Vignettes

Yesterday I was with my friends at the Rob, killing time before the Nat Sci exam. We were on our way back to U.P. and decided to take the lift to save time. When the lift went down to the second floor, a group of floozies came in. Mga tuta at yung amo nilang banyaga. The lift suddenly began to beep in overload agony. The foreign man refused to budge, even though he was obviously obese and the lift was obviously straining under the combined weight of their party. The fat man began to ask the fag among the floozies ( Sorry, couldn't resist. Nothing personal.) questions in a language I could not understand. It may have been French, it may have been Russian. Who knows. He obviously did not want to get separated from the floozies, although they seemed quite willing to leave him. The stupid man stood there like a goose until finally one of the floozies got off and told the others to do the same. When the lift closed, the lady standing beside me said, "Ano ba naman yun, ang laki-laki na nga eh ayaw pang umalis. Mamaya sasampalin yun ng kasama niya." I said in reply," Oo nga po eh, tumutunog na nga yung elevator ayaw pang bumaba. " When we got off, my friends and I could not help laughing, although N--- told me there was a floozy still left on the elevator. Oh well, that floozy can tattle all she wants, we'll probably never meet again, as C--- said.
*****
I enjoyed reading To Kill a Mockingbird, and I got curious about Mr. Blackstone, the geezer who wrote Commentaries. However, I was disillusioned as to this man's judiciousness when I saw one of his quotes on ThinkExist : "The husband and wife are one, and that one is the husband." The quote had a rating of three stars(!) which means that there are many masochists in this world still. It reminds me of the injustice of Flagrante Delicto, of the rule of thumb, of the many crimes committed against womanhood. It is even more unfortunate that even though we have been enlightened, we still stoop under the yoke of "tradition". If that is so I spit upon tradition, on the bondage it has imposed on everyone, its delusions, its fallacies. The mind must not be a sponge; it must be a sieve, to sift out what is irrelevant and to keep what is important. We Filipinas have experienced enough suffering through our docility, our compliance. It is time we defy this constriction imposed by dead nameless misogynists; we need to rise from our long sleep. We must rebel against submission merely because the one in authority has his superiority declared not in deeds, but in the mere fact of his being a man. There is really nothing new in this. In the same way that apartheid and segregation emphasized the schism of races within a race, so is discrimination against women. Women are part of the human race; without them it would have perished long ago. We are not inferiors but equals. Until prisons are demolished, until bridges are built to effect reparation, there will be no real hope for the race of men; for as long as these obstacles continue to exist in our minds, we will remain as we have always been-- always doubtful, always suspicious, always severed even though we should be one.