ON Monday morning, there I was, messaging Editor-in-Chief Cong Corrales about the column that I emailed for that day, with the extra note to “Please use the one with FINAL FINAL.” Yes, in caps.
I have this hard-habit-to-break of checking the emailed column to see if it has mistakes or I want to change something in there, and if my suspicions are proven to be true, I’d edit it and email it again, and send a message to EIC Cong with the note, “Please use the one with FINAL.”
I put “FINAL” first in the email’s subject line, and proceed to write the column’s intended release date and title. And then, I’d review that again to see if there are mistakes I missed and if I want to make more changes. If the answer is yes to that, I’d edit it, email it again, and message EIC Cong with, “Please use the one with FINAL FINAL.”
His reply to my Monday message: “Sure na ha? Basin i-upload nako ni run tapos naa pa diay final final final? (With a laughing smiley after the question mark.)”
Haha! And, yes, I sent emails before that had “FINAL FINAL FINAL.”
There were times when I had already added three FINALs to the subject line, only to realize I wanted to change it again. Juice colored. I think this happened when Herbie Gomez was Gold Star Daily’s editor-in-chief. He had already laid out the column for the print edition, but I couldn’t stop editing. That’s when he would ask, What paragraph? What sentence? Because he’d rather go directly to that than doing the layout all over again.
To say that I have obsessive-compulsive disorder is unfair to those who are truly suffering from OCD. Perhaps I have a mild case? I don’t know. But I now refrain from saying I have OCD because somehow I know how it is, no thanks to the panic attacks that I used to have. I couldn’t even attend Mass then because of the crowd. Inside a church, amidst the humidity, with strangers seated right beside each other—this always made me run out to the back, and stay outside of the church.
The worst happened inside a subway train from Manhattan to Brooklyn after 12 midnight. I wanted to leave the train but how? It was after 12 midnight in New York! The only choice I had was to wait until I had reached my destination. I then ran up the stairs, and asked the cops outside to watch me while I ran to the apartment. Whew.
I then recalled what I had that day that could have triggered the panic attack. Hmmm. I drank three mugs of coffee. Plus one Starbucks bottled coffee.
My body didn’t like coffee then, and it still doesn’t like coffee now. But caffeine addiction is real. Aside from coffee, chocolates, green tea, energy drinks, and cola have caffeine, too.
Don’t worry, be happy, though, for there are new non-caffeine drinks such as Sprite Zero Sugar and Royal Tru-Orange Zero Sugar. But are they totally safe? Here’s a tip: if it’s not beef, pork, fish, eggs, and other sources of meat, the final and only answer is no.
