One of Lead Character's college friends, Eng, has been having his own designs printed on a shirt, just for his sake and his alone. What impresses Lead Character is how the designs, simple as they may be, are nice to look at and at the same time a very good way of expressing oneself. No, a Facebook status update is not enough. If you want to express yourself, print it on your shirt.
Eng used Japanese characters, something that not everyone in Cebu can understand. Lead Character thinks it's sly, hence he asked Eng to send him a design, one that says something offensive like "I'm a fudgepacker."
But Eng never did deliver, so Lead Character decided to make his own design instead.
The whole process hadn't been easy. Lead Character wanted a ringer T-shirt, not just any plain shirt, for his design not to look too bland. After all, his design is simply a French term in a red Ampersand font. The shop that prints out your designs for you, Transfer It! (located on the first floor of Robinson's), only had plain shirts available, so Lead Character had to search the entire city. The bigger challenge was not just to look for ringer T-shirts, but ringer T-shirts that didn't have prints on them. After hours of looking, Lead Character finally found ringer T-shirts with no prints at Giordano in Ayala.
The idea behind Lead Character's design is to go for something as sly as using Japanese characters, and with his life-long fascination with the French language, he went all out with it--something desperate, something sad.
And viola...
It's "fuck me" in French.
Note: Thanks, Chris and Chris, for teaching Lead Character useful French terms. Soixante-neuf, anyone?
i so knew it that your shirt would say "f--- me" in french, nyahahaha. maybe i should have one done in swahili, nyahahaha
ReplyDeleteHahaha. Love it! But I don't think I have the ovaries to pull that one off. Hahaha. Hmmm, I want a shirt with some French stuff written on it, too. I'm a bit of a Francophile myself. Maybe: "Le coeur a ses raisons que la raison ne connait point." It means "The heart has reasons of which reason knows naught." or something like that. =) I want! How much did it cost to print?
ReplyDelete@uh-huh girl: swahili would be so cool! why the hell didn't i think of that? but then again, aren't swahili men too big for me? hahaha. as if i can even take one that's french-sized. hahaha.
ReplyDelete@sitting pretty: i only got coeur and raison from what you wrote... so thanks for the translation. i think that might even look better as a tattoo. you can have a shirt printed for Php 170. it might get more expensive, depending on the design. but if get the shirt from them as well, it will only cost you from Php200 - 300, i think. but their shirts aren't really of great quality, so in case you're particular with that, you might still want to get your shirt somewhere else. :)
@ Lead Character: Aramaic nalang, nyahahaha!!! pero basin ma gaba-an ta ni Lord, nyahahaha. You would need scholars to do that for you. But then I wonder if they had those kind of bad words in Aramaic. Murag equivalent of "slut" ra tingali ang pinaka worse sa tanan, hehehe.
ReplyDeleteI will have to buy one from you! I think that shirt rocks!!!!
ReplyDeletebut i think the shirt is lame in france, tim. hahaha. but yeah i'm still waiting for that moment when i'm wearing the shirt and a french-speaking person acknowledges it. :)
ReplyDeletei can have a shirt printed for you as a gift, but only when you're here, though. ;)