Picture-perfect

Our street near Quezon Avenue feels like EDSA every time we drive through. Apparently, Filipinos are gifted in terms of their spatial intelligence. Almost every light post, every wall, and every square inch of our town has a face to it, literally. My neighbors are probably having a hard time with their cable reception as all their wires outside are weighed down by the hanging greetings from ‘our friendly neighborhood spidey-chump’.

Personally, I’ve found traffic additionally unbearable if for whatever chance the vehicle I’m in gets stuck behind a giant grass-colored bus. I wonder if the nausea from the pollution would create a 3D effect if I stare long enough at the face painted on the bus’s rear. Then again, there’s this more epic fruit-colored poster of someone who looks like my great-great-great-great-great-great uncle. Need I say more about him?

All this ridiculing aside though, those precious moments with those priceless faces make me appreciate our blessings. Well, why not call them just what they are — blessings.

For in this cruel and seriously UGLY world, we apparently live in the few places where beautiful people are bountiful. Or, at least, that’s the impression that I get. Our city, filled with not-so-discrete media featuring the faces of our prospective public servants, stands testament to my claim. Why, where else can we find more smooth-skinned, even-teethed,straight-haired, slim and wrinkle-free politicians?

Not even our Mutya ng Pilipinas last year can trump the hair-free upper lips or toned behinds of my barangay’s candidates. Or, at least, that’s what the posters lining our sidewalks imply. I wonder if there’s a height requirement or some looks-based criterion when people file their necessary documents for candidacy. Do the secretaries in COMELEC always bring a tape measure or have a knack for counting pockmarks? If not that, then perhaps these people running for office are heaven-sent bodies of perfection.

Were they, in all their magnificence, sent to save us from the ugliness that is dark skin? Maybe if I use that placenta soap their faces are so often posted next to, my complexion would resemble my prospective mayor’s cement-like skin. How can I not call myself blessed when, in my generation, the people who run for positions in the government resemble celebrities from Hollywood and Bollywood: quite literally combined? Certainly, those plastic surgeons frequenting on free TV would cry their hearts out in envy if they knew of the perfect facial symmetry of my next barangay kagawad.

Then again, that’s just me. Or the version of me if I were living under a rock! Oh please! You and I are well aware of the miracle software whose name always reminds me of dinner. I wonder, though, do my grandparents voting this May know about that as well? Or how about my technophobe uncle, who expects to see that chinita candidate at his birthday inuman?

Oh, what I’d give to see how he reacts when he is faced with the very ugly truth.