Divorce cards, anyone?

Since I arrived in Malaga last year, I have been to the department store to buy a greeting card for a grand total of two times. I'm not gifted with enough patience to produce handwritten letters and cards to stay in touch with friends and family from another part of the world. The relatively good postal services here are of use to me in matters relating to pure business, so that most envelopes sent out under my name are actually cold, unfeeling documents. Besides, my penmanship has grown increasingly similar to a highly intensified code, so the chances that I would be understood by others are higher with e-mail.

Those two times I actually had the need for a greeting card happened last week. The first one was for a cousin in New York. They were celebrating the baptism of her first daughter, to whom I was ninong. The second card was for a less happy occasion, a get-well-soon card for a cousin who just had a critical surgery in the UK.

As I was searching the display shelves at El Corte Ingles for the right card, my gaze fell upon one thing that got my curiosity: in Spain, you could actually buy a divorce greeting card! These greeting cards can be found under the category "Separación" placed beside other themes like birthday, friendship, anniversary, etc. Curious, I picked a sample from the shelf that had a drawing of two people running away from each other, with matching clouds of smoke coming out of their feet as if they were cars speeding away. The message in Spanish said something like: Your worst nightmare is over. At last, you're free!

I was quite surprised because I didn't expect people would actually make divorce greeting cards. Are these cards for sale in the Philippines, too? I wonder if I will ever need to go to the post office one day to send my first divorce greeting card. That such a thing is produced and sold in Spain means that people here are buying it. It means that there is a demand for it. It means that like weddings, birthdays, graduation, Christmas, etc., people have started to mark divorce as an occasion. And it means that someone is making money out of broken relationships.

I made a quick Internet search and found that the divorce situation in Spain is not that bad. Only 11 marriages out of 100 end up in divorce. It's not that bad when compared to Belgium where 60 out of 100 marriages fail. However, as my flatmates would say, broken marriages (not necessarily divorced marriages) are so common in Spain, so perhaps that's where these greeting cards come in handy.

To be honest, I don't know much about the Spanish attitude towards marriage, but from my experience with the gay men I've met, they seem to be quite averse to it. When you ask them about marriage plans - given that gay unions have been legalized here - the 30-something's will tell you that they have never and will never consider it. Most likely, they will articulate to you their dislike of it with so much raging passion (almost hatred) that suggests that marriage is the most foolish choice one could ever make.

Sounds plain and simple: if you do not marry in the first place, then there's no need to divorce...

Is that the better way to go?

Pending

Pending. That is probably the word that best describes my present state. If I had the power to change it, like if it were possible to use a remote control to change life's current track, I'd gladly extricate myself from the present time and fast forward two months or so. My pending state is due to the fact that I'm waiting for a lot of things. That my feet are pitched, so to speak, on uncertain ground is putting my waiting skills to the test.

For example, I'm waiting for my mother's appointment to apply for a Spanish visa. I'm obviously not the one in need of the visa, but I think I'm more nervous than my mother is about it. She got an interview date for Nov. 10, a full month behind the ideal date we'd have wanted, so I'm nervous whether the visa will be issued on time. Or, if they would issue it all. For a long time now I've wanted to bring her here, perhaps as a gratitude for all that she means in my life. But whether this plan will materialize or not depends upon how fast the Spanish bureaucracy works. Since the Spanish are not exactly famous for speed (except in the case of F1 champion Fernando Alonso), I'm quite nervous. They are more famous for paella and flamenco.

I'm waiting for a thesis topic. For the past one month, I've been trying to get myself to sit in front of the computer and produce a thesis statement. Yet one thing I have learned, rather painstakingly, is that it doesn't happen in one sitting; one will probably develop eye problems first from too much computer exposure, before a nice, doable topic finally enters one's thought bubble. Right now I have a few clue words playing in my head - ICT, agriculture, rural development - but I have yet to further develop them.

I'm waiting, too, for a host of other things: my monthly stipend, my residency card that's currently under process, the September bill for the flat, my medical test results, and some books and DVDs ordered on the Net. I'm waiting, too, for two weeks to pass so I can jog again without triggering pain in the knees. There is a great deal of waiting that I'm subject to at the moment and I'm not enjoying it a bit. Pending is like being in a 14-hour flight, suspended thousand of miles above sea level, suffering from the cold in a cramped economoy seat, yet neither here nor there.

It sucks.