Deep Thoughts

Not that I am capable of any right now.

And oh, Eid Mubarak! Today is a holiday, and yet I am working. Well, for the simple reason work gives me a chance to be on the Net for free. Also, lazing at home is just as wonderful as watching paint dry.

I noticed that the hardest, most boring work is also the most numerous. I am currently compiling the results of our Employee Opinion Survey. I don't have to be a seer to know that the bulk of comments would be focused on salaries and bonuses. No doubt about it, you'll hear it most everywhere. There's never enough for anyone. Not that our company is particularly generous. I'd say it's on the middling road - not a bad employer, but certainly not one of the best ones.

Sigh, there's only so much one can do.

I have been more observant of my mood swings and that ever-present WORRY of not finding someone is, while always palpable, not altogether bad. It purges me of any lies or any self-deceptions about who I am and what I'm about. Also, it is an amazing goad for me to work harder. If it raises the flag on my need to be more physically fit, well and good, so I can gradually putt all of my motivations into one hole. It's not there yet, but I suspect it would be.

So yada, yada, yada. Life goes on, and nothing is lost. Except that I am a prisoner of time.

I've stopped reading the news lately because the "new" in "news" is ever a tableau of sameness. The more things are changing, the more that they remain the same. I even tried to get into a "fight" with a member from one of the e-forums to which I belong, and somehow, it didn't even feel mildly satisfying. First, the man is completely blinded by his own fanaticism (as if I weren't blinded by my anti-GMA sympathies, hehehe), and second, the argument wasn't that even intellectually challenging.

Go figure - a man complaining about others complaining about something worth complaining, saying an e-forum is not the right forum to rant about the sins of government. Either the man has some loose screws or well, he is an amazing political lapdog. I don't know which is which. Still, as my old English teacher used to say, he is "entitled to his own WRONG opinion."

The apathy among Filipino youth is appalling, on the one hand, while the willingness of my generation to be co-opted by the powers-that-be is even more appalling. I don't know if it's in the genes or enforced social conditioning. I admire those who stay, even more, especially if they are salt-of-the-earth types who soldier on even though things are getting tougher and tougher. Of course the pragmatists often leave, but the worst part is that the best "pragmatists" are part and parcel of the explotiative franchise.

It would be nice really to worry about my own kids, worry about the bills and the tuition, worry about their grades and whether they will succeed, whether they are smoking pot or gambling during their free time, whether my son is a bully or a closet sociopath, whether my daughter is making a reputation as a slut or a bitch, waiting for the time bomb when one of them will nonchalantly announce, "(Blank) and I are going to have a baby." Par for the course, par for the course. There are so many tough things out there, having a gifted and well-adjusted child is almost like a miracle.

The parents I'm with take it all in stride, eventually, though most of the times, the worry can render one to become an emotional train wreck. The only fear I see in their eyes is whether they will outlive their children - no parent should be allowed to bury his or her own child, especially if the death was untimely, or worse, violent in nature. Which is now the case with a dead flower girl in the United States. I only have empathy for her family. It is something I wouldn't want to happen to anyone, even those people I don't really like. No force in all this universe would probably hold back my wrath and revenge if that were to happen to me.

So many lives intertwined and all the life I have to live is mine. It makes excellent food for thought - there is so much in your life that you can't control, forces beyond your ken or even your awareness. But it's the life many are living, and seemingly, for a great number of people I know, they are just throwing away the treasure they hold for the illusion of something more. Rushing for the next BIG THING, the next social event, the next big promotion.

Alas, no matter hex-signs or crosses or genuflections I will do to ward off that impending fate, it seems so much, so much harder to avoid.