The Gentle Art of Making Petiks
By ALICE SARMIENTO
The term petiks was derived from “pipitik-pitik”. Directly translated, this means to snap one’s fingers, but in the more familiar territory of slacking off, it can be better understood as the “thumb twiddle”, a.k.a. that thing you do when you sit back and wait for something to happen. Which is highly unlikely in the rank-and-file culture of the corporate world: that wonderful environment where you can actually convince yourself that the dude in the next cubicle is a likely bet–despite his being gayer than a handbag full of rainbows.
At an office, the art of thumb twiddling, or petiks has been raised to new heights with the advent of the information age. Petiks has found a friend in twitter, tumblr, friendster, and of course, facebook. This problem has been solved by your friendly neighborhood IT person, who has dutifully gone on to block all the addresses that have made petiks possible–except on their own networks which still give them free reign over their cabbage patches in Farmville.
My office had me confused about the difference between petiks and work. In my definition, work was anything I did sitting at my desk for 8 hours a day. Work didn’t have to be a pain in the ass; on average it took about an hour and a half to generate and sift through sales reports and merchandising calendars, which left me with copious amounts of time throughout the workweek to twiddle my thumbs. But really, where did all that time go?
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EXCEL ART!
Me, to my boss: How do you do that thing on excel where you select a whole area and then fill only certain cells with color?
My boss: (blablabla some gibberish I can no longer recall)45 minutes later, and TADA!
How much color can I throw at my eyeballs? Let Excel count the ways.
Excel is useful for organizing data and designing really garish Welcome mats, among other things.
Here’s Your Coffee Motherfucker!
By SOPHIA FISH
To Whom It May Concern (you know who you are, you soulless bastard):
Please, please, please accept this letter as resignation of my position as fashion assistant, effective as soon as motherfucking possible. I am offering you two weeks’ notice that will hopefully, by some way of miracle, be enough time for you to find the next masochistic, idiot to take my place. Good luck finding one who’ll put up with your stupid motivational posters (WORTH: Just because you’re necessary, doesn’t make you important) and ridiculous requests (No, you can’t call me Yaya in photo shoots. And no, I won’t go an ice cream diet just so you can look thinner next to me).
How About Telling a Story?
By HANNA KRISHNA S. CALLORA
DISCUSSED: This was a goodbye letter/mix-tape that I made just last year to cap off a wonderfully painful and rather long relationship that ended in shambles. It was one of my many firsts and this marked the last of it.
February 23, 2009 Monday 00.56
1
Broken Social Scene – “Pitter Patter Goes My Heart”
This is the score.
Every note is strung together to tell the story of the sighs and tingles, blushes and butterflies, sparks and smiles.
This is how it’s supposed to feel. This is what makes everything worth it.
Download “How About Telling a Story?”
Neon Lights at Midnight
Intimacy is that dizzying ride home after your high-octane night towards the inescapable lure of slumber – what have I done? How much cash did I burn on booze again? Will I get another tongue-lashing for going home barely an hour before daybreak? How will I drag myself through work?
The way intimacy transitions into reality gets cruel at times, and as you curl up half-sober in the backseat of a cab, you are soothed only by leaning your head on the window and feeling the cold, hard surface against your flushed cheeks.
Sultry saxophone notes, searing synthesizers, and a tinge of white soul courtesy of Go West – midnight neon light music. — MARGA DEONA
Download “Neon Lights at Midnight”
Getting to Know You
Songs that may merely facilitate intimacy, and not exactly discuss or explore it…
I asked people about intimacy and the songs they associate with the word. I cautioned them about the first impressions of that concept, of the physicality it immediately implies, and asked them to veer away from the R. Kellys and the Careless Whispers. As one friend put it, those are songs that may merely facilitate intimacy, and not exactly discuss or explore it.
I actually have a playlist in my iPod of more than three hundred songs that, I assume based on personal preference and popular opinion (I’m not the only one who listens to my iPod), could set “the mood”. But intimacy is no mood.
It involves inside jokes delivered with a momentarily raised eyebrow and acknowledged with a hidden smile. It is the tenderness after a punch in the arm. It is the subject matter of proxemics, haptics, and possibly any theory that hinges on the idea of introverts having Facebook accounts. It is the knowledge of birthmarks. It is the difference between blanket and comforter. And of course it includes the sharing of bodily fluids.
These are the songs that talked to me about intimacy—describing it, finding it, and even discussing the lack of it. Up to you, these songs may even facilitate it. –PTM Tolibas
Download “Getting to Know You”
The Deathless Love We Swore to Protect with our Bodies is Stumbling Across its Bleak Ending
Those are not my words, they’re John Darnielle’s. If I had to choose one band/musician to describe the ending of my last long-term relationship–or at least to set a good story to good music–it would have to be The Mountain Goats.
Not that my break-up is a good story, at least not in that way. It’s actually pretty bleak and anti-climactic, but it’s the lack of a need for us to hurl breakables and yank our hair out that makes it so heartbreaking. I mean, what if I wanted to yank my hair out, wait for the scab to heal before I rejoin civilized society with a half-assed excuse for my sudden bald spot. What if I wanted to feel like there was something worthy of hurling bottles at walls? Instead, all I really remember is shrugging, going to bed, and waiting for it to sink in. It didn’t take long and it came with a sigh of relief, a gradual unburdening.
It’s not a good story and I still have trouble telling it without being too cryptic or too general. We’re still friends though, which is a wonderful thing to come away from a 5-year-long relationship with. From time-to-time though, I still wonder how something that bore so much gravity on my choices can suddenly feel so weightless. --ALICE SARMIENTO
Download Breaking-Up to The Mountain Goats
I am Sorry for my Commitment Issues
A Mixtape About a Penchant for Emotional Unavailability.
First things first, you must admit: unavailability is attractive. You have this quote-friend-unquote. You share beers, you share spit, you share the occasional cold bed which you warm every weekend after your friend convinces you that you are too drunk to go home. Just stay the night. This must sound ridiculously familiar to many of us.
“Why do you keep coming back to your friend’s bed?”, you ask yourself. Precisely because the unavailability is attractive; It is precisely because the lack of commitment is attractive. You are friends, you convince yourself as you pull up your pants the next morning, the mutually beneficial kind.
Think of this mixtape as a story unfolding, we begin with:
The Magnetic Fields’ “Papa Was a Rodeo”, about a wanderer who is very used to leaving people behind to get back on the road. Emotionally unavailable people almost always come with a disclaimer: “I have commitment issues.”
So it begins: you start calculating about the elaborate possibilities of all the times you will be together–whether in your head this will lead to romance or just doing all the fun sans the drama of a commitment.
You come over once a week because either one of you need cheering up as you use Voxtrot’s words: “Cheer me up/ I’m a miserable fvck”
But as Eaten By Monsters has very aptly sung, it will eventually come to this: “Friends who kiss are not really friends at all. One of them kisses hoping that the other would fall.” Over and over again, you say you are just friends, as you listen to Wilco before you sleep sing, “But I promise/ We’re just friends.”
You try your best not to fall in love with your friend, yet it begins. – DK Leomo
Download “I am Sorry for my Commitment Issues”
She’s Gotten Used to This Version of You
If he listened, he’d know that she is more scared than she is angry. But he never does, he never lets her finish a sentence without a fight, and she doesn’t care enough to explain herself anymore. So they wrestle all the time about things past and future (the worst fights are about things that haven’t even happened yet), until someone breaks down. I just want things to get back to where they were, I don’t know how to fix things, and how, how, how, did we ever get like this?
Things really shouldn’t be this hard.
God Hates a Coward: A mixtape for all of those times that you need to fight
The fight or flight instinct is one of our basest human tendencies. Though modern society has pretty much made sure that our lives are very rarely put in actual danger, evolution has yet to get that memo. Because of this glitch we go through life feeling like running or fighting when we should actually be dealing with things calmly and logically.
Personally, this often manifests itself in nervousness and anxiety during high pressure situations. I’ve fucked up job interviews and oral exams thanks to those feelings of unease. I’ve also noticed that I tend to do the flight part more than the fight. My first instinct is to run from difficult deadlines and I’ve talked about feeling like running away from girls in a previous contribution. Running away from things that matter is never really an option however and more often than not we need to stand up to those things that make us want to run away.
The songs in this playlist have helped me at one point in my life or another to stand up and fight. Though I don’t think I’ve had to prepare myself for any actual life-threatening situations, these songs have actually saved my life in the sense that it would have been much shittier if I hadn’t had these songs to help me hold my ground and fight for certain important things.
Monday Is For Drinking To The Seldom Seen Kid
Illustration by Regina Bautista
Like many of you, the relationship I’ve had with alcohol and its consumption has waxed and waned over the years that have transpired to convince me that I am, on most levels, a functioning adult. As I transitioned from the early, degenerative years of experimentation and toxic yolk brain hangovers to the ‘reformed’ dynamics that govern the drinking sessions I enjoy today with friends; I’ve realized the important role that music plays in determining whether or not indulging in this pastime and social lubricant will be a good night.
I’ve experienced, on several occasions, the influence of a good playlist complimenting the cold one or cocktail in front of me. Whether the music is blasting from a battery charged, trebly, tragic iPod speaker on some random curbside, or coming from the amps of a good band playing live, I’m a staunch believer in the fact that good music + alcohol is the formula for the equivocator Shakespeare was really talking about.
