Goddess, I Am.

Picking up where I left off…

I came back from Boracay a tad browner and somehow sadder than before I left. I got a glimpse of how the other half lived. I met people untethered by corporate jobs and familial responsibilities who spent their days bumming around the island and traveling elsewhere whenever they felt like it. Of course, these people probably had trust funds and stipends from God-knows-where that made such a life possible for them.

That did not stop me from coveting that kind of lifestyle, however. I started considering my options. I had this crazy idea of giving up my day job, moving to Boracay, and living off the P8,000-a-month I was earning from writing. Pretty farfetched, I know. After all, who lives on P8,000 a month in a very expensive island like Boracay? Still, I hoped and dreamed and hoped some more.

Then things started happening all at once. First, Chin got wind of the depressing rate I was getting. It was she who told me I was being taken advantage of. I was meant to get paid at least 3 times that rate for the same amount of work for starters, even more as I gained the experience. She then introduced me to the lovely woman she was writing for and who was more than willing to pay me the going rate.

While this new deal was definitely a huge help, it still didn’t address my feeling of restlessness. Once again, Chin came to the rescue. She knew a lovely Filipino couple, Paul and Rose, who worked as teachers in Bangkok, and they just happened to be looking for someone who can work as an office assistant. The pay was 15,000 baht (about $400). It wasn’t a lot but with my new writing rate, I figured I would have enough to live on comfortably, albeit simply.

For someone who had never left home before (except for those brief summer vacations to visit my dad in Manila), it was a huge and scary decision, but I took it anyway. My family and friends had misgivings, but they still supported my decision, and between all of us, we managed to scrape up enough money to get me to Bangkok and tide me over until I got my first paycheck. Barely a week after I started talking to Paul and Rose, I landed in Bangkok’s Suvarnabhumi International Airport in the wee hours of the morning with a suitcase full of clothes, Fita biscuits, Milo, cup noodles, and a flashlight and a Neo laptop that I got on loan (payable within 6 months) from a friend.

My first few hours in my new city was extremely harrowing. I couldn’t find Paul (who was supposed to pick me up) anywhere. I didn’t have his number (stupid, I know), and I was scared shitless. He did eventually find me, thank heavens, and I stayed in his and Rose’s place for a couple of days until I moved into a one-bedroom apartment a bit closer to the office. For 1,800 baht a month, I got a tiny bathroom, a double bed with a rock-hard mattress, and a small wardrobe. But it was clean and decent, and I fell in love with it at first sight.

The office I worked at was beside the railroad tracks across the old Don Muang International Airport, about half an hour by bus from where I lived in Pathumthani. It was a placement agency for English teachers, and my job involved developing their lesson plans and playing liaison. I met the man I married on my very first day, though we didn’t start dating until a month or so later. I guess you could say I was off to a good start.

Naturally, the office had Internet connection, so I downloaded my assignments and found research material while I worked during the day and wrote at night. By then, I was earning a cool $150 every couple of weeks from writing alone, and I enjoyed it immensely. The writing kept me busy enough to fight whatever loneliness might be lurking around the corners of my tiny apartment.

Bangkok is ripe with Filipino English teachers, and I met many of them while I worked for the agency. Now, I’ve been speaking English almost from the moment I learned how to talk, and having spent my entire career life up to this point working in call centers, I took pride in my language skills. I found the English proficiency of these Filipino teachers dismal to the point of non-existence – a very disconcerting fact, considering that they were meant to be teaching the language. They also got paid more than I did (upwards of 20,000 baht), so the hoity-toity part of myself felt mildly insulted.

My Thai boss, bitch as she was, refused to give me a teaching job, so I started looking elsewhere. It didn’t take long before I landed one, and oh, what a disaster that was! I was fired within a week (click the link for the full story), and because I resigned from the office job to take on the teaching job, I was left unemployed and just a tad broke in a strange, new city that I still regularly get lost in even after a month of living in it.

I was at a crossroads. I had two choices: I could go home, lick my wounds, and go back to my old job (my supervisor said I could), or I could stay in Bangkok and try again. At this point, however, I’ve gone right off teaching. For me, it was as pleasant as the prospect of colon cleansing. I had absolutely no talent for it and no patience for rowdy Thai students, and the thought of classrooms just made me ill. By this time, however, I’ve already started dating The Husband and it was starting to look serious, so I knew I had to find a way to stay.

And I did. I e-mailed the woman I was writing for and asked her if she had a full-time job available, and she made me team manager! I was put in charge of all the campaigns she got going on top of the writing I was doing for her. Fortune was definitely smiling on me. I started earning at least $600 a month (often a lot more), which, in turn, allowed me to live more comfortably, travel more, and move to a bigger and better apartment in The Husband’s building.

By the end of 2007, life couldn’t have been better. I was in a wonderful relationship, I had a job I thoroughly enjoyed, I traveled a lot, and I was earning more money than ever. On top of all that, I was learning so many things from my job that would prove to be completely invaluable later.

To be continued…

I’ve finally managed to tear myself away from sweet-talking vampires and hormonal adolescent werewolves to do some serious writing over the past few days. I had no idea just how “out-of-shape” (for lack of better words) I was until I had to practically pull out all my hair and cry hysterically just to get my brain working. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Because this post is my first post for the new year, I’m going to do exactly what everyone else does: nitpick on the year that just ended and make resolutions that I’m not likely to follow (okay, maybe I will…ish). Yes, I’m a conformist like that.

On Writing

This time last year, I wrote article after article without having to struggle. Somewhere along the way I became less of a writer and more of a businesswoman. I became much too engrossed in the money I was making that I stopped finding joy in writing and saw it as no more than a means to pay the bills. The more I looked at writing as a job, the more I found myself hating something that I used to love.

This year, I want to write – and I mean, really write – again. I want to enjoy what I do again, have fun with words again, and essentially be a better writer. Maybe I’ll write a book, or maybe I’ll just blog more often, who knows? Oh, and I’m seriously leaning towards monetizing this blog. That’s as good an exercise in writing as any, though I’m still balking at the idea of writing about things that would be all wrong here. We’ll see.

On My Finances

I probably earned more money last year alone than in 4 years of working put together. So am I financially solvent? The answer is a dismal “I should be.“ I should have enough money by now to allow myself to be frivolous from time to time. I should have a lot more than a few hundred dollars in my savings account by now. But I don’t. I made a lot of mistakes last year. I spent too much, and although it’s for mostly good reasons, too much is still too much. I can’t help but feel cheated.

This year, I’m going to pay closer attention to my finances. I’m going to stop indulging myself and the people I love too often. I’ll spend wisely, live on less, and save what I’ve slaved over. I would like to invest on something and earn a bit of passive income to increase my retirement fund, especially when I’m hell-bent on being able to retire by the time I’m 40. I’m also going to start looking at insurance quotes for myself and The Fiance. I will be looking at several options within the next few months, and I hope to increase my savings many times over by the end of the year.

On Our Relationship

This year was a very significant one for myself and The Fiance. The end of February saw us moving in together when we’ve both never lived with other people (family excluded) before. Months later, he uprooted himself from Thailand and moved back to Cebu with me. Most recently, he asked me to marry him – something that I never expected, considering how he made it clear right from the start that he had an aversion to marriage.

But it wasn’t always happy, happy, joy, joy. We had some really bad fights – fights so nasty that we’ve almost called it quits. But we haven’t, and that matters most. No matter how bad it got (and mind you, the last one had me shrieking like a banshee at the top of my lungs – something that I never used to do), we were both always willing to talk things over and fix things as soon as we’ve both calmed down. I like to think that it has made our relationship stronger and that we now understand each other a lot better.

This year, we intend to get married. I don’t want anything grand, nor do I want a lot of people around. There are very few people who I can still call friends, and I suppose, in this case, it’s a good thing because I won’t be obliged to feed a hungry mob who have all but forgotten about me while I was in Thailand. I want my wedding small, intimate, and preferably costing no more than 20-Gs. (Man, I’m cheap!) Whatever. I just want to be Mrs. Young!

On The Family

Here’s one thing that I realized when I moved to Thailand in 2007: I can’t live without my family. Or I can, but I don’t want to. I don’t think anyone else in the world has a mum as awesome as mine and a sister as adorable, and I can’t remember why I even wanted to leave home in the first place (okay, I was bored out of my eyeballs). Indeed, there’s nothing like being away from home to make you want to go back to it.

This year, I want to build our little family venture into something big to give all of us more financial security, especially my sister and her baby. For some strange reason, we’ve all been hit by the entrepreneurial bug. We’re also studiously turning our money trees every morning and analyzing the feng sui calendar. Is this our minuscule Chinese heritage at work? Not a bad theory, as long as I don’t turn yellow.

On Travel

Last year, I vowed to myself that I will go to Europe this year. Unfortunately, my savings account isn’t going to make that possible anytime soon, so Florence will have to wait until 2010 at the earliest.

This doesn’t mean that I will be putting myself under house arrest. Au contraire! After being away for a year, I realized that Las Islas Filipinas actually has quite a lot to offer. Thailand’s beaches has nothing – and I mean, nothing – on our really good islands – and I should know because I made it a point to visit as many beaches as I could to see what the fuss was about while I was there.

This year, therefore, will see me and The Fiance traipsing through the archipelago and (hopefully) swimming with whale sharks. I also want to visit more of Asia – though I’m definitely not going back to Thailand, even if someone pays me a million baht!

On My Nails

This one deserves an entire section all to itself. After a lifetime of biting – no, eating – my nails like they’re Scottish shortbread, I finally managed to successfully grow them. Admittedly, it wasn’t by choice. I had a toothache so bad that I couldn’t partake on my usual, umm, diet (gross, I know), and before I knew it, my nails were nice and long and tougher than cow hooves.

This year, I’m going to keep my nails nice and long and tougher than cow hooves. I will have them trimmed, buffed, and polished in every pretty color of the rainbow. Who would’ve thought being a girl was this much fun?

So this sums up what I want this year. There are some things I didn’t include, like a MacBook and a vibrator (every girl has to have one, haha!), because they’re trivial, trivial, trivial.

(Belated) Happy New Year, everyone! Here’s to a year of love, trust funds, and French manicures.

Since I moved here a year ago, not a day goes by that I don’t read from one blog or another about how intellectually inferior the Thais are from the rest of the world. It’s all good reading, but one can never appreciate the magnitude of such claims until one sees it for herself. A scene that I witnessed earlier this evening is a very good example of the average Thai brain’s, umm, capacity.

On the way to dinner, the boyfriend and I stopped by an ATM kiosk to take out some money. As I waited for the guy ahead of me to finish his transaction, I glanced over at the other ATM where two university students were withdrawing 200 baht. I didn’t think much of it because the guy before me had finished, so I stepped up to the machine and did my thing. Done, I stepped away, and the boyfriend took over.

While waiting for him to finish, I managed to glance over at the other ATM again where the same two university students were clearly struggling with their transaction. Curious, I surreptitiously took a peek at what they were up to. They were still trying to withdraw 200 baht, except that the machine had run out of 100 baht bills, as what was apparent from the on-screen message telling them that it was only dispensing 1,000 baht denominations and asking them to enter another amount. They keyed-in 200 baht again, and naturally, the machine returned with the same error. They did this over and over and over and over and over. And just for the record, the on-screen message was both in English AND Thai, so there could be no doubt about what it was trying to say.

By the time the boyfriend finished his transaction and we were leaving the kiosk, they were still at it. Considering the fact that they were already there while the guy ahead of me started his transaction and they were still there when the boyfriend and I finished ours, I’d say they’ve been going around in circles for almost 10 minutes. And these were university students, as what was obvious from the uniforms they were wearing.

They say two heads are better than one. That seems to be true anywhere but in Thailand where two heads don’t even equal a brain.

For the past couple of days, I’ve been trying to figure out how to upload pictures on my blog. Oh, it’s not that I don’t know how; it’s that it won’t let me. This is the first problem I’ve encountered since I started a self-hosted site (am I using the correct term?) a few days ago.

As it turns out, this is common problem with WordPress 2.5.1. After poking around a bit (and a rather frantic message to Matt in Facebook), I found a myriad of “solutions” ranging from upgrading Flash and Java, to updating source codes. It was enough to make my head spin, Linda Blair style. So I took the path of least resistance and decided to install a plugin (that’s at least something I know how to do) to disable the Flash uploader and just use a rather basic one instead. Thankfully, it worked. You can now see Jollibee smiling happily in what used to be the barren landscape of my blog.

So there you go. I have just managed to fix my first ever technical problem on my own, a feat that’s pretty much wasted because my camera (or should I say, my mum’s camera that I borrowed) decided to die on me for no discernible reason. And this was after I bought a special USB cable that cost me 700 baht just so I can upload my pictures. Obviously, I’m not happy, not happy at all.

So until I can figure out what’s wrong with this piece of shit camera, you’ll have to put up with ol’ big butt over here.