Puzzles and Haywire: More Fun in the Philippines

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?