Three of the best words in the world are, “You are right.” When I find I’m the recipient of these three words, it calms me. It makes me feel good.
But sometimes, it also shames me. It gives me a strong urge to jump off a cliff and die. How can anybody enjoy feeling so right when the rest of the world seems so wrong?
These days, I’m finding comfort in being wrong. It feels good. It removes the burden of trying to keep up with all the fucking pretense. I’m wrong? That’s just beautiful. As beautiful as George Bush in power or walking out of the Kyoto Protocol, or as feel-good as this old, completely toothless 80-year-old lady who still sucks guys’ dicks somewhere on Doroteo Jose (if you don’t believe me, ask somebody like Noli de Castro. He will know).
Because that’s the rare beauty of people’s idea of wrongness—it feels superficial. It feels like cold water dribbling on your skin. You squeeze your heart to feel the real deal about the universe, and your heart tells you that what everybody’s mouth says is wrong, is what everybody does in real life.
Rightness is somehow good, but it’s fiction. It’s like this eternal PR propaganda, served by ourselves to ourselves. We have our cake, eat it too, then tell the rest of humanity we never ate the cake; in fact, we never baked any, goddammit.
In my line of work, I fix up these English documents and hunt for “wrong things.” Dangling participles, incorrect subject–verb agreement, and wrong use of dashes (there’s the hyphen, the en dash, and the em dash, and each of them has different uses—and I’m sure somebody already guillotined whoever invented these three). There’s British English and American English. There are all the crazy idioms that don’t make sense.
Sometimes, when I’d look at an English composition and see the glaring mistakes, I’d find myself fighting hard to make sure it remains wrong. Because there’s a day you realize what’s so wrong with wrongness, anyway? So what if this Japanese dude said (as a warning on a mobile phone), “Warning: Be careful of bad language in this mobile phone, because a partner’s feeling is going to be bad. Let’s keep mobile manners.”
(That came from www.engrish.com; I can’t use my own “editables” as specimen here. But let me just say my own work is equally mind boggling.)
I mostly spend my days trying so hard to be right, find the wrong things people do with their writings, and “correct” them. In my dark moments, I usually daydream it would be cool to accomplish my job with a loaded gun and a bulletproofed Bentley, so I could “correct” the authors myself and ensure they won’t contaminate the system with their mistakes ever again.
Sometimes, the urge to be wrong is so strong I unconsciously fuck up my own grammar or spelling. If you find many mistakes scattered all over this blog, it’s because I don’t really care [but I’d like to reassure the people who give me “rakets” that as long as they pay me, I can “control” these demons, thank you very much. As Bill Gates usually say about Windows, “Yes, I am on top of this. Everything will be alright”).
Here are some more wrong things I want to do:
1. Flash a crisp P500 bill to Cory and Kris Aquino’s faces, the one with Ninoy’s somber face on it, and tear up the money so slowly and dramatically while I laugh like a horse on meths.
2. Bring the entire team of young “psychics” of the TV show Nginiiig into a room and beat the living daylights out of them until they’d admit they never really saw or felt any ghost EVER—until they confess to the truth that they only had really bad childhood involving characters like a sexually repressed dirty ice cream vendor, a gay boy scout instructor, and a horny female goat.
3. Challenge Butch Francisco to a gun duel, only that his bullets would be blanks and mine would be dumdum, and he won’t be informed.
4. Bring the parish priest of Saint Michael’s Institute in Bacoor,
5. Teach a class of eager and impressionable kindergarten kids how to use a condom, with their young twenty-something teacher as my “demo assistant.”
I could add more, but I have to go out and take a ride on my “bulletproofed Bentley.”
I’ll see who I can “correct” tonight.
***
For similar posts, see Bullshit Meister.
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