"Why is the word ambulance..."

"...written backwards on the front of an ambulance?"

I found it extremeley amusing the other day that on the TV trivia show I was watching, so many were asked the aforementioned question and so little managed to come up with a decent answer.

Yes, I have pathetic means of self-entertainment these days. A crammed product training period does that to you. The spare time I've got, I've been spending it on sleep, or food, or even more sleep. I'm pretty thankful though that the spare time I have is still a gigantic sum compared to the amount of spare time that everyone else my age has.

I think it has more to do with my body clock adjusting to my new schedule than the amount of hours I have away from work. I did after all come from a regular 9-5 position.

Speaking of my body, I currently feel gravely ill. Since around 1am this morning, while I was listening to sample calls and making notations on our tools for my assigned account mentor, I've been getting the uncomfortable urge to vomit. My eyes feel like they're on fire, my joints ache, and whenever I squeeze my joints or flex my limbs I could swear there's some form of battery acid in there eating away at my cartillage.

Not that I've been comfortable with my body when I was feeling healthy several days ago. The short of the long of it is this: I'm getting fat.

I could feel my double chin pressing down on my larynx even if I'm not pushing my chin against my colar bone. My face is several milimeters wider than it was 4 months ago. I 4-story-climb up a flight of stairs is enough to knock the wind out of me. My pants still fit me, but the tire around my waste is starting to spill over my beltline.

Thank God the fat hasn't moved to the area near my bladder, otherwise, I'd have to buy several new pairs of pants.

I'm ill, I'm fat, and I'm draining by the requirements of my new occupation... isn't there a trivia show on some channel that gives you the solution to this?

"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.

"Politicians are like diapers."

"They should be changed frequently, and for the same reasons."

I can afford two posts today. This is due to the fact that I'm currently at a location where the connection is virtually free, and the access isn't restricted by workload that is under a tight deadline.

Anyhow, the quote above is from this movie that had Robin Williams play a comedian named Tom Dobb - a comedian that ran for the position of president of the United States of America.

As you can obviously tell by now, the movie struck a chord with me. Maybe, because of its similarities with Stephen Colbert's satirical campaign, and my devious wishes that it was something a little more than a lampooning.

However, in retrospect, I think the fascination on my part is mostly due to the ability of William's character, Tom Dobb, to walk away from something without fear. Sure of himself and his detour, as long as his previous direction went against things, concepts, and values he held dear.

He said it all so concisely and more effectively in a different scene in the movie. Unfortunately, I can't quite quote it exactly at the moment. The verbage elludes me. So pardon me for my pathetic attempt at paraphrasing it.

He said, in essence, that jokes loose their meaning if you run fake laughter over it.

Upon hearing that from him, I sat, I thought, I drank my glass of water, and I smiled. Now that's entertainment.

"For everything else..."

Formula for bout of depression and loss of faith in humanity: watch The Future of Food, Robert Newman's A History of Oil, and Idiocracy in succession. Yes, at times I find myself with time by which I can do stupid things to my psyche.

Formula for dose of pure, spasmic joy: carry 5 week-old nephew in arms until he falls asleep. Mastercard got that advertisement of theirs dead-on. Some things/moments are priceless.

Good night little monkey. May you not grow feathers.