My Christmas. Financially.

Here’s a sad, sad truth about me: I stopped enjoying Christmas after I turned ten. Looking back at the Christmases before that time, as a kid, what’s not to love? There’s Christmas vacation from school, lots of food at home, money from my godparents and really awesome gifts from relatives! I mean Pau’s mom who is my aunt/godmother, as far as I can remember, invariably gave me shaving cream from Gillette every Christmas until I’m like 10–a time when I didn’t even have pubic hair and armpit hair, let alone facial hair.

(So yeah, tita, thank you for giving me a gift that allowed me to shave off my eyebrows when I was a kid hassle-free! I mean, as if the fact that I peed sitting down when I was in grade school wasn’t enough to make a good part of my childhood miserable, I also had to be the kid with one of his eyebrows shaved off.)

The endearment I feel towards Christmas, although taking a slight dip, remained at a considerably positive level when I was in college–a time when I got an apartment near my university and was experimenting with alcohol, cigarettes, women and homosexuality–things which, at that point, I didn’t know were going to be recurring themes that, five years later, would send my life into a downward spiral of immorality, debt and waking up inside my car parked in front of a bank with dried vomit on my pants.

After spending two Christmases away from my family, I started to miss spending Christmas at home. Truth be told, I don’t think this has much to do with missing my family members but rather the comfort of being at home like having a tidy, air-conditioned room and a bathroom I didn’t have to share with like ten other guys that includes a Pakistani Med student named Rajput who shaved his pubes into the toilet which, causes me (the guy who usually uses the bath room after him) to end up standing up after taking a poop session to realize that my butt cheeks are riddled with shaved Pakistani pubic hair and the turd I left in the bowl looking like a marmoset.

So, every Christmas after my junior year in college, I have been spending Christmas with my family. Adjusting was a little hard at first owing to the fact that my family had rigid house rules like: “No alcoholic drinks with your friends after 1am” or “You can not, drunk or not, sleep butt-naked beside your father” and “We will not tolerate visits from crack dealers at 3:00 in the morning!”

Thus began a nosedive in terms of the general interest I feel towards Christmas. This year, with only a good six days away from Christmas, I can not emphasize enough how un-Christmasy I feel. I’m guessing this could be because I’m crashing down from a good trip I got this morning when I got to work (Dear Romark, from Content Development, thank you for the wicked meth you shared with me. I will see you again tomorrow morning at the generator room in the basement parking area), but it could also be because of a lot of things.

Financial Situation? Maybe. Well, let’s just say I got a sizable bonus and a mandatory 13th month pay from the company. But you know the problem when you put that much money in the hands of someone who has a slight alcohol problem and an idiosyncratic belief than an ATM pay card is key to limitless amounts of money?

That’s right he spends a huge chunk of it on alcoholic beverages that come with a 150% markup in swanky bars to impress his friends; and on entrees that cost more than his daily rates in posh hotel restaurants to make his girlfriend think he’s more marriable than he really is and to make everybody around him think, in his own words, that “that’s how he rolls.”

Given all my addictions and delusions of grandeur, I was still supposed to eke things out if my salary for the December 15th payday is to be considered. The problem was, and I don’t want to get into any details because I myself do not understand it fully, there was some sort of Tax Annualization Voodoo the government implemented a couple of months ago that, long story short, made me end up getting a measly 4 thousand bucks for that pay period.

Things, I realized, got a little more complicated after I spent a significant amount of money buying everyone gifts (something anybody who knows me would tell you is “so not like me”) and pre-ordering a multi-thousand peso camera as a Christmas present for my ladyfriend.

As if things aren’t bad enough, our good friends at HSBC are pursuing judicial action against me if I do not pay off my credit card debt within the year.

So here’s where I am, ladies and gentlemen: I have 4 thousand bucks in my bank account (well, actually 3,200 bucks. I succumbed to a terrible 800-peso meal yesterday. Fuck.), I have a post-dated check deposited for my monthly condo amorization which amounts to over 20,000 pesos–a check I HAVE to fund lest I spend my Christmas in jail for Estafa AND I am forced to file a Salary loan to pay off part of my 140,000++ peso Credit Card debt before the end of the year.

And oh, Merry Christmas to you too.

Additional comments powered by BackType