Weekends are my life, which weekdays rudely interrupt

I am contemplating on having a year-long sabbatical.

This is my revenge to the old me who wouldn’t let my inner child do anything fun. As young as I am (evidenced by my childish ways), I have been burned by life. By work. By people displeasing to the eye and the soul. By jadedness and selfishness. I wish to run away from it all, as I am sure the rest (i.e. my two readers) of you feel.

I was in this particular state of mind when Eureka happened. I can go and leave it all. I can run away. I can start something new and electrocute myself to live again, ironic as it may sound.

I long for the beach, for the luxury of time, for doing things with reckless abandon. I don’t have to constraint myself with Blackberrys and email. I don’t have to be online everyday, savoring each morsel of megabyte and URLs, trying to convice myself that I am getting my time’s worth by lounging in cyberspace. I long to walk free without the attachments of deadlines, paperwork and insane “diversified strategic plans”. I can wiggle myself free from corporate monstrosity and urban slavery. I can pursue things that make me utterly and unconditionally happy.

I will take a sabbatical. Mark my words.

 

Challenging Times

Things change while they stay the same. A man who stays the same as the world around him changes will eventually find himself lost.

Living alone has made me question my assumptions in life, my dreams and the means I always thought will help me get into that path of success. I have a perfect picture of how it would look like to win in life, even cultivated principles and plans around these aspirations, but I find myself moving further away. For someone who has drafted impeccable blueprints and project plans for the next 5 years of life, I find myself more and more confused. My principles and ideas are not inherently wrong, I know, but I feel they have not always been right either.

I took pride with my ability to envision a possibly pristine end, I thought I can conquer misery by figuring out everything else and setting fortresses for me to not fail. But the world is hard and jaded, and in no time will be any nicer to me.

I hope I can find my redemption soon.

 

Cup of Coffee?

Things get better when I am around you. You make me happy and ecstatic about life, my endeavors, my future. You always know what to say, and when not to say anything at all. You soothe every nerve. You comfort every fiber of my being. You’re perfect…

While you’re still hot.

 

It is what it is

A foreigner colleague asked my opinion on surge of Filipinos as maids in Hong Kong. His tone gave away something I cannot say is entirely about him soliciting objectivity nor information just for the sake of intellectual discussion; it’s more of “Damn, your folk are made to be maids!”. I don’t know if it was intentional or just some bias that was not successfully disguised, but I answered him with this: “It is what it is”.

In a perfect world, anyone who has good education and the drive to succeed can rule. Those elements are enough to take you anywhere your heart desires in my opinion. But the world we live in is not at all perfect, the Philippines at the far end. So many factors should be taken into consideration to even categorize someone as surviving. It takes so much to get so little, multiply that to the burden of feeding a whole family for a wife/husband, or even some relatives for perpetual breadwinners.

The situation is indeed dire, hence the exodus of every capable Filipino to far-flung (or not so far-flung, like HK) countries to make sure mouths are feed daily, education is given and families are housed. What they cannot provide their loved ones through means available locally, a high-paying job that can make life more or less comfortable, they will seek elsewhere. Never mind the nights of homesickness, paralyzing depression or abuse from strangers. There is a greater goal that needs to be pursued. And until something drastic happens, a new world order turns where Filipinos can truly enjoy a life worth living back in their homeland, there will be endless lines in POEA and recruitment agencies… people wanting to be placed as maids, drivers, nannies, nurses and every stereotypical job fitting to “my kind of folk”.

It is what it is.

 

Thought for the day

It’s easy to romanticize anything when you’re alone.

 

A Public Announcement

Save yourself! You’re doing yourself a grave injustice if you’re working on weekends!

Weekends are supposed to be invested in much more emotionally fulfilling endeavors. They are supposed to rejuvenate and ready your soul for yet another nuclear week of meetings, endless paperwork and deadlines. Unless you’re a lifeguard who can soak under the sun and marvel on the majestic boh-deys of your swimmers (greatest job in the world in my opinion), you deserve the 48 hours of your God-given life to do something fun and unrelated to an activity solely made to pay the billz! Go out and live, my friend!

Let’s just say I really love my weekends.

 

Curve Ball, The

I have a strange relationship with learning curves.

Let me disclaim that I love learning. Let’s just put it out there. I always thought that as a true functioning human being, you should not turn away from it. An unevolving organism meets extinction, didn’t you hear? Darwin said so. Everyone believes Darwin! Besides, have you sat beside a sad paramecium in a bar? No, because they don’t have legs to sling over the stools! Silly. I also happen to know it won’t be much fun to talk to it, yes?

However, as much passion I have for learning, I get bored. Ironic, I know, because you need time to learn. I don’t know what it is but when I get to spend too much time on something, my eyes get droopy and my attention shortens than usual. There’s a mental time bomb ticking: you need to move, you need to move, you need to move. I’m always that way when I have to do something that requires time.

Career rut? Hardly. I’m not talking about years here. I’d say months, unfortunately sometimes weeks. I always move on. That’s my curse. Don’t get me wrong, I deliver, but when I give too much time and effort on one thing and one thing alone, I start to hallucinate. Why I am still doing this? Am I not good enough for anything else? Why am I here? Am I stuck? Why are there red dots when you look at the sun and then on something else? Do fish pee? What happened to Ross and Rachel after “Friends”? You see, I am propelled to this string of, you might say, unneccessary and dramatic existential questions in my head then I start to shrivel. Yes, like a plant. I start to get yellow spots and dry skin, questioning if I am good enough. It’s a bad, BAD case of incurable ADD, splashed with bipolarity for good measure.

So I come in this new world, taking pride in myself for being brave in trying new things. Compared to my old life back home, well, there’s not much to compare. Career was dead-end, pay was horrible, and I desperately want to try my hand on independence. Miraculously, it was given to me, no questions asked and with minimal arm-twisting. On this side of the fence, everything’s better and shinier, lots of opportunities to grab and people to network. And yet my emotions are circling around my love-hate drama with The Man, the learning curve. I am learning like a toddler with his walker stashed away, like parents living alone after their kids went to college. You initially think it will be awesome, but these thoughts!

I guess this, my emotional state, is driven by what I feel in work. Two months here, but why haven’t they revered me? Why are there no parties in my honor? Why are people not yet stopping to kiss my ass when I walk around the floor? Why are they not yet soliciting my opinion? Where is my goddamn corner office?! Back home, I am a golden god!

There’s logical part of me that has hit me on the crotch several times already to communicate that a) what I am expecting is waaaay off the radar considering the time actually invested in learning the new job (2 months is nothing), and b) I think too highly of myself and my propensity to acquire new knowledge. Having been raised in a time and age where people tolerated and possibly reinforced my delusional feelings of grandeur, I choose to believe the former.

So here I am, ranting semi-coherent thoughts to finally stop Logical Self from hitting me way too much (not that it affects me as I have no manly bits to get hurt… as far as I know) through the only medium I know that can relax my ever-present cynicism, desperately hoping that with this entry I can convince myself that things that matter take time and investment and that I should work on patience, a concept alien in my self-absorbed world.

 

Meh.

This defeatist outlook in life, it has to stop.

 

(Chinese) Effington

(My Hong Kong chronicles)

I am typing this from my 300+ sq.ft. box of an apartment, while enjoying “Little Miss Sunshine” on KMC and my Ben and Jerry’s Strawberry Cheesecake ice cream.

I am approaching my second month of living independently here. The weeks were fast but slow, they were exciting and sad and poignant. You’ll never really know how you’ll survive being alone until you’re actually alone. Moving out of your parents’ house is one thing; living independently is another. Factor in being in a strange environment where people talk an entirely different language, with no real set of friends… let’s just say it’s not a walk in the Kowloon Park.

I must admit, I have my moments. As much as I took pride in my being tough, I never knew being away would have this much emotional impact. I cried for countless of times in my first week here, questioning my decision to be here while unloading a year’s worth of clothes. It was comical, if not utterly pitiful. Pictures of friends and family I took with me, they didn’t help ease the longing. Deep inside, I knew I was missing out on all of the happenings back in the Philippines. Never mind how mundane. The point was I’m alone in a country where no one in  particular will fuss over if I have eaten already or have taken my insulin. No one in the 30-mile radius was even aware that I existed. I could die in my flat, and no one will know I even lived here until three days later when the smell of decaying flesh becomes unbearable. And as you may have guessed, these kinds of thoughts propelled more crying.

When you spent all your life acting a certain way, doing certain things, assuming certain things, you’re definitely molded. And that won’t help when you’re suddenly uprooted. I never anticipated the psychological toll this whole experience has given me. Before, I found the whole idea of moving to another country with nothing but your bags and a clean slate as somewhat romantic. You’ll get to live your life with no one knowing any better if you are indeed what you are portraying to be. You can be anyone. A new beginning. A new life. A few days living that way gets a bit old though. I started missing family and friends, most especially on weekends. I didn’t know what to do with myself. I still don’t.

But I guess the human spirit is indeed resilient. Someone told me that things will get better. Truth is, it did. I started to open up to a world otherwise alien to me. Before, I thought HK is just a place you visit, not a place to live. I assumed that all locals are cold. I thought HK is nothing but a shopping haven. Week after week though, these generalizations came tumbling down. HK unfolded before my very eyes. I realized this isn’t so bad. I can actually live here. Live BETTER here, even.

I am starting to love this crazy world of ticking pedestrian lights and bustling marketplaces, nature trails and dragon-boating. I find myself comforted with all the Cantonese-speaking men in suits with the mobile phones going off and Chinese tweens in their pink leather jackets walking past. I welcome colleagues pushing me to try weird but scrumptuous snacks from mainland and mooncakes during the Mid-Autumn festival. My eyes glaze over the sights and sounds, the smells and feel of my new world. I take a deep breath every night I walk home, and feel…normal. I’m OK. This is new, but I’m OK.

I love Manila, and it will always be special, but I have done everything I need to do in Manila. HK pushes me out of my comfort zone, sometimes too much I get scared. It has become a representative of everything I want to discover in myself: independent, surprising, unapologetic for being straightforward. HK is indeed becoming my Effington. It is becoming home.

 

Thought for the day

Your life is your movie. Be your own hero and make it your favorite film to watch.