The Status Symbol
Posted on Monday, 1 December 2014
The
Status Symbol
By Apolinario Villalobos
To be a standout is nice. It makes people
see you, as being head and shoulders above those around you. Some people are
born with this mark, while others have to buy it, earn it honestly, or move
heaven and earth to have it.
People who are born with the proverbial
silver spoon in their mouth need not exert effort to be noticed or to have a
swarm of friends around them. Their person glitters with the monetary symbol
that attracts different kinds of friends. There are people who practically work
their way up the ladder of the society to be recognized, and these are the ones
who deserve emulation. There are people who try their best to amass wealth that
they can use in buying attention that will put them on a pedestal of
short-lived recognition.
Here is a story of a woman who was not
satisfied with her hard-earned money despite the comfort that it has given her.
She wanted more, as she was raring to get back at those who talked behind her
back when she was still a struggling vendor of local sausage and ham. Finally,
her patience paid off when she successfully opened six specialty stores that
sold sausages and ham from Cebu and Ilocos, as well as, exotic fruits from
Davao.
At the age of fifty plus, she began
dressing up grossly with expensive apparels and regularly went to a derma
clinic for a series of physical make-over. She underwent bust and butt
augmentations which did not look nice on her because of her age. She had gotten
rid of her real eyebrows in favor of tattooed ones. She had her lips operated
on to assume a pouting look. She even had her wrinkled and furrowed face
injected with butox. She also underwent the grueling hair transplant. She did
everything for her transformation to look beautiful and successful, so that she
can effectively flaunt her new status in life, especially, to those whom she
considered her detractors in the past.
Today, at the age of almost seventy, her
face looks strange. Her tattooed eyebrows somewhat distanced themselves from
her eyes, giving her a permanent astonished look; her once butox-smoothed face
is pockmarked with red spots and the deep wrinkles are back; her once proud
breasts are horribly sagged unevenly; she could not sit for a long time because
of the pain in her butt that got peppered with allergies; her once proud
pouting lips have assumed a slight grimace, that looks like a crooked smile.
The only intact transplant in her, are the hair.
Sadly, she is back to her senses with much
regret, as her young boyfriend ran off with her money when she shared her bank
accounts with him. She was my former landlady more than two decades ago. I
learned from a fellow boarder who I met accidentally about her mild stroke from
which she was recuperating in a hospital. I immediately visited her several
days ago in the hospital and found out that only one, out of her four children
is left with her. The rest are with their father, living separately from her,
and who are still harboring ill-feelings when they failed to restrain her
revengeful acts of getting back at her detractors that resulted to her
senseless spending to “overhaul” her body. That time, she socialized with
new-found friends whose pastime was spent at the casino and bars where she met
her young boyfriend.
I told her to believe in the power of
prayer…and believe in miracles. In my mind, though, I am hoping for a miracle
that she will be spared from cancer that may result from the synthetic
substances injected into her body. The lesson here, is that we should be
contented with God gave us.
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