Long Holiday

The long weekend was spent mostly burying my lazy ass deep in my couch and watching whatever cable TV has to offer. Since my schedule freed up from all those projects, I've had the luxury of being able to work from home. When I say work, I mean answer emails and SMS. Occasionally, there are phone calls but since I have to mute the TV so they won't figure that I'm at home... I try to keep this to a minimum.

I basically divide my time in fulfilling 2 functions. First, visiting past and present clients to check on them while trying my best to talk about anything at all just to sustain a 15-20 minute meeting, and second, doing pre-sales work for prospective ones (which is essentially the same except that you get to lie a lot here). The truth is, there is actually a 3rd function that does consume a bit of my time also, and this is scheduling and going to employment interviews... but lets not mention too much of that here. So practically, if I don’t really have any scheduled meetings, you can probably find me unwillingly being tugged along by my wife as she takes the usual 3 hours to pick a new blouse at the mall (more on this later), or just snoring at my couch at 3pm in the afternoon.

I've always been one of those guys who actually keep track of whatever is on several different channels at a time. I don’t really know, but I feel like I have to get the most out of my time watching TV, so I try my best to click back and forth between the channels that I've earmarked... usually about 3-4 of them. And then an hour or so later, I slowly drowse myself to sleep. I know that this is most probably an after effect of experiencing a lot of business process re-engineering meetings with users and analysts, but I digress.

My wife has decided to start the Christmas shopping early. So she happily interrupted my dedicated snooze hours by dragging my ass out and making me drive her to the mall. To make it worse, the weekend coincided with a mall-wide sale so naturally; she had to cover more ground. Ever since we got married, I've been trying (unsuccessfully so far) to make it a normative practice to just split up whenever we're inside the mall. Not because I don’t want to be with her of course, but because I don’t want to be with her.... while she does her ritualistic shopping routine. I think I speak for a lot of men when I say that shopping is the bane of my existence. I can play basketball for 2 hours and run back and forth while sweating myself like a pig, but I cannot stand the standing and walking from 1 boutique to the next. Really. This is the only thing that you get to do. Every second feels like watching leaves fall down from a tree. Your wife decides to enter a boutique; you go in with her and wait your ass somewhere inside. Some boutiques understand this and actually place some very comfortable couches inside and they really are lifesavers. I have begun to know these stores by heart like Celine, Kamiseta, etc. because I know that I can sit there, throw my head back, and wait for my name to be called when it's time to leave. The one thing I can’t understand is why some women actually sit there seemingly oblivious to the fact that these seats are supposed to be for men only. Because if we are in there... we sure as hell ain’t shopping are we? Isn’t it too obvious that we got dragged inside?

The only thing good that comes out of me tagging along is, I get to constantly bark my objections about stuff that she fancies enough to buy. Sometimes its some new decoration for the coffee table, or something she wants to hang on the wall, or plants to put beside the door, or some fragile Chinese vase that will effectively prevent me from moving freely in my own living room. At least when I'm actually there during the "buying process", her decision gets challenged. I admit, I usually lose in these arguments and therefore our house gets to welcome some new dust-accumulating clutter, but I do win occassionally. Sometimes she loses the appetite to "look" at the other stuff because of the impending discussion so that's got to account for something positive.

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For the first time since she died, I failed to visit Lola for the annual semi-reunion at the cemetery. Was really a bad timing this year, I had a meeting early in the morning of Nov 2 and had to prepare some docs for that on the 1st. I hope she understands. I hope at least she understands more than my Tita's who are probably speaking ill of me right now for not being able to make the trip. But I don't really care if they do, I probably deserve it anyway.