I'm A Bad Kid, And I Will Survive, Oh I'm A Bad Kid...

The plan was something only Your Lady of Purse-Pinching Cheapness can concoct: hog 5-ish hours of Starbucks space with only 60-pesos worth of butter/cream cheese bagel while browsing/blogging away in cyberspace on SuperSurf50 Globe connection in all her posh-hipster glory. Having only slept 6 hours for the night though (my ideal is 13), I was forced to shell out 95 pesos more on bitter brewed coffee to keep me awake after the bagel hit me with a punch of drowsiness. I might as well have done away with the trolling bagel and ordered just the coffee in the beginning. It was yet another affair with false economy.

Spending big all at once hurts, so by spending piecewise one hopes to save and fulfill a need for a lesser price. Screw it up however and one ends up paying much more than one would have had.

~~~

Many years ago I wouldn't even dare think about stepping in on a fast food store. Even eating meat on a karenderya was a luxury for me. I had to survive on just a pack of 5-peso chicken skin and two cups of rice for a meal to survive on a 500-peso-a-month budget. My ideal was just to spend 300 pesos a month for food. The government scholarship I was in just wouldn't believe I deserved more than the almost non-existent stipend I'm getting from them, which was all I depended on during the first years of my college life--as far as they were concerned, I was a Forbes-worthy billionaire.

It took a few years before I got a part-time job to feed me, but I had then have to let go of finishing my Engineering degree. I've never returned to college, nor to my family since.

Even After Three Hours It Betrays Me

"We're sorry, but something went wrong.
We've been notified about this issue and we'll take a look at it shortly."


I shuffle between two jobs at the moment. One is for an American academic tutorial company, where I mostly teach school kids how to multiply two binomials or find the final velocity of a ball thrown at an angle of 45 degrees. The other is for a multinational text answering service where I'm obliged to answer any question out of the sun, from train times to the proper etiquette of cucumber sex.

The error above was for the latter. I was happily answering texts when at about 5pm today the work platform went haywire. As I'm supposed to be working until 8:45 tonight, I have no choice but to stand by for updates, which is costing me internet cafe fees by the minute. It wouldn't be an issue if I were working right now at home--alas the new neighbors who just moved in this week has added to the already disruptive chorus of banging doors.

I'm yet to hear the reply from a prospective landlord offering a condo unit for lease in uptown QC for "flexible terms". Never mind I'll have to brave a killer highway to get to the actual location--with my peace of mind to work at home at stake, I need to move to a new place very, very soon. Here's only the hope that I'm not to be required postdated checks, yet again. The cost of opening a checking account can already pay a month's rent.

~~~

It's been three hours since the work platform went down, and I'm yet to hear any updates. I hope a proper compensation comes along with them when they come.

My Personal Space Is Sanctuary; My Blood is Red (Duh-duh-duh....)

I would have just wanted to spend a quiet Sunday at home. A wave of new neighbors in the apartment building however has made my once peaceful abode less than hospitable. Slamming doors are my worst peeves. Sadly I seem to be the only one complaining, otherwise the landlord wouldn't make any delays in installing door stoppers and paddings on every unit. It's probably the cost of urban culture to be insensitive to these "trivial" concerns.

I rode a half-filled jeepney, and the first thing that reached my nostrils is the second-hand stench of tobacco from the driver. It's ironic that there was a big "Bawal Ang Manigarilyo (No Smoking)" sign posted on the jeepney--I guess drivers have their privileges. It wasn't long before the jeepney got filled up to the delight of the driver. I'm close to the stop where I get off, but the cigarette smoke and the warm moist touch of female skin was too much for my personal space to bear any further. I hurried out of the jeepney and as usual managed to hit a leg and step on a foot. I sent unglad tidings to the departing jeepney.

The "trivial" incident would have lingered with me throughout the day, were it not for a text message:

"Love the design! At nakuha m ung album cover font nya (And you matched the album cover font)! Not too sure bout the text font though."

It looks like I'll be tweaking my text font for the next couple of days.

(Posted with a Medion laptop at a barely-filled Starbucks Waltermart Makati on a rainy day with a choppy Globe Visibility connection, feeling pretentiously hipster.)

The Manifesto of Mother Datu

To be born is not exactly a wonderful thing. It's not something you've ever had a choice. You one day wake up and realize you're in a world where joy and pain dance perpetually in a cosmic pendulum. However, one is given a choice to be reborn, and this birth, unlike the first, is infinite.

The theme of change and rebirth I believe has been constant throughout my history of blogging. I started out as a love-struck teenager, and I've since become a number of persona: a powerful goddess, a nomad-pastoralist, an S&M dominatrix, a disillusioned college student, a demented prune. And the evolution goes on.

This Lady Gaga-themed blog would then be timely. The Mother Monster has since been famous as a maverick of metamorphosis, never wearing the same costume twice. She's inspired a legion of Little Monsters to be creative and be reborn endlessly as they see fit. In this light, I vow with my latest incarnation to write as I feel it, to tell stories as one deserves to hear it, and should the time come that I cease to "honor my vomit", to evolve into yet another monstrosity.

This is the Manifesto of Mother Datu. Amen.