It’s not too often I grab the brass ring.  Here I am, with an opportunity - admittedly a slim one, but an opportunity nonetheless - to leave this country.  I have staked my name and reputation in a modest research, all in the effort to get somewhere.  Lately, I realized how important that brass ring was, and how fortunate I am to cling to it: it’s a make-or-break that will either cement my career, or leave it in the proverbial pool of quicksand.

   Not that I’m regretting anything, but with my less-than-satisfactory performance in six years of undergrad school, I would probably get an academic position only when pigs fly over a blue moon on the eighth day of the week on the thirteenth month of the year.  So much for a chance to teach.  As much as I tell most people that I make a bad teacher, I know that a lot of young people who would enter my classroom will learn a lot from me.  It’s all about taking a chance: like many people, I need all the chances I could get.

   But I know how distant a classroom in UP is from my grasp now: I have my limits.  So last night, I decided to pass a résumé to a company looking for writers.  Another day, another gamble: I have laid my bets so many times at the roulette table of many a writing contest and, like Kenny Rogers’ gambler, I knew when to hold ‘em and knew when to fold ‘em, knew when to walk away and knew when to run.  I didn’t know what kept me from winning that elusive Palanca, so I just kept on it.  I honed myself - and I still continue to do so on a day-to-day basis - on the grindstone that is the blogosphere.

   I wouldn’t pass up a chance at a call center if I was a practical-minded person, but suffice to say, I’m not.  Maybe my friends are right: I have too much going on for me to work telephone lines and troubleshooting computers run by inept people half a world away.  That trust and confidence was something that has kept me - for the longest time - to pass my résumé to Sitel.

   Ambition is something I reserve for things that are worth my while: I won’t aim for the stars if I know I’m not prepared, even if I know how to get there.  Knowing how to get to your destination is half of actually getting there.  Whenever I get out of my comfort zone, I throw my propensity to cost-benefit analysis and just go, paying neither heed nor caution to the wind.  It has sometimes been my undoing, but often the best lessons I’ve ever learned are lessons from rolling my dice.

   I just got reminded by my mom that if I have any plans of getting travel documents in the way of passports and visas, I have to cut my hair.  Somehow, many of my relatives are quite concerned about my hair length.  It’s paranoia by syllogism:

• I have long hair.
• I’m from UP.
• I used to be an activist of the street-rallying kind.

   It’s not that I’m afraid of having a haircut: when I took the summer term at UP Diliman a couple of years ago, I had a haircut.  Some of my friends were very nanghihinayang that I cut my hair when it was so long, shiny, and fell in a neat cascade almost to the small of my back.  Now my hair is below shoulder-length: it’s still too long by conventional and conservative standards.

   For all intents and purposes, I used to be very vainglorious when my hair was longer.  I oiled it myself on a regular basis, used handfuls of shampoo and handfuls of conditioner (not the all-in-one kind), and even went so far as to have it cellophaned once.  When pesky lice infested my hair, I took the burning sensations of Kwell, had my hair ironed, and then went to a hair spa a month later… all in the effort of ridding my locks of the parasitic vermin.

   Now that I have shorter hair - and figured out the cost of my vanity - I stopped giving my hair the kind of attention I don’t give my romantic prospects.  The truth is, you don’t have to go to a hair salon to have good hair: you only need to give your hair an extra oomph of shampoo.  Soap, surprisingly, works fine.

   But I don’t know what haircuts have to do with travelling abroad.