Published Book or Work by:
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Burnout |
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| Published by www.emanila.com | | 2 March 2005 |
| I wish things were different or otherwise - whatever this otherwise is I do not know. I would not want to know. Each day I get to realize this fact as I rush from my cozy rented room to my cozy spot in the office where I work.
Each day I am given a chance to ponder this bitter reality as I suffer the morning tedium in Rosario, Pasig, a tragic bottleneck primarily because it's dominated by a green bus line whose drivers and conductors are - depending on your luck - either knights or goons. They stuff their bus as if there's no tomorrow. Commuters-students, employees, elderly, seldom children-are packed (not like sardines anymore, the can doesn't have much fish anyway) as if it is the final trip.
What's with the crowding and the rushing I wonder. I always wonder. Yes, perhaps it's all about money. And all it offers to these people - sustenance, survival. Or maybe life. I observe that most people in this city cannot just get tired. Everyone just would like to earn. And I feel sad about it. I feel isolated. I feel like I do not want to be one of them. I wish things were different. Or otherwise.
Yet in the same trip, I get to admire the Filipino worker. I admire their hard work, their silence, their temperance. I admire how they are able to get up in the morning, put on their work attires, get transported in a bus that stuffs them like they were fish, get conveyed inside their buildings by stinking elevators that smell of fart and shit, work the long day in their cubicles (perhaps their self-made enclosures and later coffins), the same places where they get more anxious intimating with office politics that smells horrible like their pantries soiled with cockroach's and rat's shit. They just do not fail to amaze me. Talk of juxtapositions and symbols. Talk of redundant realities and coincidences. I suppose some of them are thinking things were different. That things were otherwise.
In the workplace I get to read the endless complaints and lamentations by Conrado de Quiros in his column. In his terse words, he sounds more convincing about how people in power and authority cannot just seem to get enough of their greed, ever oblivious to the poor people's daily travails and struggles. It is amazing. He does not get tired of saying the same thing all over again. In every column, he slights at the government's inefficiency, incompetence, and stark shamelessness. I wonder what more could he do. Or maybe it is just his job - just to make people see. Just to make them see all the time. But to no avail. To no avail. But I suppose he is correct - he seems to be endlessly wishing things were otherwise. Otherwise.
Maybe whatever I feel right now is not burnout anymore I suppose. I was burned out long ago with work even before I traveled to work in Manila. I left the simpler life in Naga because it bored me. I hated my students because they would not understand me. Now I realize that it was I who did not at all understand them. I am glad I did not teach anymore. I am proud of myself for it. At least I am not adding insult to an injury. I am not contributing to their future burnout. Maybe disillusionment is a better word. | | More Information... | |
Alternative Lifestyles
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