Retreat!
Sunday, August 24, 2008
Spent the weekend at a resort in Lake Caliraya, Laguna with some of the Mabuhay staff. A trip to check out the digs, so we had access to pretty much all of their amenities. Thus, in a single day I had (in chronological order):
+ set foot in Los Baños after several years. The place has been significantly Koreanized, no duh.
+ fished for hito at a pond (or at least tried for an hour, the fish having gotten too smart for our bread-laden hooks)
+ my very first wall-climbing experience, which I had particularly enjoyed. I may have found (at last! at last! ‘tis never too late!) a sport I can be adept in. Anyone recommend a good wall-climbing facility in the Shaw-Ortigas area?
+ careened through the air on a very high, very long zipline
+ careened on my butt with three other people down a steep, hillside soap/mud-slide (soapy, muddy, tarpaulin slide + short shorts = skinning off of thighs)
+ videoke’d
+ played a grossly outdated version of Outburst, lost, and conked out.
This morning’s rain, unfortunately, prohibited us from riding the horses. Sayang yung Victorian boldstar from the moor moment ko.
It was a nice little overnight stay, all told. But what I really wanted to share was a pretty fucked up discovery I’d made right before our departure.
The resort, apparently, caters to the Christian retreat crowd (hence all the group dynamics-related facilities which we abused in a perfectly selfish, non-denominational kind of way), so it has this quite pious gift shop I couldn’t help but inspect. There were Bible verse-inscribed paperweights, copies of A Purpose-Driven Life, and all those other devout doohickeys typical of such a store. So far, so saintly.
And then I saw The Rod.
(It's not a dick.)
It was this long, heavy plastic paddle with the saying “Spare the Rod, Spoil the Child” stickered onto its surface. I thought it was a joke, at first. I mean, for whatever it’s worth, I still have some smidge of faith in humanity, after all. But, in all seriousness, the thing really was manufactured for exacting corporal punishment on young’uns. Besides the saying, there were other heinous bits of text slapped all over it. “Made for Preschool/Elementary Age.” “Researched and Approved by Dr. __________.” A whole guide on “How to Spank,” which then provided a step-by-step procedure on hurting tiny behinds.
At a hundred bucks a rod, I was discouraged from buying it. Even so, I normally would; the sheer horror I felt could’ve been motivation enough. But then I realized that I didn’t want to give the nutsacks who made this wretched contraption any of my money. I blow my cash on lots of horrendously useless crap, yes, but the Rod was something else. It was evil. Heaven’s Gate evil. L. Ron Hubbard evil. Jim Jones Kool-Aid evil. It was Just. Not. Good.
Spent my money instead on buko pies, kesong puti and pastillas. Call it a rare glimpse into my morality.
posted by marguerite @ 3:33 PM
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