The Fat Man Today

Not unlike millions of hipsters, lifers, hippies and intellectual elitists in the world, I find pop culture to be quite the tiresome affair. The fact that one cannot live in this day and age without dealing with pop in any form makes today's standards of living very poor indeed. But like everybody else, I muddle along somehow. One of the current manifestations of the nebulous tumor of pop culture, at least in the Philippines, is the horrific #Aldub phenomenon. For the uninitiated, Aldub is apparently this new soap opera format employed by long-running noontime variety show Eat Bulaga. Beyond that, I know very little else about it as I choose to avoid Eat Bulaga, despite being a fan of TVJ movies as a child.

Man drinks alcohol. Man is happy. That's like one of the most zen realities there is. This is the reason why we flock to watering holes at the end of every week - every day, if you're an alcoholic - for a pint or two of the golden brew. Living in Manila, however, means that you're either a San Miguel Pale Pilsen fan, or a Red Horse Beer fan. Colt 45 is also there for the truly courageous, and Manila Beer - a fantastic product while it lasted - just didn't make it. The lackluster selection of alcoholic beverages in the metro has led to a proliferation of high-end "speakeasies", a hipster term for the truly expensive drinking spots mostly found in Makati. Do not confuse these places with prohibition-era speakeasies; you won't find the neighborhood drunkard here, on his way to see a man about a dog. These places have achieved exclusivity by virtue of being expensive, and I spit at the idea of calling them speakeasies. There is nothing "easy" about a...

One of the best things you can choose to do for your social life - both on and offline - is to disconnect.  Oh sure, you say, people do that all the time. Disconnecting is one of the things we do on an almost cyclical basis. We do it when we're fed up with the banal everydayness of all the posts we see in Facebook, or when we're overstimulated with all the media we've absorbed for months on end. When we disconnect, we go on a cleanse, we think. We purge our system of all the bad vibes we've built up in the weeks and months of being connected. And after some time - when we can't stand being so far away from the buzzing world of social media - we reconnect with a vengeance, feeding on the silent electrical impulses we receive from the world of the Internet.  It's no wonder that the 'net's gone from a luxury to a basic necessity. It's being treated like a lifeline to the world at large, where the time spent away from it comes rushing back in, consuming ...