Lord of Rants

Ihing-ihi na ko sa EDSA. Pero sa kung anong demonyo ang sumanib sa akin, ikaw pa rin ang naalala ko.

Dahil? Para?

Ewan ko. Siguro tinamaan na rin ako sa huling tunggang pinagmukha akong pulubi. Pero isa lang talaga ang makakalarawan sayo - IBA KA.

Sana wag ka na lang mahismasmasan. At ibigay mo na ang hinahanap kong pagmamahal. Kung sa ganyan mo lang maipapakita ang daplis ng pagtingin mo sa akin, nanaisin ko na lang maging sabog palagi.

Hanggang sa muli.

You’re my beautiful stranger.

And all I want to do… is hate you.

After all, you never were a good juice.

Tastes bitter.

Right… Great…

So, the bigwigs (or dimwits) changed their mind. Team Manila stays. For the meantime. Or whatever.

Ever since news broke out that my account would be moved to another location, I have made much effort to mask my devastation. It sure did hurt as hell knowing the account you have helped build would just be taken over by somebody else. It was an insult to all the hard work we have made just to keep the business running for more than three years, despite all the bad aftertaste that the job gives us.

We were never in a bad light with the client in terms of performance. We in fact did not have any competitors, simply because we diligently did our best to keep the client confident with how we run things, so that it didn’t have to look for a place elsewhere.

Recently though, a negative buzz surrounded the client in the US when it was reported to lay off nearly half of its workforce because of financial losses brought about by its unfruitful investments. Though our company here in the Philippines assured us that this turnout with the client would not affect us, it still didn’t feel right to hear that the client might even outsource the jobs lost in the US here.

And so, our sister center somewhere down south was touted to be the next big “place” for the client since it wanted to put all of its centers under one location per BPO. Wanting to cut back on cost because the salary down south is way much cheaper than the Manila rate, it must have looked very appealing to the client.

But really, how do you just simply throw away a consistently performing team and have it replaced with beginners for the benefit of immediate cost-cutting measures?

In the long run, it spells death for the business.

Without being able to understand why the client would arrive at a seemingly backward decision, we lost our drive to do our best. The usually hectic floor instantly became gloomy. Worse, though the company here in Manila assured us that we would be secure with our jobs, it didn’t even make sense why we were not allowed to secure a slot with the same team in the new location. We can relocate, but not with the same team. How was that impossible?

A part of me wanted to stay with the team, even I had to relocate and get sick with eating dried mangoes everyday.

Staying with the team meant I’d still be able to keep my position and the perks that go with it. Even the prospect of new opportunities appealed to me.

But was it all worth it?

Leaving Manila meant uprooting almost a decade of life to begin elsewhere. I had to leave my friends and family, compromise my studies, and lose all the joys I have found in the city.

It was a battle of career and happiness.

I thought if succeeding in this career I’ve chosen would eventually bring me happiness, then I must take a leap of faith and finally commit to a risk that I’ve never done before. I might just want to begin a new life. Maybe it was time I do it.

But I also thought of what is the point of thinking for the future if I can’t even seem to cope up with the present. I had so many issues to resolve, so many things I still wanted to do. Only here in the city could I do that.

The part where I had to weigh my options was most difficult. I had to lose myself with my amber friend a couple of times just for me to find solace from my predicament. I even saw some of my colleagues lose themselves in  the same predicament I had. I couldn’t blame ourselves if we even had to somehow lash out our frustrations to our program director because we felt he didn’t do anything much to prevent this thing from happening.

I resolved to stay. I was afraid to end up blindly navigating strange waters. I realized my strength was here in Manila, and so I had to capitalize on that. I’m playing it safe, but for someone who’s got more to lose than gain in relocating himself elsewhere, it was just really a matter of common sense.

So I came to the detachment phrase. Or call it acceptance stage. If we were goners, we didn’t want to end up as losers as well. I personally decided to make the most out of it. If the business has to leave Manila, it should leave with flying colors.

But then the news came.

Perhaps having drunk a draught that brought them back to their senses, the bosses decided to retain the business in Manila.

It’s supposed to be good news, but I felt insulted again. After all the things we had to go through, all the damages done, everything would just have to be back to normal again?

Though my respect for the client has been constantly in erosion for the past three years and more, another heap of it went down the drain with this news.

But I remain thankful that I could still keep what I have. I just find no reason to celebrate. We simply deserved it.

Before they could even plan again to take it away though, I plan to take myself away from them instead!

It’s as if my world got transported to the abyss. I should fester and burn to ashes, but I feel cold. Frozen.

It’s official now. One of my most important lifelines is about to be taken away from me. I feel helpless, derailed. My heart is heavy. My mind is a mess. My tears won’t come out. My emotions are building up inside me. I’m cold. I’m frozen.

It is the most difficult goodbye.

It’s not just about losing business, nor losing the position I’ve worked hard for. It’s not even about losing the perks and material rewards, nor the prospect of having to start my career all over.

Even the point of suddenly losing all the achievements you’ve worked hard for all these years - to keep the company alive - micrifies the one thing I cannot bear to let go.

I cannot bear to lose the people I have built a very strong strong friendship with over the years.

I cannot imagine how to step inside this place knowing that I would soon be facing complete strangers. Where’s the comfort in not being able to witness and experience, again, how we used to deal with our everyday lives - the funny moments fooling around the floor, singing out-of-tune songs, relaxing during coffee breaks, burning cancer sticks at each opportunity, gobbling down food during food trips, and forgetting sanity for each gulp of that amber liquid?

There’s no way I could describe what I am about to lose. I can’t even begin to deign how I feel. Sure, it’s sadness. Dysphoria. And that makes it all the more tiring. I haven’t experienced how it is to lose someone you hold dear. But the way I’m feeling right now, I fear it’s this close.

My tears can’t seem to find a way to get out. My non-reaction is fleetingly dangerous. I’m a breakdown waiting to erupt. I’m a heartache waiting to unleash hell.

I’m still trying to put the pieces together. Perhaps, despite the sadness, I’ll be able to find a shifting happiness in reminiscing times spent in reverie. But at the end of the day, as sure as night turns into day, I would find myself unwillingly turning my back on the people I have come to cherish. A miracle would be most welcome, but the uncertainty of it is daunting. I am not confident to be positive about it, when we were surely confident before that no way would our exploits end.

It is the end.

Goodbye Web Hosting. Till we meet again.

I never expected you to go. Not like this. Not when everything is just so right.

This is harder to bear than the usual separation I have endured in the past. You have been a force in my life for more than three years. In fact, you are where my world revolved around. I cannot imagine life without you this sudden. I have in the past attempted to let you go, but your pull always leads me back. I never noticed as time passed by that I have spent more time than I expected sailing through rough times with you and relishing the victory of overcoming those once unfriendly seas.

I do not want to live without you. I feel so lost just thinking how you’ll be gone. Imagine just missing the familiar routines that we go through each time our roads meet? Everything will turn so hollow. A vacuum will erode the sense of security I have established because of you. But do I have a choice if you are so bent on departing?

Though I cannot afford to curl up and die, I want to succumb in your arms and wail my despair, if just for an instant. How could you leave this way? How could you choose abandonment when you have just turned my life around?

And yet, I have to accept that you are who you are. We never owned each other. We never had even a short leash to each other to thwart our diverging ways… You had promoted me to enjoy happiness, growth and formidability. You had gotten me to appreciate how challenges could be turned to achievements. And for one last test of character, I guess I would have to employ the ways you had helped me develop about myself to overcome this threatening certainty that is about to lead us to our real destinies.

Off you go. I’ll find my way. If not back to you, perhaps back to myself.

Of all the groups I associated myself with during my pre-fallout years in the University of the Philippines, the UP Subol Society Diliman Chapter was my longest ever love affair.

Love affair, eh? Well, let’s just say when you give a part of yourself to something without expecting anything in return, I guess you could call that love. Or whatever that comes close enough.

But yes, I consider it a love affair. From 2000-2003. When a significant part of my colorful life began. When I considered Subol the center of my universe during my younger college days.

It feels like deja vu trying to relive those days, as I’m sure I’ve had spent many hours before penning this same story during my Silew (the org’s official newsletter) days (I almost took the post of editor-in-chief a career… Not!). I never really planned joining a provincial organization halfway through college. But I guess I owe it all to fate that eventually I finally found a place to belong – to share a heritage that I embraced during the time I lived in a town called Binalonan, Pangasinan.

So Subol brought my home in the province closer to Manila. As it turned out, Subol later became my solace when turbulent times in my life came; it’s also where I began to feel the need to lead. Needless to say, I could not have enjoyed the good without the bad. And so Subol was also where I got to experience some milestones of baptism by fire – my first taste of breaking down after a very tumultuous encounter with Mr. Love, and yes, even politics in the microcosmic level.

Truly in many ways Subol helped me grow and evolve.

There’s just too many events to reminisce about Subol. Too many memories so good to relive. I remember too many people whom I have touched and touched me in more ways than one. People I have always looked forward to spending time again to reconnect.

It is a cascade of many wonderful times that truly made my college experience something really worth treasuring.

Yet time flies and in my desperate quest to find my life I took a detour and had to depart from the life I have had with Subol - my way of growing up more outside of the org’s reach. As I learned to deal with the more important things of life, being with Subol had its toll. In no time I found myself buried in the midst of winning how to survive life. I had to move on to be sure I did survive. But surely the legacy Subol had imprinted in my existence continued to live on…

After almost four years, I finally came to terms of revisiting my so called Subol past. Yesterday, I found out through Friendster that the org was to be holding this semester’s talents night for applicants. Though I was meant to prepare for Leo’s birthday that day, I asked Edward to tag along, short of gate-crashing, just for me to finally have an idea on how the org and its members were faring. (Leo and Edward are friends of mine who are also characters of another dimension of my UP experience – that is, the Narra days. But that’s another story).

After almost four years, I suddenly found myself sentimental about Subol. I guess it was about time that I paid my ex-love affair a visit. My nostalgia was just too hard to contain.

Pity, the venue was off-campus. So we had to ply the pristine suburb of Balara (even passing by Mang Jimmy’s – yet another spot that evokes many memories) to reach the place. And there, with less than 20 people, I found myself surrounded by members and applicants who undeniably paled compared to my age…

Being with them (later on Edward agreed with me) made me feel so old. Old in a very disturbing way…

I guess the point of going there was to re-establish my connection with the org, though I was half-expecting I’d chance upon members of my own generation. Though everyone was a complete stranger, my presence was enough to draw attention. I was slightly taken aback when they almost hesitated entertaining me. But thanks to Edward, we were able to break the awkwardness with his usual display of ricocheting queen antics.

So there I was, almost trying to bully the applicants with all my questions. As if not enough, I rounded on the members too. I don’t know how to earn their respect, so I just had to be myself. The usual Kiko – bubbly, loud and full of non-sense. It felt good to give them a short laugh, no matter how artificial it probably had been.

Still, it really felt good to reconnect.

Too bad I couldn’t wait for the program to start. Sadly, I couldn’t even wait for any more familiar faces to show up as I had an appointment that I couldn’t forgo (being there in Subol had me already cut hours on my workout session). I was a bit disappointed to see how not being able to follow their own schedule (due to Filipino time circumstances, I guess – it never changes after all) deprived me of the chance to meet some old friends again, but meeting the force that currently keeps Subol alive (it just celebrated 32 years of service to Pangasinan) felt more than enough now as I am more confident that Subol would still likely survive the years to come.

That way, there’s still a Subol I could return to. Until time really makes me realize that though old I may have become, a part of why Subol still exists today was in a way because of me and the members who persevered to pass on the old Subi tradition.

Francis Eusebio L. Bautista
The Subolite Known as Kiko – and no, not the founding member.
Batch 2000A
Mga Incredible Subolites - Mi2S

I have always wanted to bring it.

Right. I’ve been a UP Pep Squad fan during my young UP years (do I really have to rub the fact that I ain’t young no more?). I would die to be part of the team, but my fixation for it melted when I realized I didn’t have the body to bring it…

So I just stood by at the background, cheering for my team win 3 consecutive UAAP Cheerdance Competition titles from 1999-2001. Oh it was so awesome, feeling that school pride burst out of nowhere (well, if UAAP Basketball for UP wasn’t so dismal, school pride would have been channeled there).

How did I make it up to myself? Well after so many years…

The PeopleSupport Olympics 2007 Cheerdance Competition was my release…

And cheerdance champions at that, hell yeah! Hehehe.

-oOo-

And, uber-congrats to UP Pep after 5 grueling years of UP Fight!

2007 UAAP Cheerdance Competition CHAMPION!!!

Ayoko ng magcomment sa mga kumakalat na  comments about some being gracious losers and UP being sore winners. Labo!

Till next year UP Pep!

I guess the ironic thing about hearing out a friend vent out all his frustrations about his failed relationship is the part that reminds me that I’ve been there, I’ve done that.

How do you challenge yourself to be at peace when you feel you’ve given him all you’ve got, all you are, but turns out he neglects your role in his life and you end up feeling nothing at all? How do you take all these reasons, albeit alibis, about why and how that thing you have with him won’t certainly work out when you’re doing all your efforts to make it work? How do you let go of something you have made your life’s center, no matter how foolish and condescending you have become just to insist on keeping it, when you know you’re blatantly given the run-around of a surely sour ending?

How do you accept your love wasn’t worth it for him? How do accept him accepting your love only to see him disregarding you like he never took it all?

Hearing all those things, I felt my insides twist a little. It kind of made me remember the same hell I’ve been through before. Only that, I can’t see why my friend hasn’t seen the answers to his questions. I had seen mine, and it’s so simple. But I guess feeling his shoes, I had to remind myself that it took time before I ended up in my own realization. It really is always about time - time to let go and heal.

In this case where you see yourself lost in your own labyrinth of confused emotions, to truly find your direction is a matter of choosing how worth it is to keep something that keeps you happy but at the same time makes you miserable.

People become stupid because of love, blinded by the fear of losing the one they hold dear.

But then, it always goes back to the part where the more important person for you is yourself.

It’s obvious, but most of the time people forget. Suffering never is a pleasant experience (except for masochists perhaps?). You can’t suffer all your life. And in the natural order of life, all things must come to an end, suffering too.

You just have to know when to stop.

-oOo-

I’ll be having my own laptop soon. Thank God Edward offered me his because he’s off to the US any time soon and he won’t be needing it there anymore (He still hasn’t confirmed when he’ll leave, only that it’s soon. Fine!). But the cost, though relatively cheaper than it’s original cost of purchase, still exhausted my resources a lot.

Yet, I look forward to better things because of it.

I can already see myself so messed up trying to redo my abominable blog.

But I think I’ll be able to delete those private pictures I stored somewhere in the Internet now. I feel uncomfortable letting them lie there just in case it turns out I’ll be the next big scandal in town. Hahaha!

But the best delight is the part where I’ll be able to write more now. I feel my scrawny fingers typing those keyboards each time I feel a little off and need to loosen up by writing.

Geesh. Am I forgetting I bought the darn thing because that absolves me of any more alibis why I cannot do my freaking bachelor’s thesis?

Touche!

-oOo-

I’m feeling a little "old".

But let me do some cheer dancing to see if it helps. Hahaha!

I hate it when I’m bored. It makes me write silly stuff.

Gotta go!

It’s not my fault you’re tired; I’m as tired as you are. It’s not even my problem you’re crapping all over the place; I have my own crap to clean up.

But never - NEVER - ask me to clean up your own mess.

I’ve been through enough mess to know how to mop it out my life. If you’re struggling to be at par with me, then work hard and beat me. Just don’t ask me to go down with you. I’ve been down long enough to suffer; all I can do is go up after hitting bottom low. So stop being a crab and don’t be mental about it.

I find no pleasure in seeing you suffer. But I’m not even sure you care when I’m the one obviously suffering. Just because I take it easy doesn’t mean I’m not grumbling.

That doesn’t give you any license to question the sincerity of my position. I am disgruntled because all this time, I’ve tried hard to be on your side. It crushes me to learn that you antagonize me in spite of all the efforts I’ve spent in trying to please you.

Through it all, it even irks me to see that I’m trying to explain myself when I don’t owe you any. It only makes me arrive to the conclusion that never will I take any more blows for you when I know for a fact that you’ll never even glance my way when you already know I’m dying.

I don’t need you. So get out of my life.

There goes the scattering of lost feelings.

Before I could hardly restrain myself from wanting to have him again. Everything back then was so raw and fresh. I couldn’t remove him from my system. From my life.

Now I can’t believe how foolish I was to have insisted on something that I had already lost, something never meant for me. My take on love then was that if I wanted it so badly, I would have to make sure I did everything possible to get it.

And I ended up where I first started - alone.

Now, I’m still alone. But curiously, it dawned on me that after a long time of letting go, after a long time after I did let go, I can look into his face again and find my feet still on the ground. I am not crashing down, as I did before.

He’s merely a face now, not the one I used to almost worship.

I guess it’s true then that time heals all wounds. Everything ends in time.

I caught a glimpse of him today, I entertained the thought of glaring at him to test myself. Thankfully, I can now turn away, happy that what was once a sad episode of mine has now turned to a murky chapter of little significance. There’s no more heavy emotions. Just the delight of discovering that I could make it afterall.

There goes the scattering of lost feelings. There he goes.

And I’m gone from his life as befits my choice.