Perspectives, polarities and movements of a generation
I was getting angry. It was end of the day and things didn't go well at work. It was about branding, office environment. That sort of thing. It left me tense, the back of my head hot and I dared not check my blood pressure. The office sign was off. It took three visits, a year of planning, designing, back to back meetings, permissions, Covid - and we still got it wrong.
There I was huffing and puffing with remnants of office matters. I decided to wash it off with tequila shots and two movies after my daughter forced me to do deep breathing while clearing up after dinner.
In the middle of the first movie, I got a message asking me if I knew someone in Iriga. It's the next town after my parent's hometown. Five minutes drive.
A friend who is also a former colleague has been in prison after being red tagged. He was moved to Iriga from Cavite. He left Silang Tuesday evening. Plenty of time to have gotten to Iriga by now.
Nobody has heard if he arrived at the jail some 10 hours away. His lawyer is in quarantine having caught Covid. We just wanted to know that he's alright. We can never be sure with these political arrests especially with this administration.
I got busy calling. We got contacts from two opposing sides. One was a police officer, the other an inmate where our friend was supposed to be by now.
After the last call for the night, I sat around an imaginary light of illumination. The smallness of the problems I was sitting on when my evening started seemed like an irritating light seeping through the bottom of a doorframe when you're trying to sleep. I had my BP hitting critical levels for a poorly set up sign when people around me face imprisonment and even life or death situations.
Then there were my sources: a friend of the family from the very side that arrested my former colleague and a cousin who is in jail because they planted drugs on him.
When my parents were alive and people were stuck and needed the police or a lawyer, they would approach our uncles, aunties and friends. My grandfather from my mother's side was a judge. Now the olds are gone and their remaining friends are probably with Alzheimer's or too senile to still be practicing their professions.
The generation has moved. It's now a 'let me call my brother or my cousin' time. Now we look to our own.
The sign on the wall in the office is still wrong.
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