Otherwise Maladroit

15 May 2001

15 May 2001

Today is the fifteenth of May in the year 2001. The year of a new millennium. In a few hours I, Suzanne Sison Credo, am turning 21. I just recently graduated from the University of the Philippines Manila (a prestige that really tickles me) finishing a degree in Political Science (a course I chose because it sounded pompous and promised less math).

Tomorrow is my birthday. I was born three o'clock in the morning of a Friday in 1980; this year my birthday is happening on a Wednesday. I have been promised cake, hopefully with the kind of icing I like, and what has been hinted as pistachio nuts. (Not on the cake, mind you.) I fervently hope that the pistachios remain pistachios and do not turn out as dates.

My uncle, married to my mother's sister who is third of four siblings (my mom being second), works somewhere in the Middle East and constantly sends date nuts. However the dates, as beguiling as they were when I first tasted them, does little to excite my palate. I find them too sweet.

This year I want no gifts, but employment. I live in the Philippines, a Third World country in hot and humid Southeast Asia, and unlike kids raised in one of the Caucasian states average graduates here do not have quite the same euphoria from finishing tertiary level of education. Of course I do not speak for everyone, but here unemployment is a crashing reality. So are an increasing cost-of-living and extended families.

I myself am not born in poverty and have never been needy ever. I'm pampered and spoiled to the best of my mother's hefty salary as a manager in a now defunct German pharmaceutical plant.

posted by Otherwise Maladroit @ 5:21 PM