Trends of the week

MANILA, Philippines - The week began with #AfterVacation sitting atop the trends list — a somber reminder that the tranquil dream that was the Holy Week was over and that we, as a nation, was thrust back into reality and forced to finally come to grips with it — like with most things — via Twitter.

The post-Holy Week shift into normalcy is one of the most difficult of the year. It’s one thing to move on with Christmas lights still hanging from walls; it’s quite another to resume one’s daily routine and slog through traffic after seeing nothing but empty streets and large bodies of water for days. Whether you spent the better part of the Holy Week in Metro Manila or in out-of-town resorts, the sight of beaches and Metro Manila resembling a vast ghost town was too jarring, too surreal to be brushed off so easily. They looked, and felt, and stuck out like dreams. They were nearly impossible to wake up from.

But here we are, at the far end of our week of re-acclimatization, and we’ve survived. All it took were a few repetitions of familiar routines for the memory foam of our minds to settle back to their old crevices. And Twitter, of course.

Basketball internet raises week-long ruckus

To those confused over the names Durant, Westbrook, Lillard, and the phrase “Talo OKC” littering the trends list: those are all in reference to the NBA playoffs, which began this week, causing Pinoy basketball geeks to froth at the mouth as they bother Twitter about how amazing and unbelievable every play of every game is. Mid-April to mid-June is reverse-Lenten season for NBA nerds — 40 decadent games in 40 decadent nights (mornings in Philippine time) that send serious basketball fans into a frenzy and casual fans to jump on the bandwagon.

Those who couldn’t care less will continue to be pestered for the next couple of months, and on behalf of all NBA junkies out there, I sincerely apologize. Lord knows I feel like blowing up Twitter every time an awards show or a beauty pageant is on, but what is a basketball addict to do when a young player like Damian Lillard carries a team in crunch time during his first ever playoff game or when Kevin Durant keys his team’s rally with an impossible four-point-play falling out of bounds? What’s that? None of those words meant anything to you? Uh…how about those One Direction kids?!

#1DinManila becomes new rallying cry of the proletariat

Rumors of a One Direction concert in Manila spread like wildfire on Twitter this week, for reasons that are unknown. No one knows who started it, just like no one really knows who starts anything in the vast wilderness of social media. The question of who starts trends isn’t interesting, anyway, or at least not as interesting as what trends end up becoming. The #1DinManila hashtag, in particular, became something more fascinating than an unconfirmed rumor gone haywire: the tweets evolved (or devolved?) into dispatches of the class war.

An overwhelming majority of tweets were of people bemoaning their inability to afford a concert that hasn’t been officially announced, let alone priced, and the fact that only wealthier, less-passionate fans would be able to attend. As one tweet went: “I hate those rich kids who will buy front row tickets and don’t even know the words of the songs!” Everyone’s a hipster now — even non-hipsters.

Middle-to-upper class hipsters never react like this when their favorite indie bands visit Manila. Blessed with a large reservoir of disposable income and a limitless sense of entitlement, these people have timelines that turn into grand lovefests and impromptu contests on who loves the band more, never a misery parade that this rumored One Direction concert ended up inspiring. With the country’s economic realities puncturing the indie/mainstream dichotomy, the masses are the ones more inclined to relate to sullen, sad-bastard indie music after all. Hey, (theoretically) heartbroken One Direction fans, can I interest you with some Morrissey?

Twitter on the edge of its seat over Napoles tell-all

The Pork Barrel Scandal Queen is finally ready to make her pronouncement and Twitter is in rapt anticipation over the long-awaited, long-overdue expose. The consensus online is that Janet Lim-Napoles can be a state witness as long as she tells everything she knows and returns all the money she stole.

The Internet can be adorable sometimes. Or sneakily snarky. I can’t tell which one’s at play here. Do people actually hope that Napoles will tell the whole truth a la Jack Nicholson in A Few Good Men? Do they believe that there are no backroom deals involved here, that this will somehow be the exception in the government’s long history of half-truths and full-fledged lies? And do they actually expect the stolen money to be returned, appearing on our pay slips like enormous tax rebates or in our mailboxes as giant checks?

Or are these tweets meant to demonstrate the unacceptability of Napoles’ plea to be a state witness by expressing the impossibility of true justice? I don’t know what to believe anymore. And neither does Twitter.