DEAR Mr. President,

Mr. President, I read the news today. And I said, Oh boy. It’s about a lucky man who made the grade. And though the news was rather sad, well, I just had to laugh, Mr. President. I know you’re a fan of the Beatles, like me. Sorry if I had to steal lines from one of their songs. I’m not very good at writing letters, so I wrote whatever came to mind.

I don’t know why “A Day in the Life” came to mind after reading the news that you bought yourself a Porsche. Maybe because the song is about a young politician blowing his mind out in a car after he failed to notice that the lights had changed. Then there was that crowd who just stood and stared even if they’d seen his face before. We both know what happened to the character in the song, Mr. President. He died in a car crash before John Lennon could even get to the third verse.

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THAT a lot of people don’t like the police is not surprising. The public and men in uniform (including the military) have always been inimical to each other. The public thinks cops can’t be trusted while cops think the public is so damn right. So the police created a non-crime related office called Police Community Relations (PCR) to convince the public they’re friends.

Like any police office, the PCR is composed of cops. But instead of going out in the streets to hunt for snatchers, PCR cops visit crime-prone communities and wear stupid Santa hats during Christmas, bringing gifts to little rugby boys and girls, who will eventually grow up to become big rugby boys and girls.

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NOW let’s talk about babies. Not that it’s Christmas, although we’ll get to that later, but because I’m an expectant father and everything that’s in my head right now are images of babies and baby stuff as I watch The Partner’s tummy grow bigger each day. In three months’ time, we will meet our firstborn face-to-face, and I expect our baby to flash me the Devil’s Horns, or the rock-and-roll hand gesture, as his/her first official act as the newest member of the human race.

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CHANGE your profile picture to a cartoon character from your childhood and invite your friends to do the same. Until Monday (Dec. 6) there should be no human faces on Facebook, but an invasion of memories. This is a campaign to stop violence against children.

But we’re sorry to tell you that you can’t use Pinoy cartoon characters because they are so ewwwww. You are the children of this generation with Justin Bieber as your cultural icon, so please don’t use anyone from this list called “Insoymada’s Top 10 Pinoy Komiks Characters:”

1. Kenkoy–Tony Velasquez’s Kenkoy is the first komiks superstar. This hilarious portrait of the Filipino, trying but always failing to keep up with his American mentors, was born in the Liwayway comics in 1929.

When you say, “I so love my BF because he is so kenkoy,” you now know where the word came from. And you jejemons out there, Kenkoy’s been there, done that with his trademark lines like “Halo, how is yu?”, “watsamara” (what’s the matter), “dats oret” (that’s all right), “nating duwing” (nothing doing), “okidoki” (okeydokey), “lets tek ewok” (let’s take a walk), “is beri nesesari,” and “bay gali.”

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YOU know the moment has arrived when you look at your food and you think you’re having balbacua when you’re being served caldereta.

Me: Wow, balbacua! My favorite!/ Host: Ahm, sir, it’s caldereta. / Me: Really. Oh, I love caldereta too.

This bothered me because only a few years ago I could tell if it’s ants on my adobo or black pepper. Now, I have to use my sense of smell to make sure it’s pan de sal I’m dipping in my coffee instead of some round and brown tropical fruit like chico zapote.

So I did what any normal guy scared of the prospects of poking his nose into the world and living the rest of his life like that would do: I went to have my eyes checked by an eye specialist.

If you haven’t met one yet, an eye specialist is an extremely well-trained medical professional who lives in a mall, preferably in a dark corner of an optical shop, who thinks she’s a dentist in that she has this huge, scary-looking chair and all those scary looking equipment on standby in case she needs to gouge your eyes out.

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I APPLAUD City Hall and the City Council for their plan to build boxing clinics in the barangays under the long-term goal of producing the next Manny Pacquiao.

Here’s a portion of the news that came out in the front page of this paper’s Nov. 15 issue under the headline “Councilor wants boxing clinics to search for ‘the next Manny.’”

“After Manny Pacquiao’s victory, a Cebu City councilor said he wants the Cebu City Sports Commission to build up its boxing clinics in the barangays. These clinics, said Councilor Alvin Dizon, may help the city discover ‘the next boxing hero.’

“Dizon, who chairs the committee on housing, also wants the sports commission to expand its boxing program and include the urban poor and resettlement areas.

“Cebu City hopes to discover a new breed of good boxing fighters in the mold of the Filipino champion Manny Pacquiao from our city’s barangays, said Dizon in his resolution.

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The first Manny Pacquiao video that made the rounds in Facebook minutes after his fight with Antonio Margarito last Sunday was not a footage of the boxing hero hammering his opponent’s face to a pulp but of him playing the guitar and singing a medley of popular Visayan songs.

Copies of the video were sent to me by friends, all lovers of Visayan music, who wanted me to write something about it. Pacquiao is the world’s biggest endorser, they told me. He could endorse the lowly kamunggay today and the next day you can expect his fans to have fried kamunggay for breakfast.

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SPENDING all my non-office hours in the hospital for four months now has taught me a lot of medical words that I wouldn’t have otherwise discovered shooting down adjectives and adverbs in the newsroom. Tracheostomy, for example.

Tracheostomy is a surgical procedure which consists of boring a hole through a 79-year-old asthmatic second-hand-smoker retired teacher’s throat so that a PVC pipe can be inserted through to make her look like an abandoned DPWH drainage project. Seriously, tracheostomy is a surgical procedure performed to make it easier for us children to pump oxygen into our mother’s lungs because she’s too sick and tired and bored to do the breathing herself.

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In college, I was a member of the school’s official performing arts group. By official, I mean we were the ones sent by the school to different parts of the province to convince graduating high school students there’s more to college than Differential Calculus and Terror Professor 101: there’s Tinikling and Maglalatik, too. And if you’re super talented, like I was back then, you will be given the most noble and profound task of donning a G-string and exposing your skinny white legs in an Igorot dance, so enrol in our school now and enjoy a 50 percent discount in miscellaneous fees and ID lamination.

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I’m not exactly sure when this practice of columnists putting their contact information at the end of their columns began. When I started reading newspapers, there was only the apathetic period at the end of a column, or a question mark for that rhetorical ending, or an occasional exclamation point for the angst-ridden. Emoticons were not invented yet.

If a reader wanted to tell the columnist he wrote crap, he had to address his letter to the publisher in the hope of reading it in the paper’s Letter to the Editor Section 48 years later. Or he could opt to barge into the newsroom brandishing a machine gun for a more immediate response. But even this more violent option didn’t always ensure success since not all columnists worked regular hours in the newsroom.

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