Maldita Moments

It was one of those lunches in the 17th floor. Rhoel asked where I got the black dress I was wearing, saying I looked nice in it. I told him I bought it at Maldita. Jon stops in mid-bite and solemnly pronounces that if there’s one word he can think of to describe me, that would be it: maldita.

These are the same guys who think I’m the bad side of Hermione, the know-it-all, eager-beaver, self-righteous side. Malk can’t stop laughing when I tell him these things. He says my friends must really love me if they think I’m this evil girl but they put up with me, anyway.

I can count with one hand the people I know who are truly good inside, the kind with no mean bone in their system. But as for the majority of us, we all get nasty thoughts about other people all the time, and we only differ on whether we verbalize these thoughts or not. I belong to the verbal group. I can bite my tongue about things like an unbelievably tacky fashion statement or horrendous grammar that’s enough to make you cry. But I just have to say something to people who are inefficient in their jobs, or who try to put one over other people. Sometimes, I say more than intended and more than needed to set things right and put some people in their place, and I end up feeling quite bad, actually.

When it’s just with friends I don’t bother censoring my speech, so I invariably come up with statements that seem to shock them out of their senses. But then I see amused glints in their eyes, so I guess they share some of my sentiments but are just too nice to admit to harboring the same line of thinking. And if this makes me bad girl, so what? I have nothing about genuinely nice people, but I can’t stand those who just pretend to be, the kind who put on a big smile while talking to you but you just know in their minds they’re sizing you up and concluding you fall short of whatever stupid standards they have. I can just punch these hypocrites in the face.

I digress, as usual. So anyway, that’s how I got my reputation. Rhoel sometimes wonders out loud if my name isn’t spelled b-i-t-c-h. In the three or so years we worked together not a week went by that he didn’t ask me, half-pleadingly, “Why can’t you just be normal?” Normal probably meaning tactful and behaved and who can be counted on to keep her wicked thoughts to herself. But I know he loves me. He turns to me for help (“Lo, bigyan mo nga ng isa”) when something brazenly unjust is about to be done to us by some higher-up in the office. And I am always more than willing to oblige.