why people should not go to the malls...

09.21.2005

*****

After a rough day, your tired feet manage to carry you to a stop at the mall. As you amble your way inside, tired and quite exhausted, a Nemo-got-lost-feeling dawns on you while walking against the flow of the swarm of people. You wonder what these folks are up to, why do they even go to the mall. Quite a number of Filipinos are absolute mall rats. Rats! Hehe. Some go there just because—as though observing The Tao of Pooh: Pooh just is. Then, your antagonist persona thinks about the pretty interesting reasons for not going to the malls…

1. Paranoia leads you to believe that these shopping centers—havens to mall enthusiasts—could be easy targets for terrorist assaults.
2. Although you enjoy poring on books at National Bookstore and Powerbooks and Fully-booked, even finishing Kokology, on installment reading-trips (sheesh! next target: Ang Alamat ng Gubat), you wouldn’t like to visit the mall if you end up spending a HUGE part of your measly income on unplanned book-purchases.
3. A stop at the music store tells the same story as number two, only different, humming to a torment-yourself-tune, where in you find all the CDs (and tapes—yes cassette tapes still exist—yey!) you like, play that of your current favorite’s a while and decide to get a freeboot version instead. Are we hearing a confession? Or are we looking at heads nodding in unison? Waha!
4. Trying to relax yourself while taking pleasure in ambling, you almost crash into a lady. Now what’s interesting about that? Well, the lady looked fairly decent, but she seemed to have broken away from Mandaluyong (or must be trying to find her friends from ward seven), she was mumbling sharp words, and seemed really unstable. A couple of fellow ramblers give her a quick second-look, including yourself and you realize no one should’ve looked at her that way, but is there anyone to blame? Should anyone be blamed for people going nuts?
5. If you’re the queasy-easily-hate-sticky-floors-type, you shouldn’t go to ordinary malls. Darlings like you should keep yourself to the high-end establishments where shoes and stilettos treading their floors never walk on grimy cobbled sidewalks.
6. You shouldn’t go to the mall if you are this person who is Gagay-in-the-flesh-the brownout princess, they call her, when the entire mall had to put up with a major power interruption while she was simply having lunch with a friend. (HemHem!) She does that even in Cavite, go ask her relatives, where this person is, power failure follows.
7. You wouldn’t like to go to the mall when the mall leaves you walking with memories of friends minus the friends themselves, who are, at this point, busying themselves with work, med school, and who seem to be practically living in their own cosmos, very far away from your own.

Even then, with their accessibility—malls abound in every major city—SM and Robinson’s even put up adjacent stores—and the simple pleasure of window shopping, being with friends, or bumping into old friends, some people cannot simply do without the mall.