cooking breakfast, with the egg yellowing and whitening to sunny-side-up perfection. And that inspires your tummy to growl. Hungry? But it’s almost 2 am!

You’re here, they’re there, and the time-zone difference is literal—day and night.

Once upon a time, the political parties in Cagayan de Oro were also as opposite as day and night. But most of them are now joining PDP-Laban. Yay! Happy days will be here again in the 2019 election! I’m definitely looking forward to Mayor Oscar Moreno’s version of “What a Wonderful World.”

Election 2019 will have the usual winners and losers, and we can only hope the losers will gracefully let go of things not meant for them.

But here’s one question: Laban against what?

If the newly or soon-to-be inducted PDP-Laban members want to be more 21st than 20th century, they may consider changing their political-party name. Hint: There’s this band called Rage Against the Machine.