He was leaning casually on a red SRX bike parked on the street that leads up to our house. I didn’t take much notice. I was busy trying to hatch my escape plan. He waited for me to approach. There is no other way. I sighed and continued moving forward.

I got closer.

“ Hi.”Gave me a tentative smile.

I dug my hands into my back pants pockets and prodded on. I was getting really close. I was inches away when he took a deep breath and slung his other arm around me. I froze.

“ Hey, I’ve missed you. You seem to be all around the place. You’re never at home whenever I visit.”

“I’ve been busy.” I said quietly.

“Busy? Doing what?”

“Whyso many questions?”I retorted in my bitchy tone.

He seemed to be taken aback by that one. He must have not heard that tone from me yet.

Using that unguarded moment, I took hold of his arm on my shoulder and flicked it away. Flicked it, like it was some dirt caught in my clothes.

He stepped back, seemed genuinely confused, his practiced air of confidence slowly vanishing.

I started walking away. He grabbed my hand.

“ We need to talk.”

“We have nothing to talk about.”

“Yes we have. You’re not taking my calls, you seem off whenever I’m around, or you’re always somewhere else. You’re …”

“It’s over.”

“No, you still love me.”

“ Not anymore, don’t you get it! You and I both know that it was over when I stopped taking your calls.”

He faltered again. Maybe processing that bit of info that I had been drumming in his head for weeks already. God, I hate repeating myself. I started to walk away again. I suddenly feel very tired.

“Don’t”..he falters…”don’t just walk away like that.”

I turned around with a calmness that even surprised me.

“Watch me.”

Then I just walked away. Not caring if he was instantly jubilant that I’m finally out of his life, or if he actually was heartbroken.

okay, no more dilly dallying. have to write something. NOW. even just something to bitch about…

It’s October and I just realized that apart of snippets of thoughts, mundane and eccentric alike that I try to scrawl into my green Sterling notebook at home, I haven’t written anything that sounds like a comprehensive article or even something blog-like for freakin’ 8 months already! (hmmm, doesn’t sound like someone who aspires to be an editor someday, huh?) So anyway, here I am and let’s see if I can still put my journalistic chops to good use. I warn you, this might get rusty and a bit dirty…

….on my writing

              ….I super miss it but sometimes I loathe the thought that I can’t write as much as I want to due to brains cells dying one by one like a bunch of lined cans ready for a sniper’s target shooting. Bang! Bang! Bang! Dead! No use at all. Absolutely worthless. I hate it that I can’t write as much as I want to, because either I’m busy at work or I’m busy trying to sleep or to the contrary, partying or just bumming around.  

…my take on aging

        …funny that im just on my early 20s but I feel like life has left me behind and that my biological clock is already ticking. Not the clock that I should be married and have children, mind you, but the clock that says that I should be doing more and there are a lot of younger people out there and I will soon be rendered obsolete like a friggin’  Windows 98 anytime soon.

…my dependency on everything illegal

            I used to be dependent on food and writing blogs to make me happy and sane, (yah I used to be so low maintenance.) That was then. This is now. My mother will surely drag me back home if ever she knew that I need some sleeping supplements to knock me dead, that I am hooked on caffeine of all dosages and make (whether the brewed, iced or fizzing ones) to keep me awake, some puffs to help me poo, booze to make me euphoric or cuddle me when I’m fuckin’ miserable, and fastfood and my roommates’ cuisine to nourish my garishly disproportioned body. Now let’s leave it at that. I don’t want to say something that may discriminate me.

…the love-hate relationship that I have with my job

        …you might have guessed by now that I work as a call center agent. The job I said I will never be caught dead doing, simply because I think it won’t make me grow; the job that those who know me well enough tell me doesn’t deserve me because it’s way beyond my league (ahem); and the job that will absolute kill me (refer to abovementioned danger signs). Okay, I can’t say im crazy about this job or that I hated it to the core. I don’t know. Maybe a mix of both, if that’s possible. Love-hate will be the best way to describe it. I love the perks of it, the fact that I speak English for eight friggin’ hours, even on breaks; the fact that I can bullshit Westerners to believe me eventhough I’m absolutely clueless as well (beat that!), of course the pay ( that I squander to my heart’s content), the workplace that doesn’t care if you’re straight or gay or if you are a minority as long as you can do the job, the ‘no dress code’ policy, no pending stuff to thing about after logging off,  and…the boys. Let’s not forget the boys. I also like the fact that I can utilize all the expletives that I want to use to its full potential. When before the only way I can used expletives were using bleeps and asterisks, now my daily language will be peppered by the fuck yous , eat shits, and all the expletives that I have mustered and have been itching to use in public before but cannot because the environment calls for me to be decent. In a nutshell, what I like about my job is I became better in spoken English, confident in public, and aggressive, such as the ability to fend off hopeless computer illiterate customers as illiterate as me from eating me alive.

        Now let’s also go to the not-so-good-part. The bad thing in this picture is, this whole conundrum is keeping me away from the things that are good about me, my writing, my dream job, and the confusion. And my sleep! I have so many aborted resignations, jobs that I was already hired, but for some crazy twisted reason, I walked away from. Simply because I cannot leave this job. Because something is holding me back, and it sucks that I don’t even know the answer as to why. Plain bullshit, if you ask me.

…on being a schadenfreude

Schadenfreude in German is the ability to feel good about the misfortunes of others. Or simply being a skanky little bitch. What do you do to move on from a blotched relationship? Some wallow in depression, others mount a vendetta, while some wreak havoc into someone else’s life. I dabbled in each one, but I excelled in the latest one. Misery does make one numb and downright nasty, and sad to say I did it. The poor bloke swallowed it all, the mind games, my cutesy lines, and my seemingly innocent facade. And boy, did he fall for it, Hook, line and sinker. Made me feel good about myself, and bad about myself, for acting like the jerk that I am. Fuck. Life’s a bitch.

…on other things that I might consider bitching about

ahmmm, nothing much…just that I have lesser things to stress about but wishing I had a lot to think about ….

And hoping the guy beside me will stop using betterment in his letter to a BPO company because it is NOT FUCKING RIGHT!

as of this writing , im still fresh from a bout of fever that came out of nowhere last night…after the initial high of change and the dizzying speed that I had led my life this past month( new job, new life, pampanga, puerto galera), the ensuing lull was like a pail of cold water and I’m feeling a wee bit down lately. Actually I’m down BIG time. I always feel like this on the onset of illness. I get depressed; I’ll miss Mom real bad, and everyone else. I just hate being sick (who doesn’t?). It’s so embarrassing to sniffle, sneeze and cough in public. I get grouchy because I can’t eat stuff that I wanted, like that strawberry flavored ice-cream in Ministop and all those soda, and then …I will always almost want to give up on everything else. Add it to an episode of crazy stuff that led to a falling out with a dear friend( or so I think) someone I hold close to my heart, and whom I held too close I didn’t realize its not healthy any more. I wasn’t sure if it was the best thing to do, but hey, I gotta take the risk, right? I may be too stubborn to admit it at first, or I really tried to ward off that feeling but now, I’m in too deep and before it gets too deep, I need to get out, and whatever happens, let’s just get this over and done with.

…I hope you know, I hope you know
That this has nothing to do with you
It’s personal, myself and I
We’ve got some straightening out to do
And I’m gonna miss you like a child misses their blanket

That’s what always happens when im sick. I wanted to give up on my job, my life, and all I wanted to do is go home and howl like a banshee. But then, I always have the people I love to count on, my dad whose text messages have my inbox bursting at the seams, he knows when I get home from work, he wont sleep unless I get to work at midnight, and hy and yan who makes me laugh when im down and will go all the way from paranaque just to meet me, net who is just a text away for some booze and chika, and ate min whose just a YM away.  But this episode will pass. I’ll wallow, hate the world,give myself some time to feel the pain ‘ emote emote”…. and then,  I’ll remind myself that this is the life I wanted and struggles are part of it all, and , I’ll stand up and go kick some ass. It always works.

But I’ve got to get a move on with my life
It’s time to be a big girl now
…and big girls don’t cry

…8 am and I just
got off from work .here in my usual net café nook for my daily dose of
friendster and online music , craving for krispy kremes and waiting for sleep
to beckon me to eternal snoozedom.

…life’s been
pretty okay lately. the new life that is.  the new job is exciting, the excitement of
doing new things every day (or night?) had mah system up and running after a minor
bout with the colds and cough that had me losing my voice for a week during our
foundations training. talk about a call center agent having no voice. yeah, i know
that was way absurd, but I tell you, that did happen…father said it was a
result of the stretching of mah laryngeal muscle, or too much coughing , or
maybe from too much English. im practically living, eating , breathing English that
im now searching for the English equivalent of chemeroo ( you know, keme keme…)
   but this girl aint complaining, na-ah.

…the new crib is
fine, except it’s pretty stuffy on hot  days ( but very conducive for daytime
sleeping), im getting 10x my allowable fastfood consumption, and my habit of
sleeping during class hours is now making its way back in the scene. and soon, my
caffeine intake will overtake any Hollywood  star’s
coffee guzzling record.

…what I love about
being here is because my favorite people are very much in the vicinity and spending
time with them is always a blast, whether it be house-sitting yan and hy’s
apartment while surrounded by books and cable TV or to strolling the malls that
populated every mrt stopover, my weekends are full of activities that I barely
rest, but its worth it. ( my weekdays are full of sleeping anyway, so that’s
ok.) I wanted a life and this is what I got and so far, im loving it..) though I
miss my stable life back home, my roomy space , my own TV, my former co-workers, and even my
cubicle, but my unsatiable nature would take excitement over stability any day
so I guess that’s pretty much it.

…v day’s coming up
and I guess we’ll be seeing roses and cutout hearts everywhere, all that sappy,
mushy music will be on mamang fx driver’s
stereo, and cuddly couples will have your insulin level shoot up enough to give
you a sugar high, or rush you to the nearest medical center. some of the people
are starting to ask how my v-day’s gonna be spent but I guess I wont have much
time to go out coz I’ll be up to my ass with our certification ( major exams in
the call center trainee’s life) on the 14^th and 15^th , so
there’s absolutely no way im gonna spend the day staring at someone else’s eyes
through my mascaraed lashes. oh well, maybe my v-day’s gonna be spent on some other
time, probably sometime in the –ber months.

…now im getting way over my head with this blog and as usual, a planned mini- entry has become a fullblown article that hasnt had much sense into it, but hey, i havent written a single thing since the new year so excuse me for the mumblings, folks! cheers and till my next entry!

…I never thought leaving a job could be so stressful, with all the email you have to sort, files you need to backup, responsibilities you have to pass on to,  equipment you have to return, and the backlog over the YEARS( in my case,  a friggin year and 8 months). Add that to the sort of ‘guilty ‘feeling of leaving it all (the people, the project, the place) behind. It’s like having constipation, you don’t wanna do it coz it’s stressful, you need to exert effort, and more effort, it’s emotionally draining (anatomically, too), and it stinks… but you need to do it anyway coz you have to get rid of it (you must know what im referring to) first before you could get outta of the toilet seat. Whew, I wish I could get it all off my ass. Hee hee hee

I have been searching for some heavy reading these past few days because I have been plagued by this insane sense of being way behind on my reading, due to absence of books in my humble abode of a rented room owned by a Chinese family. All I could find to read was a bunch of nursing journals that I couldn’t simply comprehend, except for atrioventricular ( heart related), atopic ( something to do with allergies), sphygmomanometer ( bp apparatus, as we normal beings call it) , asymptomatic ( when you have something and you didn’t know because there weren’t any symptoms that said your dying of something), laceration, malaise, asphyxiation and some, ( I learned those from a semester as a pre-med student and from watching a lot of CSI, Criminal Minds, Justice and a lot of other crime series).

When I was a college student, I felt really deprived. I didn’t even know that the Harry Potter movies are based on Harry Potter books, so when I finally did learn about it, boy, didn’t I went all berserk. Dough just went a-missing. In two weeks of sembreak, I was driven into a -what my father called-  temporary psychotic fit.

We all know what public schools in remote areas are subjected into, no classrooms, no books, and sometimes, educators who are inadequately trained. Some of the teachers aren’t even board passers, some of them couldnt even spell correctly, some of them teach wrong things. Some of the newer teachers couldn’t just match up to the calibre of old teachers. That’s the sad part. It’s just so sad that the education of future generations is deteriorating before our very own eyes.

I’m just so fortunate to have a father who loves hoarding books and my mom teaches English, that’s why I get by, despite all this. It also helps a lot that I’m such a bookworm; I love to read about anything, from newspapers that are used as wrappers in sari-sari stores or to wrap delicate kitchen ware, to comics and komiks, to transcripts of my favourite shows on the internet. I’m also a TV addict, my brain acts like a sponge, absorbing anything that comes out of an animated box.

But right now, I just feel so deprived of information. I felt like I should really brush up on the works of my literary heroes and do some heavy duty reading. That’s why I’m happy when I found this site where they have online books , poems and short stories of my favourites such as Dante Alighiere, jane austen, Charlotte Bronte, Agatha Christie, Guy de Maupassant, George Orwell, Edgar Allan Poe. Ok , now I need to stop. Im hyperventilating. Oh, this is just pure bliss. Now I can immerse myself in literature whenever my boss isn’t looking. Har har har… Now I gotta go, I have to catch up on my reading. See yáll!

major screw up

here we go again. the old song plays the same tune, even my words seem so used. i never meant to stay. i never meant to get attached. i hate it when things go beyond my control. I never liked playing games; I only managed to get suckier every minute. I never liked Scrabble cause, oddly, I would run out of words. I never liked playing ball because I couldn’t catch it. I quit dancing, because I always trip every time. I never sing because I just couldn’t hit the notes. I never tried doing cooking again, because the yolk simply would just break in sunny-side up, the ramen soggy all over when I do canton. I stopped driving, because I always veer off-course. I never liked playing games, because I never play with the rules. It seems the only thing I do right is diss that long faced middle-aged woman and her gayman friend whenever they hit the dance floor and knocking over beer bottles when I’m already tipsy. I am my worst enemy. You know you messed up when you see yourself standing in front of you, playing the patintero, hindering you from going forward, moving on and finally stop yourself from getting into situations that will have such a tight hold on you couldn’t even breathe. I sucked big time. Everytime. Right now, I couldn’t even end this properly. And then I’ll publish this for the entire online world to see how big of a screwball I am.

”Courage is not the absence of fear but rather the judgment that something is more important than fear. The brave may not live forever but the cautious do not live at all.” -Princess Diaries 2001/Ambrose Redmoon

The past holds me. The present has me in a limbo, and the future scares me. I used to get stuck to the past. It had me caught up in some invisible glue that I couldn’t let go, some of them memories just keeps coming, some of them I just couldn’t, (and wouldn’t) let go. Then I realized, keeping memories are good, but letting them hold on to you too much, is like strapping yourself to the main door or intentionally losing your keys even though you’re running late. Pretty absurd. Damn stupid.

Then suddenly I managed to gnaw through the strong rope holding me. Oh, there are still threads holding me back, but not strong enough, which I could snap in a few efforts, but I’m still not ready to let it all go.

The present has me in a limbo, simply because I am feeling desolate. I am afraid. I suddenly let go of the thing that I have been holding back for quite a time. I didn’t just surmise that letting go would leave me feeling all hollowed out. Simply devoid of any emotion. The feeling of being vulnerable again, of being susceptible to any pain is just so unnerving.

Now, I had to let go of something that has been keeping me stable for years. My fort. My comfort zone. Even though it makes me miserable. The future…the future just scares the shit out of me. In my younger years, I was a risk taker. Risks were not a variable for me. Risks were things I faced head on. Risks were something that wouldn’t keep me up all night. Those were stuff I’d deal with without batting my eyelashes. Now, these things keep me up at night and it’s not even remotely connected to the nightlife I maintain. I guess it comes with maturity, if I’m any closer to being mature. But the older me is hesitating, meditating and tossing and turning. The younger me would say, “Why do I even have to push this issue when I could simply let it all go? Just hit the road of life and just let it all go. Like what I used to do. “… this is simply scary. Im pretty scared, I tell you.

Last night, mack was a bit down so we decided to have a couple of beers. Three bars and 11 bottles later, me and mack are at a bar where the gay crowd dominate the dance floor and the singers of the band shriek too much that I could only decipher “Merci, merci”. A bottle smashing at the table a few feet from ours had me wishing that a rumble is on the works to make the night even adorable. Noticed five underage boys in the table front of us, trying to act tough, the youngest in the green shirt and looks like a 10 year old sniffs repeatedly into his cigarette, while the one in the white shirt, the one macky pointed out as cute, reminds me a little of my brother. I keep reminding mack that if some guy will dance with us, and he permits, I’ll totally scram. Leave him with the bills and all. People are dancing, smoke was billowing and I’m busy keying these words into my mobile. I’m such a freak.

The night started out pretty quiet, me and mack just downing beer bottles at Catribo before we shifted to an animated discussion of the one thing that drive us crazy, lovelife. His lovelife is making his entire life difficult and talks of suicide were in the premises. Soon, the place was too quiet for me and I just do not like the quiet. It suffocates me and makes me dwell on negative thoughts so it was decided that we transfer to Larsian, where a band we knew, the Junkyard plays nightly. Called Yan and Hy on speakerphone while driving aimlessly in macky’s car. Our other close friends, them accomplished ground stewardesses, are also struggling with their own issues there in faraway land. We shouted, giggled, joked until the load ran out. That was bittersweet. I glanced over to the backseat, where Yan and Hy usually sit while I’m at the passenger seat with my feet propped up the grey upholstery, reminiscing the days and nights we spent in macky’s car, all the kwentos, the dissing other people, and singing our hearts out to the tune of Aaron Carter’s “Crazy little party girl, how I love her….”

At Larsian, RB, the lead vocals and also on guitars, welcomed us by name, to the chagrin of the patrons there, I supposed. We ordered bottles and fries and do what we usually do. Drink, kwento, sing along, pee, and pee some more. I urged mack to let all his emotions out but he couldn’t because I was giggling. He says that I still could laugh now, but when the time comes when im finally the one hurting, he’ll laugh a lot louder. After the set, our favourite club music was blaring in the sound system that we just had the itch to move and dance. Fast forward after paying the bills ( why do we call them chit, any way? ), we are in alejandras where a couple of men tried to dance with us but walked away empty handed. Macky said that I’ll be an old maid if I keep up with the bitch-maldita-mataray me. But, he couldn’t afford to have me walk out on him, which I actually did when the two guys sitting behind us started offering dance and cigars. I could be pretty bitchy at times, well, ok im pretty bitchy most of the time, he just ran after me, hee hee hee, but not after scolding me and illustrating my behaviour as a numbah one reason for my just non-existing lovelife.

Then we hit the road but I aint in the mood to go home just yet so I convinced him to drive all the way to Karagasan to “relive our college days” where we spend most of the time travelling to Ayala, where Yan and Hy lived, but not after I gassed up his car. The drive up there was awfully quiet, with one of us occasionally giving a comment or two. Then finally I told him to turn back. It’s time to go back.  Adulthood has really its perks and hazards. The stuff we usually do when we were younger were such great moments that doing that again makes me feel young, not juvenile. Pretty random. That was what we were when we were younger. Decisions were made in split seconds, planning is non existent, and life comes and goes and we managed to have fun despite disastrous moments.

It’s cool to make random stuff some times; especially when you’re getting older and things are getting a lot complicated. Sigh, I wish I’m just a kid again, or at least a college student. I wish I could turn back time, back to the time when making random decisions is a way of life.

September was the month when I actually wrote a lot,>creative juices flowed< they say. I don’t know if I was ultra sensitive, or maybe I was just a tad too bitchy, or just extra twisted this past month, but hey, I did post a lot! I was like a human machine spewing out blogs every few days, sometimes I post 2 or 3 blogs a day. I also wrote a lot of unpublished stuff…but right now…. I couldn’t, for the life of me, figure out where this particular blog is heading. So, I guess I’ll take the easy way out and just… sign out.