Tuesday, October 09, 2007 Malilong: Thing called TV By Frank Malilong The Other Side
I HAD heard about this thing called television in my youth in Masbate but never got to see or watch one until I came to the city for college. And the first few times that I did, my cousins and I had to crane our necks in order to peep through the wooden jalousies of a neighbor’s window so we could watch Hawaii Five-O and Mission Impossible.
We tried to be as unobtrusive as possible, because during the times that we were noisy our neighbor shut (slammed would be a better description) the window on us. It was difficult trying to keep our voices down especially when Jack Lord was chasing the bad guys but we had to pay the price for our neighbor’s tolerance.
When I got married, I bought my first TV set from a town mate, who had a relative, who ran, we had been told, a business in Olongapo. It turned out his was the seamy kind of business, buying stolen things, if he didn’t steal them himself, and selling them to us.
The TV set that I bought must have been sourced that way, which made me liable as an accessory (there was no anti-fencing law yet at that time) to theft or robbery. But criminal liability was the least of my concerns even after I got wind of my town mate’s business. The TV set itself was the problem.
Two days after I parted with my one month’s pay (P5 a day, no work no pay) for something that didn’t even come in a box, I discovered that I, too, had been had. The picture on the screen was either too fat or thin and the more you turned the knob for fine tuning the more distorted the images became.
In spite of that, my set and I had an otherwise peaceful co-existence. After all, it was my first prized possession. That all ended, however, when one day my favorite student, who used to tag along, complained that he developed a headache every time he watched television in the house. I sold the set away.
So many years have passed since then and so many things have taken place. For example, my former favorite student has become a Cabinet secretary. I see him on TV every now and then. This time, I didn’t have to peep through a neighbor’s window nor contend with a screen where the images are either too fat or too thin.
And why this sudden recollection of the origins of my addiction to the idiot box? Yesterday’s banner headline of this paper is to blame. “Manny causes brief ceasefire,” it said. That is only partly true. Even if Manny fought but there was no television, there wouldn’t have been temporary peace.
