Smells Like Old Spirit

Going on a long vacation on a small budget and bringing along my external hard disk with me, I woke up one morning thinking why the hell I accumulated all these movies yet I didn't have the time to watch them. The same goes with my books which, to my family's great dismay, ended up in almost 20 big boxes. We only knew how many I had when we moved house last year. Heh! (Reminds me of Maestra, Switters' grandma in Tom Robbins' "Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates", a literary companion I planned to leave in this country I am in now, except I find it so hilarious and such a literary gem that I am having second thoughts... On the other hand, this is a practice on detachment. Let's see what will happen around July.) 

I guess I was too busy at work and school, too busy doing things for others, for my family, for friends, and for that special someone. Then again when push comes to shove, I have proven that only family will be there for you. So starting 2017 I have been more family-centered and have gone out less with friends, putting my family at the topmost priority, even before work. (In case you are wondering, work is not even in my top 5. Yes, it is important, but I realized after graduation that work only pays the bills but does not nurture the soul much. I had fun in all my jobs, but I know I am in the wrong place. But I stayed on working for private companies while being compensated not so handsomely because you know how capitalists work. I mean, they don't work, they let other people do the work for them for a measly sum, and that's how we perpetuate this stupid system that widens the gap between the rich and the poor.

After I graduated from college, all I wanted was to be of service to my country. I know that a person of my skill is much needed. In all the job interviews I've been to, the interviewers look at me with much awe and almost always exclaims, "You are such a rare breed!". Breed. As if I am some kind of an animal domesticated, engineered by humans to serve their purpose, not mine. But being someone who sees the good in everything I take it as a compliment. When you meet a person who speaks many languages fluently, and some languages that enables her to survive in different countries, I guess you will also be amazed. But I realized, I don't want to be seen as just that because I am more than that. I am also human, flesh and blood. I get hurt, I cry easily, I laugh easily, I have my idiosyncrasies that, if you are a capitalist or a friendly user, you don't need to know me in that level, you will only know me and befriend me for the fact that you know I can be of use to you someday. Pretty much how 95% of the people are in the office until I couldn't take it anymore and finally called it quits. Same with the "friends", those people whom I spent time with and whom I loved truly for who they are but who ended up just, you know, people who are engrossed in this materialistic world they don't care about other people.

But anyway, back to how I would have loved to serve my country... I got opportunities but they were small opportunities and I felt like an instrument. Like, whenever I remember how a professor hired me to do archival research and translations for her but ended up getting paid only PHP 5,000.00 per month, I cannot see how she sleeps soundly at night when she tells her stories to others about how, as a PhD student in Cambridge, she was grateful to have been hired as a library assistant which gave her extra money. (To benchmark, PHP 5,000 is monthly salary of graduate assistants who do clerical work. What I was doing was research and yet she paid me the same amount she pays to someone who just arranges her class readings and staples them. She could have added extra, just because my work was totally different and requires special skills. And yet there she was, knowing fully well my capabilities and work ethics and taking advantage of me who was a penniless archaeology student doing freelance jobs and paying my own tuition so I often worried about going on LOA every semester because I might not have enough money to pay. Talk about hypocrisy. That was my first brush with hypocritical "intellectuals", but I do know that there are true intellectuals out there, those who embody not just honor and excellence, but also service and compassion. My parents did offer to pay although they couldn't understand what got me in such adiscipline that demands money, time, and effort with no monetary returns. I couldn't tell them "THIS IS WHAT LOVE IS ABOUT." (But I guess what I understood from their kind gesture even though I stopped getting money from them after I finished my undergraduate course while working part-time for our family business for no salary, just allowances which was just enough for me to photocopy some readings and I had to walk instead of taking the jeepney to be able to save up for books... is that, you know, family will always be there for you, even if they may not, or if you think they may not, understand you fully well.)

But I guess before going on this long vacation, what really made me sure of my conviction that family will always be there for you is that, my mother arranged for my transport needs to haul away all my things from my dorm and office to our house. I already negotiated with two friends on that, one for backup just in case the other will have unexpected things to attend to. I didn't think of asking anyone from the family because I know they are always busy and I also know (or think) that I am low on their priority list as evidenced by many times I have been let down in the past, thus I was almost always a no-show in my friends important events. (Looking back though, I was able to attend two debut parties of my friends, and my first year-end party in my last company because my brother agreed to pick me up. Looking back, I was able to watch Phantom of the Opera because my dad agreed to be my date as he was concerned for my safety going home late. So maybe, even though I bore grudges against my family especially my parents for not allowing me to really get into the things I wanted, I guess they grounded me in reality in the fact that they made me realize that life is not just about art or literature or music, that it is also about WORKING, being independent, earning your own money so you can get the things that you want and need without depending on anyone, or better yet, in my words, WITHOUT USING ANYONE. (But the idea of working in the humanities is beyond them coz many artists and writers died broke and I know they are just afraid for me if I become engrossed in the pursuit of excellence in those fields.) Early on, as a grade 2 student, my mother taught me how to check receipts of payables. That made me do well in math later on until of course, being a lover of abstract ideas, I really fell in love with math eventually when I discovered its beauty... and chaos theory. LOL. So I ended up taking trigonometry (Math 17, said to be the deciding factor for engineering students because many who got in the program fail in this subject before the 50 series) right after I finish my undergraduate course and so I didn't attend the college graduation rites because I was in class and I didn't want to be absent in class. It was the first time I paid for my own tuition fee and so I felt more responsible and more serious, compared to my undergraduate days wherein I always end up sleeping in class, or being late (I had a bad reputation back then and was notorious for my tardiness thus earning the ire of many teachers).

And this blog entry feels like a small trip down memory lane. I guess this vacation is doing me good. I feel like an old person on her retirement. It's been a little more than a month living in a country so far from home. I had no one to depend on so I cook my own food, wash my own clothes, and just look after my health with extra care because I certainly cannot afford to get sick in a foreign land. So I adopted fully my being Chinese here, adopted the thousand years old tradition of preparing healthy and delicious food, by experimenting on many different things. My diet consists of veggies and fruits and little meat and carbohydrates while this winter cold persists. Of course I miss fried chicken and much as I hate the US, I do confess that I miss KFC, especially hot shots which have been my comfort food when I was staying in the dorm. (And I do miss the fried chicken in the stalls in the friendly neighborhood, the ones which come with sweetly spiced vinegar... And of course, who doesn't miss adobo?)

Oh yeah and before I forget, after one month of living here, I discovered many things about myself, that indeed I am a Cooking Master Girl! LOL. Having tasted many different food in my travels allowed me to get a very nice understanding of how different treatment of veggies and meats and fruits. One only needs to know their essential characteristics and unleash all creativity in the kitchen to bring out their best flavors. I did. And this is called living in the moment for me, being resourceful, being conscious. It's like when you date a person, you want to know about him, what makes him tick, what makes hims sad, what brings out different emotions in him, so you can support him better and bring out the best in him. But at least with food you are rewarded with good health, elated tastebuds, and happy tummy. With dating, you need to invest in the right person otherwise, you end up being drained because you give the good in you away getting nothing in return.

So there my rants and my reflections on life in general. This vacation is meant to heal me from all the negativities I let in without a thought all these years. It was a difficult process, sometimes I doubt myself if I will return to my country with a whole and happy heart again, sometimes I feel afraid of losing myself but I am taking it slow. Instead of hopping from one place to the other, I chose to stay in one place, savor the moments, enjoy the moment, no haste, no deadlines, just plain relaxation while I spend my hours walking, watching movies, reading "Fierce Invalids" (which I am reading at a very slow pace because I don't want to part with it yet), and several ebooks in between. And my offline Youtube videos don't work here which sucks so I watch very few videos. Ugh!