The annual week-long celebration of the UP Fair was concluded last February 13, which incidentally fell on a Friday, so it was made more special. Apparently, the community of the Jumping Jologs or JJs, to make it more subtle, held a meeting in a dark cave somewhere in the deepest abyss and agreed that they would disrupt the most important event of the week.
Not surprisingly at all, when we arrived at 11pm on Friday the 13th, the OUTSIDE perimeter of the concert grounds were full of—well, Jumping Jologs. They’re Jologs and all they do is jump around looking like idiots. Sometimes they’re also called Jumping Jologs in Black or JJBs. They looked their usual selves. Black shirts, skinny jeans, Chucks—for girls they wore sleazy fishnet stockings and plaid mini skirts, piercings in the weirdest places, whole bottle of hair product in their hair, a full eyeliner pencil spent lining their eyes.
The most unfathomable thing for me though, and what really pissed me off is that they exerted all the effort in looking like that, probably scouting dingy retail stores just to look for those plaid mini skirts, but they wouldn’t even spend a meager 90 pesos for the ticket to go in. And they are so annoying, really. They see fireworks, they jump up and down like crazy. Some unknown band goes on stage, they jump up and down like crazy. Bamboo goes on stage, guess what they did?
Obviously we weren’t able to go in anymore because there were more people outside than inside. It was a struggle to even breathe fresh air with the number of JJs just roaming around outside and being annoying.
At around 1am the Jumping Jologs were in their most hyper selves. By then, a lot of them were jumping (what else?) and banging on the fences, intent to destroy it. Naturally, after Bamboo finished their set, the emcee was calmly warning them to stop disrupting the show or they would be forced to cut the concert short. Of course, the JJs took this a go signal to destroy the fences faster, so more of them joined in with the jumping and the banging. There was no love, it was all rage! Fine, lame joke.
At around 1:30 am, the concert was indeed cut short. We never got to go inside, but it’s fine with me because I was able to sell my tickets when I realized it would be useless to even try to go inside. There were firemen and police cars circling around Sunken Garden, grabbing a random JJ to quiet and detain him.
Eventually everything mellowed down, but it would’ve been one of the best and memorable events in the history of UP Fairs. Thanks to the Jumping Jologs, it was indeed memorable, but it was such a riot—and not in a good way!