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.