STREET LIFE

What’s wrong with local non-working holidays? I seemed lost just when the week is about to end and here I am in my office in my faded Levi’s, a varsity T-shirt and a worn-out Diesel. Well . . . it’s my city’s charter day and tomorrow’s People Power 19th Anniversary, a double holiday treat huh? I might as well do my Blog . . . .


On TV, the motor-vehicle makeover is windshield to the soul! Car owners have a peculiar habit. When they walk out from a mall, office or public parking areas, and realize they’ve forgotten where they parked, they scan the parking lot, keys in hand, and ask- WHERE AM I? Where am I because your car is you. It expresses your aspirations, your taste, your social class and your virility (or your need to compensate for the same). I learned this when I got my first company car 10 years ago as a medical representative for a British company and lived by the car slogans: Its not just your car its your freedom, The power to live. Live your dreams…. It’s your soul. I lived in a city where most people don’t have cars; others like me don’t even have decent driveways to display them in. We don’t experience our cars as ourselves. If we did I would have to confront the sad fact that I am a Metallic-green 2000 Mitsubishi Lancer. We express ourselves instead through our clothes, shoes and, which is why most of us love so much the reality-TV-makeovers. There are, however, car-and-bike makeover shows: MTV’s Pimp my Ride and several others turn junkers into sleek street machines and motorcycles into works of art, and in the process tell viewers (both men & women) how to express and define themselves through their stuff.

In these shows you have heavy metal and rap music, not dance club remixes. Tattoos and piercing, not Dolce & Gabana. Metal working and not wine preparing. If there is such a thing as opposite to metrosexual, the motor-vehicle makeovers are it. Most important, growing up- becoming urbane and understated. These shows are about nurturing your inner third-grader. Get tricked out into roaring, smoke-spewing beasts that resemble something out of 6-year-olds toy box.

These are Cinderella stories for the boys, in which the stars are the fairy-god-mothers who turn the lucky pumpkins into kick-ass coaches. No one feels the connection between wheels and independence more strongly than the teenagers, which is more probably why Pimp My Ride became on overnight hit for MTV. With rapper Xzibit as host, it’s a kind of hip-hop. It takes young driver’s beat-up jalopies and turns them into rap-video dreams, rolling Xanadus with DVD players, video-game machines and the mandatory spinning-wheel rims. The show owes everything to the materialistic side of the hip-hop culture, but Xzibit says that the Pimp’s fantasies are more accessible than the million-dollar house tours on MTV’s CRIBS, and more personal. The makeovers, according to Xzibit are boost to the kids’ confidence.

I suppose he’s right. I also hope, though. That Pimp’s viewers- watching a channel increasingly dedicated to the idea that a car, or a mansion, or a new pair of breasts, is the ticket to fulfillment- realize there are cheaper routes to self esteem. “We’re about to put $20,000 into a $900 car,” –a craftsman boasts as he rebuilds a pathetic Mitsubishi Mirage for Antwon, a19- year old art student. The gleaming, finished car hilariously over the top (including a built-in mini-aquarium) and Antwon is delighted. Don’t we wonder if he would be better off with $20,000 to pimp his college fund? That, of course, is the spoilsport in me. The kid in me replies: Better not ask. Better to enjoy the ride. Better to step back and admire your reflection in the beautiful Mirage.

WHITE WATER RAFTING – there really is nothing quite like rafting trip on Cagayan de Oro River. The stretch from Barangay Dansolihon to the city provides you with strikingly beautiful panoramic view of the river rocky walls, untouched vegetation and the sight of the resting haven of monkeys. It has breathtaking rapids that provides the more adventurous with thrills and challenges of rapids intervals not less than 10 – 15 minutes of each other. Cagayan de Oro river has everything that makes for a memorable experience with awesome roar and power of water cascading over rocks and boulders.