The sky was partly cloudy and people were waiting for a bus to stop right in front of the loading/unloading zone. I was thinking about what I could have ridden to get to a particular restaurant where my friend and I had lunch a couple of hours before we decided to go watch a foreign film.  

A few minutes from then and it was starting to rain. I stood along the sidewalk with a friend and we started talking about a current socio-political issue, or perhaps it was about how to get from a certain spot in Manila to another, I could hardly remember. I was looking across the road and was suddenly startled to see her staring at my face, marveling at something I wasn’t sure of. She gasped, “Wow Jing! Ang dami ng whiteheads mo! Sa sobrang dami nakaka amaze!” Then she laughed at my reaction.

Do you know those scenes in animated series where the manga artist changes the character’s facial expression from serious to desperate, and the skin tone turns as white as a sheet of paper? Add a bit of those short curvy lines that form a cross on top of the character’s head to show nerves about to break up, and a bit of wind blowing away dried leaves to portray the awkwardness in her amazement. If my sister were to draw that specific instance in my life, I’d have been that pale character humiliated to the core. 

I have a couple of questions about this, though. 

First, since when has the troubling amount of whiteheads on a person’s face been amusing, or rather amazing as she put it?

Perhaps it was a pathetic attempt at using euphemism, being socially respectful or being merely gentle so as to avoid further argument, wasn’t it? Mayroon nga bang sapat na dahilan upang matuwa ka sa dami ng whiteheads sa mukha ng tao? Masaya ka ba na madami akong whiteheads at hindi ito sing dami ng nakukuha mo sa mukha mo? O masaya kang hindi ka pa nakakakita ng ganoong kadaming whiteheads sa mukha ng kahit na sino?

I wanted to be cool. If I had been any cooler, smarter or more of an ass during that time, I swear I could have said “What do you care?”, “You want some? I’d gladly give you most of mine”, “Yeah it’s the trend among happy women these days” or “I know! It’s amazing right?! I wish you could have it so I’d be amazed looking at your face too!” But I wasn’t, I was struck and amused myself, because of what had entertained her and how she could say that to my face considering my assumption that she has tact and wit in choosing her words. 

Second, why did she have to blurt it out in a public place? Should it be something she can hardly wait to tell me in a place where I could run to a mirror, see it for, and be disgusted about it myself? Was it a mere observation that one can hardly avoid being told for everyone to hear?

Third, what exactly was she thinking? Did she just stop at the thought of me having countless white heads on my face and not bother asking herself what I would have felt after she brought it all up? 

I sincerely appreciated that she wan’t grossed out by what she saw. But surely, she wouldn’t be happy if I did the same things and say “wow, your front teeth are impressively huge! It’s really amazing how one could have front teeth as huge as yours and those of a rabbit’s! Your eyes are so huge, I can’t believe their sizes match the height of your forehead!”

And as if my incessant grunting about it weren’t enough, she was even so interested at looking and touching my face like an avant-garde painting on canvas until I finally begged her off to drop the subject and asked her to get on the bus. 
I find this funny of course, that I must have been in the middle of talking about the society being wretched by its current unsolved issues while this person was more into the bacterial/microbial/viral growth on my face. What’s even funnier is I, in turn, had responded to this ridiculous anserine behaviour by justifying my reaction. For a moment, I forgot the socio-political dilemma I was ruminating on because of a dense dermatological amusement. 

It’s an indispensable habit of people to look at something and focus at its flaws. For instance, let someone wear a clean white dress amounting to a thousand bucks and spill a cup of coffee on it, people will start staring not at how white the dress is but at how the coffee stain spoils the dress, not to mention they’ll start talking about how hard it’ll be to take off the stain and make it look as good as new. Not that my face is as pure as the dress, of course. This is just the weakness of my metaphors disabling me from setting my point across all the time. Still, the idea that we focus on what sucks about things is what’s helping all of us into sinking lower and LOWER than we do now. 

From then on, until we got to a washroom in Shangri La, I couldn’t stop my hand from feeling the roughness of my face because of the damn whiteheads that I didn’t know were there.