It’s just … it’s crazy and I have to get this down.

The heat. It’s not even pa-cute heat, which inspires the richer neighborhood kids to bring out the inflatable kiddie pools. It’s hide-your-children heat, or-they’ll-come-back-broken-and-mabaho. English-speaking friends insist it’s more proper to say, “it’s warm,” than “it’s hot.” YOU’RE WRONG. IT’S HOT. IT’S SO HOT.

It’s like this thing they call in white people countries, Seasonal Affective Disorder except here it’s about the scorching, humid, suffocating heat. And instead of making me feel sad, this heat is making me so mad. I’m so mad. It’s so hot. Everything’s melting. Food’s spoiling, bananas are complaining, the air from the electric fans are a pathetic sticky skin-licking joke.

You have goals and there’s this all-encompassing B.S. wrapped around your environs like an unshruggable fur coat. The irony of that simile, is of course, you’re already close to naked and it’s still there.

You try with electric fans and AC to function like a normal human being, but unless you’re in the office with industrial-size wind blowers you just feel it.

The strange thing is if you go to work in IT they turn up the AC so high so the servers survive but then you’re in Siberia while it’s the Gobi fucking desert right outside the building. Guess who’s getting sick of the temp change?

But if you’re mostly at home or nagliliwaliw kung saan-saan, wala ka nang gugustuhing puntahan kungdi ang mall. Hindi mo masisisi ang sambayanang Pilipino. Pero kaya rin naman kapag pumunta ka nga sa mall, feeling mo nandoon din ang BUONG sambayanang Pilipino, all 98 million of the seething masses. You, you yourself, are a seething mass of human heat, wrapped in anger, fried in sweat, wrinkled and peppered with middle-class angst.

I’ve gone to Reddit a year ago (as you do) to complain about the heat and everyone on /r/Philippines who replied was just, we’re losing the battle, man. Move to Canada. And we’ve reached even higher temps this year. Anybody who is still saying that the climate is not changing can go meet me at 12 noon in the middle of our street and I will take that kumag down, one burning limb at a time.

There’d be a story in here somewhere, and it’d be about how this heat transforms a nation of kindly, forgiving, past-forgetting, karaoke mic-bearing, brown-skinned people into self-combusting, gripo-happy, socipathic daylight zombies who have no bargaining interest except to melt you down with them: from your insides, to your mind, to everything and anything you hold dear. WE WILL CHAR YOUR DREAMS. Char. Hahaha. Char talaga.

ANG INIT!

Pawis na pawis na ang kilikili ko, tatlong beses na’ko naliligo sa isang araw, pero nanghihina pa rin ako sa init. Nakailang baso na’ko ng tubig, ihi ako ng ihi, ang init naman sa banyo. Ang init sa labas, ang init sa loob, ang init sa jeep. Dagdag mo pa ang nag-iingayang pulitikong walang pakisama, dagdag oppression sa mangilang-ilang senses mo na hindi na dapat naapektuhan ng init. Sige, silawin n’yo pa ako ng mga mukha n’yo sa nagkikinangan n’yong poster!

Ugh.

Iinit pa daw sabi ng PAG-ASA. Plus points for inherent irony.

Magsayaw na nga lang tayo.

Screenshot galing sa  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BV9_SZbQpI0