Can You Stand this Guy?

Let's name our antagonist Narcissus. You can call him Narcis.

"Look, Narcis, chics!"

Narcis steered his attention away from his drink on the table and followed his cousin's lead, to a plus-sized woman in a short spaghetti-strapped dress walking past our group towards the plaza. Her dress wasn't skimpy and oozing with fats. The only accessory that was oozing right out of her was confidence, and I admired that. But he sneered, "Fat women don't have the right to dress sexy."

Everyone in the table had a common reaction -- Hooooowat are you saying?

"Wala silang karapatan," he repeated, as if it wasn't clear. Though it was obvious each soul in the table wanted to give Narcis a verbal spanking, they maintained their poise and laughed it off as another of his infamous shows of superficialdom and i-am-greatness.

But I couldn't sit down with it. If there was anything I hate more than haughtiness, it's haughtiness expressed with not a single morsel of remorse. It didn't occur to me that expecting remorse from the haughty is like praying for a rainbow in one painfully hot summer day. So I asked, with a clearly annoyed emphasis, "You mean to say, fat women should not dress sexy at all?"

Narcis nodded, with a half-smile, half-smirk.

Oh my gawd, he is smirking!

Ok, ok, ok, I have heard a lot of times about the remarkable attention and care Narcis performs for his physical and aesthetic well-being, and his seeming condescension towards people who are physically challenged. In a farmer's territory like Ormoc, this is translated as metrosexuality or for a lot of people, he-is-gay-ness. But just because he takes more time to dress than 10 male Ormocanons combined do, I didn't want to expect that he is exactly that, petty and skin-deep, and just that. After all, Narcis keeps a politically smart and personally insightful column for one of Ormoc's weekly papers.

BUT, as that night showed (to me for the first time -- the others pretty much knew they can expect that from him any time), he is just that. He reserves his wit only for the paper and his two-dimensional mouth for the rest of the time. What's more shameful is that he seems to be snooty proud about it. It's almost like he enjoyed everyone's reaction to his reaction.

Thankfully, he left our table early. He said he had to go home and take a bath.