My So -Called FX Life

Agom has been traveling overseas and outside the city more frequently these days. This relegates me to two home-office commute options and vice-versa. Option A: subdivision to city hall tricycle-fx to megamall-another fx to Quaipo-taxi to Intramuros. Option B: subdivision to city hall tricycle-fx to Megamall-MRT to EDSA station-LRT to Kalaw Station – jeepney to Intramuros. Both options would take from one and a half hour under normal Metro Manila traffic conditions to two terrible hours when there is just one too many traffic officers mixed with disoriented traffic lights at work. These past two weeks, I’ve been taking Option A for no reason. Agom tells me taking the MRT-LRT routes would be less stressful but I just can’t bear being compressed like sardines in a can inside those train cabs specially when it picks up passengers in the Makati stops. So FX it is for me all the way to Quaipo then vice-versa in the evening.

But I think I have to reconsider the acceptability of Option A. My reason is that I may be sitting a bit comfortably inside the vehicle but I am so deprived of much-needed quiet while commuting. I’m a promdi working in the city for almost 15 years and I value some quiet time wherever or whenever I can get it, including sitting back and trusting the FX driver to bring me to the terminal safely.

These past days, I can’t do that. The other night I had to suffer listening to three passengers speak, no, shout, in their dialect while the FX radio was blaring pop music. I had to stop myself from asking either the driver to shut the radio off or my three seatmates to postpone their presscon until they get home. I was beginning to think they were angry at me because the woman beside me kept looking at me while she told the whole FX-world about something she might be angry about. I could only guess from their tones and their faces for I speak a different dialect. This morning, I did not suffer through shouting bouts in an alien language but I was a silent witness to the plans, financial woes, airport concerns of a girl saying goodbye to her boyfriend a zillion times as they cuddled themselves inside an oven-hot FX! I was beginning to think I took an FX bound for the international airport not Quiapo! While others might savor being voyeurs to their “lambingan,” me I don’t.

Call me overly decent, call me a hypocrite, call me anything but be careful if you’ll tell me to just take a cab and have peace in exchange for a few bucks.