Honesty: Sometimes NOT the best policy

Since I’ve gotten started on the topic of indelicacies, here are a couple of examples where employees provided too much information (more popularly known as TMI). These are two separate incidents involving two separate people.

The employees were telling me their respective reasons as to why they couldn’t report for work that day. Again, I am translating their words, which were spoken in Filipino. This rather detracts from their funny-ness, but you’ll get the point.

Incident #1

My office phone rings.

Employee: (sounding very disturbed) Ma’am! I won’t be able to go to work today! I had an accident in the bathroom!

Me: (worried by her tone and imagining her slipping and hitting her head on the toilet) What happened??? Are you all right?

Employee: Yes, yes, the bleeding has stopped.

Me: Oh my God! (then, rather repetitively) What happened???

Employee: Well, I was picking my nose…

Me: (wishing she wouldn’t go on) Oh.

Employee: Then I dug in too deep…

Me: Hmmm. (thinking of hanging up and pretending the line was cut by some strange electric force)

Employee: So it bled and bled and bled. Thankfully, it stopped bleeding already.

Me: (rather hurriedly) Okay, take the day off. Bye! (slams the phone down)

Me: (aloud in the office, to no one in particular) Why couldn’t she just say she had a headache?

Incident #2

My mobile phone rings.

Me: Hello?

Employee: Ma’am! I won’t be able to go to work today! I’ve got loose bowels. I’ve been going to the bathroom to relieve myself since last night. It’s so bad that my stools are like water! I think…

Me: (quickly interrupting) Okaytakethedayoffbye!

Honestly! Whatever happened to the good old headache excuse?

Overheard at a public washroom

I was at a public washroom and overheard a very strange conversation. This exchange made me realize (again) that some people simply do not have personal boundaries. Woman number one was standing, washing her hands, while woman number two was inside a cubicle (so I could not ascertain her exact position). I translated their words into English, but believe me, it was way funnier the way they said it in Filipino. They conducted this conversation without moving from their respective places.

(WARNING: If you are easily offended by talk of bodily functions, read no further.)

Woman #2: There’s something wrong with my tummy.

Woman #1: (Sounding concerned) Really? Does it hurt?

Woman #2: Not really, I just can’t stop farting.

Woman #1: Well, maybe you have a bum stomach.

Woman #2: Well, if that’s the case, why don’t I feel like taking a crap?

(Short pause. Then loud fart.)

Woman #2: See? It’s all air! Nothing else is coming out.

At this point, I just had to leave the washroom. Not only because of the smell, but also because I couldn’t hold in my laughter anymore. (And we all know what happens if we hold in our laughter for too long.)

Life lessons

A very good friend of mine recently pointed out to me two simple life lessons that are worth learning and remembering.

Lesson #1: Do not mock another person’s pain (especially if you had a hand in causing it). Unless, of course, you want to receive the same treatment when it is your turn to be mired in misery.

Lesson#2: Do not gloat when victorious, particularly if you achieved your victory through deceit, betrayal, or some other unscrupulous means. Aside from being… well.. just wrong… this also reveals your lack of breeding, and your total absence of class. (Class after all, demands magnanimity.)

Too true, my dear friend, too true.

Celebrating my birthday in Sipadan, Malaysia

School of yellow snappers we saw at the Kapalai house reef

Another long spell of non-blogging for me. First of all, I STILL don’t have Internet at home. That’s factor number one. Secondly, I’ve been doing a lot more writing for work recently. This sometimes has the effect of making me feel like writing IS work; thus, I associate blogging with something not so pleasant. (As you can see, I am not crazy about my job.)

At any rate, I realized I hadn’t been blogging in a while after my new-found friend Caren messaged me with the observation “You don’t blog anymore, do you?” It made me realize that I hadn’t written here for more than a month, and again, a lot has happened since my last post.

First of all, a big THANKS to everyone who greeted me on my birthday (August 19, for those who forgot!). I had a really fabulous time. One of my best celebrations, I have to say. That’s because I spent it scuba diving in Sipadan, Malaysia, with one of my best friends, Anjou.

We stayed in an oil rig, and it had an elevator that brought you right into the water. It was a pretty interesting place to live for a few days. Even if the accommodations and facilities were less than stellar, it scored bonus points for its coolness factor. I mean, how many chances do you get to live in a fixed structure in the middle of the sea?

Also, the food was just amazing. Apparently, the cook in the rig had already been featured in four different food magazines in Malaysia. Every meal was delightful. Lunch and dinner were something to look forward to. (Breakfast was too early for me to appreciate.)

We had fantastic dives, and saw practically everything one could hope to see. Lots of giant turtles, big cuttlefish, sharks, and other interesting-looking creatures that one only sees in books or magazines.

I have a few more underwater pictures on my multiply site- you can look at it here.

It was a bit depressing, though, in the sense that I knew that the Philippines once had all that bounty in the sea, probably even more. However, over-fishing and lack of concern for marine life have resulted in a damaged underwater environment in our country. If only more people could appreciate the beauty of our own seas and realize that we are killing it slowly but surely. (Insert big, deep sigh.)

Aside from this trip, though, not much has happened. It was pretty much the highlight of the past month. I haven’t spent my birthday in the Philippines for the past four years. On the minus side, I don’t get to spend it with a lot of my friends and family. On the plus side, I manage to escape the mandatory birthday treat that everyone (including every Tom, Dick, and Harry in the office) seems to expect.

“Sex and the City” on the big screen (in my case, almost tiny)

One thing that’s hard about being single in coupled Manila is that it’s sometimes difficult to find a movie buddy. And when you want to watch a movie you’ve been waiting for with almost breathless anticipation, one that you particularly have to watch with girlfriends like “Sex and the City”, it gets that much more frustrating. It seems you just have to wait until the pirated DVD comes along to be able to watch it.

Several of my girlfriends texted me, called me, or talked to me after having seen the movie. “Have you seen it?” they asked. “I thought of you,” they added.

At first, I felt a sort of resentment. Well, it’s very sweet of them to say, I thought, but not one of them asked me to go with them to watch it!

I wanted to go and watch “Sex and the City” in the theater, but it seemed my girlfriends had already seen it. Most, if not all of them, with their significant others. Which is totally understandable and expected. (Now you see the point of what I wrote about being in coupled Manila.)

I then thought of going by myself just to see the four girls and their fabulousness across the big screen. I thought, though, that for this particular movie, that might be a tad depressing.

So tonight, I went and bought a P40 not-very-clear copy of the movie and rushed home to watch it. I just finished watching it on my laptop, and I am still sniffling from the rush of feelings that it brought.

Most women can probably relate to one or more of the characters in varying degrees (though I would probably have to say that there is almost nothing I have in common with Charlotte). But it’s not so much who among my friends reminded me of whom, or who is the most like which character.

Watching the movie reminded me of many situations I’ve found myself in with my girlfriends. The ones I’ve bought shoes and purses with, the ones I ate with, laughed with, been catty with, drank with, and bawled my eyes out with. Even the ones I’ve fought with.

I am so very fortunate to have so many Carries, Samanthas, Mirandas, and, ok, even Charlottes in my life. I am largely who I am because of them. Just like Carrie to Miranda on that cold New Year’s Eve, they’ve often said to me that I’m not alone, and they have many times made me feel so.

And though I did watch the movie all by my lonesome on a Friday night, I felt that my friends were there with me, right there on my tiny computer screen. Not all of them dressed as fabulously, but as great at being friends as those fictional characters ever were.

The happy-ever-after of Carrie and Mr. Big moved me not at all. But the enduring friendship of those four women? Now that’s a happy ending.

So… I raise my glass in a toast. To all my girlfriends… Female, and fabulous.

It’s been a while…

since I wrote here, and a lot has happened since my last post. One of the biggest developments is that I have FINALLY moved into a better place (this is literal, not figurative), one without cults, religious figures in the hall, queues of people outside my door waiting for a miracle cure, more lines outside my window forming for a shot at being part of the audience of a game show, and one-eyed people grabbing my arm as I leave my condo (hopefully I will be able to write about this in a future entry).

My new place is still walking distance from my office, though a few meters farther from my other condo. Small price to pay for finally feeling that my home is a haven, and not hell.

The bad news is that I have no Internet in my new place, because of red tape and all that. Thus, I am now accessing the worldwide Web in a coffee shop at the ground floor of my new place of residence. I am still working on getting Internet at home, but it’s a long tedious process. Argh.

Summer’s (come and) gone

In my last entry, I said that I’d been pretty busy. Well, I really felt this statement to be true when the rainshowers began, signalling the end of summer. I wasn’t even aware that summer had already come and gone. I can’t believe I’d been too busy to spend some serious time at the beach.

Sure, I went diving, but because I’d been doing it as part of my training to become a dive master, those weekends spent at Batangas didn’t really qualify as summer trips- they felt more like work. I didn’t get to lounge by the beach, lay on the sand and soak up the sun as one should when summer rolls around. And now it looks like I won’t get a chance to do so.

I always mourn the passing of this season. Sure, I am relieved that temperatures have now gone down, that my skin is no longer baked whenever I walk to work, and that the humidity is not quite as oppressive. But those are small inconveniences to suffer in exchange for the constant feel of the sun on your face and the sense of freedom that the season seems to bring… the feeling that school’s out, that it’s time to go on a road trip, and that work is a world away.

Busy, busy, busy

As you can guess from the title of this post, I’m about to tell you just how busy I have been. It’s been a rather hectic schedule which began on the last day of March. My brother Jerick, his wife Liz, and their son Aidan came over for a (too-short) two-week visit then. Since they were here for such a short time, we had to cram in as much hanging out, chatting, and eating together as we could during that period.

After they left, I began assisting dives as part of the course to become a dive master. My weekends have been occupied with that since then, so I have been rather tired. Apart from many things, it’s a physically demanding job. I am learning many things in this course, but it is taking a lot out of me.

I’ve also been trying to get back to playing badminton regularly. My sister-in-law Tintin is now back in fighting form after giving birth to Raffy in November, so I now have someone to go and play with. I have a running joke with my badminton-mates, that I only play badminton quarterly. Well, I hope to up that frequency, though with work and all, it’s still been a struggle to do so.

Hopefully, my time management skills will kick in even just a little bit so I will be able to do what I want to do, what I have to do, and even what I don’t want to do (but have to, anyway.)

New Year’s Resolutions Progress Report

I have a bazillion little resolutions that I haven’t started on, but as far as those resolutions that I wrote on this blog are concerned, I have, at the very least, taken initial (baby) steps toward fulfilling them. There were three major (major to me, that is) things I wanted to accomplish this year, and two of them were related to diving. As I wrote in an earlier entry, before the year ends, I hope to be both a technical diver and a dive instructor.

Before my non-diver friends get bored, a little explanation may be in order. A technical diver is one who is able to go deeper and stay underwater longer than recreational divers. A dive instructor (though you can probably figure this out for yourself) is a dive professional who teaches people to become licensed scuba divers.

Earlier this month, I finally started to take lessons to become a dive master (DM). The DM course is the first stage in becoming a dive professional. A DM can lead recreational dives and assist instructors in teaching courses. This course is rather rigorous, and includes written exams, practical training, and swim tests. Among all the requirements that I need to fulfill, the one that I am worried about most is the swim tests. I have to swim 400 meters in eight minutes, and in my current fitness state, that is just plain impossible to do. I will have to train and become more fit to be able to pass this phase of the training without passing out. At the rate I’m going, it will still take a few months to check off everything on the list of requirements before I become a licensed dive pro. But it’s still early in the year so I am hopeful.

As far as technical diving is concerned, the biggest barrier to learning how to do it is the cost While saving up enough money to enroll for the course, I took another class that is a prerequisite for the tech diving course, which is diving with enriched air or nitrox (a mix of nitrogen and oxygen). Diving with nitrox allows you to have less nitrogen in your body after a dive, so you feel less tired. It also allows you to stay longer underwater without getting sick from having nitrogen in your body.

So, despite my failure to start on a fitness program, lose any weight, be a better person, chuva chuva chuva, I am happy to report that I’ve started to work on two of my other resolutions for this year. Wish me luck on passing the swim test and saving up for the tech course (At this point both seem equally difficult).

Life in the Third World

The main reason why I chose to live in the shoebox despite its too-small living space, traffic noise, the masses of people lining up outside for a game show, proximity to a cult, etc.- is that it is very close to the TV station where I work. Because gas prices zoomed up while I was away, I didn't want to have to shell out a lot of money just to gas up to go to work (I don't mind it as much if I have to pay for gas for out-of-town trips). Because I live so close by, I just walk to the office and hardly need to use my car (which I call Zak).

However, this morning I discovered YET another reason to be stressed about my living arrangements. When I was about to leave my building for work, the guard approached me and tried to tell me something in a very soft voice. "Blah blah blah blah blah blah", is pretty much what registered, since he was speaking in unusually hushed tones. I asked him to speak up, since I was already late for a meeting. He spoke a bit louder, and he said "Ma'am, nawala po ang sideview mirrors niyo." (Ma'am, your sideview mirrors have been stolen.) No wonder he was speaking so softly! It was his job to guard the (very small) parking lot in front of our building!

I rushed to Zak, and saw for myself that yet another car of mine was stripped of its sideview mirrors. This is the third time this has happened to me. My two previous cars had been victimized in the same manner. As in the past two incidents, I just felt helpless and frustrated. There was no way I was going to get those mirrors back. I just have to suck it up, go to Banawe to buy cheap and probably stolen replacements. As the joke goes, I might just be buying my own mirrors back.

These are the moments when I really hate living in Manila. When your car is violated right outside your home, and when you realize there's pretty much NOTHING you can do about it.

The Wonder-Vitamins and My Landlord

I think I know why my landlord has not gotten in touch with me yet after I complained about having many people in the condo’s hall.

Let me backtrack a little bit. As I said in my last post, there have been many people outside my door, lining up to buy vitamins from the office next door. Things have gotten a bit worse since then. They have put benches along the hallway, where people wait their turn to buy these confounded vitamins. So now, there are people sitting on both sides of the hall whenever I leave or arrive home, and I have to undergo their scrutiny and have their eyes follow me as I enter/exit my room.

They are also very noisy. I hear these people talking loudly, and sometimes they bring along their children who run up and down the hallway, banging on the walls as they go.

Because of this turn of events, I have had to make a few household purchases. First, I bought a divider that I set up by my door, so as to limit what the people outside can see of my room. Two, I bought and installed extra locks and a peephole on my door. Since my landlord was not doing anything to improve the situation, I figured I should do what I could to protect my privacy and enhance my security.

Now, one of the voices I often hear outside my door is that of a man, who seems to be the head salesperson of the vitamins that they are peddling. One day, I heard him give his sales spiel to an old woman. “Lola, sa tulong ng vitamins na ito, gagaling ang almoranas ninyo. (Grandma, with the help of these vitamins, your hemorrhoids will be cured.)” This was a very intriguing claim, so I listened on.

“Maraming sumusuporta sa produktong ito (Many people support this product),” he explained. “Yung isa sa mga sponsor nito ay si Judge ——–, lolo ni —- ——– (One of the sponsors of this product is Judge ——–, grandfather of —- ——– [a popular actress]).”

That’s how I discovered the reason behind the non-action of my landlord after my complaint. Judge ——–, aside from being one of the vitamins’ backers, is also my landlord.

My New (and Very Annoying) Neighbors

I hadn’t had neighbors to the right of my unit since I moved into my little shoebox in August. There are only two doors to the right of mine, one across and slightly to the right of me, and one beside me. After those doors is the end of the hall. A few weeks ago, I noticed that there were people coming from and going into those two doors. I heard a lot of banging and shifting sounds that usually mean that someone is moving in.It turns out that the units to my right were going to be offices. They would be selling some sort of vitamins, which, according to a big sign posted outside their doors, would cure pretty much anything. I didn’t pay much attention to my new neighbors. I had no idea how many people were working in these offices, and I didn’t see or bump into its occupants.

Last week, as I opened the door for a delivery boy to get the pizza that I had ordered, I was surprised to see about three men standing right across my unit. They were just… standing there. I wondered what they were doing there, and I wanted to ask them what they wanted, since looked like they were waiting for something outside my door. I felt a little (okay, a lot) uncomfortable, since my shoebox is just one room, and you can see everything inside my home from right outside my door. This includes my bed, my mess, dirty clothes I may have tossed onto the backs of my two chairs, and pretty much my whole private space. It’s hard enough to open my door to delivery boys who could pass judgment on how I may or may not be cleaning my room. It’s worse when strangers on whom you are not dependent for food delivery can see into the heart of your home without your invitation.

Anyway, they just looked at me as I was getting my pizza and didn’t say anything, so I dismissed the incident and figured those men were just waiting for their friends who might have been in the offices. However, it was apparently just a preview of things to come. A few days after I saw those three men waiting outside my door, I started seeing lines forming outside the doors of the vitamin offices. The lines weren’t even very straight, so the hallway outside my door was filled with people milling about and waiting to get into these offices. This started happening on a regular basis. Like, everyday, for the WHOLE day.

I decided to send a text message to the building administrator to complain about the situation. After all, when I moved into my unit, I thought it was a residential area. It was bad enough that I’ve had to contend with the noise outside my window when lines are formed for the game show. The lines forming for this vitamin beside my unit though are causing me even more stress. Not only do the people make a lot of noise, it’s also making me extremely uncomfortable that dozens of strangers can see into my room and see where I sleep whenever I have to open my door.

I haven’t heard back from the building administrator yet. Maybe I should just make the most of a bad situation and start charging the people in the hallway a minimal voyeur’s fee for a view of my room.

New Year, Old Resolutions

New Year's Eve is one of my favorite times of the year. First of all, it signals that the end of the Christmas season is near (I intensely dislike that holiday). Mostly though, I like it because it's a good time to rehash resolutions that I failed to fulfill in the past year. I stubbornly hold on to the irrational belief that I will achieve what I simply have not managed to, year after year after year.

For 2008, the usual things that I haven't crossed off my list will remain. You know, mundane stuff like losing weight, exercising more and the like. I have also included some relatively more interesting things on my list for this year. A lot of it involves being a student of sorts once again.

Here is a partial list of things I resolve to accomplish within the next twelve months.

1. Become a technical diver.
2. Learn to surf.
3. Study to become a dive instructor.

That's only three of a seemingly endless, rather ambitious, (and maybe a tad unrealistic) list, but those are the ones that I will focus my energies on. I hope they will be crossed off by the time '09 rolls around.