Being good

With Christmas less than a week away, I’ve decided to be on my best behavior. As they used to say back in the old days, you can never can tell if someone up there is actually making a list and then checking it twice.

With the way my luck has been going this year, I need to be as good as I can ever be or at least appear to be one, although I know there’s no fooling you-know-who but hey, He or She or They might give me an “A” for “a” fort. Maybe then, the blessings will double-back, poke me in the shoulder and say “don’t I know you” with a southern drawl.

But before any of that can happen, I will also need to call on all the saints I know. Trust me, it won’t take that long considering I can count them in one hand.

And let’s not ignore all those maybe not so silly superstitions. That means I’ll be knocking on wood and whatever else it is that people do to stave off bad luck and attract manna from heaven more often.

Come on, I need all the help I can get. Even if it means putting on a multicolored polyester top and flared trousers and lip-synching to Abba’s “Fernando.” Although thankfully, it hasn’t come to that. Not yet, anyway.

So how do I intend to go about being all I can be without enlisting in the US army?

Well, for starters, I will veer away from topics that might upset someone.

The Dengvaxia controversy? It’s in the hands of the Senate blue ribbon committee whose members have no vested interests whatsoever. Really.

Complaints of some internally displaced persons (that’s “refugees” for non-NGO peeps out there) that they have yet to receive aid that was supposed to be provided to them by the national government? All I can say is, wait for Christmas Eve. They might be in for a surprise.

What about the in-your-face traffic that has become as common as the cold? Well, what about it? People are probably just making their last-minute shopping. Or they just like to spend time on the road. Will that mean I’ll be ranting about it? You won’t even hear a whimper from me. Not even when I have to wait, at the very least, 30 minutes to have a cab pick me up at home when I’m in a rush to an important meeting. That’s when one actually shows up.

Or carp about standing by the side of the road, under the blistering sun or in the pouring rain, with the rest of the hoi polloi trying to find a jeepney with an empty seat.

There’s no point in talking about the traffic. This pre-Christmas road nightmare happens every year. Like clockwork. It’s the same scenario, streets will be clogged with smoke-belching vehicles up until the night of the 24th and then all will be back to the normal gridlock.

Inshallah.