Another Shot at Unemployment

In less than three weeks, I will be unemployed again. I have started my countdown. Not surprisingly, it feels like the last few weeks during grade school or high school when you're raring for summer vacation but you still have to endure those unbearingly long weeks of school left.  Very apt since I have treated this job more like a school from the very first day. Except this is ten times worse because it is presently happening. Anything in the past may be romanticized. The present can only feel longer, more constricted. And that is exactly how I feel: trapped and boxed in.

I try to find the positive in it. I have long trained myself to think that nothing at all is wasted in a writer's life, no matter how boring, painful, or worst of all, ordinary. At some still to be identified future time, these things will come in handy. And I did learn some new things, made some new friends, earned some money. All in all, I think it's not a waste of three months.

So now I am passively looking for a job. I want another run at the fulltime writing/revising of the novel, thus the "passive" description. I have not worked on it at all since the translation job started and hopefully, I have accumulated enough material to finally finish it. I really, really, really want to be done with it (*sobs). In the meantime, if you know of any freelance projects that may need writing and translating, send them my way. I still have to eat, you know.

On My Need for Stories and Burning Time Cards

Consistent with my “Touch and Go Joni” moniker, I have printed my resignation letter and am set to file it on Friday. I’m afraid I’m too much of a gypsy to stay in one place for too long. I have to keep moving. But that’s an oversimplification.

There has always been something about my job that does not feel real. Maybe because since graduation, this is the first time that I find myself in an office environment, punching my times in and out. As the measure of my existence in the company, they count how many hours I stay in the office, regardless of the amount of work I’m doing. I have been reduced to an eight-hour entity, occasionally having to put in an additional couple, at times four, hours in a day lest I disappear from earth and never come back.

But I had grown tired of the sheer mathematicality of the whole thing. The words wish to spring forth from me. I no longer just want to have to write “main entrance,” “granite,” “foresta green” and “polished” all in a straight line, from one language to another. Is there a candy store right outside the main entrance? I would want to see the little girl peering into the display window, her face pressed close to the glass, mesmerized by the greenredyellowpinkbrown in a large jar in the corner. She would go home only after her eyes have had their fill of the colors of the candies, her mind have imagined the sweet slightly rough texture of the round objects in her mouth. 

I thought working with words, in two languages no less, would make me happy even for just a few months. But I realized before long that I needed to have them in my hands, shaping them into a reality that I can see in my head before my soul can be truly satisfied. I need the stories. And that’s how I know I’m cursed.

The utter frustration of having red granite for the pavement and not see a young boy of about fourteen sitting on it so he could have fifteen minutes all to himself before he goes home to a crowded house filled with siblings and parents forever in shouting matches has reached its limit. Perhaps he thinks about the new girl in school as he hugs his knees closer to his body. How she had looked at him and shyly smiled across the classroom that afternoon. Or perhaps he’s looking at the stars and wondering about the light years that it takes before the light reaches us.

I need the stories. I will have to look for them elsewhere. In the meantime, I wish I could burn that time card.

I've Been Tagged: Seven Random Facts About Me

I've been tagged by Emer and Cai. Here are my Seven Random Facts About Myself:

1. When my throat itches, the corners of my mouth itch too. I would scratch them until they get sore so sometimes I go around with wounded mouth corners. No people, it's not from too much eating.

2. If you look closely, you will notice a small greenish dot between my eyes, closer to the right. My sister and I were tickling each other in bed while she was holding a newly sharpened Mongol pencil. Inevitably, I got stabbed. Quite surprisingly, it didn't hurt. I lifted my head and saw the pencil swinging from side to side while still stuck to my head. That made me cry. I was maybe seven or eight years old.

I think she was aiming for the eyes.

3. I tell stories in a super-loud voice, especially when I get excited. I am usually unaware of this until a friend would call my attention to it. And much as I try to keep my voice down, I would forget about it after less than a minute and have all of the passengers in the FX/jeepney/MRT know what happened to me that day.

4. I never graduated high school Chinese.

Most Chinese schools in the Philippines follow this format: regular classes in the morning (with subjects like Math, Science, English, Filipino, etc.), then Chinese classes in the afternoon (with whatever subjects they could come up with that were taught in Chinese). I failed Chinese Math (Geometry in Chinese!) and was thus required to attend summer classes to make up for it. I did not attend. I had to repeat 3rd year Chinese while I was a senior in English. Most fun Chinese class I had ever had.

5. I have posed nude for a friend's photography project in school. That was ten years ago and it was for art's sake. Enough said.

6. I am twenty-seven years old and I have yet to apply for a real driver's license. Maybe next month? We'll see.

7. I swear by tomato juice. I hate the taste but it makes my complexion glow and when you're vain, that's all that matters.

I'm tagging Jason Hinsley, Nick Wah, Jason Tan, Bevz Asenjo, Jing Racelis, Anna Cinco and Cheska Lim.

Bonding with Baby Iel

An Employee Again

I do admit that my absence from the cyberworld for the past month or so is nothing short of unacceptable. I apologize and will try harder to entertain you with updates of my life. Yes, I’m talking to both of you.

True, I have once again joined the workforce. I got myself a job. I am paranoid. I get very worried when I’m not earning money, no matter how small. Never mind that I’m the most barat person I know. My friend Kate once described me as “economical” after I made sure one piece of tissue was enough to wipe my sopping wet face while she used three or four times more. Another friend simply said that I’m “Intsik.” This was after I expressed dismay at his having deleted the Globe promo message that would give us free McDo regular fries many years back. He offered to buy me large fries instead but of course that would totally defeat the purpose. I didn’t really want the fries but I’d eat them because they were there and they were free. I don’t know if that only made sense to me.

I live in perpetual fear of poverty and over and over in my head, I hear the old early-90s commercial with a young man shouting, voice breaking, “Ayoko nang maging dukha!” I don’t know where that fear stems from but it has always been present, lurking around in the shadows. And it comes out full-blown when I’m in between jobs.

Thus, despite still working on the novel, I decided to do something that would generate income. I made myself employed.

I am, at the moment, a fulltime translator in an architectural firm somewhere in Makati. The company’s clients are mostly from Mainland China, thus the need for translators. Let it be said that up until a few months ago, I never imagined myself translating professionally so this is somewhat of a fulfillment for me, more than anything.

At the risk of sounding ungrateful (which I am most definitely not), I will have to reveal that it is not exactly high-paying. This is where I assure you that you can still feed me anytime you feel like it because the job has actually only made me busier, not necessarily richer. If anything, I accepted it not for the pay (although the old fear is ever present and that was the very reason that I was compelled to have an income-generating job) but for what I’ll be learning from it (yes, cheesy as that sounds even to my own ears). Architecture is not exactly a field that I’m an expert on, even in English. But it’s always the challenge that makes things exciting.

Truth be told, next to Literature, I would probably rank Architecture as my favorite classical art. Dulce et utile at its best. Practicality and beauty put together, who wouldn't want that? And as a consequence of this new job, I will be giving “The Fountainhead” another chance at making itself interesting. I got to about a quarter of the book years ago. Let’s see how far I get this time.

And it may only be my optimism that’s making me think that I can juggle this job, my novel, the unending string of things that I had already committed myself to (that I had previously written about here), my cyber life and my social life. We’ll find out soon enough if that were at all possible. The social life I can afford to sacrifice. My friends have gotten used to my sudden moments of hibernation, only to reappear a few weeks/months later just before I embark on the “next project.” There is a reason I was called “Touch and Go Joni” back in college because I would drop by the tambayan just to say “hi!” and let everyone know that no, I have not yet fallen off the earth’s face, before I disappear to whatever appointment I got myself into.

Based on past experiences, I have reason to believe that it really is a seasonal phenomenon for me. I am of course most worried about the novel. At the moment, I’m experiencing another dry spell. Hopefully, I will be able to write more soon. When that time comes, I am more than ready to drop everything to heed my muse’s call. Hopefully, I will not have to become dukha before I finish writing it.

Akoh's Birthday

This post is long overdue. More than a month has already passed since Akoh's birthday but I hadn't had the time to update my site, as you've probably noticed.

We had spaghetti, ice cream, hotdogs on stick (with marshmallows!) and coke. What more could we ask?

Sadness is Liquid

Sadness is liquid. It is the sweat that oozes out of your pores, gleaming and smooth; the salty tears that eventually become too heavy for your eyes to hold, rolling down finally free; the blood that gushes out a few days each month, pungent and pure.

Sadness is liquid. The seeming weakness of it biding its time within the bodies' crevices, eager to rush out, maybe become one with the ocean of sadness that served as home millions of years ago.

Aren't we all walking liquids? Our skins nothing but flimsy wrappers that attempt to hold us all in so we don't end up a mess of a puddle on the floor. There are times when a drop manages to seep out, as from a wound. And then we drip a bit of ourselves, sadness released, acknowledged and shared with the rest of the weeping and bleeding creatures. And who knows where all these droplets go, if not trickling back to that primordial ocean? Evaporating into the air to fall back down again, staining clothes and sheets as meek reminders of our shared fluidity and sadness.

Sadness is liquid. Wouldn't it be oddly comforting to think of how lovers share a bit of their loneliness at each exchange of fluid? And why else do we wallow, drown in our sorrows? Rumi talks of Grief drinking from a cup of sorrow.

We are careful to release just a bit at a time. It is how we survive, the life force itself. To slit one's wrist is to release too much. And yet not releasing enough can poison one's soul so we cry a little and let go some. It is the only way.

*Inspired by Tin's entry