In line with the upcoming book signing at Fully Booked on November 22 (Saturday) or if you are interested to purchase a copy of “Lies My Yaya Should Have Told Me”, I am reprinting my Philippine Star article from December 26, 2007 which has several excerpts from the book.

If you wish to order the book online, you can pick up a copy from National Bookstore’s online store over here: http://www.nationalbookstore.com/shop/categs.asp?categ=95&mode=2&compact=1&page=6

Or you can also order the book online from Anvil Publishing at: http://www.anvilpublishing.com/bookdetails.php?id=2007000105

Thanks for the support! Namaste

I have an obsessive-compulsive disorder which yanks me out of bed thirteen times to relieve myself in three-second durations until I can finally go to sleep.  I resemble an elephant that has gone into a seizure when I attempt to play basketball. I walk with a hobbling gait that looks like I was jailed in a Saudi prison in my adolescent years. I pranced half-naked regularly in a late night comedy show in an effort to drum up controversy and resuscitate my dismal showbiz career (yet I can’t even guest appearance on Jojo A All The Way. After all the times I’ve plugged him in this column, hmp). And during one of those lazy Sunday afternoons when Lolit Solis was not dropping any bombshells, I was mortified to discover that one of my boys hung lower than the other (although after checking in with my neighborhood manghihilot, I was relieved to find out that this was perfectly normal). 

As you can see, shame has pretty much become a theoretical concept as far as I am concerned. But one of the revelations that I have blurted out in this column that has sent many a female reader scrambling to give the cellphone number of their psychiatrist is: Does he really have a yaya?

Does his yaya edit his work before he sends it into the Philippine Star?  Does his yaya even know that she is writing about her?  Does his yaya get royalties?  What does his yaya think of his fiancée?  Will his yaya be a bridesmaid in their wedding?  Will his yaya serve as a natural form of birth control and sleep in between them when they are married? 

And will my first book, ‘Lies My Yaya Should Have Told Me, RJ Ledesma’s Imaginary Guide to Whine and Women’ answer any of these questions. 

Hardly. 

But hey, it does make my yaya beam with pride when her name appears beside mine in documents other than police blotters.  I have purposely kept her image and likeness away from the prying eyes of the showbiz press until we finally get Marian Rivera to play her in the next Metro Manila filmfest.

And for those of you who would like to laugh at something other than the administration and are still wondering where you should fritter away your Christmas bonus on, I have asked my yaya’s permission to reprint some excerpts from the book. 

Lies about Boys’ Night Out:

‘What truly amazes me about my species is how we are able to rise above our mental capacity as slugs to prevail upon our significant others to visit a motel (and I say this in the most theoretical way possible).  I mean, don’t we already struggle with asking permission from our girlfriends to join the boys for a “night out.”?

In their more complex minds, women mistakenly equate “boys’ night out” with cheap beer, voluptuous women, and really lousy singing.  They’re wrong you know – the beer is hardly cheap. 

But with the impending threat of being reduced to self-love for the rest of the relationship, men ‘voluntarily’ choose to incarcerate themselves at home and watch the Maging Sino Ka Man Book One DVD with their women, when they could otherwise be enjoying really expensive beer.  ‘

Lies about Karaoke:

‘Far worse than our addiction to Sunday tsismis shows (You’re da best Kuya Boy) is the Pinoy’s inexplicable desire to sing truly sappy, romantic songs.  Admit it, my three female readers: during lull moments in the bathroom, your favorite pastime while staring at yourself butt nekkid in front of the full length mirror is to belt out a random cheesy song while singing into an imaginary microphone (my personal favorite is “Let the Love Begin.”)

Much like botched coup attempts, Pinoys have gained a level of immunity to cheesiness that would normally put other nationalities into a catatonic stupor. Think about it: We have kept Side A’s career afloat beyond an acceptable life span.  As a result, we often need a stronger shot of cheese to elicit any form of reaction. So we got Keith Martin to stay in the country for good.

However, I believe Pinoy men have merely rediscovered what our harana-warbling forefathers discovered a long time ago: truly mushy love songs have the ability to clog up the pathways to rational thinking AND cause hallucinogenic effects on both sexes (much like sniffing rugby or watching news on the government-owned stations).  If a man croons exceptionally well, despite his pockmarked and butt-ugly face, he envisions himself to be the spitting image of Piolo Pascual.  And if a woman thinks that he croons well, she then tends to reinforce the delusion.’

Lies about Comedians:

‘A May 2005 survey of more than 1,600 adults from the US conducted by Match.com, an online dating service, revealed that 70 percent of singles believe that they are most likely to fall in love with someone who could make them laugh.

In fact, it was sense of humor – not expertise in color coordinating one’s belt with one’s shoes nor building up one’s pecs so that they can use it crush castanas – that women cited as the No. 1 romantically attractive trait.

Now I know that God is just.

Because for every Marc Nelson and Will Devaughn and Derek Ramsey who have been cursed with sun-kissed skin, penetrating eyes, porcelain white teeth, rock-hard abs, and product endorsements that could pay off the national debt, there are the Vic Sottos,  the Michael Vs, the Vhong Navarros, and even – God help us – the RJ Ledesmas of this world who score with women who have recently collected beauty titles and high school degrees.  The average Pinoy must be doing anatomically improbable things, like kicking himself in the groin, asking himself how RJ had the gall to include himself in the list. Besides being awash with money, cars, and fame – save for RJ – what else do these funny men have going for them?

Apparently, “funny men” have the ability to boost the endorphin levels in women.  Endorphins are biologically produced chemicals that are probably the best way to achieve a natural high.  Endorphins produce four key effects on the body: they enhance the immune system, they relieve pain, they reduce stress and they postpone the aging process.  Endorphin levels increase when people laugh really hard or when they have scandal-video worthy sex – because of these experiences leave the person with a ‘blissful’ feeling. 

Endorphin production can increase to 200 percent from the beginning to the end of your sexual activity.  Since increased endorphin levels occur when you have sex and when you laugh, “funny men” hope to leave women temporarily confused and have them thinking that they are still laughing when they are already actually having sex.

But if you think about it, sex with “funny men” could actually be good for your health.  If he can make you laugh during sex, you might be able quadruple your endorphin production and end up becoming enlightened and immortal.’

Lies about Speed Dating:

The rules of speed-dating were fairly simple: Singles gather at a café or other venues where they will not be subject to much public humiliation.  Armed with a nametag, a “scorecard”, well-rehearsed answers to possible questions, pick up lines downloaded from the internet and a sparkling personality, the couples are paired off on their “first date”.  They are allowed to discuss anything except for their fetishes and whether or not they have been in long-term relationships with domesticated animals.

After three minutes of conversation, a bell is rung, and the coordinators tell the participants to move on to their next date or else they will be flogged until they have gone through twenty-four dates.  Think of this as fast-food dating. And the best thing about speed dating is that, unlike a vasectomy, you can always rejoin speed dating events as many times as your budget allows unless the organizers ban you for aesthetic reasons. 

Like prophylactics, the organizers assert that speed dating is safe dating because there are standards that must be upheld.  Women demand that the men participating in speed-dating are certifiably single, have a credit limit beyond P5,000 and have no criminal records. Men demand that the women have a pulse. 

Lies about Dealing with an angry woman:

‘Whenever my girlfriend gets angry with me, the image that comes to my mind is that of the Hindu goddess Kali.

In the Hindu mythological text Markanderya Purana, Kali springs forth from the forehead of the goddess Durga when Durga is in a fit of divine feminine anger.  The goddess Kali sports a frightening countenance.  She is dripping with blood and encircled with snakes while a necklace of human skulls carelessly dangles around her neck. She has a gaping mouth, a lolling tongue, pendulous breasts, and she looks just about ready to make this world her appetizer.  In this aspect, Kali is known as Bhairavi, “The Terrible”.  Thus, whenever my girlfriend gets terribly, divinely angry with me, it takes a supreme effort on my part not to soil my underwear and avoid making comments about pendulous breasts.

For my fellow males who do not want to become part of a necklace, there are certain rules that you must obey when confronted by female anger.  There are de facto rules that I discovered as I went through seventeen brief lives as a cockroach stain on my girlfriend’s floor.

The first rule is that she has the divine right to get angry at you about anything because it is entirely your fault.  Her problems at work, her lack of sleep, her constipation, her wrong shade of lipstick, her future wedding plans and her PMS – all these can and will be traced back to you. 

Complementary to the first rule, because your karma being born a man, the second rule is that you don’t have the luxury of getting angry right back at her (and she will remind you of this as she dangles her necklace of human skulls in front of your face).  Instead, you can just have the luxury of an aneurysm.’

I was planning to copy my book in verbatim and perpetuate disinformation for free, but my yaya made me kurot in my singit.  ‘Huy, mawawala yung aking commission.’    

But in the meantime, my yaya has allowed me to share some of the germs of wisdom that she imparted to me as a chubby,  pomade-wearing, baby cologne-drenched, khaki shorts-clad boy of twenty-one that would put Robert Fulghum to shame:

Do not touch yourself in public or else it might come loose and fly away.  Do not leave school until I pick you up or else a DOM might pick you up.  Avoid watching bomba movies or else you will lose your hair.  Always carry a panyo in your pants pocket. Always bring your ‘good morning’ towel if you are going to get pawis.  Always wash with soap and water after you make doodoo (If there is no soap, then you can use Wet Ones).  And, most importantly, whenever you leave the house always make sure your your t-shirt is tucked into your panty.    

Aside from the occasional butter knives that were surgically removed from the orifices of the male participants, a recent speed dating event I attended in Manila proceeded without need of police supervision.  However, I was quite wary of the claims made by the organizers regarding the elusive “spark” that could be generated among the participants without the benefit of alcohol, heavy medication or a mother’s kakulitan.  The men appeared to be as clueless as government officials as to whether or not they would be on their way to a second date. 

During the speed dating event, I noticed how these men struggled to create a good first impression despite opening their mouths.  Aside from unbuttoning their collared shirts to reveal their well-groomed chest hairs, some of the men were wearing enough cologne to knock out domestic animals and small children.  Somehow, I doubt that the ability of a man’s cologne to suffocate their dates made them more attractive.  However, what might make these consider these men as potential sperm donors is if these women could associate the man’s cologne to a past experience, a past experience that was memorable, a past experience that was memorable, and a past experience that did not require fumigation.     

According to Indiana University psychology professor James Craig, “It is pretty clear that much of peoples’ responses to perfume and other smells is learned.”  Smell is, in fact, a very powerful memory trigger, and past associations with certain colognes often dictate how a person will respond to a given scent.  For example, if a woman suddenly drop kicks you in a bar, grinds the spike of her heel into your manhood and calls you a “lousy cheating bastard!” then you are probably triggering bad memories. However, if the shapeliest woman in the bar pounces on you, starts shredding your clothes and plants kisses all over your chest, then you know you’re going to get lucky tonight. Until you discover her Adam’s apple.  

Apparently, this “spark” which these speed dating enthusiasts are referring to is not voluntary electrotherapy.  However, even without the benefit of this elusive “spark”, there is still hope for men who want to short circuit the whole dating process and get a free pass to the fulfillment bump and grind. And that secret to short circuiting the date and mate process lies with people who smell as good as their cheese: the French. 

Despite their much-maligned hygiene habits, Frenchmen are reputed to be the best lovers in the world. While we pride ourselves on the fact that our singits smell sampaguita clean, the French are even prouder that they have yet to surrender their natural aroma to nuclear-powered kalamansi fresh deco-colognes!  And despite smelling like Gruyere cheese, their natural aroma has been known to disintegrate the undergarments of women for centuries. 

And this could be the same reason why your only date during Saturday night is your right hand:  Because you are just too damn clean!  In fact, washing yourself too frequently in all the inappropriate places scrubs off your pheromones, leaving a woman unable to smell if you are the right one to help her overburden the Philippine population.

Pheromones are small organic molecules which act as form of chemical communication between two animals of the same species that can signal an individual’s identity, arousal, or sexual receptivity.  The pheromones we emit come from our singits, kili-kilis, mucous membranes, nipples and, uhm, genital secretions which produce aromatic messages that travel through the air and affect the sexual behavior of the opposite sex.  For example, when I don’t shower for a couple of days, my yaya wants to shower me in Lysol. 

In a warped experiment to demonstrate the potency of pheromones, researchers who were picked on as children anesthetized a male golden hamster and placed it in a cage. Then they let a normal male hamster into the cage.  The normal hamster bitch-slapped the anesthetized hamster, bit his ears and body hair-pulled him around the cage.  And because these researchers were not having enough fun yet, they performed the experiment again, but this time around they rubbed vaginal secretions from a female hamster onto the anesthetized hamster. 

When the normal hamster was placed back into the cage with the anesthesized hamster, who reeked of Parfum ala Vajayjay, the normal hamster’s reaction was quite different: he did not try to kick the butt of our dazed and confused hamster.  Instead, he tried to hump it.  And it was only when the scent of the vaginal secretions wore off from the anesthetized hamster that the normal male hamster realized what he had done.  After five minutes of screaming, the normal hamster curled up into a ball and cried while the song “Crying Game” played in the background.  If anybody knows where we can find these researchers, please let me know. We will have them jailed in Muntinlupa with convicts who are not permitted conjugal visits.

But more disturbing than being slathered with vaginal secretions is the revelation that what makes us really attractive to the opposite sex is our immune systems (and not the size of your bald spot, as my dad had mistakenly led me to believe).  According to an article in Psychology Today, how our body odors (also known in Austin Powers parlance as ‘mojo’) are eventually perceived by females as pleasant and sexy is a process more selective than a government bidding.  We usually smell the most attractive to a person whose genetically based immunity to disease differs most from our own.  

In a mojo-generating experiment, men were asked to wear a shirt two nights in a row and not to wear deodorants or scented soaps (this experiment is better known among men as a “lifestyle”).  Women were then presented with six shirts – three from men with similar genetically based immunities, and three from men with genetically based immunities different from their own.  First, the women were made to take a whiff of their shirts.  Next, the women were revived with smelling salts.  After they had regained their wits, the women preferred the scents of men whose immunities were different from their own.  The scent of men with similar immunities to their own reminded the women of a relative’s odor, such as a brother or a father, while the smells of immunities dissimilar men would often remind them of a past or current boyfriend.  This suggests your kili-kili has powers that even you did not know that it possessed.

So if our mojo is the best way for us to attract a potential mate, then why do men wear cologne to mask their essence of singit?  That is because cologne is the Trojan Horse that makes the female snort up our pheromones.  Sniffing your man musk into the most remote regions of the nasal cavity is important to let your targeted female discover if she is the right partner to bear your six children.  Given this, a pleasant smelling cologne is used to encourage unwitting members of the opposite sex to inhale more deeply the air surrounding its wearer, increasing the probability that the pheromones from the individual will also be inhaled. So, my three female readers, beware of the men who are wearing enough cologne to tranquilize elephants.     

Indiana University Chemistry Professor Milos Novotny postulated that certain substances in perfumes could also act like pheromones in humans and thus heighten a person’s sexual attractiveness. Since women often claim that men are animals, perfume manufacturers got the bright idea of deriving the secretions from animals which they use to mark their territories as perfumes.  Among the more popular secretions are the skunk-like spray of the civet cat, the castrum from the peri-anal glands of beavers (Drakkar Noir sounds much better than Eau de Peri-Anal), the musk from the genitalia of the male musk deer and, as if wearing secretions wasn’t humiliating enough, the ever-popular boar urine.  Among all those secretions, boar urine appears to be the most potent – once female pigs get a whiff of his urine they arch their back to demonstrate their willingness to mate.       

So, to all my readers who are part of the No Girlfriends Since Birth (NGSB) fraternity, there are two divergent strategies you can employ to meet your reluctantly ideal mate: First, forsake hygiene as it is an imperialist concept and lock yourself in a room with no ventilation for several days.  When your odor is full-bodied enough to murder innocent cockroaches, you know you are ready to mark your territory.  Do not be afraid to proceed to the most crowded bar possible as lesser men will run away at the mere fragrance of you.  Find the woman that you have pining for, wrestle her to the ground, and thrust your armpits fully into her nose.  If she arches her back, you will know that she is immediately smitten by you. However, if instead you put that woman into a coma, you will be sent to the US for lab testing, smeared full of female hamster secretions, and placed in a cage with several thousand virgin male hamsters.

Otherwise, you can take the other route of spending a ridiculous amount of money that could otherwise repay for our national debt and drown yourself in cologne that smells like animal genitalia and urine to attract the opposite sex. However, what the perfume manufacturers fail to mention is that, although they are sure that animal secretions will get some animals to arch their backs for you, they aren’t sure if these secretions will work on human females.  But even if the cologne doesn’t help you attract the opposite sex, you needn’t worry.  There are probably still some lonely female boars out there.    

Welcome to dating in the 21^st century. Men spray themselves with anal secretions to make themselves more attractive. No wonder women think men are a$&holes. 

(Originally published in Manila Times on June 26, 2005)