Of quizzes, finances and dating

At work, Kaye and Vlad got us a few time wasters over email to pore over. They were mostly Excel spreadsheets made into interesting quizzes and games, such as the Name Game (guessing common first names of celebrities), the Jologs Quiz (tests your memory of Pinoy pop culture from the 1970s onward), and the Epol Apple test (how well you can translate Filipino words into English).

The Filipino-English translation quizzes were the most appealing to me. One of them even mocks you for mistranslation, saying things such as “Bobo!” or “Pilipino ka ba?!” Of course these quizzes are not a formal benchmark, but our difficulty in translating these common words correctly shows just how our language skills have deteriorated as we got older. We’ve gotten used to speaking Taglish that our proficiency in either pure English or Filipino has suffered a great lot.

My personal favorite, though, was the one about Filipino advertisements and taglines. It’s had me scratching my head, trying to match the slogan or tagline with the products and brands.

See posters and print ads for details, indeed.
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My first paycheck is due this Thursday. I can’t wait.

I’m still trying to work out just how much of that initial pay-out I’m going to save, and how much I’m going to spend on stuff I like or need. This time I’ll have to take into account how much I spend for gasoline and my weekly expenses. I have to be a lot more prudent this time, especially now that I know first-hand just how hard it is to earn any money.

The last thing I want to find myself in is in massive debt. For heaven’s sake, I’m not American.
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At least I’m off to a good start: I saved up enough money from my allowance last week to buy myself an oil filter wrench and oil filter for my car by Friday. I even treated myself to some Mongolian take-out after four days of bringing my own lunch, and I still had some money left over for the weekend. All this was after I had set aside my substantial weekly deposit.

Not too shabby, I should say.
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After a month or so doing little things, I’m starting off doing my real job on Tuesday. I will do what I was paid to do: be a professional nitpicker.
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Looking back at the girls I’ve taken a liking to over the years, I find myself asking “Why did I ever like her anyway?” Sure, they all had places in my heart, but time has afforded me another look at things and I can now honestly say most of them weren’t eternal beauties or an ideal fit with my personality. Some of them even had the most irritating of personality quirks: Followers of this blog know how I despised the unfounded jealousy of my ex—and I’ve never cheated on anyone.

I really want to start over.

Angiela told me over dinner two weeks ago that girls like to “tame” unpredictable guys, that they like it when guys don’t pay them too much attention. That way they’d get the guys to notice them.

Hmmm. If that’s true I think I’ve been doing things the wrong way all this time. So my ill-temperedness and cold-shoulder demeanor are actually positive traits in the dating game?

I’m not too keen on making mistakes...but it seems I’ll have to embarrass myself at least a few times before I get to that point where I can avoid them entirely.