Dearest Elize,
Did you know that I have a girl cousin, Ophel? Her name meant, “the helper” (not maid or domestic helper. But close.) Dark skin, pig ugly uncombed frizzy hair like an ersatz female egoy and a stupid look about her. You’d never have suspected with all her activist-activist front, when we were in college many years back, she was working for the Fabian Ver intelligence mean machine. She appeared to be way too unconventional in my eyes that as a young spoiled brat she became my role model.
Each time my dad complains, she compares me with Oppy, this girl cousin of mine. And he used the word. Het. Don’t get too het like Oppy, he said.
Just recently, I said sorry to a long time friend and used dad’s word too: I miss getting het, heh heh heh, I said in my note to her. I wonder what my long lost friend would say (I used to quarrel with her for no reason at all. Just het.)
I really didn’t know it was exposing myself too much to many interpretations. Het pronounced as / hɛt / is slang when used as “het up” meaning heated or agitated, but it is also the short of heterozygote and heterosexual.
Of course, in biology, heterozygote means having a recessive gene – so that one has a different skin color than her own close relatives, short of looking like an illegitimate child.
Het is also used in short form for heuchera americana and heuchera cylindrica – or alumroot, that Wikipedia says is “a small (under 2 ft. high and wide) evergreen perennial native to Central United States. Lobed semi-palmate green, purple, or brown leaves are often veined or marbled. Loose racemes of insignificant green to cream flowers are born on 3′ stalks in early summer.”
In the Middle East, it is also another short for heswedeh, a very popular MidEast slang that means “anything and everything.” Sometimes it means “damn,” or else “hell” or “shoot.”
Or else it is used with suffix neh, as het neh, that literally means “fuck that”.
Dad’s use of het is actually in the context of “don’t get too het up”, or don’t get too agitated, too angry over something.
In another milieu, het is the abridged form of hetaera, that means prostitute, courtesan, or geisha in Japan, changnyeo in Korean or Jìnǚ in Chinese. I used to be just familiar with hetaera as an unusual word play in scrabble. Really didn’t imagine a hetaera stood for merchant of flesh.
Dad’s word keeps ringing in my ears for some time. Perhaps it’s because I sorely missed my flight one day in September when there was a huge storm and flooding to boot. Oh, how I hate those PAL peeps who went on sudden strike! They did that mind you when me and my fellow passengers already boarded our flight. We were all trapped for several hours, it seemed like centuries inside a hell hole!!! Jesus H. Christ!!! I missed several scheduled interviews outside the country, broke up with my boy friend and fought a tooth and nail battle with my mom. (Dad’s been gone a long time and my mom and I seemed to have made quarreling our favorite past time. The fights have been more frequent and longer, even Manny Pacquiao would be ashamed.)
But just see what they did to poor little me?
A slim, good looking Eurasian was beside me as I was cursing the soulless, inconsiderate, beastly striking PAL workers. He pitied me, I could tell, but never had the courage to tell me he liked me. Maybe I’m too good looking for that.
But going on strike at the expense of everyone in the airport who had their important schedules to satisfy, really got to my nerves. I’ve been contemplating changing jobs and becoming an assassin after that shitty experience. How could those animals be so coldhearted? Ah, they must have been born reptiles. And I really hate reptiles; they’re my panic button. It’s as if, when God made the world, God placed me somewhat at a distance, (really, farther than that) so I was too good to be beside reptiles. That’s how I justify why reptiles are so anathema to dear moi.
So those PAL peeps got their way, and like so many cussing passengers, I was left to my own designs.
Of course, I did not have the nerve to hitch on another airline to my destination. Right now I’m so dirt poor, I can’t even afford a ride to Boracay. I’ve quit two jobs in a span of just over a year and knowing my track record well, I really did mess it up big time! And now these striking reptiles let me fail in landing myself a job, even if turns me into an OFW. (What the f____!)
Hey Mr. Lucio Tan, can’t you please do something about the reptilian crawling all over your airline?
I bet that your beloved President cares just a bit about what’s happening here, despite the huge, huge embarrassment the PAL workers brought to the country! Hell to pay!!! But he couldn’t care more, what with his pol adviser singing another song with his leftist comrades?
Imagine paralyzing a national flag carrier! OMG!!! What kind of mentality do these spineless bastards have?
Obviously the PAL reptiliana are harping about something that their reptilian brains cannot fully fathom: outsourcing. Something the Japanese have been practicing for the last forty to fifty years!
Who is giving seminars to these reptiles? Aren’t they teaching them to give honor to the national flag carrier, just because?
If I only lost a job, what of the other passengers who suffered in monstrous proportions from the action of the PAL in house reptiles?
Where can I get a calamity loan? Surely, the reptiles will just laugh at me for even imagining such obstreperous arguments, mindless that I am aching to get back on my two feet after the disaster they put me into.
I cannot even scratch their faces and leave scars in their hideous reptilian skins. They’re too thick for my nails, plus I can’t afford getting myself pampered at my favorite beauty salons at this time. I’m poor, remember?
With all that water in the floods that hit Luzon and elsewhere and like the Fukushima shit, governments become inutile in the face of enormous challenge, with my unemployed status and the shit I got from palea reptiliana, supported by venoma fasapa, all the stupid brouhaha over petty issues whirling in the political stratosphere, no wonder I’m all so het.
Of course, a lot of other creatures are all het up but I still can’t understand why I’ve been a failure at moving forward this time.
Wallowing in the het is killing me, I really hope a reptile dies tonight. One down.
I really hope I depressed you.:(
your godsister,
Liling
bryghtnez and louminizenz 
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