Another day, another explosion. Welcome to the Philippines.

This time it's in Subic. And it's a gas leak. 2 dead, 2 critical. That's all the news said.

A panicked 15 minutes of scrambling to reach an aunt who traveled to Subic yesterday. Horrifying images running through my head of Losing Yet Another Loved One. The heart-rate-slowing pills stopped working.

But she's fine. So I'm fine. Heart rate's still pretty fast but at least I've stopped hyperventilating. Phew.

Tags: bad days, demented doses, life in manila
coordinates: manila
state of mind: relieved
background noise: annie lennox

I saw this picture today.



And remembered the day I took it.

There are stories about the white corridors at the point of death. Of corridors leading to The Light that we're all supposed to head for. But this particular white corridor was not for the dying, not for their last breaths, not for him. It's for the ones holding their breaths. It's for those hoping to stall death.

And on that day, in this white corridor, we held our breaths for 12 hours. Then he breathed his last.

I took this picture to remind me of that day. To remind me of him.

Tags: bad days, life in manila
coordinates: singapore
state of mind: awake

There were three reasons why I was looking forward to this trip:

1. Hanging out with  the apc peeps and friends.
2. Gorging on books at Kinokuniya.
3. Going home after my last trip for the year.

The last reason has had me sleeping with a smile on my face. Seeing the kitty cats again, hanging out with the Weirdoks, being there for PM's Xmas Surprise, spending time with Big Boy and Ozman, Xmas preps with the family. I've been drooling over the thought of all that.

But, since no one bothered to tell me that my flight home today was much earlier than my original flight, I'm pretty much stuck. Thank goodness I have friends with flats to squat in!  I couldn't believe how difficult it was to get a flight that would have me back home before Xmas. I eventually had to use a good amount of my airmiles to get a seat on the 22nd. A seat that would have me spending a night in Bangkok before heading home. 

The Turtle says it's the universe telling me to stop traveling. And I agree.

I want to go home.

Tags: bad days, tripping away
coordinates: kuala lumpur
state of mind: grumpy
background noise: ben10 on tv

Storm Signal #3 in Metro Manila today.

Schools and offices on all levels, closed.

All flights cancelled.

Southern Luzon Expressway closed off.

Trees, billboards, rooftops, walls, buildings falling, pinning people to death, making loud noises, leaving debris. Lots and lots of debris. Sections of Robinson Galleria and Market! Market! roofs have collapsed. A building in Calamba has collapsed and hurt about 50 people.  My balcony's flooded and everything in it pretty much soaked. Our lone plant has been uprooted; all its tiny flowers, dead.

No electricity in Metro Manila. Even the electricity company's offices don't have electricity (getting that SMS from a friend who works from the said company was hilarious). Electricity will not be back for the rest of the night. I hope the generator in this building lasts us the night.

Manila Mayor declares Manila in a state of calamity. I don't know exactly what that means, but it sounds serious.

But life goes on.

The Inquirer and GMA-7 are still delivering up-to-date news.

Politicians are still going on and on and on and on about the proposed Charter Change.

The Philippine government is making a move to have an Islamic group on the US and UN terrorist blacklist -- so anti-terrorism and all its tentacles are still alive.

There were people in the mall today when Cirio and I stepped out briefly to buy food for the kitty cats.

According to gurlygurlracer, our favourite pool spot is open for business tonight. She's been there since 4pm, since her office closed down for the day.

And I'm online.

Tags: bad days, life in manila, pointless posts
state of mind: blah
background noise: marcy playground -- sex and candy

So back from the sewer that was my stomach since Monday evening. Correction: Sewer in a sweltering summer's day in Manila.

Man, I hate being sick. It's like the entire world is on super dim lighting (which always gives me headaches) and is constantly shifting from extreme heat to extreme cold. And lifting your hand to reach for the tissue to wipe your snot is a study on moving in a molasses-filled tank. Everything's just sticky, and wobbly, and heavy and just plain painful. Super sucky.

But I woke up this afternoon feeling much, much better. Definitely not 100% functional yet but at least the sewer tummy and the ache-y limbs are gone. Temperature's liveable, but the head's about 50% cotton-filled. Things are looking up. Super!

And dammit, now I'm remembering snippets from the horrid flight back to Manila. Sat next to some old American dude on the flight from Bangkok to Manila. When the old dude saw my passport before we de-planed, he said something like "You're Filipino? You're not very friendly for a Filipino. I thought for sure you were Chinese." I remember being pissed off but too tired to come up with something wittingly scathing to retort -- which pissed me off all the more. But I let it go and pretended I didn't hear a thing -- to which he reacted with a loud voice asking me if I understood English, like I was some kind of idiot. I pretended I didn't understand a thing he was saying. I was just too sick to engage.

What I wouldn't give to have had the braincells and the energy to say something as mild like "Wow. Two cultural sterepotypes in less than a minute. That must be some world record."

What I wouldn't give to have had the energy to reach for my camera then (or have had a smaller camera that any sick person could lift)  and take his photo to put on my fantasy website, c5's List of Cluelessly Cultural-Stereotyping Idiots.

What I wouldn't give to have had the will to upchuck the contents of my sewer-tummy on his bushy beard.

One of these days, I'm going to record super vitriolic statements on my cellphone so I can play them back just in case I'm too sick or lazy to use my own mouth against Random Idiots. Heh.

Tags: bad days, pointless posts
state of mind: better
background noise: some tv show on cable

Give me one freaking moment to whine, please.

It started on Saturday evening. I was playing pool with my cousins when someone filched my cellphone from my bag. I didn't let it bother me all that much at that time because I needed a new phone anyway (it was all banged up and the keys were pretty wonky). I thought the only hassle was that I lost my address book, which wasn't such a huge hassle because everyone in that phone book was either a close family member, a close friend or someone whose email I had. It would have been easy to recover those numbers.

But that wasn't the end of it.

Tuesday afternoon, after running errands the whole day (Korean visa crap and bill payments), I came home to find my landline disconnected. That kind of pissed me off because I had just paid my phone bill that morning and I didn't know why my phone was dead and I didn't have any way of getting in touch with them to give them a piece of my mind because I didn't have my new cellphone and my freaking landline was freaking dead.

So Wednesday morning, I went to the phone company's customer service centre to do a full on Bratinella Act and demand for the reconnection of my phone line. I was met with bureacratic reasoning:

Me: Why is my phone dead?
Customer Service Rep: Let me check your records, miss. According to the system, you didn't pay your bill last month, miss. You need to settle your overdue bills so we can re-connect your line.
Me: Well the receipt here that I have and the current bill that you sent me says that I did pay my bills last month. Look.
Customer Service Rep: Oh. Let me file a report on that, miss, so we can request the system to begin your reconnection process.
Me: And how long will that process take?
Customer Service Rep: That is up to the system, miss.
Me: So you mean to tell me that even though it's your fault that my phone line is disconnected and I've reported your mistake, I won't be going home today with my phone line connected?
Customer Service Rep: I really can't say, miss. It's up to the system. It usually takes 48 hours.
Me: 48 hours from now?
Customer Service Rep: The system will receive the report that I filed tomorrow morning, miss, so it will be 48 hours from tomorrow.
Me: So you're saying 72 hours from now. That's a huge hassle for me, is there nothing I can do or fuck to get my phone line reconnected sooner?
Customer Service Rep: It's really up to the system, miss. There's nothing I can do.
Me: So me fucking the system won't help?

And so on and so forth.

By the end of the 1.5 hours in that place, I wanted to know who was in charge of the freaking system and where that person lived. But screaming at underpaid customer service reps who were conditioned to give some standard, stonewalling spiel in response to all concerns was not only an effort in futility, it was also not very fair.

So I left  to get a new SIM and buy a new mobile phone instead. The dude who handled my request said my new SIM would be reactivated in an hour. So I went bought a new phone. Three hours later, my new phone was on but the line was not activated. Cool, I could wait.

Then I went home and found my DSL disconnected. Now that was really just low. With my landline still on the blink, and cellphone still deactivated, there was no freaking way I could call up the phone company (also my DSL provider) to complain. So I called up every bit of Zen loser in me and calmed down -- and tried to do some offline work.

Thursday morning, I woke up with the beginnings of reconnection. My cellphone was finally reactivated. So I started bombarding the phone company with calls about my disconnected line and dsl. I got stonewalled everytime, but venting (without going on a full blown Bratinella Attack) helped soothe my royally pissed off nerves. I decided to give up on the complaints by lunch time so I headed to Greenbelt 3 where there were a few cafes where you can buy WiFi connection for about US$2.00 per hour.

For some reason, that day, all of the freaking access points in that freaking place was not working. Lovely.

I ended up in a cafe in Quezon City with free Internet access, but since I had used up most of my battery trying to connect in those cafes in Greenbelt 3, I only had one hour left to bask in that free connection. But I did manage to catch up a bit with my email and send some really urgent messages. So I was cool.

Friday morning. Landline's back. So it was time to bombard the phone company about my dsl connection so more. More stonewalling and "the system will reconnect you within the day, miss, but I can't tell you exactly when." So I bought a prepaid dial-up card and connected. By around 5pm today, the dsl came back.

I am so glad this freaking week is over.

Tags: bad days, life in manila, pointless posts
state of mind: apathetic
background noise: some nicolas cage movie on tv

I'm drowning in IPR regimes, debates, concepts, epistemologies, theories, philiosophies. Two days ago, I was basking in all of that. Today, I'm drowning. And daunted.

The first half of the conference was spent with resource speakers and panels discussing different dimensions of IPR and the so-called 'commons' -- from the political theories behind "property" frameworks, to open business models that are based on a 'commons' approach rather than a proprietary / private one. There was an interesting presentation comparing modern notions of "piracy" to how colonisers branded "pirates" based on what colonial rule deemed legal and illegal territories and acts within such territorities. A cordoning off of space based on what colonisers saw as "theirs" -- much like how IPR policies are currently marking information based on who it belongs to.

I'm in. I'm convinced. Dominant definitions of "intellectual property rights" is evil and artificial and just so wrong. It didn't really take a lot of convince me because I do have visceral issues with ownership -- of things, of people, of spaces. I generally believe that "ownership" and "property" are articifial and temporary labels we place on things / people / spaces to segregate what's mine and yours, but really, no one, nothing, no place belongs to anyone. We all die and the things / people / spaces we own our not ours in the afterlife -- not unless you're an Egyptian Pharoah who gets buried together with all his wives and gold.

But I'm digressing. My point was that I buy the whole idea of doing away with (or substantively lessening)  IPR policies that threaten to label everything as belonging to someone or some corporation / government / estate. Topple the current IPR Regime! And topple it now!

But aside from going off to Panthip Plaza to buy "pirated" dvds, what else can we do? Countries, mostly developing ones, are tied up (or will be tied up) in anti-piracy agreements and policies that are (apparently) necessary to continue to participate in the global (*cough*US*cough*) economy -- and all the anti-WIPO / GATT / FTA / WTO protests are achieving what exactly? Forgive my broken and cynical activist heart, but right now, every street protest feels old and ineffective. I might be wrong. I hope I'm wrong.

It's like we're trying to run after a train that's been travelling for quite some time now, and has therefore gained its steady and optimum velocity and momentum. How are we ever going to catch up? Just thinking about it makes me so tired, I just want to bury under the covers and sleep forever.

Tags: activist stuff, bad days, geekery, tripping away
state of mind: gloomy
background noise: music from the turtle's ipod

The way I'm feeling right now, I can work up intense irritation at just about anything.

The carpet pisses me off because it's green and I'm not as happy with it as when I was when we first bought it. It's not new anymore and it traps dirt and cigarette ash like a freaking  vacuum cleaner. It needs a shampoo. Or to be ignited and thrown out of the balcony in a blazing heap.

And the yellow slip of paper on top of the coffee table. It flips up and down, following the swivel of the stupid electric fan. A weightless piece of yellow fluff that can't stay still. Must it always bend to the will of stupid electric fan? Up and down, up and down, up and down in my periphery. Grr.

And my hair and its annoying in-between stage. In between short and mid-length. In between brown and black. In between ugly and fugly. If I chop it all off, will it stop bugging me? Or will the sight my scalp bug me much more?

And look at that stupid calculator to the left of the laptop! What a waste of space. Really. What's the point of a calculator as a stand-alone device when all computers and cellphones come with built in calculators? It's not like the calculator in question is the scientific type that can extrapolate complicated formulas. What can it do that a cellphone can't? Why did I buy one in the first place? Freaking useless.

I know I can't go around snarling at random inanimate objects and blaming them for the limitations of what they and what they're made of. I can't hate the stinking scrap of yellow paper for flipping up and down because the wind from the fan exerts a force on it that has more mass than the paper at just the right spot to make it move upwards. It's just doing what it does under the laws of Newtonian physics. And really, it can't do anything because it has no will of its own to do something. It's a piece of paper, for crying out loud! Let it go.

*****

Someone (or maybe a few someones, I can't remember exactly) once (or maybe a couple of times) told me that there's no reason to be bored. There's so much to do, and more importantly, so much that's going on in the world that a person can involve herself in that there simply is no reason to be bored. And that bored people are just brats who are looking to justify their brattiness (hmm. I think Velma said that, and followed it up with "If you're so bored, why don't you go and clean up your room!").

But for a Boredom Connoisseur, or a person who has spent her life avoiding boredom at all costs because it makes her do stupid things (like get "involved" with individuals who are bad for her, or ingest certain combinations of chemicals to turn her boredom neo-green and -purple), boredom is more than feeling weary and dull. It's a state that leads to worse states like depression, falling in love (with inappropriate people), and hyperactivity.

I can't afford to get depressed. One, I don't think my health insurance covers it. But more importantly, I do have a lot of work that needs to get done -- as in yesterday. Wallowing in a Pit of Major Suckage is simply not an option. I don't have time for it. Plus, I'd rather jump off a building than fall into depression again. Hamburger-ed body parts are prettier.

Falling in love. Bwahaha. Nope, not gonna happen. Not any time soon. It's not an option. Period.

So hyperactivity then. Let's see... I woke up early today and I've scrubbed the kitchen clean, re-organised my closet, gone to the bank so I can pretend to be a financially productive citizen of the Philippines, prepared extra-special ham sandwiches for lunch, finalised the last money transfer related to the GEM India workshop, checked email about 7 times, gotten back to writing the draft for the wireless training workshop for women, talked to a few friends, planned a weekend in Kuala Lumpur. I've also arranged for dinners with friends throughout the week and a trip to Baguio for the weekend. There's been a frenzy of activity today, and yet the sound in my head remains a droning, repetitive, cotton-y buzz.

And I'm still angry at the carpet.

Tags: bad days, demented doses
state of mind: indescribable
background noise: angela mcClusky -- the things we do

The thing about the heat is that it brings out my rashes, which irritates the shit out of me, which makes me wish that human beings were robots because illogical human behaviour annoys the hell out me -- especially when my rashes are acting up because of the heat.

So I blame the horrid summer season in Manila for wishing for a scalpel everytime someone near me does something so irrationally human that I want to give them an instant lobotomy. If only the sun would hide behind massive cumulus clouds for a while, I wouldn't have glared at the woman who, after her heart gets broken and beaten, still insists on exposing herself to the one who hurt her. If only the wind would show up once in a while, I probably would have let the incident with the silly girl who gave up a pretty good job so she can spend a few days with her boyfriend blow over. If only the dormant water in the air would stop making my skin steam, I'd be super cool about the temporary work partner who refuses to understand emails, no matter how many times I re-write and re-state my message.

Things that Boggle the Mind, so Fly Girl says.  In more forgiving weather conditions, I'd have rolled my eyes at such illogic and let it roll off me as if I had a Teflon hide. But, man, when the weather is harsh and the heat is intense, every illogical detail and act sticks to my rashes and itches.

And I'm irritated with myself when I'm irritated.

Can't we all just be robots living in an airconditioned environment?

technorati tags: c5

Tags: bad days, demented doses, life in manila, pointless posts
state of mind: hot and irritated
background noise: Bjork -- medulla

I need to break today's stupor -- a completely natural and logical after-effect of lastnight's  / early this morning's Weirdok Get Together (to celebrate slapandpop's birthday, gurlygurlracer's freedom from work and fairlycloudy's "Yay, it's not cancer" moment). Because there was so much to celebrate, the conversation went on til about 3:30 am (+ about 15 minutes of goodbyes and stalling to open the door and taking final photos and packing food for people to bring home and last minute kwento).

So today I'm a Space Cadet.

I have been staring at the screen for over five hours now and all I've got done was answer a few emails, Yahoo! a bit with some people (some for work, but mostly the weirdoks telling me they need to get more sleep today), read KarenH's Guidelines on Writing for an International Audience, and do some catch up reading on Mark Shuttleworth (and what he's said so far on education and Open Source)  in preparation for tomorrow's meeting. Oh and attempt to answer the Intelligence Test Level 2 (Level 1 of which was collectively dealt with lastnight). I've got four questions done (5 to 7 C of the W, 208 to 214 B in the HB, 4 W of a C, and 21 Q S F). And yeah, a phone conversation with Iyeng about my grand plans to take on Digital Photography by buying a big ass digital SLR camera, and when best to buy a Mac.

This won't do. It's almost 3pm and I need to be doing more! I need to be: working on the GEM South Asia workshop, drafting the wireless training for women concept brief, drafting the overall apcwomen training plans, outlining the presentation I'll be doing on gender and e-commerce, finishing up the text on the PANGO project, and re-installing the OS on the other machine (giving up on PCBSD for now and re-installing Ubuntu so FlyGirl will have a machine whenever she wants to do some work here).

Or, for goodness' sake, I could BAKE SOMETHING! Or maybe even label a few more stuff in the kitchen! Re-organise my closet! Anything that would keep me from feeling like a huge WoS*!

Right. Having an anxiety attack on things I should be doing when all I can do is stare blankly at my screen is not helping. So I blog, hoping that the exercise of articulating my current situation  by constructing coherent sentences would snap me out of my stupor and bring me back from Space Cadet Land.

Sheesh. According to KarenH's Guidelines for Writing for an International Audience, this entry (as most of my blog entries) are not very friendly to non-native (or near-native) English-speakers. I've used way too much slang, phrasal verbs, informal and abbreviated words. Not to mention complex grammatical structures that convey more than idea per sentence. And I want to change that but I'm too lazy -- and today, I'm too spaced out to re-think about how I write. So tough, this entry stays.

(Or, if I'm to write that in a friendlier way: I want to change how I write, but I cannot do that today. Because I am too lazy and too distracted. So you will just have to accept that I will not delete this entry.)

I've gone off-tangent. Right back into Outer Space.

I think I'm just going to let the Space Cadet run wild today. I've tried my best to resume control of the Mother Ship. I tried a fuckawful cold shower to wake up, about 3 cups of shitstrong coffee, ass-kicking rock music, stupidly articulating my stupor into oblivion, and running around the flat like a crazed bitch, opening cabinets and drawers to organise and label. But the Space Cadet insists on being in control today. Maybe if I give in to her today, she'll be too tired to bug me tomorrow.

This entry is lacking in point.

__________________
* Waste of Space (fyi)

Tags: bad days, demented doses, pointless posts
state of mind: spaced out
background noise: street sounds below