…doing freelance work at home

…blogging to stay connected with old friends and meet new ones

…an ex-research chemist

…blogging for a living

I’ve always not cared about blog stats. Even if this blog is embedded with an invisible (free) statcounter tracker, I never used the tool to worry about how many people are reading this blog. I just check it from time to time just to get an idea on where my readers are coming from or if I really have more than my loyal commenters. :-P

My Google Adsense account, after two years have barely 20$ in it - so that pretty much say a lot about my blog monetization efforts here. I am after all a network (pro)blogger. He he. ;-)

Anyways, I just checked the recent visitor activity of this blog via statcounter and I am quite surprised to find out that this blog has turned into landing pages of a many google and yahoo web and images searches. Key words like “bicol words”, “what does magayon mean?”, “legazpi”, “gubat, sorsogon”, “lubi-lubi”, “why did Gabby Concepcion leave the Philippines?” somehow make it to this blog. However, words like “bicol lady waiting for love” and “sexy bicol filipina looking for fun” do as well. Imagine who’s putting in such key words to search the net?!

I would like to believe that the filipina-mail-order-bride days are over. But during my net-cafe-just-to-get-online days, I was shocked to realize that the Filipina-looking-for-foreigner-BF phenomenon has just been brought a notch higher, with internet chat rooms as a tool encompassing Filipinas of all ages, from the twenties to the fourties - of all shapes and sizes with one thing in common - very long black hairs - a trait that apparently the prospective BFs look for in a Filipina (isn’t this old notion?!).

While I have no qualms about meeting a decent guy online (I know quite a few who found long lasting fruitful relationships from meeting their husbands/partners online) I am not going to exert that much effort by hanging out in all chat rooms there are like it is my bread and butter. 

One time I overheard a young lady (a college student at that!) while chatting with her cyberspace “boyfriend”. ”Okay I’ll turn around and show you my butt but you have to put that money in my bank account like you promised!”  Afterwhich, my jaw just dropped and thought ” Oh my God, is she serious?!” and “what the heck I am doing here blogging like a machine to earn money to feed my family?”

That been said, I am not acting like some bigot here, judging that “kind of Filipina”. After all, I live in a place where there are more Filipina japayukis than Filipina domestic helpers, and more plain housewives than college graduates who’ve worked after marriage. I just think that Filipinas (especially these Filipinas from small-town barrios) should get out of the mentality that the only ticket to go abroad and live a better life is marrying some (retired, old) foreigner with (lots of) money.

They should stop demeaning themselves and finally realize that there is more to being a Filipina, to being a woman for that matter and that life abroad is not always that land of milk and honey we were taught in the colonial days and that not every foreign man comes with money and he doesn’t even have to be old and retired!

There are way too many options these days to go out into the world and get out of our poverty-striken, humble origins. Like getting an education or doing some honest work to put yourself in school. C’mon ladies, gone are those days that provincial Filipinas should be married by age 18 and should have a bunch of kids by 25! Gone too are the days of young daughters as payment to some landlord that her parents owed money to. (meron pa bang ganito?!) Sana wala, this is year 2007 for crying out loud not 1807! At may internet na nga sa Gubat!

Filipinas are strong and sweet, honest and courageous and are inteliigent women of the world and all that good stuff are made of. That’s what Filipinas are! :-D