Random thoughts

Yes, I stole a friend's blog title for this post. But I am quite confident that I will be forgiven for this indiscretion. I'm so bored right now writing all these articles for our newsletter. Creativity is almost down to zero. I can't even come out with an interesting title for this piece. I imagined that jotting down all these thoughts, as I become aware of them amidst the chaos in my head, is a better activity. Actually, the ideas listed here just hit me earlier while I was on my way to the office. Finished reading Bob Ong's book, Stainless Longganisa. The book amply demonstrated the underlying profundity of quite simple thoughts. Reading Stainless is one mind-expanding, stress-busting experience (i.e., if you're a Pinoy).

• Should the state of being a traditional politician, especially here in the Philippines, be considered a serious psychological disorder? They often talk and act weird. They definitely inflict a lot of harm on other people. Sometimes, as my good friend once observed, their actions impact very negatively on their own images and positions. There's this famous case of a lady senator who has repeatedly promised to shoot herself or do all these crazy things in public if proven wrong with her claims. She was in fact proven wrong a number of times. Asked by a journalist if she's finally going through with her self-imposed sentence, she gave out one of her maniacal laughs and admitted to being a liar. And then, there's former DENR Secretary Mike Defensor ... but, that's an entirely different story altogether. I think it was a case of an alien conspiracy aimed at wreaking havoc in the country.

• What is it in the written word that sometimes makes it more powerful than the one spoken in a face-to-face exchange? Is it because of this fear of anything recorded or documented, and therefore couldn't be easily erased or deleted? Or is it because we all know that a written word is something that couldn't have been easily conceived and brought forth into this world, as is the case with its more impulsive oral counterpart? Realized again the power of writing and its product when I received today an email from an old friend in college. Obviously slighted by my recent attacks on her ideas and opinions from an earlier exchange, she advised me to "get a grip of myself". Never expected that I could ever be perceived as insane with the things I write or because of the way I write them. Oh well, as somebody said it once, those are the risks of the trade. From where I stand, the only choices are to face up to these dangers or retire your pen (or keyboard). I couldn't stop my writing. But I could take Foucault's advise and send a stronger message by keeping my peace.

• My boss recently brought to my attention (in a very indirect and subtle way) my lack of initiative. I've often wondered about this situation too: why can't I bring myself to initiate projects or volunteer for work here at the office? And then I thought about how my boss swamps me with all these work that I hardly have enough time to do. Trouble is, I don't have the guts to say no. And I take our office's standards regarding quality of work quite seriously. So, I usually find myself always trying to catch up with my so-called "backlogs". Which I think is precisely the reason why I'm having difficulty starting out or signing up for new work. Because that would only mean a higher pile on my workstation or a longer list of things to do. Then I thought of how bosses are supposed to be the ones calling the shots and ordering things around the office. Taking the initiative in the project is their job, not mine. So, most of the time, I end up wondering why I even bothered thinking about it at all.

• What if I resign from my job and just blog all day? Minus time spent on sleeping (about 5 hours), on eating (3 hours), watching tv/reading/etc. (4 hours), that would be 12 hours a day, 84 hours in a week, approximately 4,380 hours in a year. If I get to live to 64, and assuming that my gray matter can still work out the answer to the question "who am I?", that would be 118,260 hours of blogging. Will I be able to fill up all the virtual space assigned to my blog by blogspot.com? And what would happen to the archives list by then? Will it be truncated at some point, or will it just keep on getting longer until it spills out of the page and my blog displays an error message? What if I die at some time in the future and people who used to know and visit my blog also died or have completely forgotten its URL? What would happen to my blog then? Perhaps a more existentially meaningful (isn't that an oxymoron?) question is: should I go on toying with these inane thoughts inside my skull or should I just bear with my boredom and get back to work?