Carpooling Loonies
By Jinki Beldia

32 flavors

It's not everyday when you wake up feeling ‘a hundred percent.' By a hundred percent, I mean looking at your face first thing in the morning and not getting scared of it. In a society where people sometimes forget to scratch beneath the surface, most of them end up feeling like a three-day old muffin waiting to be picked up. If it's a Roger's muffin, why not? But there are thousands who are just muffin muffins and that fact paves the way for society's major psychological breakdown. It won't be the first, but just another one of them. Are we depressed?

Like most of you, I love to drag people down with me to misery lane. So I'm not going to discuss manic depression like I was the only human being around here experiencing it. I want to point fingers (I'm doing that right now), especially since I received e-mails from people wanting to get out of it but not knowing how. I don't know how to pull anybody out of wretchedness, but what causes depression is no mystery to mankind, unlike the truth about God's sexual orientation. Let's talk about it just a little bit. Manic depression, I mean. I have so much respect for God I'll wait for Him to come out with the truth. Speculating can be rude.

Manic depression is like breakfast. You don't really want it in every waking moment of your life but you end up having it because other people have it on their table. I'm still deciding whether it's the domino effect or the I-wanna-have-what-everybody-else-has attitude. Maybe it's none of the above. In one study (in a book I picked up from somebody's junk) it was revealed that one of the major causes of depression is discontent. Yes, of one's self. It's not always about having only P6.50 in your pocket when the minimum fare is P7.00. It's not about settling with instant coffee when you're craving for brewed. It's being disturbed by this mental picture of yourself morphing into the morphed Michael Jackson and believing it by heart. In some extreme cases, people develop Body Dysmorphic Disorder (BDD), a psychological disorder in which a person experiences lingering anxiety about his or her physical being. These patients go to dangerous lengths like having multiple plastic surgeries, yet still remain unhappy about their looks.

A BDD patient named Jenny came out in Oprah Winfrey's show (where else do psychologically handicapped people go to reach the whole world and send their message of concern for humanity for free and with a bang, plus with Dr. Phil on the other side of the sofa?) and shocked what seemed like the whole world with the revelation of her BDD. Twenty-eight years old with 26 plastic surgeries plus two more before she guested in Oprah. A little botox here and there and something else. She said it all started when her ex-husband told her she would look better with bigger breasts and that her nose was too big. Craper . Oh, don't look this word up in the dictionary. It's not there. But, craper . Do we blame the husband? Just a teeny-weeny bit. The problem is not only because she had a dim-witted husband, but her self-esteem was nowhere to be found. Nowhere to be found like that dog I poisoned.

We all have moments when we feel inadequate and would march to the nearest mirror and blame everything on our physical attributes, like our whole face was a disaster made in New Orleans. Some want bigger eyes, smaller nose, wider hips, anorexic legs, hairy chest for that macho effect, a six-pack, one whole pack of something on this part of the body, etc, etc. I wanted to have Diana Ross' 1980's hair at one point because spiders were beginning to turn my room into a huge web and I blamed it on my boring hair.

If a lot of people could afford plastic surgery in this city, BDD would be one of the mayor's major concerns. Imagine people walking around with either an undeviating smile or a permanent frown… and very unhappy? Chuckies on the loose. Wrinkle-free faces, tiny noses with the false teeth still hanging there. If you are not one of them muffin muffins then I worship you. You are 32 flavors and then some. It's important keep that boom box inside you (tiny voices work for horror movies only) reminding you that.