04.26.07 kulturnatib

Hats

Unless you are taking one of those air-conditioned jeepneys in Makati, or you get invited to join Bigfoot's boss and owner Mick Gleisner in his specially outfitted Jimpney -- a jeepney spruced up to be like a pimp mobile, the not usually announced attraction at the Bigfoot compound in Mactan Island -- you shall, like myself, just have to bear with riding in the regular jeepneys that, in the summer, meaning now, are just a little more than rolling Kenny Roger's roasters.

Hopefully, with the number people of who were able to watch the screening of Al Gore's award winning documentary, “An Inconvenient Truth,” at SM cinema recently -- a sizable crowd, I was told – more and more will now consider that the heat we are suffering through or bearing up now has a label to it: global warming.

Most people, however, don't wait for labels or agonize through one. They just take action. Usually in the direction towards effects mitigation and not much or not enough towards phenomena prevention; actions toward preventing global warming in the first place, in this instance.

In any case, the other day, I was in a jeepney going to work. A guy gets on. He was one of these ubiquitous ambulant vendors you see everywhere in the city, even all the way up the mountains where I live.

I am no longer surprised at the entrepreneurial ingenuity of these fellows seeing the almost endless variety of goods that they pull, carry, sling, pack, hang and balance on every part of their bodies, and walking, as they do, for kilometers on end.

This guy didn't have too many things. But what he lacked in both variety and number was made up for by the imminent sense of what he did have; cut-off finger gloves that do not end at the write but extend all the way to the upper arm to become arm sleeves, bandanas that can also stand in for handkerchiefs and two kinds of hats, the baseball type and the military-floppy type.
I struck up a conversation with him after buying a pair of desert camouflage military type floppies. I bought it for P100, haggled down from P130. Even with the original price it was still nearly half of what it would cost at a mall or department store.

Sales were good for hats he said. They were made in China and people expect them to be cheap. So they were. But they looked to be well sewn together. Though, and he agreed, truly, the test of the pudding is in the tasting. I didn't exactly put it that way, but he understood what I meant, nodding his head in agreement.

He said a few people would get another pair in order to drive the unit price further down by a few more pesos. If I didn't already have a floppy, given as a gift for Christmas, I would have done the same. These are so handy and so useful that I wouldn't mind having a pair in every bag or pack that I lug around so that one would always be within easy reach.

The gloves cum arm sleeves were also popular, he said. But mostly with people who ride motorcycles or bicycles. This prompted me to ask about this accessory that I've been noticing on the faces of more and more motorcyclists and bicyclists.

These are masks that are contoured for the nose and the chin. They provide better coverage and protection than the usual mask that is really just a wad of cloth to put across the nose and mouth area. They are also held in place with velcros that do away with the tying, untying and the general difficulty this entails as this is normally done where it is not immediately visible to the eyes.

This accessory is very useful in our now smoke clogged streets although I am not sure if these have provisions for dust and smoke filters. Still, I also imagine that the cloth, normally flannel-like with the ones I've seen close up, could do the job well enough.

I got off ahead of him. I donned the floppy hat. I walked the rest of the way to the office appreciating my new mobile shade. I was also thinking that here was our legendary repute for coping at work and how this will be put to the test when the worst of global warming really starts to kick in.