Athletes in the provinces

CHEWING the fat with my ex-girlfriend’s uncle over the weekend just gave me a bird’s eye view of how the national government has always treated provincial athletes all these years — from the time of President Ferdinand Edralin Marcos’s Misamis Oriental School of Arts and Trade to President Rodrigo Roa Duterte’s University of Science and Technology in Southern Philippines — not much has changed.

Suffice it to say, they’re all full of it with the athletes end up holding a big bag of crap when they fail.

Sometimes, even if they do get the gold for the country, the government may slander your name under the pretext of the war against drugs backed with shoddy intelligence work.

Case in point for this is Olympic weight lifting silver medalist Hidilyn Francisco Diaz. From out of the blue, the Palace included her in their supposed matrix of government destabilizers.

“Please do not link somebody who is busy making sacrifices for everyone, for the Philippines. I am merely doing my best to represent the Philippines in weightlifting,” Diaz posted on her Facebook in May, this year.

The Palace has never issued an apology to Diaz and instead blamed “some media outlets” for getting their haphazard matrix wrong. “There has been a wrong analysis of the diagram by some media outlets,” Palace spokesman Salvador Panel had said in a statement.

Along with Diaz, former volleyball player Gretchen Ho was also enlisted in Malacañang’s “ouster matrix.”

In an interview with media, Ho pointed to a tweet she posted on March 29 as the likely reason why she was included in the matrix.

“But how can you reason with paid trolls and egg heads? It’s warfare online, and we’re getting caught in between. Be smart and discerning, folks. Don’t let the internet fool you,” Ho posted on Twitter.

Ho said a troll commented on her post and it turned out that it was a DDS troll (Read: Duterte Die-hard Supporter).

 “Siyempre ’yung mga DDS, nagalit sa akin kasi akala nila… they misunderstood it, they put in on Facebook, took it out of context saying that I was calling all the Duterte supporters egg heads,” a Rappler report quoted Ho as saying.

As I have always said, social media, like any other medium or platform for public discourse, is garbage in and garbage out. If the content is king then context is queen. Articulating your point on Twitter will always be a challenge since the platform only allows you 280 characters for every post. If you are not creative in your posts then you will just be contributing to the overall dumbing down of an already comprehension-challenged generation.

How do you expect these athletes to be mentally prepared if the government and non-government trolls keep on taunting them on social media platforms? In the case of Diaz, she isn’t only looking to dominate the powerlifting event in the Southeast Asian Games. As early as when she was tagged as an alleged government destabilizer, she has set her sights to the Olympic Games in Tokyo next year.

That’s why I don’t understand this administration’s minions supposed rally cry to “just support our athletes” when they themselves troll these promising sports icons.

After all, has been said and done, do you think these athletes will remain in the collective consciousness of the country? Apart from the very few, the likes of Lydia de Vega and Efren “Bata” Reyes, there are many national athletes in the provinces who are struggling to make ends meet after giving pride to the Republic some odd years ago. Pfft.

Walking Fiona

IT took me a while to walk our Fiona around the neighborhood again. A fortnight ago, we had an unfortunate incident with a confused alley tomcat as we were about to climb back our stairs after the walk. I will not go into the details of what happened exactly, except that our new bitch is an American Pitbull Terrier.

I remember throwing up at the sight of blood and gore. I am not ashamed to admit that I was shocked at Fiona’s ferocity. However, now that I have had time to process that incident, I have learned a lot of things about Fiona in particular and dogs in general. Yes, through our nightly walks around the neighborhood.

My ex-girlfriend reminded me that Fiona did wag her tail and was kind of offering the mangled tomcat to me. But I was too engrossed at the sight and smell of blood that I hardly saw what Fiona was trying to do. She was trying to please me, as her new daddy. It was supposed to be a gift!

I’m familiar with dogs, mind you. Emilio used to have 14 dogs at one time in our Gusa residence before. All of them were stray mutts and mongrels but we loved them just the same. They somehow gravitated to our house and papa was kind enough to give them a home. I remember we would have dog poop scattered all over our lawn. But I was busy with school that I never had time to play with any of them except for one, Duffy. He was the biggest among the mongrels.

Fast forward to owning a dog, I had doubts if we were prepared to have a full-sized dog around our small house. For one, we don’t have a lawn to speak of. We are right smack dab in the middle of the city. But after seeing Fiona for the first time, I was so heartbroken at her condition that we accepted her and vowed we’d love and nurse her back to health.

Her body was ridden with really big ticks. I guess, big ticks because she’s a big dog. Worse, Fiona was so thin that you could see the outline of her spine and ribs.

Before when she was all bony and thin, Fiona was withdrawn and looked like she’s bored out of her wits. Now, that she has grown considerably faster than before, she is surprisingly bubbly. She is extremely kind to our Chewie.

Our first dog at the house, Chewie, is a mixed breed of Pomeranian and Shih Tzu. Understandably, she was annoyed, to say the least, at the sight of a new dog and a bitch, like her, at that.

At first, we were afraid that Fiona would mistake Chewie to a cat and devour her. But that fear gave way to laughter when we officially introduced Fiona to Chewie. Manang Rhona Canoy taught us before how to introduce a new dog to the family. She said you let the old dog smell the butt of the new dog.

Whenever Chewie would “visit” Fiona’s corner in the house, she would scratch Fiona’s face even though the latter would try to lick her profusely. We can’t stand it. It always makes us laugh that a big dog is being bullied by a much smaller dog. Maybe this is because Chewie took a stronghold at the house first. I guess, for dogs, size doesn’t matter in identifying who the alpha dog is in a household.

Fiona has also displayed one adorable behavior when I walk her through the neighborhood. As you may have surmised, Consolacion has a butt-load of stray dogs. There are too many dogs that my son has called the “kangaroos” (Read: kagiron nga mga iro).

 These mutts would growl and bark as Fiona and I walk by. What amazes me is Fiona’s composure through all of these. Sometimes, she would stop and glare at barking dogs which almost always silences them up. Sometimes, she wouldn’t even care to look at the direction of some barking dogs. By the way, all of them would always scamper away from Fiona, given the glare or not.

But when we go back to the house to retire for the day, Chewie, the in-house bitch of the household would be there to challenge her. Willingly, Fiona obliges her.

She is still on the leash right now but given the improvement of her social skills, we are seriously considering her to be free to roam the house. Of course, we’ll have to assess the structural integrity of the post-WWII house we are living in.

We can learn a lot from dogs. If I may paraphrase George Carlin’s lines: “They are decent people. When was the last time you heard of a (sire) hit his (bitch) after coming home? You haven’t because (dogs) are decent people.”

I used to think I understood the idiomatic expression — “dog eat dog.” This idiom is used to refer to a situation of fierce competition in which people are willing to harm each other to succeed. It is much like the popular, albeit misused idiom nowadays, “crab mentality.”

Now, after having two distinctly different dogs in the house, I say that idiom is a slur against dogs around the world. We seem to be attributing the dark side of human behavior to animals as if they willingly do the same. Pfft.