Word choice

I think she’s funny.  Hilarious even.

Been watching a lot of her in youtube lately. Go watch.

… means Happy New Year in Arabic.  And that goes to y’all!

It’s now my fourth time to experience the year turn in Qatar, and I would say this time tops all.  I just came from work (fucking bank audits!) and yeah, I counted 140 million in currency.  Got that? 140 million in cold fucking cash baby, and not a single amount is mine! Talk about ending the year with a bang. 

Isn’t the noise money counters make taxing enough? Counting other people’s money is … dammit, i don’t even wanna talk about it. Just kill me, please. Screw you all millionaires out there. I’ll work my ass out this coming year and I’d be one of you too, jerks! Hah!

Wait, now that’s a toughie.  Anyway, at least I figured out what I’d keep myself busy with in 2009.  Aha! A resoution of sort.  I’ll make that next to axing this bad, albeit very stress-relieving, habit of mine –cursing. Rrrright. I’m absofuckinglutely looking forward to do that. *lol*   

I’ll close my blog entry here. I need to hit the sheets now, another 57 million is waiting for me in less than 10 hours.  (I promise you, I didn’t design this crappy audit life myself!)

Fuck. (give me a break, resolution starts no sooner than tomorrow)

Had my pre-birthday celebration a few hours ago.  My close friends and I headed to Movenpick Hotel Doha to feast on seafood and, well, just to plainly overeat (as we always do haha).

Although not a big seafood fan myself, I would say the food selection was commendable enough.  The smoked salmon was my personal favorite and I liked the california maki and the other maki-looking, rolled-rice-with-something items they served on the buffet area.  Plus, we’ve tasted heaven through their mixed fruits with cream dessert (not sure what the actual name of it was), which was certainly a great way to end a hearty seafood meal.

I did not celebrate my birthday last year and yeah, it actually felt nice to have a celebration this time.  A realization occurred to me–it’s important to celebrate the very root of one’s existence (wow, lalim).  And I don’t mean celebrations via expensive birthday parties or the gifts that come with it.  Over and beyond these temporal jubilations, the celebrator must contemplate and be thankful for the year that has just passed and have faith in the greatness of the years that lie ahead. (syet, eto mas malalim)

My last statement is a bit strong and idealistic, but that’s just how I think birthday celebrations should, first and foremost, go.  Then again, that’s just me.

Enough of this.  Advance happy birthday, me.

————————————————————

Notwithstanding above crap, I still welcome birthday gifts.  And surprise (read: expensive) birthday parties are just as great. LOL

18:30.  Airport.

I’m exhausted.  Hours ago, I hurdled to finish an audit file that was totally not in my plans to submit today.  Thanks to my brilliant boss, I had to instantly prepare a sleazy, barely-done, working paper just to satisfy her superficial whim.

Can people at least be normal?  Come on, what makes her think that solving a web-like series of journal entries and preparing a logical set of financials therefrom would give you spare time to set up some decent audit file bullshit?  I have just 4 days to do that, sweetheart.  And yah, that is inclusive of the query sessions I conducted with you that, expectedly, made things more blurry.

22:05.  Bad air.

NEVER let it loose inside an airplane.  Seriously. 

People would rather jump out of the air bus than have the time of their lives smelling (and ultimately suffocating from) that obnoxious gas emitted by some friendly neighbor-psycho’s ass.

(Read: This message goes to the prick who sat beside me in the flight I took last night.  Well that’s the reward for eating a lot of KitKat bars, old man.  You should have saved some until you reached home, so that no innocent soul would have inhaled that stinking fart of yours!)

23:25.  Cheesy.

Nostalgia has hit me hard.  After the grueling flight I just had, I entered a hotel room utterly reminiscent of those chintzy units I stayed in during my out-of-town audit trips back in the Philippines.  With modesty aside, my room in our flat is far cozier than this four-cornered dungeon they gave to me.

But it seems I have no choice.  My body and mind are too bloody tired to make up some lousy complaint, anyway (as if they’d listen to that crap, retard).  Perhaps, I’d just get back to the client in our final report:

AUDITORS. NEED. DECENT. ROOMS. (Management letter point)

24:10.  Doze off.

What a one fine fucking day.  I wanna catch some Z’s, if you may.

“Whatever the size of my problem is, a size 37 can make it go away.”  That’s from a TV commercial that runs in one of the local stations here and yes, it meant shoes.

People love shoes.  They just do.  I was browsing the net a few days ago when I read something about the most expensive men’s shoes in the world.  It was published by Forbes.com with Berluti topping the list, a pair of which could cost as much as $1,830.  Whew, some people are just willing to spend fortunes to be properly shod!  The article added that, still when considering the cost of the more elaborate designs in women’s shoes, these expensive men’s shoes do not seem all that pricey.  What?  Doing some math, it meant that ordinary people could just afford…hmm, the shoelace?  No, the aglet.

Shoes are must-haves.  It’s like, shelter for the sole.  In the present world, no one walks barefoot unless, of course, the person’s doing some penitence on a holy week.  From the elite’s made-to-order Blahniks to the common person’s mass-produced footwear from the local department store, the use of shoes have evolved from just foot protection to establishing one’ social position.  I mean, the former Philippine first lady would NEVER want to be caught dead wearing some pumps from Divisoria. 

Back in the Philippines, I always dreamt of having one of those Ferragamo shoes displayed at The PowerPlant.  It was sort of an object of fascination that left me drooling every time I saw the pair.  I never had the chance of wearing it, though.  Nor did I ever attempt to see if it would fit, probably because I knew I couldn’t afford to buy it that time.  But even if I had the resources, I still don’t think I would shell out that much just for some designer’s.  I just felt that it was too much.

As I watched the Iranian art film Children of Heaven some weeks ago, I was reminded of this fancy Salvatore pair that I was dying to buy.  In the film, a young boy (Ali) accidentally loses his sister’s (Zahra) recently mended shoes.  Since their parents are too poor to afford a new pair, they kept it a secret, sharing the pair every day in a mad rush, jumping gutters and navigating the twisting lanes to their schools and back.  Then Ali hatches a plan to join a student footrace, wherein the third-place prize is a new pair of sneakers.  And he’s determined to take the third place, nothing but it. 

The film’s message was so strong that it made me think of how certain things mean differently to different people.  The pair of shoes may have meant everything to Ali and Zahra, but the same pair would have been meaningless to Bill Gate’s son or to any other who had the capacity to have it replaced.

It made me realize how we all see things from varied lights, which more often than not, ignites conflicts among ourselves.  But try to think of it, our varied perceptions on things are just like our different shoe sizes.  What would remain to comfort us is the thought that maybe, God made different shoe sizes so that we won’t be fighting over the same pairs.

I once wrote something about Michael Jordan.  It was for a public speaking class back in college, which required us to prepare a speech or something of that sort we had to deliver in front of an audience.  What I have written was hardly original, though.  It was, you may say, just a collation of select clips from a number of magazines I borrowed from my sister’s collection.  Call it plagiarism if you wish to, but it was still some darn research for me.  The introductory paragraph was originally written by me, anyway.  That would at least cover up for the theft.

I chose His Airness as my topic not because I share the same passion for the ballgame that he plays (I can barely get the ball in the hoop), nor that I had any inclination in sports writing.  It was plainly for convenience’s sake–MY convenience’s sake.  Had it not been for the magazines I took the articles from, my speech would have gone something like “Michael Jordan is a great athlete.  He is a true hero.” or something cheesier and shitty.

To write something was always an ordeal.  I remember the instance when my high school teacher put a note on my essay sheet, “Bad handwriting”.  She could have dropped ‘hand’ easily as my composition was simply full of bull, but she was, apparently, kind enough to not abase an adolescent who just could not pen a decent essay or write something worth reading.

I think I digressed a bit.  Anyway, my speech turned out fine.  It had a title “Immortalizing the Power of Human Strength”, as was coined by a brilliant classmate of mine who was a good writer, by the way.  I was supposedly the Mayor of Chicago at that time and I was to deliver the speech in front of the Chicago Stadium in time for the unveiling of Jordan’s statue– clearly a make-believe set up as you exactly would have thought.

The speech was alright, but it was the title that had this profundity one could not just ignore.  I say profound because it tells of a goal every person wants to achieve, which is to leave a mark. Each of us feels we can make a difference.  A difference that, regardless of magnitude, would somehow fill up the void that shouts from our innermost beings.

Elvis.  Mandela.  Hemingway.  They all made their presence felt.  Each played a stellar role from music to human rights to literature.  Michael Jordan’s incomparable athleticism may have been his way of leaving his own mark, or it may even be how he has transformed the number 23 into THE number that it is today. 

I want to leave a mark myself.  I just don’t know when and what it will be.  But I’ll be leaving something behind, definitely.  Something beyond my decaying corpse that would feed parasites I have never even known.

It makes me wonder what my wishes would be had I been lucky enough to trip over a magic lamp or maybe come across a magic genie.  My first would certainly be to have an indefinite number of wishes more (yeah, talk about greed).  And next, to keep the lamp for myself.  Ha-ha.

But seriously, I don’t really subscribe to the idea of getting things easily.  Hard-earned things usually become more important to the person who worked for it, rather than those that were simply presented to him on a silver platter.

Regardless, I still came up with these three wishes that I perhaps would want to have the most:

(1)    A job to love

I’m still looking forward to that day when I can finally tell myself and other people that I love my job.  Loving one’s job means that you do it because you like to, and not because you need to.

            Mine is a fucking need-to.  End of discussion.

(2)    A healthy life

In one of my recent e-mails to a close friend, I mentioned the idea of getting old dawning on me these days.  I’ve been living for a quarter of a century already and I don’t think I am paying enough attention to my health.  I buy multivitamins that I do not take anyway and I’ve visited the gym for like, only three times this past year.  No, two.  Wait, did I pay a visit?

I never consider going for a full medical check-up in fear of subjecting myself to all these medical stuff that they use and much more, the possibility of learning that I have armpit cancer as a result of using too much deodorant or something even weirder.  And grosser. 

(3)    A significant death

Somebody once told me that a big fear of his is to live an insignificant life; and even bigger, to have a worthless death.

I completely feel the same way actually.  I can’t imagine losing my life in such futility like say, choking myself to death while drinking water or unknowingly swallowing a rusty screw inserted in a chicken breast.  The latter scenario is based on a personal experience, by the way. 

Reading over my list, I think my wishes are pretty reasonable.  I might as well just be my own genie and fulfill such desires–at least the first two.

And besides, I don’t want to wait in vain for that lamp.

The water droplets seemed like snow when I first saw rain in Qatar.  It was the last thing I would expect from a desert, so I was naturally amused by it.  It hasn’t been a year since then and rain has come again.  The shift in weather has been so quick this time–December has just started and yet temperature has gone down to as low as 14 degrees.  My feelings toward rain turned from anticipation to dismay.  For what reasons, I don’t exactly know; maybe because it has been a pain in my ass lately.

Extreme heat is a natural occurrence here in the more arid regions of the planet, but daily downpour definitely isn’t.   Streets get flooded easily because apparently, they don’t have fucking drainage systems.  Umbrellas cannot be easily purchased here; I’m not even sure if such an invention is existent in this part of the world.

The rain here really got into my nerves one gloomy afternoon while I queued up for a cab.  I was, maybe, 10^th on the line and taxis were nowhere to be found.  It was damn freezing on the sidewalk (I learned later that day that the temperature registered at 10 degrees), and yes, you guessed it right, rain started to fall.  I was half-drenched when I finally found myself instructing the driver directions on the way to the client’s place.  I practically needed thawing that time and my head was pounding like hell.  Call it weird or whatever, I just feel like getting sick the moment raindrops fall on my bald head.  I often think that I was born with unusually large hands so that I can use it in place of an absent umbrella.

Rain became even more unappealing after that super typhoon that struck my hometown just recently.  All of a sudden, my bad rain experience became too trivial in comparison to the immense destruction that people, including my family, had to deal with because of the natural disaster.  I feel blessed, on one hand, that my loved ones were safe from the calamity but depressed, on the other, thinking of all the lives that were literally swept off by the catastrophe.

But beyond all these, I do not hate rain.  I love water so much to start with.  I still recognize the fact that without it, the water cycle won’t work.  And all would perish. 

What I just ardently hope is that rain would fall more gently on humanity; that it would keep lives and not take them away.

And that drainage systems and umbrellas would finally make it in Qatar, of course.

Ageing has never been an issue to me.  Significance always has.  It just hit me recently that a link exists between the two.

CAUTION:  The following statements may contain assumptions not suitable for all readers.  Discretion is highly recommended.   

A graphical representation of a man’s life, I believe, would be a parabola; with say, X as the years of existence and Y as the degree of significance (pardon me for this math thing–I’ve been avidly watching NUMB3RS lately…great show).

Now, we assume that a life span of 75 years is divided into the following age groups: 0-20, 21-60 and 61-75.  The first two decades in a man’s life is basically spent at school (or somewhere else), where lessons are learned in preparation for the more ‘challenging’ years ahead.  At this point, the meaning of his life revolves on how he can pass exams and ultimately grab a diploma in his hands.  His existence is only as significant as the academic status that he has.

By the time that he graduates and lands a job, his value extends from the corners of his home to the perimeter of his workplace.  In this time span, he probably decides to create a family of his own, carrying along with it new roles to play–a responsible father and a loving husband.  The expectations of him as an obedient son or a good brother or a valuable asset to the working environment he enters into escalate to being a good provider and a sturdy pillar to the home that he builds.  The significance of his role as the CEO to the employees of his company is as enormous as his being ‘Dada’ to his three-year old son.   

As the seasons change in the first sixty years of his life, the worth of a man increases proportionately to the number of candles that he blows on a birthday cake.  His transformation from the unruly first-grader to the extremely wealthy business tycoon carries with it the gradual rise in the significance of his being, until it reaches the end of the prime years of his life. 

The shift from a 40 year-old active market analyst to a 60 year-old grandfather, sad to say, limits the expectations of a man’s abilities from creating business empires to just controlling a bladder.  The company no longer needs his opinion on how to respond to an imminent labor union nor does his son require his advice on a contemplated divorce.  From bold to old, the executive seat in his corner-room office is now just a rocking chair in the dusky porch. 

To live in a foreign land sometimes lures us to do things we never would have thought of doing had we been home.

The idea just made perfect sense as I’ve found myself watching some cheap trashy concert last night.  In my entire twenty-something years of existence, I have only been to five concerts.  The first four are good shows, as far as my standards of what a concert should be is concerned.  The fifth one is simply unbearable.  No, make that depressing.

My friends and I drove to some amusement park (though there’s barely anything there that amused us) to witness some singing stars(?) perform.  It was not the type of concert that anyone of us would watch had there been any activity to do instead.  We arrived at the venue thirty minutes late.  But alas, no singing can be heard from the time we arrived and some 45 minutes more after that.  Yeah, filipino time is filipino time. WHEREVER.

Upon arrival, we immediately went to the concert area to get some seats for ourselves, only to find out that none are left! (sh*t, we should just have bought those cheaper “standing only” tickets had we known things are gonna be like that).  And by the way, the concert area that I was talking about was some open, scarcely-decorated, monoblock-filled  space fit for a miting-de-avance in a barrio somewhere.  Holy smokes, the place really looks like a disaster.  As we hear people complaining on how bad the event turns out to be, “A whole new world” suddenly echoed from the speakers.  Oh, what a perfect combination with the carpets  strewn all over the place that all of us were stepping on.  Aha, so that’s why the place is called Alladin’s Kingdom.   Talk about coherence! 

Anyway, we had to keep ourselves busy so that the night would not be completely wasted.  So we tried out some rides in the park while waiting for the f**cking concert to start.  As we queued up for some bump car action, somebody from the concert stage finally said something.  Much to our dismay, it was just the event coordinator explaining why the current state of things is as such.  Expectedly, her impromptu speech was openly answered with rebuttals.  I bet cursing was all over the place.

Some time after that, the concert started.  FINALLY. But I don’t want to talk about it anymore.  Some things are just never worth putting into the worldwide web.