The Gentle Art of Making Petiks
By ALICE SARMIENTO
The term petiks was derived from “pipitik-pitik”. Directly translated, this means to snap one’s fingers, but in the more familiar territory of slacking off, it can be better understood as the “thumb twiddle”, a.k.a. that thing you do when you sit back and wait for something to happen. Which is highly unlikely in the rank-and-file culture of the corporate world: that wonderful environment where you can actually convince yourself that the dude in the next cubicle is a likely bet–despite his being gayer than a handbag full of rainbows.
At an office, the art of thumb twiddling, or petiks has been raised to new heights with the advent of the information age. Petiks has found a friend in twitter, tumblr, friendster, and of course, facebook. This problem has been solved by your friendly neighborhood IT person, who has dutifully gone on to block all the addresses that have made petiks possible–except on their own networks which still give them free reign over their cabbage patches in Farmville.
My office had me confused about the difference between petiks and work. In my definition, work was anything I did sitting at my desk for 8 hours a day. Work didn’t have to be a pain in the ass; on average it took about an hour and a half to generate and sift through sales reports and merchandising calendars, which left me with copious amounts of time throughout the workweek to twiddle my thumbs. But really, where did all that time go?
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EXCEL ART!
Me, to my boss: How do you do that thing on excel where you select a whole area and then fill only certain cells with color?
My boss: (blablabla some gibberish I can no longer recall)45 minutes later, and TADA!
How much color can I throw at my eyeballs? Let Excel count the ways.
Excel is useful for organizing data and designing really garish Welcome mats, among other things.
The Economic and Psychosocial Merits of Working Seven Minutes Away From Home (And Why We Measure Distance in Units of Time)
By BOBBIE STA. MARIA
Faulty title, minutes do not measure distance. But we get what I mean: How far is the airport from your house? One hour. How far is Cebu from Manila? One hour. Distance is only as relevant as the time it takes to get us there. I hope that appeases our intellectual snobs.
With that out of the way…
There’s this phrase that some people live by. And by some people, I mean the lazy half-wits from the northern side of Manila who I call male friends. It goes, “sexy, pretty, Quezon City.” It describes their ideal girl, to state the obvious.
It is my destined task to disagree with the first two, but I fully subscribe to the third, seeing as it makes for a lot of why I love my work. Not everyone will agree with lawyering for the poor as a sound career decision (it is, Mother), but nobody can argue with Quezon City.
The much overlooked economic viability of working for my QC-based NGO is explained below:
When the Workplace is Full of Teacup Humans
By NICE BUENAVENTURA
In case True Blood has not reached where you live (under a rock), teacup human means small human or child. In season one, it was said that children’s blood tastes best, followed by virgins’. I doubt that. If children’s blood had a taste, it would be like sparkling water to the fizz intolerant – deceptively sweet, but biting to the throat.
A vampire sheriff bidding two teacup humans farewell
This is why, if you simply want to try it out, I do not recommend teaching.
Less Is More, Don’t You Think?
Intimacy and Back in Six-Word Stories
Words By MIGS MARFORI
Illustrations By REGINA BAUTISTA
The intro to “Not Quite What I Was Planning,” Smith Magazine’s collection of Six-Word Memoirs tells of the legend that Ernest Hemingway was once challenged to write a story using just six words. He came up with: “For Sale: baby shoes, never worn,” and proved that you don’t have to be wordy to spin a yarn. Below are a few of my own attempts at the medium, with beautiful illustrations by Regina Bautista.
Disclaimer: In keeping with the theme of this month’s issue, the stories below cover the entire spectrum of intimacy, from its beginnings to its sometimes-tragic disintegration and disappointing endings. While all of them are true to the New Slang philosophy of oversharing, some aren’t me; instead, they’re a nice mix of autobiographical and fictional accounts of intimacy, all keeping within six words.
Once Upon a Dreary Afternoon
By HANNA KRISHNA S. CALLORA
Had he not made the first move, she wouldn’t have spoken to him.
She was this quiet little thing who was afraid of everything – people, clowns, heights, monsters under the bed – until that fateful day when he came along.
He was just as tiny. Every time he wanted to see her face, which was almost always hidden behind a curtain of hair, he had to look up. But he didn’t mind because it was always worth it.
Workplace Wushu for Beginners, pt. 1
Illustrations by BUNNY LUZ
Words by PAOLO JOSE CRUZ
Swipe that ID. Log in to the system. Harness your chi. Enter the arena.
For those of us who aren’t blessed with a trust fund, mad freelancing skillz, or a sustainable “funemployment” plan, the average workday can sometimes feel like a merciless bloodsport tournament. Like competitive martial arts, office power struggles have a universal quality that cuts across all kinds of employment, gainful and otherwise. Even as the flavor and emphasis of the combat varies from one culture to another, the essential conflicts remain.
Many of these happen for genuinely petty reasons: irresponsible water cooler tsismis, passive-aggressive internal memos, ambiguously worded company policies, and “I believe you have my stapler”. But some of them hint at much deeper systemic issues. Of course, you’ve got the vintage Marxist theory about workers being alienated from the means of production, setting up a fundamental rift between management and staff. But intra-office brawling takes on more convoluted forms, including nepotism, sweetheart deals, horse trading, and stealing credit for others’ work. And on the most basic level, you have that old reliable standby: professional conduct FAIL.
The organizational structure of big corporations usually makes them an ideal place to foster vicious on-the-job combat. But really, it can happen in any workplace scenario: entrepreneurial ventures, start-ups, family businesses, you name it. Even a microenterprise could become a potential battleground, with the right (or wrong) mix of volatile approaches to getting things done. Likewise, it takes root on all levels: you can end up being party to a smackdown within a team, a business unit, an account, or even a whole department.
So how does one emerge (mostly) unscathed from the 35 Cubicles of Shaolin? For starters, it helps to recognize the various styles of Office Fu. Here’s a partial guide, arduously compiled from the notes of a Most Venerable Shifu’s Quarterly Performance Review.
Black Tiger Style
Like the fierce jungle cat, a Black Tiger Stylist goes right in for the kill, using an epic combo of battlefield strategy and raw force. This might be a positive thing, when “the kill” involves hitting production quotas, reaching a milestone, or creating a dynamic work environment. Obviously, this is not so great when it means taking over the duties of colleagues whom they judge to be under-performing, based on their own exacting standards… and by force, if necessary.
The Tiger Style is favored by people who are naturally bossy control freaks. Imagine the 80s Frosted Flakes mascot on ‘roids, and you have the basic idea. Direct and aggressive, they often seem like insensitive jerks, with their crisp approach to getting the job done. Often enough, they don’t mean to be assholes; they’re just so focused on the task at hand that the nuances of interpersonal relations become a secondary concern. Upper management may eventually take notice of their initiative, but it’s just as likely to saddle them with unwanted extra responsibilities, like sprucing up the company newsletter, or coordinating drunken “team buildings” at some beach resort.
2020: Yet Another Grim Dating Year
Words by DAVID LOUGHRAN
Illustrations by PAULINA ORTEGA
DISCUSSED: Why gays who stereotype are usually single, A discouraging decade
In 2020 I will be, gasp…33 years old. At age 33 I will no longer be deemed cute (let’s be hypothetical and pretend I am now), and so I will have to triple efforts at dating. Presumably at this age I will also be more desperate and hell-bent on “finding the right one”.
I will have to be “hot” to compete with the droves of fresh gay meat that come in yearly, but my fear of close quarters and heavy machinery will deny me the obvious first destination – the gym. I will instead succumb to the marathon, and while I will not make it to the end of the finish line, I will meet The Fit Outdoorsgay. He will chuckle at my having fainted at the marathon. “Cute!”, he says, like a scene from that movie.
The Fit Outdoorsgay
The Fit Outdoorsgay is a variant of the more popularly known gym bunny, but prefers to venture outside the confines of Fitness First. Proficient in local geography (specializing in mountain trails and obscure surfing spots), he also knows all the branches of Nike and North Face. He eats fruits and nuts for breakfast and abhors sleeping all day when “you could be running in charity marathons!”.
By REGINA BAUTISTA
Cordillera Day
By MARIA LORENA CLETO
I have always had a thing for fields.
Wide open spaces – they represent freedom. I want to have a field, somewhere I can go anytime I feel like lying down in wild grass. But I want my field to be dotted with trees, here and there. I like climbing trees. I like climbing. In Chuyo, what remains of my family’s ancestral land (and they are on the verge of taking this away from us), my cousins and I would run through hills of grass and climb rocks left from times when even the Cordillera was underwater.
But it is summer now, 2010, and submersion is only a distant memory for these mountains. At present, the Cordillera’s streams have been reduced to trickles, and there have been episodes of spontaneous combustion in her pine forests, fields, and grasslands. The region is experiencing a crisis of water; timely, in a way, because it is April again, the month in which the Indigenous Peoples of the Cordillera commemorate a man – a chieftain from Kalinga – who gave up his life in a battle over water.
April 1980 – Military troops of the Marcos dictatorship gun down Macliing Dulag for leading protests against the construction of a dam that will sink the fields and villages of thousands deep, deep under the Chico River’s waters.
It is this death, this hero that we remember on April 24, Cordillera Day.
I Can Name That Hip Hop Love Affair in 10 Songs
By MIAO OLIVAR
Download “I Can Name That Hip Hop Love Affair in 10 Songs”
Before Hip Hop
Because I am the product of two baby boomers, a deep appreciation for hip hop did not come naturally to me. As a child I listened exclusively to RJ100.3 on the radio. The Beatles, The Beach Boys, Dave Clark Five, The Shadows, The Ventures and a slew of Motown and Stax Records artists comprised the foreword to this romance saga that is my love affair with the genre and its accompanying culture.
With this solid pop, instrumental, soul, and R&B background, you’d have thought that I was a shoo-in to be a born and bred hip hop enthusiast. You’d have also been badly mistaken.
The First Time We Met: Legit Misfitz – “Jabongga (1994)”
Like most middle class, post-colonial, post-EDSA revolution, post-Generation X children in the Philippines, I caught the OPM rock fever with the release of the Eraserheads’ “Ultraelectromagneticpop!” debut album. I was 10 years old and struggling to find my identity in a school that didn’t seem to appreciate my natural capacity to be a shy, quiet nerd with a penchant for stuffy, old-fogy music. So, it happened that my inner nerd concealer became OPM rock. It was fresh, it was new, and best of all it was something I liked that everybody else seemed to like as well. I saved my lunch money obsessively, and in between buying Nancy Drew and Sweet Valley High books, I bought cassette tapes and song hits. From RJ100.3 I switched to LA105.9, and along with rock bands like Rivermaya, Teeth, The Youth, and Yano, I was exposed to heavier and louder music in the forms of Dahong Palay, Tame The Tikbalang, Kabaong Ni Kamatayan and other acts that I’m sure had even more colorful names.
