Procurements

One of the advantages of being unemployed is that you are compelled, in a way, to rummage through your old stuff when spacing out and daydreaming no longer work. You take out your journal and recall what you have been doing or thinking at some points in your life.

Going through my journal, I have been reminded of the things that I did about a year and a half ago, when I decided to leave my first job. I was unemployed for about three weeks. Most of the time, I was left alone in my room – no PC, no books. What I had included a television that only had three or four channels, a mobile phone, a notebook, and a pen.

Most of those unemployment days were spent staring into space, chatting with a friend through SMS, and writing down some noteworthy messages that this friend was sending me. Thanks to him, I got myself to post a new blog entry.

This friend and I were talking about how poor and bored we were at that time, and what we would become in ten years. One of his memorable messages (as written on my journal) was:

Hehe. I know we’ll be good friends Kat. Just think about it, 60 years from now we may never fulfill our ambitions, but we can look back and be happy bout the things we enjoyed together.

(Warning: You may find this entry too personal, melodramatic, irrelevant, and so on, and it would save you a lot of your precious time if you stopped reading this now.)

“Still pursuing, still achieving, learn to labor, learn to wait.” – Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Based on my employment history, I would like to believe that people grow more patient as they age. Two years after I graduated from university, I got three employments. For my first employment, I lasted one month; the second, four months, and the latest, fourteen months.

Right after I went out of university, I was itching to go out of the city in my desire “to see the world”, the overrated “real world”. So I got a job that flew me to another city. But after a month, I left my job because it frustrated me. Then I got another job, and it was less frustrating this time. I loved the people I worked with; I learned different lessons, from using Open Office applications to the biggest US companies that filed for bankruptcy. It did not frustrate me that much, but still, it frustrated me. Plus, I was itching to go home before the year ended, and eventually, I left my job again. 

So I got another job, this time, in my very own hometown. You see, it is writing for the Web. Since it involved writing, I programmed my mind to love it. But, … and some opportunity came, an opportunity that will yet again allow me to see the world, only that this “world” this time is way too far from my comfort zone, my family, and friends. But hey, this is something new, so why not take the chance.

Bittersweet good-byes

I found myself too excited to leave the company after I submitted my resignation letter. But, a day before my last shift, my friend (also a co-worker) and I chatted through SMS. I told her that it was finally my last shift, and ended it with the expression, “hahay”. In reply, my friend said, “Nganong hahay man? Dapat yehey!”

I told her that somehow, I felt sad. There was no particular reason why I felt that way; I just felt sad about the whole idea of “leaving.” I was not particularly close to my officemates, and my very close friends had already left. But I don’t know, leaving is one of the few things that I feel sentimental about. As soon as my last shift started, I had a couple of people in mind to say good-bye to. And saying good-bye to them, I really felt sad, sentimental, and so on. I am just glad that there are people in my most recent workplace that I truly care about as I have always enjoyed bittersweet good-byes.

Probably, a month from now, I would be making the biggest, saddest, most bitter good-bye of my life. But, to console myself, I would make myself a believer of Proust, a person who decided that those years he suffered, those were the best years of his life.