culture shocks

i. grade school

riding a zopote zapote bus home with vince [after the s15 and s20+ inuman at gdonya's], we had the misfortune to bear witness to the final episode of mulawin. good news: it's finally over; bad news: they're planning another telenovela with richard "binagsak ko ang benilde" gutierrez as lead.

let's take a moment to study that etymology ['telenovela', not the moniker i gave richard gutierrez - the source of those words is painfully obvious]. tele- is from 'televised', further derived from 'television', and -novela is filipino for 'novel', which is taken to mean anything dramatic, and involving estranged lovers, bastard children, a contrabida who returns after plastic surgery, or any combination of the three. this compound word has then spawned other forms, namely the chinovela ['chinese novela'] and koreanovela ['korean novela']. it is amusing to note that in both children, the prefix tele- has disappeared, and only context will reveal that the entertainment forms being discussed are not in written form.

now, after that lengthy segue, we arrive at the actual point of this topic. i would like to present the following segment gleaned from the koreanovela following mulawin, the title of which i am thankfully oblivious to:

girl: may cute na rabbit na nakipag-unahan sa isang napakaibilis na pagong. sino'ng nanalo?
boy: 'yung rabbit.
girl: ding! mali, 'yung pagong 'yung nanalo. napakabilis nga n'ya diba?
boy: ...
girl: o, eto naman. may cute na rabbit na nakipag-unahan sa isang pagong na nakasalamin. sino'ng nanalo?
boy: ...
girl: sige na, sagutin mo!
boy: 'yung rabbit! 'yung rabbit!
girl: ding! mali, 'yung pagong 'yung nanalo. nung tinanggal nung pagong 'yung salamin n'ya, s'ya din 'yung napakabilis na pagong kanina! nakakatawa, diba?
boy: alam mo, para kang alien. bumalik ka na nga sa planeta mo.
girl: kung ako alien, ikaw naman, gold na paniki! ikaw na nga kinukwentuhan, ikaw pa'ng magagalit!

to be fair, i did find the alien bit funny, but "gold na paniki" was still severely wtf. it might be a cultural thing; i'll ask my mother later.

ii. high school

jonat invited me to zobel's end-of-schoolyear concert. 20 south-based and|or zobel bands, including mayonnaise, but by the time i got there, all but two had finished their sets. good bands, but the crowd was a bit too wild for my taste, which is strange considering that they were mostly comprised of zobel high school undergrads. there was even a grade schooler sporting earrings and and blond mohawk. i suppose they are entitled to a little slack, since their schoolyear's officially over, but i really couldn't draw the line where the musical appreciation ended and the posing began. it being zobel after all, perhaps there wasn't any in the first place.

i ran into mikey's cousin pao, but the real highlight of the evening was the surprise guest appearance of victor basa, doing his own version of the bugabuga dance [read more about it here]. small world.

after that, i crashed at jonat's for some tequila and a movie. we finished half the bottle and half the movie [full metal jacket], before hitting the hay.

i really am getting too old for this.

iii. college

paco: O seh. Have place to go, people to do. Ingats.

ladies and gentlemen, another sign of the impending apocalypse.

sige ingat.ü 
posted by stani at 11:06 AM