Part of my routine after pushing the office door and depositing my things in my work station is to fix a cup of coffee and grab the daily. And then, weilding a pen, I bow my head for the 8 o'clock habit.
I buy the dailies for one reason: the only things appealing to me in the dailies these days are the crosswords and sudoku puzzles in the entertainment section. There's a certain simple joy in filling the boxes with the correct letters and numbers: that what was a problem previously is now solved by your doing.
The news in the city, in the the capital and abroad are the added bonus I get that allow me to play informed smart-ass among the irregular newspaper-readers at work. But that also means that the randomness of my newspaper-reading habits fill me with generalities.
Today though, I decided to flip to neighboring sections before proceeding to answer the number game.
Story number 1 was of a man who entered the afterlife after having an argument with his girlfriend. According to news, girl did not allow boy friend to join an outing she was attending with former classmates. Thus, the noose.
Story number 2 is of another man who kills himself after having been left by his wife,who brought along with her their kids. The latter packed up after having been hit by the husband while engaged in an argument.
Apparently, trends also tend to happen with crimes. Consider the latest hyped story of the murdered call center agent, and that of the MEZ employee, both of which happened a week apart. Both deaths also resulted from texting.
And what's the count on females who were butchered, and whose parts were wrapped in garbage bags and carelessly disposed in various areas?
Or the drive-by killings, many cases of which remain as jigsaw puzzles with missing pieces.
Daily, at least one dies by someone's wrath or one's own will. Suspects are shown in technicolor, most of them remorseful for their acts. To the reasonable and functional, it is very puzzling how repercussions never occurred to them -- all that time they put to waste by going stale in prison.
As for political bickering -- I do not touch the stuff as I am not an expert, unless I am up for teleserye-ic following of the developments on the pingpong of rebuttals and retorts. It's muddy enough in the mush of truths and lies in their arena; very unappealing to the random daily-reader like me.
These stories neatly laid out on newspaper pages provide us our daily dose of confusion. Despite the distance we maintain, the more one reads the more one becomes concerned. Paranoid. Angry. The rabble-rabble of people's opinions do not provide enough explanations to fill in the large hole that is "WHY". It makes one think that the Filipino people are up to their ears in their own shit. And as these stories pile up day after day, they become mundane and one tires of the befuddlement.
I flip back to my sudoku to refocus my brain.
Those who do not keep abreast with the latest crimes and current events choose to do just that because there's enough disorder to think about in their own spheres.
Other modern-day Houdinis escape news of the city's atrocities by answering games answerable by logic.
We opt for the crossword, or the sudoku, because unlike reasons for the heinous and the atrocious, the blank holes in the puzzles do not gape at you without answers.
