Supreme’s holiday madness survival guide

MANILA, Philippines - December is finally here, boys and girls. Everything we’ve worked hard for all year leads up to this — the long death march into the clustermuck of traffic, MRT mosh pits, mall rushes ‘til midnight, and the screaming maw of general holiday season panic. Christmas is supposed to be the most joyful and positive time of the year, yet everyone knows how December can reduce the country into a coiled spring of stress and fury. So let’s try to take a collective deep breath and find ways to squeeze out any ounce of merriment that we still can from this situation. The big holiday rush is giving us a ton of lemons. Let’s drown ourselves in lemonade.

Traffic Zen

This week, I got in a cab whose driver still couldn’t believe that traffic exists on EDSA. Throughout the whole 45-minute slog, all he did was curse, cluck his tongue repeatedly, and shift in his seat as if he couldn’t wait for class to be over. I drive, too, so I know how uncomfortable traffic jams can get. But being in the same car with this dude was at least 10 times worse.

The Dante’s Inferno that is our traffic situation is spiralling down three more circles at Christmastime. We all know this. We also know that, with the way our cities are currently structured, there is no viable way out of this mess, that those so-called “Christmas lanes” are really just code for “other places to get stuck in traffic.” There’s no sense in fighting it.

We can turn traffic into a transformative experience. We can turn hour-long logjams into hour-long meditations. Why lose hours of your life to traffic when you can gain hours of your life back thinking about the bigger stuff? What does life mean? Is it time to quit my job and start a business? Does her Twitter message mean she likes me? What exactly happened to Matthew McConaughey inside that black hole in Interstellar? Things like that.

The MRT fitness program

Christmastime also means the MRT situation is about to get impossibly worse than it already is. Compounded with the fact that you’ll likely ride these sardine cans of humanity dragging along hours’ worth of Christmas shopping, what you get is something that closely approaches torture.

Well, you know what they say about pain: it makes you beautiful. Allegedly. At least that’s what gym buffs say. So the next time you have to balance yourself in the middle of a moving packed train with heavy shopping bags on both hands and somebody’s butt is pushing you out of the tiny square-inch space you’re barely occupying, think of it as a highly advanced workout designed to strengthen your core.

Buy new crap, make new friends

Malls and bazaars are fun until you physically have to be in them. The sheer volume of people is enough to rouse your inner agoraphobia and make you despise your fellowmen, what with all the constant see-sawing between being shoved by harried shoppers and becoming the one who’s doing all the shoving to people who just won’t give way.

It doesn’t have to be like this. These people aren’t obstacles to your shopping — they’re friends you haven’t met yet. Treat the malls as your own personal mixer, where you get to expand your social circle via people who share your basic interests: making sure that the gears of holiday commercialization keep turning and that you get out of there in one piece.

Poetry in stasis

Lines are a part of urban Pinoy existence, but they seem to quadruple in length and number come December. There are now long lines where there were none before — at cashiers, gift-wrapping counters, and in every single mall entrance that exists. It’s tricky to deal with them because they sit between the limbo of complete time-wasting nuisance and tolerable hiccup. They’re an inconvenience, yes, but they aren’t long enough for you to do anything of consequence. Game apps? Too absorbing; someone may cut in line. Books? Longer attention is required. Getting someone’s number or Facebook? Not enough time and too creepy.

That leaves us with one option: haiku writing. You can compose it in your head while watching the line move and you may have a full anthology come Christmas Eve. An entire universe of tiny movements is at your disposal, providing you with limitless material. You could easily come up with instant classics like:

manong guard’s drumstick

is a blind inspector

ripping her Class-A LV.

Go rogue (or maybe not)

Or here’s an idea: just stay home. Forget spending time putting great thought into gifts that will just accumulate dust in someone’s room — dust off your own discarded gifts from a year ago and recycle them into someone else’s problem.

But of course, you still need to go to parties and buy food and be a functional human being. You don’t want to be antisocial in the most social time of the year — you have to go out there and take part in the chaos if you want to feel the real Christmas spirit. You can either be a Scrooge or a stressed-out sociopath. Your choice.

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Tweet the author @ColonialMental.