Goddess, I Am.

I hate headaches (who doesn’t?). I find them inconvenient, unnecessary, and completely inappropriate all the freakin’ time. Unfortunately, I get so many them. And though I could’ve just taken a Tylenol before, or even just ignored the telltale throbbing and called it a day, the pain has since become an everyday constant of the unrelenting, debilitating kind.

My headaches don’t really have a specific trigger, so I can’t really blame flickering light bulbs or bad perfume for my ordeal. Rather, they just happen. I would normally wake up in the morning dizzy with my head throbbing dully. It gets progressively worse from the moment I step out of the house. It gets particularly bad around midday and well into the evening. As a result, I’m hardly getting any work done because not only does it hurt to think and write, it is absolute agony if I even so much as turn my head my inch. This has been going on for the past couple of weeks.

Naturally, I’m quite alarmed, so I’ve been trying to figure out what’s wrong with me. I’ve ruled out pregnancy because I just had my period, and I still think that I’m at least 85% infertile (don’t ask). The Fiance believes the diet pills that I’ve been taking (this will be another story) may have something to do with this, but I totally doubt it when my mum and my best friend who are both using the same pills feel fine.

Personally, I’m thinking that this has something to do with the combination of rapid weight loss, a declining eyesight, a full-time day job that I hate (and bosses who yell a lot and office mates who sing even more), several freelancing gigs (and difficult clients), and a semi-decent wedding to plan (and an irrational fear of getting jilted). As it turns out, I may be right.

After doing a bit of research on the different types of headaches (there are about seven), I’ve found out that I’m more than likely suffering from chronic tension headaches. All the symptoms – from the vice-like ache around my forehead to my inability to turn my head as I please – seem to confirm this. It even mentions the very sleeping pattern that I’ve been suffering for years, even when I’m bone-tired – how I have trouble falling asleep, how I wake up frequently during the night, and how I wake up earlier than I’m supposed to. All these can be attributed to just about any form of stress there is, and heaven knows I am more overextended than Hillary Clinton.

As accurate as this information might seem, though, I’m still taking it with a grain of salt. After all, nobody should self-diagnose over the Internet. That’s why yesterday I paid a visit to an eye clinic. Sure enough, my vision is in a pretty bad state, so I got myself a pair of prescription glasses. Considering I spend about 12 hours on the computer every day, I’m hoping that this will fix my problem for good. I don’t fancy having to go to some useless doctor who will probably just turn his nose up at me and give me a prescription for even more Tylenol.

I’ve got less than an hour before I can leave work and pick up my new specs. For now, I’m going to spend the next few minutes resisting the urge to bang my head on my desk, hoping against hope that it’ll knock me out cold so I can at least get some sleep and forget this cursed throbbing.

The past few days have seen me running around like a headless chicken, trying to get anything and everything done at the same time. I’ve got work to do that can’t seem to stop piling up, and a wedding that is seemingly refusing to go on schedule.

It’s a very long story, but, in a nutshell, the NSO helpline is a bleeding mess, which resulted in some of our documents turning up over a week later than they were supposed to. And so it was that I found myself drowning in mountains of paperwork that needed to be filed pronto if we were to have the wedding on the 18th as planned. If it wasn’t for my mother’s seemingly endless connections, I’d still be drowning in photocopies.

The earliest possible time that we can get our marriage license is on the 7th of April, which is really cutting it a bit fine already because we still need to speak to the judge and Lord only knows what else. Here’s hoping mum can work more of her magic.

One thing’s for sure: I hate Philippine bureaucracy and all its useless nonsense. How I wish we can just go on one of those Vegas vacations and have Elvis marry us. After all, he’s not dead, you know!

I think I have an abuse problem. The problem is it’s an addiction I can’t afford to sustain, so I just end up frustrated, very unsatisfied, and feeling all too silly. Why, oh why, couldn’t I just have a drinking problem? Instead, I have to be hopelessly fixated on laptops, of all things.

It all started when I bought my first one in 2007 before I left for Thailand. It was a large, bulky thing with a 14-inch screen that I got on a 6-month installment scheme, and I must say that it was definitely the best investment I’ve ever made because it ended up being my meal ticket.

Because I wrote for a living, I loved how I could take it with me everywhere. Eventually, however, the novelty wore off and it weighed me down quite literally. I used to carry all 7 kilos of it in a backpack, and it gave me horrible back and shoulder problems. And because it was a rather tacky brand (the best I could do at the moment), its performance went progressively downhill from day one – enough to be annoying, but nothing to be alarmed about.

I then developed a wandering eye. I would trawl through shops, longingly inspecting sleek, lightweight models with features that made my old, reliable, less-than-a-year-old lappie look like a relic from the ruins of Pompeii. I almost succumbed to the urge to splurge a couple of times, but thanks to the voice of reason (The Fiance’s), I managed to walk away from the shiny, pink Vaios and Macbooks aplenty in Bangkok’s Panthip Plaza.

And so it was that the next few months found me toiling with that laptop and all its familiar quirks – that is, until I managed to save up some money. I somehow convinced myself and The Fiance that I will be a hunchback in a year if I carry on lugging that monstrosity around Southeast Asia. I still couldn’t afford a Macbook, but I could get one of those ridiculously cute netbooks. I then dragged him to Future Park Rangsit one evening where I got one of those oh-so handy Acer Aspire Ones in white.

At that time, they only had the 8GB ones that ran on Linux. If I wanted the ones that ran on Windows XP, I had to wait a couple of weeks until they came in. Looking back, I probably could’ve waited, but with my typical impatience, I reasoned that I’m only going to use it to write and browse, anyway, and I still had “oldie” if I somehow needed to use Windows, so why not? Plus, it was cheaper. And that was how Gretchen (Chin forced me to name it) came into my life.

She didn’t disappoint for a while. With only a 9-inch screen, she was so small and she hardly weighed a thing. I could simply stash her in my purse and forget that she was even there. I bought an 8GB SD memory card to give her a bit of a memory upgrade and found a way to install Firefox 3 so I could browse with a slightly bigger screen, and we were happy. Still, she was nowhere near the Macbook of my dreams, so it wasn’t long before I started to tire of her and her spartan features and to look at the shiny new netbooks available these days with their huge hard drives and prettier colors.

I still have both laptops. Nearly two years old now, the bigger one is running on the dregs of its ancient battery, so it’s not good for traveling anymore. It freezes almost all the time now and crashes when pushed to do too much. It even wheezes like an old person, and if it could speak, I suspect it’ll beg The Fiance (who uses it most of the time) for retirement.

At 7 months old, young Gretchen is really not so young anymore. She has a very temperamental charger that only works when it feels like it. The older one’s charger does work with her sometimes when plugged in the right angle, but I can’t use it too often when “oldie” barely has 2 minutes on its battery. So poor Gretchen is almost always dead these days, and when she is working, she messes up the multiple inboxes I set up on my Gmail because her screen is so little. Not only that, I can’t seem to find the inspiration to write when I use her. She still runs pretty fast, though, which is an upside of her running on a Linux system. Still, I can’t be bothered to sort out her little issues because I do most of my work on my office computer now, anyway, for lack of better options.

So as you probably can tell by now, I am, once again, dying to get my hands on a new laptop. And with a rather healthy statement balance on our joint bank account, it is, indeed, quite a challenging exercise on self-control. After all, I am going to be a very married woman soon enough, so I can’t just be frivolous at a whim anymore.

But hey, that doesn’t mean a girl can’t dream, and this girl is dreaming of a 13-inch Macbook Aluminum.

Or, at least, the Vivenne Tam edition of the HP Mini 1000.

Drat. Where’s that fairy godmother when you need one?

I honestly don’t know what I’ll do without online shopping. I discovered it fairly early back in the days when having a Pentium 3 computer was the height of cool and we had dial-up connection that worked slower than Nicole Scherzinger’s brain cells. I can still remember using my mum’s credit card (I had a supplementary account) to order silly things like signed posters of the Spice Girls and “authentic” katanas. Luckily for me, no one shipped to the Philippines back then, so not only did I save my mother a few hundred dollars, I probably saved myself from a lifetime of being grounded.

Fast forward to a few years later. People in the west have now realized that the Philippines actually has real people that use (gasp!) computers, so one can now buy just about anything under the sun as long as one is willing to pay for ridiculous shipping costs and customs charges and wait for weeks (sometimes even months) to get one’s parcel. This is how The Fiance gets his Blu-ray movies.

I must say I totally admire the man’s patience. I, for one, will be climbing the walls by the second day; hence, why I prefer to do my online shopping on some of the local websites. As long as I pay early in the day and bug the seller senseless to ship before the courier’s cut-off time, it’s guaranteed that I’ll get it bright and early the next day. (And mind you, I’ve only been let down a couple of times.)

How true is it, though, that folks in the U.S. are getting their stuff delivered within minutes? I saw this video promoting an online site with an overenthusiastic Howie Mandel and a very amused little old lady named – wait for it! – Gay.

So a strange man (Howie) knocks on Gay’s front door and she actually lets him in, use her computer to order a smoothie maker, and lie on her kitchen counter. Then somewhere between the actual sale and him admiring her light fixtures, someone’s at the door again with – you guessed it! – said smoothie maker. And it doesn’t end there. Gay, displaying the best of American hospitality, even makes him a smoothie on the spot!

Farfetched or not, I think the video shows exactly how endless the possibilities of online shopping are. Although The Fiance will probably still have to wait several days for his imported movies, I can at least expect the sewing machine I ordered on behalf of my sister to turn up within the hour.

It does, indeed, sound super cool – in theory. For all I know, it might only work with Howie hyperventilating in my kitchen. If that’s the case, I think I can wait a day or two.

Why do people always assume that couples who are getting married are going to actively work towards producing dozens of babies? And why on earth do they get this strange, almost pitying look when you say you’re not planning to have any? Is there even a law somewhere that states married couples should procreate?

Ever since The Fiance and I have decided to take the plunge and get married, people have been asking us about having babies in almost the same breath of their congratulations. It’s harmless, I know, but it’s still rather awkward whenever we tell them that we’re not planning on having kids EVER because they get That Look on their faces like we’ve just offended their delicate sensibilities or something. It’s very off-putting.

Right from the very start, The Fiance has made it totally clear that he doesn’t want to have children because the world – and the Philippines, in particular – is grossly overpopulated as it is. I, for one, have never really been a great fan of kids with the exception of my nephew (my sister’s) and my goddaughter (Chin’s) because they’re both ridiculously adorable. That still doesn’t mean that I’m going to voluntarily change nappies out of the goodness of my heart. And unless the world suddenly changes and babies are born pre-potty-trained, I doubt if my perspective is going to change anytime soon.

We have, of course, discussed it at length several times. We’ve examined the pros and cons, and guess what? The cons definitely outweigh our one and only pro – which, by the way, is to simply gloat at the product of both our superior genes (tee hee) brought together (silly, I know).

Truth be told, we’re more likely to stock up on pet supplies than diapers, and as surprising as that might be for everyone else, that’s a choice that we made together.