Eco-friendly

Netnet Camomot .

FORMER Environment Secretary Gina Lopez has often said that Pinas should be in ecotourism and not mining.

As for me, here’s my environment-friendly contribution: I write my first draft on scratch paper.

Cagayan de Oro will also become environment-friendly through its plastic ban starting Jan. 1, 2019. Yes, that includes plastic people. Haha!

Imagine a world where every person is true, real and genuine. But with Election 2019 coming soon to a theater near you, plastikan will be the norm.

Promises are made to be broken and that can happen with political campaign spiels with their lofty wishes to give you the moon and stars, only for you to learn later that the candidate was referring to “First Man,” the movie about Neil Armstrong.

Which now brings us to R.E.M.’s “Man On the Moon”: “If you believed they put a man on the moon, man on the moon/If you believe there’s nothing up his sleeve, then nothing is cool.”

Since Pinas is a tropical country, it can never be cool? Hmmm. But expect the first letters of typhoon names to use up the whole alphabet before the year ends, which may prompt the resident of a flood-prone area to exclaim, Que horror!

There’s this video of two Pinoy men on a raft, they’re paddling along flooded Panay Avenue in Quezon City to an armored car that was stuck right there in the middle of the street. Only for them to find out there was no one inside the car. Deep sigh of relief there.

It’s supposed to be man’s nature to take care of his surroundings. You see some dust on the bedside table and your immediate reaction is to wipe the dust off that table. You see dust balls under the bed and you shoo them away. You see lizard eggs inside a cabinet and there you are, mulling on miniature fried eggs. Wait, that last one is not what Lopez meant.

Still, exotic food from balut to Soup Number Five will always remain a part of the country’s tourist attractions.

Non-exotic food is the general preference, though, of the madlang pehpohl. Such as this: Sugar Bowl Bakery Brownie Bites. No preservatives. Zero trans fat. Yay.

Chocolates are mood-boosters and the dieter can use that as an excuse for the brownie bites, hot dark choco sachets, and the cocoa-dusted truffles in the bedroom fridge.

And then, there’s the meat industry promoting red meat as an excellent source of protein, bahala na si Batman with his arthritis. Eggs are also being promoted as good food. Chicken eggs, of course, and not the teeny weeny ones that the resident lizard left in the cabinet.

And then, there’s the wise eater who decides to learn about healthy diets and ends up cultivating his own organic farm.

The smoking ban in CDO, which began on Oct. 1, would hopefully also make the Cagayanon think of his health.

The city does have Designated Smoking Areas where a smoker can huff and puff and blow his lungs away before withdrawal symptoms can make their presence felt.

But with the rising prices, is the smoker willing to give up his hard habit to break and use his cigarette budget to buy rice?

I tend to ask people about where they bought their sign pens, and that’s where my cigarette budget will go, that is, if smoking is my hard habit to break.

Anyway, the sign-pen owner would often reply with, Gisuroy man ni. Finally met a gasuroy young lady who entered a resto in a mall in downtown CDO. Had she been selling something else, say, cigarettes, whose source and quality could be summed up as smuggled, that would have required reporting her to the resto and mall owners with the hope of them, instead of me, advising her to please get outta there pronto. But she was selling sign pens. Sigh. And my delight must have shocked her. My friends bought sign pens, too, and so did most of the resto’s patrons.

A few days later, we were having dinner at a resto in another mall downtown when a young lady appeared and—surprise! surprise!—she was selling sign pens, too. But I had to say no this time since I already bought some via the first purchase.

So, how many young ladies are selling these sign pens at three pieces for P100? Should I now expect to meet at least one each time I go out of the house? I’ll be collecting sign pens then, like as if this house doesn’t have enough pens which I buy in bulk.

That’s my hard habit to break—pen and paper. Plus books, magazines and newspapers. The free ball pens inserted in seminar and convention kits are most appreciated, too. Anything connected with reading and writing, which I guess are better than mining in Pinas.