Unbounded

Good evening my dirty little city, it’s been a while.

I love my country. Only here would you be able to find academic marketing at the expense of other institutions.

Kudos for this particular series of billboards (well, they’re not actually billboards, but more of graffiti’s in the form of tarpaulins. Eyesore, really) going to Eastwood, courtesy of Informatics. One of them goes like this:

“Ateneo or La Salle may be your first choice. But abroad, this one counts: Informatics.”

True, very true.

I’ve never really heard of any overseas domestic helpers who heralded from ADMU or DLSU.

Make your countrymen proud, dear graduates of Informatics, we need the remittances.

[link]

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I’d like to leave these parting words, in reprisal (since it relates very much to why these promotions were made in the first place) courtesy of yours truly:

“What meaning is there to exist when the poor has no one to look up to and for the rich to look down to? When all dreams are real and when all efforts come in vain?

How can joy exist without sorrow? It's unrealistic and absurd to hope for a perpetually happy world for after a while, it would cease to be happy; it would be awfully boring.

Contrasts and limitations are thus necessary for anything to be considered valuable.”

“The last thing I remembered was cheap whiskey and cheaper perfume. I think her name was Vanessa. I clearly wasn’t paying any attention; I just didn’t want to drink alone.

Vanessa, Van, V. the girl who had an opinion to just about anything you could conceivably throw at her at. Opinions which, at least to her anyway, needed to be heard for her to feel, well, noticed. Vanessa. Verbose.

So there I was, idling in a dull, throbbing semi-consciousness. I knew I was in for a rude awakening. But an apocalyptic hangover wouldn’t be the worst of my problems.

For the past two days, the silent vibrations of my phone were more of a nuisance rather than an anticipation of a sweet nothing. I checked my answering machine today and got about ten messages all from the same sender:

‘[beep]

Hey. I’m calling to tell you that we were expecting you yesterday but you failed to show up. Anyway, we’ve been meaning to ask something from you regarding her case, and I suppose you know that there’s a pending case between the management against her, and we received some documents in which you’re involved. So as your former employer, we would like to protect your interest as well, so we were hoping to hear your side, if possible. So there. Give me a call or message, okay?

[beep]’

I never expected that this whole case would grow so much to become extremely overrated. I never wanted to become legally implicated in this shuffle between her and everything else, but it seemed inevitable. Looks like what she did to me sealed the deal. My deal. My fate.

I guess the price for me to do anything is as much as a shot of whiskey and a blowjob. ‘Protect your interest’, HAH! What bull. These are the things that I loose my sleep over, and I love my sleep.

Now, you can leave me alone with my thoughts and my next shot of drink.”

xxx

How every evening, he would anticipate her panes waking up, her fingers gently tapping the frame, where he would imagine where he was instead, beside her, getting a glimpse of everything from her perspective, opening her room's full bodied window.

He would opt to hide every morning in the shadows of his own room, as a result of being in waking for the whole night, until the morning chirps of the sparrows beckon him to call it a day (or night). His bed, now streaked with the morning rays coming from his grilled windows, with lights from the sky seemed hesitant, of whether to accompany him or not.

The woman through the other window, although he had the chance of knowing her name, he would not dare mention it, would move between the small square panes of her now open windows. Shadow fleeting by, it's a most peculiar feeling.

[…]

As the rain was easing to a slight drizzle that night, the man's hands were damp with cold sweat. His knees could barely hold him as he crawled from the bed to the floor and tried to stand up to take his final peek.

[…]

Between the streaks of the faint raindrops he saw the silhouette of flowers on a vase, placed quaintly, right in the middle of her window frame.

He swears they were tulips.

xxx

Good evening my dirty little city.

The thought of doing a local version of Adam Savage, Jamie Hyneman, Katie Byron, Grant Imahara, and Tory Bellici’s series came into my mind again while I was staring blankly at the huge gaping pothole left by the Metro Manila Development Authority beside the Citybank Building sidewalk on Eastwood Libis.

If you might recall, I think I did one such thing some time ago when I tried to test the myth that your streetwise barkers, those clingy raggedy peons who shout public transport destinations (see On Commuting, pt. 2), could fill a bucket with coins from their daily earnings (amounting to about Php 500.00 / day). It was statistically found (through T-test analysis), that one could indeed reach that quota, but also to effortlessly go over it.

That particular experiment could use an update because I came to the realization that a perspective check was in place (see On Commuting, pt. 1). Barkers indeed do not serve their primary purpose of helping you find the jeepneys, FX, or whatnot, because that’s simply a stupid reason. We’re not friggin’ blind.
Barkers persist to thrive in the complicated microeconomy of public transportation because it serves a useful (presumed) purpose of helping to market specific public utility vehicles for random passengers to choose them for others. Now that I’ve thought about it, barkers tend to raise the probability (again all under a presumption) of a specific jeep to be chosen and ridden by random passengers.

Using an experimental model, with the barker as the dependent variable, and during a one-shot week long data collection to get the mean daily earnings of a jeepney driver (taking into consideration the variable that a jeepney driver tips a barker of about 3-10 pesos, whenever a barker attracts a passenger, regardless of him successfully attracting one or many, the variable of mean daily fuel consumption, the variable of mean daily food consumption, and the variable of mean daily bribe money), three questions are being raised:

1. Is there a difference between the mean daily earnings of a jeepney driver when aided by a barker, and one without?
2. In the finding that there is indeed a difference, is the difference enough to say that it is significantly beneficial / significantly detrimental to the jeepney driver?
3. In the finding that there is indeed a difference, what is the difference between the probability of a random passenger choosing a public utility vehicle without the aid of a barker, and one with?

Ahh, the questions in life that could change the world.