I’m still wretchedly sick and I spent most of the day lying limp like some giant, analgesic dependent squash that reeks of camphorated liniments on my bed. There used to be a time I had a cat curled up at the foot of my bed on lousy days like this. And most other days, too. And nights. Not anymore. Exactly one year ago today my cat died. And of course, I haven’t seen her since. I’ve had peculiar dreams about her every now and then, but that’s about it. Still, every time I see her in my dreams I cherish every moment of it and try to remember as much of it as I possibly can, because I learned so much from her while she was still around, and would have wanted to learn more, if only she hadn’t died.
When she did I didn’t know how life would be, how I’d turn out to be, days, weeks, months, or a year later. I couldn’t imagine any of it. I couldn’t imagine how the never-ending dramathon that is my life would be without her. She had always been a main character. No. To me she was more than that. She was a part of the main character. She was a part of me (of course I’m the main character, it’s my life). It was like imagining how Rapunzel would have turned out if she suddenly suffered from alopecia and lost all of her legendary long hair. It was just unimaginable. For as long as I could remember, from back when I was still very, very young, she was there. And I’m sure she was also there back when I was still too young to even have memories of it now. She was always there wherever I was, moving around my feet, fearlessly exploring the big world around her like she owned it. But time has passed, and it flies fast, whether you’re having fun or not, whether you want it to or not. So much has changed, and yet so much has stayed the same. In the middle of it all, somewhere in the middle of the colorful, swirling circus of confusion that is my life, there’s this big empty void I’ve learned to move around in, a big gaping hole I cannot avoid but always pass by hurriedly just so life goes on without me painfully remembering her death and breaking down. A part of me died with her too. And I didn’t want to remember that.
But as I’ve said, some time has passed, and the pain of losing her isn’t half as bad as it used to be (or the pesky bout of arthritis I’m suffering from right now). I didn’t know it would come so fast, one year later, her first death anniversary. I had not realized it would be as if it was just yesterday. Time allowed me to hurt and feel and wallow in the pain until it didn’t hurt so much anymore, and then turned my head around, kept me from looking back, and taught me to look forward and move on. I’ve learned to just pick up the pieces that fell apart and try to put them back together, as if nothing happened and life is just as it should be. But there are times, times like today, when I can’t help but remember her and how life was back when she was still part of it. I miss the days when I had royalty depending on me for her dinner. I miss the days when I would chase after her wherever she would decide to go next, like a humble chamber maid to her queen. I miss the days when I shared my room with an animal that thought she was sharing her room with me. I miss the days when there was undisturbed peace in the kitchen even when all the lights have been turned out. Apparently, the neighborhood rats have learned of her passing and have took it upon themselves to raid our kitchen. Indeed, when the cat is away, the mice will play. And my, do they play loud, knocking bottles off tables and running around kettles and pots and pans.
When you share your life with an animal you see the world’s secrets unfold before your eyes, and you learn many lessons no other human can possibly teach you, because there are some things in this universe only animals know, things they know by nature and things they learn from nature. It’s a wonderful gift, having the chance to share your home and your life with an animal. You learn so many things, understand so many things even the greatest of teachers and sages cannot even hope to teach you. Simply because she was there and was herself she opened up my mind to many things, may things people who have not had an animal at home will unfortunately never come to realize.
Some people will wonder why other people who live with animals seem to be so attached to them. The friendship a person builds with an animal is something that’s entirely different from one that the same person has with another human being. With an animal a person can be truly himself, stripped naked of all the facades and manners and cultures of politeness and social graces we humans have learned to dress ourselves up with. With an animal you can be truly honest and set aside the many pretensions you assume when with other people. You don’t need to smile at a dog you meet down the street, or curtsy at the neighbor’s cat when she happens to pass by your backyard, or turn your head away from a dog you see pooping in the park, or pretend to your cat that everything’s fine even when you’re miserably sick. Even when animals see you at your very worst, they understand, they do not judge, they accept. They take you just as you are, and they have no ill thoughts stirring in their animal minds even when they see you as you truly are.
With animals there is no need for words, words that often mislead, confuse and deceive, words that are often misunderstood and misused, words that are empty and meaningless. Animals do not tell you. They show you. And in that experience you are there to see, hear and feel everything, learning as you see them do, as they show you, whatever it is they do. There is so much to learn from them. If you let them, they open up your mind and widen your horizons, and you begin to see things differently.
In that small animal’s body was a soul not different from mine, or anyone else’s for that matter. It still pains me that I wasn’t there to say goodbye and send her off on her journey to the other side. But I know my old cat is at peace wherever she is right now. Unlike me.
Wednesday, August 27, 2008
My bestfriend Morpheus
For the past two days I’ve been feeling a bit sick. After all the cheerful walking, hopping and skipping around the city I did during the weekend my irritable joints seemed to realize that they’d been overused once again and collectively agreed to remind me (in a very painful way) that they do not take to such unmindful abuse kindly. I don’t blame them, though, as I often tend to forget my body has certain physical limitations that are supposed to keep me from altogether killing myself out of sheer folly and adventurism. When I woke up really early today for my review classes I knew it was one of those days when I’d rather stay in bed and lie in until around noon instead of getting up and insisting on starting the day. My body was aching everywhere, as if I was mercilessly mauled and thrown against the mint green walls and bashed against the floor while I was peacefully asleep. Still, both my aged cellphone’s loud alarm clock and my equally loud father would not leave me alone to rest and just have at least a moment’s peace, so I forced myself to get up and get going anyway. I clumsily wobbled out of my room and got a glass of cold water.
I sat in the dining room for quite a while, blankly staring out the window while sipping my water and waiting for my dull senses to wake up and become reoriented with reality after hours of oblivious hibernation. I kept on glancing at the wall clock and the hands of time that moved and ticked and tocked in a precisely measured pacing, mentally calculating how much more time I had left before I’d be late for class. I’ve never been good at anything remotely related to mathematics but I soon figured I didn’t have too much time left. I needed to leave in a few minutes if I wanted to get there in time, given the way jeepney drivers seem to wait forever just to get a passenger these days. And given the way most of my body was throbbing like they were about to explode, I couldn’t have moved fast enough to make it to class without running late or looking like a total wreck and a big, sick mess, anyway, even if I did leave then. It all just felt so wrong. Painfully wrong. So I crawled back to bed, pulled up my thick blanket right up to my neck and went back to sleep.
There really are days like this, times when you’re so sick and tired and simply can never be at your best but you still have to deal with the trivial, tedious details of everyday life. There are days when you feel so sore all over but still have to endure the tortures of public transit and traffic just to get to work or school, days when you feel so weak and flimsy but still have to plumb the kitchen sink just to wash the dishes without having an ocean emerge in your own kitchen, days when you just want to stop living for a while but can’t. Sometimes I even wonder why we do the things we do, eating, walking, breathing, talking, feeling, watching, listening, hearing, touching, tasting, smelling, going to school, working to put some money in the bank (or some department store’s cash registers), doing the household chores, spreading nasty rumors about the neighbors, dressing up to impress the strangers we meet while walking in the sidewalk, rallying to campaign against animal cruelty, when at the very end of it all, all it does is exhaust us and tire us and drain us and fatigue us.
Don’t you ever get tired of living? Of doing the many complicated things we humans do? Of carrying the weight of the entire world on your shoulders? Of trying to figure out the jigsaw puzzle that is your life? Don’t you sometimes wish you could just vanish into thin air? Don’t you sometimes wish time would just pause and the world would just stop turning, or that you could at least stop thinking about all the things you can’t help but think about or stop doing all the things you can’t help but do? I do. Most of the time. And when I do, I lock myself up in my room, cry, write poetic suicide notes, cry some more, slit my wrists and watch as the blood trickles out of me like filthy red rivers of sin. Of course not. I sleep. And when I sleep, I meet up with an old friend who never fails to please me and ease the pains of my existence, a friend who the wise old Greeks called Morpheus, the god of dreams. He’s always there to welcome me just outside the gates of slumber, in the bizarre yet beautiful realm of sleep, with my colorful memories, hopes, aspirations, ambitions, fantasies and whatever other sweet gift he has in store for me. He reminds me of all the things I was, all the things I’ve always wanted to be, all the things I thought I’d be, all the things I think I’ll be, all the things I hope and dream I’ll be, and all the things I’d never thought I’d be. He reminds me of everything that’s been a part of me, everything that’s been a part of my life. He takes me to places I’ve never been to, shows me things I’ve never seen, makes me think thoughts I’ve never thought. And he makes me forget all that is waiting for me when I wake up. All of it. What a friend.
I’ve always believed that when all else fails, sleep. When you’ve tried everything but nothing seems to work, all there is left for you to do is escape, run away, hide, sleep. You die for a few happy hours, and with that ephemeral death all your worries and troubles disappear and die with you. The world comes to a screeching halt, and everything, every petty thought and every fleeting idea that usually crowds your mind just fades away. When you’re asleep nothing can possibly disturb you or scare you or bother you. And if ever there is, say a horrible nightmare, you know that the moment you wake up it will be gone, that it can’t really be something to worry about. While you’re asleep you move in a different dimension, one that’s sometimes a bit strange and weird as well, a world that’s often more beautiful and honest and simple than the one you move in when you’re awake.
I woke up just around lunch time. I had another strange dream. I always have strange dreams, especially when I sleep during the day. I had already missed half a day and dragged myself (especially my right foot) just to attend the other half of my review classes. Limping. I wished I had not. It was terrible. Excruciating. Aside from the constant agony of my painful body parts pulsating to remind me they still had not forgotten my exploiting them, the lecture bored me in ways I cannot explain. It was just pure suffering that made my brain hurt just as bad as my joints did. It was something I should’ve just slept through. I’ll try that next time. If ever I decide to wake up and leave my bestfriend Morpheus to attend some tiresome lecture, that is.
I sat in the dining room for quite a while, blankly staring out the window while sipping my water and waiting for my dull senses to wake up and become reoriented with reality after hours of oblivious hibernation. I kept on glancing at the wall clock and the hands of time that moved and ticked and tocked in a precisely measured pacing, mentally calculating how much more time I had left before I’d be late for class. I’ve never been good at anything remotely related to mathematics but I soon figured I didn’t have too much time left. I needed to leave in a few minutes if I wanted to get there in time, given the way jeepney drivers seem to wait forever just to get a passenger these days. And given the way most of my body was throbbing like they were about to explode, I couldn’t have moved fast enough to make it to class without running late or looking like a total wreck and a big, sick mess, anyway, even if I did leave then. It all just felt so wrong. Painfully wrong. So I crawled back to bed, pulled up my thick blanket right up to my neck and went back to sleep.
There really are days like this, times when you’re so sick and tired and simply can never be at your best but you still have to deal with the trivial, tedious details of everyday life. There are days when you feel so sore all over but still have to endure the tortures of public transit and traffic just to get to work or school, days when you feel so weak and flimsy but still have to plumb the kitchen sink just to wash the dishes without having an ocean emerge in your own kitchen, days when you just want to stop living for a while but can’t. Sometimes I even wonder why we do the things we do, eating, walking, breathing, talking, feeling, watching, listening, hearing, touching, tasting, smelling, going to school, working to put some money in the bank (or some department store’s cash registers), doing the household chores, spreading nasty rumors about the neighbors, dressing up to impress the strangers we meet while walking in the sidewalk, rallying to campaign against animal cruelty, when at the very end of it all, all it does is exhaust us and tire us and drain us and fatigue us.
Don’t you ever get tired of living? Of doing the many complicated things we humans do? Of carrying the weight of the entire world on your shoulders? Of trying to figure out the jigsaw puzzle that is your life? Don’t you sometimes wish you could just vanish into thin air? Don’t you sometimes wish time would just pause and the world would just stop turning, or that you could at least stop thinking about all the things you can’t help but think about or stop doing all the things you can’t help but do? I do. Most of the time. And when I do, I lock myself up in my room, cry, write poetic suicide notes, cry some more, slit my wrists and watch as the blood trickles out of me like filthy red rivers of sin. Of course not. I sleep. And when I sleep, I meet up with an old friend who never fails to please me and ease the pains of my existence, a friend who the wise old Greeks called Morpheus, the god of dreams. He’s always there to welcome me just outside the gates of slumber, in the bizarre yet beautiful realm of sleep, with my colorful memories, hopes, aspirations, ambitions, fantasies and whatever other sweet gift he has in store for me. He reminds me of all the things I was, all the things I’ve always wanted to be, all the things I thought I’d be, all the things I think I’ll be, all the things I hope and dream I’ll be, and all the things I’d never thought I’d be. He reminds me of everything that’s been a part of me, everything that’s been a part of my life. He takes me to places I’ve never been to, shows me things I’ve never seen, makes me think thoughts I’ve never thought. And he makes me forget all that is waiting for me when I wake up. All of it. What a friend.
I’ve always believed that when all else fails, sleep. When you’ve tried everything but nothing seems to work, all there is left for you to do is escape, run away, hide, sleep. You die for a few happy hours, and with that ephemeral death all your worries and troubles disappear and die with you. The world comes to a screeching halt, and everything, every petty thought and every fleeting idea that usually crowds your mind just fades away. When you’re asleep nothing can possibly disturb you or scare you or bother you. And if ever there is, say a horrible nightmare, you know that the moment you wake up it will be gone, that it can’t really be something to worry about. While you’re asleep you move in a different dimension, one that’s sometimes a bit strange and weird as well, a world that’s often more beautiful and honest and simple than the one you move in when you’re awake.
I woke up just around lunch time. I had another strange dream. I always have strange dreams, especially when I sleep during the day. I had already missed half a day and dragged myself (especially my right foot) just to attend the other half of my review classes. Limping. I wished I had not. It was terrible. Excruciating. Aside from the constant agony of my painful body parts pulsating to remind me they still had not forgotten my exploiting them, the lecture bored me in ways I cannot explain. It was just pure suffering that made my brain hurt just as bad as my joints did. It was something I should’ve just slept through. I’ll try that next time. If ever I decide to wake up and leave my bestfriend Morpheus to attend some tiresome lecture, that is.
Underneath a blue umbrella sky
Surprise! I woke up on the right side of the bed today. Even if I woke up to my dear mother’s unnecessary panic over the padlock she couldn’t, for the life of her, open again (because she keeps on using the wrong key). At least I didn’t wake up to the usually bothersome (and scandalous) quarrels of the next-door neighbors from hell, or the radio blaring old country music so early in the morning. For some reason only God knows, it was a beautiful Sunday morning. So I woke up early, watched nostalgic cartoons (the same ones I’d been watching over and over again since I was in grade school), had puto and cheap spaghetti some vendor was selling for breakfast, washed the dishes I’d neglected washing the night before, and hurriedly tried to spread the infectious happiness that was overwhelming me to both friends and strangers online. It was just a great way to start the day. The sun seemed to smile, its beams warm yet kind and gentle, and the air calm and pleasantly cool. There was so much happy energy going around even the wild, murderous beasts we call our dogs were at their best, least destructive behavior, quietly lying like placid, harmless pieces of wooden garden furniture in the backyard.
Later I did my laundry and hung them up to dry on the clothesline (so idyllic), watched some local TV shows I surprisingly found quite entertaining, and had some lunch. Still, there was a little, almost invisible smile on my face. But I knew it was there, of course, if you know what I mean. Soon I had to run some errands (my mother, a teacher all her life, had run out of liquid eraser and my brother needed his clothes dropped off at the maritime school where he’s imprisoned for the rest of the school year) and visit the mall again. I know. I’m not supposed to be spending the way I am. I felt my conscience pulling me back a bit again, too, but no, I just had to buy a vest after waiting months just to get twenty percent off of its original (and ridiculously expensive) price. My conscience, of course, couldn’t do anything about it and gave up, retreating in shame to the dark corners of my mind.
It was such a good day I just wanted to make the most out of it. Carpe diem, as they say. And seize the day I did. I was in so good a mood I explored my closet and walked around the city as if it were some sophisticated metropolis (it is not), running errands wearing a white graphic tee (that had the words “go for it” printed on it), blue plaid skinny jeans, my plum colored Converse All-Star sneakers, and a yellow and black scarf. I also had white wayfarers on and lugged a big printed canvass bag around. Had you seen me you would have just stared blankly, laughed in amusement or cried in utter horror. The hideousness of it all might even haunt the dreams of some innocent children forever. Still, I am so in love with myself right now I couldn’t care less. I wear normal clothes. Just before people recognize they are. Like any normal human being, though, all that walking around the mall and conscious posing for people who gave me strange looks consumed my energies and soon I was hungry and badly in need of a place to sit and rest my geriatric feet on. But I didn’t want to spend any more than I already did. My wallet was threatening me it would run away and never come back. So I just marched to the grocery and bought a bottle, half a liter, of fruit flavored white tea instead, and convinced myself it was all I needed to revive my now lethargic spirits. It was a good day. I believed myself.
Even if it was around three in the afternoon I walked out of the mall and decided I’d take a different (and cheaper) route home, one that required me to walk my way up to the downtown area instead of just lazily boarding one of the jeepneys parked outside the malls’ entrances. The mall I’ve been treating like a spiritual temple and refuge of sorts for the past few months is near the bay area, such that a pleasant breeze always lulls the parking lot into a calm, serene silence. The pier is right behind the empty lots outside the mall’s rear end, and the mall seems to be thriving and constantly flooded with tourists having the sea port nearby. With the cold wind blowing from the ocean, it wasn’t that hot to take a (really long) walk. And besides, I wanted to save every centavo that I could, anyway, so little sacrifices had to be made. It was an unusually beautiful day, really. I walked from the mall all the way up to the strangely empty street across the city plaza and then crossed to the nearby commercial center, looked around a bit, crossed another busy street lined with people selling fruits and pirated DVDs and cellphone accessories and magazines and poor little puppies and peanuts, and then rode a jeepney that would take me home. I could’ve bought some salted peanuts along the way (they come dirt cheap so I didn’t have a problem with that) but quickly remembered I had eaten tons in the past few weeks and that they’re especially prone to fungal growth that releases carcinogenic aflatoxins that might come back to haunt me in the future. So I just took another sip of my tea instead and walked on.
I just did a great job telling myself it was a great day and insisting it was all good that I cooked chicken adobo for dinner and was relieved to know I still cooked it as good as ever (either that or my family has an innate immunity to poison). It even started to rain, something that never fails to make me feel all giggly inside. Today was just a beautiful Sunday. It’s hard to say when I’ll have another Sunday (or another other day for that matter) like it. I believe that as we go through the long and winding and often misleading road that is life we will only come upon two kinds of days. Yes, two. Only two. The good, and, of course, the bad.
There are days that you wish would never end. I wish all my days were like this, light and easy and bright and warm and breezy and sunny. When I feel everything is as it should be, when everything feels right, when I am at the right place at the right time with the right people (even if I’m by myself) doing the right thing in the right frame of mind. When everything seems possible and all your dreams and even the highest and farthest of your ambitions are so clearly so close at hand. When you feel like skipping and hopping instead of just walking and singing a happy song aloud instead of just quietly humming and tapping your feet. When the haze of confusion disappears and everything is so suddenly clear, lucid moments that come seldom and far between, that bring an unusual sense of clarity and wisdom. When the world seems so perfect and colorful even an old fire hydrant becomes peculiarly interesting and you seem to live underneath a blue umbrella sky. When the spirit of inspiration strikes you and lifts the clouds of gloomy doubts from your head. When the universe and life present themselves so beautifully to your eyes as to become your muse and positive energy just surges through every fiber of your being like an electric current, filling you to the core. Happiness permeates every minute avenue of your body, every small vein and artery, and fills every part of you, every single appendage and body part.
I wish all days were like this. But as I’ve said, there are two kinds of days. And not all days are good. But I’m glad today was. Hope tomorrow is, too.
Later I did my laundry and hung them up to dry on the clothesline (so idyllic), watched some local TV shows I surprisingly found quite entertaining, and had some lunch. Still, there was a little, almost invisible smile on my face. But I knew it was there, of course, if you know what I mean. Soon I had to run some errands (my mother, a teacher all her life, had run out of liquid eraser and my brother needed his clothes dropped off at the maritime school where he’s imprisoned for the rest of the school year) and visit the mall again. I know. I’m not supposed to be spending the way I am. I felt my conscience pulling me back a bit again, too, but no, I just had to buy a vest after waiting months just to get twenty percent off of its original (and ridiculously expensive) price. My conscience, of course, couldn’t do anything about it and gave up, retreating in shame to the dark corners of my mind.
It was such a good day I just wanted to make the most out of it. Carpe diem, as they say. And seize the day I did. I was in so good a mood I explored my closet and walked around the city as if it were some sophisticated metropolis (it is not), running errands wearing a white graphic tee (that had the words “go for it” printed on it), blue plaid skinny jeans, my plum colored Converse All-Star sneakers, and a yellow and black scarf. I also had white wayfarers on and lugged a big printed canvass bag around. Had you seen me you would have just stared blankly, laughed in amusement or cried in utter horror. The hideousness of it all might even haunt the dreams of some innocent children forever. Still, I am so in love with myself right now I couldn’t care less. I wear normal clothes. Just before people recognize they are. Like any normal human being, though, all that walking around the mall and conscious posing for people who gave me strange looks consumed my energies and soon I was hungry and badly in need of a place to sit and rest my geriatric feet on. But I didn’t want to spend any more than I already did. My wallet was threatening me it would run away and never come back. So I just marched to the grocery and bought a bottle, half a liter, of fruit flavored white tea instead, and convinced myself it was all I needed to revive my now lethargic spirits. It was a good day. I believed myself.
Even if it was around three in the afternoon I walked out of the mall and decided I’d take a different (and cheaper) route home, one that required me to walk my way up to the downtown area instead of just lazily boarding one of the jeepneys parked outside the malls’ entrances. The mall I’ve been treating like a spiritual temple and refuge of sorts for the past few months is near the bay area, such that a pleasant breeze always lulls the parking lot into a calm, serene silence. The pier is right behind the empty lots outside the mall’s rear end, and the mall seems to be thriving and constantly flooded with tourists having the sea port nearby. With the cold wind blowing from the ocean, it wasn’t that hot to take a (really long) walk. And besides, I wanted to save every centavo that I could, anyway, so little sacrifices had to be made. It was an unusually beautiful day, really. I walked from the mall all the way up to the strangely empty street across the city plaza and then crossed to the nearby commercial center, looked around a bit, crossed another busy street lined with people selling fruits and pirated DVDs and cellphone accessories and magazines and poor little puppies and peanuts, and then rode a jeepney that would take me home. I could’ve bought some salted peanuts along the way (they come dirt cheap so I didn’t have a problem with that) but quickly remembered I had eaten tons in the past few weeks and that they’re especially prone to fungal growth that releases carcinogenic aflatoxins that might come back to haunt me in the future. So I just took another sip of my tea instead and walked on.
I just did a great job telling myself it was a great day and insisting it was all good that I cooked chicken adobo for dinner and was relieved to know I still cooked it as good as ever (either that or my family has an innate immunity to poison). It even started to rain, something that never fails to make me feel all giggly inside. Today was just a beautiful Sunday. It’s hard to say when I’ll have another Sunday (or another other day for that matter) like it. I believe that as we go through the long and winding and often misleading road that is life we will only come upon two kinds of days. Yes, two. Only two. The good, and, of course, the bad.
There are days that you wish would never end. I wish all my days were like this, light and easy and bright and warm and breezy and sunny. When I feel everything is as it should be, when everything feels right, when I am at the right place at the right time with the right people (even if I’m by myself) doing the right thing in the right frame of mind. When everything seems possible and all your dreams and even the highest and farthest of your ambitions are so clearly so close at hand. When you feel like skipping and hopping instead of just walking and singing a happy song aloud instead of just quietly humming and tapping your feet. When the haze of confusion disappears and everything is so suddenly clear, lucid moments that come seldom and far between, that bring an unusual sense of clarity and wisdom. When the world seems so perfect and colorful even an old fire hydrant becomes peculiarly interesting and you seem to live underneath a blue umbrella sky. When the spirit of inspiration strikes you and lifts the clouds of gloomy doubts from your head. When the universe and life present themselves so beautifully to your eyes as to become your muse and positive energy just surges through every fiber of your being like an electric current, filling you to the core. Happiness permeates every minute avenue of your body, every small vein and artery, and fills every part of you, every single appendage and body part.
I wish all days were like this. But as I’ve said, there are two kinds of days. And not all days are good. But I’m glad today was. Hope tomorrow is, too.
Rehab
The hardest part of being sick (and not seeing the doctor about it) is when you can’t really decide if you’re sick or not. There are times when you feel like you’re ill beyond all relief, and there are times when everything just seems to be fine and nothing could possibly be wrong, that you are just as you should be. I feel just that. I can’t decide if I’m just thinking too much these days or if I really need to get some help, a nice lobotomy or a good shrink maybe, and emancipate myself from my current addiction. Well I don’t think I’m sick, really. Just a little disturbed and deranged I guess. But as I’ve said, I’m not sure.
Yesterday, after attending review classes for my frightening yet inevitable foreign licensure exams, I went to the mall with my friends. Yes, the densely populated, heavily polluted mall. Again. I go there almost everyday now and believe me it’s starting to scare and distress and annoy me as well how I have become so psychologically dependent on the many escapist diversions the stores (and their cunning sales ladies) brandish at me. I’m starting to regularly visit the mall like it was my church, the clothes my gods, the stores my altars, and shopping my religion. Wretched, I know. All the directionless walking around and wishful staring and hasty fitting and reluctant buying somehow keep me from thinking too much about the deeper meaning of life and the purpose of me living it and other things I shouldn’t even be thinking about in the first place.
Besides, I just can’t help but try and look for a good way to calm and console my convulsing, spastic brain cells after all that redundant mental torture, reviewing for nursing exams. Every now and then I would check my nose and my ears for leaking cerebrospinal fluid as I could feel my poor cerebellum cramping. If ever any of that was physically possible. It’s just so tiring, desperately attempting to exhume all the lessons I’ve learned from nursing school that I’ve long buried somewhere deep in my mental cemetery. But I like it. Makes me feel younger. In some ways.
I must say, though, that loitering aimlessly in a dissociative fugue around the mall, lost in the crowds of unfamiliar people and tempting new clothes, is indeed a good way to empty your addled brain of all the discombobulating events and realities of everyday life. Instead of just leaving my wicked problems inside the shadows of my mind and giving them the chance to grow into some big, nasty monster that will ultimately just feed on and drain the life out of me, I find it better to just melt my brain altogether in the confusion of all the colorful clothes arrayed in the displays and the people around me walking back and forth in dizzying haphazard lines.
It’s good to be happy, to be stuck in a moment without the burdens of living and being, no matter how fleeting that moment might be, no matter how unfairly small that fraction of time might be before the troubles of existing begin to slowly crawl and creep back again to torment us. I think that is something we all share, our repugnance for the heavy weight that we carry on our shoulders everyday and our desire to once in a while forget that the weight is there and that we have no choice but to bear the weight while we are alive. After eating a heavy lunch that seemed to somehow satisfy not only my anatomical hunger but my starvation deep down inside as well, I went around the shops with my friends, walking as if my worries would sooner or later slowly slip away from my body, trickle and bleed out of my worn-out plum and electric pink high-cut Chuck Taylors and be left helplessly strewn across the floor like spilled milk. I played video games I had not played in a long time at the arcades and discovered I was still so good at them. I sang out my soul’s inexplicable, unspeakable sufferings, screaming and screeching like nails on a chalkboard at the videoke room. After all that, however, when the friends have gone home and I walk around the city and ride a jeepney home alone, the happy moments still start to fade away, and the world and the walls close in on me again. Why do we always find ourselves in situations and circumstances like that? We seem to cry six and a half days a week and then get to laugh half a day as a consolation. Why is contentment, and the peace of mind and happiness that come with it, so hard to find? I always feel like a hunter lost in a forest, looking for that elusive wild animal that seems to escape every single trap I set to capture it. And I don’t even enjoy hunting.
When I got home I realized something. My room’s starting to look more like a poorly organized boutique now. There are more shirts and skinny jeans and vests and jackets and scarves and bags in there than floor space to walk around in. Since late last year I’ve been shopping every single chance I get. It’s like I’m lethally allergic to money. It’s pathetic. My savings have dwindled dramatically like the population of endangered wild axolotls. See, you don’t even know what that is, don’t you? Well, it’s a cute, slimy little salamander, and the world’s quickly running out of them, just like I’m running out of money to spend on caprice and folly and merrymaking and amusement.
I ask myself why I buy all these clothes when I could very well buy sacks of well-milled rice with the money I spend on them instead. Well, unlike the clothes I buy, I can’t wear sacks of rice when I go out, for one. And there is some (twisted) form of happiness in it, shopping around and buying stuff. You feel a certain kind of power, of control over your life, when you get the things that you want to have. I feel like I have what it takes to create and become my own entity whenever I buy these clothes. I realize I am addicted not to the clothes, but to the idea of getting what I want and the fear of losing what I want to have before I even have it. It just so happens I want all those clothes. Among other things.
Staring at the receipts I get from my ATM card and the diminishing figures printed on them, I am now beginning to slowly wean myself from all this shopping. Maybe there is some form of rehab for this. Then again, maybe all I need is the time and conviction to get away from all the worldly and material things that surround me and cloud my thinking. I know that if I really wanted to I could go on sudden withdrawal, stop this nonsense and snap back to reality. But right now I can’t say I want to do that, because I feel good whenever I get to buy the clothes I like, and do the things I like doing, and be the person I want to be. That would make me a hedonist. Then again, aren’t we all? Don’t we all just want to be happy? To find happiness in whatever it is we’re doing? To find true happiness wherever it may be? Problem is, no one really knows where it is, or whether it can be found in this life or on this earth, or whether everybody can find it in the same place, or whether it can be found at all, or whether it even exists. We’ll all have to wait and see, although I’m sure we’ll all know one day soon.
Until such a time I find the path towards true happiness, if ever there such a thing, I will have to enjoy these shallow pleasures rather than not have any happiness at all. I guess if you can’t have the real thing then you’d just have to be content (or at least pretend to be) with an imitation of it or live with not having it at all, genuine or fake. As they say, if you don’t have it, fake it.
No, I don’t think I’m sick. Just a little disturbed and deranged I guess. But as I’ve said, I’m not sure. Where oh where is the brilliant Sigmund Freud when I need him? Perhaps an ispiritista can help me find him.
Yesterday, after attending review classes for my frightening yet inevitable foreign licensure exams, I went to the mall with my friends. Yes, the densely populated, heavily polluted mall. Again. I go there almost everyday now and believe me it’s starting to scare and distress and annoy me as well how I have become so psychologically dependent on the many escapist diversions the stores (and their cunning sales ladies) brandish at me. I’m starting to regularly visit the mall like it was my church, the clothes my gods, the stores my altars, and shopping my religion. Wretched, I know. All the directionless walking around and wishful staring and hasty fitting and reluctant buying somehow keep me from thinking too much about the deeper meaning of life and the purpose of me living it and other things I shouldn’t even be thinking about in the first place.
Besides, I just can’t help but try and look for a good way to calm and console my convulsing, spastic brain cells after all that redundant mental torture, reviewing for nursing exams. Every now and then I would check my nose and my ears for leaking cerebrospinal fluid as I could feel my poor cerebellum cramping. If ever any of that was physically possible. It’s just so tiring, desperately attempting to exhume all the lessons I’ve learned from nursing school that I’ve long buried somewhere deep in my mental cemetery. But I like it. Makes me feel younger. In some ways.
I must say, though, that loitering aimlessly in a dissociative fugue around the mall, lost in the crowds of unfamiliar people and tempting new clothes, is indeed a good way to empty your addled brain of all the discombobulating events and realities of everyday life. Instead of just leaving my wicked problems inside the shadows of my mind and giving them the chance to grow into some big, nasty monster that will ultimately just feed on and drain the life out of me, I find it better to just melt my brain altogether in the confusion of all the colorful clothes arrayed in the displays and the people around me walking back and forth in dizzying haphazard lines.
It’s good to be happy, to be stuck in a moment without the burdens of living and being, no matter how fleeting that moment might be, no matter how unfairly small that fraction of time might be before the troubles of existing begin to slowly crawl and creep back again to torment us. I think that is something we all share, our repugnance for the heavy weight that we carry on our shoulders everyday and our desire to once in a while forget that the weight is there and that we have no choice but to bear the weight while we are alive. After eating a heavy lunch that seemed to somehow satisfy not only my anatomical hunger but my starvation deep down inside as well, I went around the shops with my friends, walking as if my worries would sooner or later slowly slip away from my body, trickle and bleed out of my worn-out plum and electric pink high-cut Chuck Taylors and be left helplessly strewn across the floor like spilled milk. I played video games I had not played in a long time at the arcades and discovered I was still so good at them. I sang out my soul’s inexplicable, unspeakable sufferings, screaming and screeching like nails on a chalkboard at the videoke room. After all that, however, when the friends have gone home and I walk around the city and ride a jeepney home alone, the happy moments still start to fade away, and the world and the walls close in on me again. Why do we always find ourselves in situations and circumstances like that? We seem to cry six and a half days a week and then get to laugh half a day as a consolation. Why is contentment, and the peace of mind and happiness that come with it, so hard to find? I always feel like a hunter lost in a forest, looking for that elusive wild animal that seems to escape every single trap I set to capture it. And I don’t even enjoy hunting.
When I got home I realized something. My room’s starting to look more like a poorly organized boutique now. There are more shirts and skinny jeans and vests and jackets and scarves and bags in there than floor space to walk around in. Since late last year I’ve been shopping every single chance I get. It’s like I’m lethally allergic to money. It’s pathetic. My savings have dwindled dramatically like the population of endangered wild axolotls. See, you don’t even know what that is, don’t you? Well, it’s a cute, slimy little salamander, and the world’s quickly running out of them, just like I’m running out of money to spend on caprice and folly and merrymaking and amusement.
I ask myself why I buy all these clothes when I could very well buy sacks of well-milled rice with the money I spend on them instead. Well, unlike the clothes I buy, I can’t wear sacks of rice when I go out, for one. And there is some (twisted) form of happiness in it, shopping around and buying stuff. You feel a certain kind of power, of control over your life, when you get the things that you want to have. I feel like I have what it takes to create and become my own entity whenever I buy these clothes. I realize I am addicted not to the clothes, but to the idea of getting what I want and the fear of losing what I want to have before I even have it. It just so happens I want all those clothes. Among other things.
Staring at the receipts I get from my ATM card and the diminishing figures printed on them, I am now beginning to slowly wean myself from all this shopping. Maybe there is some form of rehab for this. Then again, maybe all I need is the time and conviction to get away from all the worldly and material things that surround me and cloud my thinking. I know that if I really wanted to I could go on sudden withdrawal, stop this nonsense and snap back to reality. But right now I can’t say I want to do that, because I feel good whenever I get to buy the clothes I like, and do the things I like doing, and be the person I want to be. That would make me a hedonist. Then again, aren’t we all? Don’t we all just want to be happy? To find happiness in whatever it is we’re doing? To find true happiness wherever it may be? Problem is, no one really knows where it is, or whether it can be found in this life or on this earth, or whether everybody can find it in the same place, or whether it can be found at all, or whether it even exists. We’ll all have to wait and see, although I’m sure we’ll all know one day soon.
Until such a time I find the path towards true happiness, if ever there such a thing, I will have to enjoy these shallow pleasures rather than not have any happiness at all. I guess if you can’t have the real thing then you’d just have to be content (or at least pretend to be) with an imitation of it or live with not having it at all, genuine or fake. As they say, if you don’t have it, fake it.
No, I don’t think I’m sick. Just a little disturbed and deranged I guess. But as I’ve said, I’m not sure. Where oh where is the brilliant Sigmund Freud when I need him? Perhaps an ispiritista can help me find him.
Robots have feelings too! And I have separation anxiety!
The moment I saw the theatrical trailer for Pixar’s WALL-E I couldn’t wait to see it. I was just so thrilled. I’ve always loved cute metal robots with human feelings. There was something about the rather rickety and rusty robot that was so emotionally appealing, something that strongly pulled and strummed at my heartstrings and told me I just had to watch it. So I did. I watched WALL-E the other day when it premiered in local cinemas, standing in line along with other pesky children my age. After waiting months to see it (the last movie I saw in theaters was the equally brilliant and moving Kung Fu Panda) I’m glad I wasn’t disappointed.
Perhaps because of excitement I woke up early that day (something I didn’t really intend but happened anyway) and met up with the good friends I left at the company I worked for until two weeks ago. We ate oriental (and quite expensive) brunch at an old but still decently popular Chinese restaurant and looked around the shops at the nearby bazaar. They still worked on grave yard shifts, the poor things, so they soon unanimously agreed to abandon me and leave me to watch the movie on my own. Fine. I’m getting used to doing many things alone these days anyway.
When I got to the mall (crowded, as usual) I still had some time left before the movie so I strolled around a bit, helplessly bought some graphic tee shirts (again), opened a new bank account to try and set aside and save some of what little that remained of my savings, and sent money to an online shop I ordered a shirt from the day before. I was beginning to feel miserable again. Soon I met up with my other friends (who only agreed to watch the movie because I’d been trying to convince them for so long) and we went to see the movie.
The movie is about WALL-E, an innocent, inquisitive, amusing, but hopelessly obsolete waste disposal robot that’s the only one of his kind left after centuries of working to clean up the mess humans left lying all around on earth. For most of his life he has been alone, cleaning up, collecting and neatly stacking up the garbage on an eerily silent planet. All alone. All he had was an adorable and (resilient) little cockroach for a loyal pet and a container van full of beautiful garbage to go home to at the end of his long day. As he goes about collecting trash everyday, he picks up things he finds interesting, bringing them home and wringing whatever little droplets of happiness he could get from them. Somehow, his longing for company, his desperation to escape the loneliness that envelopes his world like the mountains of trash, comes out once he is home, inspecting and staring at his collection, and watching old videos of happy people singing and holding hands and sharing the joys of togetherness with each other. For a long time, that is how things are for him. And then all of a sudden, one fine day, another being comes along, a sleek and sophisticated robot called EVE who searches for signs of life in the uninhabited earth WALL-E cleans everyday. His life begins to change.
Sometimes we forget what we have and how important they really are to us. We don’t realize it before they are taken from us, before we are stripped of all we’ve taken for granted. The movie reminded me how terrible a life it is to live without friends, without family, without love, without the many, many blessings we have but often forget to be thankful for. Every now and then it pains me that in life, in this very short life, there is so much separation. Living the kind of life we live nowadays, we simply can’t help but drift apart, unconsciously floating away from most things we hold dear. We’re often forced, ripped apart from everything we try hardest to keep, to cling onto. We often find ourselves separated from things we wish we could forever be with, finding comfort in the familiar togetherness of friends and family. I don’t show it often as I wasn’t raised that way, and I know it’s wrong to seek to become whole and complete through others. And yet I also can’t deny that seeing the threads of my ties and bonds with these people slowly unraveling is a bit of a heartache. I feel a dull pain deep in my heart. And I don’t think it’s just angina. We’re often told that in this life people will come and go. But that doesn’t ease the pain. Like characters in some elaborate story, they enter the scene, play their part, and exit whenever the storyteller pleases. And yet, in the end, the characters’ demise, no matter how expected, still manages to upset us in some way. I guess the challenge then is how to find, and keep, relationships that help us become altogether better people.
The movie was just fantastic. The animation was perfect, the characters were absolutely adorable, and the plot simple yet succulent with valuable realizations. It was both an ominous reminder of the importance of ecological preservation and an endearingly warm love story set in the bleak future. Grown-ups should go see animated cartoon movies more often. It’s a bit sad to say but really, I think we all sometimes feel that way, alone and abandoned in this big planet, quietly living our lives in our own little impenetrable bubbles, that we, at some point or another, inevitably begin to feel detached and distant and separated from everything and everyone around us.
We live our lives in stoic loneliness despite the millions of other people around us, as if we were living alone on a cold, deserted planet. We fill up our houses with things we don’t really need but feel good about having, finding some twisted form of friendship with clothes and gadgets and furniture and everything else that’s unfortunately too inanimate to reciprocate our gestures of friendship, hoping to replace the companionship of the people we’ve lost touch with with the material things we drown ourselves in. Then there really are times when the desire to connect with each other and the longing for companionship simply becomes too strong to fight off and ignore, times when we feel all alone and yearning for something, someone, to come along and change things. I guess that is what life is about, finding and realizing you have found whatever it is that completes you. We all need somebody, someone to fill the gaps in our existence and ultimately complete us. A big part of life is about figuring out who or what can complete us, and finding that missing piece to create our own masterpiece. Like most cartoon movies, it had a happy ending. But it left poignant lessons in its wake as well. I’m so glad I went to see that movie.
Perhaps because of excitement I woke up early that day (something I didn’t really intend but happened anyway) and met up with the good friends I left at the company I worked for until two weeks ago. We ate oriental (and quite expensive) brunch at an old but still decently popular Chinese restaurant and looked around the shops at the nearby bazaar. They still worked on grave yard shifts, the poor things, so they soon unanimously agreed to abandon me and leave me to watch the movie on my own. Fine. I’m getting used to doing many things alone these days anyway.
When I got to the mall (crowded, as usual) I still had some time left before the movie so I strolled around a bit, helplessly bought some graphic tee shirts (again), opened a new bank account to try and set aside and save some of what little that remained of my savings, and sent money to an online shop I ordered a shirt from the day before. I was beginning to feel miserable again. Soon I met up with my other friends (who only agreed to watch the movie because I’d been trying to convince them for so long) and we went to see the movie.
The movie is about WALL-E, an innocent, inquisitive, amusing, but hopelessly obsolete waste disposal robot that’s the only one of his kind left after centuries of working to clean up the mess humans left lying all around on earth. For most of his life he has been alone, cleaning up, collecting and neatly stacking up the garbage on an eerily silent planet. All alone. All he had was an adorable and (resilient) little cockroach for a loyal pet and a container van full of beautiful garbage to go home to at the end of his long day. As he goes about collecting trash everyday, he picks up things he finds interesting, bringing them home and wringing whatever little droplets of happiness he could get from them. Somehow, his longing for company, his desperation to escape the loneliness that envelopes his world like the mountains of trash, comes out once he is home, inspecting and staring at his collection, and watching old videos of happy people singing and holding hands and sharing the joys of togetherness with each other. For a long time, that is how things are for him. And then all of a sudden, one fine day, another being comes along, a sleek and sophisticated robot called EVE who searches for signs of life in the uninhabited earth WALL-E cleans everyday. His life begins to change.
Sometimes we forget what we have and how important they really are to us. We don’t realize it before they are taken from us, before we are stripped of all we’ve taken for granted. The movie reminded me how terrible a life it is to live without friends, without family, without love, without the many, many blessings we have but often forget to be thankful for. Every now and then it pains me that in life, in this very short life, there is so much separation. Living the kind of life we live nowadays, we simply can’t help but drift apart, unconsciously floating away from most things we hold dear. We’re often forced, ripped apart from everything we try hardest to keep, to cling onto. We often find ourselves separated from things we wish we could forever be with, finding comfort in the familiar togetherness of friends and family. I don’t show it often as I wasn’t raised that way, and I know it’s wrong to seek to become whole and complete through others. And yet I also can’t deny that seeing the threads of my ties and bonds with these people slowly unraveling is a bit of a heartache. I feel a dull pain deep in my heart. And I don’t think it’s just angina. We’re often told that in this life people will come and go. But that doesn’t ease the pain. Like characters in some elaborate story, they enter the scene, play their part, and exit whenever the storyteller pleases. And yet, in the end, the characters’ demise, no matter how expected, still manages to upset us in some way. I guess the challenge then is how to find, and keep, relationships that help us become altogether better people.
The movie was just fantastic. The animation was perfect, the characters were absolutely adorable, and the plot simple yet succulent with valuable realizations. It was both an ominous reminder of the importance of ecological preservation and an endearingly warm love story set in the bleak future. Grown-ups should go see animated cartoon movies more often. It’s a bit sad to say but really, I think we all sometimes feel that way, alone and abandoned in this big planet, quietly living our lives in our own little impenetrable bubbles, that we, at some point or another, inevitably begin to feel detached and distant and separated from everything and everyone around us.
We live our lives in stoic loneliness despite the millions of other people around us, as if we were living alone on a cold, deserted planet. We fill up our houses with things we don’t really need but feel good about having, finding some twisted form of friendship with clothes and gadgets and furniture and everything else that’s unfortunately too inanimate to reciprocate our gestures of friendship, hoping to replace the companionship of the people we’ve lost touch with with the material things we drown ourselves in. Then there really are times when the desire to connect with each other and the longing for companionship simply becomes too strong to fight off and ignore, times when we feel all alone and yearning for something, someone, to come along and change things. I guess that is what life is about, finding and realizing you have found whatever it is that completes you. We all need somebody, someone to fill the gaps in our existence and ultimately complete us. A big part of life is about figuring out who or what can complete us, and finding that missing piece to create our own masterpiece. Like most cartoon movies, it had a happy ending. But it left poignant lessons in its wake as well. I’m so glad I went to see that movie.
Monday, August 11, 2008
God bless the jobless!
Earlier this week I resigned from my (somewhat depressing) job as a call center agent. For some reason I still can’t seem to figure out, despite the sweet success I had already achieved, I couldn’t help but feel miserable and discontented and unhappy with all that I had done and all that I was doing. Without me really realizing it, I’d been working there for a year now (months longer than I thought and hoped I would) and I had come much, much further than anyone, including myself, believed I would. But, like most good things in this short, tragic life, it had to end. Especially since I was beginning to feel like there wasn’t any room left for me to grow in. And I was beginning to suffocate, cramped and confined in the sad small space that, for the longest time, was the entirety of my world. I was stagnating, not going anywhere, despite all the time that had passed and all the work I had done to get somewhere. I felt like I was a tiny seedling that had grown too large a plant for the small pot of earth I was buried in, and it was time for me to uproot myself from it so I could grow even more. Otherwise the pot would’ve cracked and split in half just trying to hold me in. It was time for me to go elsewhere and find better things to do with myself and my time, a place where the sun would shine warmly on me and breathe new life into my now monotonous existence.
The day after I resigned from my job I came in for my NCLEX review classes, in preparation for the daunting exams I’ll be taking later this year. It had started the day before, but I chose to miss the first day as I wanted to give myself some idle time to at least take in all these sudden changes and realign myself with the realities that I now moved in. I was so surprised at how quickly things changed, and I needed some time to regain the balance I lost in all that spinning around when I shook up my own humble existence.
When you think about it, there really are times when things just settle on their own, when you don’t really plan out everything but then it all seems to fall into place anyway. After abruptly quitting my job I didn’t know where to go. I didn’t have any plans at all. I just wanted to leave, to get away, and that was it. I didn’t know where I was going, or why, or how I was going to get there, but I went anyway. My emotional outbursts, as you can see, constantly put my dear life in grave danger. And yet, despite the directionless wandering about I was preparing myself for, the kind universe plucked me from the mental limbo of ambivalence I was floating in and put me on a path it had already paved for me, my very own yellow brick road. How remarkably thoughtful. I hadn’t even had the time yet to brood and rest and contemplate on things and maybe even regret my decision a bit and already I had something else to do sitting on my lap like a puppy wagging its tail and waiting to be embraced and toyed with. It was there, and I had no choice but to accept what I’d been given.
And so that is what I’ve been doing for the past three days or so, constantly rearranging my mental furniture to try and recover (with little success) lost pieces of the lessons I learned in nursing school years ago. They had been lying there, sleeping in undisturbed peace and stored in dust covered shoeboxes under some big bed in the dark shadows of my mind, while I was busy working for the past year. It is always a struggle looking for memories you aren’t even sure were there in the first place. As we go through answering the many drills and tests to refresh my memory, I feel like convulsing, falling on the floor and just dying. So much has slipped away from my mind, and it will take some time and a lot of work to regain some, if not all, of them. And I don’t even have that much time left. Oh well. I’ll keep trying anyway. It’s not like I have any other choice.
The other day I finished my review classes early, just before lunch, and my friends had their own plans in mind, so I ended up finishing the rest of my day alone. I went around downtown, withdrawing money from the bank, paying the phone and internet bills, window shopping, people watching, and helplessly buying myself a couple of new graphic tee shirts, all the while pulling up the green skinny jeans I was wearing to keep them from falling to the ground and humiliating myself. Apparently, I had lost some weight without me so much as skipping a meal or missing a single grain of rice, even. Stress does have some wonderful side-effects after all. In the end, after all that walking that almost certainly wrought permanent damage on the white and aqua and skull imprinted slip-on sneakers I had on, it was inevitable that I had to eat lunch, no matter how late. I went into a fast food restaurant, ordered a budget meal (I had spent a great deal of money on the clothes so I had to compromise) and sat on a small table for two in the corner.
Since I didn’t have anyone to talk to anyway, I would look around every now and then as I ate my lunch, staring at the people around me and the stories they carried around boldly painted on their faces. It was then that I noticed that right across my table was the restaurant’s kitchen, and every time the door opened and closed I saw a quick glimpse of what it was like on the other side of the counter. It was chaos. Every five minutes or so some poor employee would come rushing in and out with a bucket or a mop or some other cleaning tool, shuffling from one task to the next like little mice scampering and scurrying around to get something done before the precious opportunity disappears. They all seemed so harassed and agitated and panicked and fatigued. I know working and toiling like blessed beasts of burden will always be part of our lives (or most of it), but at that moment I was glad I didn’t have a job anymore. All that torture’s bound to kill you sooner or later.
I’m not entirely jobless, though. Reviewing for exams is like any other fulltime job. But it doesn’t pay. Which isn’t much different from the job that I just left anyway, so I don’t mind. I’m still getting used to learning things again and putting my geriatric brain cells to use after their untimely retirement, but I’m beginning to see all this is a blessing. I thought I’d end up regretting my decision to leave my job but no, I was spared from that terrible fate. There was something waiting for me, and I didn’t even see it coming. I’m glad I didn’t have too much time between leaving my job and starting my review classes. All that unused time gives you a chance to think about everything, and you end up conceiving and giving birth to your own inner demons, monsters that will inevitably awaken ugly insecurities and doubts and all the other things that can discourage your spirit. I’m so glad God blesses even the jobless.
The day after I resigned from my job I came in for my NCLEX review classes, in preparation for the daunting exams I’ll be taking later this year. It had started the day before, but I chose to miss the first day as I wanted to give myself some idle time to at least take in all these sudden changes and realign myself with the realities that I now moved in. I was so surprised at how quickly things changed, and I needed some time to regain the balance I lost in all that spinning around when I shook up my own humble existence.
When you think about it, there really are times when things just settle on their own, when you don’t really plan out everything but then it all seems to fall into place anyway. After abruptly quitting my job I didn’t know where to go. I didn’t have any plans at all. I just wanted to leave, to get away, and that was it. I didn’t know where I was going, or why, or how I was going to get there, but I went anyway. My emotional outbursts, as you can see, constantly put my dear life in grave danger. And yet, despite the directionless wandering about I was preparing myself for, the kind universe plucked me from the mental limbo of ambivalence I was floating in and put me on a path it had already paved for me, my very own yellow brick road. How remarkably thoughtful. I hadn’t even had the time yet to brood and rest and contemplate on things and maybe even regret my decision a bit and already I had something else to do sitting on my lap like a puppy wagging its tail and waiting to be embraced and toyed with. It was there, and I had no choice but to accept what I’d been given.
And so that is what I’ve been doing for the past three days or so, constantly rearranging my mental furniture to try and recover (with little success) lost pieces of the lessons I learned in nursing school years ago. They had been lying there, sleeping in undisturbed peace and stored in dust covered shoeboxes under some big bed in the dark shadows of my mind, while I was busy working for the past year. It is always a struggle looking for memories you aren’t even sure were there in the first place. As we go through answering the many drills and tests to refresh my memory, I feel like convulsing, falling on the floor and just dying. So much has slipped away from my mind, and it will take some time and a lot of work to regain some, if not all, of them. And I don’t even have that much time left. Oh well. I’ll keep trying anyway. It’s not like I have any other choice.
The other day I finished my review classes early, just before lunch, and my friends had their own plans in mind, so I ended up finishing the rest of my day alone. I went around downtown, withdrawing money from the bank, paying the phone and internet bills, window shopping, people watching, and helplessly buying myself a couple of new graphic tee shirts, all the while pulling up the green skinny jeans I was wearing to keep them from falling to the ground and humiliating myself. Apparently, I had lost some weight without me so much as skipping a meal or missing a single grain of rice, even. Stress does have some wonderful side-effects after all. In the end, after all that walking that almost certainly wrought permanent damage on the white and aqua and skull imprinted slip-on sneakers I had on, it was inevitable that I had to eat lunch, no matter how late. I went into a fast food restaurant, ordered a budget meal (I had spent a great deal of money on the clothes so I had to compromise) and sat on a small table for two in the corner.
Since I didn’t have anyone to talk to anyway, I would look around every now and then as I ate my lunch, staring at the people around me and the stories they carried around boldly painted on their faces. It was then that I noticed that right across my table was the restaurant’s kitchen, and every time the door opened and closed I saw a quick glimpse of what it was like on the other side of the counter. It was chaos. Every five minutes or so some poor employee would come rushing in and out with a bucket or a mop or some other cleaning tool, shuffling from one task to the next like little mice scampering and scurrying around to get something done before the precious opportunity disappears. They all seemed so harassed and agitated and panicked and fatigued. I know working and toiling like blessed beasts of burden will always be part of our lives (or most of it), but at that moment I was glad I didn’t have a job anymore. All that torture’s bound to kill you sooner or later.
I’m not entirely jobless, though. Reviewing for exams is like any other fulltime job. But it doesn’t pay. Which isn’t much different from the job that I just left anyway, so I don’t mind. I’m still getting used to learning things again and putting my geriatric brain cells to use after their untimely retirement, but I’m beginning to see all this is a blessing. I thought I’d end up regretting my decision to leave my job but no, I was spared from that terrible fate. There was something waiting for me, and I didn’t even see it coming. I’m glad I didn’t have too much time between leaving my job and starting my review classes. All that unused time gives you a chance to think about everything, and you end up conceiving and giving birth to your own inner demons, monsters that will inevitably awaken ugly insecurities and doubts and all the other things that can discourage your spirit. I’m so glad God blesses even the jobless.
Monday, August 4, 2008
Clean up the puddles of blood red banana ketchup on the dining room floor if it’s already 1 am and you still can’t sleep
It takes up so much time and energy you’ll be sleeping sweet and sound before you know it. Unless you just quit your job and you have rats raiding your pantry. How did I come to such a random realization, you ask? Why not just count imaginary sheep jumping over white picket fences like any self-respecting insomniac? Well the story goes this way. As I am beginning to write this, it is nine minutes before 1 in the morning and I’m still awake, tossing and turning on my bed, stuck between tomorrow and today. I’ve had a lot in my mind the past few days (and nights) and I have had some trouble sleeping. Perhaps because in the past few weeks I had been working at night and sleeping during the day, and just when my tortured old circadian rhythm was finally beginning to adapt to the sudden change, I surprised it yet again by quitting my job and trying to sleep at night again. I imagine my internal body clock must be so confused and irritated and exhausted right now it might as well just break down into pieces and stop ticking altogether any minute now.
Or maybe I just can’t sleep because of all the noise I keep on hearing. I had to get up just now to get a glass of cold water. Maybe it will help me sleep, I thought. My mother turned off the dispenser so I get to quench my thirst with a glass of wonderfully refreshing lukewarm water instead. I visit the toilet several times to try and dispel and exorcise whatever inner demons I might have curled up inside me that are tormenting and poisoning my system. I stare down at the toilet and I see nothing. Still, I feel bad. But at least now I know for certain it is not my stomach or some precious part of my alimentary canal that is upset.
Then I hear something break and smash. From what little evidence I could see I reckon the turn of events went something like this. Another one of those large, pesky domestic rodents I had been campaigning to protect from my father’s pesticidal tendencies had betrayed me again and tried stealing food from the table. Instead, it ended up bumping into a bottle of banana ketchup and sent it falling into the dining room floor. The culprit disappeared. The mess was like a horrid murder scene. I had to clean up the blood red puddles of banana ketchup, carefully feeling the sticky dressing with my bare fingers for shards of broken glass that might have been buried and might get left behind for an innocent foot to accidentally step upon one of these days. My fingertips are still a bit red with all the ketchup I got them into. I remind myself to buy a new cabinet or something, as my container of clothes is now full to the brim and all the clothes I leave around just lying in my room are in great danger of being viciously attacked and preyed upon by these ungrateful, pillaging rats. If only my old cat were still alive, I thought, these thieves wouldn’t be as brave in intruding our house as they are. Then again my old cat wouldn’t have stood a chance against that gigantic monster anyway. It was almost the same size as her and would have easily killed her if it wanted to. It was so large just seeing it crawling there scared me with morbid thoughts of dying from the bubonic plague.
I go back into my room, still wary of that giant rat. I caught it crawling back up the table but couldn’t bring myself to so much as shoo it away. Anyway, it scampered off into the darkness again, and I’ve no choice but to go back to bed with the hopes of finally getting some sleep. If ever I do get to sleep I hope I don’t get nightmares. It is well past three. As usual, without apparent reason, the dogs are restless outside (like me), breaking out in scandalous barking marathons every other twenty minutes or so. Speaking of dogs, if I were one I’d be dangerous and chances are I would’ve already ended up in a stinky, cramped dog pound somewhere. The problem with me is I seldom bark or growl. I just bite when I’m already pushed too far up against the wall. And after I bite I run off and hide, never to be seen or heard from again. That was exactly what happened when I received my insultingly small paycheck from the office last Thursday. I exploded, and with that, whatever little enthusiasm I had left for the job went flying out the window. It was like discovering a fly happily swimming in my bowl of soup just as I was half through with it and completely losing my appetite to finish the rest of the meal. Hopefully the little scene I made got my message across. And they will be more careful next time.
Already I am beginning to feel bad about having to resign from my job. I had been working there for eleven months now, and over time I’ve come to love what I was doing. But I had to do what I had to do, and there’s simply no turning back now. The trouble when you’ve already established a certain routine is that you don’t think, much less worry, about the near future. Tomorrow does not bother you. You know exactly what time to get up the next day, what to wear, where to go, what to do, who you’ll see, what time you’ll be through with the things you need to do, what time you get home, and so on. There is very little room for pondering on uncertainty and hesitation. And yet, when that routine comes to an end, say, when you graduate from school or, in my case, when you quit a job, you are faced with so many questions you had little time to even think about back when you still had your schedules and itineraries all planned out. Right now I have all these doubts swirling in my head. But I know there is no reason to fear tomorrow. At least I’ll have the time to drop by the grocery store and buy another bottle of banana ketchup. And maybe some rat poison too. Maybe not.
Or maybe I just can’t sleep because of all the noise I keep on hearing. I had to get up just now to get a glass of cold water. Maybe it will help me sleep, I thought. My mother turned off the dispenser so I get to quench my thirst with a glass of wonderfully refreshing lukewarm water instead. I visit the toilet several times to try and dispel and exorcise whatever inner demons I might have curled up inside me that are tormenting and poisoning my system. I stare down at the toilet and I see nothing. Still, I feel bad. But at least now I know for certain it is not my stomach or some precious part of my alimentary canal that is upset.
Then I hear something break and smash. From what little evidence I could see I reckon the turn of events went something like this. Another one of those large, pesky domestic rodents I had been campaigning to protect from my father’s pesticidal tendencies had betrayed me again and tried stealing food from the table. Instead, it ended up bumping into a bottle of banana ketchup and sent it falling into the dining room floor. The culprit disappeared. The mess was like a horrid murder scene. I had to clean up the blood red puddles of banana ketchup, carefully feeling the sticky dressing with my bare fingers for shards of broken glass that might have been buried and might get left behind for an innocent foot to accidentally step upon one of these days. My fingertips are still a bit red with all the ketchup I got them into. I remind myself to buy a new cabinet or something, as my container of clothes is now full to the brim and all the clothes I leave around just lying in my room are in great danger of being viciously attacked and preyed upon by these ungrateful, pillaging rats. If only my old cat were still alive, I thought, these thieves wouldn’t be as brave in intruding our house as they are. Then again my old cat wouldn’t have stood a chance against that gigantic monster anyway. It was almost the same size as her and would have easily killed her if it wanted to. It was so large just seeing it crawling there scared me with morbid thoughts of dying from the bubonic plague.
I go back into my room, still wary of that giant rat. I caught it crawling back up the table but couldn’t bring myself to so much as shoo it away. Anyway, it scampered off into the darkness again, and I’ve no choice but to go back to bed with the hopes of finally getting some sleep. If ever I do get to sleep I hope I don’t get nightmares. It is well past three. As usual, without apparent reason, the dogs are restless outside (like me), breaking out in scandalous barking marathons every other twenty minutes or so. Speaking of dogs, if I were one I’d be dangerous and chances are I would’ve already ended up in a stinky, cramped dog pound somewhere. The problem with me is I seldom bark or growl. I just bite when I’m already pushed too far up against the wall. And after I bite I run off and hide, never to be seen or heard from again. That was exactly what happened when I received my insultingly small paycheck from the office last Thursday. I exploded, and with that, whatever little enthusiasm I had left for the job went flying out the window. It was like discovering a fly happily swimming in my bowl of soup just as I was half through with it and completely losing my appetite to finish the rest of the meal. Hopefully the little scene I made got my message across. And they will be more careful next time.
Already I am beginning to feel bad about having to resign from my job. I had been working there for eleven months now, and over time I’ve come to love what I was doing. But I had to do what I had to do, and there’s simply no turning back now. The trouble when you’ve already established a certain routine is that you don’t think, much less worry, about the near future. Tomorrow does not bother you. You know exactly what time to get up the next day, what to wear, where to go, what to do, who you’ll see, what time you’ll be through with the things you need to do, what time you get home, and so on. There is very little room for pondering on uncertainty and hesitation. And yet, when that routine comes to an end, say, when you graduate from school or, in my case, when you quit a job, you are faced with so many questions you had little time to even think about back when you still had your schedules and itineraries all planned out. Right now I have all these doubts swirling in my head. But I know there is no reason to fear tomorrow. At least I’ll have the time to drop by the grocery store and buy another bottle of banana ketchup. And maybe some rat poison too. Maybe not.
Disappearing act: the art of letting go, walking away, not looking back, and moving on
I’m hopelessly passive aggressive. I have this habit of letting annoying things pass, just taking a deep, deep breath and ignoring all these little irritations, until such a time all the pent up emotions just completely overwhelm me like some evil spirit and erupt, sometimes even at the slightest provocation, and I snap in a very telenovela way, exploding like a furious, over-dramatic volcano that just woke up from centuries of cold dormancy. Imagine the very timid Dr. Bruce Banner losing his temper, tearing his clothes off, and transforming into a very mad, very green Incredible Hulk. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t lose my temper that easily. I’m very patient and non-confrontational, sometimes even to the point of selfless sacrifice and martyrdom. Pardon the histrionics. It takes a long, long time before something gets to me and irks me so bad I end up throwing and smashing things.
But if and when that happens, there is simply no turning back. Some bridges are burned, some bonds and ties (and I sometimes imagine body parts too) are cut off, and some feelings (mostly mine) are hurt. Apologies are not made. Not by me, at least. I see no reason in apologizing for something you intentionally do. I do not know how to explain it. Anger is a strong wind that blows out the lamp of the mind, a short period of utter lunacy where one simply loses control. I think British poet Francis Quarles describes it very well, my passive aggressiveness. He says to “beware of him that is slow to anger; for when it is long coming, it is the stronger when it comes, and the longer kept. Abused patience turns to fury.” That is exactly how I feel.
You see, after a bad (and quite possibly my last) day at work last week, I just had to get away. I have not reported to work in two days, and probably will not ever again. I have avoided contact with anything remotely related to my work. I just had to disappear. In the past three weeks or so I had been working on graveyard shifts, something that is already a challenge in itself. The company had decided that the dayshift we had been on for the past year was not working, and the best way to keep operations reasonably affordable was to have everyone working all together on one shift. And yet that did not bother me as much as I thought it would. I did not allow it to. I was even willing to explore the positive side of working at night, no matter how difficult it is to find that side with the sleepiness messing around with my senses. I stayed at the office after the shift that day, sleeping on a seldom cleaned couch. It was payday and I, together with the three other senior agents I worked with, was waiting for the salaries to be released. I didn’t mind having to miss a few precious hours of sleeping in the comforts of my own damp bed just to have my salary as soon as I could. There were clothes waiting to be bought.
And then they woke me up, telling me the paychecks had arrived. Finally, I thought to myself, and I happily walked into the HR office even before waking up completely. I was surprised at how small my salary was. Maybe it was just because I had just woken up, but I lost my temper. After receiving a paycheck so small I just felt so feverishly frustrated. I was so insulted and appalled. To me, the company made it clear I was no longer of value to them, giving me that check. It was half of what I was expecting to get that day, and I was just so offended receiving a salary that had been reduced to close to nothing by surprising deductions I didn’t even care to know about anymore. I may have been top agent several times, but I still have my two feet firmly planted on the ground. I wasn’t asking for too much, I just wanted what I worked for and what I deserved. Nothing more, nothing less. And yet they did not give that to me. Being the promising theatrical actor that I am, I slammed my fists on the table, I slammed the door, I cried, I laughed, I walked out, I walked back in to get my check, and I walked out again. I just lost it.
This is exactly what happened with my first job at an inbound call center years ago. I stretched my patience and tried to tolerate everything, every little mistake and evidence of neglect, for as long as I could. But there really comes a time when you know have had enough. I know it will probably be another decision that I will come to regret. But right now, no matter how I try, I can’t bring myself to decide otherwise. It may sound petty, but it was just one of the many things the company had done to show me how little I was appreciated, how much they had taken me for granted. And it was the last. It was the last straw. I may have allowed things like that to happen before, but I have had enough. And when I’ve had enough of something, I let it go, walk away, don’t look back, and move on. Every moment spent looking back into the past is a wasted opportunity to step forward and move on into the future. So I’m not looking back. The future is waiting for me.
I felt like a battered wife divorcing herself out of an abusive marriage. It hurts, but it had to end. It was my emancipation from cruelty. It doesn’t even matter if my estranged husband already finds himself another wife by now. I’m sure the company has found a qualified substitute. They might not admit it, but we all know I am irreplaceable. They will never find another me. Someone like me, maybe, but never another me. They might even get someone better. But not another me. If only they had not neglected me and pushed me too far. Sadly there really are times in life where you have to get abandoned by an employee for you to realize how valuable that person was. We realize to change for the better just when things get worse. We realize to correct our mistakes just when those mistakes have already done irreversible damage. And we finally decide to prove ourselves worthy just when the person to whom we want to prove our worth has already decided that we are not worth it at all, walks away, doesn’t look back, and moves on.
Oh well. I’m sure the company has learned its lesson now that I’ve given them a much-needed wake-up call. And I’m sure all the other employees will reap the benefits of what I have just sown. As for me, I’ll be moving on. Happily.
But if and when that happens, there is simply no turning back. Some bridges are burned, some bonds and ties (and I sometimes imagine body parts too) are cut off, and some feelings (mostly mine) are hurt. Apologies are not made. Not by me, at least. I see no reason in apologizing for something you intentionally do. I do not know how to explain it. Anger is a strong wind that blows out the lamp of the mind, a short period of utter lunacy where one simply loses control. I think British poet Francis Quarles describes it very well, my passive aggressiveness. He says to “beware of him that is slow to anger; for when it is long coming, it is the stronger when it comes, and the longer kept. Abused patience turns to fury.” That is exactly how I feel.
You see, after a bad (and quite possibly my last) day at work last week, I just had to get away. I have not reported to work in two days, and probably will not ever again. I have avoided contact with anything remotely related to my work. I just had to disappear. In the past three weeks or so I had been working on graveyard shifts, something that is already a challenge in itself. The company had decided that the dayshift we had been on for the past year was not working, and the best way to keep operations reasonably affordable was to have everyone working all together on one shift. And yet that did not bother me as much as I thought it would. I did not allow it to. I was even willing to explore the positive side of working at night, no matter how difficult it is to find that side with the sleepiness messing around with my senses. I stayed at the office after the shift that day, sleeping on a seldom cleaned couch. It was payday and I, together with the three other senior agents I worked with, was waiting for the salaries to be released. I didn’t mind having to miss a few precious hours of sleeping in the comforts of my own damp bed just to have my salary as soon as I could. There were clothes waiting to be bought.
And then they woke me up, telling me the paychecks had arrived. Finally, I thought to myself, and I happily walked into the HR office even before waking up completely. I was surprised at how small my salary was. Maybe it was just because I had just woken up, but I lost my temper. After receiving a paycheck so small I just felt so feverishly frustrated. I was so insulted and appalled. To me, the company made it clear I was no longer of value to them, giving me that check. It was half of what I was expecting to get that day, and I was just so offended receiving a salary that had been reduced to close to nothing by surprising deductions I didn’t even care to know about anymore. I may have been top agent several times, but I still have my two feet firmly planted on the ground. I wasn’t asking for too much, I just wanted what I worked for and what I deserved. Nothing more, nothing less. And yet they did not give that to me. Being the promising theatrical actor that I am, I slammed my fists on the table, I slammed the door, I cried, I laughed, I walked out, I walked back in to get my check, and I walked out again. I just lost it.
This is exactly what happened with my first job at an inbound call center years ago. I stretched my patience and tried to tolerate everything, every little mistake and evidence of neglect, for as long as I could. But there really comes a time when you know have had enough. I know it will probably be another decision that I will come to regret. But right now, no matter how I try, I can’t bring myself to decide otherwise. It may sound petty, but it was just one of the many things the company had done to show me how little I was appreciated, how much they had taken me for granted. And it was the last. It was the last straw. I may have allowed things like that to happen before, but I have had enough. And when I’ve had enough of something, I let it go, walk away, don’t look back, and move on. Every moment spent looking back into the past is a wasted opportunity to step forward and move on into the future. So I’m not looking back. The future is waiting for me.
I felt like a battered wife divorcing herself out of an abusive marriage. It hurts, but it had to end. It was my emancipation from cruelty. It doesn’t even matter if my estranged husband already finds himself another wife by now. I’m sure the company has found a qualified substitute. They might not admit it, but we all know I am irreplaceable. They will never find another me. Someone like me, maybe, but never another me. They might even get someone better. But not another me. If only they had not neglected me and pushed me too far. Sadly there really are times in life where you have to get abandoned by an employee for you to realize how valuable that person was. We realize to change for the better just when things get worse. We realize to correct our mistakes just when those mistakes have already done irreversible damage. And we finally decide to prove ourselves worthy just when the person to whom we want to prove our worth has already decided that we are not worth it at all, walks away, doesn’t look back, and moves on.
Oh well. I’m sure the company has learned its lesson now that I’ve given them a much-needed wake-up call. And I’m sure all the other employees will reap the benefits of what I have just sown. As for me, I’ll be moving on. Happily.
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