Hippie Colors

I dropped by the 7-11 at the condo place across campus this morning and as I was paying for the doughnut I bought, I noticed that condoms were being sold behind the counter.

I talked to a contemporary a little later and said, iba na talaga ang panahon ngayon, ang dali ng bumili ng condom, and she agreed. (And let me say before I proceed that contrary to image, I am not a prude. I have lots of liberal/ liberated friends, diba? Hahaha!). Dati, sa pharma mo lang nabibili ang condom (hindi ka pa nga sigurado kung meron doon), nahihiya ka pa. Ngayon, meron na sa convenience store sa isang building kung saan nakatira ang maraming studyante.

A digression: at least yung sa 7-11, nasa likod ng counter. There are some pharma outlets where condoms are right alongside other grocery items so buying condoms can be a casual affair. Hindi mo na hihingin sa cashier.

Another digression: I was talking to a member of a charismatic Catholic group and they said they talked to a pharma outlet near school to place the condoms behind the counter para mahiya yung hihingi.

The incident at 7-11 reminded me of a conversation I had with some colleagues who are 40-50 years old and one of their "concerns" was the increasing incidence of youth caught in the act. My unarticulated reaction was that those "acts" were always happening but (some) people just weren’t conscious about it. I remember that there was a time when we’d see cars whose suspensions were being tested in parking lots and because it happened quite consistently, we called it the three o’clock habit. Then someone came up with a brilliant solution to put a stop to this practice by claiming environmental protection.

As the population grows, more youth are caught in the act. As the youth live away from home, closer to their schools and away from adult supervision, there is more room (literally) for sex. And they get even braver as DKT successfully retails condoms through convenience stores.

And then there is the environment. Media in general and youth media in particular portrays sex as everywhere and at the same time taken-for-granted. Not an episode of popular shows like Gray’s Anatomy goes by without suggesting sex. Then there are the publications like FHM and Cosmopolitan and Men’s Health which fuel sexual drives further.

Things are different now and it’s a non-starter when a discussion on these matters begins from the point of view of morals as if things that were in the past (as if they were ever like that to begin with) remain the standard for understanding the present. And at this point, I think more understanding and not judgment is needed.

Condoms are being sold in 7-11 located at a condo near a school. Why am I not surprised? I’m more surprised that people are surprised.

There was a discussion in my Ph.D. class a few weeks ago about cross-cultural adjustment and a guest panelist said that foreign students adjusting to the Philippines have to make a double-adjustment to Filipino culture and to U.P culture. Then she went on to speak about how difficult it was for anyone to adjust to U.P. My teacher, who always associated me with Ateneo, turned to me and said, "Was that your experience?" to which I said instinctively, "No, U.P. family kami".

Rarely do I say something that really gets me thinking but this is one such instance. Yes, we are a U.P. family. My father and mother both graduated from U.P. My father even got his M.A. there and taught there for several years before I was born and a few years before he died. He even was a candidate for Dean of the U.P. School of Education and it broke his heart when he lost at the Board level (my father being probably the most professionally apolitical person in the world). Now that I think about it, that probably contributed to his ill-health subsequently.

Because he was teaching at U.P., we lived on campus, in a house with a large lot that was adjacent to Commonwealth Avenue. I went to nursery in a Protestant school near the U.P. chapel. My lola and I would walk to and from that school which was only a few blocks away from our house. We moved out of U.P. when I was 6.

My three eldest brothers and sisters all did their undergrad education at U.P.- Marine biology, Economics and BAA. Only us two younger children chose Ateneo for High School. By the time we graduated from elementary, our family could afford to send us two younger boys to Ateneo. I dont know why my brother chose Ateneo but I chose Ateneo because I thought I’d be going to school in barong or long sleeves and tie. Boy was I disappointed. My classmates even bothered to fake collared shirts. After high school, it was a choice again between Ateneo and U.P. and I chose Ateneo because I felt (physically) safer there.

Now I’m studying at U.P. for my Ph.D. and I can’t thank my teachers and my fellow classmates enough for the experience. I was telling my wife a couple of weeks ago that right now U.P. is my academic community. Maybe it is because I am a Ph.D. student that I feel that I am taking part in intellectual discourse at U.P. more than I am at Ateneo. But even more than that I feel that my tastes have become more aligned with the academic tastes at U.P (although I get a sense that these tastes always were aligned). I have ideas I want to develop and am hard-pressed to think of anyone at Ateneo who might be interested but can easily think of people at U.P. who would help me develop what I’m thinking.

Being at U.P. at this time of my life is like coming home, remembering that before Bangkok, U.P. was home (literally and figuratively). At the very least, being at U.P. is very liberating.

There was a front page article in The Inquirer and a cover story in Time Magazine which talked about Mother Teresa’s doubts about the existence of God. I felt that this was natural given the fact that she had invested her whole life and sacrificed a lot in the belief that there was a God and that this God was calling on her to go against the natural grain of modern day existence. I suppose the more she invested and the more she gave up, the more she wondered whether her investments and sacrifice were worth it and the more she wondered whether or not the beliefs in whose name she made her investments and sacrifices had any basis to begin with.

I suppose this is true for all of us and all the investments we make which may account for the life cycle crises we face whether this be the early life crisis (anxiety about where we will make investments in terms of a career), a mid-life crisis (should I go further down this road?) or an end-life crisis (was it all worth it? Have I gone as far as I could?). Of course, since a lot of us make conventional investments, the crises we face are much less muted compared to the crisis faced by Mother Teresa who made unconventional investments. At least we can take comfort in the fact that other people have made similar investments (so we rarely ask if that investment was worth it or had any basis but our curse is that we end up asking if we have gone far enough, especially relative to others who made similar investments).

I remember when I was in college my friends told me once in a while that I think too much, I over-intellectualize, etc. etc. My reaction to that is often that people don’t think enough or that there is no such thing as thinking "too much" (In other words, I dismiss such comments casually).

I think I still do think "too much" except I don’t bother anyone anymore with my thoughts except through essays like these and all the other essays I’ve posted on cyberspace. I know I still do because who else would think about writing an essay about thinking too much?

Round about noon today, I realized that people who think too much are people who are trying to figure out the world because they are seeking to obtain a practical mastery of the world through conceptual mastery. The fact that they do not have practical mastery of the world means that they are not of that world.

I guess it’s like language. When you have practical mastery of a language, you know what to say without having to think about it. When you are an outsider to a language, you are not as sure about what it is you are going to say or how to say it.

I think people who think too much think about one of two things. They agonize over ends which they do not fully accept.  And/or they agonize because they do not know the means to achieve the ends they want to achieve. In Tagalog, hindi sila marunong dumiskarte. At hindi sila marunong dumiskarte dahil hindi sila babad sa mundong kinabibilangan nila kaya’t pinag-iisipan pa nila kung ano ang tamang diskarte.

Some guys for example, are natural players. They are always on the prowl and in the market without being conscious of what it is they are doing. They manage to attract women sometimes without even intending to. Other guys are hopeless Victorian romantics: thinking too much and short on action and results.

I realize now that thinking too much is (in most cases) not a psychological phenomenon (much less a spiritual phenomenon) as much as it is a social phenomenon. A person who thinks too much is most likely not a nutcase but a social misfit (in a non-judgmental sense of the word misfit).

Therefore, I think people who think too much are best served not by psychologists, psychiatrists or priests but by sociologists (the rare few who make sense of the world in a non-theoretical way), management consultants, image-makers and stylists depending on the field that they are thinking about.