If Friday the 6th wasn’t the hottest day of the year in Manila, I must’ve died and gone to hell. At two in the afternoon I was standing on Epifanio de los Santos Avenue, waiting for a taxi. I waited and waited and waited. Everyone in the city must’ve had the same idea: hundreds of cabs zipped past me, all of them occupied. After maybe half an hour I began to hallucinate. I imagined that the people sitting inside those nice air-conditioned cabs were pointing at me and laughing. “Loser!” they seemed to shout as I waved limply at their taxis. I was raw hamburger in a nuclear furnace. My skin hurt. My brain hurt. My hair hurt. Anyone who still thinks global warming is left-wing tree-hugger propaganda should try stepping outdoors in the afternoon.
As I stood on the sidewalk absorbing massive doses of ultraviolet radiation, a white van appeared and parked next to me. There was a name written in huge red letters across its front and sides, but I was too weak to read it. “Is this a mirage, or some kind of cosmic messenger?” I thought. Just then I heard a senatorial candidate’s campaign jingle blaring from the van. It was set to the tune of Mission Impossible, and it went like this: “Ping ping ping ping ping ping/ Ping ping ping ping ping ping. . .” I knew then that I was in hell.
And then, just before dawn on Saturday, the electricity went off. The entire island of Luzon was hit by a power outage. I was jolted out of sleep to find myself drowning in a pool of my own sweat. The combined requirements of hundreds of thousands of airconditioners and electric fans struggling to combat the heat must’ve wiped out the power supply. Or maybe it was those blasted jellyfish again. In December 1999 thousands of jellyfish clogged the vents of a power plant in Central Luzon, causing a massive blackout. The jellyfish may have been swimming upwards to escape the rising temperatures in the depths of the ocean. The very next day there was a strong earthquake. More likely the power plants had passed out from sheer fatigue.
Throughout that powerless Saturday I felt like a contestant in the lowest-rating episode of Survivor . Come to think of it, living in Manila is like being on Survivor, except that instead of getting a million dollars for outlasting everyone, you have to start the game all over again. If there were a Filipino castaway on the current series, she or he would win without even trying. By now she would’ve opened a sari-sari store and carinderia in the Australian outback.
When I hear the contestants whining about how hungry they are and how weak they feel, I want to slap them. What a bunch of wimps. They have rice, but they still haven’t figured out how to cook it properly, and one of them is supposed to be a chef.
They toss about a kilo of rice into the pot and add a cup of water, then they wonder why the stuff is inedible. Is it possible that they’ve never eaten in a Chinese restaurant, and never seen congee, i.e. lugaw? They catch fish, but they only eat the midsections and throw the rest of the fish away. They have cherry tomatoes, but they don’t know what to do with them. A Filipino contestant would have had the sense to make sinigang (fish stew). In the last episode they hadn’t eaten anything in 24 hours, and then they had a food auction and gorged themselves. Naturally they got sick.
Being pampered citizens of the first world, they have no idea what deprivation is and what it does to the human body.
I don’t know why I even bother to watch Survivor II when it’s so infuriating. Either I’m a complete loser, or the heat is making me stupid.