Irritation about Life!!

I don’t remember exactly when this flow of work started, though it seems it did late February or early March. Since then, I haven’t had a real day off. Good and bad. The corporate finance to June won’t be too bad as I’m managing to make a small profit, and I hope this continues to the end of this financial year.

Not having had a real day off means I’ve been contained, or detained, in this apartment effectively. The only time I went out to have my time with others was April 14, when I met three guys for dinner, one of whom I hadn’t met more than 10 years. We are like comrades who survived a large translation project, a battle, some 13 years ago. I enjoyed that reunion. After we parted, I went on to CC for some more drink.

Being home almost all the time, except when I go to the supermarket for grocery shopping, is also affecting my daily life. Very often, I stay up until early morning (5:00 am in a few occasions) doing an online word game and watching YouTube and wake up only in the afternoon. Today, I got out of bed relatively early at 10:00 am.

Staying in bed and in that familiar state of “half awake and half asleep,” my thinking almost always goes to mother and my history with her. I think… she didn’t like me very much. Her attitude toward me when I was a small kid seems to me can be understood now with this idea that she was unhappy with me because I enjoyed being with father. Therefore all those stories told to me by her about him, telling me what a terribly violent and unethical person he was, perhaps trying to peel me off from him.

As for reading, after “America’s Boy,” I’ve read “The Story of English (Robert McCrum, Robert MacNeil and William Cran),” “The Fooling of America: The Untold Story of Carlos P. Romulo (Pio Andrade, Jr.),” “The Catcher in the Rye (J.D. Salinger),” “Douglas MacArthur: The Philippine Years (Carol Morris Petillo)” and “Corresponding with Carlos: A Biography of Carlos Kleiber (Charles Barber).”

“The Story of English” is its third edition and of course this is the base on which that famous TV series was created. This is a very nice book for one to see many Englishes used in today’s world in perspective but didn’t change my hostility toward so-called Singlish.

I decided to read “The Fooling of America” because the book was cited in “America’s Boy.” This was published by the author himself because no publishing house accepted his work. Surprisingly, I found his handwriting in this second-hand copy to “Dear Dr. Pontius” and comments throughout it. It was rather tedious to finish this book as this is badly written as the author is admitting in his message to the doctor and he is very emotional in many places. I wonder if Romulo was a politician so exceptionally deceptive. Many in almost every country are, and it shouldn’t be surprising at all when we talk about politicians in the Philippines.

“The Catcher in the Rye” is something I should’ve read years ago. But I had been ignoring American literature. As far as I remember, the other novel by an American author was “Sophie’s Choice.”

Carol Morris Petillo attempts to dissect the general’s psychology. A hero enthusiastically welcomed by the folks of my country at least partly because they were unaware of what sort of information control they were placed under, the author depicts him as a Mama boy.

“Corresponding with Carlos” must be a very rare source to look into the personality of this reclusive “old coot” conductor. It was like having a sneak view into private exchanges between Kleiber and the author though letters only about private matters are excluded from the book. It should be interesting when the book is perceived by combining it with the DVDs, “Carlos Kleiber: I am lost to the world” and “Carlos Kleiber: Traces to Nowhere.”