Caustic Thoughts
Random funny thoughts with a taste of Pinoy and a hint of acid.
A PERSONAL BLOG is like an exhibit no one wants to visit.
That may or may not be true. Your mom, brothers, sisters and maybe 20 other relatives can pack your gallery. It does, however, take a great deal of work to maintain readership even among those loyal to you because they had no choice in having you for a blood relation. So why blog at all?
This was originally a personal blog. Surprisingly, I once found a small audience for it outside of my family, a handful of individuals in varying shades of jadedness, with the same level of acidic insanity. I lost a lot of my readers when life got in the way. The realization dawned that money, not words, feed babies. For many online wordsmiths, money is hard to come by.
I don’t think I’ll ever really quit though. I like it here because I don’t have to struggle and give up who I am to survive. I don’t have to pretend to be anything and there is certainly no requirement to save the world.
Call me selfish. When every other blogger wants to make a difference, I want to keep this small space for my personal mental therapy. Anyone looking for a case subject for a psychology study is welcome to dive into this spontaneous morass from a self-confessed nut case.
Incidentally, during my bouts of lucidity, I do try to save the world too in other virtual spaces not in danger of getting tainted by my cerebral drippings.
I’m a blog addict. The invisible player in my head starts playing “Singin’ in the Rain” when I start customizing themes, widgetizing sidebars and activating plugins, but navigating blogging platforms is the farthest I can go. When techies start going on about PHP, JavaScript, Pearl, MySQL and such, my eyes glaze over. Computer was, after all, one of my subjects of doom in high school.
That’s why when my host started emailing me about backing up my own databases, I dismissed him as a relic from the Tower of Babel. Unfortunately, my inability to decipher tech speak led to me nearly getting killed by a virtual tsunami.
Over the weekend, my sites were stripped clean, hundreds of pages, thousands of visitors, thousands in income, gone with a click of a mouse. The perpetrator who took away three years worth of hard work left his calling card on one of my homepages with the obvious advice, “You must be better next time.”
A thousand thoughts raced through my numb neurons, most of them gibberish, but I had the energy to at least wonder why hackers do what they do. My friend says there are white hats who stick warning notes on poorly secured servers. The black hats are the ones with motivations that are harder to figure out.
Caesar had a reason for crossing the Rubicon. Superman had a reason for going against good judgement and wearing briefs like a highlighter over tights. Heck, even Robert Pattinson probably had a reason for agreeing to portray a one dimensional character in perpetual need of a bath. So why, why, why are there black hats who just break things?
I was a kid who lost a lollipop over the weekend. I wonder if the one who took it is happy now.
I was in the local bookstore the other day looking for Tim Ferriss’ “The 4-Hour Workweek” for some business related research I needed to do. The sales clerk proceeded to ask me if that was “4,” “Four,” or “For” and if that was “Ferriss” as in “Ferris wheel.” Finally, after much swapping of letters that would have lost both of us the national pre school spelling bee, the clerk declared, “It’s out of stock.”
I had my doubts, but I did not request for a spelling rematch. I had decided right away that I had a spare Php 300 because over at the fiction shelf was Miguel Syjuco’s Ilustrado.
Long before I set off to attempt to crack the secret code to earning a fortune online, my interest lay in literature, the kind that pureed your brains, gave you a nosebleed and left you depressed. Not that Syjuco’s masterpiece is anything of that sort, but I’ve only really just started reading it.
It’s been four years since I’ve picked up anything of this sort. Since I had kids, money books made better sense because, for lack of a kinder term, they simplified life in no uncertain terms. Learn what sells and learn to sell or your kids starve.
So why am I cheating on my kids, reading a book that doesn’t teach you how to make money? I’m convinced my uninterrupted running after money has left me dumb and dumber. Soon I might also lose my character.
I’m on a vacation from trying to make more money, at least for a couple of hours, prepared to drown either in my cup of overpriced tea or in Ilustrado’s pages, whichever comes first.
It’s unavoidable. Working moms can try to balance work, family and self to maintain some semblance of sanity but there is no defying the natural limits of time so ultimately priorities have to be made. In the mad daily rush that defines a family woman’s life, family comes first followed by work and then self.
That explains why I often get to comb my hair only once a day and not even properly such that only half of all my strands are in their proper place. The rapidly expanding natural life saver around my torso has also been left so seriously unattended that I’m certain I’ll soon develop enough fat to naturally protect me from the cold. The previously allotted schedules for 100 brush strokes and stomach crunches are now dedicated to my hyper active screaming banshees and to extra gigs to make more money that’s just never enough.
That’s just how it is and I don’t resent it. Besides, there are those moments when circumstances force you to stop. The other night, we had to rush my daughter to the hospital and after all the panic had subsided and she’d been given medication, we were told she still had to be admitted.
In a room with no instant internet connection and no way to chat with clients, time stopped. I didn’t complain. Nobody likes to be in a hospital but staying put with my favorite girl in the world watching Bizaare Foods on cable was the best treat I’d had in weeks.
When I was a college OJT, I got the chance to accompany my boss to a public school where he taught values. As he was shedding sheets of sweat, and nearing dehydration, with the effort of exhorting his students to emulate some saintly virtue, several pairs of eyes kept peering from the hallway windows.
I learned later on that the owners of those eyes were part of the class. They were constrained to give my boss’ constipated performance a mandatory standing ovation outside because there weren’t enough seats inside to accommodate them.
Those kids had it good actually. The kids at the back of the class had to risk their limbs performing a delicate balancing act on chairs that looked like they were held together by safety pins. Some chairs had no back rests, arm rests or had gaping holes on the seats like toilet bowls.
More than a decade after witnessing that state of calamity, I wonder how modern Philippine classrooms are doing. Based on news reports, there have been changes. Here are just some of the improvements that support better learning:
President Aquino is eager to add two more years to the high school level. It’ll be interesting to see how/where else students can hold classes. Well the trees are still unoccupied.
My trip to the Cebu Blog Camp 2011 gave me the chance to stretch my limbs and introduce some movement into the rippling folds of fat I’ve accumulated through my stationary work situation. What did I think of it (the camp, not the exercise)? Was it worth the monumental effort of using a crowbar to pry my existence from the computer chair?
The Sugbuanons did not fall below expectations. They delivered exactly what they promised. There was little room for drastic last minute program digressions that would have made visiting bloggers appear polite and pleasant only to leave trails of virtual discontent.
When they said they’d offer insights into photography and travel for bloggers, they did just that. By the end of the day, I was again entertaining the grand delusion that I could ride a bus into the sunset to the distress of my paranoid blood relations, discover hidden retreats where there are no Jollibee outlets, learn to ask “Where is the toilet?” in 101 dialects and add my voice into the teeming mix of Filipino travel bloggers.
I must say though that I did entertain other hopes (a.k.a. ulterior motives) when I attended the camp. Since I work for a foreign internet-based company, I needed to find out if any of the speakers would mention the words internet marketing in the same sentence.
In the various blogging events I’ve attended, the Filipino bloggers I’d met were schooled in the belief that one should blog just because of one’s passions and interests. I’ve never attended an event in Vis-Min that taught bloggers to treat blogging as a real world business. That sometimes makes me think real Filipino internet marketers prefer to stay under the woodwork where they can secretly burp to the tune of five figure dollar incomes, away from the all seeing eye of the internet’s version of Big Brother.
Is internet marketing (IM) a forbidden topic in blogging events? Is IM the equivalent of horror stories told around campfires? No one really wants to hear them and have nightmares of Big Brother taking away blog page ranks and contextual advertising accounts.
The last two speakers, Coy Caballes and Reuben Licera, social media management experts, came closest to approaching the topic that must not be named. Licera in particular was perhaps the father I never knew and would have given me the right guidance to taking baby steps in the traffic laden streets of Facebook, where crazy virtual drivers on steroids can run you over and cause death by social media, if he had more time.
By the end of the day, I could not resist the itch to ask why no one had yet said anything about future plans of teaching Pinoy bloggers IM that I made an effort to overcome my fear of men in shades and approached Philippine Blog Awards top man Juned Sonido to ask. He said plans for IM seminars might be in the works and that they have not consciously been avoiding the niche at all.
For the record, there are ethical ways of marketing online so future blog campers perhaps do not need to fear getting raided and rounded by Big Brother’s agents in ninja suites. I’m looking forward to those seminars Mr. Sonido.
My six-year old kid has developed a liking for a tween-oriented Sunday show. When I’m not snoring away to recuperate from my endless quest for financial survival (if that quest were equivalent to physical exercise, I’d have washboard abs), I get to watch snippets of the show with her.
It’s a lot like watching a visual scientific exposition of the life, death and multiplication of acne. Every forehead and cheek shot is an insight into the oily bane of adolescents. Other than that, I didn’t think the show had any more biology lessons to teach my daughter.
Yesterday, she asked me if the cute pockets of acne in her favorite show were boyfriends and girlfriends. I missed a beat.
It’s not just the show that taught her the concept of romantic relationships. In our neighborhood, adults already have “pairs” in mind for their kids. In fact, my 2nd child, who still has more gum than teeth, already has his pair. In school, the more astute little kids, just a year out of their diapers and now missing front teeth, already steal kisses.
They start so early.
I never like lying to my girl. When she asks sensitive questions, I like to stick as close to the truth as possible. Of course, I still really wish she’d just ask me about the life cycle of Propionibacterium acnes.
Malls are marvelous inventions of modern society. They’re like the Swiss Army knives of life. You can do almost anything in a mall— shop, eat, work, take a nap while sitting through two hours of Richard Guttierez’s stoned/stony/stone age movie acting. Despite initial objections, Catholics can now also pray in malls in the midst of worldly allures.
One of the more recent additions to mall services are play areas. Now you can drop your kids like bags in a baggage counter and claim them with a numbered card after an hour of shopping. I do that all the time. After all, I only have two arms and two lungs, not enough to lift 30 kilos worth of kids through endless aisles of merchandise.
The all in one play areas are the best options to deposit little people with short attention spans because these places have varieties of diversions to choose from. Specialty play pens with shorter play minutes have been offering good competition though. These are perfect pit stops for parents who just need to make a trip to the loo.
One of the more popular specialty play areas here offers stuffed horseback rides. This one I find a little disturbing. Just like I’ve never really warmed up to masses in malls, there’s just something odd about fake animals in malls.
I’m not over analyzing this. It just feels weird. I was lucky enough to have ridden a real horse as a child. I’m not sure if my kids will ever be able to ride more than stuffed animals. That’s sad.
Some people set a thin line between vanity and good grooming. For example, I’ve been given the advice that before applying for a job, one must pluck one’s eyebrows and apply makeup because these are components of good grooming. That’s news to me. I grew up in an environment where anything beyond washing one’s face was considered vain. Yeah, for the nth time, I had lots of nuns in my BFF list.
I still don’t “groom” myself very well despite the good advice of other friends who don’t hang out in cloisters. The last time I put on makeup was five years ago when co-workers convinced me that the only way for customers to take me seriously was if I painted my face.
I’ve also aggressively refused to pluck my brows. The clerk I was with yesterday convinced me that I made the right decision. Whoever “groomed” her gave her a perpetually surprised look. She probably realized the magnitude of the disastrous grooming session and decided to grow out the plucked parts so now she has something akin to stubble on the wrong part of her face.
I must admit, it was a lot easier not to care about my looks when I was younger. Seventeen years of lack of sleep, lack of exercise, and regular McDonalds fixes have joined forces to ruin my skin quality and create dark continents under my eyes.
The dark circles around my eyes are the hardest to ignore. They’re like the hole in the ozone layer. They grow larger every year. Fellow online workers who share the same look are considering putting up a Panda Look-Alike Society. Why pandas and not raccoons? Because we now also have the girth to match pandas, thanks to our bad eating habits and sedentary work.
A few weeks ago I thought I found the solution to the negative evolution of my facial looks. I bought a product that promised to take care of the 7 signs of skin aging in just 7 days. The product ad said nothing about doing cartwheels or replacing my daily diet with generous helpings of grass so in the guise of scientific testing, I gave in to my sudden attack of vanity and bought it. Seven days later, I looked like I aged 7 days.
Perhaps the product only works for folks who don’t get exposed to the sun, who sleep 15 hours a day and who thrive on wheat sticks. For the rest of us regular folks we only have three choices to look good: pluck eyebrows and put on makeup; live healthy lifestyles and look for golden flowers to sing to like Mother Gothel.
I still refuse to pluck my eyebrows so I’ll try exercise next week.