Living with OCD: Boobies come in threes!

So now it can be told – I have Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD). 

"Apple Head."

When I was five years old, I was so good with numbers that I knew how to count by multiples of three even before I learned how to multiply.  In fact, I would count objects of the same kind in threes and always in threes – hotdogs on the breakfast table, consonants in my Alphabet Soup, heck, if my nanny's boobies came in threes instead of pairs I would have counted them out loud, too, “One, two, three, one, two, three, one, two, three…”

I became so good at it that at one point I was able to guess correctly – in one glance – whether my dad and his friends had already downed 29 bottles of beer at a drinking spree.  I would feel upset about it, not because they were drunk, but because 29 isn’t divisible by three.  So I would wait them out until they hit bottle number 30, or 33, or until one of my dad’s friends emerged from the toilet with his dick still in his hand.

My dad, of course, didn’t know zilch about my little counting disorder.  But my mom did. 

Even then, she could see I was a pretty organized kid.  I always kept everything, be it my toys or my stash of Mongol pencils and Crayolas, arranged in a special order logical only to me.  You messed with that order, you messed with me.  For the most part, though, everything seemed harmless (and in some cases, such as schoolwork, advantageous) and, despite my penchant for counting everything in sight, I looked as perfectly normal as the next kid – only most normal kids at school were subconsciously inclined to meet Big Bird of Sesame Street while I had a secret affinity with my fellow arithmomaniac, The Count.

As a kid, I found it disturbing that Sesame Street characters had only four fingers.  Good thing The Count loved his threes as much as I did.

 

Then, around the same time my parents split up, the proverbial shit hit the fan. I started counting out loud, “One, two, three, one, two, three, one, two, three…” – well, not really out loud, but more like “in whispers” – barely audible but visible enough to make my eagled-eyed mother think I was going nuts or was under some kind of demonic possession.  At nine years old, I realized it (or I) wasn’t cute anymore.  I was a weirdo in bloom.

The thing about OCD is that it thrives on the combination of two factors that seem meant for each other: Stress and Routine.  How do you escape it when school life is built precisely around these two things?  It’s distressing enough that a stupid disorder controlled my eating habits (counting nuts during recess only to find out, to my horror, that a pack of Growers had 49 nuts on average) or how I positioned myself inside the school bus (third from the door, right beside the ugly girl); it’s downright sad that I had to keep all these to myself.

And so I spent the next few years of my adolescent life finding ways to “go under the radar” and blend in with the norm.  My coping strategy was to always go in the opposite direction: To counter stress, I adopted a carefree, happy-go-lucky attitude.  To defy order, I developed a talent for chaos and turning things upside down, whether stuff in my room or thoughts in my head.  My nose for numbers (and with it my incessant counting) vanished into thin air and in its place I developed a knack for words. 

In my early teens I would still indulge my OC impulses every now and then, especially when nobody was looking.  The impulses ranged from the silly, such as avoiding cracks on the sidewalk and saying ‘sorry’ each time I inadvertently bumped into an inanimate object, such as a table or a chair or my gay Math teacher Mr. Cuevas (imagining them to be plotting revenge), to the practical, such as doing late-night checks to make sure that all the doors at our house were locked and that the LPG tank in the kitchen was safely secured, before muttering a stutter of a prayer on my way back to my room.  I had to do everything in the exact same way everyday and in the exact same order, or I would do everything all over again, lest some imagined misfortune befell me.

In high school, I was known as the class mambobote (bottle collector) because my locker was always filled with empty bottles of Coke.  Classmates who needed a quick buck just went up to my locker to exchange the bottles for deposit at the cafeteria.  While the whole class thought I was demonstrating an entrepreneurial streak, I was actually just satisfying an irrational urge to hoard and collect. 

I learned not only to hide but also embrace my obsessive compulsive behaviors so long as they did not severely disrupt my normal routines or make me look wacko.  If they did, I would make a conscious effort to overcome the said behaviors by following a tried and tested formula: break the routine, start a new one, and then break it again before it gets better or gets worse – steps as simple as one, two, three.

College brought forth a new set of challenges.  Suddenly exposed to girls after going through four years of testosterone-charged, all-boys education in high school, I suddenly had to grapple with raging hormones, a 24-hour erection, and the female species, renowned for their intuitive ability to sniff out creepy behavior from a mile away.  I was gonna get smoked out of my hole, man.

Pubescent girls, religious icons and my mom's hot Church friends -- the annual Reyna Elena celebrations put me in an unbearable moral dilemma.

Some of my friends complained that I looked at girls a ‘certain way.’ 

“Like what way,” I would ask. 

“Like you’re undressing them.”

Without going into graphic detail, well, yeah, it did look that way to the untrained eye. 

So here’s how the drill worked.  If you were a girl and I was meeting you for the first time, and you were immune to my sleepy-eyed charm, you’d notice that I would look at you in a sort of ‘Bermuda Triangle’ pattern: First, I would look at your face.  Then my eyes would draw a line from your eyes down to your right booby, and then to your left booby, and then back up to your eyes.  Creepy?

Darling, if I ever looked at you that way in college, forgive me, it’s not because I found you irresistible.  It’s not you.  It’s me.  I ain’t lookin' at them apples, baby.  I countin’ ‘em.

More specifically, I was merely responding to the compulsion to mentally draw a triangle by connecting three distinct circles on your upper body, yeah, as if you had three faces rather than three boobies.  In my twisted mind, if I didn’t give in to my compulsion, I feared I would get run over by a car or something.   It’s totally irrational, and somewhat disabling, alright, but nothing I felt I couldn’t handle.  And as my social skills became more refined throughout college, I even used that ‘look’ to my supreme advantage. 

The stigma of living with OCD further diminished throughout my early adulthood, as pop culture depicted it increasingly as some kind of cute quirk rather than a chronic illness: Jack Nicholson’s obsessive-compulsive Melvin in As Good as it Gets, Tony Shalhoub’s Monk character, Leonardo Dicaprio’s Howard Hughes in The Aviator (and Dicaprio himself).

As the stigma lessened, so did the symptoms and, except for the rare occasion that I’m late for work (on my way to the office, where I suddenly ask the driver to turn the cab around and drive me all the way back home because I missed reading the roadside billboards in the exact same order I’ve gotten used to every morning), I no longer do most of the stupid things I used to do.  Not even that triple boobie thing.  Well, almost.

So, if you happen to be a girl and you’re not so bad-looking and you feel as if I’m undressing you with my eyes the first time we meet – it’s not me.  It’s them apples.

Moshing 1998

Youth anthems are like doggy ears on a well-worn book -- they quickly take you back to a chapter in life you love coming back to.  This song takes me back to 1998 which, like the calm before the storm, provided the last rays of youthful idealism and carefree abandon before the dark clouds of reality crept in and swallowed us whole.  Spoken like a tired old man, amp. =P 

Basketball? Crazy! Filipinizing the World through Pinoy Hoops

By Ryan Asis Maniago

Basketball is a religion in the Philippines. In Hong Kong, there are over 150,000 basketball-crazy Filipinos who, however unwittingly, are spreading the best (and worst) of Filipino culture through the gospel of hoops.

Eric Goyena, a living legend of sorts in Filipino hoops lore in Hong Kong, looks on impassively as several children loiter around a garbage bin, attempting to throw bits of trash using a variety of basketball moves: a jump shot, a baby hook, a tomahawk dunk. They are missing badly.

“Filipinos will shoot their thing into just about anything with a hole in it,” he tells me matter-of-factly, unmindful of the sexual connotations of his statement and the HK$1,500 fine for littering.

It’s a hot Sunday afternoon on Southorn Playground in Wan Chai, where an OFW (Overseas Filipino Workers) basketball league is in full swing. The bleachers are filled to the rafters, so to speak, with pinoy migrants from all walks of life: Filipino professionals who don’t look like Filipinos, musicians and bar tenders nursing nasty hangovers, domestic helpers enjoying their day off, curious locals, the token gwai lo (caucasian) on the lookout for a Sunday girlfriend.

Don’t hate the player. Hate the game. Filipino players point to the tallest person on the team – their 6’2” American muse - Photo by Bobby Ormoc 

The atmosphere is loud and festive. Players are in full battle regalia, strutting colorful jerseys with tacky team names that can put authentic NBA merchandise to shame. One of the teams is called the Dakers – dead ringers for the Lakers. Dakers is Filipino gay slang for a man with a big, um, wang.

Kobe and Fish? The Dakers will next star in a movie entitled “Honey, I Shrunk the Lakers!” - Bobby Ormoc 

The loudspeaker is blaring with the voice of a diminutive man who looks like a big-haired TV evangelist as he gives a blow-by-blow account of the action unraveling on the court. Beside him sits a petite Filipina in a cheerleader outfit who has vied for “Best Muse” in the tournament. Her presence appears to be giving Mr. Big Hair the Dakers.

Fans squeal excitedly as several players trip over each other during a rebound situation. In the mad scramble, a middle-aged man, with a pot belly the size of a cauldron, picks up the loose ball, dashes to the front court, and attempts an acrobatic layup against three defenders. His shot hits nothing but air.

“Matanda ka na! (You should retire!),” hisses an elderly lady, drawing laughter from the crowd. The team she is rooting for is up by a big margin as the first half winds down to a close.

While fans taunt each other in good humor along the sidelines, mini-banquets are being laid out on top of park benches under the watchful, disapproving eyes of Wan Chai’s gleaming skyscrapers.

“Painit muna tayo, papa (Some congee to warm you up, Mr. Handsome)”, a Filipino lady boy tells me. He exposes a pair of cup Cs as he bends over a big cauldron to ladle piping hot arroz caldo (Filipino chicken congee) into paper cups. I say thanks and take a cup in my hand. A cup of congee, I mean.

Jam packed. Filipino basketball leagues in Hong Kong are a dime a dozen. This league, which opened on Lockhard Road in Wan Chai, paraded twenty teams.  - Bobby Ormoc 

“Who won?” I ask Eric. He doesn’t hear me, or pretends not to. I learn later that his team of grizzled veterans lost to an unheralded crew of rookies in an earlier game.

At 35 years old, Eric has the looks of a war-weary warrior, his skin parched from endless hours of playing hoops under the searing afternoon sun. Like many Filipino ballers of his generation, he played his first pick-up game in a makeshift basketball ring erected in the middle of a busy Manila street.

He recalls being a gangly, awkward ten-year old attempting to dribble the ball against the neighborhood toughies while – in between acrobatic shots and rib-crunching fouls – barely eluding passing cars and jeepneys (retrofitted Manila jeeps, used for public transportation).

Kids in his neighborhood risked life and limb just to win a game. Losers had to choose between buying a round of ice tubig (melted ice in plastic bags) or crawling between the legs of the winners as a gesture of subjugation. Tied ballgames and disputes are often settled not by overtimes or a rematch – but by fist fights.

If such an environment doesn't develop creativity and mental toughness, I don't know what will. This is Filipino-style streetball in the literal and grittiest sense of the word. Eric fell in love with the game and never looked back.

One-on-one? The best Filipino players would rather go one-on-five or one-on-six, if you count their own coach screaming along the sidelines.  - Bobby Ormoc

The year was 1984. Magic Johnson and the LA Lakers were up against Larry Bird and the Boston Celtics in the NBA finals. While cable TV was largely unheard of in Manila, Filipinos were snapping up Betamax recordings of the games at video rental shops scattered all over the city.

Manila was largely Lakers territory, enamored as we were of their brand of “showtime” basketball, despite the fact that they were considered the underdogs against the more fundamentally sound Celtics, who eventually won the series. Back then, even the Philippine Basketball Association, Asia’s first professional league, played out like a Lakers boot camp for players under six feet.

Indeed, Filipinos love rooting for the underdog. And there’s no other sport that plays up the underdog card better than a game which, fairly or unfairly, favors height – something we are not particularly blessed with. Sometimes, it feels as if the Americans brought basketball to our shores at the turn of the 20th century as a sort of substitute religion, much the same way the Spanish brought us Catholicism some 300 years earlier. Like any colonizing religion, basketball emphasized our natural disadvantages and appeased us with the blind faith that we can rise above our, err, shortcomings.

Highlight reel. This player has high ambitions – to be the next Air Jordan logo, 5 feet below the rim.  - Bobby Ormoc 

At worst, basketball has allowed us to do what we do best, which is to ape America. With generations of Filipinos weaned on American-style basketball (although some pundits will argue that we have developed our own unique brand of play), most players today, from the street level to the pros, are equipped with an arsenal of logic-defying moves and -- of course -- plenty of macho posturing. The problem is, when you try too hard to ape America, people will tend to see the ape and not the American.

At best, basketball has exposed our fundamental weaknesses as a people which, in certain situations, also happen to be our strengths. Any foreigner who gets a chance to watch a Filipino basketball game will immediately get the impression that we play an exciting and passionate, albeit disorganized and individualistic, brand of basketball, which pretty much sums up our social fabric and body politic.

There is, however, a method to the madness. Talented Filipino players, much like talented Filipino musicians, prefer to play it “by ear” rather than be hassled with the X’s and O’s of the game.

For us, the name of the game is not orchestration. It’s improvisation. It’s not classical. It’s Metallica-featuring-Barry-Manilow.  Certainly not the beautiful game -- more like the beautiful chaos.

Hence, a typical Filipino basketball game feels like a roller coaster ride showcasing brilliant individual creativity, collective cunning, a never-say-die spirit and, most importantly, a dash of self-deprecating humor – crucial skills to have in a third world country where winners get it all and losers get it, well, in the a$$ from the government.

In basketball, as in boxing, many poor Filipinos see a ticket to redemption. The professional and collegiate leagues are immensely popular and some of the country’s basketball superstars have leveraged their hoops fame to carve out careers in show business and politics.

In a way, basketball also serves as a microcosm of Philippine history, having charted our rise to the top and downward spiral over the last 50 years. As a testament to what we could do if we only put our minds and hearts into something, a team of vertically challenged Filipinos placed fifth in the 1936 Olympics and third in the 1954 FIBA world championships – feats no other Asian country has replicated. It is no coincidence that, at around the same period, the Philippines ranked as Asia’s second largest economy after Japan.

But while other Asian countries improved their game and bred taller players, our international ranking in basketball deteriorated due to incessant bickering among our sports leaders – thanks to too much liberal democracy, another American legacy. We all know what has become of our sorry economy: a giant exporter, not of goods, but of people.

“Last two minutes!” announces Mr. Big Hair to usher in Filipinos' favorite part of the ballgame, or favorite part of anything, for that matter. Southorn Playground is throbbing with anticipation as the game reaches fever pitch.  A throng of local ah pahs (elderly Chinese men) have blended in with the pinoys, looking bewildered and on the brink of being infected by the rabid fanaticism not commonly seen in prim-and-proper Hong Kong.

Eric is up on his feet. What was a lopsided game has turned into a come-from-behind thriller bordering on cardiac arrest, 109-107, time down to 16 seconds. It’s crunch time.

Mr. Big Hair is spewing gibberish, barely able to keep up with the pace of the action. Point guard number 23 has the ball. He hurtles through a throng of defenders like a headless chicken to the delight of the crowd and, for the first time, Mr. Cup C’s eyes are riveted on the game rather than my frame. He is squealing like a school girl. And I am looking at him like a school boy. I shudder at the thought and force my attention back to the game.

Number 23 still has the ball (and the balls) as he dribbles the time away. He doesn’t look like he intends to pass it anytime soon. Last eight seconds, man. WTF are you thinking?

Dribble, dribble, dribble. Everything is now happening in slow motion. Five seconds. Four. Three. The idiot finally decides to take it strong to the hoop against all five opponents. He believes he can do it. The crowd thinks so, too. I don’t. Then, out of nowhere, he kicks it out to an open team mate who unleashes a long bomb that swishes the net to beat the buzzer, 110-109.

The crowd erupts. Mr. Pot Belly is roll-on-the-floor ecstatic at center court. The underdog has done it again.

When the smoke clears, everyone is all smiles, even Eric the Skeptic. In jest, he accuses the referees of fixing the game. The referees shoot back, saying he should try growing his baby Afro to add a few inches to his 5’5” frame. The ensuing laughter is only as hearty as Mr. Cup C’s congee.

We are, after all, a happy people – sometimes to a fault. As Mr. Cup C hands out his cups of happiness to players from the losing team, we hear a familiar voice behind us.

It is our friend Jules, asking us whether we would like to play an indoor basketball game in Shek Tong Tsui. I remind them that there is a bucket of ice-cold San Miguel Beer and a plate of crispy pata (Filipino deep fried pork knuckles) waiting for us at Traffic Bar on Lockhart Road. It shouldn’t be a tough choice – basketball or beer? For Filipinos, one usually follows the other.

As we mull over our predicament, we are suddenly disturbed by the most divine of apparitions: Ms. Best Muse, with her come-hither eyes, raven-black hair and alabaster legs, walks right by us, leaving a trail of Dakers doing the double take.

Beauty and Brawn. Filipinos love their B’s – basketball, boxing, billiards, beer bellies and beauty pageants. - Bobby Ormoc 

If there is one thing that can overcome the indecision of three hot-blooded Filipino men with beer bellies and big hair, it’s an epiphany with great legs. Basketball or beer? This is Wan Chai, where one night of beer (goggles) and beauty can make a hard man humble. Jules and I turn to Eric the Wise for counsel.

“Basketball,” Eric says in response to our silent question. Jules and I look at each other blankly.

Basketball? Crazy!

**

Ryan Asis Maniago works for an executive recruitment company in Hong Kong. He loves basketball even though basketball doesn’t love him back. He is also a firm believer that it’s only a matter of time before Philippine basketball (or the Philippines, for that matter) gets its act together and starts kicking ass on the international stage.  This blog post was published on Jumpshot.sg magazine.