There is a lot of work for me to do at school. I have to create designs for the new display boards in school as well as work on the display board for the project competitions as well. I want to push the student news team as soon as possible to get the ball rolling ball rolling but there are problems with the school cameras and scheduling is difficult for the students since they too have little free time. Now I am trying to relax and take it easy cuz my wife will be giving birth soon. I am just counting the days. I hope to get stuff done as quickly as possible before the baby arrives. Else, a lot of work will go unfinished and I will be in deep trouble. I just remembered… thee midterm testpapers are due this week. Sigh.
Moved
Its been a while since I blogged. I decided to move all my posts from wordpress to this new site I setup “limbo.tk.” I wanted to make my own blogsite customizable with its own domain name for blogs and email. I hope this will make me blog more…
Putting the Hua-hin plan in the shelf.
Buddhist belief says that life is full of endless suffering, happiness is only temporary. I am no Buddhist, but I believe that it is true. My plan of going to Hua hin with the family to reward myself for a hard school year, will be set aside for the moment because of this belief. I believe it is a time of suffering. With a lot earthquakes, floods, tsunamis and freakish weather happening (its summer time but it is still freaking cold), I became quite hesitant to go near a large body of water.
Not only that, some unfortunate events happened to friends and family. My best friend Chip’s home burned down. That included their family business and the many many precious stuff he collected through the years like books, magazines and comic books (which I know means a lot to him), and he also got himself hurt from the panic. I feel terrible. Somehow I wish it was easy for me to go back to the PI so I could somehow console him for his pain and loss. My dad’s younger sister, Aunt Fanny, died from cancer just yesterday. I remember her having some kind of malignant tumor couple of years ago that she had an operation done, I was shocked when my brother told me she was celebrating her birthday in advance last week because her life was already near the path of the clearing. Again I feel terrible for not being there for my dad or my cousins. Life is miserable.
So I declare my summer this year, as a period of suffering. My wife isn’t happy about my sudden change of plans but I somehow convinced her with the reason of trying to save money for her delivery, or some rainy day thing. I just wouldn’t feel like enjoying myself in the beach with all the trouble going on in the world today, and the suffering my friend and my family are having right now. It doesn’t feel right. If I still go, I would have this lingering doubt and repugnant taste in my mouth. So I have decided. Now is not a good time for self-indulgence.
I’d rather keep myself busy with the usual stuff for now. Hua hin won’t go anywhere.
Hua hin here we come!
I love this job. My teaching load isn’t heavy, I enjoy doing my work very much and most of all, I get to have a month long PAID summer vacation and 2-week semester break vacation in October, every year. My monthly salary increases 1K yearly plus I have a 3k housing allowance that also increases every 2 years. Sad thing is though, I don’t get to spend all that money by myself. As you know, a married man like me has to hand the money over to my accountant wife so that we spend wisely and set the budget for necessary stuff for our kid and our future. I’m not complaining. I’m not even going over on the details why. Let’s just say it is part of the commitment I made. Sacrifices must be made. I am no longer a bachelor. Sometimes I wish I was, but I should face reality.
Anyway, we initially planned to visit the PI for the summer break, but due to my wife’s pregnancy complications, she is not allowed to go in any form of aviation. So we pushed our plans to that maybe by October in our 2 week break. So what shall we do for our month long vacation? Stay at home? No f**king way! Summer days are too hot here in Mahasarakham and the town gets boring because all the college kids are away. So we plan to go to the beach!
So where to anyway? Pattaya is crowded and full of whores, so a family vacation there is out of the question. Chonburi is someplace we don’t know and not really sure of… Hua hin, been there and it seems really nice, and my wife wants to go there badly. So Huahin we will go.
Checking my directions in Google maps, it looks like a 9-10 hour drive from this town to that part of Thailand. 672 kilometers from our house to the hotel. Sounds like fun! Sunny will be going out for a long drive again. I just hope I don’t carry a lot of baggage or else gas will be too expensive. I estimate around 5k of gas for the whole trip. Pretty decent. Time for a tan!
Tromols
Last night, my good friend Alfie posted a lot of photos in Facebook, and all these photos were of my old gang back in my teens. Our faces looked different. Younger, innocent (probably) and full of energy. The photos were memories of days before our bellies start growing bigger, before wrinkles started forming on our faces. Life was less complicated then. “Tromols” was the name of our group. We didn’t come up with it intentionally, a classmate back in DWU high, Wabert Garcia, coined the term as the name of our group. It was derived from the phrase “State of Turmoil” which was the name of a band me and Jeffrey was in. The other guys of Tromols were actually in another band called Feedback. I remember leaving Feedback and joining State of Turmoil because, Jean Paul started learning the guitar and he was getting better than me. Well he eventually did up till now. I got so childishly jealous of being demoted to rhythms so I joined State of Turmoil and we would play Ehead songs as covers. I was so into the band that I even managed to stage a mini-concert for our band in Abuyog with little funds and little help. I made a lot of trips back and forth to Abuyog, and Chip came along a couple times. Even now, I can’t imagine how I was able to put it together.
So our group, the “Tromols,” had lots of fun back then. We would always go to Alfie’s place (cuz he wasn’t permitted to go out sometimes hehe) and hang out, play Playstation, watch movies, play with water bombs, and other silly stuff I can’t remember. There was always food at Alfie’s place. Sometimes, we would be at Jean Paul’s place too when we wanted to jam. I eventually left the State of Turmoil because after the mini-concert stint, the other guys began to have other things to do. So rejoined Feedback and the rest of the Tromols as bassist. We had great fun.
some people’s TV
In February 1986 I was 6 years old. I was totally oblivious to what was happening in our country then, especially since I lived in a small city in the province. My parents were probably paranoid on what was going on especially since our family were known supporters of Marcos. I remember seeing those black and white photo albums in the big old house with pictures of my grandma and Imelda, along with other friends in happier days of the ’60s. I was told that my grandma was once Imelda’s music teacher in Holy Infant College. My grandparents were close friends with one of Imelda’s brothers, Kokoy, who was then the governor in our province.
When the Edsa revolt happened in Manila, I was minding my own business as 6 year old, playing with my brothers inside the household. We grew up in a big old house with our grandparents and we were sort of well off then. I’m not sure what day it was but sometime before or after Marcos fled the country, a strange thing occurred in our big old house. There was a huge truck that arrived and a group of people started unloading a lot of stuff and putting it inside our house. I thought we had won the sweepstakes or we got a hell lot richer because these stuff that they unloaded were expensive. A really huge TV set, a grandfather clock a lot of other expensive appliances and furniture that I didn’t really pay attention to because a kid my age then would be more interested in the giant TV. Among the things that arrived were huge locked suitcases that were to be kept hidden in a locked room. My brothers and I were fascinated with the sudden influx of stuff in our home. We were very happy to see the giant TV. I guessed it had a 50-inch screen and it was from the USA. It was the 80’s and if you had a TV that big in the small city I lived in, you were awfully rich. For some reason, I began to learn that the stuff wasn’t really ours because our household help told us not to touch it or even plug the big TV in. The stuff were not to be touched as per our Grandfather’s orders. He arrived from his work as a RTC judge in Baybay, and he was not happy to see all those new things in our big house. A few days later, a truck came by again and a group of people took the stuff that was not really ours.
Years later, I found out that those things belonged to one of Imelda’s siblings who was fleeing as well, and they wanted to prevent their stuff from being sequestered by the newly formed government. My grandpa ordered to have those things removed because they put it in our home without his permission. I guess he didn’t want our family to be included in the mess that was going on. My dad laments that he should have kept one of the big suitcases for it could have been full of money.
My brothers and I weren’t disappointed with the loss of the huge TV, because a few years later after that incident, our grandpa bought a new Sony TV, but only 27 inches, imported from another country because it had a 110v only power input. But it was big enough for us, and we watched a lot of great movies in it like James Bond movies and Cannonball Run. That TV lasted more than a decade, for the last time I saw it on was in 2004. It stopped a couple years later when my brother Dane plugged it in a 220v socket.
the green buggy
My bestfriend Chip recently is into the pay-per-click business. He has a lot of blogs that has a lot of ads. And the design of his blogs are a mess. While going through his blogs, I found out that he bought a new beetle… well not new, actually pre-loved, with lots of ravage. It was an old piece of junk a year older than me that was slowly decaying with rust. Chip loves beetles. I kinda wanted to have one too. But I decided to get a pre-loved 97 nissan, that I love because it is fast and furiously nice to drive. Thailand is country with lots of highways, I can go beyond 120 kph with my nissan.
Going back to Chip, one of the photos he posted along with his newly acquired beetle, was a photo of the “Green Buggy.” It was Chip’s old beetle that he drove back in Tacloban. I remember when we were in high school, I used to creep out of the old big house at night and Chip would arrive in front of our gates and we would go for a ride from midnight to the wee hours of the early morning. Funny thing was, Chip and I didn’t know how to work the green buggy’s gears, we had a hard time putting the car in reverse. So the only thing we could do is to drive as far as Tolosa where we could make an easy U-turn in front of lonely rice mill. If we were stuck in a dead end, Chip would as me to push the damn thing so we could go around. It was crazy fun. With a lot of those escapades going almost every other night, I was finally caught when my mom discovered I wasn’t in my room one night. As I returned that night, I saw she posted a note on my bedroom door telling me how bad a son I was for giving her a worried headache. The next day when I asked my hungovered dad for an allowance, he punched me in the gut for my misbehaviour. But that didn’t stop me from doing those silly escapades with Chip and his Green Buggy at night.
Now I see Chip in a photo with his new beetle, he had it fixed and repainted and it looks snazzy cool. But it’s not green as the legendary Green Buggy. When I get back to the PI, will we have a round of those silly driving escapades in Manila? Maybe. I terribly miss his company. I just hope he won’t ask me to get off and push it. He should learn how to work the reverse gear on that by now.
Inconsistent blogger.
I am a lazy sonuvabitch. Sometimes I remember to keep blogging something here and because of laziness, I always forget. Jeez. I really want to blog more so I won’t lose track of whats going on in my life. For some reason, I’ve been forgetting a lot of things like people I used to know. I can’t even remember the name of one of my ex-girlfriends.
Anyway, here’s whats going on: As you know my wife is pregnant, and her pregnancy is kinda at risk if she travels a lot. So that means, we’re not going back to the PI for vacation this summer. Classes ended for this schoolyear and I’m done proctoring the tests for my beloved homeroom class. They are a noisy bunch of cheaters but I love ’em anyway. I have finished the 2554 newsletter too, and currently waiting for it to be published. Thank God, I think my boss isn’t interested in publishing a yearbook, else.. I’ll be gnashing my teeth on deadlines. I won’t have a lot to do this summer break, except for the usual school books for next school year. What I really wanna do now is start working on the grades, but for some reason I feel so lazy now that I’ll be working on it a couple of days before the deadline, which is on the 11th. For now, I’m in “relax mode” and thinking of what to write in this stupid blog.
Who I am today.
Today I started this new blog in WordPress. I was thinking of setting up my own blogsite with a WordPress CMS installation but I became too lazy. And maybe I’ll just do that some other time. So let me write something about myself that will describe who I am today.
Today I am 31 years old, married, working as an Art teacher in a small town in the kingdom of Thailand. I wasn’t born here. I was born in the Philippines, in a small city which I miss so badly.
I love my job as a teacher. Before I used to loathe this profession because my parents and grandparents taught and I wanted to get a more high paying career.
My wife and I have a pretty daughter and we live in a small apartment in this small town in the province. Life here is sweet and simple. I have pretty much everything I need.
Hello.
Blogging used to be my thing years ago until my life became too busy. A lot of things, good and bad, started happening and made me lose track of time for blogging and cause me to have some kind of writer’s bloc. Evidently, my life has changed for the better. When I started blogging, most of my articles were made out of desperation, loneliness or some kind of depression. I realized that I did not really have a life then. I realize that I have a life now.
Should I forget my past? No. Even though I feel happy now (kinda), I oftentimes ponder how I made it this far. Which included constant reminiscing on the past. I feel kinda old. I am 31 already, and it seems like I wasted a lot of time in my life and haven’t really achieved a lot. But then again, I have a life.
And I am happy for it.
So ladies and gentlemen, I present to you my blog entitled, “the blog.” I am quite sorry for I couldn’t think of a really interesting name for my blog because there’s really nothing interesting about me at all. But in case that you do find my entries quite interesting, I must commend you… for you are someone who understands me better than I do.
I hope you enjoy it.