Three Months Later

I shake my head in disbelief that I actually went through three months without blogging. My mind is ecstatic as I ruminate on suceeding letters and words to encode, my fingers clearly manifesting this as they happily tap-dance in frenzied symphony on the keyboard. Several things have happened in the last three months planting seeds of thought, time permitting them to germinate in my mind for ripe literary harvest.

Picking up from where I left off, I:

• have completed the academic and clinical requirements for my residency
• along with classmates, danced to one of the gayest tunes ever in celebration of Nurses' week
• received a truckload of hand-me-down furnitures and what's its
• attended the wedding of one my finest friends from the Philippine TV industry
• invaded outlet stores with newfound friends and together explored our newfound buying power
• got a tattoo while spending Memorial Day in Venice beach
• celebrated classmates' upcoming birthdays (including mine) in one collective gastronomical feast
• graduated and started on the graveyard shift
• did Vegas
• watched John Williams live in concert
• realized my childhood dream of seeing Optimus Prime on the silverscreen
• achieved permanent resident status
• finally got to do leisure reading after a very long hiatus
• and now relishing an apartment that feels more like a home than it did a couple months ago.

Time went by like swift wind as it always does. On another dimension, though, the hourglass seemed to be frozen as several situations remained status quo. I still:

• depend on public transporation and kind-hearted friends to go around and beyond the city
• rely on public and hospital libraries to access the internet, which is quite a bummer because time is limited in the former and filters are unbelievable in the latter
• am single and have yet to go out to date
• don't have cable TV having found more than enough gems and garbages in VHF and UHF channels
• do my routine exercises at home and haven't gone back to the gym.

But more or less I have further assimilated to the daily grinds of my relatively new work and social environment, transforming activities of daily living and working from strange and nerve-wracking to familiar and confidence-boosting. Having completed one pending task after another allowed my mind and body to gradually settle and finally focus on things that needed daily attention.

The one task that was most daunting and took longest to finish was fixing up the apartment, specially with the huge amount of stuff I inherited from my sister; she had it trucked to my apartment after several years in storage. Anticipating dust, dirt and rubbish that will accumulate throughout the entire cleaning event, I covered the whole apartment with plastic drop cloth.

There were tons of boxes to rummage through and gazillion things to sort. The strategy I employed was categorize things among "keep," "give" and "throw." The second and third categories were most managable and easily rewarding. Things I chose to keep I had to clean, and being endowed with OCP (obsessive-compulsive power) I made sure every item had a "CLEAN" bill of condition. I'm still at it as of this writing as making the place spic and span is about 95% complete. And I suppose that 5% will always be there. (,")

Having checked off pending tasks and reaching this level of completion also afforded me time to write again.

It feels good to be back.