blogging bugs

These are hard times. I’ve talked to some senior citizens and they all sigh and say that times have never been as hard as today. I don’t think that’s an exaggeration. I see it everywhere. I can feel it, too. Ah, let me rephrase that, my pocket feels it, too.

But we can’t let this eat us up. Life has to go on no matter how hard it is. There is no use moping and griping and ranting. That’ll only add up to the stress and depression and won’t solve any of our problems.
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Many years ago, when I was working as a fulltime teacher, I’d take lunch in school because my schedule demanded it. I had only an hour’s break so it seemed a waste of time to drive home and back again (the place where I live is less than a 5-minute drive from school; if there’s traffic, the longest driving time would be 10 minutes).

What I couldn’t forget about lunchtime in school was when I passed by the desk of a colleague who was also my grade school teacher. She was having one hard-boiled egg and rice. Just that. Nothing else. I thought that maybe it was just one of those days when we tire of meat or fish and would just like to have something simple and fast. Sadly, I found out it was a necessity. Not a matter of choice but the dictates of economics.

When I started teaching again about a little over a year ago, I took the jeepney in the first few weeks. But when my back and neck started complaining (I had to bring my laptop and several books plus some other things and it seemed my bag weighed a ton), I knew it didn’t make sense to scrimp and then suffer in the evening when I came home from school. I started taking a taxi. Each trip cost P35. Which meant that I spent P140 a day for taxi fare since I had to make two trips for my morning and afternoon classes. It didn’t seem so much then. I still had enough (even if not much) left to do my groceries or buy cooked meals in the evening.

Today, I pay P40 for each trip. I don’t know why it seems the taxi meters have become a little faster but I no longer see P35 on the meter. It’s now either P37.50 or exactly P40. But whether they’ve been tampered with or not, it’s not a big deal for me. Taxi drivers must be taking really hard blows with gas prices ticking up faster than their meters so an additional 3 or 5 pesos from my pocket is my way of sharing their burden. BUT this also means, that if I go back and forth twice a day, I’ll be spending about P168 a day (at an average of P42 per trip) for taxi fares. So I now eat in school - leaving home by 9 a.m. and coming back at 6 p.m. This time, even if I have to wait 3 hours for my next class, it’s a necessity because, after taking out money for my fare, there seems to be nothing left to do the groceries (and I now buy only what I need, not what I want).

Buhay titser, talagang mahirap. It’s really difficult to be a teacher.

First, I saw this …

Then it rained. I checked the internet for the weather news. No storm, this site said. Thank God.

When the rain stopped (it wasn’t even ten minutes), I looked down from my window and lo and behold!

I couldn’t take photos of the part where water was deeper - I saw a man wading and it reached almost up to his knee (he was maybe a couple of inches above 5 feet). I wondered what he was wading in … maybe pieces of plastic bags, styrofoam containers then the picture turned more yucky: perhaps even rat feces and urine, cockroaches and other things.

About this same time last year, people from the fire department came and put this big pipe into the sewer to suck away anything that might have been clogging it … out came fastfood containers and plastic bags and all sorts of trash.

This is the price we all have to pay.

Update: I posted some pictures here.

The electric transformer on the post just outside my bedroom window blew up at 1:30 a.m. of Saturday, June 21. That - plus the howling of the wind that sounded like a pack of hungry wolves - announced that Frank had arrived. I wasted no time. Though I was already in bed at that time, I immediately looked for as many containers as I could and filled these up with water. Since the building uses an electric water pump, I knew there was a big probability we’d run out of water before the electric company could come over to fix things up. And that was exactly what happened - the building ran out of water early Sunday evening and my own water supply ran out Monday noontime.
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Today is Jose Rizal’s birthday. How can I ever forget? Twenty-eight years ago, I celebrated because it was the day I found out that I passed the CPA Board Exams. Actually, I took the October 1979 licensure examinations in Manila (at the time, the exams were being given only in Manila) and I had to endure nine long months (like a pregnant mom!) to know if I passed or failed.
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… courtesy of Globe Handyphone.

Several weeks ago, I read this one page ad in the papers about Globe Handyphone’s internet rates (time browsing, they call it). It said it’s charging only 10 pesos for every 30 minutes of browsing the internet. Sucker me, I fell for this promo and immediately texted “TIME” to 1111. I got a confirmation that I had been registered and I browsed the internet using my cellphone for a few minutes. Later that day, I deleted the confirmation from my phone. Fatal mistake.

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That’s Manong Abe, a trisikad driver. Two nights ago, I took his trisikad coming home after shooting the Negros Occidental Provincial Capitol and Lagoon (my photos here). He was talking to his fellow trisikad drivers when I approached them. He was first in the long queue and as he got up on his bike, he said “Ay, grasya … may isa pa.” [grasya literally means grace; a blessing]

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Followers of this blog know that I love striking up conversations with taxi drivers. I learn a lot from them and because I enjoy 9 out of 10 of these chats (a very good batting average, if you ask me), I feel like it’s worth the 10% to 20% tip I give to the drivers. That would be about 5 to 10 pesos, depending on the quality of entertainment … so what is 10 pesos for getting entertained?

On that particular day, I was a little testy. I was going to a mall so I could complain to SmartBro about my intermittent broadband connection and I am really cranky when I get poor service. It was also particularly humid and, as if to test my patience further, I waited for nearly 20 minutes to get a taxi ride.

So when I finally caught a taxi, I wasn’t in a chatty mood. It was the driver who started the conversation and, perhaps noticing that I was profusely sweating, he talked about the weather - dark skies in the morning, humid till the evening, an occasional rainshower which isn’t even enough to water the plants. I totally agreed with him but the best I could come up with was a languid “yes, yes”.

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Do you remember who uttered that line and in what movie? Will tell you the answer in the next post which means, uhm, maybe tomorrow, maybe next month.

First, I would like to say thank you very much to n i c e h e a r t. She is responsible for putting The Cook up, something that I failed to do here. Kiss the Cook! David Cook’s MP3s are doing very well in iTunes.

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There is something seriously, seriously wrong with the way Philippine education is being managed.

Of course, this is no longer news to many of us. Yet it gets outrageously disgusting to read about how everything is getting bungled here and there and everywhere. It should alarm all of us that administrators in government agencies- they who are armed with all sorts of highfalutin’ titles and academic degrees - who are supposedly tasked to oversee our educational system can not even observe something as simple as due process.
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