Admit it. We’re all a bit petrified of Jessica Zafra. And for those who are woefully unaware of her existence, please remember that you will be damned to watch an eternal loop of Kris Aquino’s entire run on Game Ka Na Ba until you pick your brains out of your nose. But if you plead for forgiveness now to the omnipotence that is Jessica, you will only be made to watch an eternal loop of Edu Manzano dancing the “papaya” on Game Ka Na Ba. Her omnipotence first materialized during the heathen Backstreet Boy ‘90s when she began spewing bile in her weekly column “Twisted” (which appeared in the Today newspaper, now the Manila Standard Today); she followed this up by terrorizing Manila with manananggals, indoctrinating those of lesser wills by co-hosting the television show Points Of View on Studio 23, managing the biggest El Bimbos, D’Eraserheads, for all of four months, outlining her blueprint for World Domination in her eight-issue-long magazine Flip, vacationing in hell and being unceremoniously deported back to earth for fear that she might shift the balance of power and, finally and most importantly, judging cat shows.
I daresay that there would be no abnormal brain growth sufficient enough to produce my very own column without previous exposure to her omnipotence’s radioactive bile back in the early ‘90s. And though I tread on blasphemy, I would like to think of myself as a spawn of “Twisted.” In fact, I find my whole body of work to be shamefully derivative of her body of “Twisted” work. Consider these parallels. She speaks of world domination, I speak of being dominated by my yaya. She doesn’t suffer fools gladly, and I am a gladly suffering fool. She talks about her three cats Saffy, Mat and Koosie, and I talk about my three amorphous female readers, whose names cannot be revealed publicly because of a court order. She has a strange compulsion to pull the hair on her scalp: I have a strange feeling that my body is eating away at the hair on my scalp. Will my sniveling attempts at flattery secure for me the position of Boss Chief of Yayas in her new world order? Or will I just be puréed into another flavor of cat food with orange pulp bits?
Back in the ‘90s, when I still had a niggling showbiz career by way of hawking carbonated oranges, I excitedly dragged my yaya to join me as a guest on the earliest iteration of Jessica’s Twisted morning radio show (when it was still on NU107). When I entered the studio and first beheld her gloriously cynical countenance, I had to tie my panties (that’s what my yaya calls underwear) into a knot to prevent myself from regressing into an effusive, salivating groupie who wanted to be ridiculed by her omnipotence in the most incendiary way possible if only to boast that “I didn’t just get put down, I got put down by Jessica Zafra!” This privilege would be right up there with being a blind item on The Buzz. Then I’d know that I’d made it in the annals of Pinoy pop culture. While I was on the show, I was mortified that if I missyllabicated, mispronounced a word, or made a grammatical faux pas, she would unsheathe a knife hidden in her glasses and turn my tongue into steak tartar. Which she would then use to feed Saffy, Mat and Koosie, of course.
So when Her Omnipotence asked, nay commanded, me to review her newest compilation of columns, Twisted 8, I took it to be a great honor to salivate all over her preview copy and write her praises worthy of a North Korean bureaucrat to Kim Jong-Il. And her omnipotence doesn’t disappoint. And, of course, she never disappoints (please don’t hurt me, Jessica. My fiancée will kill me. Again.).
Twisted 8 is like being privy to Jessica’s stream of consciousness, except that in her case the stream has been replaced by molten lava. She is in her best form as our resident rant-conteur, which she does this time around with a bit more aplomb, a bit more snark and a bit more hydrochloric acid. As we peruse the pages, we are reminded that we are not just her readers, we are her minions. Take heed of her panty-twisting revelations, and you may yet be spared from a future of being turned into kitty litter.
Things I have learned about World Domination from reading Twisted 8:
1. Jessica Zafra owns the world (as if you didn’t know already). And cats own Jessica Zafra. And just to make this point clearer than catnip, Jessica relates that when she was leaving for the US, her cats suffered separation anxiety and ended up peeing on her suitcase. (Now, you don’t want to know who pees on my suitcase when I leave the country.)
2. Jessica has simple dreams for world domination. These consist of winning Wimbledon, writing a novel, bagging a Pulitzer, seducing Colin Farrell and then dumping him right after, and finally and single-handedly ending all conflict in the world. I have had similar dreams. Except for winning Wimbledon.
3. Jessica actually likes fools. She likes to eviscerate them, pulp them and turn them into fodder for her writing. Be thankful if you grace her writing as you will be immortalized as a smudge of ink.
4. Jessica doesn’t think that all of us are lesser mortals. Even you deserve praise — as long as you are Andre Agassi, Maria Sharapova, James Blake Andy Roddick, Marat Safin, Rafael Nadal or Roger Federer (especially if you are Roger Federer), Colin Farrell and the late Italian painter Caravaggio. Or if you are a cat. (I’m sorry, Sting, she has spiritually divorced you. You can now enjoy your six-hour-long orgasms all by yourself.)
5. Jessica is the Alpha Geek. She is the geek that all aspire to become. She is articulate, well-read and sports the ultimate in atomic-proof horn-rimmed glasses. Me? I’m a pretend geek. All I have is an encyclopedic knowledge of all the superheroes in DC Comics and a vast library of ‘80s porn (which will soon be excommunicated by my fiancée). I can only ever aspire to be one-eighth the geek she is. But her omnipotence plans to remedy this by making sure that all her minions read one book a week by eliminating television from their daily schedule. But I’m not sure if I could live without Oprah. (Or, God help me, Kris Aquino.)
6. Jessica wants us to recycle. Our omnipotence has masterfully conceived of a way that combines our current obsession with celebrities with the popularity of liposuction into an entrepreneurial venture that even Joey Concepcion will fear. For the non-Buzz watching members of the reading public, celebrities now openly endorse and discuss liposuction as part of their beauty regimen. But why simply toss away their greasy blobs of fat as hospital waste — when these are greasy blobs of famous people? Why let all that celebrity waste go to waste when you can make a tidy profit from selling bottles of pickled celebrity fat and display it in your living rooms, next to your framed picture of “The Last Supper”? As you parade your guests around your vinyl-wrapped couches, you can brag, “Look, that’s the bilbil of (blank for reasons of libel) in Patikim ng Patatas Mo? And those were the thighs of (blank for reasons of childhood adulation) in Bagets 3: Sobrang Bigat Na. Sigh… those greasy blobs of fat really bring back memories.” Hey, you can even mix and match your favorite greasy blobs of fat, congeal them in one jar and create your own favorite imaginary love team.
7. Jessica plays with tongues. Our would-be world conqueror moonlights in the stimulating profession of writing English subtitles for Tagalog movies, a profession that all literature majors aspire to do aside from telemarketing (Hey, we’re channeling Jessica Zafra, okay? A sense of irony is a prerequisite). And the truly captivating nature of this raket includes the reshaping of idiomatic expressions into their English counterparts without losing the richness of their meaning. And aside from the word balato, the biggest challenge so far was the translation of the word (ahem, ahem) kepyas — a word that repeatedly appears in my collection of DVDs. How do we artfully capture the idiosyncrasy, the nuance and the sheer kalaswaan of that word into the English language? Only Our Omnipotence can weave her globe-trotting magic on such words and master even more challenging movie titles like Umaga na nang Hinugot (imaginary movie title, courtesy of Jessica, not me. Promise.)
8. Jessica does not fall in love, she becomes romantically afflicted (or inflicted, whatever is more painful). Romance is nothing more than a bunch of annoying chemicals demanding that she replicate. However, our beloved cat-lover is not without her feminine wiles. Although rarely used, Jessica does have “girl powers,” but they only seem to work outside of the Philippines. If her girl powers are used here, it might cause a small-scale nuclear explosion. She learned of this ability during a visit to the Sundance Festival in Utah. The trick, according to her omnipotence, is a) to speak very rapidly, preferably in an octave higher than normal (it is the same squeaky high-pitched voice used by Kris Aquino and Mahal) and b) to make your eyes as big and round as possible (it is the same wide-eyed look that we see in Angelina Jolie and the sexually androgynous Tweety). We hear that Utah is still recovering from the devastation.
9. Jessica is not a language expert. She concedes that honor to the cunning wordsmith and language provocateur that is Melanie “Do not judge my brother, he is not a book” Marquez. But hot on the hells, I mean, hot on the heels of our favorite Placenta endorser is first runner-up Cesar Montano who used this soon-to-be classic line referring to one of the movies he directed, “Essential yung eksena, so dapat tantamount yung level niya.” But now, we come to the practical application of this term. Try to pepper your daily conversation with variations on this Montano-ism. For example, “Is your T-shirt tantamount to your pants?” or “Is your soft drink tantamount to your fries?” or “Is Brazil tantamount to the Philippines?” (An in-joke for the tsismoso in you.)
10. Jessica has discovered the true purpose of tsinelas. Whether Havaianas or Sunbeach sandals, her inner Alpha Geek discovered that tsinelas are very good for two things: to wear in the shower and to kill cockroaches. And Jessica is the Buffy (or in Pinoyspeak the Enteng Kabisote) of Cockroach slayers. Tsinelas are the only reliable cockroach-termination weapon. In fact, she has officially decided that cockroach-slaying would be her greatest contribution to the benefit of humanity. (I am now officially worried about my reincarnation.)
11. Jessica wants to hurt you, ‘80s style. If you continue to annoy Jessica by breathing, she will personally mail to you a copy of D’Jeepney driver’s greatest hits — songs from Queen, Abba, the Scorpions and (God forbid) Nazareth. Jessica wants you to relive the moving torture she experienced in the ‘80s as being bombarded by Nazareth’s walang kamatayang Love Hurts (Editor: It’s actually a ‘70s remake of a 1960 Everly Brothers song). And just to make the torture more exquisite, she will throw in Starship’s We Built This City several hundred times. (Have mercy on the children.)
12. And finally, in Jessica’s new world order, you have nothing to be worried about. As long as you are a cat. Or Roger Federer.
In the end, we are glad that Jessica continues to write a column and a blog documenting her rantings. Jessica’s musings reveal to all of my three female readers what we already know about ourselves: in our mundane little lives, we can always be left a little bit mangled, a little bit misshapen, and a little bit twisted.
And we need Jessica to keep on writing. Not only because her writing has contributed to our collective cynicism. Not only because she wields irony like a weapon of mass destruction. And not only because her writing is a subliminal form of hypnosis preparing us for alien invasion. No, because if Jessica does not keep on writing what she writes, she may just go postal and kill us all. In other words, mag-aamok siya.
And what she cannot take down with her prose, she will take down with a well-hurled pair of tsinelas. And her three cats.
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Twisted 8 is now available at National Bookstore and soon at Powerbooks. Her previous Twisted collections and her other books are still in print and available wherever would-be world conquerors perpetuate mind control. She continues to espouse pan-galactic domination on her blog www.jessicarulestheuniverse.com and has a Friday column in The Philippine STAR called “Emotional Weather Report.”
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A running contest! The best answers to this question, “What is the most important lesson you learned from your yaya?” will get a free autographed copy of my book Lies My Yaya Should Have Told Me: RJ Ledesma’s Imaginary Guide to Whine and Women during the book launch on February 7 (Thursday) at 6:30 in National Book Store, Rockwell. All three of my female readers are invited, of course. Text your answers to PM POGI <text message> to 2948 for Globe, Smart and Sun subscribers or email ledesma.rj@gmail.com.
– See more at: http://www.philstar.com/fashion-and-beauty/38783/infinitely-twisted#sthash.7yX0eMes.dpuf
