Tied Up and Smothered with Blood and Gore

The lights went out at 9AM. I took a couple of candles from my room, brought it down to my office, lit one up for my boss and the other one I put on my table. By elevenish, we pushed through with the weekly meeting even though it was dim enough to lose Khalid in the dark. From last week's nine attendees our office staff count reached 17. Men in ties. Yes, including me.

By noon, I called up Johana, a self-confessed fag hag, for lunch and coffee. And finally, at the mall, after the blackout at the office, after the surprise population explosion, after a heavy meal at the Filipino restaurant, after a cup of mint mocha, and after engaging in heavy flirtation (bordering into sexual harassment, really) with a Lebanese working in a perfume shop, I went out of the mall, found a van, and got myself sucked.

Bloodsucked, that is. The Red Crescent (it figures why they don't use Red Cross in a Muslim country) was holding a blood donation drive. I have always wanted to donate blood but never had the chance to do so back home. I dragged Johana to the Red Crescent van and convinced her to do it with me. No, not sex but the bloodletting. Good intentions aside, I had hoped that they can classify my blood because I don't know what my blood type is. Unfortunately, they can't do it in their van. I went ahead with the donation anyway and watched as my blood flowed through the narrow tube and slowly filled the blood bag. Somehow I found this relaxing if not mildly erotic.

The next day, I thought I'd mellow down from the halloween motif--orange tie on black shirt--and grabbed an earthy color from the new set of clothes that hung from my disposable cabinet. When my boss saw me, he congratulated me again for finally looking like an executive. I smiled and told him that I'm glad I put a smile on his face, otherwise my 500-riyal shopping spree would have been put to waste. Already, I had supplied the proper tone to my new look--smartass.

It turned out I had every right to be grumpy. The accountant slash registrar slash cashier left the office for a month-long vacation and I was given two out of three of his tasks. They would have given me the registrar job as well if my Arabic was good. Thank God for small miracles.

The task at hand is daunting. The accountant was so old school that he did everything in scribbles on manually-lined graphing paper. I told the boss right away that I'm not up for the job. It's ironic that I hired an accountant to do all the gory stuff for my biz back in Davao while I'm here doing accounting for somebody else's biz.

The effects of multi-tasking are glaring. For one, I haven't attended to my blogging ritual. I also felt a bit of stress. It might be the tie. It might be the bloodletting hangover. It might be the horror of facing numbers. I'm celebrating an early halloween and they're not giving any candies.