I left my heart in Chiang Mai

I was no more than a stray summer wind that blew over her mountain tops and blended with her cool breeze before leaving just as quickly as I came.

I spent only 3 nights in Chiang Mai to attend a short meeting of old and new colleagues and friends, and I left it too soon. It was nice to see old and familiar faces from last year's Hanoi institute and Surabaya program. Abdul and Ericka alone made the trip worthwhile. I had some apprehensions about attending, due to its proximity with my Beijing consultancy and the work I was leaving behind in Phnom Penh.

Also a welcome sight was Sirinate, a new friend I made in Kuala Lumpur 2 months back. Her mild-mannered charm (that betrays her sharp mind) continues to allure me. And her Burmese partner is also a sight to behold (a fact that wasn't lost to Abdul–naughty bitch!). It is seldom that I meet a writer whose beauty is only matched by his excellent writing skills. I wasted no time informing him that I am a fan of his works.

The hotel was marvelous–old but still regal, and the staff were very friendly. My only regret is i forgot to tip the bellboy who welcomed me when I arrived on Monday afternoon. At that time I had no Baht in me and I completely forgot about the tip in the flurry of things. 

I can't wait to return. 

After the love has gone

Tomorrow I am leaving for Chiang Mai to attend a regional meeting on sexuality. There'll be quite a few Filipinos in this meeting and I don't know most of them. And two days are not enough to get to know them so… After that I am jetting off to Beijing to work on my first consultancy outside Cambodia and the Philippines. I am very excited to do this because if I do this well, it could start my new career in China. And I've always wanted to see the Forbidden City and the Great Wall also.

However, I am leaving Phnom Penh with a heavy heart. Professionally, there's a project that's long been delayed that will be delayed further because I am leaving. I had wanted to finish it before this trip (which had been scheduled since last month) and this consultancy (which was confirmed only 2 weeks ago). I hope Tony does not get tired of hiring me.

On personal matters, Kaloy and I haven't been speaking with each other since Wednesday. I just got so irritated by his cavalier attitude towards me. On Tuesday we shopped for groceries and when it was time to pay at the cashier, he went out of the store to smoke, leaving me to sort out the goods at the counter and with no one to help me carry the bags out. Good thing the driver was alert. And when we got on our ride, he had the nerve to tel me that he intended to walk home and leave me with all the groceries. I told him if he did that, he'd find his cans of beer scattered on the sidewalk, like a trail, to our front door.

Then that night, when I told him to wake up early so we can go to the market together, he refused to go with me. I told him if he didn't go with me, i will not speak to him again till next year. So there. And I don't intend to be the first one to talk to him, even if it means leaving him without anything (fresh food or money).

I was not asking him to help me with my personal stuff. Shopping for food, which we both eat, should be a shared task. That's what makes me mad. He has exerted great effort not to be regarded as a guest in my house but as a flatmate but when it came to doing shared tasks, he balked. It's not as if he was busy working; he was just having his daily social drinks with himself. 

Anyway, as I promised myself, I wouldn't let this (him) affect me negatively. I'll focus on my trips instead. 

Karma chameleon

Last week I paid for all the procrastination, all the dilly-dallying, and all the hesitation that I did instead of doing my work. At the start of this month I had two self-imposed deadlines that I set in order to be free from these commitments so I can move on to my next project(s). One deadline was Monday, June 4. The other was Tuesday, June 5. I had decided to spend the weekend working my ass of so that by Monday morning I can meet deadline #1 then still have the rest of the day for deadline #2.

But what did I do? Instead of doing what I intended (working my ass off), I dawdled around the house and around the web (please refer to my previous post). So come Sunday evening, I had accomplished nothing!

Thankfully deadline #2 had been moved a day later, but deadline #1 was more problematic. I've been working on this for too long that I just wanted to be free of it already. So I had to give notice that instead of Monday, I'd be submitting my commitment on Friday, June 8.

This is how the proverbial cookie crumbled: on Monday I worked on deadline #1. On Tuesday through early Wednesday I finished deadline #2. I started work on Tuesday, 8AM, worked non-stop until Wednesday, 4AM. After emailing my submission, I slept for 4 hours then got back to working on deadline #1 again. I had to stop by 5PM because I saw old friends from the Philippines and Indonesia who were here for a conference. Kimrun and I took them out to dinner because they'd gotten tired of hotel food. On Wednesday I was only able to work in the morning because I had promised to take them shopping in the afternoon. This time Kaloy went with me. The afternoon shopping stretched to dinner so I managed to get home by 10PM. I was dead-tired and Kaloy knew it so upon his advice I slept right away and woke up at 6AM on Thursday, got back to work at 7AM and did not stop until Friday at 12 noon. I made my submission at 3PM, as I promised.

At around 4.30PM I finally succumbed to sleep deprivation and slept through Friday night and the rest of Saturday. On Sunday I saw 4 new pimples on my forehead and a new depth in my eye bags. 

Always something there to remind me

It is a quiet, Sunday mid-morning and I have two huge tasks that I need to complete by Monday afternoon. But, instead of being neck-deep in work, I found myself wandering around the web, and looking at the profiles of people who are not part of my life now. Nope, they did not die, but they may as well have. Ex-lovers, ex-colleagues, ex-friends, that sort of thing…

I'm not sure why I do this. Whether it is a combination of my voyeuristic and masochistic tendencies exerting their influence on my mind is beyond me. I just do it. Not to renew my ties with them. Hell, no. Except perhaps, to keep tabs? See what they're up to these days in their little corners of the world? Look at how they appear now? Geez, I should probably be working for an intelligence agency. Didn't someone told me many years ago that I am suitable for intelligence work? It was a career counselor or something similar. This was echoed by a friend who admired my capacity to be still for hours just silently observing the goings-on in an outdoor cafe.

Still, I would like to know why I keep doing this. It's a waste of time. Seriously. I examined my feelings while doing this and I came across a blank wall. Except for the reasons I previously mentioned, nothing else came up. My mother faults my memory for this. According to her, my sharp memory keeps me from letting go of the past. That I forgive, but never forget. That is very true. I, in fact, do not believe that phrase. It does not make sense to me. I mean, I can forgive, and I sure can stop bringing up one's past mistakes, but I will not forget them. Because keeping those things at the back of my mind will help me avoid the same mistakes or protect me if they indeed happen again.

If there is anything that I learned fiercely from my mother, it is this: once trust is broken, you can never bring it back.

But I digress. In coming across a blank wall in my search for a reason, does this mean that I am destined to be doing this over and over again, as the list of my exes grow longer? I hope not. I do not want to spend the rest of my life pondering on the imponderables. I don't want to end up like Marcel Proust!

Better for me to sign up with the nearest intelligence agency, pronto!

Here comes the rain again

During the past week, the warm weather in Phnom Penh has been interrupted by gusts of wind and rain, especially in the late afternoon. I wondered why before realizing that May was over and the rainy season is upon us.

The rainy season. I remember when I first arrived in Phnom Penh three years ago, I was struck by the mild-ness of the rainy season. Compared to the tempestuous rainy season we have in the Philippines (typhoons, floods, and the rest), the rainy season here is so mild and predictable you can practically schedule your day around the rains. Usually, you get a clear morning, a humid noon and the rain between mid-afternoon to early evening. Sometimes you get rain before dawn, resulting in an overcast morning which brightens up late morning and the rain again on the afternoon. Now it's a bit erratic. Al Gore's voice begins to drift inside my head, talking about global warming.

June was a happy month for me. When I was a boy, I associated it with the opening of the schoolyear, ergo new shoes, new uniforms, new things: a bag, lunch-box, notebooks! About three weeks before school started, my mother will take me to department stores and school supply stores to shop for school stuff. Of course, I didn't have the final say as to what kind (or brand) of things I end up with (That decision-making power was bestowed upon me during high school) but that was okay. In fairness to Mama, she never refused me outright; she would ask what I liked, and if it fit her budget, she'd buy it. If it didn't she'd offer another suggestion. Besides, Mama never bought me a notebook that had movie stars on the covers, or a tacky school bag. We would buy shoes, belt, school bag, lunch box, pencil case.

For the other school supplies, she regularly went to this shop in Divisoria (Manila's bargain shopping district) where she's buy things in bulk: notebooks, writing pads, boxes of pens, glue, adhesive tapes, pencils and crayons, reams of art paper, rubber eraser, scissors, puncher, stapler and staple wire, and a small bolt of plastic cover sheet to cover my notebooks and books. I remember how I used to love the scent of these plastic cover sheets. These things were stored in a closet in our house, so that for the whole school year, I wouldn't have to worry about school supplies. No trips to the neighborhood store to buy a few pieces of bond and art paper and a tube of glue. No worries of running out of pad paper for writing. That's how organized my Mama was, is, and will, I think.

June is still a happy month, until now. The changing of the seasons usually have a buoyant effect on my feelings and emotions. I am usually excited, not frightened, by the concept of change. It is only when that change becomes all-too real that it causes my innards to knot themselves into a tight ball, and when the change looms above me like a storm-cloud, i will again feel suddenly relaxed and without an ounce of worry. 

What the heck. Give it to me. Whatever that is.