California, 2007

I’ve noticed that I’ve been so busy lately that I haven’t had the time to sort through my digital pics in months. Various pics on my phone, on my crappy Kodak, and all over my hard drive.

This one was a sunset on the I-80, just past the refinery before the Benecia-Martinez bridge, on our way home from Fairfield.

We usually visit our uncle and aunt there, although not often these days, now that I’ve started working through the weekends.

Daly City BART, on my way home from work. The January fog is rolling in. Really, really cold.

Especially when you miss the six o’clock bus and have to wait thirty minutes at the stop for the next one.

This is the view from Alcatraz’s mess hall window. We went to The Rock for Christmas. Now that I think of it, that was kinda depressing.

But at least it was time spent with family, so it’s worth it in its own way.

This is a typical Friday night. One AM, when I finally give up on coding, and I try to kick back and relax with a beer and Civ IV.

Try to. Sometimes it even works.

Junk food. Nostalgic junk food for homesick people I guess.

2 for 99 cents.

Oh well, I need to lose weight anyway.

Notes to self. Do not attempt to cook adobo after three beers.
Do not attempt to cook adobo and vacuum the apartment after four beers. Do not attempt to cook adobo, vacuum the apartment, and play an MMORPG after five beers.

And last, do not attempt to to consume greasy, half-burnt adobo in the middle of a hangover the morning after six beers.

Two years ago.

The last time we’d been to the beach. Real, Quezon, just before the landslides and the typhoons.

Things will never be the same again.

There’s always a last time for everything.

Moving on and moving forward.

Like you have to divide your life into two halves. One part before you left home, before you lost your old job, before you left all your friends and family behind and bought that one-way plane ticket to LAX on the slim hope that somehow things will be different on the other side. Not better. Different.

And this half, on this side of the ocean, in this cold and lonely city. Working days and nights and weekends and holidays, saving what you can, skimping on things you don’t need (well, need, but not NEED) like clothes or eating out or medical insurance. And looking at nothing else but doing the same thing over and over, for weeks and months and years in the foreseeable future.

And there’s nothing but this thin thread linking the two halves of your life together, a thread composed of bits and pieces of news and pictures and long distance phone conversations at mutually inconvenient times. Blurry postage-stamp-sized webcam images, showing your newborn nephew, showing a tiny, tiny slice of the other part of your life.

The old part of your life. The part of your life that you’re supposed to have left behind, that you’re supposed to not think about, because thinking about it is not moving forward, it’s not moving up.

People tell you of the opportunity cost, of investments and careers and making money and ask you why were you still wasting your time in a dinky little university in a dinky little third world country getting paid less than three hundred dollars a month (before taxes).

And they tell you that you should grow up. That you should get a car, buy some clothes, join a gym. That you should be an adult for once. That you should get a life.

I remember, over a decade ago, someone telling me those exact words. "Get a life". And for ten years I ignored her advice, blissfully continuing on the same path I’d been on, living in the same routine, in the same little town I’d grew up in.

So. Maybe this is what growing up is all about. Leaving your idealism and nationalism and deeply held beliefs behind. Facing the real world. Tossing everything you’ve built, everything you’ve worked for, every single cent in your savings accounts on a single roll of the dice.

Maybe. But there’s still this deep nagging suspicion that maybe it’s not.