State of one’s nation
If the body constitutes one’s nation, then what is the state of my nation?
This question was prompted by one of my friends who asked me on FB: “Where are you now, Danton?” I guess he meant not just my physical location, but also what have I been doing?
Aside from having a daily radio show on Radyo 5 called Remoto Control, I now find myself on TV every week night, because the radio show has a live simulcast on Aksyon TV Channel 41. Then I also have a segment called “Remoto Control,” which means several nights a week on Aksyon Tonight on TV5. These shows are carried by TV5 And Aksyon TV international channels. They are also on livestream at www.news5.com.ph, and so they can be seen around the globe. Not only do I have to read all the news and research their contexts, not only do I have to write the scripts and think of the guests and the sound effects for radio, I also have to scrub my face.
Scrub seems to be the perfect verb, because I have to use this cleanser, followed by that toner, and finally this anti-aging oil so my face doesn’t look dry on TV the next day. My minder has found a cosmetic sponsor for me and has been badgering me for a schedule so that the cosmetic doctor can examine my face, like the etherized body in T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land.” I really do not have two hours to sit still while she pores over my face and injects this and that to puff up my cheeks and lips, and so I keep on hemming and hawing on my trip to Her Who Will Change My Face.
And because I have not yet gone through the “facial makeover,” I need to have makeup every night. Our resident makeup artist takes care of four anchors at 6 p.m., so I have learnt to put on makeup myself. If you work on TV, one of the essentials in your bag is a MAC foundation and concealer, because you do not know when you will need it to cover the acne scars of your terrible teenage years. Plus, a reliable lipstick that is not too red because you’re not the leading lady in a Korean telenovela. This two-in-one lipstick will not only moisten your dry lips, it can also give the blush of life to your withered cheekbones. My former makeup artist also bought me a Naturactor, which is a white miracle powder from Japan that looks like shabu but has finer grains. Naturactor magically banishes everything dark, spotty, and ugly from your face. Now you can see what I learnt in three years on the job.
Atty. Mel Santa Maria, our resident legal analyst at TV5, sent me a text message last week telling me how young I looked on TV. I wanted to tell him, Atty. Mel, thanks to three layers of makeup. I really need five layers, but I only have 10 minutes before the camera begins to roll.
That takes care of the face. What about my body? I am glad to report that my old sponsor, SM Supermalls, still takes care of what I wear, thanks to Annie Garcia (president) and Millie Dizon (vice-president). They make sure I don’t wear rags, or the clothes I wore when I was still an absent-minded professor. Which means clothes with no color coordination, full of psychedelic zigs and zags, dots and dashes, that explode on the TV screen. Or just plain white, which will make me float like a ghost on the screen.
I am also happy to have ectomorph genes. The size of my tummy does not go proportional with my age. I’m half a century old but my tummy is not that ancient. I got my long neck and my high cheekbones from my mother. I am almost six feet tall, which I got my father. I love my parents, now both dead, following each other to the grave one month of each other’s death, but still I thank them when I sit before the mirror surrounded with big, blazing bulbs and begin to rearrange my face and check what they call “your over-all peg.”
Because when you have a double chin and a stomach the size of a barrel of beer and your body looks like Humpty Dumpty astride the wall in Through the Looking Glass, man oh man, there will be hell to pay. Television is such a cold and cruel medium. It makes you look 10 pounds heavier. I am 145 pounds, plus the 10 added by TV, so I look 155 pounds on TV. The charts say my ideal weight is 160 pounds, so I am just five pounds underweight in the illusion-filled screen of the television.
I also wish I could go to the gym on a regular basis. My only problem there is that I have the will, but the people there talk to me all the time. They want updates on the news, on politics, on everything under the sun, as if I am the factologist from CNN or BBC that I am not. So I cannot do my exercises without being asked my opinion on the President and his Cabinet, on the LGBT movement, or what I will do in 2016.
It is still less than two years before the elections, but people are already talking and doing politics. Before the Janet Lim Napoles case broke out, one political operator called me up to say that since there is no more PDAF in the Senate and Congress, “then you should run for councilor of Quezon City, Professor Remoto. We have done surveys, and they like you there.”
When I asked him why, he said: “Because QC councilors have an Internal Revenue Allotment (IRA) of P35 million per year.” And forthwith, he and his group offered to fund my campaign. The quid pro quo? They will “manage” my projects to be funded by my IRA of P35 million. I listened to him, but I never called back. They will fund you, yes, and then their hands will throttle your neck until you die. That is how some political gremlins get elected, and this is where your taxes eventually go.
Every election I get offers like this, so much money, paid out in cash in three tranches, to be delivered to your condo unit inside duffel bags. But if they offer me a bookstore, with thousand upon thousand of books, perhaps I might say “yes?”
Because if I don’t need money to pay the bills and send my nephew to the conservatory of music and my adopted daughter to grade school, I would just read and write till kingdom come. I have just arranged my library, discarding several boxes of books for distribution to the public schools, and wonder when I can read these beautiful books left on the shelves.
At this point in my writing career, the tables have turned. Publishers besiege me with offers to write a Literature textbook or a book of erotica, to translate this bestselling novel or that ground-breaking memoir. After my translation of The Fault in Our Stars by John Green sold 5,000 copies in three weeks, I have received offers to translate more books. In fact, two offers just came yesterday.
I just tell myself to calm down.
I have finished a new collection of poems. I have a book of stories. I have another book of essays. My novel has been accepted for publication years and years ago, but the publisher wanted minor rewrites, which I haven’t done. The proofs of The Best of Ladlad have been sitting on my desk for a month. With the daily radio and TV shows, I can only do this on weekends.
But Saturdays I spend sitting in graduate classes in the morning and in the afternoon, because I feel so inadequate, and seeing my boyfriend later in the afternoon and into the evening. On Sundays I visit my sisters in Fairview and San Jose del Monte, Bulacan, to check if the roof is leaking, if the ref still has food, if the vegetables in the backyard are now turning green with life.
We also have five ducks in our backyard, and I stop the impulse to sit beside them and do what President Erap Estrada did.
Because when the President was on house arrest in a far bigger house and lot in Tanay, he said that one day, he sat down beside the geese in his backyard. He was so tired from it all that he just sat down and talked to the geese And one of them answered him.
In the mournful voice of former President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, the goose told him: “I am sorry.”
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Comments can be sent to danton_ph@yahoo.com.
