Organizational Announcement

Please join me in the following congratulatory announcement:

Jairus Jason

From ______ to ______

Here’s to a job where you can expect nothing but the worst. Organizational announcements sound just like obituaries.

I now have a monthly income (in thousand-pesos) that’s more than the number of years I’ve spent on earth. I wouldn’t deny that I was proud and even happy. Until you entertain the idea of how you’ve been swallowed into a cycle. First, you were just pretending at work. You master the subtle practice of being impossibly polite, peppering everyone with empty praises, inserting buzz words into your sentences, patronization, managing perception, and mindless productivity. Sometimes you stand out with a bright idea. And when you begin to earn a little, you pretend, eventually becoming forcefully sincere about answering to life’s questions with clichés and corporate canned responses since you can’t risk de-motivating others. When you realize you’re falling into the traps you’ve avoided all your life, you hope your choices and actions lead you to something more genuine and meaningful. You sought the alternatives but you’re hooked with pride. And as work wears you down, you begin to accept who you are. You fearfully grow comfortable with who you’ve become. Lastly, you still feel a lamentable lack of money, and might end up wanting more.

Congratulations, Jairus. You Drama-King you.

Starting Right

Why was there an enormous scarcity of journal entries last 2006? When our corporations pressure us to put an explanation in position, we do a deep dive, pointless blame-storming, and optimistic strategizing.

And of course, we think in bullets. To return to the original question:

• My life has been embarrassingly humdrum
• I have failed to capture the poise, specify the uniqueness, the silent clarity, and the engaging experiences of everyday.
• I was counting on converting what I thought were remarkably written emails, but they turned out to be too businesslike, witless, if often too utterly senseless to commit to this form of documentation.
• I was busy doing something else, and I didn’t find time to write because I chose not to. Because I thought my life only as interesting and recurring as a blur, and it had a slight chance of being well written and well expressed.
• And because I didn’t live up to myself.

There’s also no effective explanation, no scientifically satisfying reason why I suddenly had a non-specific viral exanthema (probably German Measles) this January 1, 2007. And so we turn to the metaphorical outlook: fate wanted me to isolate myself, my body needed its rest, my mind/spirit required replenishment. After the December 31 revelry with wine, fish fillet, salad and grilled chicken, there was fever, joint pains, tiny red dots and rashes all over my skin.

My body begins the New Year with a big, red bang.

The doctor ordered my isolation and I fell in love with it. I rediscovered how I had it in me – the rare power not to need other people and close up my world. Except that I needed D. to come visit. I got a chance to listen to over 10GB worth of music, finished two or three books and stayed in the room all day.


Starting Right. I started with the Death of Ivan Illyich this morning and should be finished this afternoon. It was perfect with sodium-rich imported corned beef, white bread, strong coffee, and classical music.

The new translation makes it an easy, excellent read. The more adjusted, contemporary language made it easier to relate to being a yuppie in 1880 Petersburg. It just fits the exact profile: the selfish pursuit of money and pleasure, careers, promotions, vices, climbing the social ladder and commingling with the people who are exactly like you, who live like you. Finally, there’s dying a well-deserved, ugly death that is inconvenient. And when you’ve lived like that, the secret source of joy of those closest to you – is that you’re dead.


Dying is practically how I felt when I arrived at the inexorable conclusion - I had to go back to work. Goodbye music (Recently added: WDOUJI’s Zen and the art of Dressmaking – courtesy of D., a lot of Miles Davis and John Coltrane downloads – courtesy of Limewire, the new Dashboard Confessional album – bought from UM, and a Classical Compilation – bought from the Music One in Greenbelt). Listening to the seven angels sounding the trumpets of the apocalypse: that’s how awful work sounds.

Now here’s another so-called metaphorical outlook: I’m no longer physically sick, just lazy.



But I still want to begin this year with a restated absurd hope: maybe it wouldn’t be that bad.



Incidentally, “maybe it wouldn’t be that bad” and the whole business of being unexcited about what to expect in life was along the lines of a thought in Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night A Traveler:

“You’re the sort of person who, on principle, no longer expects anything of anything. There are plenty, younger than you or less young, who live in the expectation of extraordinary experiences: from books, from people, from journeys, from events, from what tomorrow has in store. But not you. You know that the best you can expect is to avoid the worst.”