Not like childhood Christmas

It feels like I have outgrown Christmas. No more excitement, no more genuine happiness. I so need Peter Pan right now to take me to Neverland.

Holiday get-togethers

OCG friends met at Dads. For the first time in almost a year, Boss Richie finally joined! The buffet table was evil. The bottomless iced tea was equally sinister. Good thing i didn't eat lunch, but still, it was like stuffing yourself sick til u want to vomit which was....fun! haha. Swapped snowmans with Fred because i want the red one :p

Mental note: need to find a way to upload pics because the new phone is missing a data cable. Think of friends on the other side of the wall who have laptops with IR, think of them all the time!ü

Office Xmas party

It’s a hat party this time. I particularly liked the huge Mexican hat worn by a developer. I so want to wear a cowboy hat but I can’t seem to find one. I wonder where Chin got hers from…In the end, I settled for an old fisherman’s hat, too much for creativity.

We arrived late at Linden Suites because I had to accompany an officemate to her client. We immediately went to the buffet table, and surprisingly, after 3 hours of being late, the food seemed almost untouched. These people weren’t hungry??? That’s new. The food was fine. I wasn’t able to finish mine because I had to join the beer drinking contest and felt full after. I almost won if I hadn’t burped three times, hehehe.

Raffle prizes….as usual, I never won anything major. I was salivating over the DVD player that I thought I won (it would have been perfect with the television set I bought), it turned out that it was Yza, seated beside me, who took it home.

My monito gave me the gift I like – Harry Potter VCD series. Nice, had I known earlier that my monitor is one of the bosses, I could have gotten away with a DVD player. Chances…Anyways, I got a dry iron and nothing more. After two bottles of beer, I’m done with the party. It wasn’t grand but my team mates were hilarious and being around them is was chaos. Yet, to sum it all up, this party though great, paled in comparison with last year’s Ephil Xmas party. Hehehe. It was still my most memorable Xmas party of all time.

Not a good year for friendship

Once there was a friend, he is all honest to you, pouring his disappointments about the fire-breathing dragons pestering his life. He felt helpless and he involves you in his daily grind, in finding a way out of the cursed village. And you did find a solution; he seemed pleased and would like to move to the next village. Promises were made, even curses. At fortnight, you never heard from the friend again. You thought he was just busy packing up so you go and tidied the house where he’ll move in the next day.

The following morning, Hedwig the owl brought a parchment from your friend asking for extension. The landlord being a seasoned businessman asked you what happened, warning you of profits and losses, and telling you why something like this isn’t good for the business. You do not understand what happened so you demand the friend an explanation. The friend seemed enchanted for he did not make any sense to you. He said he has so much going on. He had to shoo away the ginger bread man who comes at night to feast on his ginger garden. Then he had to make an ornate shirt for the king, for there was a village week-long street-party that the royal family will be attending. He has scheduled a search for Hansel and Gretel who were lost in the forest the other day. He promised Rapunzel to help her braid her hair, he had to meet with the seven dwarves for tea every Sunday, and the dragons still pester him, and the list goes on and on and on.

Finally you realized that he never wants to leave the cursed village after all. Exasperated, you asked him if he really intends to leave. The friend never answered the question, instead, he ran far, far away into the woods and never so much as say a word to you again, abandoning you and leaving you out groping in the dark dungeon where the landlord holds office, all the while asking you to explain what happened. Your friend goes off telling half truths to the villagers, making you appear like an imposing witch bitch. Of course, allies come to his rescue for he cannot wager a fight himself, all for the glory of friendship.

The following morning finds you cleaning the messy aftermath of groping in darkness, alone, by yourself. All this, while the friend continues to deal happily with his business, making himself comfortable with the village despite the regular irks he complains about each day, oblivious about how you managed to see the light of day. Aaahh…I bet the Grimms brothers would have loved to hear this bastardized version.

Moral of the story is, until a person learns to be honest to himself, until he learns to respect a promise or a guarantee, until he learns to trust himself and the goodness in other people, he is not a friend to himself and definitely not capable of keeping a friendship. Shorter translation would be, grow a spine and fend for your self.
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C said it’s really not a good year for friendship. She is so damn right! But I’d still like to believe otherwise. Yet I can’t discount the fact that only in 2005 have I met people who act like my bratty little 2-year old niece, most of the time, that bratty niece fairs better than these twenty-something/thirty-something adults when it comes to good manners and right conduct. Frustrating.

Friendship, to me, does not need to be complicated. It neither should have any standards nor rules. It is a beautiful thing bound by mutual respect, trust, and honesty. Just these three of the most basic of human acts alone guarantee you a good, fun and lasting friendship – three very simple things that the whole world seems to lack nowadays. Failed friendships happen. I’ve had my share of them. But I take comfort in the fact that I am always the victim. It’s much easier that way; at least I know I remained a true friend until breakup.

7260

After 7 months of waiting for my moto e398 replacement unit, I finally was able to talk the customer service agent into replacing it with a Nokia 7260. He was so accommodating that in two weeks, I finally have the phone. I added 1k which was soooo fine since they were initially asking me to dole out P3k for it. Out of sheer excitement, I bought some pastries from Dulcinea for the customer agent who updated me every single day of the status of my request. Kudos to Carlo de Vera for an exemplary customer service.

In hindsight, except for the ultra sleek design, I’m not happy with this phone. It’s too manual.

The power of four

Just when we found the perfect place away from the Metro, people started to beg off and beg a rain check. In the end, it was Haha, Sonia, Leo, me and that big, deserted resort in Tanay. I really wished the guys were all there to share the agony of having to be seated inside the jeepney for hours! Sooo unfair! Apparently, a huge 10-wheeler truck carrying sacks and sacks of cement decided to conk out after it has happily spread itself across the stretch of the highway. Nightmare! We only humored ourselves just to survive each minute. I’m sure the passengers inside the jeepney found us too amusing that they didn’t bother with us laughing on top of our lungs. A manong even decided to join in the chitchat, hehehe.

There were three huge pools and only the four of us. It couldn’t get any colder on a starry December night, so we only stayed in the water for a few minutes and decided that it was better to chitchat in dry, warm clothes. No booze this time, primarily because Marlon, too, wasn’t present. Either way, we had soooo much fun!

God Talk

During dinner, I told a friend that people get along very well until they talk about religion. A professor turned good friend expressed how she feels about what’s going on with another friend, in religion’s point of view. She said she felt the need to rescue her from some destructive force. I was saddened, more so, I was torn.

In the catholic school where we used to go in college, we were taught about everybody being a child of God. Up until now, I share Dr. Margie Holmes’ perception of God. That He (or She) is somebody who isn’t short-sided and unfair to let people (man, woman, homosexual) be thrown to hell for eternity just because they are what they are. Then there’s a movie I saw (I think it was Stigmata) that made me “doubt” religion being the vehicle with which to reach God. A verse lifted from the Gospel of Thomas was read in the movie, which was, so they say, deliberately omitted from the Bible because of its unequivocal message that fiercely clashes with what the Catholic Church has long established as the Christian way. It said,

“I am the light that is over all things... Split a piece of wood, I am there. Lift up the stone, and you will find me there.”

The message, to me, means that I can commune with God even without the church, even without religion telling me what to do, for God is everywhere and most of all He/She is within you and me. It is through faith and personal relationship with God that one will be able to find Him/Her. Therefore, I still hold that a person, as long as s/he remains productive in the community, s/he is good to other people, and s/he believes in one holy and powerful being that is far greater than us all, that person is every inch a child of God no matter how “odd” his/her preferences in life might be.