More Orkut Amusement

Over the weekend, I stumbled onto the motherlode of Orkut communities: All Things Filipino.

Now, most of you out there wouldn't think twice about this community, but to those of us transplanted to the West, or who have only known the West, we full well know how things could've been because we were raised by these crazy people called Filipinos... well, to find such a community is a boon to people like me, who experience nothing Filipino on a day-to-day basis, even though we look like we're FOB: fresh off the boat.

You might think I'm being harsh, calling my own kind crazy, but if you saw some of the posts from those of us second+-generation Filipinos who grew up in immigrant households, you'd have to agree. There are long threads about weird Filipino behaviours, such as:

* naming the entire family with one letter, such as what my brother did with the letter M for his kids: Melissa, Michael, Madeleine, Megan, Maribeth (there must be some kind of latent Filipino thing going on with him, since obviously we grew up in the same household, and I would never do this, neither would our brother Alvin... or did our DNA thumb its deoxyribonucleanic acid at the genetic programming??)

[by the way, if you think that's not crazy, remember that this is mostly a Catholic nation with big families... some families go alphabetically, and one girl in California mentioned that everyone in her family has a name that starts with the letter A and ends with N: Alvin, Aileen, Allan, Arleen, Allain, Arman... see?]

jeepney

* taking a van and converting it into the "van of vans" that they have back in the Philippines, replete with horns... and musical horns!

man in a barrel

* making tacky imports, like this man in a barrel that has a spring for a willy (don't even ask... Filipino humour is so twisted, but what's even more twisted is that tourists actually buy this stuff)

... oh my, I could go on and on, but I wouldn't be doing the homeland any favours by trashing it. Rather, I should mention the good stuff, like the food. It goes without saying there are whole threads in the Filipino community related to food. Sad to say, I don't know how to cook any Filipino food, but I'm good at eating it!

I couldn't stop laughing at the Filipino Expressions thread... I don't know if any of you folk will get it, though, unless you know Filipinos. It was game over for me when someone mentioned the "pointing with the mouth" thing... I laughed so hard... IT'S SO TRUE!! This was my post in that thread:

f's and v's
...when they pronounce words such as "five" like "pibe"... There's some linguistic twistedness in imperialist Spain giving a colony a name that its own people can't even pronounce!!!