These are the times that try men’s souls.
(Yeah, I know, Thomas Paine lived in an age when gender-conscious language was virtually nonexistent, and so I take the liberty of assuming that his famous statement includes women as well. But anyway…)
This morning I woke up at exactly 8:25. (Our time-in at work is 8:30, by the way. I live in Diliman and work in Ortigas. O divah, ang ganda.) So I hurried through the morning routine and raced to the MRT station, only to find a huge, agitated crowd outside the turnstiles and on the platform. Turns out that a defective train had to stop at Cubao, stalling all other trains behind it. Stranded passengers stood in long, unmoving queues. An irascible man argued with an equally irascible guard. I went down to the street in the hopes of catching a bus to work instead, but as it happened, about a hundred others had the same idea, and so all the buses were jampacked. Hayyyy. Good thing I had bought a waffle from a stall, which had now diverted most of the blood supply from my brain to my stomach. Otherwise, I might have transformed into a head-biting, fire-breathing dragon, too.
In about five minutes, the trains started moving again, and so, the commuters on the street trooped back upstairs to the station. The irritable crowd had turned into a pack of bloodthirsty wolves intent on getting onto the train, and for a moment, I had a glimpse of a pre-stampede situation. By now, some people had totally lost their tempers. From a distance, I watched as a woman shouted (profanities, I presume) at the woman walking behind her, who shouted back. I couldn’t hear what they were saying, but the murderous looks on their faces were unmistakable. As I hurried through the turnstile, I passed by another woman screeching at a guard. I faded in and out of hearshot just long enough to hear “…tapos sasabihin nyo sa akin na hindi nyo alam? Ang tatanga nyo naman! Bakit ba kasi…”
Getting on the train involved the usual jostling and pushing, although perhaps with a touch more desperation. I breathed a sigh of relief as the train began to pull out of the station, enduring the press of people on all sides, anticipating how I had to worm through the crowd when we arrived in Ortigas. Behind me I heard a woman say to her companion, “Grabe yung babae kanina ano? Minura yung nanay nya,” to which her friend responded, “Sanay nang magmura.”
It’s just another day in paradise.
)