04 Dec 2007

12-04-07

it's the same, deep-seated anxiety every december. a month when one can become unexplainably sentimental. and everyday is hanging-on day, because the people and opportunities are just too good to pass up, and you want to cling to them forever. it's only during this cold, forsaken month that you actually live FOR THE DAY, and you don't care much for the future, because the only thing that matters is that you're happy NOW. no reservations, just LIFE in its purest sense.

26 Nov 2007

11-26-07

a loud noise has roused the dead from sleep. just when i was about to dance like leaves in the wind, a harsher storm swept across the landscape, and leaving me with no choice but to run for cover, and in vain, wait for the next breeze to twirl around in.

late post 1 18 nov 2007.

early into the evening yesterday, our neighbors were getting rowdy again. they'd brought out a karaoke machine and parked a pedicab in the middle of the street to prevent automobiles from coming in and disturbing their drunken stupor. i'd been very stressed from a walk to the tailor with mom - we walked thru one chinese garter game, tiptoed around stray dogs, tried to walk along the city sidewalk already taken by vendors and potholes - and I couldnt take much more. i prayed hard over dinner. prayed for a storm, for rain.

and it did rain. it rained good and hard albeit quickly.

Indeed, pray hard and pray harder. For the Lord our God listens to prayers which are whispered again and again, without failing, with all the faith you can offer. Ask until you can ask no more, and you will receive.

The Lightness of Being.

i went grocery shopping this morning. my typical grocery list consistently consists of the following:
a. Chase's dog food (1 sack)
b. an assortment of toiletries
c. flavored tea bags (this month it's Lipton's Infusions - cranberry, strawberry and raspberry mix, decaf)
d. biscuits (love those cute animal shaped seaweed biscuits)
e. chocolates and caramel bars (get cheap alternatives - the Middle East produced Demolino tastes almost as good as a Twix bar)
f. a bag or two of chips (pile on the guilt)

this morning however, i went shopping for the most important two weeks in my life (or so id like to think). i go on a strict detox diet tuesday, and my cart today belonged to a gym bunny, not a mall rat. i purchased the following:

a. chicken breast fillets (no skin)
b. sour cream
c. capers (used sparingly)
d. red beans (instead of carb)
e. tomato soup (good for the immune system)
f. liter packs of fruit juice as part of the daily allowable A.C.E.S.
g. wheat bread (only one slice a day)
h. no msg seasoning (salt pepper paprika cumin thyme tarragon rosemary)
i. tortilla chips (baked, not fried, with salsa)
j. romaine and tagalog lettuce
k. red wine vinegar

put them all together and you have a new me, post diet in just two weeks. that's the lead time im giving myself, and fingers crossed, i will be sticking to my diet this time. so why detox? at 23, i have the eyebags of a 34 year old. the pandesal, or puson, or lower gut of a 30 year old. the flabby arms of my almost 60 year old mother (slightly exaggerated). i have cellulite to last me a lifetime, falling hairstrands that are more than the number of healthy hair follicles on my head. i feel tired waking up every morning, and am ready to retire in the evening at 830 p.m. i am older than my grandma. plus, i get the worst hangovers in the world.

before i went to taipei last july i did pilates for a month, every single day. my body asked for it when i stopped, my back was sore, my appetite bigger, my metabolism slower. i became too lazy though to do so and put on a good amount of weight. i started drinking again and that affected my strength considerably. when stressed, i'd turn to a glass of alcohol and for the moment or the evening, lose myself in a hazy perspective that can only liquor induced. the morning after, id have the biggest headache, a migraine would follow, and id be low on red blood platelets the entire day, feeling nauseaous and weak.

i tried hard to pick up where i left off, but it's difficult to break a routine, if you could call it that. i had been thru the same type of lifestyle back in college, when drinking sprees started at 3 in the afternoon and ended at 9. but these affairs never gave me trouble. id be on a consistent hamburger and fries diet and would be alert enough in class to participate in discussions and answer exams. i never thought, and neither did any of my colleagues and friends, that it would be so different once you hit a certain age, if you stop caring for your body. last month i bought myself 7 drinks under a drink all you can promo and found myself sprawled on the ground under a tree, along the entrance of a high class mall complex in Makati. water was coming out of my nose already, and i was passing out continually. i wanted to sleep, throw up, sleep again and just whine my way out of that evening.

indeed, health is wealth. the amount of stress young people choose to go through today will eventually take its toll on our bodies, especially if we subject our bodies to neglect. there's no better time to start loving yourself again. and there's also no better time to start knowing who your real friends and family are. surround yourself with people who take care of themselves, who shy away from vices, and those who keep clean the creation which we call the temple of God. it's a good start. pretty soon your efforts to physiologically declutter your lifestyle will branch out to help keep the rest of your life in shape.

A no's a no.

no matter how many times you've faced rejection in the past, you still cant seem to shake off the nagging feeling that claws down your self esteem every time and says, maybe you could have done better if you had (fill in the blank here). every single time, you still feel the sting.

Young Blood: Coterminous

By Jo M. Mendoza
Inquirer
Last updated 02:19am (Mla time) 07/24/2007
Every day, my mother and I take a cab on our way to work. I’ve probably met half of the population of taxi drivers in this country. Before I hail a cab, I pray that I will get a decent cabbie, and then switch on my X-ray vision when a taxi pulls up, trying to look into the driver’s soul before getting in.

I spend an hour every morning inside a taxi bound for Roxas Boulevard in Pasay from Quezon City. Each weekday morning I get into a cab, I make eye contact with the driver through the rearview mirror, give him the directions (to mom’s place first, then mine), settle down, pull out my makeup kit and make myself presentable. When mom gets off on Taft Avenue, I repeat the directions to my office, zone out, iPod in hand, take my wallet out when we pass the Cultural Center of the Philippines and pay the driver when we reach my destination. Every morning is a scripted affair, and I should have a mind to tape the instructions to be played in succeeding trips.

Inside my cubicle at the office, I can’t see how different sitting in my swivel chair from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. each working day is from riding a taxi along the same route for an hour every day. I am amazed at how I can bear being sedentary for so long. I have whiled my days away by being a robot. Inside a taxi, I am just a depressingly empty person going from one point to another. As part of a company that is in transition between two owners, I am a dispirited employee finishing task after task. My restless spirit is muffled, my passion diluted.

I can’t be like this forever. I have a type A personality, which makes me a go-getter, a competitive individual, one who never says die. Cab drivers only know me as someone who spews out a complete paragraph of directions and shuts her mouth during the rest of the trip, except if to correct wrong turns or protest reckless driving. My boss and my colleagues only know me as their younger sister, who nods understanding to commands and wants also to please both head and subordinate.

When I sit in the backseat of a taxi, mum and indifferent, I frustrate the driver’s effort to share his life with me, and give up a chance to learn something new as well as our opportunity to make a difference in the way we live our lives. When I get off in front of my office after failing to connect with the person, who brought me safely to the place where I make a living by routine, I fail to exist. In the few moments that we are with our families, our friends, our mentors, our neighbors and strangers, we do not live to pass each other by. Clichéd as it may sound, it is true that all things are coterminous. We should not live for the past but for today, and all things in our future will fall into place. We have to make the most out of now.

Every day the sun goes down on what you were able to accomplish. It also sets on what you failed to do. Then one day, the sun will set for good. When that day comes, will you be happy with what your life has become? Or will you beg to be turned into a phoenix, rising from the ashes?

As I settle in the backseat, I catch the eye of the cab driver in the mirror, and smile. "Manong, kamusta? Sinong ibinoto niyong nanalo?" [How are you, sir? Who among those you voted for won?"] The national elections are a popular topic of discussion and he launches a tirade about election fraud and corrupt officials. I take my headphones off and switch off my iPod. I take a deep breath. "Oo nga po, narinig ko din sa radyo kanina…" ["Oh yes! I also heard earlier on the radio that…"]

Jo M. Mendoza, 23, works with Mirant Philippines.

Desiderata, learning from the fall.

i bought a laptop a year ago so i could learn how to write again. the key word here is learn, because just recently, when i started going through a massive ordeal in my life, my plate of silence was more than i could manage in one sitting. mentally and emotionally, i was hemmorhaging and i could not tell a single soul because i realized i really didn't know how to write.

when i was in elementary, after reading a book on ancient egyptian rituals, i wanted to become a mortician. thereafer i realized it would gross my parents out, and would be too messy (i had read the entry on embalming by way of esophagus and nose) and so diverted my secret childhood dreams of being a funeral parlor worker to becoming a professional roller blader and singer instead. i would sing on skates, i figured. to amy grant's baby, baby in a black velvet fedora and paisley t-shirt dress.

somewhere in my elementary life i had quiet dreams too. i remember writing Ann M. Martin of the Baby-sitter's Club fame and reading her response ( a whopping ten pages) of club and personal history during show and tell in fourth grade. thereafter i started buying books, cloth covered journals and fragrant ballpoint pens with my lunch money. i fell in love with print - the smell of bound books, the annual readathon, ordering every month from scholastic books, doodling on a clean ruled page in my lock and key diary - all these events marked the start of my affair with writing.

in high school i came back to the Philippines and my dreams involving writing were temporarily shelved during the first three rocky years of puberty.in senior year i didn't join the creative writing class because i missed writing, but because it was the cheapest elective and the only one that didnt really require me to move around, interact with other people except during groupwork (and this was minimal) and would give me the chance to catch up on my note/letterwriting to my crushes and friends (this was the only pen-spiration i had been getting lately, so it didnt really count).

my affair started haunting me in the latter part of sophomore year in college, when i mustered up enough guts to join the literary and political essay writing contest sponsored by the journalism society. i took first place in that contest. the following year, i was tasked to become one of the two associate editors of the society newsletter, after i decided to take up journalism after winning the said competition. winning had to be a sign, didn't it?

it was a sign. a sign that obviously said, great writers don't have it easy from the start. i thought after bagging the contest and being declared editor everything would be laid out for me. i hated studying, and studying writing? you have got to be kidding me. i played my cards loosely, and consequently, lost a lot during the last two years of my university life. yes, i did become editor in chief, and was class president two years in a row. but failure was also my middle name and i almost didn't graduate on time.

hanging by a thread - that's the position i was in, my natural science professor told me during the last few weeks of the term. if i wanted to graduate, i should show my interest in doing so, he stressed. i had lost my passion for everything then, i had lost interest even in THE affair. i had left it all to chance and charm and pride - and these dont really get you anywhere in the real world, which at the moment for me, was the academe.

i had forgotten that to achieve something, you have to work for it. i know some people claim luck is the ultimate accessory and it may be true for some. but what if you're not that type of person? what if you start out thinking you're that type of individual - lucky in the game of chance - lucky as a match game - and never lift a finger to work for what you want - and when the whole game goes up in smoke you'll think it's the end of the world? some say the ancient game played by the gods - fatem or destiny, still rules the universe. never underestimate though, what you can work with in between two point of fate - what you can achieve with free will if you put your mind to it.

fate has brought me to reconcile with my lover - that which is written - once again and it is only now that i understand so. after college i was hired as corporate communications staff for a multinational energy firm. i had no experience. i had a solid paycheck, no real friends, and a business card. i was not writing, i was running errands. i was setting up for exhibits, events, cocktail parties - i was doing budget and balancing - i was calling suppliers and doing inventory. my break came when my colleague kissed employment goodbye. i did some layouts and copywriting for in house collaterals, and made some minor decisions on my own. still, no real writing. my ex-colleague was replaced by my present sidekick, and since, the workload has gotten more demanding, and there is a lot more stress, which means a big chunk of my salary goes to therapeutic development aka spa treatments, and some writing, which doesnt interest me a whole lot since it's work related anyway.

these developments in my life - loss of love, misunderstanding with friends and family, heartwrenching moments and sorrow inducing experiences - intertwined with brushes with mirth and joy - instead of turning schizophrenic, i have realized that i have to rekindle an old flame so that i can finally have a real outlet to express and nurture my emotions. i realized that when i started going through a lot in my life, the lessons i learned and are continuing to learn are worth listening to, worth sharing, and if i learn how to write again, when i bleed, you can bleed with me, or you can come to terms with your own pain, and we can come back to the page that sticks with you, again and again, until you and i find healing.

Coming Home.

Taipei is home.

Happy burpday mumsky!

Memories of today: MSG high. shrimp foo yong. Binondo bottleneck traffic. drizzle. the Orchard Spa experience. happpeeeee.

shiznat.

hello, the blogging world.