For days, it had been nagging me like a girlfriend dropping subtle, but resolute, hints that she wants a Prada Craquele Tote for Christmas. Apple’s iTunes, each time I ran it, would remind me that there was this wonderful, new version of itself now available – and that it would be in my best interest to download it.

Thinking it was just one of those minuscule, insignificant tweaks with changes I’d pay mind to like an office memo about a mid-morning fire drill,  I kept ignoring it.

Then, a couple of weeks ago, Apple sent out an e-mail announcing to the whole world that the latest iterations of the iMac and Macbook were out. That got me excited in a way that only a new episode of 30 Rock could.  It got me excited enough to make me want to grab a piece of paper and write this letter to Santa:

Dearest Santa,

I’m not perfect. I make mistakes, and, God, I know I bitch a lot. However, overall, so far this year, I’ve been nice, not naughty; I’ve been generally good, not bad. I don’t cry, I don’t pout. I deserve an iMac!

Well, I think you owe me one.

For years, since I found out that you, Santa, really can’t climb down chimneys wearing that dorky red outfit and that you really don’t cruise the world in a single night on a sled pulled by a bunch of reindeers led by a red-nosed Rudolph – but that you do exist as certainly as love and generosity and devotion exist – all I’ve ever asked from you on Christmas Day has been to put love in the hearts of men and world peace. You have yet to make good on your end of the bargain on that score, but never mind.

Now’s your chance to make it up to me. Now, I want something for myself. I want an iMac.

After writing this letter, I finally decided to upgrade to iTunes 9.

***

I am not being a selfish, little prick who covets an expensive gadget just because it’s hip, new and cool.

You see, I’ve had my trusty, old Acer Aspire 3620  for four years already. We’ve had a good run, and – in ways that are often solicitous, sometimes recalcitrant, sometimes pleading – she can still deliver the goods.

Over the years, however, she has grown too familiar, too cantankerous and too slow. The excitement I felt the first time I booted her up and tweaked her settings so she’d mirror a sliver of my soul is no longer there.

Nowadays, she always makes me wait. She always complains over new things I want to try. She chooses the things she wants to help me out with, and throws a tantrum whenever I press her about my needs and become captious.  Sometimes, she even shuts her own self down, and I have to wait until she can again collect herself.

The spark is gone.  It’s time we part ways.

***

My AA 3620, however, will forever occupy a special place in the IT division of my heart. She has been with me through three jobs, two countries, a painful separation, and two costly surgeries.

I got her at a discount just before I left my old job at a  beverage and condiments company, and was settling into a new one at a struggling newspaper financed by an Ilocano warlord.

The newspaper was a hole-in-the-wall, beneath-a-pool operation, and we pretty much were short on everything.  I had to share my office computer, chair and table with two proofreaders and another editor, so having a laptop then somehow elevated my standing in the office.

With the wonders of wi-fi, I became untethered.  My AA 3620 gave me freedom from the office and all the dreariness and madness that went with working behind a desk inside a  very cramped, claustrophobic office, across a musky banquet hall and directly beneath a rooftop swimming pool.

I was able to work from home, letting me spend most of the day with these three very adorable human beings who called me “daddy”.

That racket lasted for about six months.  Before the newspaper folded, I and my AA 3620 were already on our way to the Lion City.

***

The relocation wasn’t just about having a new job. I needed to re-assemble myself.

My marriage was unravelling, and I was broke. I couldn’t pay my shrink anymore.  I didn’t want to leave the three people who meant the world to me, but I had no choice.  I was already clinically depressed; I didn’t want to starve as well.

One of my mentor-friends – a middle-aged man with a woman’s name and a premature outburst of white hair – wisefully warned me when I told him I was heading for Singapore: “Make sure you’re leaving for the right reason. If you’re just running away from something, you won’t last three months.”

He was right in that my first three months in Singapore were perhaps the loneliest, darkest period of my life. Apart from the fact that my world was falling apart, and I was 2,600km from home, I had also become what I had always swore I’d never become: an overseas Filipino worker.

***

My father had been an overseas Filipino worker for nearly a decade – through most of my teenage life. He was one of those millions of Filipinos who formed an invisible army of drivers, construction workers, nurses, nannies and entertainers who kept the economies and wars of the Middle East humming.

He first worked as a backhoe operator in Iraq, when Saddam Hussein was still both a god and the devil in that country.

“We built Saddam’s bunkers.” my father would often brag.

“They would bring us to the job sites blindfolded, so we wouldn’t know where the bunkers were.”

After four years in Iraq, he then went on to work as a trailer driver in Saudi Arabia and was, by then, helping Uncle Sam’s mighty, righteous army bust the bunkers he built for Saddam.

One of my fondest memories of him was when he came home one time from Riyadh at the end of one of his two-year contracts, not with toys and chocolates but mementos of Operation Desert Storm: a gas mask, thermal pants, a helmet, a  flack jacket, and some spent M-16 shells rummaged from the US Army.

***

My memories of my father were sparse, as his presence during those years had been confined to a voice on a cassette tape and a few mails that were forever lost when our apartment in Parañaque burnt down.

I hardly remember what he said to me in his recordings, but I could still hear the droning of his voice – monotonous, expressionless, filled with melancholy – as most Ilocanos were prone to speak like they were in a wake, remembering the good and glossing over the bad about the man lying inside the casket.

I knew he loved me – he once pledged to kill a neighbourhood thug I had a heated argument with  – and I understood why he had to work abroad and be away for years at a time.  I wouldn’t have been able to go to college had he not left.

However, in those intervening years when he wasn’t there, he missed a lot. I missed a lot. We missed a lot.

I was a child playing with beetles and bicycles when he left to work in the Middle East. When he came back for good, I was already a young adult with a girlfriend who’d be the mother of my children and a beat-up,  good-for-nothing Ford Laser hatchback.

***

I vowed, therefore, never to miss out on my children’s growing-up years – but fate  likes to play cruel tricks.

So, there I was, alone in a no-smoking room in a hotel on Orchard Road, an overseas Filipino worker, with no one and nothing to keep me company but my AA 3620.

So, you see, Santa, I really do deserve an iMac.