Summer is over. Finally, the clueless creatures in Friendster accounts can now replace their bare-bodied pictures and their glistening tanned skin in the beach with something else. All because, raindrops are falling...

People are gearing up for the rainy season. Umbrellas can be seen everywhere: 3 folds, 2 folds, long and old-fashioned, signature or bargain, rainbow-colored or plain. MMDA and other authoritative folks wear raincoats and boots. Cars and other vehicles begin to use their windshield wipers. The streets are wet and all roads seemed to be slippery. People bring out their gloomiest faces. Hospitals and drugstores swell with children and other weaklings who caught colds and are running with fever.

Even if I get sick easily these days, even if I have to wear closed shoes and I have to use my umbrella, I am still the happiest person when it rains. Well, except when it is raining cats and dogs, and the howling wind that slaps my face, I'd rather take my word back and bask myself under the sun. I just love a simple sheet of rain. It brings me back to my childhood days where I can be so nonchalant to play outdoors even if it is raining. I remember enjoying my last days of vacation at around May, during my elementary years, my sister and I would wear our threadbare clothes and we would play tag and literally dance in the rain.  Sometimes, she runs amok while I get a hose then squirt and shower water to her face.

I so much appreciate the rain because the younger you are in school, the easier your classes can be called off. When I was in grade school, Signal no.1: no classes. It's true that people get grumpier as they grow old. I was cantankerous when I was in highschool and college because DECS and CHED got more strict when it comes to suspending classes. They seem to be fond of fortifying the wrong belief that Filipinos are always late in time. When I was in La Salle, I felt like a rut whenever they would cancel classes after I hurdled along the floody streets of Taft Avenue. And the fact that it was almost 5 p.m. back then. I think they are trying to see before they believe that people need not loiter in the streets when it is Signal no. 2. 

The other drawback of rainy seasons during my early years was my school bus. You wouldn't believe this but my school bus is a legend in Bene. Ever since I got into Benedictine Abbey School (changed to St. Benedict College then to San Beda College Alabang, or did I still miss something out?), my school bus was doing service then. And now I am all grown up and working, the bus is still there looking like a service for garbage and other junk materials to Payatas or Smokey Mountain. How many overhauls and motor/auto-related repairs had it been through? Haha! I hate rainy days when I ride that bus because it was, is, and I guess, will always be the perfect sample for Vulcaseal and other "pantapal" ads.

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Speaking of rain, we now get back to the same old problem of our country. Aside from being the text capital of the world and the second most corrupt country (if I'm not mistaken), we are also the capital of floods. During rainy seasons, people are literally rowing along flooded areas (as if they are in Gondolas). They use dismantled roofs or other fallen furnitures as their lifeboats. Since illegal logging and deforestation through the kaingin system are still perpetrated, all our garbage will sing along to Celine Dion's famous ballad "It's all coming, it's all coming back to me now". The smell of rotten food and other rancid spoil will waft through the "clean and green city".

The rainy season is detrimental to the impoverished many not only because through the aforementioned rowboats, garbage rebounds and illness from hygienic problems but because the flood metaphorically takes away the remaining "wealth" of poor people. The rain is a major nuisance to lower class business people. Just think about the street children, beggars and vendors in Quiapo and Edsa. People get poorer as the rain becomes heavier. I think GMA needs to construct a huge and monumental umbrella to cover up and shelter people. :)

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Since it is June and wedding bells are ringing and the rain just keeps on flowing, I was just curious why do a lot of people always and continuously use rain as the symbol of sadness and one of the mediums for romanticization may it be in stories, books or movies? Just take a look at popular movies of Claudine Barretto and Regine Velasquez, Audrey Hepburn and Helen Hunt, or even the TV series Meteor Garden and Full House, there is always a rain scene where two lovers meet each other whether to break up or reunite. Of course when they break up or say the "I never loved you" lies, there would be a crying scene that flows down with the fall of heavy (and artificially induced) rain. But when it is a make-up or reunion scene, a long passionate kiss would ensue or would be the ending as the lovers get more drenched and get more entwined, and the camera slowly moves away (maybe towards an aerial shot) or lights would gradually dim. I just find rain a bit of a cliche when used in poetry and novels, to symbolize melancholy. And I think it is overrated and overly used in movies especially when utilized or included in the title or blurb. I am not saying just because great poets or great filmmakers were born in so many years and decades ago, and they were the ones who first used rain in their imagery, one cannot use it anymore. There are a lot of ways to make rain as life-threatening as it can be, or as gentle and mellifluous as the sound of a lark in the morning.

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Speaking of romance, love and all that goes with it, the rainy season just reminds me of RAIN/BI. Ha! nonsense but it is still raining in my house even if the whole Full House mania has dwindled, I am still hooked with Bi, may it be his character in his soaps or his career as a singer/performer. I don't know, maybe I am going crazy. Help me chant "Rain, rain go away, come again in another day!"