Madness

I never liked staying up late. Unless it is an all-night drinking binge, a good book, or a video-game relapse, you would never find me at midnight without my face in a pillow and my head in the clouds. So when I find myself at 1 in the morning staring at a brightly-lit ceiling, I know something’s bothering me. And with the past few days, it has been quite a lot.

I’ve quit my job recently. A lot of people found it surprising, but that’s just because I haven’t told anybody about it for a while. But truth be told, I too found it a bit early. But certain events have made me show my hand earlier, and now I find myself in the unemployed side of the river again. This means that I don’t have to try to crunch three articles in the morning (which is rare), nor do I no longer have to compete with Homar on who can stare at the monitor the longest without blinking (Hahaha just kidding Mar. Peace out man). I have been attached to MBSTek for ten months, and as with all attachments are you feel a sense of loss and sadness when you release yourself from it.

But I had to do it. Over and over again I say to myself that I had to do it. It’s not that I am fooling myself into thinking as such, but rather because I have to remind myself why. As a friend once said to me, sometimes you have to let go of something good to achieve something better. However, this time I am not looking for something better. I’m just looking for calm.

So far I haven't found it.

Oh well.

The Toss of it All

Getting married is hard.

That’s what my cousin, a teacher of 23 decked in a pearl-white wedding dress, said to me as I sat near her table during the reception. If I was younger, I would have scoffed. But as I have gone older (if not more mature), I too have realized that in marriage, as well as in other cornerstones of life, it’s pretty much the game plan.

One of the tendencies of our clan is that we tend to have families at a young age. This is especially true for the men, as I have male cousins at my age who already have two or three children of their own. And I have attended almost all of their weddings, most of which I played the role of the groomsman. There was even one time that I have caught the bride’s garter, and got the unfortunate opportunity of slipping it on some blushing girl whom I don’t even know. I still haven’t known that girl, and I have now learned to keep my hands to my pockets during the garter toss.

But the wedding was usually the fun part of it all. Being a close-knit extended family, I have occasionally spent a day or so in the houses of my newlywed cousins, and I have seen first-hand what it is to support and manage a new family. In the same way that I have often found myself in weddings, I have also been in more than often in a delivery ward, baptism fountain, a late-night rush to the pharmacy, early-morning walk to the corner store, and the day-to-day toil in earning the food of your family for that day. And sometimes I look at myself, and wonder if I too will see myself as such.

And that was the thought that popped in my mind as my cousin spoke in my ear those words. And I haven’t asked myself that question for a long time now, because marriage, nay, a relationship, is the last thing on my mind at the moment. But as my friend and fellow noodle-connoisseur Romalyn once said, the future is always uncertain.

I looked at my cousin’s face, and beneath the make-up and the weary look of preparing for the wedding all month, I saw the sparkle in her eyes and her happy smile. I looked at my recent cousin-in-law, a hulking tower of a man with a skilled hand and an affable grin, shaking the hand of my aunt and deflecting taunts from the other groomsmen across the table. I then looked back at my cousin, patted her on the shoulder, and told her that everything was going to be fine.

Fear the Asterisk! wahaha...

--_--

Somebody keeps stealing the padlocks in our house.

It all started before Christmas, and so far they’ve managed to filch three of our locks. It’s actually more annoying than intimidating, as new locks are quite expensive (the good ones cost about 2 and half dollars, which is already a handful here in our country) and we have to update our keys every time it gets lost. So far we don't know who the culprit(s) is/are, although Mom says it's probably some of the bored kids roaming around the neighborhood, which kind of makes a lot more sense than my theory involving keymaker elves bent on a worldwide conspiracy to monopolize the padlock industry. But I'm still not taking the jumper cables off the gate though (hahaha just kidding*)

Green Beans

I’m not really a fan of podcasts. It’s not that I don’t like it though, it’s just that it would be just too much of a distraction for me while at work (where I am always online). So I found it quite odd that I would be in a café high above the city streets doing a podcast with Eph and Jaymee.

I’ve known Eph for about 4 years now, as he was my Editor-in-Chief during my stint in the college paper as well as being my spiritual confidant at church. And it was in our weekly group meeting that Eph asked me to guest in the next episode of their podcast Get Back to Work. And since I am always eager to try something new (as long as it doesn’t void my insurance benefits), I decided to give it a go.

There are three things which I learned during the podcast.

1. I have an accent. Being born in the Philippines, having a Filipino accent while speaking in English is expected. However, I have been speaking, writing, and talking to myself in English as long as I can remember, so I was a bit surprised that all those years hasn’t affected my accent that much. But it’s not that I am ashamed of it either, however it’s hard to be taken seriously when you're proclaiming your intentions of taking over the world to the terrified masses with a solid Bicolano twang.

2. I (apparently) have an unruly lifestyle. The episode in which I was to guest in was about whether personal organizers and New Year’s resolutions really work, and I was the one representing the ones who don’t. According to Eph, I was the only one he has found in time for that side. So unless I misquoted the E-man, it just proves that I am the only unorganized person in the city, or maybe even the planet. It just kind of makes me imagine myself as Will Smith in I Am Legend. Except that Will Smith is richer ... handsomer ... and manlier ... than me.

...

I think I'm just going to curl up in this corner here and weep for a while.

3. Pee before doing a podcast.

Overall, the podcast was nice and quite interesting. Heck, I might just even try it sometime, although I won't do it now as the technician will kill me if I choke up the bandwidth of the office network.

For those of you who want to know more about Eph and Jaymee’s Get Back to Work podcast, you can visit it at
http://getbacktowork.podbean.com. If you want to hear the episode with me in it or you're just looking for some juicy stuff to blackmail me in the future, just click this here link.

Thanks to Eph and Jaymee for the opportunity.

EDIT:

Da**it, I sound like Borat. Very nice!

Screwed

I suffer from chronic depression. When you're a lanky, post-adolescent recluse with a screwy childhood, I guess it comes complimentary. It's kind of an on-and-off thing: one moment I'm bright and chipper, and the next thing you know the last two factors that are stopping me from killing myself is a lack of a firearm and a deep-seated fear of God. (Yes, there are other methods of self-execution, but medical studies show that a gunshot wound to the head is the quickest and most effective way to die). And right now I'm going through the same motions again, although now without much of the bells and whistles that was so prevalent during my teenage angst/emo years.

There are a lot of things that led me into this recent ticket to the dumps. Work, love, and a sense of personal lacking are the main reasons why, with the L-word taking up the lion's share. But I will no longer elaborate on these. Aside from the fact that I am a man who takes his privacy seriously, poking at one's emotional wounds will only make it heal longer. But nevertheless, the pain still heals at a snail's pace, and it tends to leave a scar in your mind. Sometimes I even wonder if I still have places in my brain which haven't been scarred at all.

So right now, in the same way as I treat most things in my life, I'm just winging it until it finally blows over. One good thing about having chronic depression is that it tends to get old over time, and you take it with much bitter stride. I even find it quite silly at certain moments, although I just wish I would stop thinking of shooting myself that much.