Marlon’s World

This is hodgepodge Marlon at its rawest, so please bear with me. It’s 11:30 PM now in Valladolid. Everyone is quiet. Well, it’s a Sunday. Sundays are quiet, except for the seldom banter of new residents outside my room. Tomorrow’s gonna be the first day of classes in the University, so there are new people coming to the dorm. I think I’m one of the veteran dormers here. We’re only a handful. About 10, I guess. People know me here as either "the Asian," "the Filipino," "the One who Speaks English," or "the Noisy Guy on the Third Floor." I prefer the fourth one.

I can’t sleep. I’ve just finished translating a manuscript for a film and I’m nearly (just nearly) insane now. Earlier this month I was translating quite a number of texts for a hospital website. Last Saturday, my 14-year-old tutee, Alberto, came to the dorm for his weekend English classes. He comes in for two hours once a week and we talk about the X-men, Green Day and world languages.

All those things done, I still have to prepare now a 5-minute talk for Wednesday. I’ll represent AECI in the foreign students welcome party (which is just a fancy term for extolling Valladolid and its International Relations Office which, with all due fairness, is an efficient center). I can’t think of anything to say except that the mensualidad during the summer months arrive late.

And, yes, ladies and gentlemen, everything is gratis et amore. Carmen, our dorm receptionist, has been telling that there’s a thin line between charity and stupidity. Well, yeah. I totally agree. With the way people think nowadays, everything done in good faith could be considered charity. It seems that people now think that service always requires some form of personal benefit. Which is sad and absurd, since it wouldn’t be service in the first place when you demand something in return. It’s just a cold and heartless transaction. Then again, in an age when people can change partners with a blink of an eye and justify almost anything with relativism, cold and heartless transactions make a lot of sense.

Working is my morphine, I guess, since last week is undoubtedly my septimana horribilis so it’s better to drown myself with work rather than think about my worries. (No, wait, let me correct that. Slacking off is my morphine; working is just the chaser.)

In brief, my laptop crashed and I had to take it to a service shop for repair. They recovered my thesis and my pics but everything else I lost. Bummer.

Then two good people died under different — albeit equally devastating — circumstances. One was Lorelei Estores from high school; the other one was our family doctor and friend, Ildefonso Martinez. Both died unexpectedly and very sadly. I’d spare you the details and let these two gentle souls rest in peace, but let me just say that this is one of those times when you wish some other useless lunatic died instead of these two genuinely good people.

And then came typhoon Milenyo to Manila with all his wrath and fury (Milenyo is a boy, I insist). I feel thankful that (1) I’m in Spain, safe and sound, (2) my family is safe and sound, (3) they still have a roof over their heads, and (4) the power resumed immediately in Bulacan. But then again, there are a lot of people affected in other areas. It is so unnerving to be relatively okay when everyone else is not.    

On the brighter side of things, though, I’m off to Portugal on Thursday. I didn’t take any summer break so I’m kinda excited now. Besides, I think I’ll like Portugal since it’s not as touristy as Paris or as imposing as Rome. Let’s wait and see.

By the way, last night I bought a plane tickets to Belgium for just 0.99 euros. As in, 99 cents! Of course, there were additional airport fees and taxes so all in all I had to pay 20 euros. But hey, a round-trip plane ticket from Valladolid to Charleroi for 20? Not bad at all. I scheduled it for next year, right when all my pending obligations would have been finished.

Well, that’s about it for my post. I wanted to write a scathing entry on one of the inanest articles I’ve read, but I’d rather not spend my neurons on commenting on a stupidity. (Tell you what. I’d recover my forces in Portugal and you’d have your seething commentary next week. Deal?)   

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 1st, 2006 at 3:24 pm and is filed under Reflections. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.