'if, for example,' i said to alvin out of the blue a couple of weeks ago, 'some drug addict suddenly attacks u on the street, do you think you could beat him up?'

'what?' he asked, startled.

'you know what,' i continued thoughtfully, 'i don't think you can. i think you're kind of a wimp. you know those guys in movies who you take one look at and automatically think, "ooh, he's gonna get beaten up!"?'

now, what i actually meant when i said that he was a wimp was that he was too gentle and level headed to engage in such barbaric behavior. i think i didn't phrase that thought well enough though because alvin spent the next couple of days sulking and feeling insulted.

of course, by then no amount of explanation could convince him that for me, his 'wimp-iness' is, in fact, a *good* thing and that i actually *like* those sweet, make-believe men who get beaten to a bloody pulp.

two years ago, when lolit was trying to explain the universe's logic of finding and falling in love with the someone my will-be present self needs, i listened but didn't really believe in the chances of it happening. i was eyebrow-deep in grief and wallowing with all my strength.

ten months later i met alvin.

five months later we became a couple.

i think i was smitten from the very first group dinner, a night when relationships were the farthest thing from my mind; i was simultaneously recovering from a long-term relationship that ended abruptly and smarting from a short-lived love affair and had declared myself closed for renovations. yes, it was probably that, i was caught unaware and with all walls down.

alvin is an easy person to love. he puts up with my every-other-week mid-life crisis, he watches whatever movie i want to watch, he listens when i rant. also, he cooks(!) and has saved me from starvation countless times.

sadly, he has drawn the line at letting me call him binny in public.

ours is an easygoing relationship. we talk, we tease, we laugh. when bored, i hit him and he lets me.

i think the fact that we've both had long-term relationships in the past and that we've both known pain, albeit different kinds, play a big part in how we are with each other. simply put, we have learned to distinguish the essentials from the non-essentials; he knows not to suddenly die on me and i know not to do anything to betray his trust.

everything else we take one day at a time.

this morning. mrt. guadalupe to shaw boulevard station.

mommy, little boy (maybe around 3 or 4. i'm bad at gauging ages.) and lola (grandma) get on the train. a loud, whining kind of screaming almost immediately ensues.

little boy: screamscream.

mommy: no, anak, that is not correct.

a nice woman offers her seat to lola. more screaming follows while lola tries to sit.

mommy: no, that is *not* correct! no, you can't sit down. just stand. see, i'm standing up. see?

lola tries to make the kid sit on her lap.

little boy: no! screamscream.

mommy:  stop it! that is *not* correct.  is that correct?  no, that is *not*!

little boy (finally on lola's lap now): whinewhinegarble pleeease!

mommy: no, anak, seats are for ladies.

little boy begs some more.

mommy: no! boys don't sit! i'm sorry. seats are for ladies!

jing's dad is in the hospital for a colon operation and needs blood. one would think all this would entail is for a doctor to fill up a form and dispatch a nurse or intern to get some from the blood vault or whatever they call it. it's not as if we're talking about spare organs here. blood is such a basic thing there's bound to always be some extra bags lying in a hospital back room somewhere, right?

wrong.

we soon learned that there's not enough blood to go around. far from it. there are, apparently, scores and scores of dried up human bodies lying around needing to be refilled. so with stocked blood out of the question, the only other option is: blood donors.

now, bloodletting has never been a hobby of mine. i've been known to struggle and protest on the few and far-between occasions when i needed to have blood extracted. struggle and protest loudly. really loudly.  hospital-personnel-running-into-the-extraction-area-to-see-what-the-screaming-is-all-about loudly.

so, no, i am not the person to run to if you need someone to cheerfully volunteer to have a gargantuan needle inserted in her vein. fortunately for my guilt, i have perfectly legitimate excuses to not be a blood donor: anemia and a tattoo. more importantly, i have alvin.

alvin is big and strong and is not afraid of big, sharp needles. also, he has donated blood in the past and so, presumably, have inside knowledge of the whole procedure; lessening the chances of him rapidly taking off screaming once he realizes that the burly guy with the gloves is not kidding and his blood is really going to be siphoned out.

so early yesterday morning alvin and i took the mrt-lrt to pgh, where jing's dad is confined, so he can donate blood. a total of five to six 500cc bags are needed, half of which will be used pre-operation. jing told us to arrive as early as we could as donor lines are long and there's a 100-person daily cut-off at the hospital blood bank.

we got there at 8am and soon realized that donating blood isn't as straightforward as we thought. there were 3 people donating for jingy's dad that day: alvin, kumpareng openg (lolit, who's also afraid of needles, likewise brought her representative) and bel.
 
thankfully, jing was at the blood bank ahead of everyone and held a place in the confusing, unruly line for us. however, there was the matter of the just-that-day implemented no-reservations rule which everyone, including us, totally screwed over. ahem.

of course, the fact that only a total of about five people followed the rule didn't stop everyone from screaming at- and threatening bodily harm to -anybody else who somehow managed to get ahead of them in line. i made no eye contact, kept quiet and tried to make myself as little as possible lest the enraged woman mouthing off immediately behind me realizes that our group got there later than she did.

lolit, however, had a bigger problem. it was our group's turn to sign up and bel was nowhere in sight. we needed a bel proxy and since i was deemed unfit, *she* had to be bel. in the half an hour before bel finally arrived, lolit sat clutching her bogus forms, nervously keeping an eye on the mob. after subtly handing the forms to bel, she hurriedly hid in the cafeteria one floor below.

as it turned out, the criteria for blood donation is even more stringent than those for wannabe superstar reality shows. out of the three, only alvin passed.

kumpareng openg recently had a tooth extracted and was immediately disqualified during the first round of interviews. bel made it to the blood test but her blood was found unsuitable; it was too pale or too watery or something.

jing, herself, and a cousin failed the screening last saturday, and this morning, lolit brought two more people to try in vain: recent tooth extraction and irregular menstruation. this brings our win-lose ratio to a dismal 1:6.

tomorrow, aloy is bringing dennis to give it a try. we're hopeful about this one because like alvin, he has already donated blood in the past.

aloy's fairly sure that he weighs more than 110lbs and that since his last blood donation, dennis hasn't had hepatitis or malaria or turned both 'high blood' or anemic, and that in the last year he hasn't gotten a tattoo or had a tooth extracted or piercing done, and that he hasn't gotten a blood transfusion in the last six months, and that he hasn't had sexual contact with a possible aids or hiv-infected person (both male or female), and she will make sure that he won't drink a drop of alcohol in the last twelve hours before tomorrow.

so yes, we're hopeful about this one.

however, this will still only bring us to two bags out of the six which is our goal. so if you or anybody you know needs to fill up his or her good karma container for the year and does not faint at the sight of needles or blood, please, please, please be a blood donor. just let me know so i can bring you in contact with jing.

we need it asap. thanks. :)

i've been feeling extra apathetic about life and everything else lately and so have not been blogging.

when not apathetic, i've been frustrated and panicky, convinced i'm wasting the short, short time i have left on this earth by being so, so, *so* ordinary, yet clueless as to the steps i needed to take to switch paths.

it's a tough place to be.

yesterday i was ym-ing with agay, and she told me about her college theology priest-professor. to people who asked him why he believes in heaven (and i'm assuming in god and everything god-like in general), he would reply: because i'll go crazy if i don't!

i like that. :)

i wonder about a lot of things.

i wonder what the sm department store sales girl thinks about while she stands next to the shoe display for hours. i wonder if jeepney and bus and fx drivers dream about their circuitous routes over and over again. i wonder if everybody feels a little dead inside sometimes like i do.

so i've been to a couple of trippings.

i've gingerly tiptoed past swarms of sweaty construction workers to get to model units situated in the belly of a huge, dusty half-constructed condominium building. i've ridden mrt and fx and trike to reach a low-rise condo complex in quezon city's outskirts where after entering and exiting countless little boxes filled with color-coordinated curtains and tiles and dinnerware, i climbed flights and flights of stairs to inspect the penthouse cum laundry area.

but perhaps most importantly, even more so than the realization that a family of five can actually simultaneously, *horizontally* sleep inside an 18sqm unit, i've realized that there is absolutely no chance in hell that my measly savings can buy me one of them minuscule boxes.

people oftentimes think i'm kidding when i say that i'm not a sociable person, but it happens to be true. it's not easy for me to instantly find something in common and strike a conversation with people i barely know. at the same time, however, i am very nosy.

i like peeking into people's lives and seeing how they live; the cause of their excitement and frustration and pain. the way to satisfy this need without having to fumble for words to fill dead small talk air, i've found out, is through blogs. reading people's blogs, that is.

there's a fair number of lives whose stories i more or less regularly follow which, for reasons i'm not really sure of, i haven't been following recently. i found time to play catch up earlier today though and found myself having to go back to old posts; life changing events had happened, both happy and sad, and i had missed them.

beth is now based in germany with a new job and a new german boyfriend, melissa just bought her first apartment and had recently broken up with her photographer boyfriend of five years, and eric's grandparents had died within a month of each other.

i know that technically, i don't really know these people and they have no idea i exist and we'd probably have nothing to say to each other if we *do* meet in real life, but i'm still affected by what's happened in their lives.

i guess it's my version of being engrossed in a telenovela, only the characters are real people and there's no sudden magical happy ending.

once a month i scurry over to unionbank to pay my credit card bill. i usually go to the one along san miguel ave since it's only a few meters away from my building.

i don't know about the other unionbank branches, but this one is a small, drab square with neither wall clock nor calendar; just your basic gray teller counter, gray modular dividers and gray walls. they're there to take your money and that's it. they can't be bothered with fancy, colored trimmings.

their service is fast so i don't really mind, i mean, i only spend a few minutes each month in there, after all. so last tuesday i popped in for my usual here's-my-money-give-me-my-receipt transaction. only when i got my receipt, i realized that they had misspelled my last name.

me to teller girl: excuse me, my surname is spelled with an 'm.'

teller girl takes back my receipt, looks at it, scribbles something and gives it back to me.

assuming everything was in order, i stuffed the thing in my bag and went to work. when i took it out again to file (yes, i'm anal like that.), i saw that my name on the receipt now reads jom*authorized signature*alyn chan.

i am worried. but then there's nothing new about that, i am, after all, always worried about something or the other. of late however, maybe the last 18 hours or so, i have been beset with icky, grown-up worries.

issues like owning property and having pension and medical insurance. your basic security stuff.

and so i spent this morning computing and re-computing my finances to see what i can realistically afford in terms of property ownership. and let me tell you, for almost a decade's worth of back-breaking work, it wasn't much.

still i tried to keep what aloy said in mind about jumping in and taking risks and so when i got to the office i googled condo units that i could look into buying. in terms. very long, drawn out terms. surprisingly, there were quite a fair number of units that, though not exactly cheap, did not make me faint straight away.

i emailed a few agents with inquiries and now we wait.

so, yes, okay, i'm admitting it out loud. i *want* to get married. soon. maybe now, next week, next month, doesn't really matter. i'm just impatient for it to happen now that i've acknowledged my hankering for it.

grant me a little graciousness in my slight change of perspective, and allow me to be a little defensive as well. after all, i've had an aversion to marriage for years and have always thought those wanting to get, or are, married a bit daft for putting themselves in that situation.

but i guess it's my turn to be a bit dotty, and the longing to sleep and wake up everyday forever and ever beside someone i'm besotted with is just the beginning of it.

suddenly i've become aware of a need to 'settle down,' and 'build a life with someone,' and 'establish routines.' scary cliches, i tell you. and for a while i ignored them scary cliches, thought myself lacking in sleep or just in the honeymoon stage of a new love affair.

but they've come and set up camp and proceeded to keep vigil until i had no choice but to give in. and so now yes, okay, i want to get married.

somebody somewhere, beware.

i think it's finally happened, what i thought never would. to me, at least.

it took a few weeks of denying and feeble kicking before i finally conceded and admitted defeat. and since i have, and because i am me, i am now impatient for it to happen. for the gears to start shifting and grinding; pulling tomorrow towards today.

it's strange how different it feels, this time. the ease in which the slivers fell and found their places.

how quickly the unthinkable became inevitable.

me: i'm so bored nuni. there's nothing to do.

nuni: maybe you should take up a sport.

me: nooo! not a sport! maybe i should volunteer somewhere. a women's shelter or something. but i don't like dealing with paper work and red tape.

nuni: ya, and places like those expect you to be committed.

me: you're right. i just want to kill time. that's not noble enough, i think. you know what the problem is? the problem is i've lost my edge.

nuni: your what?

me: my edge. i used to be sharp and now i'm just all white and soft and doughy.

nuni: okaaay.

me: and generic. i am now generic. even my clothes are generic. maybe i should go shopping.

nuni: well, there were times when i would go shopping when i felt sad, then one day i realized i have all these things that i don't really like a whole lot. so anyway, i think shopping isn't really the answer, you know?

me: sigh. i guess you're right. but you really should get new jeans.

nuni: i do? but i just bought a new pair!

me: where? i haven't seen it.

nuni: it's dark blue denim. it's very nice.

me: well, still. nuniii! what can i do?! i'm sooo bored! if you had free time, what would you do with it?

nuni: i'd finish my novel. maybe you should write a novel.

me: i don't want to write a novel! what other things do i like doing, do you remember?

nuni: um, maybe you should decide to be an expert on something. like jewelry, or renaissance art.

me: maybe. but what? besides, you know i won't remember any of those things anyway, what with my memory gap.

nuni: oh. you're right. maybe we should just walk around. look for jeans.

me: oooh. okay!

i buried a baby bird today. took an old spoon and dug into the earth with it until i'd hollowed out a small hole. it didn't take long; the bird was only around a couple of inches long, with tiny almost-wings and eyes that were still sealed shut.

alvin found it squawking helplessly on the floor outside his apartment last night where it probably fell from its nest up in the tree branches or rooftop somewhere, its hairless body heaving with every labored breath. unfortunately, the landlord's dog discovered it before he did, so it got a couple of paw-slaps in before the yelping furry thing was shooed away.

i knew there was nothing we could do to save it but the thought of the skinny, brown thing dying broke my heart anyway. so to apologize for our ineptness, i tried to make it as comfortable as i could. i gently nudged its frail frame onto a leaf and carefully carried it to higher ground where the ants can't easily get to it.

the way i see it, sure, i can't do anything about it dying, but crap if i'm gonna allow a line of hungry, greedy ants to eat it alive. before i went to sleep, i covered it with another leaf; i figured it being hairless and all, it might get cold.

sure enough, when i woke up this morning, it was dead. which, in an odd sort of way, seemed an appropriate greeting to this day.

late afternoon today, two years ago, arlie died.

as much as i love metro manila and can't imagine permanently living anywhere else, once in a while (read: every couple or so months) i get claustrophobic and desperately want to leave the confines of its less than immaculate walls.

after my much-traveled 2005-2006 two-year combo when i managed to reach the far-off shores of no less than 6 countries, i've never really been anywhere far and the sedentary lifestyle is beginning to drive me crazy.

now, i'm not really the most sociable of beings and most days i'd much rather spend lounging on my bed next to alvin than go out, but when the urge to get up and explore the world hits, it's pretty hard to ignore.

of course you understand that when i say 'explore the world' i mean any corner of the world, or more specifically, any corner of the world i can afford to go to. which narrows down my list of world corner choices somewhat. so much so that the only choices left to me at this point in time, really, are corners within the actual country i'm in.

but i'm okay with that. the philippines is gorgeous and heaven knows the domestic travel industry needs as much help as it can get.

however, friends and neighbors, there's more than just budget limitations to overcome; being the no-eq person that i am, i, of course, want to leave as soon as possible, which means during the coming long weekend, which, in turn, translates to the place needing to be near enough to allow at least day trips and at most, overnights. one last thing, it should also be relatively convenient to reach by bus since, alas, i am poor and thus do not own a car. sob, sob.

so anyway, options that were brought up were:
one, a day trip to angeles, pampanga. apparently, there exists beyond one of the walls of clark air base a street populated by interesting restos serving various yummy fares: mexican, cajun, italian, etc. teret has been to this place and attests to the food's extreme yumminess.

two, a pampanga-zambales overnight combo trip. simply put, eat enormous amounts of scrumptious food on day one, and go beaching on day two.

three, a day trip to corregidor. i've never been there and the place seems interesting, plus there's the extra adventure of riding a ferry to get there. haha!

understand that i'm not particularly attached to any of these options and can easily be swayed, so if you know of any other place we can hie off to, by all means, speak up speak up!

i've always been a paranoid little girl and would constantly have secret plan Bs in case something or the other goes wrong and i suddenly find myself wanting of life's basic needs. like shelter. and clothing. and food.

and so in the off chance that our house catches fire without warning in the middle of the night and i'm the only one who manages to run out while everybody else suffocates or burns to a crisp, all throughout my growing years i kept silent track of various far-off relatives whose houses i can possibly relocate to.

on nights when i was feeling particularly anxious, i would tick them off one by one on my fingers to calm myself.

in college, while commuting to and from school, i regularly passed a row of KTVs and cheap discotheques brandishing wanted signs for girls 18 to 24, promising earnings of at least six thousand pesos a night as GROs, and i would feel reassured. for surely if for some unforeseen reason i had to stop school, say my entire family including all known relatives gets bayoneted by some random madman, and couldn't find work anywhere else in the entire country, the GRO position would be waiting for me.

you could imagine the dismay i felt when i turned 25 and realized i wasn't eligible for the job anymore.

across the tricycle line that is my present commute route to work is a half finished low-rise commercial building. most of the structure is still under construction except for maybe the last one-fourth of it, where a salon and a furniture store stand stacked on top of each other. i spend more or less a couple of minutes each day staring at it while waiting for my trike-of-the-day to fill up with co-commuters.

today i noticed a help wanted sign tacked on the window of the salon. they needed a whole gamut of people: hair cutters, manicurists, therapists, salon personnel. upon reading the last vacancy, my heart quickened. i can be a salon personnel! i imagined myself going to work at a certain time each day and situating myself behind the reception counter, greeting customers graciously as they come and accepting their payments as they leave with their newly cut or permed or colored hair and shiny, lacquered nails. it would be fun to be ensconced in a world of gay lingo and hairspray and mousse foundation!

i got so caught up in my fantasy i gave a start as the trike driver turned the ignition. as we roared away, i couldn't help wishing it takes them a long time to fill that position. you know, just in case.

i haven't written in a while. not because i didn't want to, but because i can't seem to manage to hold on to a single idea long enough to complete it. lately, all i've been having are snippets and snapshots of random thoughts and emotions.

i would read a paragraph from a book and be totally consumed by what it says, only to find myself completely detached once my eyes leave the page. i would be trapped in a car or bus on my way somewhere, thoughts and sensibilities flying madly unchecked, with no concrete memory of what i thought or felt when i arrive at my destination.

thinking and feeling in fragments is tiring.

my, oh, my. two posts in a day. what is the world coming to? haha!

anyway, this is actually sort of a shameless plug / job ad.

you see, alvin is the new sales manager of conlins coffee and he is looking for 4-5 sales agents to train to work under him. so if you have the gift of gab, enjoy a good cup of coffee and at the same time are looking for work, this is your lucky day! hehe.

if you or anybody you know is interested, please email alvin at alvin_lago@yahoo.com.

fresh graduates are very welcome to apply, and don't worry, my boyfriend is extremely nice. :D

jing and i pay our rent through bank deposit, and since the only option our landlady gave us was a metrobank savings account, we pay specifically through our friendly neighborhood metrobank branch. jingy takes care of paying the meralco bill, so in the interest of fairness, this task inevitably fell on me.

i've never been a big fan of metrobank. nuni has a couple of accounts there and the few times that i've gone with her were enough to make me realize that metrobank is the repository of lost souls.

my experience just half an hour past convinced me even more that each metrobank branch is, in fact, disembodied sections of that place commonly referred to as purgatory where souls wander indefinitely in limbo.

i had my whole morning planned. i would leave the house to do bank errands (i needed to pay my credit card bill as well) and get to the office in time to adjust a project's timetable before heading up to jing's office for a birthday lunch i was invited to.

it was very simple: house. bank. bank. office. birthday party. as if to further affirm the plan's simplicity, the actual, physical order of these things are also, well, house-bank-bank-office-birthday party. and except for the house-bank bit, all are in walking distance of each other. really, the chances of fucking up are slim.

so i left the house at around 10.30am and was at metrobank edsa shaw branch a bit before 11am. i dutifully got my number (74), glanced at the 'now serving' screen (60), and thought to myself, 13 people ahead of me, that's not so bad, kind of good, actually, since i'd have time to read the papers.

i leisurely filled up two copies of the deposit slip, grabbed a handful of philippine star discarded by somebody else and sat down.

thirty minutes later, i was done with the paper. i looked up to check the screen: now serving number 60.

confused, i wondered, what, did no time pass? was i sitting here reading the paper in, indeed, limbo? i looked around: everything else seemed to be the same. the people sitting in their chairs seemed to have barely moved in the time it took for me to peruse the newspaper. did i just experience a once in a lifetime cosmic blip and i was too engrossed in the paper to notice?!

the teller counter at metrobank edsa shaw is long. five counters long. as i write, there exists in that place five monitors, five keyboards, five printers and five gas lift computer chairs. enough, i presumed, to have five live tellers to man those precious pieces of equipment.

only, as is often in this life, i presumed wrong.

because the whole lifetime i was there this morning, i only saw a maximum of three tellers working side by side along that counter at the same point in time. and this only happened maybe twice. twice in the whole lifetime i was there! i know it sounds unbelievable, but friends, i speak the truth.

i'm not sure exactly as to what purpose the other two sets of equipment were there for, considering that no human hands seemed to have touched them, ever. i would hazard a guess but i fear i would, once again, be mistaken.

so i sat and i sat and i grew mad. i did not understand why the number on the screen would not move. i did not understand why they were keeping us there for such a long time. maybe the metrobank employees get lonely by themselves and the sight of such a crowded waiting area gives them joy.

after waiting for an hour (yes, ladies and gents, i finally crawled my way to teller counter 3 at 12noon!) to make my one-minute deposit transaction, i couldn't help asking the girl behind the counter exactly how many tellers were employed at this particular branch.

teller 3: three.

me: so those two monitors there, they're just for display?

teller 3: the people assigned there are on leave.

oh. there you go. on leave. that explains everything.

the day before yesterday was a day of magic.

it began with a dream. during the early hours of that morning and for reasons unknown, somewhere in the deep recesses of my mind i dreamed of knives being sharpened.

i woke up that morning the same as any other, only with images of knife edges dancing in the outskirts of my memory, just out of reach of my conscious thoughts. about an hour or so after waking, i suddenly heard a familiar nasal voice chanting: 'hasaaa! nipper gunting kutsilyo!'

every few days or so, an old man would ride his run-down bicycle up and down the length of street in front of our apartment building, calling for housewives and househusbands and maids to have their knives, scissors and nippers sharpened.

attached to the body of his rusty, paint-worn bicycle is a round hunk of rough stone on which he ground dull blade edges presented to him, making them once again keen and useful. i haven't heard him call out in a while though.

i started, the wholeness of my dream suddenly rising like a flood. for a moment i stood where i was. although i have heard the chant many times before and jing and i *are* in possession of a couple of dull knives, i've never felt any inclination to respond to it. knife sharpening, after all, is beyond the scope of my domesticity. in my experience, dull blades are cast out and new ones bought to replace them.

that morning though, perhaps buoyed by the memory of my dream and the fantastic coincidence of hearing the man call out after a long while, i felt compelled to go out of my comfort zone, gather all available knives in the apartment, and go after the figure on the bicycle.

blades sharpened, i thought no more of the chance happening. my thoughts that day were actually of a job offer alvin received the week before. he had spent the previous days thinking and thinking what the best thing to do was and had come to a decision only the night before.

tired of utilizing logic and reason, i decided to consult my online magic 8-ball about his decision. not that i really expected the ball to give me any substantial insight, you understand. after all, previous assurances sought from it resulted in such bleak replies as concentrate and ask again later.

did alvin make the right decision?, i asked silently, waited a beat, and then clicked.

'it is certain.'

i paused. the ball *never* gave me that reply before. i didn't even think it had phrases with meanings *that* clear.

so the proposal that he's going to present, they're going to like it?, i tried again.

'it is certain.'

unbelievable.

is alvin going to be happy at this job?

'without a doubt.'

he met with the company the day after and sure enough, he starts monday.

three blog entries in eight days. i haven't blogged this often since around this time last year when i was deep in the throes of, um, despair. ahem.

a friend was actually alarmed enough by the sudden frequency to feel compelled to ym me, asking if i was okay. 'pag maraming blog ibig sabihin walang nangyayari sa totoong buhay. haha!' (the number of my blog entries is inversely proportional to actual events in my real life.), i replied jokingly.

thinking about it, the statement *is* true. whereas the last few months left me so occupied i barely had time to breathe-- let alone write, as a previous entry would attest, nothing is happening in my life at the moment. nothing. hence i use the leftover time to sit here pondering my life and to lie on my bed at home thinking of ways to make it if not better, then at least more varied.

hoping to be able to inject some new activity in my life and maybe earn a little extra cash along the way, i stare alternately at the ceiling and at the street outside through the window at the foot of my bed, taking stock of my life-- all 30 years of it, and my skills-- all three of them.

yes, alas, thinking of my skills has gotten me worried. very worried.

all i could come up with were: i'm very organized, i could write (sort of), and well, i'm fairly good at keeping things clean.

i'm not sure if the last one is even a skill. i've a suspicious feeling i just shoved that one in there so it's at least a round, familiar number.

i have been having a panic attack for the last few days now.