WELCOME to Malacañang’s amazing media maze the happy face of Secretary Harry Roque! I should’ve included Happy Harry in my survey of how we’re living our new-normal lives, because this is what he said last week: With mothers as the enforcers of ECQ, discipline will rule at home, beginning with their husbands, who won’t be able to sneak out to be with the “kulasisi” (mistress).
Men, married or single, fooling around with their mistresses or friends when they congregate out in the streets to box, play basketball, gamble at cockfighting, consume alcohol, and violate all the rules of curfew and social distancing – these are the people who deserve to be conscripted for forced labor in the vilest ways. As an exasperated PRRD scolded them, “Don’t try me?”
Fiestas are on hold indefinitely. Parties, too. For a party animal like Leo, the new normal is “waking up at 5 a.m., going to bed at 9 p.m., and cooking my own food.” Healthy is in! For a retired banker, “The new norm is 50 percent of the old. Limited transpo, limited work force, no theaters, no churches, no school, senior citizens lowest priority.”
The lone dentist in my survey is afraid the scourge of coronavirus will discourage students from enrolling for a degree in dentistry. Once the lockdown is lifted and their patients will have no excuse not to have their teeth checked, they will see their dentists wearing PPE suits. They should also expect every clinic to be disinfected after each patient.
Basic hygiene – what our mothers taught us when we were in kindergarten – is fashionable once more as we creep further along into that other epidemic called ageing. Yes, the elderly are the most vulnerable, but it’s those pigheaded males in the crosshairs of Yorme and Lt. Gen. Guillermo Eleazar who endanger us and should be locked up in a lab where they’ll be offered up as guinea pigs for scientists working on a vaccine.
In these anti-social, physical-distancing times, it takes a seasoned editor to appreciate things differently: “A baby boom in December!”
Until then, what’s the norm between lovers? To reinvent or not the etiquette of intimacy, dating and mating? Need lovers prove their love by testing for coronavirus?
