Envy With Footnotes

Is this a crisis?

What I don't like about social media is the fact that I get up-to-the-minute updates on how my peers are so much better people than me in so many ways. Sure, I could just opt not to look at status updates in Facebook, or block people, or "unfriend"* them altogether, but doing so would lead to another crisis better discussed elsewhere.

Self-Love

Last Friday, a coworker and I decided to eat out for lunch. While waiting for our food to arrive we started talking, as we usually did. She was quieter than usual, and looked confused about something. When  I asked her what the matter was, she asked me a question that made rendered me speechless.

Google Translate Fails and Meddlesome Folk

I just typed the word "pikon" in Google Translate and it insists that in English, its "harmony".

Oh, the irony.

Why did I attempt it? E kasi napikon ako. And I wanted to say it. But how am I supposed to, now? (Okay, so I'll tell the story.)

Anxiety Attack

My dad is sleeping over at our house tonight. My dad.

For other people that sentence is fairly innocuous. My co-workers certainly think its no big deal. But I do. It's a big deal; a big nerve-wracking one. And no, he's not a rapist, just so we're clear on that.

Irritated by people more talented than myself.

There, I admitted it. Lots of people are more talented/ intelligent/ socially adaptable/ essentially better than I can ever hope to be. And some of them irritate the gadobeepers out of me (“Gadobeepers”-- yup, I just invented that, don’t ask me what it means, I don’t know either.); but that’s just because they’re wasting it.


I walk around inside a mall targeting the A & B markets on my way to the bus terminal -- clearly, that mall is not for me-- and some wise guy in charge of the PA system decides to play a CD of acoustic renditions of otherwise perfectly not-disgusting songs if A) the songs weren’t being sung by girls with fake American accents and B) the songs themselves actually sound better than the original versions. But A) they are, and B) they don’t.
This is annoying enough on its own, until you realize that if they could muster that much courage to make themselves look (and sound) foolish, then they could’ve expended that same courage to do something original, and help make the music industry better.

If you’re like me, and you’ve wanted to learn to play at least one musical instrument decently all your life and still haven’t, you’d be irritated too.

They say that to be an expert at something you’d have to devote at least 10,000 hours practicing it, whatever ‘it’ is. Ten thousand hours. Ten thousand. Now, I’m no mathematician, but since that’s the number for reaching ‘expert’ level, then to achieve ‘mediocre’ you’d at least have to attain half of that. So, 5,000 hours of, say, guitar practice, and you take all you’ve learned using all that time and proceed to make a ridiculous boy-girl duet of Taylor Swift’s “Love Story”? Seriously?


I understand that you’re just trying to be known, and that the easiest way to break into the biz around here is to be all pretty or hunky or pretty hunky and sing already really popular songs (probably counting on that song’s popularity to pull you along). But making sure that the songs you pick are either really unsuitable for acoustic guitar renditions, or that you make really bad versions? Or, I don’t know, just ignore intellectual property rights altogether and sing it the exact same way with the exact same “adlibs “ thrown in for good measure? How ridiculous can you get?


Oh please don’t let them take that last question seriously and actually try.

I Know I Should Be Working

But I'm not. At least not yet.

(Pause)


I've been accused of being a "Grammar Nazi". But I'm not. I use "Filipinisms" a lot ("CR", "push through", "fetch"), confuse my metaphors, and botch my sentence construction. The previous sentence is a case in point.


Okay, so my Facebooks statuses (stati?) often deal with absurd grammatical errors which I often overhear or am forced to pay attention to. I, however, don't go around correcting people's grammar at the drop of hat. I guess it just irritates me when people speak to me in English, attempting to use the old "I speak English therefore I am superior" attitude (which is annoying enough on its own) and then go ahead and say something like this while looking down their nose at me:


"You know we should continue with it, irregardless of whether they will marked it or not."


Just typing that made me roll my eyes. Twice.

Okay, so I'm done ranting. Back to work!