Blurb

Netnet Camomot .

ON the eve of the Cagayan de Oro fiesta, I was reading Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s “The Thing Around Your Neck.” By page 74, I began to wonder when its characters would finally have some sort of a connection since I was reading different characters in each chapter.

Adichie is Nigerian, most of her book’s characters are Nigerian, those names could be difficult to read with my minute brain hardly able to pronounce them, and I had to Google “Benin mask,” “Nok terra-cota,” and “Ife bronze head” to know what they look like.

And then, a eureka moment: Are these short stories? So, I went back to the book’s blurb on the dust jacket where I discovered that, yes, they are short stories. Whew. I had already read the fourth story by then. Talk of delayed reactions.

And delayed reactions pa more. You’re eating rice after vowing not to eat rice. The next day, the weighing scale reveals you’ve gained two pounds. And there’s your delayed reaction: Should not have eaten rice. But “it’s too late, baby now, it’s too late.”

Prevention is the key to a diet’s success: Just don’t.

And prevention is perhaps also the key to any other success: Avoid anything and everything that may jeopardize your plans. But it’s through life’s painful lessons that you will hopefully learn your, well, lesson, so, you try and try until you succeed.

Life can sometimes look like a maze where you find yourself in a familiar situation or territory which you promised never to enter again once upon a time. But s**t happens, thus, the maze.

But life is indeed a maze, right? You’re absolutely sure only of what’s happening right now. A second later, however, things can change, giving you more experiences from which to learn from.

Loss, for one, can be a painful and profound experience you may have to recover from for many years, with the rest of the world not understanding why you’re still recovering from it.

Since each person is unique from the other, coping mechanisms are also unique in their own way. There’s the new mother, for example, who can work right after giving birth, and there’s the new mother dealing with postpartum depression. And there’s the gossiper comparing the two. Oh, well.

To each his own. There’s no perfect formula that works for everybody. But a person who believes he’s God’s gift to the world may tend to ram his ideas down anyone’s throat. Good thing if he warns them first that his ideas are merely figments of his wild imagination. What if he presents them as the truth and nothing but the truth, and there’s the gullible listener spreading that to others as the truth and nothing but the truth.

Whenever you’re reading anything, check its original source first since it could be fake news. There are Facebook users who share fake news without knowing they’re fake. Or Facebook users who add their own cruel comments to real news without knowing the background of that news. Hay naku. Pag-research pud ’pag may time.

I saw one insensitive post on Aug. 28—yes, on the day Cagayan de Oro was celebrating its fiesta. The FB user shared that day’s breaking news in the city, complete with her own cruel comments and obviously unverified details of what happened. My jaws dropped to the floor and stayed there for a long time while I waited for her to edit her comments. Because I gotta feeling she would later realize she had a maximum of two degrees of separation from those photos.

And, of course, she did remove her comments later, but her FB friends had already added their own cruel and uninformed comments to her post by then. What if she happened to be the mother of one the victims in those photos and videos, but was informed about it only later, how would she feel?

Social media has worsened the judgmental minds of judgmental people. They see a set of photos and videos, they read a few comments, and these are enough to make them react and post their own comments based on the chismis they’ve read or heard so far.

Commenting on chismis, and believing that chismis, is such a waste of time. The chismosa should have used that precious time to read a fiction book instead because at least that’s confirmed and presented as fiction, unlike chismis that’s presented as the truth.

Well, even a fiction book like “The Thing Around Your Neck” can teach us some lessons about chismis: “Many women would be jealous, maybe your friend Ijemamaka is jealous. Maybe she is not a true friend. There are things she should not tell you. There are things that are good if you don’t know.”