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This is the blog of Ian Rosales Casocot. Filipino writer. Sometime academic. Former backpacker. Twink bait. Hamster lover.

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Wednesday, April 13, 2005

entry arrow8:13 AM | How It Is

I filed my income tax return last week. The taxable amount glared at me like a wart on paper. I pay the government this much every year? Highway robbery. I want a street named after me!

I needed some cooling down.

So last Sunday, Mark and I were doing our bit of Sunday strolling, something we used to do often but haven't done in a long time. I've been busy salvaging stories (to some degree of success) and preparing for the summer term, and he has been busy graduating from college and shooting TV shows. It is remarkable how so much clutter disguised as responsibilities make up our lives, we forget to actually live.

In Lee Super Plaza, we'd do our regular route of browsing the second-hand books and magazines at the mezzanine, eating siomai (and sometimes tacos) at the Food Court, then going on to the kitsch on display at the downstairs knick-knacks department: all those figurines and picture frames and candles and lamps and fake flowers of astonishing bad taste I wonder who buys these things. We become more excited when we get to the kitchen ware section, and the furnitures, and we wonder: why is that so? Have we become so domesticated together?

At the toy store, we revert to being children. All those Spongebobs and toy cars and funny dolls and stuffed toys and mechanical snakes to occupy our fancy! Then I saw some board games, the kind I used to play with as a kid, something that brought families and friends together: Pictionary, Trivial Pursuit, Scrabble, Bingo, Monopoly, Snake and Ladders, Clue...

I don't know anybody -- kids or adults -- who play board games these days. With that, and taxes, the world becomes so much sadder.


[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich




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