My second annual year-end review. Same crap, different year. Enjoy.
January. Job hunted all over Makati with motley crew from admuECEzerofive. Discovered that potential employers will be all over you when they find out you're from THE Ateneo... and then quietly burn your resume when they hear how much you want to charge them for your Jesuit-educated services. Bugumm.
February. Started the Sunken Losers club. Aside from that, don't remember much. Probably blocked out Valentine's Day memories, erased whole month instead.
March. Year of the Dog powers kicked in. Finally graduated after six (six!) years in college. Got (and accepted) job offer from the first company who offered. Slightly pathetic considering I applied to about a zillion companies. Nevertheless I don't regret my decision. Yet.
April. Fun: overnight swimming at Club Manila East with the Bataan Ten. Rented adjacent villas, snuck in illegal goods at midnight, played tong-its til morning. Had good ol' family fun. Not so fun: was subjected to all sorts of inhuman tests, had to submit every form of bodily fluid imaginable, got felt up by a lady doctor for routine medical examination.
May. Started five-month training at ADTX. Was told five months will fly by. Did not believe them. Was right. If you're not an Action graduate from ADTX, you do not have the right to have an opinion about those five months.
June. Received first paycheck. Realized I had been royally ripped off. Watched the last movie I will see in a theater for the rest of the year (X3: The Last Stand).
July. Turned 24. The same age the regulars of Central Perk were in season one of Friends. Note to self: must get a life.
August. Not much to tell. Probably filmed friend's basketball games in random gyms all over the Metro Manila area. One Tree Hill it was not.
September. OJT in Alabang. Started The Adventures of Jamie the Lady Bedspacer in Sucat, which later became The Adventures of Jamie and the Roommates with the Rhyming Names in Las Pinas. Amiel, Daniel, Rommel - the L's. What fearful symmetry. Symmetreye.
October. Graduated from training. Placed third over-all, behind All-Knowing Kabo and Ren the Learning Machine. Which was actually not saying much seeing as there were only 14 of us, but nonetheless I was pretty impressed with myself, the self-admiration lasting two whole days until the PhilNITS results came out and I was back to comfortable self-loathing.
November. Back in Alabang. Got first full paycheck. Scratch that - ASYON got first full paycheck. Dreams of financial independence squashed by fear of getting thrown out of the house by angry mom.
December. First Christmas where it was MY turn to hand out the angpaos. Wasn't too thrilled about that. Spent Christmas with the family (how wholesome.) Watched amazing fireworks and wealth display on New Year's Eve by neighbors at subdivision.
New Year's Day, 2007. Attended family reunion. Got drunk with cousins on gin, brandy, wine, and beer. Gak made me own up to my mistakes in the past. Fuck. Had to follow Ernest Hemingway, who said you should always do sober what you said you'd do drunk. That will teach you to keep your mouth shut. Lesson learned.
So that's it. My year-end review. Pretty short considering it was a veeeeeeeeery long year for me, what with the waiting for graduation, for job offers, for training to be over, for my first paycheck, for everything else.
Anyway. The Resolution. My New Year's resolution is (drumroll please)... to buy more books. What (no pun intended) a novel idea. I read "American Gods" by Neil Gaiman last month and realized how much I missed reading actual books, as opposed to reading from a computer monitor. Also I was challenged when I read about Time's "100 best English-language novels from 1923 to the present" in Erasmusa's blog and found that I had read only two of them - "Things Falls Apart" by Chinua Achebe, which everyone from my high school batch has read, and "The Lord of the Rings," which everybody else has read. I actually felt depressed.
To remedy my depression, I blew a coupla hundred bucks at National Bookstore last night on two books - J. D. Salinger's "The Catcher in the Rye," and Ayn Rand's "Atlas Shrugged," stuff I'dve read a long time ago if I knew any better. On the next to buy list: "By the River Piedra I Sat Down and Wept" by Paulo Coelho, "About a Boy" by Nick Hornby, and "The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes" by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. I'll probably buy books I actually know about first, maybe some stuff from the Time list, and then move on to lesser-known titles. Suggestions are of course welcome.
Nooni nooni noo. I should really be getting back to work. Haha. That'll be next year's resolution. Til next.
