All these young, cappuccino-sipping, text-dependent, Internet addicts go ballistic when they can’t get a signal on their cellphone and bitch when they can’t freeload off a WiFi signal. How dare they. How dare they!?
These young ones, who have not had the benefit of growing up enduring Jojo Alejar on That’s Entertainment, have no right to bitch when they don’t know how it’s like to wait in line for hours on end and feed three beinte singkos into a red rotary phone when school was called off on account of Signal Number Three!? Do these young upstarts even know what it was like to dictate a drippy romantic line to an usyoserang message operator who would transcribe, critique and correct the grammar of your pager message? Tell those young upstarts that whatever technological glitches they have to contend with are nothing compared to growing up with technology — nay, for what passed as technology — back in the early ‘80s. Now, that was a challenge.
While the parents of my three female readers were still violating church laws, my barkada and I began our first steps towards hair loss by writing our high school research papers. And how did we do it? Did we have www.wikipedia.org? Did we have www.google.com? No, we did it the long and hard way (not like that, you D.O.M. you). We had to skim through dust-encrusted pages of the school encyclopedias where the spinster librarian with a perennial case of PMS would whack our pwets with heavy wooden rulers if we tried to rip out the pages from the encyclopedia and take them home. Imagine that: we had to plagiarize our research papers by hand-copying the encyclopedia onto index cards and then typewriting them pa into our research papers. It was either that or we had to spend our hard-earned allowance to buy our papers at Recto! That much effort poured into cheating should only be undertaken by governments. But nowadays you can plagiarize by merely copying passages from a website and pasting it onto your Microsoft Word document! Totally unfair. And where was the Internet when we needed it? Still being field-tested in underground bunkers by paranoid US Department of Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (ARPA) strategists who wanted to make sure that we would be able to make tsismis online even after a nuclear Armageddon. Hay naku! And there we were, going Armaggedon over our research papers!
Speaking of schoolwork, have these young punks ever known the pleasure of damaging their dainty fingers in an elementary typing class using a manual typewriter? Have they even ever touched a manual typewriter!? Scratch that: have they ever seen a manual typewriter, aside from displays at the National Museum? Did they ever have to take a typing class where you had to count the number of letters in a word or sentence you were typing and then center it from the middle of the page!? Now all they have to do is click on the centering icon on Microsoft Word and bam! Three years of elementary typing in high school rendered as archaic as press freedom. Sigh. My only consolation was that my barkada and I were at the height of cool in school because we came to class with our state-of-the-art electric typewriters. Well, at least we were the height of cool in the nerd class. Pero cool pa rin.
And think how easy it is for the Meteor Garden generation to come by entertainment. These young whippersnappers can listen to their favorite songs by merely twiddling their thumbs on a portable music device that they string around their neck. And while listening to the music, they can easily store the portable device in a bodily orifice for safekeeping. Did they ever have to contend with large portable stereos (‘80s Pinoy translation: malaking cassette player) that helped build upper body strength and back problems at the same time? The only advantage that our “old school” portable stereos had over these measly little music players is that our cassette players could turn into Decepticons.
So you can’t seem to figure out how to burn (‘80s translation: record) your favorite playlist from your Apple iTunes onto a recordable CD (‘80s translation: record from tape to tape) so you can impress that nubile young thing with the plunging neckline and wrapped up in a barely existent skirt (‘80s Pinoy translation: mukhang bomba star)? Imagine how difficult it was for us to impress the chicks back in the ‘80s when we had to cobble together a mix tape of the latest pop hits! (And if any of you pubescent heathens claim not to now what a “mix tape” is, I will have you shackled in a room where you will be forced to listen to Starship’s We Built This City repeatedly until all your skin sags like five-year-old underwear.) Now, back when the Bagets were big and J.C. Bonin still had a showbiz career, you wanted to dazzle those young chickadees who spoke a mutated form of kolehiyala Taglish and who wore their bangs up to their ankles. To get her bangs all in a ruffle, you had to meticulously stitch together an analogue copy of the latest hit songs that were not yet available in record stores and could only be heard on the radio. So you had to wait impatiently as the DJ rattled on and on with his faux American accent by way of watching too many episodes of Falcon Crest, and then when you finally heard the first few chords of that hit song, you quickly punched the “record” button on your cassette player and cursed the DJ to shut the hell up because his voice was overlapping with your hit song. And you had to repeat this process 12 or so times until you could fill the mix tape. But to top it all off, by the time you gave her your mix tape, some rich coño kid had already given her a copy of the original cassette tape imported from the US. (“Your tape is so baduy naman. Did you tape it from the radio? How kadiri to death.”) Damn you, Inaki. And damn you, Steve Jobs!! Couldn’t you have started fiddling with circuit boards a few years earlier?
These upstarts can buy just one single DVD which squooshes together the best action movies starring Jean Claude Van Damme, Steven Seagal, Jet Li, Eddie Garcia, Ian Veneracion, Bong Revilla and Edu Manzano, and play it on a paper-thin DVD player. But what did we have in our days? We had Betamax. And no, Betamax is not the name of an obscure Japanese robot. It was our state-of-the-art home video system where we would stuff an oversized cassette tape into a video player to enjoy the latest film transfers (2007 translation: ahem, preview copy) from the US. Fast-forward to 2007: aside from my collection of Royal Tru-Orange commercials and three year’s worth of That’s Entertainment Thursday editions, the only thing my Betamax tapes are good for nowadays are as topics of conversation, paper weights or murder weapons.
And have videogames really improved over the years? Do these young Turks know the pleasures of fiddling with those impeccably named “joysticks” on an Atari Video Computer system? Aside from developing hand-eye coordination, these joysticks were essential in developing lower arm strength and wrist dexterity, something that is very important for many teenaged males who don’t have girlfriends. But nowadays, the only things that second-generation joysticks (2007 translation: control pads) are good for is developing carpal tunnel syndrome. And what’s with all the blood and gore and double-D cups in videogames nowadays? I am told by many N.G.S.B. (no girlfriend since birth) types that there is a set of keys you can plug into a “Tomb Raider” game and voila! Lara Croft’s displays how ample her weapons really are. And what was the sexiest female video game character we had while we were growing up? Ms. Pacman.
And these young whippersnappers have the gall to complain about a bad signal on their cable TV? Well, in the early ‘80s, do you think we even had freakin’ cable TV!!? Well, except for those notoriously clever individuals who didn’t mind spending a year’s worth of sweldo to install a radar dish in their backyards, their television sets would pick up snatches of US bases’ Far East Network (FEN) channel. (Now the only thing these dishes are used to pick up are solar rays for an al fresco barbeque grill, ha-ha-ha). But for the less technologically competent, our folks paid half a year’s sweldo to settle for the colorfully named Channel Five otherwise known as Sining Makulay. I barely remember any of the shows that came out on that channel. However, because our brains like to replay traumatic memories, I still have nightmares about some white guy who wore orange p*kp*k shorts with white trimmings and a body-hugging, nipple-protruding orange shirt to match teaching aerobics. I can only lobotomize him from my thoughts with banned medication and dirty chopsticks.
And look how much more lubricated the social network is for the kids nowadays. We didn’t have things like Friendster and Facebook so that we could “hook up” for eyeballs or ninja parties or other nocturnal activities my parish priest would frown upon. Those of us who went to all-boy schools back in the ‘80s could only interact with females during high school dances or soirees or while being identified in a police lineup. Nowadays, these young paramours send atrociously spelled text messages punctuated with winking smiley faces via their cell phones if they want to “hook up” with nubile young things. That is totally wrong! Except for the nubile young things part. We had none of that. If we wanted to express our adolescent libidos to nubile young things (who are now only nubile in their high school yearbooks) but did not yet have fully formed testicles, we would send cavity-inducing love notes through their nosy female posse (‘80s translation: mga tulay or bridge or mga walang hiyang bungangera). But if her posse was “boxing” us out because they preferred some stinking rich coño kid to make ligaw their friend (Damn you again, Inaki), we would try something more foolhardy like folding our love letters into the shape of a paper airplane and shooting them through the slats of her classroom’s windows and hoping to God that the letter did not end up on her teacher’s desk (“So, you really want to buy me a Royal Tru-Orange, Joey?”).
But perhaps the biggest difference when it comes to the technological divide is: How did we come by our porn? The only effort the young ’uns make to accumulate an illicit library is to visit their neighborhood dibidi stall and sift through piles and piles of bootleg DVDs for that perfect combination of 64-in-1 scandal videos which meet his discriminating tastes. And the more lasciviously computer-literate merely have to hack into websites of questionable repute. But in our day, how did we score our porn? We had to scour seedy magazine stalls in Greenhills, where they were willing to sell dog-eared magazines hidden underneath record album labels to pimpled-faced adolescents with fake driver’s licenses. Otherwise we had to take a two-hour trip to the boondocks of Dau to buy plastic-wrapped issues of favorite men’s magazines at PX stores with lax customer policies. Buying smut was more stealthy and adventurous then. It made the satisfaction of enjoying silicone enhancements all the more worthwhile, until our yayas discovered the secret stash stowed underneath our beds. Now, all these unsupervised kids have to do is click and download. I just hope that when you “mistakenly” download www.ilovefarm-animals.com, your computer catches a virus.
Yeah, yeah, okay. I’ll stop griping now. Sige, go ahead, you youngsters, and squander your chestnuts on whatever technological doohickeys that you can get your carpal tunnel syndrome-ravaged hands on. But be warned: given the rate of technological advancement and consequent obsolescence, the next gadget that you buy will be technologically fashionable for about, say, the next three days.
But if you continue to rant about a slow dial-up connection, a skipping DVD disc or a dropped signal, my fellow That’s Entertainment babies will shove you into a time-traveling DeLorean and send you back to the ‘80s. And remember: when you reemerge in the ‘80s, you should not be scared of the man with the sequined glove and the whiny voice, because that’s Michael Jackson. Or maybe that’s Kuya Germs. (On second thought, you should be scared. Whether it is Jacko or Kuya Germs.) But if you do come face to face with the King of Pop, do him homage by grabbing your crotch and screaming in falsetto or else he might moonwalk all over your ass. Or even worse, Jacko will ask Kuya Germs and Jojo Alejar and the Tigers to moonwalk all over your ass.
Shameless plug: My first compilation of columns entitled Lies My Yaya Should Have Told Me: RJ Ledesma’s Imaginary Guide to Whine and Women, hits National Bookstores and Power Books branches in Metro Manila this week. It’s a great gift and also makes for really expensive toilet paper. Buy several copies of the book as a Christmas gift and help subsidize my credit card bill for the holidays! And there will also be a formal book launch in January, so my three female readers can finally meet my yaya in person. Details to follow!
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For comments, suggestions or if you want to moonwalk all over my ass, please text PM POGI <text message> to 2948 for Globe, Smart or Sun subscribers. Or e-mail ledesma.rj@gmail.