Chapter II: Payment
October 23, 2008He says “no thanks I’ll pass”. I ring him up for the bill for the 6pc McNuggets and Coke. He pays, I hand him his change.
MERALCO as the monopoly.
According to Criticisms of a Real Sane Genius Meralco, the electricity distribution company in the Philippines, is trying to merely pull a fast one on consumers. The newswires are burning with the imminent refund of a few billion pesos worth of refunds to consumers who have been overcharged by Meralco in recent years. (more…)
Books the solution to boredom
The semestral break has taken a toll on me. I have done nothing but mope around all day for how many days now. There are certain exceptiional days however, where I have had to move around the city doing errands and chores. While at Trinoma I decided to victimize the Powerbooks book store there. I bought a few books, 2 works in Filipino by Lualhati Bautista, Bata Bata Pa’no Ka Ginawa and Bulaklak ng City Jail, and another book by Upton Sinclair titled The Jungle.
These 2 books by Lualhat Bautista have a very feminist lean to them and both portray the plight of the Filipina in a very raw way, one is the story of a Filipina mother who has had two men leave her in the course of a few years, leaving her with two children and endless trials. The other is a story of a Filipina who was fooled by a philanderer into being his concubine. She was subsequently attacked by the wife and spent a few months in city jail. Her story while in jail and the various humiliations she had to undergo is made clean by the fact of the birth of her child from the man. Though these two stories have very gloomy tones these nonetheless manage to show the tenacity and resilience of the everyday Filipina, the people we call Mom, Sister, Girlfriend or Wife.
The other book that I bought is Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle. Set sometime in the 1900’s the story is about Jurgis Rudkus a Lithuanian immigrant to the United States of America. He is a country youth in Lithuania and is deceived by stories of wealth that can be had in the States. Jurgis, innocent as he was, went with the immigration and discovered first hand the difficulties of life in the yards of Chicago. As the story progresses he learns how to survive in the Jungle created by unbridled greed.
