FRIENDS IN THE APPLIANCES, KITCHENS, PARKS, SCHOOLS, OFFICE AND ROOFTOPS
By: Iris P. Concepcion
I am a sticking glue when it comes to attaching myself to people. I keep the names of my kindergarten chums who were one with me when our nappies were still peeking out from our Santa Claus costumes. I often find myself hanging around in their houses, sometimes sharing with them toothbrushes and lollipops. Those who are the closest, I converse using the old post offices in properly transmitted letters with stamps, often embossed with Mark Twain stamps.
I had been fairly lucky to have shared plenty of happy comings in and out of people in my universe whose moles in the faces and necks I could never forget. I am not a high brow chooser. I do not select people based on their purse content. The funny people always get inside my circle, wittingly or unwittingly. The most engaging and soulful ones are, weirdly, those who have not finished college but are roughly emblazoned more with their craft superiority (drawings, letters, music). If they had finished college, I peruse their credentials and astonishingly learn that they all started from scratch i.e., tending the dishes, plumbing the bathroom, analyzing conduction burners, cutting hair, peddling hotdogs, studying urban maps, studying microbes through microscope to give us a safer source of water, advancing the faces of airconditioners ten years ahead. They make the world comfortable and functional. I had thought of it as extremely tedious, boring and colorless in the past until I saw their "rejected" canvasses of Mardi Gras-like lobsters on a secluded tourism information office here in Thailand. They looked notches higher than the ones I normally see on prints or museums. Or that bored, pampered kid diving off in beautiful ravines as his own share of showing the beauty of the unwritten wildlife.
I consider them the freest of all. This is the reason why those who had undermined President Noynoy Aquino's capability to change our way of thinking may come in for a surprise. He is not a graduate of the Massachusettes Institute of Technology and is therefore ignorant on information technology trending but he surely knows a superior Powerpoint presentation and exceptional semi-conductors. Such is the professional trajectory of some of my friends.
I even have an inkling, these friends had provided me a total assessment of who I am based on product branding. The fixtures in my Mindanao house are still standing, without failing, until now. Electrolux, Sharp, Radiowealth, La Germania, General Electric. I am sturdy as a person because my appliances are sturdy being well, appliances.
I, too, am prone to middling gossip but never on a protracted basis that could already hurt my skull. I love exchanges of the visuals and words, gut humor and music. I seldom engage in envy bull sessions to show who has the best dress ruffles among the skirts inside a videoke lounge. I was told that I could command help from friends from the past even without me bribing them to get me out of the fix. The lent hands, they instinctively connect.
I am truly a lover of people. I told a friend from law school before that I like studying their faces and mannerisms to populate my fictional writings. I would love them to have my food, my chips, my cheese, my salad, my viand and my chair. Sometimes, I had been berated for doing it too much more than my own inner circle. It is not done to pay myself into a world of domination; it is what the genes had been, preferably from my simian ascendants.
When these friends already have babies, I carry them like my own.
I am writing about this component of my human interaction since I had been renewed in spirit by the resurgence of people from the past who had resurfaced with stories and visuals to partake. Those who are connecting with me literary-wise, I had found in Facebook. The planet is not a lonely one provided you have a connection to plug your computers to. It has brought a new facet to the name friendship. It is deeper as small talks may be cast away in terms of sharing activities not otherwise discussed personally. They make for incognito affinity but the humanity is never lost.
An anthropologist should look into the psyche of getting immersed in Facebook and how it had altered the dimensions of building friendships. Here, I have found "friends" who have sights to the inner beauties of the world. Commonality and/or divergence of interests are even widely shared, if not respected.
That is my view of having a friend, whether hanging from a roof or staying on the ground.
Here is a blurb on the social networking site about my classmate, and a friend, the director Jim Libiran. Read his credentials to know fully why he has unbelievable depth:
"This native of Tondo, is a multi-awarded writer, poet, essayist, documentary filmmaker, activist and television producer and journalist. He has, tucked in his belt, a total of ten years work experience in television news – from segment producer, he rose from the ranks to become a reporter and then as manager of ABS-CBN’s news and public affairs division. He transferred to ABC 5 to become the Head of Production for News and Public Affairs. Before television he spent ten years working in various print media companies, from tabloids to broadsheet dailies to magazines. While working as a newspaper journalist, he was also a labor activist, and a grassroots organizer/educator. In his spare time, he works on short films, joins literary contests (poetry and essay), and produced documentaries for television. As a broadcast journalist, he has done documentaries and reportage on the eve of the wars in Iraq; the Taliban defeat and the Northern Alliance take over in Afghanistan;the rebellions in Mindanao; EDSA DOS uprising; as well as socio-cultural investigations on things uniquely Filipino."
Friends are extensions of my own humanity. The baby above is a friend even if we do not share the same roots. He shrieks from unbelievability and I come whacking those who had made him shriek.