The career guy

Gawd – I was officially offered the job today. Am actually feeling a bit better about it this week. Still, my feeling was pretty damn neutral. The pay they offered was slightly less than I was wanting. It shouldn’t matter, but my passion for the work isn’t such that I’m happy to work for less than I think I’m “worth” (whatever the fuck that means). That, and the way they’ve exploited J recently has left me feeling slightly mercenary. Problem is that now I have to try and negotiate, which I’ve never done before. They don’t have another option, though, so I guess I’m in a reasonable position.

I really don’t feel like actually telling people. A few people know and the news seems to be spreading fast around the institute. Even though, as I said, I feel better about it than last week, I’m not ready to jump up and down and hoohaa about it all. And people will rightly judge me as an ungrateful prick (ungrateful for my station in life, not for the job itself) if I don’t show some gladness. G already suggested that my distaste for the White Beach scene 2 weekends ago and my enjoyment of the same scene last weekend was a result of knowing about the job. I told him it was a statistical coincidence, but he was unconvinced. It’s true I was/am in a much better frame of mind last weekend, but that had much more to do with the slap in the face delivered by the bloody great argument D and I had. It seemed to snap me out of my malaise, to some extent.

My natural tendency seems always to downplay the importance of something, whether it’s a relationship or a job or my achievements or whatever. Often I think this is just realism (take my life achievements – their not awful, but nobody’s writing books about me), but I sometimes wish I allowed myself to get more excited about things. I'm getting sick of living as if wherever I am / whatever I'm doing now isn't what I want and the next step I take will get me to where/what I want. It’s gone on for too long now; I think I need to just start having fun wherever I am. Clearly there is some chance I'll never work out what the fuck I want; if I continue like this I'll be thinking that “I'll work it out soon” on my deathbed.

Forgive me the seize-the-day rant.

White Beach. Full of middle-class Filipino 20-30 year-olds, many of whom are bearing considerable amounts of flesh. Attire at most beaches here tends to be much more conservative. The beach is lined with restaurants and bars. The ones with dance floors are pumping out LOUD music, each song trying to compete with its neighbours for supremacy.

Two weeks ago I was feeling a bit crook, and seriously not in the mood for that scene. I scribbled some notes to myself for this blog:

“White Beach – all about sex, and the potential for sex. For me, if I’m out of that market [i.e., not single] it holds nothing more than a bit of communal voyeurism: young, lithe bodies on a hot night by the sea.”

Rewriting that makes feel like a bitter old dickhead. Last weekend, somehow or other, I just had fun (plus about a litre of ‘mindoro sling’). D, her friend K, and C (pommy backpacker we met on the boat from Batangas to Sabang) got talking to a couple of others, and I bopped away with the kidz till the wee hours. The other two we met graciously let us crash in their room (6 of us to one single and one double bed). I wasn’t even hungover in the morning. Makes me feel 29 again.