The Nags to Appreciate

jack_0_dandy@yahoo.comThe lonely dark room was dimly lit by the white light that reflected on the tainted glass of our window, having a pale green pane, with a view beyond it of a tall, sturdy mango tree that practically added up to the horror of the coldness of the airy night. The unevenly-shaped clock at the far right side of the gloomy warm room filled me with stupid anxiety for I seemed to hear how its hands struck the minute and the hour as they ticked to indicate the delightfully wee hours as I trudged the evening thoroughfare to the dawn of the next new-fangled day, patiently waiting for the beautiful sun to come out of the darkest horizon and persistently enchanting me to the daunt of the fearful.

Everything actually gave me the impression that somebody was fiercely staring at me, just around the corner, waiting, waiting for me to give in to my terror until it hastily takes a grasp on me. Everything inescapably made me delve with the idea that someone was coming in the middle of the lonesome evening.  With these, many things ran through my mind, racing to get into my senses captivating me with so much fear little by little.

I heard steps of a man, strides that made my heart pound. Then, suddenly, the door sprang out widely open. Somebody banged the door. I was actually terrified by that dream- a nightmare to which I wished to wake up at the moment. Yet, I was all wrong. I suddenly realized that it was not just a mere reverie. It was no longer a dream, an escapade which I indomitably created.

I could see nothing except for the blinding white light that covered the living room and continued to flash out my sight and a figure of a man whose front-face was all black whom, at first, I did not recognize until it blurted out annoying nags which made me realize that it was not a man, after all, but a woman. It was my aunt, a woman who drove me crazy the whole time.

“Oh God!”, I whispered protesting against the legendary nagger reciting her litany.

I always told myself that if she would only know what I was doing, she would know why I was in front of this sensibly appealing invention of the modern era. I would mockingly tell her with my lavish indignant lies that I was surfing the internet for me to know how people assessed the use of it, finding out the biased judgment of the people who exactly thought like her; people eaten up by the ennui of the outmoded 50’s. That is all.

Even if I hated (a bit) my aunt for always pestering me about it, as if I were merely putting my precious time into waste, that, I deemed, was not a bad speculation after all, I still gave a thought to the fact that, indeed, there was something wrong happening already. Even though I was not aware of it which more often than not I chose not to be aware of it, there was really something concretely disappointing happening.

Seating on a black tall chair in front of this seemingly lifeless state-of-the-art invention is, indeed, an inert pastime, just quite a waste of time, I guess, for I look as if I am tolerating the do-nothing-all-day campaign of the indolent and the non-functionaries of the town. This concrete indication of the relentlessly advancing world and incessantly innovating culture seems to curse us with the excruciating pain of the perilous nothingness, the leisure of unproductivity.

The conventional yet quite progressive impertinent manner of the young towards our responsibility to our neighbor and country as a whole seems to be in full command of the entire system of the local area network of the country, the modem of the youth that appears to be a unit of the typographically erred advertisement in an influential social networking site. Most, if not all, of the youth functions no longer the way they should in the society for this reason that is actually awfully contagious.  This, I am certain, is the most significant lesson I learned from the age of luxurious usage of the internet to take internet as the depiction of the totality of progress of technology.

As I created fascinating yet gruesome delusions on my mind, I was actually gradually coming up with the whole-wide truthful idea that the young are really filled with the resonating hard-whimpering sound of fear. We merely fear to sniff out of the plain of the snug softness of our comfort zones and forget figuring out where we will thrive in the end. We always frightfully detested facing every bit of the exasperating reality of our poor country wherein we can actually contribute what He has graciously given us from the very beginning, as we breathed our first.

Everything is explicitly defined as technological advancements in one way or another, drives us to the wrong road. This is only for one reason- i.e. cowardice. We want to push our exhausted parents to the limits to work for us and make everything possible for our silly wants.

Moreover, as I patiently waited to find out what the mysterious entity was, as it untiringly distracted the solitude while I was surfing the internet, I forgot to act, and not merely to act, but to act with much exerted effort to give. This became one of the most significantly dangerous psychological effects of technology that we enjoyed every day. It became the main culprit of the continuous exacerbation of the murderous procrastination of the supposedly naïve yet hardworking Filipino youth.

Yes, who will not be tempted? The luxury and comfort are all well-laid, printed on the whitest unmarred tablet, that they almost steadily stare us on the face. Just click the Orange Fox or the Blue e’d Explorer or, if not, the colorful latest chrome in town. Look for the most popular and indispensable search engines like the exclaimedY and the Goo where you can get their latest versions as well when they pop out of the LCD whenever you try to open them. Type everything you want to know. Oh no, you want to Co-Pa, I mean. Count 1, 2 and 3 which depends on the speed and the paid amount enough to buy a sack of rice. Poof! Everything is there from Aa to Zz and 1 to infinity.

I myself can never deny that fact no matter how hypocrite I may become. It is all there. We are pragmatically deceived by lightness of the supposedly hard life of the world, the misleading ease brought about by the machines our intellectually great forefathers invented.

We, having been caught up by our utopian European and American infatuations, have been and still are having a hard time dealing with this timely and seemingly time-bound reality where we are actually creating our own foolish demanding dreams which in the end create political, social, economical and psychological setbacks that continued ad nauseam.

Then, as I abhorred my aunt, I realized that I became the person I hated then on. I became indolent and insolent as well, the characteristics of a person that in no time destroy any kinds of relationship, or if not, making any relationships join the ranks of absolute superficiality.

The grandiose of being liked by different people around this vastly diverse world we have, invited as virtual friends by people whom you never know or whom you never expect to have lived, not even in the wildest dreams you have, and followed and twitted by people who know nothing but to click and click and click is affixed by the split-a-second speed of this damnation of lethargy, the internet, the technology. The social life is, then, greatly misfortuned by this terrible leisure we have. Having this ever-burgeoning and self-alluring social networking systems to which I, myself, am passionately obsessed, everything is all-conspicuously jeopardized- from taking the quest to putting an end to the computer –generated life story you shared with your computer-generated friends is all but an easy thing. This factual triviality of one’s cyber-affability is but the good-for-nothing fruit of easy and time-saving yet meaningless search for true friends.

Everything, however, does not end there. We instilled the mindsets that are in fact wrong and bring them into reality- to greet our loved ones superficially because of the mere reminders in our accounts, to add others to our circle of friends without knowing anything about the person and without knowing them any better in the long run, to converse with sheer hi’s and hello’s and nothing more, to easily and inaptly spread the hottest yet proliferated and destructive gossips to make others the talk of the town in the ultra negative ways. Everything, moreover, just got very easy- to get one’s friend and to dump him, to make one’s name and destroy it.

The effortless charity it flaunts in the midst of this work-filled world we have is somewhat intolerable. I just wonder why I became almost completely engrossed with it for I know these things. Perhaps, I just became too erroneously obstinate and expressively insensitive.

By the way, did I confidently say that being irresponsible of the people on the use of this technological advancement is what I learned from the use of internet? Yes, as aforementioned, I did. Nevertheless, let me humbly draw it back for just now there is one thing I vividly realized that I inadvertently failed to notice from the sole beginning. It is all about my aunt, my hope, who untiringly annoyed me so much to make me take a grasp at things which I often opt not to because of my childish tenacity and insensitivity. I failed to regard hope as a significant element.

What for is hope, if we would not consider it, and, perhaps, not merely faultily consider it but to work with it and be motivated by it as well. I believe that we can still do something about what is apparently taking place. It takes time and it may even require a million years to be made possible. Yet, if all of us would start now- to be courageous enough to face the dreadful realities in this innately erratic life and to be determined to do something about them by working not only for one’s selfish benefits but by being inspired by so much altruism as well- maybe the next day when we wake up ready to face what the forever unpredictable tomorrow has to offer, everjack_0_dandy@yahoo.comything is done for I consider hope as a perpetually existing entity, amidst the near seemingly becoming-bleak-and-vague future, trying to nag us every now and then, yet, give us a million chances or so.