"Drill, drill!"

I missed out on posting here for around a week. The reason behind that is pretty plain: nothing much happening in my domestic life for now.

Life's pretty much settled into a routine. Now routine doesn't mean monotonous though. I'm still going through several stages of upheaval. Work at the new company started today, and lunch break was delayed a bit, so I'm here posting away. Other changes in my domestic life include, calculations for savings, plans for living come end of apartment contract, and the required previous occupation clearances.

The Fairview slice of life's pretty much the same. The only major change I could think of is the fact that Noah can now inch himself off his pillow - much to the delight of his older family members. Oh, that and the fact that we're pretty much surprised by the realization that my driver's license hasn't expired yet.

That's that. Back to work. Back to driving practice. Back to drilling. Will my drill be the "drill that will pierce the heavens?" With enough work, who knows.

"What do you stand to loose?"

Nothing apparently.

Basically, I've been doing some math and the budget that we've got for the rest of the year can't be supported by the salary that one gets by working as a subtitler for a post-production company.

So what's one do do?

What else, walk into random buildings in Makati and apply.

After all, who cares if five companies says "no" to you, as long as one says "yes," right? And so, after 3 hours of waiting around a badly carpeted lobby, and about 40 minutes of walking up and down Buendia, I'm now a supposed employee of another BPO company.

They pay well. Can you blame me?

I'm not saying that we couldn't have lived of my previous salary. It's just that I've been a drain on my parents finances since I've been asking for support since the robbery. Also, we want to have some savings on us.

We're going to be moving into the newly-upgraded Fairview household come the end of our appartment's contract. So I want to move in with something significant to contribute.

That, and God willing, a new handheld/PC/laptop by the end of the year.

"There's no place like home..."

I was watching an episode of CSI the other night.

It was that episode in season 7 where a man mistook a house for his home. He was confronted by the actual residents when he tried to enter his supposed "house." In his confussion -- and he didn't have much of a mental state to begin with -- he ended up executing the residents of the house.

I've been spending a whole lot of time away from home lately. Home, mind you, not house. There's a difference.

I wonder if there will come a time when I walk home and open the gate and I'll be surprised by the presence of people I barely know; confronted by scared people who have nothing else but their own security as their highest priority.

In the show, a notebook of the psycho was found. In it were scriblings that said, "There's no place like home." It said that Bart Simpson style, over and over again, up to the very last page. I wonder if my similar planned repetition would prove to be a good profolactic measure.

Well it should be, right? Familiarity and consistency are the best mortar to build bridges with after all.

Enough blathering, back to business.

"...Round and round, like a hamster in a cage."

"Hey, look world, I'm no longer a mall-loving thirty something oddball. I'm a health-buff! Plus, what I'm doing isn't just healthy, it's AN ART!"

Why is it that I find mall walking particularly disturbing? Is it because it feels like an odd post yuppie, semi-hippie, gen-x justification for being a mallrat?

I'm thinking it's probably because I listened to too much Carlin in my youth.

Of course, the wikipedia entry I just linked to isn't the worst of it. Try googling up all the mall walking associations that have sprouted up. Trust me, you'll feel a shiver up your spine.

Here's what's truly grotesque about it: in the aforementioned wikipedia entry there's a line under "Advantages to mall owners" that says, "After walking, mall walkers may well stay on and shop the stores or patronize the mall's food court, increasing the traffic in the mall during what would otherwise be the very slow opening hour."

Can you feel the irony? Can you smell the pretension?

After showing off to the world that you're Mr/Ms Healthy, and that you've "burned some calories," you're fully willing to waste all of your hard work walking around the mall by eating fast-food garbage that you'd get at a food court.

What's worse, is that if you're really serious about it, and you're not a pretentious health loving yip, then you aren't really helping the mall out. That's because all you'd be buying from the food court is a small pack of prepackaged fruit salad. That, and imagine how your sweaty, smelly, sweat-sock infused, nasal-aura will affect the other mall patrons?

There are reasons why some people like to eat in a food court during the early morning, and sitting beside a fat sweaty slob in gym shorts isn't one of them.