Quarantine

I can't believe how heartless you are
To think you're a model, a shining star
You hide your contempt behind a giveaway smile
You bathe your darlings with sugar coated bile

Your wretched tongue and tar black paws
Unfazed by these stupid quarantine laws
You ruin a holiday hangover elation
By making compulsory a working vacation

No warmth, no soul, no pity
You just make me feel mighty shitty
Is "How Are You" so damn hard to say
Even if your possessed eyes give your deceit away

The death of concern you constantly betray
And it haunts me every single day
I'm alien to the world you spin around
You dance drawing in every sucker in town

I hate the let's pretend it's going to be OK
I hate these insane petty games you play
I can't keep up the cool anymore
My resistance has hit the dirt on the floor

I fight and I'll always, always lose
There's no other path left to choose
I hope you're happy with the company around
While your hoofs thunder bluntly on the ground

So disappointed that it's come to this
I'm gone for a week and I'm barely missed
I'm just a number in that datasheet you keep
Where only downward Excel graphs make you weep

I'm losing heart, losing my mind
So deep into this I'm staggering blind
I hate the madness of this savage race
Want to disappear without the slightest trace

Those pets you handpick at every whim
It's like living a bad Nazi dream
I burn and crawl with sores everywhere
But you don't even fucking care

If it's love and respect you're looking for
You have neither knocking at your door
For only the loving deserve love back
Your power is emptiness painted black

I need this out of my frantic mind
An astral distance if you'd be so kind
I'm losing sleep over little things
A peasant trampled upon by charmless kings

God you're bringing me to my very knees
Trembling from a hurt that no one ever sees

Interrobang

It hurts when I whisper
Or chew, sip or swish
It hurts to sing songs of pity
Even if it's my dying wish

It hurts to suck on ice
Or grit my teeth in frustration
There's constant fire in my mouth
That sticky kingdom of ulceration

It hurts to think of hot soup
Or nibble on corn on the cob
If I audition for a horror movie
I'll put make up people out of a job

I'll believe any old folks' remedy
To make the pain go away
Toad anal licking, lizard's stew
Or brushing teeth with clay

I don't know how to carry on
This oral hell of eternity
I'm like Jeff Goldlum in the Fly
Asking what the fuck's happening to me?!

Sickle

I feel like the little kid gazing sulkily from his bedroom window at the neighbours dowsing in the sun, running amok in the playground, wrestling, tumbling, make-believe fantasies, knowing he can't go out to play because he's down with contagious disease. It kinda takes the meaning out of a long weekend if you're down with a infection that rips the joy of eating out of you. I long so much for the crispy texture of roast chicken skin, for thick gravelly masala, for that satisfying oleaginous aftertaste of a fine spaghetti. Life without using your taste buds to their fullest potential is one not worth living.

One shouldn't use the word Act of God willy nilly, and if someone uses that for the swine flu pandemic, it implies retribution, not particularly for the human race, but for the Mexicans. No country deserves to be wiped off the face of the earth by the whims of a angry plague emitting God. I was so close to being quarantined for suspected infection, and I take such flippant biblical references very personally. If this bug is the embodiment of the judge, cloak and sickle I can think of more deserving people to be punished by it than myself.

For some reason, this seems like the perfect song to play when you're sick, alone, depressed and can only whine for sympathy.

And then you listen to this and realise sappy hopeful songs aren't all too bad really.

Metal

Most people talk of their lives as journey, but it's no hyperbole to say that the lives of metal gods Anvil is an epic odyssey. The story of Anvil is a triumphant, emotional account of rock demons exposing themselves as regular human beings, despite the wild manes, silly satanic verses and carnal abandon. Behind the hairy nipple exposing, tongue lashing, badmouthing demeanor are characters pursuing a dream we all thought came free of charge with the rockgod package. This is a paean against piracy and a vicious record industry, and watching aging men with child-like fiery eyes exuding raw intelligence and talking about relationship and bromances with the humble air of town counsellors is an inspiration not just headbanging metal fans, but to anyone with a dream gone wrong and never dared to fail again since.

How is work killing me let me count the ways

1. Reading off the computer hurts my eyes and my head
2. In this new office configuration, I get distracted by people yakking and stomping around looking like they've important tasks at hand, making me feel unaccomplished if I just sit there and do excruciating evaluation.
3. The solar colour scheme is irritating the hell out of me.
4. I run shitty unproductive errands courtesy of the boss, to think we came into this line around the same time, look where the disparity is now taking us.
5. I'm losing my passion and hope that there's something more than this.
6. I'm hopelessly bored

Now I'm sick and it hurts when I swallow, thanks to atrocious weather and office changes and being condemned to a working environment more cubicular than ever.

Officiology

One way to put office character to the test is to inject some physical labour in the form of renovation and you will observe a full spectrum of behavior that signals to you who you should be wary of in your dealings with co-workers (Notice the subtle refusal to use the more genial 'colleagues')

1. The Dictator: Tells you to move and set up computer, you strain your gluteals getting the gadgets into the instructed orientation only to have them unplug and reconnect themselves and thanking you without even looking into your eyes. Dictators usually express their egotism through the kinds of wallpaper and photos they display in their cubicle. No family or group of friends, just them alone.

2. The Homemaker: Acts annoyingly busy just to avoid helping others shift. Spends time decorating their cubicles when there are more urgent matters to attend to, settles in quickly and nicely while other people chip in to help their co-workers lift boxes or plug in their computers. Homemakers, as expected of their titles, put pictures of family and babies even on their CPUs.

3. The Manipulator: Acts sweet and coy to manipulate others to do their dirty work. Manipulators like to create an atmosphere of conscientiousness in their cubicle, exemplified by proud displays of reference texts and an eerie sense of tidiness. Their workspace is usually devoid of casual trinkets but are abundant with Core value stickers.

4. The Sit on my Big Fat Arses: Does exactly as they are named. Waits for things to get organised, then arranges ad hoc meeting to give the impression that they're making groundbreaking BPR progress. Conveniently disappear for meetings so people have to move their tonnage from one end of the office to another. They literally don't lift a finger to do anything. Sit on my Big Fat Arses pile their cubicles with communication memos and handwritten gibberish.

5. The Tech-geek Casanova: Uses his knowledge of computer setup to help and impress only female co-workers while ignoring the rest. Techies may occasionally suck up to high ranking officers, which by curious happenstance, most of whom also happen to be female. Tech geeks have Gundam wallpapers and turn their cubicles into collectible museums.

6. The Galley Slave: Pure brawn and heart, he goes to the aid of anyone who needs help, even if they are not from his own department. He personifies the true spirit of the civil workhorse. He leaves his work aside to help his co-workers unlock passwords, untangle wires or retrieve trolleys. The Galley Slave's cubicle is usually dull, messy and has scratch markings on his calendar counting down the days to a much deserved holiday basking in the Andalusian sun nibbling on tapas.

Guess which one I am.

Seniority

I realised today that there's one thing worse than repetitive rhetoric. It's vague repetitive rhetoric. All this talk of unity in diversity is bullshit with your superiors expecting you to perform beyond immovable boundaries and setting paths that your personality cannot plough through. I'm not in the mood to be defensive, but I'm tired of people telling me to brush up certain skills when there is no clear model of what a perfect evaluation report is, people telling me to be detailed and thorough when I'm uncharacteristically not, people telling me to improve my communication skills when their gesticulations give them away to a fault (No eye contact, head scratching, hair stroking), people using the excuse of seniority to tell me to be pro-active when they can't define what that means, when all your attempts at shining through the darkness are foiled by the very people who want you to perform. All these management decoys are just thrown haphazardly like platitudes from a hospitality textbook, where the closest thing you get to a praise is "timeline you're not a problem". I might as well be proud that I have a fucking penis considering I'm a man.

Good leadership is not smacking your knuckles with a metal ruler like a schoolteacher, it's the ability to motivate you while pointing out your deficiencies, it's the understanding of different work styles, it's the ability to earn respect by practicing what you preach, and not tell you woolly things, corporate pleasantries like ragcloth masking as cashmir. I want you to do this, do that, all this fuzzy authoritarian barking without an iota of empathy, respect, humour or intelligence. I left the room with my head swirling and my gut sour, wondering where the time and passion that I put into the fucking video to titillate the senior directors went to. It's just the same old shit and testament to the scary revelation that I'm going nowhere very, very fast. Their solutions to your deficiencies are simplistic, like taking up communication courses, as if these are psychological panaceas, turning Woody Allen types into charismatic evangelist orators over two days of bunk and drivel. What the fuck. Communication courses. That's like telling the Prophet Mohammed to cross the desert and spread the word of Allah only after mastering the mating rituals of camels. It's not just the talk or the walk, it's having the substance and class to pull it off, not lopping the gunk on my plate like a sulky matron at a camp cafeteria. I know this sounds like a cliche, but I believe that some things you're either born with or you're not. Talent is not just blowing a trombone or fingering zithers, it's having the genetic stock to lead and triumph, and we're slave to a system that runs on the fuel of robotic, pedantic behavior, where the benefits come with luck, a sharp tongue, and adding a touch of bastard in everything you do.

In the end, it's the unspoken things that make the loudest noise. The Facebook wall is flooded with babies being made unintentional celebrities by their mothers. A classic case of parents channeling their narcissism through their offspring. Think of the children, people. They are the only hope we've got. Professional mothers, please leave your maternity instincts at home where they belong. As for professional spinsters (a long forgetten politically incorrect word which I have the courage to finally use), reserve your maternal instincts to cross-stitch and baking and shelf the bossy nagging so that it doesn't seem like a petty sour-grape statement that work means more than family and sex.

Sardines

Nothing's more intolerable than the sound of three keyboards within an arm's radius clacking at the same time. Any stuffier and the temp room I'm in will pass Nazi gas chamber certification standards with flying colours. It's suffocating the hell out of me, this nagging state of alertness and self-conciousness, knowing the people beside you are listening in the dead awkward quiet to your every sniffle and a cough is like the shudder of thunder in a sardine tin.

It's hard to make a end of the world flick without some level of schmaltzy Deep Impact sentiment, that despite bleak chaos and desperation we humans still have the sense to spend our last moments with our dearest ones. A movie about unstoppable global devastation would be meaningless without some sort of futile humanity in it. Knowing is best watched if you have an eye for biblical references, and for a film unnervingly close to Bible Code the Movie, it was surprisingly sensible. Thanks to Nicolas Cage, I now know what song to blast to the neighbours when it's the coming of the fiery apocalypse.