Deardevils

I. So today my girlfriend and I went on a date and we both almost died. Almost. We weren’t REALLY going to, but it was a possibility under the circumstances. I mean, “NOW WE HAVE TO MOVE REALLY FAST OR SOMEONE IS GOING TO HIT US!” and “DUCK!” aren’t things you typically have to tell someone during a nice date.

II. I told off an MMDA guy on a sketchy road. He thought I wouldn’t get out of the car, but I did. My mom told me to never to do that again. I think she thought I didn’t know it was dangerous. Fuck, of course I knew it was fucking dangerous. I wouldn’t be able to do a lot of the things I do if I wasn’t so big, because I move rather slowly. (The alternative to being big and strong, by the way, is to be small and fast, when it comes to escaping physical danger.)

III. Someone said that Duterte said that he said that the following conversation took place before the number 911 became Davao’s emergency number:

D: Henceforth, I want 911 to be the emergency number. 

Phone networks: But that’ll be expensive.

D: How expensive would it be for you if I blew up your cell towers?

Of course, he wasn’t really going to blow them up. Duterte’s not into terrorism. It’s an expression of how fucking INSANE it is to say that it’s an unnecessary expense to want to save people’s lives. This is the fucking result  when emergency cases aren’t routed to the best available medical facilities. All fucking right?

IV. I stopped listening to anything that anyone from Ateneo had to say after Bianca Reyes died and NO ONE, but NO ONE, from there had anything useful to say about it. Her [redacted] is headed down the same road. Does anyone care? Of course fucking not. Filipinos are only interested in mourning loudly for their dead, not in preventing people from dying.

V. Since I think American / Filipino marketing is stupid bullshit, this puts me decidedly at odds with some of my professors.

A few terms ago, I got into a pretty bad confrontation with a professor during a presentation. To the point where I began slouching against the wall in disdain and she had to tell me, “Stand up straight.” I thought I was doing a good job of keeping my cool, but later one of my friends in the class told me that it was a patently hostile exchange, and my rage was obvious to everyone in the room. I told myself I’d never let it happen again… which is why I didn’t go to class yesterday. Nothing like that has happened again yet, but I felt like it was a possibility, so I pre-empted it.

Marketing and Multiculturalism

I.

It’s a predominantly American thing to want to manipulate reality instead of adapting to it (for examples: turning up the heat indoors instead of putting on more clothes, killing inconvenient wild animals instead of learning to avoid them, massacring natives instead of negotiating fair terms of land ownership). And since Filipino culture is mostly derivative of American culture, we buy into that shit too, wholesale.

Australians don’t massacre the frankly terrifying creatures in their land, but fatalities from animal attacks there are fairly rare – certainly much more rare than American fatalities from their fucking insane citizens who are constantly shooting each other en masse.

 

Bedouin tribes in the Saharan desert survive the oven temperatures sans airconditioning because of the design of their clothing. Black and white people can mix without making a huge deal of it in British society. The tendency to be uncomfortable with the unfamiliar / different, and the unwillingness to adapt and coexist without conflict, is a very American thing. I’m of course not saying they are the only culture like that (Bonjour, France!) but American culture is the most infectious of all.

II.

This tendency is the whole basis of marketing as we know it. They openly admit it in one of the definitions: To manipulate demand. Manipulate. Not to understand demand and therefore meet it in ways most advantageous to both supplier and consumer. Not to know the truth, but to force what you want to be true.

You don’t need a fucking iPhone to be happy, but they’ve made you believe it. I walked down the seaside boulevard once without a bra and no one grabbed my fucking tits (I think they will do that in Bombay or Calcutta, though). I look tired without makeup? I am, your girlfriend kept me up all night.

Heh.

III.

They talked about the best thesis. “They were so passionate! The panel asked them why they chose a bear for packaging and they had the research on hand to prove that bear shapes hypnotize people into buying cookies…” You think you can run a business on passion and trivia? Show up to  the SEC with a briefcase full of passion, fill out your tax returns with the trivia you memorized? Your product will sell, or it won’t. That’s it.

IV.

The problem now isn’t not enough goods manufactured, but not enough goods sold. Do you realize what a GREAT problem that is to have? That we humans have made production so efficient that supply far outweighs demand? The role of marketing is supposed to be the efficient distribution of goods – to make sure everyone can have what they need and nothing’s wasted – but now we use it to sell people stupid shit. We have people spending thousands on concert tickets, clothes, movies and dinners out,  when their houses are so dirty and poorly maintained, they eat fucking garbage all the time, they’re at work all day, then stuck in traffic, they never see their children anymore. Because they’re so convinced they NEED those things that they don’t, at the expense of things that they do.

Don’t get me wrong, I think a lot luxuries are nice to have. But it is absolutely fucking insane to neglect one’s basic needs to attain the nice non essentials.  And that’s exactly what marketing now seeks to make people do. So fuck them. I’m in this field and I know its purpose. I am different. I will do things differently.