375 deadlift PR and 405 deadlift PR in the same month.

I just finished watching the Spartacus: Blood and Sand season finale and googled up season 2 to find out that it has been delayed because the lead actor has Hodgkin’s Lymphoma. One of my other favorite shows would have to be Dexter and coincidentally the lead actor, Michael C. Hall also has Hodgkin’s Lymphoma which indefinitely delays season 5.

God damn cancer, ruining all of my shows. What else is there to watch on pirated television?

Today I witnessed a sparrow with her little head caught within a crow’s beak. This tiny bird flapped its wings with a look of shock upon her face as the big bad crow simply took her away from her little friends.

Last week my father and I got layed off, being that work was apparently thinning out and our boss wasn’t making enough money. It was quite a shock being that we’ve been so busy, but I suppose that’s the way things go and I’m getting over it. So, I have officially worked for this little electrical company from April 11th, 2005 to April 9th, 2010. Five years! Holy shit. Anyways, I’ve applied for EI and am going to wait it out and see what type of work my dad might land and maybe I can apprentice for him. Being an apprentice and searching for a job alone is a lot more difficult than being a fully trained journey man.

Meanwhile this should be considered an opportunity for myself to do things that I haven’t been able to do for myself. Such as work out to an insane degree of absolute overkill and restore my car to its former glory. Plus all these months I haven’t gotten my shit in gear and got my schooling done, I should either consider retaking my course or wait it out for my test to come out again after its done going through review. Blah.

Recently, I read an article about purging half of the things you own and am planning to do something along those lines just to give myself some sort of mental clarity. Everyone has shit they don’t use, but keep it because it holds some form of monetary value. Things are just things, they are not people or memories.

“One does not accumulate but eliminate. It is not daily increase but daily decrease. The height of cultivation always runs to simplicity”

- Bruce Lee

On Sunday I went to a big family get together for my Filipino side of the family, which I rarely visit and haven’t seen in three or more years. To put it all together in one word, it was awkward. Everyone has strange foreign “nicknames” on top of their already uncommon legalized names. Although I rarely forget a face, adding names that sound somewhat similar to each other into the formula makes everything so much more difficult. After that comes the lack of confidence that my mind has correctly paired the persons face with their name together. I’m such an outsider.

I’m half Filipino, I don’t speak Tagalog or any dialect of the sort, nor do I have any Filipino friends, heck I don’t even look Filipino. (Being 6′ tall makes me the tallest person there.) It’s really something special every time I get together with my family. A real eye opener in a nice nostalgic sense of some sort. People probably asked me when I’m coming back to visit in the Philippines, because I stayed there for a year when I was nine. One day, perhaps.

My cousin, who is the same age as me, has apparently immigrated here and is living with my Grandmother.  Being a new immigrant, he has no friends here. So, I will try to reach out to him and be his friend. My memories of playing as children ages ago seem as if they are simply from another world. It’s weird. I remember running through the fields and catching dragon flies. Everything from back then seems so strange.

My writing is really going down the hole. Perhaps I should blog more often just to shake off the rust. Or maybe I’m just killing off my brain cells from having an inactive mind of some sort, maybe my brain is just turning into some variation of dumb.

I really love my job, even though there are times where I have to grudgingly force myself through tough shit that less willful minded people would simply walk away from.

Today I had to climb through a dusty attic filled with old fiberglass insulation (the kind that just pierces through your skin). The roof was of the gabled triangle variety and left me with about 2′ clearance below the peak to crawl on top of thin 1″ thick rafters elevated a foot above the actual ceiling joists. Laying on top of the damn things really hurt since they kind of bite at your nerves pressed between wood and bone. Not only do I have to breath stale dusty shit-quality air through a cheap mask and lay upon these thin slats of wood. I also have to be extra careful not to put any weight on the drywall below, or else the ceilings would get damaged.

All that I’ve written sounds like blah, blah, blah. So, I will simply say it was hell and leave it at that.

I’m free now.

Work, work, work. Pay, pay, pay. That’s all I do.

I’m well tempered or at the very least I may say that I’m rational and well practiced at hiding my true cynical feelings for the sake of avoiding conflict. I heard the a story yesterday of how someone dear to me was harassed on the bus by the security guard who refused to believe that any of her ID’s were hers, when it was point blank no-shit-Sherlock-obvious that they all belonged to her and threatened with handcuffs and such until finally letting her go. It was harassment and wrong to accuse anyone of ID fraud when they have all the necessary identification and look exactly like their picture. So what if they’re not wearing glasses in the picture? Ridiculous.

This has left me burning in rage underneath for the past 24 hours, I don’t know if I could even let anything go in that situation. I’d probably act as my cool usual self, walk away, and end up stabbing them in the back of the neck and slitting their throat or bashing their heads in with a hammer. But then again that’s my imagination fantasizing vigilantism. Secondly, I’m probably more upset that it happened to someone that I care about rather than myself. Anyways, there’s one reason I drive everywhere.

Today, I was in my car driving back towards the job site from Timmy’s. With one hand on the wheel and the other on my seeped tea (as I do not have cup holders), I saw a pair of brown squirrels at the very edge of my line of sight, in front of my car, scurry across the road. In an instant I was thinking, “oh shit, I hope my tires missed them.” One second later, I look to my rear view mirror to see one of the squirrels inspecting their friend rendered as a lump of fur plastered onto the pavement, then scurrying back towards the curb where it came from.

I didn’t bother getting out of the car to check on the victim, as it was busy with traffic. There really was nothing that I could do for it, a roadkill victim with a body that fits perfectly under the tire of a 3000 lb car probably broke many of its fragile bones. It would be nothing like a crow that broke its wing. Nursing it back to health would be nearly impossible.

My initial thoughts were, “fuck I wish that didn’t happen” and throughout the day mini scenarios of the couple reeled through the back of my head as I worked away and pulled wire. To myself, I imagined really cartoon-like visions of these critters as mates, in love, searching for a bite to eat or venturing back to wherever home may be only to have their short lived relationship succumb to tragedy. Sad, as it is I also imagined myself in such a situation as a squirrel.

Now, thinking about it logically, if there was one squirrel of each gender, then it is possible that the male could have been chasing the female. I killed the one leading the pace. Now just imagine a boy chasing the girl for some hardcore baby making only to watch her get crushed to death right before his eyes. It doesn’t make it any better, but it does eliminate whatever tragic love stories may have been envisioned in my mind. It’s just death.

I wish that didn’t have to happen. It’s the price we pay as humans living in a world of convenience and selfishness. The animals who live here have to suffer for our laziness, our greed to become “better” and more technologically advanced while the earth we squat upon deteriorates in some sense.