CHRONICLESOFANEWBLING

Using a laptop for the first time, you get (a) giddy; (b) amazed at the new features that an old clunky piece of metal you once possessed but now has gone bonkers didn’t have; (c) bored at clicking away for items you’ve already seen before; (d) pissed by the realization that you will sooner or later purchase another deep-in-the-pocket application licenses and brand new anti-virus CD.

When one has gotten used to all four feelings alternating in your head, you get this prompt:
“You are given 25 chances to use the Microsoft Office applications until you install a purchased license. Enter a code to install a new license?”.

Then you want to scream.

Yes, and another one bites the dust is exactly how I think my old laptop has gone off. It decided to stop breathing one day when I was itching to be connected to the entire world. Its buttons all turn blue as it normally does on reboot. But it doesn’t show anything on the screen. A sign of death. Then as if one huge angry piece of dragon awaken from its centuries of slumber, it spits off heaps of heat one after another. Then it hit me: crap, time to buy a new one.

I normally hate doing this but scouring for a new laptop is no different from looking for a new relationship, a new house, a durable. It’s with which a chunk of your time will be spent with and therefore, it must satisfy all your requirements.
Mine were: aesthetics (first and foremost), after-sales service, processor memory, speed, storage, brand, and price – in that order. Of course I have a price in mind but I set the specs first before the money matters. Thank you for noticing that aesthetics come first in my priority list. I have an OCD after all. I wouldn’t like toting it if it weren’t pretty.

This new piece of metal that caught my interest was love at second sight. It is silver, sleek metal chassis all over, small, light, with lots of freebies, and a printer came with it. What more can you ask for?

Before I left this morning to hunt for a new piece of metal with which most of my time will be spent with, I actually had to write in the things I’ll accomplish once I get my hands on it. And I’m on item #3 and finishing it with this sentence. :D

Dan and two pairs of contacts: how hard can it get?! After sweating buckets and snot running through my nose, nah it isn't easy - twenty five minutes all in all including gasps for air. And that's just one. Man, this sure isn't a feat for the faint hearted.

Acceptance is sometimes equated to settling for something you don't want.
This is a concept I have yet to begin accepting.
Mediocrity is sometimes something that I am not too satisfied with. But as I was recently programmed to think, I should just settle for it and move forward.

दिगिताल्ली स्पेअकिंग, इ'म बेक!

My brain is acting up. It apparently cooperated with my hands that are either too busy trying to feign busy-ness otherwise known as work or both hands had been picking on my brain cells and plucked them little by little to finally understand what could have gone wrong with me. Now, I think I have little of those left – I seem to have forgotten how to write, reason, or grow up. I miss my brain cells! Coffee sucked them dry, too. Damn you S***b****! (Repeat until fade)

Let me break it to you: I'm in a rut. Brings back memories of Arkarna's "So little time so much to do" hit song. That’s the kind of hell I’m in, kind of. Ste, I am writing this in response to your guest book post. I got concerned.

I have so much in my head and most of these I'm not comfortable divulging online. A friend made me realize that I've been wearing my heart on my digital sleeve a little too much in the third quarter of the year that was. That was a sick indication that geez I have no other friend to talk to about those things that boggles my head until now and big time. They puzzle me so much that it can give world records of worry a run for their money.

Figured it would give me so much peace of mind to drain all my pain* and worries away. Lift it up to Him. Have faith. Pick a new hobby. Stop and smell the roses. I even think I might join you in one of your biking sessions – I’ll rent one at the Circle. Just promise me I won’t wind up in the headlines the next day reading: “Babae sumadsad bisikleta sa bangketa, patay!”. Or we can make ourselves look really thin under minimum effort (how on UP Diliman grounds did you do it? Wonders me to no end). Or we can revive all sorts of team ups with Gibs and Merms. I don’t know what’s up with me but I’d been really mushy lately reconnecting with old dear friends. Must be the global crisis.

Dear friend, thanks for resuscitating my love for blogging. If for anything, I owe this much to you (gestures with my hand) in terms of that and a lot more.

*For lack of a better and digitally polite word for something radical I’d want to say.

PAIN IN THE A**...

(...the literal and not so literal sense of the phrase.)

WARNING: Not for the faint of heart and the freshly full.

Do you get that feeling when you are about to go #2 and you twist and turn to stop it from going because you are still two meters away from point of touchdown? Then during the torturous act of stopping it (by gosh legs and limb in all of its creative positions to subtly stop it from taking a plunge into your underpants and still look posh), you feel a deep jab into your a** connected to your intestines that seems as if all of earth's gravity has been put into your pit-hole - you just can't seem to fathom where that came from. And when you finally go, all of the dark troubles from your innards just won't quickly find its way out and the pain jolts you up again - starts from the inside then drags your a** down with a downward pull as if your hole is being detached from your body.

I have just basically described to you, ladies and gentlemen, how it feels like to actually stop breathing for another human being. (Hey, that rhymes - I should consider poetry instead, only that I hate it along with all the cheese involved). Of course this time it does not involve the excretory system. It actually involves the heart and all its chambers. ***Literary pause for effect - more like I don't want you in on the gory details because it just hurts so bad it makes me want to gag.***

At the end of the day, all we have to do is to just flush it out of the system. (Note to self: Yes Dan, keep telling yourself that until you hear yourself and convince yourself to stop, eat and start breathing again.)

STUCK!

The world is such a lonely place if you think it is. Looking out my window, I see a panorama of buildings. It feels so near to the most stressful place on earth, because, come on, it really is. I live a few blocks away from work. Not that I'm complaining. I save tons of money and hassle and tempers flared from the commute. Not my cup of tea. But anyway, work is only stressful if you allow it to stress you out. If you are so tired of what you do, quit. If you do not look forward to working, stop it. Don't cheat yourself if it only boils down to money. Earn and enjoy the job at the same time.
That was my conscience by the way, talking inside my head. And oh yah I was doing my laundry...yet again. Neat.

A bubble burst inside my head just recently. (Raises both hands in total frustration). I am stuck in a rut. Suddenly I paused from the hustle and thought that my plans do not seem to materialize. My idealism left me and my savings are not climbing. Sure I quite have heaps of experience. I counsel my friends who do not seem satisfied with their jobs. I appear, thank goodness, happy at what I do now relative to these people. I earn more than they do. I did not age so progressively than they did. I do not have career-related dilemmas that pose danger to my colleague's paths. But at the end of the day, I still feel empty.

I used to quip that the ascend is going to be slow but steady. I knew it for a fact. It is an unfair world where the comforts I experienced while I was a sheltered kid just would not happen again. If so, it's never going to be fast.

Usually when I talk like this, it's just a monologue. The intricacies weaved into my brain is so complex. I cannot quote the bible, forgive me Lord, but I feel it would be in vain if I do so at this stage. I am a hypocrite pretending to have a grand master plan, which I do have by the way. Only that this plan has yet to materialize and I am feeling that my brains have not yet reached the point of exclaiming, "Eureka, I have found my passion: the one thing I will truly never get tired of doing for the rest of this lifetime!"

I am lost, so to speak. If only I can apply my favorite trip adage to this stage of my life: "The best way to know a place is to get lost in it." Whoever can help me here is most welcome.

And it is the first time I have reflected through the depths in my soul without even thinking of a boy in my head. Finally I have breached the comfort zone.

Getting asked to marry someone is supposed to be fun and chilling. Girls are supposed to cry and be swept. But if you were asked with the mother of the man within earshot and the question popped was not necessarily that of marriage but to start a family, it sometimes get spooky that one does not muster any courage to speak. I was not quite sure if it were indeed a joke or something out of overwhelming feelings over the beauty of an architecture that stands before us.

Was I supposed to answer yes on the spot? Well, I did not.

The next day, I can't keep mum about it as if nothing happened as if nothing was asked. So I said, let's seriously consider and I think I made the guy scamper so far away he could not stand right next to me within the next five minutes. I got the irk of my life and then and there I became weird again and I hated the guy who was so finnicky about serious matters in life that he seemed to joke about only 24 hours ago.

Then it was very ironic that the next day I was given an article about marriage. It was a very nice take on this seemingly tight knot that people impose on couples either out of no choice or just because "it is the most logical thing to do". What dummy will choke himself up to something he does not want? What idiot would ask someone to spend the rest of their lives together figuring out how to keep sane just because they want to lower their tax expenses and share the rent until they hit 90? And who would want to sleep right next to someone whom he does not want to see each morning all with goo and perhaps stink of urine when they reach such an age that their kidneys won't allow them to control their urinary tract anymore? Why risk an entire lifetime (or at least a good thirds of it) knowing that divorce expenses are sky high?

Insane how they invented marriages. It goes beyond sharing spit and body liquids and taxes and cheap talk. It actually is about laughing together, sharing the same passion, growing up and learning new things each day trying to make sense out of earthly life. As an added bonus, real partners would actually believe that there is an after life together.

But having highly emotional people surrounding me and asking me to "start a family" with him on a whim is definitely unforgivable especially when he gets cold feet when I suddenly start giving it attention and detail. Is he freaked? I should be the one who's utterly freaked at the thought. How dare he.

PS
Up to this very moment, I still have no clue why I feel such strong magnetic forces that attract me to this person. I made an honest assessment of it and I cannot actually bring myself to answer the one question I am supposed to answer without batting an eyelash and without giving motherhood statements. I am a writer whose passion is to grow flowers at the end of my pen (or my fingers for that matter). However, that very moment, if it were my livelihood, would not have made me survive. I just stutter and hang on to the belief (a stupid one by the way) that if I cannot answer it, then I truly feel something for him. But it is such a crooked crooked notion that I should scold myself for actually seeing it through. He is not much to look at and I definitely have no idea why I am hung up on him . And before I sound too Joe-d-Mangoish, let me end on a happy, er sappy, note. He is now spending the night at a big crush's place bec this girl's dad died. I don't know why I feel so insecure of her. But from now on, let me avenge myself by saying that I am a highly bankable person and definitely still placed with a high market value that a lot of men would swoon after. Not that I need them. It just makes me feel so meanly happy at the thought.