'Save the cheerleader, save the world'

This week for me has been one of those weeks when I wished I had superpowers. How I longed these past few days to be like one of those ordinary mortals who mysteriously developed superhuman abilities in the hit television series Heroes. It’s also the same show that popularized that quirky battle cry “Save the cheerleader, save the world” (as its lead characters literally had to do in order to save the planet from Armageddon). First in my wish list of extraordinary gifts would be super-plumbing abilities. The power to manipulate space and time would also be nice. And finally, the capability to read other people’s minds (as one survey that was done among the show’s fans revealed as the ability they would like to have the most). 

Already buried with tons of work, I recently decided to add yet another seemingly “hopeless” cause on my plate (St. Jude, the patron saint of desperate causes, would be proud). After a disastrous meeting involving that new cause, I drove home under St. Jude’s sympathetic (albeit invisible) gaze to find my frowning wife, with her arms akimbo, standing beside our pressure tank which was spraying our front yard with strong mists of water. Talking about superpowers, home repair is, unfortunately, my fatal kryptonite. If I want to irritate my wife, all I have to do is to tell her that I spent the whole day “troubleshooting” around the house. Of course, there was no need to do so at that moment. Except for the looming flood near our gate, the rest of the house — as well as her mood — had already turned into an arid dessert. My Plan A when things like this happen is to ask my wife’s brother to rescue me. He happens to be our next-door neighbor and is Mr. Fix-It himself. Unfortunately, there was no way to bypass the leak. And so I spent a good part of the rest of the day turning on and turning off our main water valve. The next day, I picked up equipment and some workers and we tried to weld the tank. After troubleshooting the whole morning, we gave up and decided to go for a temporary fix. Unfortunately, that didn’t last long either. Neither did my temper as I tried to juggle urgent work-related deadlines and headaches at the same time. By the time we got my plumbing problems somewhat under control, I had lost a day and a half of work. After dinner that evening and just when I thought I could finally get some work done on the computer, my wife tells me that our toilet had started leaking, too. In the darkness, all I could do was to howl like a vampire hungry for blood.

Even without my watery blues, however, I suppose that I’ve always had the tendency to bite off more than I can chew. I left the corporate world several years back partly because I wanted a less stressful life. I also wanted to do something a bit more meaningful for a change. I guess that’s what happens when your father was a saint who devoted his life to the farmers and you’re someone who constantly needs to implore the Lord to “lead you not unto temptation.” I thought that the non-corporate scene would be easier. I mean, how could being a kindergarten dad and getting involved with schools, the poor, and the environment be more difficult than my previous job of selling diapers and shampoo in places like India and China? How naïve and wrong I was! Alas, I nevertheless find myself stuck in this new “career” of taking on desperate causes. Of course, I am under no illusion that I can actually save the world. Besides, I think that believing that you can could also be a slippery slope. Before long, arrogance and megalomania can very easily set in and transform you to act like a demi-god (just look at some of our politicians). Perhaps there are others out there who really can but not me. I think that the only one that I can really save is me. Amid the vastness of the universe, maybe that’s also the only thing all of us can do in our lifetimes. Yet maybe there is some salvation of biblical proportions in that thought. For if we all saved our own selves, then we also effectively save the whole world, too, right? Maybe it’s really all as simple as saving the cheerleader after all.

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