Trends of the week

MANILA, Philippines - Christmas season is upon us, boys and girls! And like Santa’s proverbial list, this week’s top trends read like a rundown on who’s been naughty or nice. Twitter’s there when you are sleeping, it’s there when you’re awake; it knows if you’ve been bad or good, so be bad for social media voyeurism’s sake. Or something like that. Just don’t get anyone killed.

#simbanggabi

Nothing makes Christmas season more official in the Philippines than Simbang Gabi. It’s also the one thing that makes Christmas in the Philippines unique and still not totally secular. It functions mainly as a “panata,” a pious devotion usually reserved for Holy Week, and is perceived by some as a drag. After all, you have to wake up very early in the morning and make time in your already insanely busy holiday schedule to come to church for nine straight days. But everything we already do during Christmas — lining-up in traffic to shop in crowded malls or going to parties — are basically chores. That many Filipinos still adhere to the one that is most relevant to the origins of Christmas gives the season its much-needed old-school purity. Or whatever purity can still be achieved while tweeting about it and uploading simbang gabi selfies and whatnot.

#MissInternational2013

Another Filipina beauty contestant, another international beauty pageant title. The country is now getting used to this trend, as we’re fast becoming the Venezuela of Asia. But there was something curious about Bea Rose Santiago’s win as Miss International 2013, and it had something to do with her crown-clinching answer to the question, “What will you do if you win the Miss International pageant?” Her response: “The whole world saw how my country suffered. One by one, other countries helped. You have opened my heart and eyes on what we can do to help each other.”

Her answer was perfectly simple and beautifully worded. But let’s face it: her win had more to do with the story behind those words than with her eloquence. Would she have still won had typhoon Yolanda never happened? Probably. Pity wins are usually pathetic, but beauty pageants are nothing if not appeals to emotion. They are pure symbolism, pure ceremony; there’s a reason they are called “pageants.” They open hearts, yes, but mainly eyes.

Skyway

The only possible reasons for a stretch of road to trend on Twitter is if it’s being opened or if something really bad happened on it. As the gruesome accident that happened this past Monday re-confirms, it’s always likely the latter. A commuter bus fell from the Skyway, toppling into a service road in Parañaque and killing 18 people. The bus driver survived.

What made the accident even more chilling was that it could’ve happened to any of us at any time. Buses are among the most ubiquitous sights in our daily commute. We either ride in them or deal with their anarchic presence on city roads. We see them zigzag through traffic as if they were the size of motorcycles, defying their centers of gravity, and just generally causing additional stress to our lives. So we blame the drivers because they provide the faces toward which we can direct our anger, which should really be directed at the bus operators whose revenue sharing system forces drivers to turn every corner into a terminal and man shifts on little to no sleep. We ignore the larger causes of road chaos — the laxity of laws, the privatization of a public transport system that is meant to be public — because they are so intrinsic to our daily lives. Finding someone to blame is always easier than finding real solutions to long-standing problems.

Dylan Sprouse

Star of the Disney Channel sitcom Suite Life of Zack & Cody, Daniel Sprouse took a naked selfie that “somehow” leaked into Twitter, which proceeded to lose its mind. If that sentence seemed familiar and predictable, it’s because everything about it is. “Leaked” naked photos or videos are the recourse of the not-so-famous. In fact, the more non-famous the person is, the more suspicious the “leaked” nature of the photos is. Sprouse made a joke about the whole thing, tweeting: “Whoops, guess I’m not 14 and fat anymore.” Tweeps and bloggers praised him for his self-deprecation, but really, they were praising him for his gender. Vanessa Hudgens wasn’t so lucky with her leaked naked photos years ago because she’s a girl and girls who do that aren’t considered cool or funny. Oh, and she was also at least a hundred times more famous then. There’s that, too.