someday i will take these flowers to the sky.

Unpublished draft: April 20, 2009

what happens when your clever lines no longer amaze me,
or when familiarity makes your humor seem dull,
when your smile losses its novelty and no longer brightens my day,
when your arrogance no longer impresses or intimidates me,
when there's no electricity in your touch.
when i just go through the motions because, well, that is what i do.

there must be something more than just the convenience of having you around all the time that keeps me from leaving, from giving this all up.
when your cleverness shifts from being thought-provoking to simply being (temper) provoking.
or when i am forced to politely laugh in response to your jokes, because too much togetherness makes it all predictable.
when there's no joy in just being with you.

(when i almost cried listening to Your Universe because i miss feeling that way around you)
when the perceived convenience of having you is already causing too much inconvenience.



and yet not having you is much more terrifying and inconceivable,



then i believe it is love that still keeps me around.

bullish.

I swear, in a few months I’ll be able to do this job as perfectly as though I had been doing it my whole life. Then I’ll quit.

I just cannot do it now when my primary reason would be my incompetence.

i only know two people who took the Bar Exams and both are in the top 10.

... now i am so happy that i didn't pursue this lifelong dream. Else, i could have been the third person i know who took the exam, and i would have flunked it.

it would have been a shame.

at least now, i could still be proud of you Beth and not be so humiliated at the same time, hehe.

wash your hands clean on yourself baby and step down, step down, step down (from your massive ego)

I was hanging out with friends last night in BHS when one friend suddenly asked me what it is exactly that i do in the office, or more particularly if i am the one doing all the clerical work in my office. My time momentarily stopped for 5 seconds - trying to figure out whether to get insulted or not - before i was able to say no, being an analyst does not qualify as a clerical job. Given my friend's propensity for asking naive questions, it should not have come as a surprise at all.

But thinking about it now, i realized that - yes, being new in this kind of job, i really should just be doing clerical work for all the other analysts, for me to have a proper transition and to achieve the normal learning curve needed for me to function effectively in my new job. Heck, at my pace and lack of understanding right now, it would have been a much better idea if they demoted me when they convinced me to cross-post.

The problem is that i have always chosen shortcuts into my career. Yes, it benefited me. But i had readily given up all the learnings that i could have had, had i chosen to follow the normal path. I was a fledgeling when i left SGV because i had been offered a better post and a better salary somewhere else, without considering the fact that i was distorting the statistical average of employees' length of stay in that particular firm. Not that it mattered then, because where i transferred, the job charter and responsibilites were totally different and i was able to effortlessly settle in. I had thought that this would always be the case.

This time though, i had to accept that the graphical representation of my learning progress would follow the normal curve only if i extend tremendous effort. But at my normal pace, it would be flat - which is unacceptable. And the prospect of me excelling in my new job is as bleak as my hopes for a promotion next year.

I wish i had the foresight and patience to waste time learning more during the past two years, even those that i didn't need to use in my job then or stayed longer in external audit for me to have the proficiency at juggling numbers and looking at and analyzing financial statements. Instead of having a crash course on everything, when i should be effectively executing my functions right now. (Instead of having to think about my own incompetence day and night and rattling on about it here).

But in hindsight, maybe i didn't do such a bad job in deciding to fast track my career. I know a lot of people who are still stuck where they were three or four years back, simply because they were too scared to say yes to the challenge of walking out of the unfamiliar and ordinary, because they are too scared to fail.

There, i needed to say all that to get me back into my self-righteousness and arrogance.

stellar.

i have always considered it a bad sign when i start noticing jobstreet and jobsdb alerts from my yahoo mail, even more when i take the time to open the mails before clicking the delete button on my mail page.

and now i am writing about it.

this is bad.

the funny thing is that i've been complaining about my job for as long as i could remember. so when luck pushed me to accept another offer from just within the company, a part of me was relieved that i did not have the chance to make any choices, otherwise, i still would have opted not to leave my then current position.

fast forward to three weeks in my new job, i am now controlling the urge to look back to where i was before, to what i was doing or not doing then, because that would just make it harder for me to accept the way things are right now. I kind of missed not waking up at 6 in the morning though. but this, i think, just take some getting used to. What i am really scared of is my own incompetence. that i might fail the expectations of the ones who got me, the ones who wooed me into joining their group because they thought i was good enough to be with the "stars of the company" - the way they call themselves, that i might disprove the way i see myself.

three weeks and already i am melting beside these so-called stars. i am scared that in a few more days or weeks i'll already lose whatever belief i have of myself, whatever image i have led others to believe of me.

as we stumble and fall and as time breaks and falls, i learn of things both here and beyond me. ...as tomorrow becomes yesterday.

An officemate asked another officemate what he got for his daughter after the company gave out our performance bonuses. The other replied and proceeded with stories of how the shopping spree with his family went on. This led to discussions about how those who have relatively less tend to raise more children and in the process sacrifice the possibility of an improved quality of life had they had fewer children.

I remembered an incident in the taxi bay of Glorietta 4 last Friday. I bought groceries with two of my friends when a girl, around 5 or 6, came up to ask for alms from us. My friend, whose name I won’t mention here for some reason, got some coins from his pocket and gave it to the little girl. He told us that what pisses him off is when a man goes asking for money from people, as a means for living when his body-built shows an obvious ability to do real work. I suggested to my friend the possibility that the father might be just around the corner directing the girl to beg for money. My prophesy came true three minutes later when we saw the girl gave her takings for the day to a man with another child (around 2 or 3 years old) in his arms, following them was a woman (might be the wife) also carrying a child and another one was clinging to the side of her clothing.

It might be self-righteous to take pity and condemn these people at the same time, but that was exactly how I felt then. Later on, while aboard a cab going home, I was contemplating on the unfairness of things – basically how those people are throwing the blame on the financially better offs when they are the ones making their lives miserable. Or of how the lot of us who have been educated with the hazards of overpopulating, carry the burden of limiting our progeny to counterbalance the acts of the irresponsible ones.