:Six Feet Under… and then some.

Here’s a news bulletin:  I actually spent the whole day studying! 
I was supposed to spend this week-end in Anilao, but those plans have been shelved for the week after next.  In the meantime, I’ve immersed myself in the world of on-line auctioning, on-line forums, and Wikipedia.  I was bitten by the eBay bug a few days back, but now I’m happy to let several “deals-of-a-lifetime” slip past.   I decided to do some research on scuba equipment (hence the whole day of “studying”), and bottom line is I’ve decided to get something I can actually test first, or even just examine before buying.  However, this decision did not stop me from trawling eBay for other things.
Its interesting to see what items people put up for sale.  While looking up SCUBA rebreathers, several rubber gas masks came up for sale – to be used for kinky fetishisms.  Made me realize that I was lucky I already had one.  Now all I need is the fetishism that goes with it.  The masks they had on eBay had the intake valve reversed so that one ends up rebreathing their own exhaled air.  Oh well, you know what they say about hypoxia and orgasms…

Also on the web were plans on a DIY dive light.  The plans came from Switzerland, but when I looked at the price of the materials… well, CHF 100 (around 4100 pesos) was a bit too much for a homemade light. Granted, the plans did give me some ideas, so maybe I can retool another cheapie flashlight (as the original one from a previous post has proven unsalvageable) – learning from my previous mistakes – and come up with a serviceable yet reasonably priced light!  At the very least, I should come up with either a success story or another academic exercise.

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I finally figured out why some people flush the urinal in (men’s) public toilets before they start to urinate.

The event occurred while watching Pirates of the Caribbean.  During a lull in the screening, I decided to relieve myself (for a two hour movie, it felt surprisingly looong).  Anyway, it so happened that this other guy went in with me at around the same time.  As I said, it was during a lull in the film, so it was disturbingly quiet in the restroom.  There we were, two guys (following the every-other-urinal rule of course) trying to take a leak and then…..

NOTHING!

Gawrsh, the performance anxiety!  For what seemed like an eternity, there we were, both unable to pee! Not a tinkling sound to be heard!  Oh, the dilemma! What to do?  Zip up and pretend to be done?  Whistle a happy tune?  Lucky for me the other guy broke first and flushed his urinal, and with the sound of flushing came the impetus for peeing, thus allowing both of us to maintain our dignity.

Next time, public restrooms should have piped-in music going: wiwiwiwiwiwi

edit: I just realized this section has no significance to most women, seeing as they do not utilize the men’s room in general.  Unless of course a similar event occurs in women’s lavatories… does it?

edit 2: the light I assumed to be unsalvageable?  I was able to take it apart, clean the internals (replacing some of the metal components), filled the whole thing with silicone sealant, and now it looks like it’ll have another chance to redeem itself as a dive light :)  Talk about really cheeeeeeeap!

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Two days and seventeen more hours to go before the bidding’s up.   I’ve been tracking this regulator on eBay for the past 5 days debating on whether or not it would be worth the 1,400 peso price.  Considering a brand new one can cost almost 25K, it seems almost tempting, like it would be criminal to just let it slip by  – even if just for spare parts!
Then again, there are some things you just don’t want to think of when you’re more than a hundred feet under water…

Haven’t I learned anything from previous forays?
But still… 1.4K vs 25K.
Damn you eBay!

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The weather today cooperated nicely.  When I woke up this morning, there wasn’t a cloud in sight!  It was a great day to go diving, and it afforded me the chance to finally test all the stuff I bought last May.  We went to a site off Mactan called Talima, with a small wreck and a wall.  We set our maximum depth to only 25 meters.  Anyway, most of my gear survived commendably, except for the flashlight.  See, I bought this cheapie flashlight and tested it in a pail.  Well, it worked great in the pail, but at 85 feet down, all the bulbs did was give a faint glow.  When I cleaned the light afterwards, I found out that the batteries had somehow exploded and crap was just coming out of it.  So here are the things I learned: 
#1. There’s a reason why underwater flashlights are expensive.  Quality does not come cheap.

#2.  If the batteries you buy for your light are more expensive than the flashlight, it’s a good indicator of the quality of your light.

#3. A better indicator would have been all the misspelled words and horrid grammar on the packaging of the flashlight.   

#4.  A pail is not a substitute for any dive deeper than 2 feet.

You live, you learn.

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After the dive, I met up with my relatives over at Plantation Bay.  Over lunch, the dive center calls up, and they say that I had forgotten something at the shop.  They wouldn’t identify the item I left behind, so I started going through a mental checklist of all my gear.  I remembered throwing all the important stuff into my crate, so I couldn’t quite figure out what I had left behind – but I had my growing suspicions.  Not having a dry bag, I usually keep clothes and stuff inside black trash bags.  Cursory inspection of my crate revealed the absence of said bag.  Upon arriving back at the shop, the secretary sees me and

says:

     “Sir, may naiwan po kayo…”

Sure enough, she gave me this black rolled up plastic bag.  The bag which contained my toiletries and my, uh,  used laundry…

     “Sir, baka gusto niyo i-check…”
     “‘Di na. Okay na ‘to.”

Of all the things to leave behind…hay naku.

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Speaking of underwear (oh wait…no one was talking about that.  Oh well.), the other night,  Joseph came over here to the house, and through some convoluted pathway, the conversation turned toward words and their Filipino translation.  We went through the basics:
     Square - Paresukat
     Rectangle – Parehaba
     Triangle – Tatsulok

To the bizarre:
     Chair - Salumpuwit

And through natural progression, to the stupid, crass jokes.
     Panty - Salungguhit
     Brief – Salongganisa

Cracks me up every time I remember that.

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I guess all people deny that they snore unless confronted by hard incontrovertible evidence – like a recording, or in my case, waking up to the sound of a starting lawn mower coming from somewhere behind my soft palate.  I’ve been told that it starts out softly then builds to a great crescendo:
snore…
     Snore…
          SNOREEEEngngnkkk!!!
          “What the… who… what… eh…?”                
There are about 3 seconds of total bewilderment right after waking up to your own snoring.  You look around searching for the culprit, then it slowly sinks in… oh. my. goodness.
It’s a good thing I can still avoid snoring by making sure I sleep on my side.  Or so I’d like to believe…

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After almost two weeks of constant cloudiness and rain (along with improperly dried laundry and a slowly putrefying carpet), the sun finally chose to show itself today!  Went swimming today in Tabogon with my brothers, and hopefully, if the weather keeps up, I might be able to go diving off Mactan tomorrow.  It’s the only way I can justify lugging all my gear here to Cebu.

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On the ride back from Tabogon (which is about 78km north of Cebu City), we would pass by bunches of kids walking home along the road from school.  I was reminded of all the years of studying I went through, and it also got me to thinking how I would view this point in my life a couple of years from now.  I can’t help but compare and contrast my own life with that of my folks.  By the time they were my age, my folks had me already (considering I’m the youngest of three boys).  And me? If you’ve been reading this blog, the predominant theme of the last 3 months has been “bumming around.”   Bum.  While there were days during clerkship and internship wherein my most ardent desire was to just kick back, relax, and maybe sleep in till I woke up on my own volition and not to the sound of an alarm clock, or to a paging system.  Well, I’ve got what I wanted in spades!  I guess you could call this a transition chapter in my life.  A chapter which began after the boards in August 2005 and will continue all the way to the 2007 match.  I guess I better just enjoy this moment while I can.  Goodness knows when the next planned opportunity will come around.

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A few days ago, I found myself in Makati with some time to kill, so I decided to revisit my old school there.  It had been 12 years since my last visit to the campus, so I was in for a few surprises.  It was a Friday, and was almost dismissal time.  The first thing I noticed was the absence of  those large school busses – which were now replaced by rows of smaller vans parked out in the lot and along the road.  Upon entry through the main gate, I was greeted with the sight of paintings of old school administrators lined up along the walls, and a miniature fountain in the middle of the lobby.  Granted, There were still things that remained the same – the way the noise level would slowly creep upwards 30 minutes prior to the final bell – from a deserted quiet ground floor, to the noisy PE classes dismissed early, on toward total pandemonium after the sounding of the last bell.

But change far outweighed the familiar.

Off to one side of the lobby, aside from the hanging paintings and old photos, there was a small museum and a really large salt-water aquarium (who needs to dive?)
The old park (with aviary) where we used to play during recess and lunch was now replaced by a treeless covered courtyard.
The classrooms no longer had the ubiquitous jalousies as windows, but now had plate glass and air-conditioning.  The chairs were no longer the familiar wooden desks (which were magnets for illicit carving by bored students), but those gray and black not-quite monobloc chairs.  I think the AV system per class came standard.
The library (the repository of dusty, unread books) was now called the “Multiple Intelligences Center” (whatever the heck that meant) and had computers left and right – in addition to the dusty, unread books.
The CAD rooms were now being used by the industrial drafting classes to come up with computer mock-ups of interior designs.  I guess they really moved on from the days of trying to animate a single stick-figure using BASIC as a computing language.  I wonder if they still knew DOS commands.
The old drive-way at the back of the school was now used as a repository of hickory wood (because goodness knows the restaurant run by the administration needed those logs for their pizza).
Even the students had changed. Back when I was in grade school, all we did was play tag, hide-and-seek, played with super-trump cards (where are those now?), and would occasionally go to the technical wing or behind the gymnasium to look for ghosts (your typical white lady, or the painting of the school’s founding father who’s eyes always followed you or who’s hand position would mysteriously change).  Nowadays, the students were walking around with cell phones and ipods dangling from their ears!  The varsity basketball team members were easily over six feet (what on earth are they feeding them!).  Even the outfits changed. As I recall, after the intermediate grades, and into high-school, students were allowed to wear any type of shoes they wanted (basta with white socks).  Well, the majority of the students I saw were in shiny black leather shoes with black socks.  In my time, aside from cross-trainers, brown leather loafers were standard.  Don’t laugh – it went well naman with the “fashionable” brown braided-leather belt (bear in mind that I went to school in a time when the song “tatlong bente-singko…” actually meant something).

With all these things, I could no longer relate to the school.  I only recognized two of my former teachers- but I doubt they recognized me.  I kept walking around, looking for something familiar to give me a sense of homecoming.  Perhaps I should have just stayed in one spot, because familiarity eventually found me.  While walking around and pondering all the changes of my old alma-mater,  I found myself back on the second-floor of the technical wing.  At that moment, two grade-schoolers furtively walked passed me, staring into the now deserted halls and pointed into the distance, with one of them saying to the other:

     "Ayun o! May multo!"

I guess some things never change.

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Its 5:12 AM and I’m literally typing this thing with just one bleary eye opened.  I swear, sleep is still sticking to me that I’m thiiiis close to typing up some gobbledeegook… sdkajnmvnyargh.  Anyway, I just had to say that it’s amazing how the mind works.  They say that dreaming is the mind’s way of integrating bits of the previous day’s information.  I just woke up from one.  It wasn’t a bad dream per se.  From what I could remember, I was in a tuxedo and was attending some function in this big auditorium.  It sorta felt like some kind of graduation or oath-taking ceremony.  Which is weird in itself because I never attended my oath-taking.  Nor my graduation from internship.  Or med-school.  Or even college, for that matter.  Anyway, moving on - all my med friends were there, except for Feliz. I kept looking for her among the sea of faces,  and when I asked around, people said she was “nasa kabilang building” So I left (at least my brain couldn’t invent what the ceremony was like).  I later ascertained that “…kabila” was in the old Duty-Free building (actually now Casino Filipino).  And then the dream proceeds to some weird thing about me trying to save the world by joining some second-rate strike force called Masked-Rider-Promise.  I took it to mean that it was somewhat akin to Masked-Rider (a series I never watched), but not quite as good – sorta like “we can be just as good…Promise!”
Then I woke up.
I know – I can’t make sense of it either.  I mean, I’ve tried correlating it with the previous day.  I woke up at around 9AM, started watching TV.  In the afternoon, I got my brother’s car fixed (again), and kept practicing taking down and putting back together his sidearm.  I spent 6 hours last night playing Dawn of War, than capped it off (three hours ago) by watching a Discovery program about the top ten bombers of all time, followed by another special about Hitler surviving and moving to the Andes.  Then I fell asleep.  Oh yeah, and Feliz is currently in Los Angeles taking her Step 2CS, which should be done just about right now.
Go figure.

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Haloo! I hope it went okay :)  Have a safe trip to Chicago

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There are some thoughts that go through my head whenever I see or hear the “First Day High” commercial of Rexona.  The most salient of these was:
Where did I fit in?
I wasn’t a rebel.  Not brainy.  Not sosi.  Erm… Nice guy?  Nope, not that either.  Hmmm, what was the label commonly attached to me?  I think it was “weird.” Yeah, that was it. Through high-school and college, and well into med-school, I preferred to fly under the radar.  The only times I’d surface was to either be weird, or be a jerk (the politer term for what others would say).  Oh well, here’s to the category busters!  Though, for the life of me, I can’t imagine what the “weirdo” high would be…
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Speaking of advertisements, the Pacquiao-Larios fight was an advertiser’s wet dream.  And that it went the full twelve rounds, was a bonus for the sponsors I guess.  Right now, post-match, they’re analyzing everything to death.
What the heck, here’s my two-cents worth… (May sukli ka pa!)
Pacquiao – he deserved to win.  Although I think he could’ve finished it a lot earlier.
Larios – there’s a class act for ya.  Gotta hand it to him, he held out ‘til the end, and was magnanimous even in defeat.

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I never really considered taking the MLE until the latter part of my internship in the AFPMC.  In fact, I always went through med school thinking I was going to join the medical corps after internship and be assigned to some far-flung area in the south.  Even during the early months of working in a military hospital, I believed that the people I was working with would be my future colleagues. On Mondays, the flag-raising ceremony was replete with military pomp and circumstance, including a military marching band and a parade-in-review. Same thing on Friday afternoons, during flag-retreat.  Yes, during those times, the romance of serving my country called out to me.  And I was willing to give up love and life just to be a part of it.

Then the little things started getting to me.

Like soldiers with gangrene not being able to take their daily dose of antibiotics due to unavailability.
Like the soldier stuck in Ward 23 not being allowed to be with his wife and new-born child on Christmas because protocol didn’t allow it.
Like the dependents who were admitted for minor reasons, then got hospital-acquired pneumonia then died.
Like the residents who, in spite of working for several months, still received no pay.

I know these problems weren’t unique to that institution.  Every government hospital has its share of stories.  But this was THE premier military hospital – the one were all the other field hospitals sent their difficult-to-manage patients.  And this is what they were getting.  Just think of what they were getting out in the field.

Don’t get me wrong here.  I was able to work with good doctors, nurses, and other hospital personnel.  Many of them also expressed a certain degree of exasperation with the status quo.  Quite a few of them started bright-eyed, idealistic, and were chafing at the bit to change the system.  And in equal measure, the system bit them back.  One by one, they started conforming – not reforming.  And bit by bit, my idealism too was drained.

One ordinary day in February, one of the ubiquitous memos that you see in hospitals caught my eye.  It was nothing fancy, just an internal memo reminding several officers to update their data for disbursement of funds.  The list was chock-full of colonels, majors, and captains.  And then, while reading it, for the first time in my life, I could no longer imagine my name prefixed with a rank.  The mil-spec, prefabricated, regimented existence I was hankering for no longer seemed a viable option.

And suddenly my life found new purpose.  The lofty, intangible ideas that I had centered my life around were replaced by something concrete.  Smaller in scope, yet vital to the structure of society.  I chose love.  I chose family.  Thus, I’m now leaving in two months for my third MLE exam.
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There is a bit of cadet knowledge that starts with:  “If you work for a man, speak well of him…”  Then it continues on to “…if you must find fault, then quit, then damn to your heart’s content.”  Well, it’s been more than a year since leaving, and this is all I have to say about it: From what I gathered from my patients there, they don’t do it for love of god and country.  They put their lives on the line for their brothers-in-arms. For their families.   And for what?  Minimum wage?   These men and women have given the best years of their lives, and I think it only fitting that they receive the treatment that they deserve.  Many who are currently serving in the field are trying to institute change from the grassroots level.   There are still people who follow the ideals of that other bit of cadet knowledge (“I am only one”), an excerpt of which goes “… I cannot do everything, but I can do something.” I salute them for their idealism and tenacity, and I acknowledge that it is through their sacrifice that we are able to have the freedom to make the choices that we make.

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