Clouds in My Coffee

I've been thinking a lot lately about my short-term plans for my career. Well, I'm planning to resign next year. I'm only looking forward to the Christmas bonus that waiting my resignation will be that long. Why will I resign? My primary objective is to finish my masters thesis in Epidemiology - to finish what I have started in the past. To do that, I'd have to resign from my current job and work on it full-time. I've talked to my uncle about my initial thesis proposal, and he rejected it and proposed a study on virgin coconut oil on multiple-drug resistant (MDR) TB patients. I am not quite confident about the proposal; it is rather unconventional for an epidemiology student to have an experimental study for a thesis. But once I prepared a good methodology and got a good data on this, it would be a major breakthrough in alternative medicine, but not really in epidemiology. (Halt! Among my few readers, nobody cares. So let's move on.) My other and more important ...

I broke Carlo's violin "Ram" (it stands for "Hiram;" I borrowed Carlo's violin; Carlo is the SICCO concertmaster) and lost 3 of my 4 P1.5k worth of strings all in two days: last Sunday and Monday. The disaster occurred after our mass performance in Sts. Peter and John Parish in Malabon. I left Ram in its case, open, on the church's floor, only to move a few steps to light a candle and make a wish to the Virgin Mary, then when I turned back, a heavy wooden music stand was on Ram, with the G string cut, and one f-hole cracked. As what I was told, a tall microphone stand was accidentally bumped, then it stumbled onto the heavy wooden (I have to stress this) music stand, which in turn crashed over the helpless violin, just when I was praying a few steps away. Carlo was upset, of course, and made loud guilt-tripping jokes on me before leaving the church. He was quite effective... I got quite furious. I tried to repair the violin. A few adjustments and the woo...