millenium

Yesterday, it rained and winds whipped around innocent trees to destruction. Well, to be more specific (since it rains every other day, what happened to the rain season ending when ‘–ber’ months start?) a typhoon named Milenyo (who chooses these absurd names? We should have stuck with alphabetical common names ending in –ing) hit the country. It’s not rare to have typhoons halt the world we live in but when you see another branch torn off a tree and landing just by your front gate and leaves strewn about everywhere that the entire road is stuck with it, you know its something else. Power was off for the entire day that I spent either cleaning my room or trashing it at the same time and listening to the wind whistle by my window while trying to sleep the entire day away.

I was unsuccessful at sleeping and was unreasonably bored. There are tons of books I could have read to pass time but for some reason I can’t force myself to read through even just an entire chapter. I keep watching the window being splattered with droplets of water and bits of leaves. I want to write something poetic or whatever but the usual excuses of laziness applies. It seems too cliché to write about the rain and too contrived to force myself to think of something else to graze paper with. I settled to trying to sleep again and listening to a battery powered radio.

And so the day passed, slowly and languidly in the cozy warmth of my room as the reckless winds continued to fall trees and billboards at the same time make roofs fly, overturn cars, strand many, and cause enough destruction to make it the headlines of news programs we didn’t get to watch because of the Luzon-wide black out it also cause. I’m reading about it just now, apparently it is not just in my imagination that the world stopped, it really did. At least eighteen are dead, many more wounded, thousands more lives probably ruined. I could already see the newscasts in my head of the tragic families wailing their loss, of flooded streets reaching up to peoples’ necks, of a deserted road with lamp posts and trees lying dead like casualties of war. All this while I’m listening to some crappy song minding my own business and devising ways to make time pass more quickly.

I wanted to write about how powerless we still are against nature. Mankind with all its technology and ingenuity still awed and kneeled over the almost-majestic fury of a few hours of rain and winds. But I am not really in any position to say such grand things, the worst I got is twelve hours of restlessness and being awakened from hard to achieve catatonia when the light in my room suddenly flare up mid-dream. This morning, while groggily fixing my first cup of coffee and grumbling about how early it still is to be at work, there was an exchange of personal horror stories caused by the typhoon. I listened as they talked about roof almost flying off, families flocking over disaster relief areas, billboards crushing cars and hour long traffic because of flood and trees almost falling over the tops of their heads… I can’t relate. Suddenly, the world doesn’t really hate me much by taking off the power for my computer. But right now, what I really want to grumble about is how pay is delayed because its suddenly a bank holiday.

Am I that detached from the suffering of my own people? Am I that indifferent to their plight? It seems that I am. Oh well, at least I have my computer back.