Year 2007

OFW#4 The Invitation





And here I am – the OFW settling down in my room. My room is the smallest of the three bedrooms in my townhouse. I inhabit it because I am very messy when it comes to my bed and closet. Laptops using different operating systems, Linux and Windows, are scattered around me. Books are piled up on top and under my bed, crawling their way up to crown my drawers and get displayed on the racks of my dark closet. The TV watches my feet, I haven’t turned it on for days. Beside my laptops are different MP3 players, an Ipod, and three different alarm clock radios. In one corner stands a stereo sound system which I have not turned on for years. I don’t like playing much music. I am hooked to books on CD.

My mess were accumulated through the years. In a commercialized world I tend to buy things I fancy but never need, my gadgets run on batteries and I am too lazy to buy new batteries when the old ones die. I thought I liked music until I discovered running half marathons with audiobooks in my Ipod more satisfying. I buy stuff and then stock them and then forget them. Good thing I have nieces and nephew back home who enjoy these gadgets I don’t want and have no use anymore.

I have established a routine that is gradually assuming a barren characteristic. The older I get, the lesser I need and want. At my age, I love to read or surf the net or run in the park and nothing more, I am quite certain night life is absurd for my age. I don’t think I will be pretty in parties anyway. Look, if I’ve worked nearly seven days and my hair hasn’t been trimmed for weeks and my body is so tired it adapts the dowager’s posture, how can I be pretty? In a bar, I’d be the Hunchback of Notre dame while the rest are the Three Masketeers and Desdemona. Also, I can no longer sustain the small talks in parties : I have lost appetite talking about the weather or politics or latest gossip, as many Fil-Americans are wont to dispense. I am not interested on who got the latest BMW or the highest salary, the biggest house, the kids with highest honors, education and titles. I listen politely as they rattle about so and so buying a palatial condo in Makati. Next thing you know hundreds of other Fil-Americans would buy units in the same building just to prove they too could afford it. I nod my head quietly upon hearing this kind of talk. Sometimes I praise and flatter them to high heavens out of spite. I never cared much about their wealth, maybe I should, but I just can’t. As I have mentioned in the past, I am more interested in lively discussions about matters dealing with life: something intellectual if not academic. I seek the ones who can tell me the latest books they read, or tell me the latest economic trends in the world, or the latest health fads around, or how life back home is improving - not the ones who held the most lavish parties.

I just feel that wealth provides only material things, and money, really, has limitations. Materialism used to be a fundamental need in my younger years. When I started working in the US, all I wanted was to earn dollars. Dollar was the solution to all my problems. Money eradicated my family’s poverty. Money provided the best health care for my parents. Money was able to put every young kid in the family to college. Money offered me material happiness which was temporal. Yet after I accomplished whatever I wanted through money, I suddenly found it no longer useful to me. I even abhorred it because I lost twenty years of my life in endless labor just to be assured of its constant flow. Then, it was suddenly over. My need for money is over.

I got accustomed to the simplicity of life. Sometimes I wonder if this simplicity is a result of loneliness or abandonment of self. I guess I have matured. Maturity is beginning to remind me of what life is about. Life itself, is only a passing time, a fleeting moment, a birth, a life, a death. That’s all there is to it. Life does not find happiness in material things, in money, in power, in physical attributes.

The life I lead fails to inculcate the need for the material. I know I have money saved for my old age but to have more than what I need, what for? I am single, no kids, I will soon get very old and senile and die, what will my millions, if I ever saved that much, do for me? I bet there will be relatives who would be fighting over my wealth and dragging my name to the courts after I’m gone. This is what I see with some of the old folk I treat in my hospital. They die miserably because no one was fighting for their smooth transitions to other life, instead everyone is fighting for whatever they are leaving behind.

I am thinking about this while lying on my bed, trying to catch sleep but my brain won’t let me. I turn on the lamp beside my bed and pick up a book to read. But the pages become words only, the ideas are hazy. I look around my room of five years, how many rooms similar to this have I occupied in America? I close my eyes and think about them, they are all squares, the first one I occupied in Tennessee was furnished by the owner, the second I had in North Carolina was unfurnished, the third I rented in Florida I furnished myself. The last two ones were officially my properties, first in the old condo I sold, this one in the townhouse I own. I now lie on the same bed that’s probably 12 years old, it’s a twin bed, no head board, its mattress hardened by my back. It’s a convenient bed which I can just move in any direction, I surround myself with books when I lie on it and read and when I’m ready to fall asleep, I let all the books fall off to the floor, one by one. I love the sound of falling books. I toss on my bed thinking of the day. I know in a few minutes I will succumb to sleep. Yeah, this OFW life is very lonely at times.

Loneliness is a battleground for every OFW, and I don’t want to deal with it. But the day’s events sometimes linger longer and I want to understand them. A Filipino co-worker who covers per diem in my Rehab department comes to me asking in the local tongue, “Were you invited to the party last Saturday?” This was asked in a conspiratorial way, like we’re two people bound by law to secrecy, and I became instantly nervous about her insinuation.

I seem to remember I was invited to a private Christmas Party last Saturday which I declined to attend because I would be running a long run that day and I would need a long rest period afterwards. I hate parties, this I make clear to people around me. I hate them because when I was growing up, I was so poor I was never invited anywhere. Even in college my classmates invited me only out of tact and even if I were to attend, my lack of party clothes would still have prevented me.

I got used to so many rejections I did not care anymore. So when Americans and Fil-Americans ask me to attend their parties, I just reply with a big smile and say, No. And I just do that naturally, without a forethought or afterthought. I never really see parties a big deal. For goodness sakes, I even decline the invitation issued by my own family. That’s me. I guard the monotony and boredom I so cherish in life. At six in the evening, I should be home. By seven, I should have finished dinner and started reading a novel. Between seven to ten, I should be either reading, surfing, writing. By ten thirty, I should be asleep because I’d like to wake up early to run on the treadmill or in the Park. Occasionally this routine is disturbed and my brain gets wacky. That’s why I protect my routine. The only possible reason I’d break my rigid schedule is sex. And even sex now is slowly fading away. I can’t even remember the last time I had sex.

So when my Filipino compatriot was asking me if I were invited, I said I was invited so many times but I refused. I just could not spend my time partying with people I spend time working with every day. I mean, drinking is fine but to me reading is better.

She screamed, “But I was not invited!”

I stared at her, quite surprised by her reaction. She was on the verge of tears, and though a party invitation was the most trivial thing in the world for me, I never realized how an invitation was so important to her. I tried to explain that she was probably not invited because she was not a full-time employee, that it was a private party among close-workers – the hospital has nothing to do with it.

She said she was all over the place with them the whole day and not one offered her any invite. It was rude she said. It was discriminatory she said. It was so ---

“Un-Filipino?” I asked. She became quiet. My dear, this is America. In here people eat on their own without inviting the people around them. People here reserve their rights to invite whoever they want and you can not force yourself into them. It’s their culture and –

“But you know where I am coming from, right?” she asked. “It is so tactless to single out one person and not invite her. I mean, do you know how that feels?” She turned about and walked away. I know she was a daughter of a rich family in Southern Philippines – her parents were once students in University of Chicago. In the south, she must have been one of those you sought to brighten up your party. She must have been at the top of the list of every family in their parties. And this must have hurt her.

I spoke to my co-workers, “Guys, listen…..”