Impatience Pilipinas

The first ever automated, not 100% computerized, election begins. As expected from anything that has knobs, wires and other scary technical stuff, it has a big chance to malfunction and not work properly. Just like your cellphone, if something went wrong, the only logical thing to do is fix it. Unfortunately, a lot of PCOS machines as they call it goes haywire, starts vomiting and rejecting all the ballots. As the technicians try to fix the machines, combination of our patented tropical heat, long lines and PCOS machine with his paper rejecting skills, many voters choose to say eff it and goes home, and most of them has no plan to return in later time.

We are fine with things we want, like we are willing to stay for a least 2 hours standing in line, waiting for our turn to enter the movie theater. But when it comes to something very important to our life such as our contribution to the election and something goes wrong, we go impatient, starts biting vigorously to our remaining candy in our mouth and decides to head home, watch the TV and point while laughing to the people who chose to stay and kick the ass of our patented tropical heat.

We love to complain, starts finger-pointing and complain more. We are patient while waiting for your food in fine dining restaurants, you may apply this patience level while waiting for your turn to vote. Don’t be a prick and just face the heat since we face the oven heat everyday, even at night. As the PCOS technicians starts reading the PCOS machines for dummies book while they fix the machine, you can do a lot of things while waiting like reading a newspaper, talking to your companions, playing with your PSP but still being alert to snatchers, making new friends to other people in line and other stuff.

Admittedly, I was never got myself registered for the election for reasons so many, so the phrase “if you are not registered, you have no right to complain” may somewhat apply to me but I want to all the registered voters just throw away their angst, wait patiently and exercise your right to vote, but please choose wisely. Don’t worry you can still watch your favorite TV shows that you missed while voting through youtube, if you have a computer and a decent Internet access that is.

By the way if I had myself registered, my vote goes to Gibo Teodoro as president and Jejomar Binay as my vice president, despite my whole family is into Villar for the presidency.

The Language Molestors

Since Internet and its all broadband glory is already in the mainstream, a lot of people uses the Internet to exchange ideas and inputs. Since many people are partaking the great Internet concept, there is still a percentage of users labeled as Jejemons.

Jejemon? what the fudge?
Admittedly I have no idea on what a Jejemon yet I met them almost everyday especially on local message boards. I just learned the term a week ago and I realized they are literally a lot of them, thousands of them. A Jejemon uses an absurd language which is a localized and modified version of 1337 speak or leet speak or as I called it as idiot speak. 1337 speak is what the foreign online gamers and computer geeks used to communicate with each other, their own language widely used by young Internet athletes, which consists of basement dwellers and has a phobia of outside life.

A simple he he he is not hard to type
The term Jejemon is taken from the murdered phrase of  “he he he”. From the universally known “he he he” was tragically converted into “je je je”. Some others say it all started with a typo like how “owned” turned  into “pwned” but repeatedly using the letter J instead of letter H is pure bullcrap. They love to put unnecessary letters to words to make it longer, for the reason I don’t know why. Another characteristic of this idiocy is to mix both lower and upper case of a letter, in one word. An example is the word hello, if  molested by a Jejemon, HeLouwH is the new word. Combining similar sounding letters side by side to make it more complicated like the word afternoon turns into AfPterNuN.

Jejemons, the Younger Years
Actually the Jejemon phenomenon is not new, they are just more prevalent than before because the easy accessibility of the broadband Internet. Back when I was just starting using the net, around 97 or 98, a lot of Jejemons already spread their language nonsense throughout the cyberspace. Internet back then is still not a mainstream thing and I got my first taste of Internet access inside of our old school library. Some of them are actually my old friends in high school and they are usually hang around in MIRC and the early versions of Yahoo Chats. Fortunately I never adopt Jejemonesque language, the closest similar language I use online are the usual Internet slangs like LOL, ROFL and Full of Win.

Jejemons, the Modern Crap
Now, the modern Jejemons dances around in the Internet, especially in big social sites. In my observation there are just a bunch of directionless male teenagers who acts like stereotype hispanic gangsters, throwing ridiculous hand signs and wearing outrageous clothes while inside of a public Internet café, wasting the hard-earned money of their parents through being idiots in the Internet. Unfortunately, they are a lot of female Jejemons, I think they greater in numbers than their male counterparts. You know the type, excited teen girls and doing cutesy stuff in the Internet, communicating each other through their murdered language and does other stuff  a lot of modern teens enjoy, which includes stripping themselves and doing shows online naked. Sadly, there are 20+ Filipinos who still do the Jejemon crap and should face a repeatedly stabbing with a broken keyboard to the head.

A way to lessen the number of Jejemons is don’t feed on their idiocy. Still The best thing to fight Jejemons is simply take the Internet and the computer itself away from them and put them back to school, probably all the way down to basic Nursery level language class.