China Crisis

No this is not an 80's pop music group. And no, it's not in reference to the latest Melamine scandal either. It's not even about Mussolini not getting her visa for Beijing fall 2008.

This is about my own crisis with Chinabank and the 1st company I've ever worked for, PeopleSupport, Inc. You see, when I left that company in 2003, I returned all the necessary training materials and confidential chuva with the HR. I retained my ATM card and kept using it during my whole stint as an unemployed and disgruntled, deeply depressed and overweight pre-nursing student. I've held on to that ATM card even after I quit nursing school and started working for another company in 2005. Somewhere during that time, I stopped withdrawing or depositing money in it so it came as a suprise when, around August 2008, I discovered my account had been disabled. I called up and feigned fever one day just to visit the main branch and have my account cut off once and for all.

China was pretty busy with the olympics back then and so I guess there wasn't any room for accommodating me. The accounts clerk was nice and had arranged all the necessary papers for me to sign. I surrendered my tattered ATM card and waited for them to give me my money. The finance people from PeopleSupport had told them I didn't finish my clearance and that my no longer have my records. It was fine really coz I'm a very patient person.

I went to PeopleSupport the same day and tried to have them find my records. I saw a handful of people I remember working with, but didn't bother saying hello. (Haller, we weren't close then!) The receptionist had me use the lobby phone to contact the finance department. The phone just kept ringing and ringing for about 30 minutes, and I'd call again and look for different people to call from that department (they had an electronic listing) until someone had answered.

The finance person told me to wait for the HR manager for clearance because he couldn't find my records there. After all, I resigned in 2003 when they were still in PhilamLife Tower. Now they have their own building. But really, nothing's changed. I had to wait for the HR manager to come in at 10:00pm to talk to her.

FoBlogger and I ate dinner at Jollibee and then hung out at Coffee Bean, took some pictures and just talked. At 10pm, we went back to PeopleSupport. I talked to the HR person and she told me she couldn't find any records either and that she would refer my case to the finance department again. I asked her to email or contact me.

A week had passed so I decided to email her. Another passed and I spammed her with my inquiry. It appears she had an emergency CTO so, ok I understand. She told me I would really need to contact finance because they're the only ones with hard copies of all financial records. I called finance again and got transferred to Admin because Admin takes care of Chinabank account applications and such. The Admin gay told me they don't handle that but that I should go visit their corporate finance office in another building so that they'd be able to find my records.

Frustrated, (and busy with other stuff too because I have a life) I tried calling Chinabank to ask if I can just get my atm back and withdraw the money that's left (which isn't much, however I desperately need the cash) and the snotty b*tch told me they can't do anything and that it's impossible for finance not to have a copy of my records and that I should definitely clear things up with PeopleSupport first. The runaround.

My past comes to haunt me; an old ghost with a strip of paper posted on its forehead that states,

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"Over my dead body!"

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Heart Attack

I was doing a run through of ads for November and found I double-booked the same ad with different names. I almost had a heart attack. Thank god I was still allowed to have it cancelled at the last minute.

My life flashed before my eyes -- in full-color, double page spread.

Phantom Burns

"All things in life are temporary. If they're going well, enjoy them. They won't last forever. If they go wrong, don't worry. They can't last long either! What's nice about life is that each day is never like the other. Life is beautiful, so bask in it!"

-- the forwarded message my father sent me just now

I had a good night's sleep yesterday nestled in love's embrace and sung to sleep by the sound of rain. And deep in my subconscious recesses, my mind managed to work up another dream, two dreams in fact, to which I'd been left baffled yet again not knowing what the message would've meant.

All I can remember is that the gas tank had caught fire -- a constant, glowing yellow-blue flame. I told crumpet about it so we tried to exhume it (recalling in my mind, the horror story about their uncle(†) whose face and body got severely burned one stormy night when the floods invaded their home and the gas tank floated and caught fire. He successfully turned the knob off with a wet towel but had to sacrifice himself to do so) and hoped crumpet wouldn't suffer the same fate as their uncle.

Crumpet's shirt caught fire. I was horrified, but somehow, we were able to blow out the nasty flames and everything was ok.

The weirdest thing, our cleaning lady was there too. Aling Diling's shirt and shorts caught fire too and she went into a frenzy trying to dowse off something that could've killed her. I think I was able to throw water on her, and everything was all right again. But what does it mean for the two of them to get burned? What is my mind trying to tell me?

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The next dream I had when I woke up at 4am looking for my blanket. The wind was chilly and the electric fan had been blowing on my face. After I found my blanket, I fell asleep again ...

Crumpet and I were in another Asian country, which resembled Kuala Lumpur a lot, and we were sightseeing and doing all the touristy stuff. I don't remember much of it, except that we stopped to stare at one of the ongoing developments there. It was a huge construction site with steamrollers and tractors digging earth and displacing everything en-site. They said it was going to be the biggest mall complex ever -- mall with a sprawling hectare of greens, a luxurious spa, an olympic-size swimming pool with jacuzzis, and a shopping center that would outdo anything we'd seen so far. Imagine: Buckingham Palace Shopping Center or Le Palais Commerciale de Versailles or Beijing Bird's Nest Olympic Commemorative Commercial Complex.

And when I woke up, it was time to go to work.

Fish out of water

Sometimes you feel it's on the palm of your hand and sometimes you don't. And sometimes you feel like a fish out of water, a total misfit who will forever not know why a bunch of percentages marqueeing across the screen are so interesting or why a crash should not cause panic or why without the necessary knowledge about grown-up stuff, you would be the kid your parents set aside in an adult conversation. You are confused with the paradoxes that surround aging and youthfulness, the need for survival, the need to be acknowledged ...

Perhaps you can only talk about trees and the sound of the breeze. Perhaps you can only talk about music and things that pertain to art and drawings. When the magazine spreads it's pages, you check out the ads for gross airbrushing, editorial typos, products that are just beyond affordability. You can't comprehend this.

Perhaps you can only talk about yourself, your experiences with other friends, your secrets and enchantments, your neuroses. Because the moment you so much as whine, you become the child your parents set aside. And so they ask you to draw in one corner. You keep drawing and drawing and drawing -- different colors and shapes appear, the brilliance of its vast emptiness becomes transparent only to you, and you call it inspiration while others ignore it. You keep drawing lines that divide chapters into acts, lines that divide the world into meridians, lines that make up people watching out for the next discovery. You draw out the oceans and lands and mountains. You draw out water, you draw out blood.

You can't follow the story anymore. You draw the heavens and the people who no longer fly in it.

Buttered or Jammed?

I couldn't sleep last night. I dunno why. What I do know is that I'm addicted to procrastination. I wait for the deadlines, I wait for the last minutes, I wait for food to rot, I wait just long enough to lose something.

Would I lose ... my mind?

I dreamt this morning that I was back in my hometown in Baguio and I was a kid again. I was walking through the garden and I saw a large green lizard, the size of a common street dog. It actually looked more like a giant gecko than anything else. For some reason, I found that I was disguised in leaves, and that particularly attracted the lizard to follow me. It felt uncomfortable so I began to run toward our bungalow. I was able to lock the doors just in time before the gecko sprung on the window to try to catch up with me. In my fear, I ran inside the bedroom to hide, locked the door adjacent to the living room. From the inside, I then heard the lizard broke the window and tore down the thin screen.

Then I woke up.

How does a flour pot fit into a mold? Cookie-cutters everywhere, tis the season for gingerbread men; can't seem to go rolling with the pin. How does one make dough rise without yeast, will a baguette grow long without shortening? What does one do with egg whites when there's no "yoke," can there be too much icing on a cake if you can't put candy flowers?

A watched pot never boils, kneaded dough become dinner rolls.

I don't wanna end up toast.