Signs you’ve been here a long time

I am still but a visitor to these lovely shores. I know that sounds weird, considering I’ve lived here for close to two decades, but my immigration card still classifies me as “Resident Alien.” I still cling to the “alien” part. Being an alien has its privileges, after all. As an outsider, you are allowed to remark on the goofy stuff that happens here that other people tend to overlook. You are allowed to chuckle over things that locals take for granted, like insane noontime shows.

But after a while you start to realize: you’re no longer an outsider. You’re an insider. People don’t even notice you’re a foreigner, because you’ve stopped noticing. Unlike the FWAs — the “foreigners walking around” who are just random statistics, temporary curiosity seekers — you’re in for the long haul.

That’s what Malcolm Gladwell would call a “tipping point.” Whether it tips you toward staying, or leaving, depends on your outlook. 

Just for argument’s sake, though, here are a few things that might suggest that you — a foreigner — have been here a really long time.

• You’re on a first-name basis with the traffic cops who regularly pull you over at certain underpasses.

• You still let your 11-year-old daughter translate to workers and helpers because you’re too lazy to learn Tagalog.

• You look forward to Holy Week because the city empties out like a zombie plague has hit it.

• You think nothing of it when the announcer at the US Embassy calls out funny, bastardized names like “Al Pacino Valero, please proceed to Window 9…”

• You start buying lottery tickets. Regularly.

• You master all the back routes between your home and office, and could drive it blindfolded.

• You forget all about notions of Western time — such as showing up punctually for social events, the existence of American holidays, the four seasons — and submit instead to an equatorial clock with only two settings: hot and wet.

• You come to associate Christmas with a four-month pattern that begins with jingles in shopping malls starting Sept. 1 and ends somewhere in February of the following year, 10 kilos heavier, after the dust has settled.

• You stop noticing/getting offended/thinking you elicit gender confusion when fast-food servers regularly address you as “Sir/Ma’am.”

• You’ve watched in amazement as presidents have been toppled, people have amassed at Catholic shrines at the foot of shopping malls, condo towers have been occupied by disgruntled soldiers and tanks have plowed through hotel lobbies. Oh, the things you’ve seen…

• You don’t find it even the least peculiar that a senator resigns the hall, not in disgrace, but to the tune of his own voice singing along to a video montage of his “greatest moments.”

• You come to understand the phrase, “Forget it, Jake, it’s Chinatown” with crystal clarity whenever you get lost driving around Quiapo.

• You keep an inflatable lifeboat and gumboots in your car trunk during rainy season, in case you have to abandon ship and float/wade to safety.

• You no longer even notice the taho guy calling out at 6 a.m., the roosters crowing at 4:30 a.m., or the sound of mahjong tiles clicking at the neighbor’s lanai every Sunday at noon.

• You know it’s winter in the States, not by the migration of birds heading south, but by the number of ’60s has-been bands and performers that flock to Manila to play concerts.

• You know all the karaoke hostesses in Malate on a first-name basis.

• You begin betting on midget boxing. And getting good at it.

• You’ve stopped noticing that half the billboards along EDSA are for liposuction treatment, and the other half are for artery-clogging fast food.

• During brownouts, you get in your car and go to the mall — just so you can experience the aircon and charge your cell phone and iPod.

• You hardly even notice that you now automatically cup your hand around your mouth while using a toothpick in Chinese restaurants.

• You have committed to memory not only the Lupang Hinirang, but the Magnolia Ice Cream Truck jingle as well.

• No matter how many years you’ve been here, you still mentally correct English on billboards and signs while sitting in traffic. (“Everyday = Every day, dammit!”)

• You have caved in to balut and dinuguan already, and you realize there’s just no other gross-out foods left here that they can throw at you.

• Seeing all the kerfuffle over PCOS electronic voting machines, you kind of miss the old days of paper ballots, padlocked boxes, ink-blotted fingers and election results that took months to call.

• The old white guys you see walking around with young Filipinas along Roxas Boulevard start to look more and more like people you went to high school with.