I know I know, why am I drinking hot tea in this heatwave when I should really be having iced tea. Sadly, that hasn't been discovered in this country yet.
I've been asked many times why I don't take summer vacations. It's because Middle Earth is beautiful in summer - long days, pretty language students, PIMMs, G&D's B52 ice cream (baileys and kahlua), cool breezes and long siestas by the rivers Cherwell and Isis, midnight cerveza parties on the lawn, listening to chill out music while lying on the grass and stargazing, and the cold cold refreshing showers. Why would I want to miss out on those?
Tuesday and Wednesday were hellish. My balls sweated so much that I had to buy a separate antiperspirant to roll on them hairy critters. Hmmm, which of these two similar bottles is for my underarm again? It was so hot that gritters were deployed because cars were sticking to the melting tarmac. It took some time for a tropical boy like me to get over the fact that this far north, the summer thermometer peaks at 7pm instead of noon. It was hotter than Ibiza and someone asked why a Flipinoy like me complains of heat exhaustion everytime the mercury goes past 30C. I'm Cordilleran I tell unto them Philistines and give a lecture on Luzon geography and microclimates.
So Dubya has added a new honorific title to his already impressive CV. - Groper in Chief after sneaking in on Frau Merkel in St. Petersburg. (German Chancellor Merkel's Physics Phd Thesis was "Untersuchung des Mechanismus von Zerfallsreaktionen mit einfachem Bindungsbruch und Berechnung ihrer Geschwindigkeitskonstanten auf der Grundlage quantenchemischer und statistischer Methoden". You gotta love those German compound words.)
I sold my Dell laptop this week. I needed the money to support my extravagant lifestyle. Afterall, those online poker losses, subscriptions to premiere porn sites, drugs, alcohol, and the plane fare for my Eastern European wife who I met online (she never showed up and I waited three days in Heathrow) put quite a strain on my very poor finances.
At 24 months, it's the longest I have held on to a computer of any kind. The Dilbert geek in me requires that I upgrade every nine months or else I'll be sooo last decade. That laptop (3.06Ghz P4, 1Gb RAM, 64Mb nVidia VRAM, DVD-RW) served me well and kept me awake while waiting for someone on the online chatrooms to do one of those "shows" that are meant to educate a teenager like me. (Pa-view naman! Cam to Cam tayo!).
I won't sell just to anyone though and thank Linus Torvalds that the guy who responded to my for sale ad was a proper geek. He already had 7 computers on a grid configuration carrying tasks along the lines of "if tell you, I'd have to kill you" he said. (I also I picked up earlier this week from a well placed source that Fujitsu is nearing completion of its worldbeating petaflops supercomputer. It's still confidential but I doubt they can trace this blog to me, much less realise that I even write a blog.)
And so I've traded this old brick of a dinosaur...
for the sweet smell of these Lillibets...... £250 of them. A fair price I computed from Moore's first law given that I paid £800 originally and the laptop is 24 months old.
There must be easier ways of making money. I already save a lot by not cohabiting with a girlfriend (It must be cheaper to live with a girlfriend I naively said before I did some rigorous economics computations but then I realised that women are simply not satisfied with you just going down on them once in a while - they also need Jimmy Choos and Hermes bracelets.)
Then I remembered that B-list celebrities make gazillions of pesos modelling underwear on those gigantic billboards that are designed to topple over during typhoon signal not-even-one- yet along the Philippine highways.
So I hired one of the cheapest photographers I know, me, to create a portfolio of me. I can hear that ka-ching ka-ching of the cash register ringing in my ears with the endorsement money I am destined to make......
Maybe my three loyal blog readers (why do you even read this blog anyway? Look away from your desktop and take a look outside the window - there are better things in life other than my diary.) will start an online petition and someone from Dolce and Gabbana will be knocking on my door asking me to be the crotch of their fall campaign. (Ok, my network administrator has told me that I DON"T have three loyal blog readers - it's the same person using three different computers.)
Yet, I still have a rational brain and quickly digest that no fashion house in it's right mind will hire someone like me who has a small brown turd of a crotch that defines the International Standard Unit for Hobbit six inches. (Yet, my little Pedro maybe chink-sized but it knows kung-fu.)
I wish there were some magic words that would make me......
shit diarrhea-loads of money......(note: £20=PHP 1,960)
I'm not a greedy bloke. I don't need money to make me happy. I just need enough to survive - money for decent food, bills, travel and expeditions, and the occasional wardrobe update from Ermenegildo Zegna.
What good timing that here I was starving, trying to make ends meet, and my mother calls to ask if I'm ok. I also talked to my dad on the phone (actually my mom passed the phone to him even when I told her not to) who asked "Do you have money?" "No, are you going to give me any?" I replied. "No." he shot back and snickered. Boy, my folks are certainly having a laugh at me.
I need to buy new flipflops because the straps of the current ones are nearing retirement. I only have one pair and I use them everyday. Of course, one should not be wearing flipflops (or anything open-toed) inside a research laboratory but health and safety regulations don't apply to Flipinoys like me. They never have. And even if, knock on wood, I should so much as drop a test tube of boiling acid on my toes or vaporise them with a misaligned laser, I swear I won't sue anyone.
I got reprimanded by the Health and Safety officer for chilling my can of Coke in the same freezer that holds SIV vials (Simian Immunodeficiency Virus, our furry cousin's version of HIV). Hey I've got a third world immune system, it can handle anything. Speaking of highly evolved immune systems, the original Jack Sparrow himself - Keith Richards.......
Now, this is a man who is truly indestructible and still going at it. He's ten billion years old, has abused drugs and alcohol, is oversexed, and has had brain surgery after falling from a coconut tree. When I grow old, I wanna be just like him. They should kill off the Orlando Bloom and Keira Knightley characters in Pirates.. and make it a Depp-Richards franchise. That'll be wicked.
I've moved to the hot and dark basement for the summer.....
Looking out of my window, it occurred to me that I'm lower than the dead people lying in the graveyard next to my place. This fellow's mortal remains, may he be in heaven by now, who died of the plague and sinking, is a good 6 feet higher than me, even with me standing in my room.....
I don't even get aerial reception for my crap television that I need to plug a cable to the wall socket. I don't watch a lot of TV but I need a weekly dose of those awesome BBC documentaries. This week was Big Cat week and who can resist those kittens from the Masai Mara? This means putting the bloody TV on top of my desk. Yet, this juxtoposition allows me to use my toes as a remote control.....
My right big toe can change the channel while the left big toe is for adjusting the volume.