That
very fact that she took time interrupting me in the middle of my erudite speech
just to dig into her clutch bag, search for her smart phone and take a picture
of it is somewhat alarming. “I’ll upload it for my friends to see. We don’t
have those in the US,” Ylda blurted.
Curious
about the peculiarity of her gestures, I threw a momentary look at the thing she’s photographing.
There they were, like snakes convoluting in an intricate dance are cables of
all sorts perched high above us. As if a pun, she asked me how we could
identify which cable is which in that seemingly mass of intertwined pasta while
flaunting a half grin.
Mulling over her absorption, it took me time to digest her thoughts. It is not that they do not have cables in the US. Working for a telecommunications company in the US as a technical representative over the phone, it is normal to receive calls from customers asking their cables to be buried. Yes, you heard it right, under the ground. They are just practically installed not to look like a ball of hair from you shower drain filter. It is not just so they are not a sore in the eye but also to secure them from suffering damages brought by weathering.
If
you look around the Philippine metropolis, you will notice that cables are
somewhat a vital part of the action-packed everyday bustles. The city highly
depends on these long and lean things to transmit electricity, data and a lot
more. Life, which is crammed by man’s race to make it more complex, would have
to stop like a film that was paused. We are dependent for the technology we
breathe everyday also relies on their existence. Without these cables, how
could you possibly upload your photos in your social networking sites when your
i-Pad needs charging?
While
it’s not what they are or what they do that really snatched my attention but
how they are set. It was akin to a ball of yarn recoiled by your purring cat –
an embodiment of twists and turns of a puzzle which solving seem dubious.
I
could now very much say that Filipinos are clever. Our electricians being able
to pinpoint which cable is working for which is a concrete affirmation of
these. On a different light, this slyness also works for the disconcerting
craftiness of some of us. Blame it to your neighbor who passionately installed
that “jumper” unknowingly setting the slum into an inferno quashing all your
valuables into ash. I remember my partner relaying a story of her Aunt who was
disbelieved receiving a month’s five-digit electric bill. How could you
possibly incur such bills when you weren’t even at your house?
It’s
a play of “pitik-bulag.” These could have been the cause of outages and companies’
who supply and maintain then seem not to notice. The lattice of cables, scribbling
high may just be ignored until something comes up that’s the only time that
action is active. Working or not, they stay as permanent hanging fixtures, as
if they were ornaments we should appreciate.
These
tangled cables somehow serves as a metaphor of the Philippines. It denotes the
country as a concoction of different sub-cultures, ideals and philosophies that
either clash or struggle to work as a functional unit. Like the intertwined
wirings, some of which could be utterly called accessory appendages for they
serve no productive niche but are rather just adding to the mass (mess).
Although
puny it may seem, the severity of these macro-spaghetti hanging above our very
heads should be addressed. An eye-sore as they are, the dangerous upshots of
probable short-circuits is disturbing. Having these in mind, we still stare at
them, blankly. After all, it’s one of the things why it’s more fun in the
Philippines. Or is it funny?
