To My Future CPA Friends and *Pate’s

I bid you good luck for tomorrow’s test.

For six months, you have prepared for this bring-it-on-give-it-to-me-now-or-give-me-death, freakin’ examination and now the possible fruit of your labor is almost within your sweaty grasp. You might be feeling mixed emotions today. Excited? A bit I guess. More like anxious perchance?  Hopefully not frightened to death.

For six months, you have toiled and sacrificed and endured seemingly insurmountable obstacles to get to where you are right now. You isolated yourself from the world, giving up your social life, shutting yourself from life’s frenzies and distractions, sacrificing being far away from your loves ones. You took it upon yourselves to live a friggin’, oh-so-boring lives limiting your communication to the outside world with texting yor folks for allowances, challenging the hermit’s lifestyle or a monk’s monastery-enclosed existence. And for that you earn my admiration.
Time flies so fast that I never really thought this would come to an end, that our moments together, although short-lived, would finally take its final chapter. It seemed only yesterday when you, rural young cubs armed with hope and young idealism and optimistic philosophies, went on board the two-floor, little apartment in Carola St., Espana to live a life for six months without any television or constant nagging from overly-protective parents or wistful yawns brought about by waking up with the soothing breeze from the province during early mornings. I’m sure you sorely missed those as much as I have longed for my idyllic Baguio life back then.

When Tina introduced me to you, you only knew me as your former snob JPIA president, an icon of academic authority back then who looked at matters with seriousness. I have to admit that I knew littler than you knew about me. Tina said you were former JPIA members, sophomores at the time we were already a year from leaving the portals of our Alma Mater. We may have crossed paths before, somehow, somewhere in the short 4th Floor AS Bldg, and I regret that we didn’t have the chance to talk back then. As it is now, I regret that I only know little about you in spite of the six-month time that we shared a common abode. Nonetheless, whatever it is that we shared in our little dwelling, I will surely treasure with utmost respect. I hope you have learned at least a thing or two about living a wicked lifefrom my SSDD-driven, drunken bastardly outlook in life.

It takes painstaking guts to momentarily part ways with your mom and dad, your siblings, your friends from the province, leaving everyone whom your life depended on, to to take this unsure, precarious journey to the big city. It takes more courage though to focus on this gargantuan task ahead of you because you know that, whatever happens, people around will inevitably look at you the way you dealt with the exam. Whether you like it or not, some asshole  out there will dismiss you as a stupid proletariat or a moronic money lootbag, tagging you as a failure because you failed to get at least 70% average in the eight-subject test syllabus of arguably, the most difficult Board examinations ever created in this side of the Pacific (Yes, Virginia, the overly-celebrated Bar exams and even the tedious, conservative Medicine Board are no much to ours, the reasons too broad to discuss in this entry. Maybe some other time, I will dissect the cases in point why I boldly proclaim our Board is the most difficult, the most “nosebleeding” of all!)

But I say fuck their bigotry and narrow-mindedness. I have told you this before and I will tell you once again - What happens after that four-day, two-week exams will matter little to defining who you are as a person. Society should never dictate what you should become. Whatever happened to individuality? It is not about results but rather, it’s about how you are remembered. Not about passing but about personality. Not about competence but character. It is just a test that is supposed to measure how well you have mastered THE course, how equipped you are to practice what we’ve learned in college, how worthy you are to be ordained with that three-letter title. Bear in mind that there is nothing different with this test than what you’ve taken in college, only this one’s big in scope - call it the test of all of tests.

You may have had shortcomings during the almost 24 weeks that you stayed with us, playing lackadaisical bastards like me every once in a while, whiling away at the nearest mall each time boredom lurks to kill you at the boarding house, sleeping like hags with mouths open and review notes eagle-spread across your faces whenever you find your review material a big piece of incomprehensible gibberish shit, but that does not mean you have slim chances of passing the exams.

In fact you do have good chances. I have noticed you burning the midnight oil until the lamp runs out dry, putting matchsticks to your reluctant eyelids just so you cover the day’s lecture. I have seen you restraining yourselves to text your beau’s or your friends or your loved ones because you thought you were trailing far behind in Auditing Theory or Business Law and Taxation and even just seconds exercising your thumb would cause you uncompromising harm. I have witnessed how you became cryptic, nocturnal banshees who’d rather be caught sleeping with drooling mouths and wet handouts in the sofa rather than be caught snoring comfortably like an ogre in your beds. Such sheer dedication, such enormous effort.

So don’t put yourself into too much thinking. Heck, you are already freakin’ preoccupied without such expectations to bother you anyway. I hope you remember what your kuya told you when he was drunk as an old fool across the street, shooting English invectives in random one time - “Whether you pass or flunk, you are still a human being. It does not make you any better or any worse.” Just think about this: people who pass it are just gawddamn lucky enough since most of the stuff they tried to put in their skulls got picked out of the thousands and thousands of probable questions to be formulated. Same as people who don’t have Lady Luck beside them for of all the things they had to fill in their heads, only just a few apparently were chosen.

So there. Just because you hurdled THE test does not mean you’re already superior than the other folks. Of course you can have some bragging rights if you aced it. Whadddafuck, you did get passed such hideous, seemingly insurmountable piece of nerve-wracking, skull-breaking test. But not too much braggadoccio I tell you. Because come to think of it, all of the examinees prepared for this. You prepared for this for 180 friggin’ days. It’s just that some are luckier than the others, the things they’ve reviewed got picked out of the gazillion possible questions to compose the exam syllabus. Being lucky (or being blessed by God or having good karma or riding the positive fate, whatever you call it) - sometimes,  this makes the all the difference. Sometimes, it becomes the tipping point.

Hence, I quip again: I bid you good luck for tomorrow’s test. Go kick some ass!

Nota Bene: Five of my pate’s are going to have one of the most difficult times of their lives today, taking the first of the four-day, two-week examinations in their quest to become Certified Public Accountants. Two friends in my barkada will be taking it as well. To Aiza, Jo Ann, Veron, Ryan, Menard, Papa Resty, and Baby Cat, three cheers to your future debit and kupit careers!

*Pate - shortened term for Kapatid, vernacular of sibling 

Time Turner Number 2: *Mercy, Mother, Mercy

My mom is about to enter the asylum.

She is beyond my comprehension and I don’t think I can stand her going ballistic every now and then. I am already bloody insane and if she, herself, hops aboard the neurotic crazy label, then I’m certain things won’t be going to be nice and easy in our own little dwellings. Magnetic fields of the same signs repel each other and two negatives–me and my mom–dont actually arrive at a positive result, thereby inadvertently defying the laws of physics.

I have an idea why she acts like Miriam D nowadays. And the reason also begins with M. M as in Money… Yes, Virginia, money is driving her into this state. Or more appropriately, the lack of it. My mom has suffered the tremendous low and it’s making her abnormal. She had been jobless since God knows when, hopped from one pathetic unstable job to another, started a sari-sari store and forced to close it just the same because the sales just inevitably leaked out of the kaput stall like a running water, even wore Mary Magdalene’s robe and loaned some doe to almost any single being she knew out in the street.

Now, she is twiddling her fingers in the hope that the annoying mannerism will bring her a switched-on lightbulb in her head. As of this moment, she is a nomadic agent of some goddamn loan company, tirelessly roaming the streets to look for clients who want to borrow money, promising heaven and earth, sweettalking anyone who would care to listen about her current preoccupation. Sometimes, a number would listen, many of them actually interested, but among the dozens she has submitted in the head office for credit investigation, only one or two would get the loan approval.

So what do you expect from this kind of job where your take-home pay depends upon the number of freakin’ persons you submit, who should have a business, a house and lot, a car, a tricycle, or any other collateral in order to get the OK signal? If you’re a middle-aged woman who happens to be a single parent with two bright (ahem!) kids in college, the elder one about to graduate and the other entering her upperclassman year, you can readily put two and two together and take the conclusion that the equivalent of your almost-night-and-day sales talking out there isn’t enough to cover the family pie chart of expenses. And to think that she’s a Business Ad graduate from one of the more respectable universities in Manila.

She’s had jobs, decent ones, before this sickening dilemma and when I remember those times, they never fail to put a smile in my face. Those were the days, the happier times when every 15th and 30th day of the month, my mom and Sean and me would go to the city, dine at a fastfood restaurant, and just have some guilt-free fun in the mall the whole afternoon. When I reminisce the time when mom was working a 9-to-5 job, wearing corporate clothes, walking in stilletoes, and dabbing her face with some respectable make up, I can’t help but sigh and say, gawd, I miss those times.

My mother is the living testament of the old story about the boy who lost a horse because he wanted something better. (If you don’t know what the helluva story am I talking about, just try to get the drift.) In my mom’s case, the horse was her nice-paying bank job here and the something better part is the dinar currency she can get from a land beyond this border. After ten years or so, she went home heralded as one of the new heroes of this country but in shortage of all the moolah she was supposed to earn outside.

Oh, yes, that was how all this little money mayhem started and I really thought that the shortest way to fatten your emaciating back-pocket is to raid the Western lands with your distinct Filipino labor. (That doesn’t deter me, however, from going to Rowling’s situs in the near future…haha…Pounds, baby, pounds…)

So nowadays, I’m the canine to my mother’s feline existence. We shoot each other with invectives almost every single day, some of them as potent as sending the most wicked teacher-villain in my school to slopping state. She starts her verbal rage about how bloody bastard I am in speaking my thoughts infront of her, about how all these parental retaliation will boomerang one day when I’m old and gray and already a doting parent to my own son, and I don’t give a damn (because I’m certain that when I have my own family, I will give them all they need..nay, even their insatiable wants). I still answer back even if one of the Ten Commandments is “Honor thy father and thy mother.” I still speak up my mind because I think it’s better for her to hear what I would like to say to make some sense out of her, about how she seems to be so incompetent in this folk tag, about the way she seems to bungle on some of the most important things we’re all expecting her to accomplish.

My mother is a good mother, and I have nary an argument in that, but what I find ludicrous is how sloppy she deals with some tough things that require clear-cut decisions. Perhaps because my mother is only learned on the maternal things-to-do list. Maybe because at the time my half-genes donor abandoned us, she wasn’t prepared, even trained, to act like a tough mama. Tough as in earning a living for the whole three mouths, religiously acing through Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, rearing the children like Marcos in his Martial Law era, or making a hard-headed son behave like a marshmallow.

I don’t know if I have to be hateful about the way she handles all the family matters. I know I shouldn’t. And I know, deep down inside, I can’t. Because she’s my mom, she’s the reason why I’m here existing, slowly beginning to be realistic and trashing-slash-shunning the youth idealism outright, currently breathing foul language and foul thoughts to this endearing (!) world. I have never greeted her Happy Birthday (she’s blowing another candle when October falls her last leaf) or Happy Mother’s Day (I know this one’s in May) and while I’m in this rotting cynical mantra, I know that I won’t ever. I have never kissed her or hugged her (ugh!) or even said Barney’s magic words to her. I don’t recall doing all of these mushy acts to her and I think depriving her of these things is not synonymous to hatred. (Before labeling me as the ultimate “prodigal son,” allow me to utter my saving grace that I take the “mano” before leaving and upon arriving home.)

I know that I will forever be grateful to my mother. Even if she gives me an allowance that is so Third-world you couldn’t even afford to have the luxury of a two-day Unlimited texting. Even if she makes a fool out of you because she doesn’t say she’s given you the day’s allowance from your own pocket, cautiously getting your hard-earned bucks while you’re still asleep. Even if I recall her reducing to bits and ashes my first Jollibee wristwatch because Sean wanted it and I don’t want to give it. Even if she almost always leaves us stuck in our tuition fee problems, of which my sister has always been the piteous victim. Even if Sean and I can remember her shortcomings more often than her plus parent points. Even if I know she’ll end up at the bottom pit if there’s a Mrs. Single Parent contest. Even if she failed miserably, in our standards, rearing her children. Even if she’s so trying hard to be a perfect mother. For she is my mom and at the end of the day, the thing that will most leave an indelible mark in my short-term-memory-loss-suffering skull is her triumph of overcoming the adversities, the obstacles in becoming the best person that she could be so that she can perform her duties to both me and Sean.

My mother’s name is Mercy.

*One of my numerous emo posts. I remember writing this when I was really fed up with my mom’s way of dealing  with our pathetic lives.  I thought it was the last single straw.  Thought of running away, leaving everything behind, moving to some faraway, gawddamn place I’ve never been to like Bataan or Siquijor and start living a new life incognito. It never happened. Turned out I had a lot of “last single straws” and a greater love for her and my sister.

Time Turner Number 1: *Gimme a Break

Nota Bene: It is difficult to part ways with my old blog entries and so, in the tradition of grand narcissistic SSDD fashion, I am reposting some of them under the title “Time Turner” (gawd, I swear I can’t still get the HP freak  off me!). I’ve carefully chosen those that mattered, those that made impact during my pre-yuppie, college mold, and ultimately directed me to the life path that I am trudging on as of the moment. Read on.

Today is Wednesday and I’m nine days off the curse of the 20-year-old mold.

Tomorrow my sister, who has been harassing my mom for some gawddamn money for an engineering project through her (my mother) wretched blue-peeling Trium model, will be having her birthday and I know she feels pathetic and morose about having to celebrate a birthday without even some pennies to afford a decent birthday candle. Gawd knows how bloody tormenting that is for a person to be coming off her last birthday with a 1-digit age.

She’ll be turning twenty tomorrow and I know she’ll be looking at it like another day has gone, barred of any special meaning whatsoever. If I have the money, which even a blind would very well discern I haven’t, I will give her the bucks she deserves and let her spend it the way she likes it spending - with a couple of friends going to the big screen, with her curled up dorm-mates having a nice tea party inside their hibernating Catholic abode, or even with that Chinese-descending guy who, I’m told, is patiently giving my sister a taste of Shakespearean flittings of romance. If…If…If…

I’m sitting here infront of a rotting PC whose keys are as stubborn as age-old blocks of ice in the freezer, listening to a blast of Parokya’s poignant melody, killing the hours innovating my friendster profile like it would make any slightest difference in the world, pouring my idiosyncratic thoughts into this bloody blog, skiving off my class and lying to my mom that I went to school although, truth be told, I only had a short walk in the town proper to look for a decent computer shop to while away.

I escape from reality, run away from its sickening entrails of cruelty and bitchiness, blood and all, and ponder on what I would do next the moment I resign from being an academic bummer dependent on my about-to-be-crazy mother’s dole outs like a blood-voracious leech.

Gawd, just for a short length of time, just for two hours, I want to be alone and philosophical, I want everyone - friends, kins, foes, and beggars - to leave me alone. I want not a single friggin’ thought of problems bothering my already deteriorating gray matter. I just don’t want anyone, not a single soul, sticking some ugly devil’s fork up my arse for a moment.

So I think and think and think, like I’m a freakin’ descendant of Plato or some other Greek idlers (wait a sec, was Plato a Greek?…whatever!). I think about my future, what I’m going to do after I haul my arse up that hell-of-a-school, what’s going to happen to mom and Sean the moment they give me that scrolled paper.

Allow me to make a digression… Why does everyone have to toil for that, anyway? A man shouldn’t be judged according to how many of that fuckin’ paper he has. If you’ve got brains and you know you’ve got the talent, in spite of being deprived of proper schooling, then who are they to tell you you’re not worthy of any decent 9-to-5 jobs out there? Who are they to tell you they’re smarter just because they have that wretched piece of rolled paper tucked in their sleeves and you don’t? Puh-leaze! I hate society’s norms but I can’t do anything to defy it… Because I’m poor and helpless and jobless and I don’t have any gold to turn the ugly tide…

So I think I’m going to work after graduation. Be a slave of the burgeoning call center industry and fatten away my arse telling dumb people what to do with this and that. God I can’t believe ignoramuses abound in numbers…But it’s good. In some way. Because I get to keep a nice-paying job (a thousand bucks a day for being superior and for telling people how utterly idiot they are? haha…) out of it. I know it doesn’t have anything to do with the course Ive taken but hey, to each his own, mind your own business. I’m not pushing you to jump off some politician’s name-extolled bridge so don’t tell me what to do and what not to.

My friends say I should first try to review for the CPA Board Exam, what with all the impressive goodies stuffed in my head. That I’ll be wasting this God-given adroitness if I get stagnant keeping my arse rod-hot in a swivel chair with a fuckin’-shit-sonuvabitch Western accent.

Sometimes, I try to think about that myself. Gawd, I studied Accountancy because I wanted to be an accountant, not an overpaid, bored blatherskite. When I think about how I could apply all the stuffs I learned in school, when I think about myself having to balance some accounts, having to audit San Miguel Corp or maybe Ayala’s conglomerate, I feel that it should be the path that I should be rightfully coursing through. But all the financial worries of my mom bring me back to my senses. (All because of her “butterflying” over a bunch of nice-paying jobs…But that’s another story. And I might as well write about that at some other time.)

I appreciate the concern of my friends and some other people advising me the same thing but it’s hard to deal with the matter when you’re an immature, lackadaisical guy who has to bring food on the table and worry over your sister’s education and your mom’s welfare all because you’re good-for-nothing father (God bless his soul!) left you and your mother and sister to cohabit with some other scarlet woman! (Nonetheless, the grudge is under the bridge now, I’ve learned to forgive and forget and if I ever have the chance to meet him again, I’ll act like a son whose longing for a father could very well be augmented by a hefty heir fortune…haha…Just kiddin’).

So I act like a big man, mature and responsible in every way, and say, Thank you for the empty words but unless you can give me 30,000 grand every month to pay off my mom’s debt and take care of my sister’s schooling, then God bless your soul, no hard feelings, no offense meant, but Im sticking to being a brown-skinned talking machine with an American twang. Until a person could give me a valid reason that may well defy logic and reason, I don’t have no choice but to be a slave of some Occidental service-providing company. And if that person is still stubborn to insist on what he thinks, I’m going to shove the devil’s fork up his arse and give him my own piece of logic: starving proletariats with the three-letter title after more than half-a-year or untitled yuppie with a sister secured of her schooling and a mother looking half her age because she’s finally debt-free?

Make me!

*Penned this a few months before I finally graduated from college. While majority of my classmates were contemplating about their post-college lives as Board reviewees, I was more concerned over earning big bucks after leaving college. All of my friends and professors advised me to review and to take the Board and thought that I had a good chance of excelling the test. I would have told them I’d really love to but my sister’s education was far more important than my review. So I chose to be a call center whore. Tough luck.

Because Manila Has The Moolah

In Espana, people in knee-deep water feel the cliche “When it rains, it pours” deeply enough.

Situated in one of the population-condensed streets of this arterial Manila road for temporary abode, I’ve always bore the brunt of waking up at least three hours ahead of my normal work schedule so as not to get caught in the mayhem traffic. After all, this is Manila and if one is to arrive right on the dot at the busy district of Makati, he must plan ahead of time and beat the last-minute rush. As predictable and boring as watching today’s “kilig”-induced movies churned out in cinemas this may sound, you have no choice but to reluctantly do it. Pretty much the same as dutifully accompanying your girlfriend to watch a cheesy romantic flick with the same, sickening recycled movie plot.To think about the rush hour is in itself a pain in the arse but what do you do under worst-case scenarios, when all of a sudden the Guy Up There fancies playing bowling and decides to pour down Olympus-sized buckets of water to a harried metropolis? Simple: you try to grin and bear with such an unfortunate event, hoping against hope that tomorrow dear beloved Espana is a bottomless pit no more.

The overpass at night, rumored to be a favorite hibernation of thugs and pugs and anyone with souls decaying in our place, has been an imperative route to get the perfect spot in hailing a Buendia FX during these times when cocooning in the thick blanket till you snooze is preferable than going outside like say, taking a walk in the park. I took the steps with nary the slightest trace of fear or hesitation, crossed the path whose stench befouls any signatured cologne one might be wearing, and trudged the lane going to a spot where bacteria-mooched waters don’t creep. The cars and jeeps and motorcycles passing, all in their honking glory, are like mad beasts in a jungle that have been disturbed by an unlikely phenomenon. It is a Sunday and the pious who have just gone to mass are mocked to test their reinvigorated faith by extending their patience and religious morales at vehicles ditching mud and dirt and dark waters to their immaculate Sunday dresses. The twenty-somethings, trying to push the weekend pass further, find themselves clinging to their significant others’ waists like malnourished tarsiers as they wait ’till kingdom come for the flood to run out dry. Here and there, a jeepney driver gets pissed off by the queue of unmoving engines and in a king-of-the-road braggadoccio, articulates a perfect 10 cuss in vernacular afterwhich honks his horn like it would make any difference in the world.

As I would like to point out, floods in Espana bring out the best and worst in its inhabitants (more so with the latter) and several cuss words, forehead creases, and 10 minutes later, I finally manage to squeeze in my behind (along with three other passengers) in a seat that could only accommodate three. The seating arrangement reminded me of the can of mackerel I had for lunch and while Dante might have closely encapsulated the essence of being in hell in his classic prose, I believe he might have had a different perspective, far worse than what he had already written, had he become a Filipino and experienced first-hand what it is to live in a city where perennial flood and angry fists and foul pollution interact like what my Grade 3 teacher talked about in an ecosystem cycle.

In the middle of my immature moans and ramblings and how I wished, oh Gawd, to be back in cool and comfy Baguio, just being there and savoring the crisp mountain air and watching the hanging fogs crown the mountainous terrains, the woman to my left asked the mumbling driver to stop right before the famed Quiapo church and have her drop off a spot where dirty, murky water do not abound (”Ma, dun po sa walang baha!”). This woman of 30 had her wish, I alighted to give way, and in her place, a lady who is, I surmise, in her late twenties stepped in the car. The four passengers became prisoners of the mackerel can again but I will not tell you that I’m dismayed. Quite the opposite, in fact, for to my right now sits a woman of utter sophistication whose perfume reminded me of the scent of morning dew in Baguio. She looked like Vicky Belo to me, much younger, and her eye lashes, oh how her eye lashes curled like a dozen vintas  sailing in the turbulent seas.

As much as I would like to veer away from her for fear of arousing that sleeping bestial part in me, her scent all the more makes me succumb like a weak prey. Such is the power of this bewitching woman that what I could only do is to heave sighs and hallucinate over lucid FHM moments, a Samson whose strength has been cut by Delilah’s beguilement. She rummaged over her flesh-colored hand bag, presumably of LV signature, and groped for her fliptop Motorola phone. And while I know it is impolite to glance over someone else’s text message, her long candle-like fingers with nails coated in shy pink nail polish lured me to doing otherwise. Over the luminous glow emitting from her phone’s LCD screen, I glanced at the short text about her dropping off MOA and congratulating her boyfriend about the basketball win and how his team was a shave off from winning it from UST and reminding him not to over-party with his teammates. It was curious how she called him “Bhiew”, making me contemplate whether the term of endearment was a rude localization of “Beau” or a sly alternation of the more popular “Bhie.”

To find a distraction, I reluctantly peered through the window and found a pack of five shirtless kids having the time of their life in the knee-deep flood without any slight trace of reservation, swimming like Michael Phelps racing through his historic eight-medal haul. There they were wading in the sea of used plastic cups, of water-soaked poopoo diapers, of drowning headless cockroaches, of sickeningly horrible who-knows-what, as if the rain quenched their thirst for that much-awaited and well-deserved siesta. It is a sharp contrast to how we in the mackerel can felt at that very moment. For the overjoyed kids in toothless grins, the torrential rain is a predilection that they would never have traded to anything else, except perhaps if you offered them some unfinished cheeseburger from a nearby fastfood resto. For the FX people, the sudden shower is an unwelcomed occurrence that meant being stuck in traffic and being late for work or maybe not meeting a commitment on time. Outside, the rain outpour is met with giggles and gleeful shouts jumps of joy. Inside the FX, much chagrin, and pouting, failed expectations and future petty excuses abound.  Such a sharp contrast to perfectly define the difference between kids and adults.

Last June, I decided to trade Baguio’s cool comfort to Manila’s idiosyncrasies. A lot would have pleaded to take my place and so much more would have thought I’m crazy for the geographical change but I have no choice. I mean, don’t get me wrong. I love Baguio, it was perfect, living there was surreal except when you put finance in the picture. Back up there, the salary that I get for speaking the American twang in order to assist someone on the other side of the globe connect to the Internet is barely enough to support the expenses of a family of three - me, my sister, and my mom. Manila, on the other hand, promises a well-compensating job with the widest opportunites for career advancement. It was actually a 50-50 dilemma until my sister tipped the gridlock. She graduated last May and confided that she wanted to review in Manila, meaning burgeoning expenses to be allocated for her apartment rent, food, tuition fee for the review school, and her monthly allowance,  meaning the need to get a better-paying job for me. The doting HF (read: Head of the Family) that I was, I said sure right there and then and said goodbye to the idyllic life in Baguio. Thus begins the saga of the Baguio lad who moved in Manila to get a better-paying job and in the process, had to endure being jammed in traffic and wading in knee-deep water to get to work during the slightest sign of rain.

The Vampire Strikes Back!

I have the writer’s itch yet again.

After over a year of abandoning this ambitious pursuit, I’m at it one more time. Writing is a forgotten craft that I’ve unconsciously put back in the backseat to pave the way to my idea of a young, urban professional’s unique eutopia (or maybe in the tradition of the SSDD mantra, a yuppie’s sleazy nighhtmare). While I never had the slightest intention to develop amnesia over this scribe’s skill, working in a graveyard-shift job that requires you to fake your accent and be extra-patient when dealing with offshore Ed, Edd and Eddy customers will mercilessly let you do just that. At first, I thought if only I had the resolve to write at least a few strings of sentences even only during my day off, then it would allow me to continue honing this love for writing. I said if this is really something that I love to do, then I won’t forget it that easily.

Truth is, I did not. Over the first few months that I became a slave of the corporate yuppie tag, I’ve been able to religiously chronicle a series of unfortunate (and rarely sometimes, fortunate) events that made a mark in my mind even during  more common bouts of short term memory loss. I was doing quite well with my resolve until slowly, like a candle wick being extinguished inch by little inch, entries in the slim Blue Feather notebook that were originally two pages long were reduced to measly half-page lazy diatribes. And inevitably, it came to a point where the lousy composiutions became mere one-liner, dependent clauses like “Stressed out. Had too many calls. Zzzzzzz…” How utterly pathetic.

So my predilection for adjectives and vivid verbs and words that pictured a thousand images went into an unforeseen hiatus, eventually dying a natural death while I continued to talk my way over overseas moolah in Baguio’s largest international call center company. What is odd and curious though is how I got hooked up into this kind of written ramblings in the first place when in fact, I am supposed to deal with monetary numbers, which I surmise I would never have the chance to  lie down on in reality. Allow me to state a digression: I took a course in college that dealt with making sure companies don’t cheat over their taxes, examining financial records and ensuring that the numbers are accurate right up to the last centavo, and ascertaining that their figures are good to go to merit a qualified opinion. Whoever said that people good in Math are ignoramuses in English and folks commanding the written word with ease are stupid in the figures calisthenics is ought to be rebutted. (But that is another story, which merits another blog entry.)

Several attempted but failed blog sites later, however, I find myself writing my very first entry for this new (and hopefully, last) blog site yet again. Here I am  at the living room of some friends’ apartment scribbling words upon words like there’s no tomorrow, whose print I would never know if any Internet passerby looking for some arousing “hoinky toinky” discreetly at one Trojan-packed R18 site (in spite of a “Strictly No Porn Browsing” sign conspicuously dangling on the cafe’s wall) would stumble upon. While I continue to write and finish these strings of sentences with a building irritation over a runny Reindeer nose leaking with a steady supply of sticky, virus-filled mucus, an itchy throat that is suffering from dry cough and that is going to be scratched with a blunt blade any time now, and a pair of watery, puffy eyes that has endured 18 hours of sleeplessness and outlasted crazy “fruit friends” filling their heads with possible CPA Board Exam questions ’till the wee hours of dawn, I have come to a resolution to post at least two chronicles every week in order to keep this passion for the pen anything but short-lived. I kept the minimum to two since the only time I could write  a sensible, unhasty composition would be during my two-day off from work. 

I am aware that most writers in the blogosphere do have the tendency to write about their freakin’, selfish I-talk, even jotting down anything trite and banal like what they friggin’ ate for breakfast, or how they were amused and mesmerized by their cute, wtf-I-don’t-freakin-care PE instructor’s pre-workout stretching,  or how they exchanged stupid pleasantries with their gawddamn beaus (”Bhie, eat knb?”…bleeech!) who probably are a few strings away from snapping and calling it quits due to getting used to familiar relationship routines. These are people who think they’re God’s gift to the blogosphere but in truth only deserve to be annihilated for polluting the Internet with shallow I am the fuckin’ apple of the fuckin’ universe’s eyes shindigs. Some bunch of self-conceited, narcissistic megalomaniacs who think their prose products are crystal reincarnates of some archaic classics. And although I admit I will be caught jumping into this benign blog entries bandwagon every once in a while, I will try my very best to slash my wrists before I nurture the abhorring act to remind myself that people are not interested with my mundane, boring life. If I find myself guilty of selfishly doing a jeezuz-christ-what-the-gawddamn-bullshit-are-you-taking-about monologue, I will try my very best to at least make it as most interesting and as most engaging as possible. (Blogs, after all, are a reflection of our freakin’ narcissistic extension to extol and gratify our gawddamn boring lives.)

In hindsight, I am wishing that this blog shall become my shock absorber of the things that make my mundane life categorically engaging. It will hopefully be a notepad of the absurdities and idiosyncrasies inherent in my ego-boosting personality, a chronicle of the day’s humdrum revelations that will eventually go into my gray matter’s recycle bin by the time I get ready to hibernate at night. I’m keeping my fingers crossed that this (pardon my lack of a better word) “diarying” won’t be as short-lived as this evening’s overhyped news coverage of what’s hogging the limelights in the current events. On a lighter note, I’d like to think that there are many fringe benefits I may derive from sitting in front of this lifeless shell of circuits and gigabytes twice a week to make a bloody “journal entry” (whoever said that Accounting and blogging can never be mutually exclusive?). These are as follows:

1. A perfect piece of exercise for my numbing, underused, long fingers

2. A chance to get even with the wicked ways of the world by polluting it with my randomly idiotic ideas

3. An opportunity to get even with the bitchy vent outs of ugly everyday real-life villains who make life worse than what it already is

5. A means to become one step closer to my devious plan of world domination

 And so at nearly less than a quarter before four, with nobody to keep me company but Aaron Eckhart’s silhouette and his “I believe in Harvey Dent” badge printed in the black KFC tumbler, a pile of crumpled mucus-filled tissue dried out by the whirring ceiling fan’s humid blast, and dminute, industrious ants marching up to rob the bowl of its carrots and cubed potatoes and sliced meat in blood-red sauce contect, I call this day a night and I begin the saga of a gifted Baguio lad-turned-Manila boy and his belief in the SSDD mantra.