Day 10 - Killing Time

I woke up yesterday morning feeling pretty blah. The weather was fitting enough to set the mood - torrential downpour in Manila. I spent a good chunk of the morning just chilling out in Starbucks chatting with Denny, checking emails, doing my to-do list for the day, and surfing the 'net for things to do.

I wavered as to whether or not I wanted to visit mom. I felt tired, and she kind of irritated me the day before. I needed a break already, and I had only seen her three times. So I dedicated yesterday to "admin" day, and got all of her social security (SS) forms together.

Gathering the forms online was not a problem... getting them printed out was quite an effort! Some challenges:

• my hotel doesn't have a business center
• i burned out my second USB pen drive (grrr...) so the files were stuck on my laptop (I saved the files to my camera's memory card in the meanwhile)
• they don't have anything around here similar to a Kinkos, OfficeMax, etc.
  

I wandered around to the other bigger hotels, like Hyatt, to see if I could pay a daily access fee to use their business center (plus, I wanted to see if I could use their gyms.) I was turned down at three different hotels. So, I headed over to the mall, and came across one of those mom aind pop all-in-one fax/copy/print shops. Luckily, they were able to use my SD memory card and print out all the files that I needed.

SO.. I will go visit mom this morning and show her all of these forms. Hopefully this will somehow satisfy her by giving her something tangible (The forms give me permission to manage her disability account.)

I came to a conclusion yesterday that its hard to find a "quiet place" to just relax and chill out (besides Starbucks.) There is so much hustle-bustle and background noise all of the time that it makes it difficult to just chill and relax. I probably doesn't help that I'm smack dab in the middle of Manila and wind up at the mall everyday. I'd like to find a place just to hang out and read. The only retreat that I have is my hotel room, but that can feel like a prison sometimes. I think that I might just use my mp3 player to tune everything out.

I really crashed yesterday afternoon... took a nap around 17:00 and then woke up at 23:00 to the annoying f**king caterwauling from the K-bar in the back alley. Drunken karaoke singers seem to be amplified in volume. I woke up, opened the window and could see all of the audience in the K-bar transfixed by the screaming singer. She sounded like a BAD Yoko Ono. I felt like I was in one of those Tom and Jerry cartoons where I wanted to throw a bottle at the cat screaming on the fence. Ugh. This went on until 03:00, so I slept intermittently.

I'm going to Cabanatuan this weekend, so that will be a nice getaway from the city. Its still a busy little city, but on a much smaller scale. Guilty to say, but if I didn't feel compelled to visit mom every day, I'd probably go backpacking or wandering around the country. Originally, I wanted to go to Borocay to take some surfing lessons, but now, I'd be happy to just go there and lay in a hammock with a good book, some peace and quiet.

A special shout-out goes to Kurt for FedEx-ing a new laptop battery to my hotel. It arrived yesterday. Up to this point, I had to carry a power plant in my bag (voltage converter, adapter, laptop power pack) and it was becoming verrrrry annoying.