Balot PInoy

I was hunched over my laptop trying to write my stiff neck away when all of a sudden, my eyes darted to the left sidebar of my page.  I almost twisted my seemingly throbbing neck when I noticed that the sidebar only had comments made by my readers (all three of them readers!) from my previous posts–waaaaay back. I mean, those recent comments I had approved just yesterday and last week were gone.  Not that there were a lot of them, though. But that’s why I know they’re gone–because there were just a few of them and they mattered to me. 

I was cleaning up my comments box yesterday.  But I was just deleting spam, those useless junk that tells you to either buy a viagra or take this and that capsule for a larger penis.  Well, for one, I don’t have a penis.  Two, even if I did, I’m sure I wouldn’t have a problem with it’s size.  I’ve always believed that big things come in small packages.

Okay, fine, going back to my lost comments…lest I digress and tread on unchartered territory…I wish I could undelete them. They must have been ticked along with the spam comments when I clicked on delete all.  I should’ve checked.  But I guess they’re gone forever.  Flushed into the huge, black hole of cyberspace called Recycle Bin.

Oh well. Bummer.

i was updating my facebook profile this morning. i came across a small box right below my profile pic that calls for my description of myself.  It took me an hour to write a simple four-liner in the box:

a lot of things have been said about me.

good and bad.

this and that.

one has to talk to me and be with me to know me.

I am seldom at a loss for words.  Neither do I have any problem expressing my mind.  Many times, I have put my foot in my mouth.  Sometimes, I wish I had bitten off my tongue before it struck someone out, like a frog to a mosquito.

But ask me to describe myself and I falter and stutter like some two-year old who’s just learning how to speak.  Fact is, I grope for words to describe me.  i can’t seem to put myself into any particular category or label myself with any word.  It’s not that I don’t know myself or am suffering from some identity crisis or anything.  Far from that actually.

It’s probably because I know myself more than anyone else does.  I also know that people around me have their own knowledge and perception of me.  And these perceptions, whether true or not, may or might have affected how I perceive myself and the world around me–as much as I would like to think that they don’t.

Just like everyone else, I am both bad and good.  My own family can very well attest to that.  To some of my colleagues, I am someone who can make things happen.  To my mother, I am still her “young” daughter to fuss about or argue with.  To my ex boyfriends (of course it’s plural! duh.), I am someone who broke their hearts (darn.).  To some other people at work, i am a bitch, a pain in their necks.  To my friends, I am someone who cries with them when they cry.  To my boyfriend’s ex-girlfriend, I am someone she should have been wary about.  To that beggar in the street, I am someone who gave her her meal for the day.

Filling out that little box in my Facebook somehow made me realize even more that I am many persons to many people.  But, I have my own little box that tells me that I am one person who matters, regardless of anything.  In that box, my kids say I am the best mommy in the universe.  It is where my family say that, good or bad, I will always be their sister and their daughter.  It’s where, today, the man I love told me how lucky he is to have me.

The four-liner was more than enough to describe me after all.

If there’s anything I can do to make some things right, I would turn back time and reconfigure the past…undo things, unbreak hearts, unmake some decisions, uncry tears…

But then again, editing and rearranging my Past wouldn’t give me what I have now–my Present.  It’s where I am.  It’s what I have.  It’s why I’m happy.

I was, and still am, in mental hibernation that explains my inability to put any thought in writing.  I have been through some highs and lows during the past couple of months. For several days, I only got an average of three hours of sleep.  If I were an average American, I’d be talking to a shrink right now or probably popping Prozac into my mouth like a popcorn.

In what would have been a casual virtual “walk” in the internet, I came across this clip in YouTube.  It could be stress and fatigue coupled with that very bad news from Dubai, but I bawled like a baby as I listened to the song. It’s probably the song, which happens to be one of my all-time favorites.  Or it could be the way it was sung.  Or it could be the sleep-deprived, all stressed out hormones that have been wreaking havoc on my sentimentality.

Whatever it is, the song hit me point-blank in the gut.  The song was If Tomorrow Never Comes sung by a humble farmer in an audition.  Click the title for the link.  Below are the lyrics of this beautiful Garth Brooks song:

Sometimes late at night
I lie awake and watch her sleeping
She's lost in peaceful dreams
So I turn out the lights and lay there in the dark
And a thought crosses my mind
If I never wake in the morning
Would she ever doubt the way I feel
About her in my heart

If tomorrow never comes
Will she know how much I loved her
Did I try in every way to show her every day
That she's my only one
And if my time on earth were through
She must face this world without me
Is the love I gave her in the past
Gonna be enough to last
If tomorrow never comes

Cause I've lost loved ones in my life
Who never knew how much I loved them
Now I live with the regret
That my true feelings for them never were revealed
So I made a promise to myself
To say each day how much she means to me
And avoid that circumstance
Where there's no second chance to tell her how I feel

If tomorrow never comes
Will she know how much I loved her
Did I try in every way to show her every day
That she's my only one
And if my time on earth were through
She must face this world without me
Is the love I gave her in the past
Gonna be enough to last
If tomorrow never comes

So tell that someone that you love
Just what you're thinking of
If tomorrow never comes

As I write this, you’re lying in a hospital bed thousands of miles away.  Oblivious to the world.  Breathing not on your own, but through tubes attached to your body.  I am trying to reach you.  To hold your hand and talk to you, to let you know, for all that it’s worth, that in spite of how things are between us now, I still care about you.

Please hold on.  Please hang in there.

You are needed.  You are loved.

What is being happy, really?

I’m happy because after everything that happened, the father of my kids and I are finally starting to rebuild our friendship again.  The bruises, the wounds are slowly healing, I guess.

I’m happy because he has finally found someone and that he may finally be happy.  And I told him so.  His reply was, “What is being happy, really?” His rhetoric question drove a dagger to my heart, somehow.  Especially when he added, “We are not serious.  Walang seryosohan dito sa Dubai, gamitan lang.“  The dagger dug deeper.    Those lines came from someone who used to love with all his heart.  The phone line couldn’t be more silent.

It’s ironic when one’s happiness becomes the other one’s agony.  Wishing someone his happiness is just that—wishing.  He has to find it for himself.

It’s one of those nights again when counting sheep till I fall asleep just doesn’t trick my eyes into closing on their own.  So, I turned on my trusty laptop and tried to scout for an interesting read. NADA! I’ve read all the new posts on my favorite blogsites.  I then decided to check my Friendster.  Got a friend request from somebody named CJ. Having 300+ friends already, I have opted against approving friend requests from people I don’t know, so I clicked on CJ’s page to see if I did know him.

The sight that greeted me on his page when I clicked on his albums was something that caused the sheep in my head to run amok.  Well, not really.  Unless these animals are scared of dicks.  Yes, you got it right. DICKS.  My gawd, never have I ever seen so many pictures of dicks in one place.  Collectively, they look gross! CJ had an album dedicated to his own package.  And if I were CJ, I would’ve cheated on the size and at least had photoshopped the pics first.

The sight was pornographic.  I, apparently, had stumbled on a pervert’s page.

I thought Friendster had rules against malicious pictures uploaded on the site.  I guess I was wrong.

I’ve always been obsessive-compulsive when it comes to toilets…or restrooms…or washrooms… However you call it, it’s there for one natural purpose–for when people need to take a leak or dump.  Aesthetic purposes such as grooming or the like come secondary.

When I say obsessive-compulsive, I mean OBSESSIVE-COMPULSIVE.  Every time I enter a public toilet, I automatically fold my pants up so that their bottoms don’t touch the floor, regardless of how clean the floor appears to be.  I never touch any part of the cubicle, walls, doorknobs, flush levers, etc. without a tissue.  I’d rather not heed nature’s call than use a toilet that I find “inconvenient” (my fancy term for eeekky).  I could climb six flights of stairs if I knew there’s a better toilet there.  If I see anyone come out from the toilet without washing their hands, they’re marred for life, as far as I’m concerned.  I could go on and on about my freakiness but that would be beside the point.

The need for toilets to be always clean is beyond emphasis.  To me, it should be an unspoken rule. My being OC about it is up to a point that I would make it my crusade to make cleanliness in the toilet–most especially public toilets–a law.  Breaking this law will be punishable by incarceration in a stinky toilet with the lawbreaker’s head forever stuck in the toilet bowl.

I really don’t understand why many people don’t feel it absolutely necessary to wash their hands after using the toilet.  I mean, c’mon!  You wipe your ass or your pee using your hands.  Unless you have some mechanical device with you all the time to do the wiping for you, don’t you think you should spare a couple of minutes soaping and drying your hands?

Last Saturday, after watching Angels and Demons with JJ and while waiting for my turn in the restroom, I did a random survey.  Yeah sure, a toilet survey in the toilet by the toilet freak.

My findings were alarming.  Out of probably less than 15 people who used the toilet while I was there, none as in nil, zilch, zero cared to wash their hands after using the toilet!!!  And most of them, after coming out from the cubicle, went infront of the mirror and either touched their hair or their faces, or put on lipstick with their fingers!  Seriously.

I yakked and yakked about this alarmingly repulsive discovery to JJ that he had to virtually stitch my mouth shut.  As he gently took my hand and led me away from the restrooms, I stopped dead on my tracks and pulled my hand away from his.  And with a crazed look on my face, I asked in a hushed yet frantic voice, “How ’bout you, did you wash your hands?”

His only answer before he dragged me away:  “DUH!!  What the f#@k do you think??”

It’s raining outside.  I’m sitting in the dark, lost in my own thoughts as Coldplay soothes me in the background with “Fix You.”  Apt, indeed.  Just the song and lyrics I want to hear.  It’s been a while since I sat down and listened to my head thinking.

I used to find it hard to think without feeling each thought.  Right now, I’m doing exactly that.  Letting thoughts pour in, free-flowing.  Unfiltered.  Unhindered.  Raw.  I should do this more often.

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A few weeks ago, the father of my kids, in one of our routine calls, cheerily called me a very sweet term of endearment.  Sweet.  Except that he had never called me that before–ever.  I have always been Mommy Yo to him–even when we had long parted ways.

Two weeks ago, he finally admitted that he has a girlfriend.  My immediate response was, “What’s her name?”  He answered with a chuckle and said, “Di sya maganda.  Don’t worry, you and I and the kids are still going to Disneyland.”

Yipee.  Then I don’t need to know her name.

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Leaving is never easy.  Especially if it involves friends that you had shared so much of your life with.  I decided to leave some friends behind.  It’s something that I should have done ages ago, when my gut instinct had told me that the friendship is not worth staying on for anymore.  But I had chosen to look the other way and thought that maybe time could heal all wounds.  That maybe, we still could salvage what we used to have.  That maybe all the hypocrisy would eventually stop.  Was I so wrong.

I’ve been crossing my fingers for too long, I think I fractured them.

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Speaking of friends, a very dear friend whom I haven’t seen for almost twelve years now came knocking on my gate last Sunday.  Years may have drawn lines on the faces of everybody that I know–but not on Ted’s face.  He looked almost exactly as I had remembered him.  He’s got a little tummy bulge now, though.  But well, among our friends, who doesn’t?

We talked and caught up with each other’s lives.  It’s amazing how conversations with dear friends could seemingly just pick up from where they left off years and years ago.

About to board the plane, he texted me, “I’m missing you already.”  That was the sweetest thing that he had said/texted to me in almost 12 years. :)  It feels good to have great friends.

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It’s been a little over three months since the son of one of my best friends died.  I have no idea how things are within her, really.  I don’t want to ask.  Even if I do, I wouldn’t know how.  I don’t even want to talk about how painful things might have been for her.  I simply couldn’t imagine.  All I know is that she is definitely one of the strongest women I have ever known.

I’ve always admired her integrity, her intelligence, and her focus.  Now, I admire her more for her resilience and strength.  It’s something that I could only wish for myself.

If I haven’t been with her a lot lately, it’s because I believe she needs all the time to be with herself and her family at this point.  Truth is, what happened three months ago was a vicarious experience that had affected me as a mother, more than I would ever care to admit.

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On a much lighter note, my sister and I were watching a video on YouTube just this evening.  As cheesy as it may sound, I had a good laugh watching the Katrina Halili-Hayden Kho video.

It wasn’t funny ha-ha.  It’s a mere testament to how stupid people sometimes get.

It’s Saturday morning, and since I’m the only one in the mighty training team who’s on the graveyard shift, I am alone in the office right now wondering if I’d be visited by the now famous resident ghost next door.

Last night was painfully hectic.  Hectic because I had to squeeze in two days worth of missed items in one shift.  Painful because five people, on five separate instances, in five different ways, told me that I am fat. Well, not really in those exact words, though.  I know, I know…weight is such an annoying and boring issue for many.  I’ve always considered it vanity when one worries too much about his or her weight.  BUT, that’s because I have NEVER been worried about my weight before.  The only thing that I had worried about in college before was how to have a chest that would not make my neurotic boyfriend then go ballistic when some moron would stare at it.

BUT NOW…

Well, if you had been 43 kilograms virtually your entire life and had only worn either XS or S sized clothes since forever, you’d be a tad worried too if one day, people you know will suddenly stop right in their tracks and exclaim “you’re fat! What happened?” as if they just discovered that you have another arm growing right out of your ears.

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As soon as I got off from work, I turned to JJ for much needed consolation, as always.  Because he probably didn’t want to risk being mauled and verbally harassed by a troubled vain woman, he said in such a manner that would kill any diabetic within hearing distance that “to me, you still look great, huggy bee.  You’re still hot.”  And he just scored free movie tickets for saying that.

I made remarkable discoveries, though.  I discovered the many ways that one can tell people they’re fat.  These were how such message was delivered to me by the people I bumped into at work last night:

from somebody whose face I couldn’t put a name to:

“Hey, you look…chunky now.”

My response: “uh..thanks?”

from two former trainees who had kept on pushing each other, undecided on who’s gonna be the messenger who will tell me the foreboding news:

Messenger 1:  “Ms. Balot, he said you gained weight (pointing to Messenger 2 as Messenger two immediately ducked out of my sight).

My response:  ***dagger look then a saccharine smile

from my good friend Py:

“You’re fat! What happened?”

My response: ***an inhuman wail

from a random person whose social relationship with me never goes beyond “Hello, Ms. Balot”:

“Hello Ms. Balot….”

My response:  “Oh shut up, I know what you’re gonna say!”

From a cleaning person I was in the elevator with going down from the cellulite-conscious floor:

“Ma’am, may laman ka na.”

My response:  “thanks.” Then I wondered how I could stash her mangled body before the elevator opened.

I have just been released from the hospital.  No, not a mental institution, thank you.  I had cystitis.  For the simple-minded person with zero medical knowledge, it sounds inauspicious.  Well, it depends on which side of the coin you are on.  If you’re not the patient, you’d casually say, “drink lots of water and you’ll be fine!”  If you’re the doctor, you’d say, “it’s an infection of the lower urinary system.  Antibiotics will cure it.”  But if you’re the patient, you’d say, “screw you and just let me pee without pain!”

Yes, cystitis may not be as severe as pyelonephritis (inflammation of the kidney) which had sent me virtually crawling, on my hands and knees like a four-wheel drive, to the hospital many times before, but it is almost as painful.   It makes peeing a very horrific thought.  I had the urge to pee every five minutes–with nothing coming out except a drop or two.  Peeing was like having my entire pelvis explode at every drop of what seemed to be burning gasoline trickling drop by drop from my urethra.  The pain was FUCKING EXCRUCIATING–it brought out the French in me.

I had to leave work midshift last Monday.  A colleague offered to drive me to the hospital but I told him that my boyfriend was picking me up.  Thankfully, The Boyfriend arrived in a few minutes asking me if I was OK.  I was short of biting his head off in response to his question as I told him to let the taxi wait while I went to the bathroom to pee–for the 6th time in 15 minutes.

The wait in the emergency room was excruciating–literally and figuratively.  Four people who called themselves Doctors approached me one after the other and introduced themselves to me, asked me a bunch of questions, and told me the same thing after I answered all their questions:  “just lie down and relax, ma’am”.  Four doctors, same questions.    Four times, same line.  Four times, I had to restrain myself from kicking a doctor in the groin mainly for telling me to relax when I obviously couldn’t and would rather strap a bedpan in between my legs so that I could pee anywhere anytime.

I had a feeling that the doctors had wanted me to drop dead first before they would finally transport me to my room and drug me to sleep.  Since I obviously didn’t do that, a nurse approached me (I was gearing for a major kick to his balls should he tell me again to lie down and relax) and asked me who among the doctors on his list did I want to attend to me.  WTF!!!  Four freakin’ doctors and none of them was supposed to attend to me after all?

I picked a Dr. Belisario on the list–simply because his surname sounded more doctor-ish than all the others on the list.  His daily visits made me realize that I should have been a doctor.  I would’ve been filthy rich by now.  I would only visit my patients once a day, chat with my patients for about three minutes, poke them here and there then speak medical gibberish, and then off I’d go with their life savings.  Good business.

Or I should have built a hospital.  Accept people who are sick, dying, or sick of dying, have pretty nurses with very clean fingernails pop overpriced medicines in the patients’ mouths, feed them fancy-sliced food, and then charge them P3,000 a day for their confinement in my fine hospital.  Marco Polo would have a run for its money.

All in all, most of my holy week was spent in the hospital.  And the only time it was close to being holy was when I exclaimed “Holy shit!” at the sight of the hospital bill sans the medical insurance.

P.S.  I believe it was the bill who cured me.  Not the meds.

It’s 4:05 in the wee morning…and I’m the only one awake in the house right now.  It feels great–being alone and awake at this hour in the comfort of my own room, instead of being holed up in my cubicle in the office as I am supposed to be right now.

I am hungry.  I could eat a horse.  With a rhino for dessert.

I wish I hadn’t promised myself to write at least three blog entries a week.  The pressure is just too much for my tiny head.  Not that I have a whole population of readers out there who are waiting with bated breaths for my next entry, though.  But me pressuring myself–and I rarely pressure myself– is equivalent to a thousand nostrils breathing down my neck.  And yes, I do have a tiny head–literally.  And no, I don’t see the relevance of mentioning it in this blog.  Just thought I’d blab for a while and hopefully, the throbbing ache in my head would suddenly ignite that elusive light bulb.

For four nights in a row last week, I only got an average of two and a half hours of sleep. That’s ten hours out of the forty hours of sleep that I should have had.  I wish I had that ability to sleep like the proverbial log.  I wish I could just switch myself off and sleep like an overdosed junkie.  I wish I could just close my eyes and dream about chasing butterflies and rainbows, instead of alien invasions and fancy dinners with Obama and Oprah, ending with a goblin swallowing Obama’s head while Oprah gives away her Favorite Things.

But no, I sleep with my ears wide open.  It’s a curse.  I hear every heavy footstep outside my door, I hear the clanking of glass from the kitchen, the vvvrrroooohm of vehicles passing by.  Darn, I even hear myself breathing!  All these, when I’m desperately trying to get into a deep, deep slumber–the kind of sleep when all hell could break loose and I’d still be happily snoring my ass off.

Here are my current envy when it comes to sleeping the world away.  I wish I could sleep like them–well…not really LIKE like them.  I sleep with more poise–at least I’d like to think that I do:

These are two of the four dogs in the house.  The white one is aptly named Bastard and the black one is Britney.  Go figure.  Just like the dysfunctional family they live with, these dogs are as neurotic as canines can be.  But they sleep so well you’d think they’re dead.

In a few minutes, I’ll try to get me some overdue sleep.  Otherwise, there’ll be a raving lunatic screaming for sleeeeeeeeppp pretty soon.

And oh, the picture here is of Britney sleeping normally.  She loves sleeping in a basin of tap water–after eating her own poop.

How could someone that you just fired for grossly malingering and under-performing come back to you one day and ask you to endorse him back to the company, in another department?

Is it just me or are there really people whose faces are made of 12-inch thick cement blocks?

I almost died today.  I swear, my eyes popped out as my face contorted into a pained and hideous-looking mask that one can only see in some old Twilight Zone episodes.

I lost my blog!!@#$#%#!!!!

When I clicked on my site today, all I saw was one post.  ONE POST and THAT’S IT!  No Recent Posts, no Comments, no Archives, NO NOTHING.  Not even a Log-in link for me to click and log in to my account!  With fingers shaking like a spastic, I YMed JJ and clicked on all applicable icons to express my horror of losing my blog entirely.  He merely said, “calm down. wait…” After a minute or two, he said, “I’m in your admin page now.  What browser are you using?”  “Explorer,” I said lamely.

So IT IS my browser.  My new blog theme is not Internet Explorer-friendly.  Darn.  And I almost had a heart attack.  So what’s with lay-outs and IE?  I have encountered several websites that posted notes that say “Better viewed using Firefox.”  Fine.  So I’ll be posting a similar notice after all, because I am not going back to my old layout and I certainly don’t have the luxury of looking for other layouts at this point.

I could not imagine losing my blog.  It would be like losing a limb.  Worse than losing a limb.  You can replace a limb with artificial ones and it still would (almost) function the same as the real one.  You lose a blog–you lose certain periods of your life.  And unless you warp back into those moments with the same emotion, the same thoughts, you can never rewrite your posts and come up with the same spice, the same rawness.

I guess it’s high time for back-up files.  I never want to lose my blog (or my limbs).

In the meantime, I’ll check my blood pressure.