Sun.Star Pampanga

Twists and turns

- VALRED OLSIM

I FOUND myself on the road again, this time to help bolster a grant proposal for one of our town’s potential agri-tourism site. The roads in Laguna are reminiscen­t of life’s mysterious twists and turns, especially the networks from Los Banos to Majayjay where we probably got lost a bit, even in this age of Google maps.

Prompted to use another route back, our driver assured us that in his 20 years of driving experience, people only get lost in getting somewhere...not in getting back home.

Amid the chaos in Padre Faura and the series of drama in the regime (including the unraveling of the tourism department’s charlatans), we passed by the nation’s capital, enduring a six-hour traffic from SLEX to EDSA. It was “Flyday” in Friday after all and people are going home for the village polls to ink their nails.

The pandemoniu­m on the streets matched the clatter in social media where half of my friends were noting the day for its infamy, and the other half were campaignin­g for their friends and relatives. The twists and turns we made out of the main highway are as complicate­d as the divided opinions of the men and women in robes of remarkable legal knowledge, who expect the common people to know the law to the last letter.

“You don’t get lost in getting back home” I repeated to myself silently as I recalled my own twists and turns of chasing knowledge and experience­s as a student of teaching, dev’t communicat­ion, tourism, psychology, philosophy, law, and what have you.

Perhaps, I should get back home away from the tangled web of these directions I followed to my brief defeat. The dreamy street lamps of TPLEX, and the lingering songs of 2am on my headphones, suggested that I should. Maybe.

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