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Years ago I heard about a teenager who invented an excellent excuse to miss school for a day: he claimed that he was possessed by devils. He didn’t even have to say “I’m possessed”, he just started thrashing about, goggling his eyes, spitting, and speaking gibberish in a low, scary voice—behavior he copied from the movie The Exorcist. So his parents concluded that demons had taken over their son, and summoned a priest. (Were they going to write him a note saying, “Dear Teacher, Please excuse our son’s absence from school yesterday as he was under the control of demons?”)

Conveniently for the kid, the priest was a foreigner who did not speak Tagalog, so he couldn’t negotiate with the alleged evil occupant. Unfortunately, that kind of intense overacting is exhausting work, and after a couple of hours the kid slipped and answered a question in his own voice. So he was busted.

I wonder if that would work as an excuse to take the day off from the office. That’s if your co-workers don’t already assume that you’re a foul spawn of hell. Here’s another possible excuse: Cotard’s Syndrome. It’s an actual neurological condition. People with Cotard’s believe that they are dead. There’s a documented case of a woman who insisted on being dressed in a shroud and placed in a coffin. She demanded to be buried, and no amount of argument (such as the fact that she was participating in an argument) could convince her that she was alive. She just lay in her coffin, and several weeks later reality matched up with her conviction. She died. Yup, try citing Cotard’s when you file for sick leave.

Maybe it’s my enormous head that makes me look like an information booth or the Navigator in Dune, because people are always asking me for directions. This is funny because I can’t point north and I can’t estimate distances—I’ll say something is nearby, and it turns out to be ten blocks away. Today I had on my giant spectacles, so I looked like a lighthouse. I was standing outside Unimart in Greenhills, waiting for a cab, when a white-haired lady walked up to me and asked me if I spoke Spanish. I took 12 units of Spanish in college so the answer is No, but I’ve seen lots of Mexican movies so I can understand about ten words. So the lady and I conversed in Spanglish. She said she had been looking for her driver for an hour and she couldn’t reach him on her mobile phone, and she’d asked various people at the mall for assistance, but couldn’t make herself understood. So I called her driver and when he appeared with the car she offered me a lift. Which was nice, because sometimes when I’m waiting for a taxi, people leap out of their cars and ask me to sign their books or the backs of receipts or something, then after avid declarations of fealty they jump back into their cars and drive away. I’m not jumping into strangers’ cars, but they’re supposed to make the offer. It’s basic human.

Hitchens pointed out that if followers of George Bernard Shaw are called Shavians, then admirers of Evelyn Waugh should be called Wavians. I’m a Wavian, I still have my tattered orange Penguin paperbacks of Decline and Fall, Vile Bodies, Black Mischief etc from college. They were not required reading in comparative lit, but I read them in class anyway, as an antidote to the teachers’ invisible tranquilizer darts. As a Wavian there is one thing I need to tell everyone who wanders onto this blog: Evelyn Waugh was a man.

Here’s a piece on Waugh by Anthony Lane. There’s a new book out on the Waugh family; haven’t read it.

Saffy on the door, originally uploaded by 160507.

Tina just got back from Borneo, and reports that Kuching, the capital of Sarawak, Malaysia is Cat City. (‘Kuching’ is Malay for cat, close to ‘kuting’ which is Tagalog for kitten.) There are statues of cats on street corners, and a cat museum, which is like the Villa Escudero of Kuching. Across the street from the Holiday Inn there’s a group of cat statues about twelve feet high. Catzilla! No live cats loitering on the streets, though; if you want to see cats walking around as if they own the place (which they do), go to Rome.

A new study says cats domesticated themselves in the Near East 10,000 years ago. At that time humans had moved on from hunting and gathering to agriculture, and begun to stay put. They built houses and granaries, so rodent problems soon followed. Some clever wildcats entered the settlements, demonstrated their pest control skills and wielded their charms, and before long they were living with the humans. I know exactly how this happened. “Hmm. We could continue to live out in the wild, which is dangerous, or we could move in with these upright creatures and make them feed us. We can still hunt for our own entertainment, and we only have to look cute. Suckers!”

So it was their own choice, which explains why they now strut around with an expression that says, “You’re not the boss of me.” They don’t really meow in the wild, you know, they’re only doing it to humor us.

Now my cats are trying to domesticate me. Help.

“Research to be published later this year will reveal that depression has exploded among French youth with increases of up to a third in the past decade. The statistics are striking. Three successive studies of around 15,000 children reveal that, among young people aged from 12 to 18, 9 per cent of boys and 22 per cent of girls show signs of depression and anxiety – three times the total in 1993. For the older adolescents the levels are even higher, with an increase to 14 per cent among boys and 35 per cent among girls aged 17 to 18. . .”

Ha! I burst my pimples at you and call this a seelly theeng! You should try growing up in Manila. There’s nothing like being born and raised in this town. Makes everyone else look like a wuss.