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It’s funny how things fall into place right when you least expect them to. Lately I’ve been considering the idea of getting transferred to another account or perhaps looking for another job. You see, my job involves developing an active subculture which takes a particular albeit alternative non-dogmatic focus on how the human body and their consequent faculties are deployed for individual pleasure.

In other words, I review adult websites.

My job only sounds cool when you’re trying to impress someone, but it hasn’t been two months yet and I can feel my brain cells atrophying because I’m not learning anything new. (The knowledge that there is a thriving, underground adult community engaged in deviant sex practices in the Tampa Bay area does not count as “learning something new.”) Last night I met up with some of my college buddies from my org, KATIPUNAN magazine, and I felt slightly embarrassed about being the only professional porn critic amidst college lecturers, grad school students, and news writers. Oddly enough, I didn’t feel as insecure as I did when I was in college. I used to feel this huge inferiority complex every time I was around them because everyone is either an honor student, award-winning campus journalist, or both. And there I was, a B-student mucking around school, putting off my thesis til the last minute, trying to put my personal life together and failing miserably. I used to angst a lot about being a porn writer when I first started but now I view it as a true test of creativity. Do you realize how many synonyms there are for the human reproductive organs? (Not many.) Do you have any idea how difficult it is to make freaky sexual fetishes sound remotely enticing? (Very difficult.) Oh wells. Everyone’s gotta start somewhere and at least I’m getting a damn interesting, out-of-the-box welcome into the real world.

From left to right: MA student in journ, English professor at AdMU,
freelance graphic designer, porn critic

Anyway. So the porn’s been killing my brain and just when I thought bad smut is the only thing I’ll be doing for the next six months, a writing gig practically fell on my lap. You are looking at the newest blogger of pmptoday.com. I wrote my first post today and it took me almost two hours to figure out what to write about, and then another hour to actually write it. I may have been around the internet for a while, but I’m more technologically-impaired than I seem. I don’t know anything about gadgets, and I wasn’t aware that there was an iPhone until just this afternoon. If it were up to me I’d rather have a typewriter than a Macbook. (But if I were given a Macbook I wouldn’t exactly complain.) I don’t understand why people these days have this overwhelming need to bury themselves in debt to fill up their lives with nanotechnology convenience and glittering gizmos that will surely impress their yuppie friends and that cellphone thief lurking ’round the corner. How lazy and materialistic have we all become? Is this what our generation is made of? Are we nothing but wage slaves to technology?

(Before you start calling me a hypocrite for challenging The System like a pseudo-hippie-lovechild, let me just say that those are just rhetorical questions that I’m pulling out of my ass because my brain is on overdrive for some weird reason.)

So, back to the new writing gig. I was told that I would be the site’s “female gadgeteer”, a job description that offended me just a little bit. I don’t like it when people make exceptions for me or choose me to do something just because I’m a girl. I’d like to think that my gender has nothing to do with the fact that any new, paper-thin contraption with more than two buttons makes me feel nervous. That this nostalgia for the “old-fashioned” and the “manual” is a weird personality quirk of Lauren Dado and not a genetically-inherited romantic trait of Lauren Dado from the Female Gender. I didn’t get too upset though. I was mostly worried I’d have a byline that would give off the impression that, “Hey, I got chosen to write for this tech blog because I’m a chick! Who likes gadgets! Date meee!”

Special Topics in Calamity Physics by Marisha Pessl

In other news, I finally finished reading Special Topics in Calamity Physics by Marisha Pessl. I’m still in the process of digesting the ideas and the themes but stylistically speaking, Pessl’s writing has to be one of the most unique that I’ve ever come across. (For instance, each chapter’s title is a book from the English canon.) It’s a story in term paper form written in less academic language, without the arrogance of the erudite. The trade paperback copy costs only three hundred pesos; if I have extra cash I think I’ll buy copies for a few friends who I know will appreciate it. But I won’t say who.