Monday, March 3, 2008

Commuter blues, bag checks and camwhoring in the CR

I've been out of the house and commuting more lately, sometimes to the point of using all three overhead rail lines in a day. It is hard not to notice how much jeepney fares have gone up. In college I paid P6 from Marcos Highway to Aurora-Katipunan. Now, it's P9. The P4.50 minimum fare from years ago is now P7.50. Riding jeeps reintroduced me to the hang-on-for-dear-life and the miss-hanggang-dito-na-lang varieties of driving and drivers. What I don't like is when they get that extra peso from my pocket. Maybe it's my fault for not insisting on getting the correct change, but that's because I think they need it more than I do. Maybe they charge me more for the way I'm dressed and made up and because I come from the Philippine equivalent of a gated community. So I try to think of it as one pence that would not have mattered to me in London. Pero kapag sa mahihirap kumukuha ang mga mahihirap, ibang usapan na yun.
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I just thought of counting the number of times I passed through security checks last Saturday: 15. That did not amount to anything except there were 15 pairs of eyes that have looked into my bag.
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I didn't know what to make of it, but when I noticed high school students taking photos of themselves with their cameraphones in the CR, I thought somebody (other than me) should be doing a study of how these cameras and online spaces have transformed the way young people see and present themselves.

2 comments:

  1. everybody say they're camwhores. do they even know what's the meaning of the word?

    malamang nakikiuso lang. basta mahilig mag-post ng piktyurs nila sa net, they all start calling themselves as camwhores. hahaha.

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  2. i think that since the second usage of the term has overtaken the first (a natural occurence in pop culture), the word has become acceptable in informal use. subjective naman ang "inappropriate times or places", di ba? :)

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