the chronicles of a bum tummy

a bum tummy forced me to the hospital last thursday. i think it was a combination of not having eaten anything for breakfast because i had to go very early to the doctor, and then eating something bad for lunch. big mistake. by afternoon of thursday i was already puking my guts out. this lost me much of the fluids in my system that i became so dehydrated and my arms, legs, and abdomen started to go numb. the doctor said if i had lasted a bit longer in that state without having been taken to the hospital, i would have suffered kidney damage. panic started setting in. i was so weak physically that i didn't have an ounce of strength to stand up, and my officemates had to carry me out of the building and drive me to the hospital. humiliating experience. i have a bad feeling that everytime my officemates see me they'd think, "hey, that's the loser who puked his guts out and had to be taken to the hospital". oh, the horror.

when we reached the ER of chong hua hospital, it took their staff a full twenty minutes before they arranged a doctor to see me. twenty excruciating minutes. they had to take their sweet time just to make sure that i would be able to pay for the hospitalization. if i wasn't so weak i would have punched the nurse in the gut to make him feel just a tenth of the pain i had so he could get me a doctor quickly. the first thing their nurse asked when i got there was if i had insurance. insurance?! watdapak!!! i'm about to suffer kidney damage here and your asking for insurance?! ironically, the free calendar chong hua gives to admitted patients claims that chong hua was a "non-profit" organization. "non-profit" my ass. if chong hua is "non-profit" then gloria arroyo won the elections fair and square without cheating.

the ER people finally took me inside. one of the ER doctors comes up to me and starts asking me questions, what happened, how many times i vomited, when i started vomiting, what i had eaten, etc., while writing down her notes in an index card. after she finished her questioning she goes to a table at the back. a few minutes later another doctor comes up to me and asks the same set of questions. i thought, "what the hell do these people want to do to me, question me to death?" i had to point out to the new doctor that i had already been asked those questions just to make him shut up, which he mercifully did.

afterwards a nurse comes up to me to attach the needle for the IV fluid on my left hand. the nurse was in his late 20s, and he seemed to be an experienced nurse, so i thought, this shouldn't be that painful. but suddenly he calls out to the interns at the other side of the ER, then asks, "who of you wants to insert the needle?" "you have got to be kidding me...", i thought. unluckily for me, he wasn't. three young looking interns who seem to have just gotten out of puberty come up to me with very eager looks on their faces, as if they were looking at the frog they would be soon be dissecting in their anatomy class. the older nurse then gives the needle to one the interns, who seemed just a bit too excited, so i braced myself for the coming pain. the whole process lasted two very painful minutes. a friendly word of advise to you dear readers, if anyone of you is going to be admitted to a hospital, ask for a more experienced nurse to attach the IV needle. it'll save you from a lot of pain.

and i sure hope that that intern won't be taking what she learned from her anatomy lesson with me abroad. nurses and doctors leaving is the last thing this country needs. but if we also consider how poorly they're being paid here, can we actually blame them? and so, the current dillema.

i was finally taken to my hospital room in chong hua's new building. i have to give it to them, the new building was pretty impressive. it's very big and modern looking, you can actually see that a huge amount was spent for its construction. the new building's lobby looked like a hotel lobby.

my officemate turned ambulance driver nilo and our company nurse grace accompanied me for the night while they waited for my mother. it was already late when my mom arrived, but i was too exhausted from the pain to even talk so i slept through the whole night.

i woke up the next morning eager to see what shows were on cable tv. let's just say i was pretty grateful we didn't have cable tv installed at home. so many channels showing nothing else but crap. they didn't even have discovery channel, only its more boring counterpart, national geographic. there were the news channels (boring...), the sports channels showing a golf tournament (boring..), movie channels showing old or unknown movies (boring...), home shopping networks (getting sleepy...), chinese, indian, french, german channels (zzzzz...), business ads (snore...), and a crazy televangelist declaring that he is the second coming of Jesus Christ and asking for donations for their "kingdom" (you've got to be kidding...). the sports channels didn't even show a single game of the nba playoffs that day. i was starting to get convinced that universe was out to ruin my weekend.

good thing there was axn though, because they had the amazing race on at around noon. i'm rooting for the hippies bj and tyler to win, as they're more fun to watch than the other teams. they kinda' remind me of the clowns of amazing race 6 (or was it 5?). too bad those guys lost, it was weird seeing a grown up man who made everyone laugh just break down and cry on tv.

some officemates also came by to visit around lunchtime, which lifted my spirits a bit, although their visit also reminded me of the office party i was going to miss later that night. so much for the anticipation i had the whole week. i spent the rest of friday desperately trying to find a decent show to watch through all that crap on cable and wondering what everybody at the office was doing and how the party was going. it was purgatory on earth.

my doctor finally gave his discharge orders on the morning of saturday. it felt like a twenty year prison sentence was finally over. i was so happy to finally get out, stretch my legs, and breathe the polluted air of cebu city, considering that i was either lying down or sitting down on my ass about 97% of the time for the last 2 days. freedom at last!

so to all of you boys and girls out there, here's another friendly word of advice: BAWAL MAGKASAKIT!!!

the enemy of my enemy is my friend

i seem to have found an ally in my war against cockroaches. no, not the local pest control people, spiders. i was taking a bath one morning when i found a creature of indeterminate shape in the corner. i have bad eye sight, so i squinted a bit to see what it was. it looked like a spider, with all the legs, but it had something bulging under it. so i came closer and saw that it was cockroach. to my pleasant surprise, the spider seems to have captured it and was in the process of slowly poisoning its victim to death. i stared at the scene for a couple of seconds with a discovery channel like curiosity. so cockroaches do have a natural predator!

i know, spiders, like cockroaches, are considered household pests. but at least spiders don't have the gall to show their ugly mug in front of you almost everywhere in the house. kung sa bisaya pa, di sila pareha kabaga ug nawong sa mga ok-ok, kay wala nay uwaw nang mga ok-oka na. spiders are shy creatures, prefering to hide in the dark shadowy corners away from human detection. so as long as they don't show themselves too much and just remain in the shadows, and they continue doing their job in the campaign of eradicating the earth (or at least our house) of cockroaches, then their co-existence with us humans in our house should be fine by me. it's like a contract killer-client relationship. they hunt down my enemies, and i give them free board and lodging. like kenshin himura, that spider was my very own assassin in the shadows. i think it's what my high school biology teacher would call a symbiotic relationship. and i don't think they're as dirty as roaches anyway.

hooray for spiders!

UPDATE: this is from the world book encyclopedia. "Spiders are helpful to people because they eat harmful insects. Spiders eat grasshoppers and locusts, which destroy crops, and flies and mosquitoes, which carry diseases." so spiders really ARE one of the good guys, they just got themselves a bad rep from all those old disney cartoons.

top 10 things i would do if i were declared the king of the philippines

this is another top 10 list. aside from the schtick people usually answer, like ending poverty, making education the number one priority, running after all crooks in government, working on lasting peace and order, etc. (which i myself would intend to do, of course), these are the top 10 things i would do if i were declared the king of the philippines:

10. bring back bobot candy

remember those? if you grew up in the late 80s and early 90s then you'll probably remember those. it's one the icons of my early childhood, those little peanuts coated in a sweet sugary layer in rainbow colors. it was one of the few items i could buy in the sari sari store with the 25 centavo allowance my mother usually gave me. cheap but satisfying. makes me wish i was a child again.

9. have people who answer their cellphones in movie theaters beaten and humiliated in public

i was watching memoirs of a geisha at sm once. when the movie was just about to start a familiar ringing sound suddenly comes out of nowhere, and then the guy to my left pulls out his cellphone and chats away with someone who seemed to be his girlfriend. AAARRGGH... for the next 10 minutes me and my fellow moviegoers discovered more about his love life than the movie's story. if i could hurl thunderbolts at the guy then i would've, but all that came out of me was a very pathetic "ssssshhhh!".

8. start a campaign geared toward the extinction of cockroaches

cockroaches. the scum of the earth, the scourge of humanity. ewww. i hate them with a vengeance. do you know that in the event of a nuclear fallout the last creatures to ever come out of it alive would be cockroaches? plus, they're disgusting little critters. everytime i see them in my house the hunter instinct in me comes alive and down comes my tsinelas (slipper) on the little beast. i know, a simple spraying of baygon is more effective, but not as satisfying as squashing that cockroach to mulch.

7. buy a new refrigerator

our fridge has been broken for weeks already, and i haven't been able to get a nice cold glass of water when i wake up in the morning for a very very loooong time now. what makes it worse is that it's summer. if that isn't hell on earth, i don't know what is.

6. order those trendy cafes like starbucks to sell coffee according to what its actually worth

selling ordinary brewed coffee at 150 pesos a cup is simply criminal...

5. have all inconsiderate smokers who smoke in public without even thinking about those who don't smoke arrested

this is one of my personal pet peeves. you're sitting in a jeepney on the way to work, breathing in a healthy dose of smoke from the morning traffic rush, then the guy beside you lights a cigarette and smokes. you try covering your nose, make coughing noises, frowning, anything to get the message through to that man's probably non existent brain that you do not want him sitting beside you with that cigarette, and yet still he puffs away.

we're already choking from all the smoke belched by those jurrasic jeepneys and those monster factories, but do you people really have to add to all that smoke? yes, this is a free country, and granted, you have the freedom to kill yourselves. but do you have to bring us non-smokers closer to hell together with you?

4. declare a moratorium on those crappy lovey dovey pinoy movies

no wonder the local movie industry is dying, all they keep churning out is crap. i hate the manufactured feel of their so called "love teams". they all look so forced, so artificially sweet so that the viewing public will take notice of their "romance" and watch their damn movie. but the public seems to lap it all up everytime, so what do i know.

3. stop the airing of all showbiz news programs

the buzz, S files, different rooms on the same hell on earth, as one fellow blogger put it. why people give a f*ck about Kris Aquino's latest love affair when we have much bigger problems to think about is simply beyond me. a friendly word of advice to all of you suckers out there: get a life.

2. PLAGIARISTS WILL BE SHOT!!! DEATH TO ALL PLAGIARISTS!!!

i was blog surfing one night when i came across the blog of a person who i sort of knew because she was one year my senior in college and who also happened to be the classmate of my former officemate and the former officemate of one my college buddies. skimming over her blog, i came across one poem, which after my reading it seemed VERY VERY familiar. then it hit me. THAT WAS MY POEM. she took most of the lines, added some of her own, mixed and matched some other lines, then voila, it was suddenly HER poem...

WHAT THE F*CK!!!

the great irony of it is, she works in the software industry, which itself is a victim of piracy, a close cousin of plagiarism. but at least pirates don't claim that they developed the software, the credit is still where it should be. so that makes her worse than pirates.

but then again, imitation is the highest form of flattery, so maybe she thinks my poem IS good :) so from the bottom of my heart, dear plagiarist, i thank you.

UPDATE: ms. plagiarist seems to have deleted her blog... hmmm... does that mean she doesn't like my poem anymore? :)


and the number 1 thing i would do if i were declared king of the philippines:

1. outlaw playing and listening to ANY song by air supply.

man, do i hate their songs. not do i just hate their songs, i detest their songs with a deep loathing. people seem to be playing them everywhere, all the time. i hear their songs in my neighborhood, in jeepneys, in videoke bars, downtown, everywhere. once, when i went out with my officemates for some videoke (yes, i now enjoy singing at the videoke. i take back everything i said about videoke.), they sang "i'm all out of love" by air supply. oh how i had wanted to eat them alive.

in one of their songs, their vocalist shrieks, "i don't know what to saaaaaay! i don't know what to saaaaaaaaaaaay!" tell you what mr. air supply vocalist sir, if you don't know what to say, then SHUT UP ALREADY!

the sound of a thousand pigs in the slaughter house

i may have one of the worst neighborhoods anyone could ever live in. every weekend, the whole place is filled with the sound of what i can only compare to that made by a thousand pigs being slaughtered. if you're a filipino, yes, i think you know what i mean. i bet your neighborhood has been infested too, at least once, by this scourge of humanity, this evil, evil device only the devil could have invented, the karaoke, and its more modern incarnation, the ktv.

if you think hearing gloria saying "hello garci" is enough to make you sick, wait till you hear my drunk, potbellied neighbors' version of a classic karaoke standard, frank sinatra's "my way". i feel only one word is able to describe their rendition more fully, disturbing. the vexation resulting from their infernal howling is enough to make me want to burn the whole neighborhood down. i think i'd rather be a refugee than be subjected to this inhumanity.

to give justice to the song, i bet even mr sinatra would rise from the grave to try to scare them back to their senses. i can almost hear him say, "the nerve! how dare they murder my song!"

man, the karaoke should be outlawed by the geneva convention. the karaoke can be considered as a weapon of mass destruction, you know. thus, it can be covered by the articles of war.

hey, mr. kofi annan, sir, are you listening? this is a matter of world peace. you should have taken this up in the last UN general assembly.

hey, mr george bush, sir, if you're still sending troops running around in the deserts of iraq looking for weapons of mass destruction, you better come here to the philippines. there's a bunch of terrorists here in my neighborhood.

this karaoke thing has taken over the whole country in ways the abu sayyaf or the npa could never even dream of. today the philippines, tomorrow the world. i shudder at the thought.

but i have to admit, i too have once been on the dark side. and i enjoyed it. now ladies and gentlemen of the jury, before you condemn me to death by karaoke, allow me to plead my case. it was only once you know, during my company's last summer outing. our damned room didn't have any airconditioning, and there were a lot of mosquitoes, so i couldn't sleep. there was no more beer, the bar was already closed. so i had no choice but to spend the rest of the night singing myself hoarse till sun up. but at least everybody else was either too drunk or safely fast asleep to hear my wailing, so, no harm done right? at least i don't do it every bloody weekend for the whole damn neighborhood to hear. not guilty.

stuck

reading an issue of the national geographic last night made me realize that the world is such a huge and wonderful place and it just left me wondering. it left me wondering why five days of every week i have to force myself to wake up early in the morning, ride a jeepney filled with people i don't even know in the middle of rush hour traffic, and spend the rest of the day stuck in an office cubicle getting scolded by my boss and fearing the next mistake that i make could get me fired. it left me wondering why i have to slave away and waste what little time i have on this earth.

why shouldn't i simply resign from this job when i'm starting to despise it so much? why shouldn't i do the things that i've always dreamt of doing? like travelling around the country or even around the world, going to places that i've only read or heard about, meeting cultures that i've only seen on the glossy pages of magazines. or finally having enough time to read all my books and write stories that can make people move and wonder.

but then, reality rears its ugly head and gives me a nice kick in the butt. i certainly won't be getting anywhere without money, much more survive. and i won't have any money if i don't get a job. and getting a job means having to force myself to wake up early in the morning, ride a jeepney filled with people i don't even know in the middle of rush hour traffic, and spend the rest of the day stuck in an office cubicle. whoever said that life is beautiful just didn't know what he was talking about.

its all starting to seem so pointless. you work to live, but when you look at it, you're not really living at all. its like your just wasting your time, for in the end you're gonna die anyway, and what little you have worked for your entire life you won't be able to take with you. it just doesn't make sense to me.

and when you die, the world just goes on. and it goes on like you never really were, like you never really existed. you are simply a name carved on a tombstone. what you've achieved, how far you've gone, is nothing in death. nobody remembers. everybody forgets.

its starting to seem that life is simply a cruel joke. you are born, then you live a hard life doing pointless work in a cold world that just doesn't give a damn, then you die and you're buried in your grave and simply forgotten. and this evil cycle continues, it never ends.

i need vacation...

to the dogs, i say!

gawd, what the hell is going on to this country:

P1-B lobby for 'sin' taxes

a government controlled by the moneyed elite...

Angara confirms meeting with Arroyo

then politicians with no backbone who only act out of political convenience and not out of ideals...

What bonus? Gov't workers gripe

and an under paid government workforce that is forced to resort to corruption...

This country is going to the dogs, I say!!! To the dogs!!!