Shuffling Back and Forth

Of the fine tuning and tweaking my work situation required, more than the people I have to manage and the departmental business units mine has to partner with, or the obligations I have to be accountable for, it’s the proximity of the other site I oversee that I really needed to adjust to. It’s what made me hesitate all this time. A matter of location kept that fast lane to a promotion clogged. I didn’t want to be inconvenienced with driving or commuting to a site that’s not fifteen minutes away from home. I wanted to stay with the familiar laps.

Or perhaps I refused to take up promotions because I didn’t want to be in another rat race. On hindsight, all these refusals of promotions over the years and the career drone of staying in a low-key supervisory level for most of my twenties actually paid off. While still gaining hands-on trade knowledge and deepening my competencies, it also helped me account for all other areas of my life and build a lifestyle that I can maintain. That drone also warded off the stress I could have encountered if pushed myself to be higher up the ladder knowing that I need to muscle my way through. If I did insist on success, or to throw all of myself towards a career, I couldn’t have ended with the life that I cherish now.


I often think that the call-center industry grew too fast. The industry leaders are often all too young, aggressive but inexperienced, and pushed into positions because of need instead of merit. If that happened to me, I know I would expend too early.

Here I am now, at my own, still-peaceful pace. In running terms, I won’t be chasing the Kenyans. Somebody else is going to win this race. The only person I have to win over is myself.

Unlike many other players, I didn’t gamble on going all-in. I guess any idiot could have gone to where I am now given the right persistence. But I saw the danger of letting this job eat me whole (or maybe it has). Whether it’s eaten me or not, this is how I played. I chose what I thought was the right time to put my chips on the table. I say cheers to the others who’ve already grown a more sizeable stack. I’ve lived to enjoy certain comforts and I’m still in the game. In the end, while I don’t have that much, I am grateful for the humility and grace I’ve gathered.

I’m amused with how I make out the humility and grace as part of what drives me in my new position at work. It complements the industriousness I imagine I have. On top of the long 11-12 hours I usually spend working, coming home is now a 2-3 hour commute. I shuffle back and forth the two sites, hurrying to make it in time for the office-provided shuttle on the way, and floating sleepless on the bus or train on the way back.

Humility, grace, strangely, blessedly keeps me on. But ultimately, the truth that makes all these ventures worth taking is coming home. Coming home to D. and Mighty Mighty.

For them I’d shuffle back and forth a thousand times over. For them I’d bleed myself dry.

Ala-"Maxims and Arrows." (Or also, possible tweets)

“If you take one step towards God, he runs to you.” – Pi, p. 61. Suffice it to say, as well, that opium is addictive.


While in transit, or while being shuttled, audio books transport you to somewhere else.


The devil known as dull conformity is often mistaken as righteousness and linear thinking.


Ordinariness is a temptation. As in “The Last Temptation of Christ.”


I may have been at fault in restricting myself to the familiar options and winning my own familiar battles. In truth I caved in to my own fears, or at the very least hid myself in a shell of convenience.


The first few pages of Sabbath's Theater by P. Roth: a more cerebral soft porn.


Process Philosophy. The Law of Transformation. Dr. Manhattan. Heraclitus. Buddhism. Change.


Maybe half or even three quarters of my life is over, who the fuck knows? Thus far, and most especially recently, it’s been a good life. And by all means, I’d repeat every little bit of it. Especially now that I’ve learned to live it with more humility, appreciating the salient details, thankfully receiving what I have as a wonderful blessing, and peacefully settling with what I do not own.


And everything I do now, I can do with so much resilience. And I think all the whining waned. My writing voice sounds calmer.

We Are Almost Standing Up

With having Mighty Mighty, the tides are on tilt to peak at a crest. By now, he’s already turning on his stomach. He’s nearly 7kg strong. I have seen him every day of his life and I see life begin over and over again in him, making me zealously live even more fiercely, repeatedly.

Today, at five months, I saw how on his own legs, in that twist of the literal and the figurative, he tried to stand up.

Pure Incoherence (or, a declogging of the writer’s block)

“Over and over we begin again”
- from Banana Yoshimoto’s Kitchen.

Yes begin with a quote like that.

November is a bundle of new impressions. I recognize some of the new impressions as a logical result of the old or as a result of a process. On the other hand, some of them still bewilder me. Very liberally, these new impressions streamed towards me and the raw simplicity of the experience makes me glad I stopped restricting myself and decided to, in many (albeit conventional) ways, open the doors.

Perhaps it was only D.’s spirit of adventurism that drove me. Perhaps it was her readiness to venture out to unfamiliar territory, to live what I usually just imagine, to let the experience of the world liberally (and as though in a natural control and calculation), beautifully gush forth. Over the five years, I travelled once or twice out of the country and out of the city for work. In both occasions and in all those places, I longed for her. And as I longed for D., I also discovered so much of myself. I figured how I have interpreted and processed the impressions I collected. I wrote the impressions I collected. As I did then, I do now, I write.