Bread and Coffee

It is 10:42 AM, the morning of my 32nd birthday. Rap made me breakfast of toasted bread, sausages, and coffee, waking me up from a bizarre dream (we were vacationing in some rural town in Korea, riding a dingy rollercoaster that had a rectangular track, and our dog Nawa was on it too). As I sip my coffee and nibble on the toast lovingly prepared by him, I check social media and reply to greetings. To my surprise, our ninong Luke has greeted me too, but of course in the form of a backhanded compliment.  Still, what a nice gesture.

I reflect how it is 10 AM on a Monday morning, and I'm having a slow start to my day at home. I can't help but compare it to my 30th birthday, which I had spent in an office, feeling sad. 

On that morning, I'd rushed out the condo at 6 AM to get to the office by 7, so I could leave the office by 4, so I could make it to a dinner with my college friends. I was sad because I wanted more than anything to just go home. 

Office life is weird. Particularly, government office life is weird. You're basically trapped in a facility for 9 hours (1 of those hours is lunch break), and you can't decide to leave earlier than that required amount of time, or else your pay is docked. Preparing for work and coming home from work add another 3 to 4 hours to your day, so the total time spent in just "work mode" is at least 12 hours a day. That's half your day you've just spent at work. If 8 of those hours are spent asleep or preparing for sleep, that means we only have 4 hours in a day to share with ourselves, our family, our friends. 

When I worked in the government, I used to leave early quite often. If you scanned my Daily Time Records, you'd see several minutes worth of "undertime" next to my daily times, that if totalled, would add up to 3-4 hours per month. But I would do it again and again just because I could not stand to spend a single minute more in that office. I longed to be home, hugging my dog, watching TV, or playing Stardew Valley.

Now, I don't know how much of a stickler you are for government rules, but in my eyes, 3-4 hours per month is not a lot of time. And since my pay was being docked by a few hundreds of pesos anyway, please do not belatedly report me for time theft. 

But the reason I've been thinking about all of this lately is that I've shifted careers recently and now do flexible, project-based work. For most people, working-from-home has been the norm since 2020, but as a Rural Health Physician back then, I never got to experience it. It's only really now that I'm adjusting to this new (at least, new for me) style of doing work, one that requires self-sufficiency, motivation, and flexibility. 

Now, instead of waking up to my phone alarm, I wake up when my body tells me to. Instead of putting off my chores until when I can handle them on the weekends, I do them as short breaks in between work tasks. Instead of counting down the minutes until I am "allowed" to go home, I am always home. I get to always hug my dog.   

This kind of life certainly has its pros and cons, which I'll probably delve deeper into in a separate post. But all this has really gotten me thinking about how profoundly work shapes our lives. Work defines how much money we make, which parts of society we get to participate in, and, most especially, how we celebrate our birthdays. For Rap, we were able to jointly decide that he could pause working for a while to support Luke in his senatorial bid. For a while, I did, too. 

Living that kind of life - without a salary, living off our savings - was terrifying. Feeling our wallets get lighter and lighter with each trip to the grocery, with each bill from Meralco, was difficult. For sure that kind of life is not for everybody. But it was all extremely fulfilling and worth it. The results speak for themselves.

Of course as working class folks we could not sustain this kind of life for more than a few months, which is why I've rejoined the labor force. I'm lucky also to have found new workmates who share the same advocacies as I, who celebrate our electoral wins and support me in my campaign work.

I guess this is why I've decided to write about my birthday in terms of work - because it has largely defined how we, how I, have spent this past year, and it will largely define how we are going to spend our time moving forward. 

These are things I'll be pondering on for the remainder of the day and for most of my 32-year-old life. But I will set aside these thoughts just for now, as it is 12 noon on a Monday. I'll finish up my coffee and toast, respond to work emails quickly, respond to birthday greetings slowly, and hug my dog, savoring this new post-elections work-life integration I'm discovering for myself.