Mind over matter

Netnet Camomot .

PEOPLE usually don’t eat cats and dogs which they keep as pets. But they do eat pigs, cows, goats, chickens, fishes, crabs, shells, shrimps, even rabbits. Some people have become vegans out of respect for animals which are treated badly on their way to the slaughterhouse. And you already know what happens at the slaughterhouse through the many videos posted on social media.

A pig is one of the cutest species in the animal kingdom, yet, it’s a major source of meat recipes and products: lechon, humba, crispy pata, bacon, ham, chorizo, tocino, chicharon, dinuguan, pork sinigang, pork sisig, this list can go on and on. If you’re into the ketogenic diet, the more red meat you’ll ingest.

Turning vegan is good for the health and is the humane way to respect animal rights. Still, easy to say, hard to do. I’ve been collecting piggies since the ‘90s but that hasn’t stopped me from feasting on piggy recipes. Which is confusing even to me.

For now, I’ve switched to fish, veggies and fresh fruits. But with the Cagayan de Oro (CDO) fiesta now making its presence felt, well, good luck na lang. The fiesta’s main attraction is the lechon. Imagine steamed pompano as a buffet table’s centerpiece—boring, eh?

The Pinoy’s nightlife could be boring, too, by now with his limited list of hard habits to break. No drugs. No smoking. No loitering. And President Rody Duterte might have added one more when he said on Wednesday last week, “I hate gambling. I don’t want it. There will be no casinos outside what is existing. I’m not granting anything.”

But the Pinoy can’t be bored. “Where there’s a will, there’s a way,” as the saying goes, and it’s the perfect mantra for the bored Pinoy. Despite TokHang, he will still find a way to buy drugs. And even allow P6.8 billion-worth of shabu pass through Customs unnoticed. Hmmm. Still remember the P6.4-billion shabu that evolved into a Senate hearing last year? At least that was recovered. This time for the P6.8-billion or an estimated one ton of shabu, only traces were found.

If you’re curious on how drugelated cases are solved, “BuyBust” is about a—spoiler alert!—one-night buy-bust operation in a squatter area, somehow revealing the reality behind the headlines. Well, the Pinoy doesn’t have to be informed about that reality—he already knows. Still, the movie’s action scenes may help him realize what agents of the Philippine Drug Enforcement Agency have to go through in implementing the war on drugs.

“BuyBust” can keep the Pinoy awake the whole time as its story sounds familiar. Blinking is not allowed so he can absorb each micro-second of a scene.

“Mission: Impossible-Fallout,” on the other hand, has scenes that may make the Pinoy sleepy. Its main attraction, as usual, is the fact that Tom Cruise does his own stunts and he broke his right ankle for this particular installment of what has become a much profitable franchise. And it’s that ankle scene that you, as the spectator, will wait for, now that it’s on YouTube and is what everyone, including Cruise, has been talking about even before the movie was shown.

Yup, an action movie can be a spectator sport.

Some actors are known to gain or lose weight for a role but only a few would dare—spoiler alert!—jump from one building to another, jump from a plane, and jump from a chopper, all of which Cruise did for “Fallout,” as if there’s a bucket list with items he’s trying to tick off before reaching the senior-moment age of 60. He’s now 56. Four more years to go if indeed that list exists.

Actors who do their own stunts naturally have injuries after all the training required, plus the actual shoots for the action scenes, but I guess the multi-million-dollar talent fee is a great motivator and has the power to erase the pain.

Mark Twain once said: “Age is a matter of mind over matter, if you don’t mind, it doesn’t matter.”

Could that same line be adopted for floods? Say, Flood is a matter of mind over matter, if you don’t mind, it doesn’t matter. Hmmm.

The only positive side of a previous typhoon is it can be the gauge for the severity of future typhoons. Thus, there was the Marikina River last weekend being compared to its Ondoy level.

The Cagayanon also tends to compare recent floods to that of Sendong.

Climate change may or may not change the way we eat, but it has changed the way we treat color-coded weather alerts. Yellow, orange and red may look like three of CDO’s political colors, but when it’s the Philippine Atmospheric, Geophysical and Astronomical Service Administration releasing those colors, each Pinoy from Aparri to Jolo does stop, look and listen.