I WAITED ALMOST FIFTEEN YEARS FOR JIM RAYNOR TO KILL SARAH KERRIGAN. THAT’S LIKE MORE THAN HALF OF MY LIFE.
WHY DID YOU HAVE TO RUIN THAT FOR ME, BLIZZARD!?! WHY!?!?!
ALSO, JIM RAYNOR, YOU ARE A F***** WUSS. :|
You gave up after two days. I thought it would take longer. Then again, this justifies that this is probably the right thing to do… :’(
“No, even I know better than that. I’m looking for selfishness. Perfect selfishness. Like, say I tell you I want to eat strawberry shortcake. And you stop everything you’re doing and run out and buy it for me. And you come back out of breath and get down on your knees and hold this strawberry shortcake out to me. And I say I don’t want it anymore and throw it out the window. That’s what I’m looking for.”
“I’m not sure that has anything to do with love,” I said with some amazement.
“It does,” she said. “You just don’t know it. There are time in a girl’s life when things like that are incredibly important.”
“Things like throwing strawberry shortcake out the window?”
“Exactly. And when I do it, I want the man to apologize to me. “Now I see, Midori. What a fool I have been! I should have known that you would lose your desire for strawberry shortcake. I have all the intelligence and sensitivity of a piece of donkey shit. To make it up to you, I’ll go out and buy you something else. What would you like? Chocolate Mousse? Cheesecake?”
“So then what?”
“So then I’d give him all the love he deserves for what he’s done.”
“Sounds crazy to me.”
“Well, to me, that’s what love is…”
“
| — |
- Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami Eventually being patient, considerate and understanding can be so emotionally draining that I wonder if I can just once, even just once, be completely selfish. |
A word for Philippine Senate candidate Cynthia Villar.
Dear Ms. Cynthia Villar,
I’m guessing you don’t know what it’s like to truly care for a sick person. You probably don’t know what it’s like to work twelve or sixteen hour shifts with more than ten patients just because nobody else can do it at the time. Or what it’s like to become close to a chronically ill patient and his/her family, only to see him/her deteriorate over the years. Or what it’s like to offer comfort to family after family after accidents, surgery, diagnoses of terminal illnesses or death. Or to hear a doctor say, sadly, of an intubated pneumonia patient: “If only they could afford her antibiotics, she would just wake up.” Or to sacrifice your own basic needs - sleep, food, water - for the sake of others.
You probably haven’t managed a smile and took time to reassure the nice old man in room 205 even after you helped resuscitate a patient in the ward and your meds are delayed. Or sat down with a pediatric patient and found out that taking time to draw his favorite cartoon characters offers better pain relief than paracetamol. Or have one of your workmates help you out with seemingly simple tasks such as following up IV fluids or checking on a patient even though you know that they have a mountain of tasks to accomplish themselves.
You probably have never experienced the happiness that a simple “thank you” from a patient, co-worker, doctor or supervisor can give. Or witnessing a mother holding her newborn for the first time. Or watching the dengue patient you were all so sure was going to die run around the hospital hallways as if nothing had happened mere days after being transferred out of the PICU.
You don’t know what it’s like to leave your family and friends to journey alone in a strange land in the hope of giving the people back home a better life.
And you don’t know what it’s like to decide to stay here in our homeland despite the low pay and the high-stress working conditions just because you believe that every human being deserves to be cared for even if they can’t afford it.
And since you don’t know what all that is like, you obviously don’t care enough to understand people like me and you would go as far as to degrade people like us just because of your preconceived notions of what a “nurse” is supposed to be, I would rather not have you make decisions about our education, our career or our lives.
I will not vote for you in the coming elections and I will discourage others from doing the same.
Have a nice day.
Signed,
A Registered Nurse
Pop Quiz:
Given limited space, resources and time, how do you deliver sustainable and preferably locally-sourced energy, food, water, shelter, hygiene, health services, education and recreation to a tropical community that is typhoon-prone, earthquake-prone and tsunami-prone in the most efficient, effective and non-maleficent manner?
Two pages. Letter-sized paper. Double-spaced. Times New Roman, size 12. To be submitted before 12:00 noon tomorrow.
But then again, people tend to be far more resilient than we give them credit for.
Hopefully, when I come back from Davao Oriental again, I will have brought back stories of hope with me.
In the meantime, thank you to everyone who has helped the areas affected by the Typhoon Pablo in cash, in kind and in prayer. We’re still far, far away from healing the damage. But we’ll get there.
And the simple answer to that is that, it will never be enough. For while you can replace broken houses and fill empty stomachs, who can replace dead mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, husbands, wives, children, friends? Who can fix the trauma of losing everything to ferocious winds that were, in their words, “two tornadoes - one on the land and one on the sea” ripping apart the world as they know it?
