This way to the stars

I'm leaving this blog...

2006-12-03T11:12:00.000+08:00

...since cross-posting to both blogger and lj has been too much of a hassle. I'm moving to http://greenlightsaber.livejournal.com. :D

Holy kamote!

2006-11-23T19:02:00.000+08:00

I just HAD to post this.

Werder Bremen beat Chelsea 1-0. Omg! I did NOT expect that! I also did not expect that Per Mertesacker (oh, the name!), of all people, would be the one to get the goal. Kudos to the reliable Frings to set it up. It was a home win; Michael Ballack must be eating his shoes haha.

Despite the loss, Chelsea's still sure to be in the round of 16. Bremen can go IF they defeat Barcelona. Oh I hope I hope I hope I hope...coz it won't be easy.

You were never needed in the first place

2006-11-23T18:56:00.000+08:00

I want to try being mean to someone and thoroughly mean it. I think it must be incredibly satisfying.

-------

Here is yet another rave on Casino Royale. Sure Daniel Craig was not as dashing as Pierce Brosnan (imho), but never had James Bond been this visceral, soul-searching, vulnerable, and human. It was as if James Bond didn't really come back; the man behind the trigger-happy finger is actually being revealed for the first time.

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Scales. Boring, boring, boring. Plus there are a LOT, which I think can very well burn my brain once I try to memorize all of them through the whole fretboard (as if I didn't have enough memorizing to do with Org Chem and Histology). Still, once I know them I can make my own solos! Yay, I am exciteddddd! :D

The need to escape

2006-11-18T02:08:00.000+08:00

Sometimes I wish I could bury myself and never come out of one of those fantasy books or sci-fi movies that I love so much. Call it escapism if you will (and you'd probably be right), but I am sick of having to face stark, banal, and utterly unescapable realities.

We've always been told - either by those awful sugary self-help books or inspirational stories of famous icons and mavericks - that we can go as far as our imagination takes us. That reality can be bent and shaped to your will if you're strong enough. But more often than not reality has boundaries as immutable as a brick wall; make what you will of the space between, but it is so hard to move beyond.

I've once read that life is like a sonnet - we are given a definite set of rules, meters, and guidelines that define the elements of a sonnet, but we are given the freedom to say whatever we want as long as we comply with them. Hang sonnets and give me a free-form poem any day. In fact, hang poems altogether; I couldn't be happier if life was a blob of neon-colored play-doh in my hand.

Holy German Football Cows

2006-11-18T02:07:00.000+08:00

I really must congratulate the German football team for making it this far into the Euro qualifiers without losses, and for scoring 18 goals in just 3 matches! I wouldn't be surprised at all to see them rise to the top of the heap at the final tournament. Joachim Low is definitely doing very well as head coach; the German team coached by Klinsmann disappointed at the last Euro Cup, though they did redeem themselves very well at the World Cup. :) I really can't wait for FIFA '10!

As for the Bundesliga, Werder Bremen maintains their spot at first place with 20 points, with Stuttgart only two points behind them at second place. It'll be interesting to see how things turn out; If Stuttgart wins at the match vs Hamburger SV (which they might, since it's at the bottom of the league), they could challenge Bremen for the top spot. Thus, Bremen's gonna have to win against Nuremberg to maintain their standing. Bayern Munich drops to third place (from second) after having a draw with FC Schalke, with whom they are ahead of on goal difference.

I'd really like Timo Hildebrand (Stuttgart's fancy-haired goalkeeper) to play on an international match sometime. After King Kahn retired from the German team, Jens Lehmann naturally took up the No. 1 jersey, and Hildebrand moved up from third-choice to second-choice goalkeeper. Poor him, being perpetual benchwarmer and understudy to two famously temperamental players despite being very good himself. Bet he can't wait for Lehmann to retire, hehe.

------

The upcoming sem promises to be a killer. Every day starts with an early class, dammit, for which I'd probably accumulate a dangerous number of lates. I suppose I'd better start cursing Mondays, which start at 8:30 in BELL (of all places) and end at 4:30 with a four-hour lab session, with only one hour break in the morning to last me the whole day. Tuesdays are worse, which start at 7:30 and end with another four-hour lab session, but with only two thirty-minute breaks before and after PE, which unfortunately is in between the two very pleasant-sounding subjects Histology and Organic Chemistry. I guess I'd better prepare to starve! Haha, I haven't even started, and I'm complaining already!

------

Playing a Santana song is exhilerating. The man is a genius for composing expressive solos, no two of which are same in one song, which make them hard to memorize. I'm about a third through Smooth, and I wanna get on with finishing it. The dance-y song is so addicting to play! I could play it till my fingertips bleed.

Still, I wonder what it'd be like to play a Steve Vai piece. Kuya Benjie says I could have those next if I wanted. Must be both torture and thrill at the same time, eh?

Werder Bremen vs Bayern Munich

2006-11-18T02:05:00.000+08:00

Werder Bremen is now at the top of the German Bundesliga, courtesy of their 3-1 win over Bayern Munich last Sunday.

From www.bundesliga.de/en:

The top-of-the-table clash brought Bremen a sold-out Weserstadion. 42,500 fans wanted to see leaders Werder take on second-placed Bayern, and the match was broadcasted live in 93 countries!

They witnessed a magnificient goal by Diego with eleven minutes gone. A good ball by Torsten Frings found Diego just outside the area, and the Brazilian dribbled round compatriot Lucio before unleashing a dipping shot that hit the cross-bar and went in, leaving Bayern keeper Oliver Kahn absolutely no chance.

Werder doubled their lead after 33 minutes. Pierre Wome fired home a 25-yard free-kick for his first ever Bundesliga goal. However, Bayern were back in the match just four minutes later when Roy Makaay artistically fired home from seven yards following a set-piece - Bayern's 3,000th goal in Bundesliga history.

The Green-Whites regained their two-goal advantage one minute after the hour mark. Lucio, surely not with his best of days, deflected a Wome cross from the left past his own keeper. Werder stay top of the table, Bayern drop down to fourth, now three points behind the pacesetters.

Thus Werder Bremen rose to the top (at 16 pts), while Bayern slids down one rank to #4 (at 13 pts). Looks like Werder has this year's league cup on sight. But there's still a long way to go before the games end; they'll have to keep up their fine form. And Klose, please score already, sheesh!

However, their positions are reversed in the Champions League. Bayern is on top of Group B, while Bremen is tied with Barcelona at 2nd/3rd place in Group A (since both won over Levski but lost to Chelsea). It seems that Bayern does better in away games than Bremen. I hope both will survive the group stages to give the Germans a shot at a European cup. :D

Speaking of, I hear Lukas Podolski scored a brace to clinch Germany's 4-1 win over Slovakia at the Euro '08 qualifiers. Of course, he had assists from Klose. Good job! :D

Werder Bremen vs Bayern Munich

2006-10-25T22:16:00.001+08:00

Boredom

2006-10-25T22:16:00.000+08:00

A is for age:
Just turned seventeen! Whoohoo one more year to go before my license! :D

B is for beer of choice:
I don't drink beer. Period.

C is for career right now:
Officially, pre-med student. Unofficially, master of procrastination.

D is for your dog's name:
I don't have any. If I HAD, I wanna name it Sauron. Or probably Hannibal. :))

E is for essential item you use everyday:
Cellphone. Yes Ma'am Theo, we are dependent on technology.

F is for favorite tv show at the moment:
Ouran High School Host Club anime.

G is for favorite game:
Minesweeper and the "Which one is Hikaru-kun game?! from Ouran

H is for Home town:
Erm, Pioneer, Mandaluyong City

I is for instruments you play:
Acoustic and electric guitar, and my armpits (haha I wish)

J is for favorite juice:
Tropicana orange, and those 10-peso refillable diluted orange Tang sold at the Ateneo caf

K is for whose butt you'd like to kick:
Bill Gates.

L is for last place you ate at:
The moviehouse at Galleria where we watched the Banquet.

M is for marriage:
The scariest thing on earth. Hahaha!

N is for your full name:
Stephanie Patricia Alinea Jordan

O is for overnight hospital stays:
Lots when I was young, most notably for an eye operation.

P is for people you were with today:
Tam, Dad, Raj, Ate Tess, Ate KC, Migs, Mia

Q is for quote:
I am singing at the Party! and If you are a man, sometimes you wear stretchy pants in your room. It's for fun. - from Nacho Libre

R is for Biggest Regret:
That I didn't take my voice lessons and choir seriously.

S is for special talent:
Playing the guitar and my Jedi mind tricks.

T is for time you woke up today:
8:30 am.

V is for vegetable you love:
Hehe I hate all vegetables except lettuce in salads.

W is for worst habit:
Procrastination, which leads to cramming, which causes stress. And nail-biting.

X is for x-rays you've had:
Very few.

Y is for yummy food you ate today:
Chicken barbeque in UP, and chicken burger in Burger King.

Z is for zodiac sign:
Libra

2006-10-25T22:14:00.000+08:00

Tagged by Mia.

Can you name 28 people you can think of right off the top of your head? Don't read the questions underneath until you write the names of all 28 people. Ready, Start!

1. Mom
2. Dad
3. Tammy
4. Aemie
5. John
6. Mia
7. Maiqui
8. Jen
9. Eliza
10. Maggie
11. Athena
12. Jocelyn
13. Monica
14. Janilyne
15. Charm
16. Karla
17. Adrienne
18. Karen
19. Maxx
20. Tonton
21. Ron
22. Jose
23. AJ
24. Exo
25. Ada
26. Erwin
27. Ralph
28. JA

1.How did you meet 14?
Janilyne was Karen Kalaw's friend, who was my seatmate in third year.

2. What would you do if you never met 6?
Mia. Aww, college life would be really different. No more band, no more dorm to hang out in, no more gulp machine to laugh at, no more OPM appreciation sessions, etc.

3. What would you do if 25 and 11 dated?
Ada. I would be really freaked out! 25 is taken (by 24!) and 11 is kinda far.

4. Did you ever like 5?
John. I believe I am obliged to like my cousin. HAHAHA!

5.Would 4 and 12 make a good couple?
Aemie and Jocelyn. No, coz neither are lesbians.

6. Describe 8
Jen. A real kikay girl who's been my faithful companion and unofficial alalay at amp gigs (where I have HR shifts).

7. Do you think 13 is attractive?
Monica. Oo naman. And hopefully a certain PHYSICS teacher thinks that too! *wink wink*

8. Tell me something about 17
Adrienne. A a smart and wacky Chinese girl who was my seatmate and Omer-bashing partner. She also used to pinch me really really painfully. Haha, memories!

9. Do you know any of 4's family members?
Aemie. Of course! Tito Thany, Tita Grace, and the whole brood of devilish toddlers (namely Moh, Matt, and Jaemie).

10. What's 21's favorite color?
Ron. Er....blue? Haha ewan.

11. What would you do if 18 just confessed he/she liked you?
Karen. Pinch myself and wonder if I'm dreaming, coz it's not gonna happen!

12. What language does 20 speak?
Tonton. Tagalog, *basic* English (haha!) and whatever Cotabato's language is.

13. Who is 9 going out with?
Eliza. Wow I've no idea. Kwento ka naman! ;)

14. What year is 16 in?
Karla. 2nd year college

15. When's the last time you talked to 27?
Ralph. Last Friday, before the Compa Ana long test.

16. What is 2's favorite band?
Dad. The Carpenters.

17. Would you ever date 7?
Maiqui. Nope, coz Maiqui has SHANE hahahaha!

18. Would you ever date 23?
AJ. Haha no! ;)

19.Is 10 single?
Maggie. Hala hindi ko rin alam. I've been losing touch with high school friends, oh no

20. What is 26's last name?
Erwin. de Guzman

21. Would you ever want to be in a serious relationship with 22?
Jose. Nope again! ;)

22. What is the name of 3's honey??
Tammy. Hmmmmmmmmmm now was that Alberto? Nico? Gian? Lesbo high school friend? HAHAHA!

23. Where does 28 live?
JA. In the Wonderful World of DOTA. Otherwise, in a dorm along Katipunan.

24. What's your favorite thing about 24?
Exo. Always challenging me to eating contests where I always lose.

25. Have you seen number 1 naked?
Mom. Of course. She's my mom.

25. What is 1's favorite animal?
Mom. Dog, I think Brownie was its name...

*****

I am officially finished with Black Hole Sun! I just need to polish up the solo more. ;) Now I'm being taught Sugar We're Going Down by Fall Out Boy; apparently my guitar teacher liked it after one of his other students made him teach it. It's easy apart from the part with the changing beats and the palm mutes. Hayy, I hate having to count one-ta-te-ta two-ta-te-ta.

*****

I intend to start two sci-fi series this sembreak: The Wheel of Time by Robert Jordan and Dune by Frank Herbert. Thus, I made my dad buy me Book 1: The Eye of The World (The Wheel of Time) and The Battle of Corrin (Dune). Good luck to me, since those two series have the length, density and intiricacy to rival Tolkien's works. Hehe ang kapal ng mukha kong bumili ng bagong libro; I still haven't finished Catch-22 by Joseph Heller. Sorry, sci-fi and horror are still my favorite genres. Speaking of horror, I also bought Anne Rice's The Feast of All Saints. Hopefully someday I can complete my Anne Rice collection. :D

News from the German (football) front

2006-10-01T01:12:00.000+08:00

Bayern Munich has made it to the top of the Bundesliga charts, with 3 wins out of 5 matches! Woot!

Last week I was lamenting how Bayern, which is known for being THE German football club, was only in third place at the German league. I was expecting better from the club with the players in the international team. But I guess they're delivering after all, even after El Capitane Michael Ballack defected (hehe) to Chelsea. They actually beat Italian club Intermilan at UEFA to the tune of 2:0 - with goals by Pizarro and Podolski (woot!). Finally, sweet revenge to the Italians. >) Currently, Bayern is at the top of UEFA Champions League Group B.

On the other hand, Werder Bremen is underperforming. :( Last year's Premier League Cup winners now in 9th place? They haven't won any of their last six matches. What happened to Mr. Golden Boot, Miroslav Klose? So far, he's only scored 2 goals for Bremen. I want to see more of your somersaults, dammit!

But on the flipside, Bremen actually had a decent draw (1:1) with Barcelona in UEFA. Okayyy, so actually both goals were from Barcelona, but one was a hapless own goal (the other was a last-minute goal by the 19-year-old Argentinian boy wonder Messi). Klose was unlucky, having many opportunities to score goals but all shots either wide or blocked. Werder Bremen is only in third place of UEFA Group A; Chelsea and Barcelona are 1st and 2nd respectively.

Stay tuned to Bundesliga.de and UEFA.com for the latest updates! I know I will. :)

The last gasp!

2006-09-27T14:20:00.000+08:00

3 weeks 'til sembreak!

In the meantime, I have to slave away for the upcoming chem, biostat, and history long tests. The theo and compa ana tests were just over, and we're studying again! Like we noticed, there is never a week when our block caf table is not flooded with papers to review and accomplish. We are not superheroes; we can't do things at superspeed or stop time (though I really really wish we could). But this is always pushing us towards our limits. In the future, we will save lives, but in the meantime, Bio is taking over ours. ;P

But it's ok; I'm looking forward to things we've already planned for our sembreak. There are the Star Wars and Lord of the Rings marathon sessions to educate Mia in the ways of science fiction epics. There are the band planning (?!) and bonding sessions with Migs and the girls. There are my daily guitar practice sessions (I haven't been able to practice now because of so much to do!).

And oh yeah, I plan to super download progressive rock songs! I love the genre so much now. Although Pink Floyd still makes me sleepy (hehe), I think that Dream Theater, Rush, Tool, Fates Warning, Coheed and Cambria are great! I downloaded songs by Pain of Salvation and Symphony X yesterday; I still haven't listened to them, but I promise I will later. And oh yeah, although they aren't really in the genre, A Perfect Circle is also great. :D Maybe I should start reviewing these artists seriously one day.

In the meantime, I should really focus on raising my grades even just a leeeetle bit (yuck, am so gc!). I am in danger in biostat; as of yet, I do not understand anything at all, and the long test covers 4 freakin' chapters! Thank God for the life-saving statistical invention called "curving".

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Woot, I met Tanya Ruiz at the LRT Katipunan station yesterday! It was really unexpected since that's the first time I saw her commuting, although she does it everyday. Hehe, it's funny, we're both really tired and complaining about our respective hell months, but we actually managed to reminisce on our old high school days. Tanya, if you're reading this, remember the High Life, whoohoo! And good luck on your readings and exams, I know you have a lot. Kaya mo yan! :) This goes to the other St. Paul people who might be reading this too.

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I should put a new Compa Ana trivia every time I post (hehe Maxx, I took a leaf from your book!). It shall now be called "The Nerd Bulletin" - for short, NB. Hehehe pauso. :P

NB # 1: Diabetes is not caused by eating excessive sweets. According to Dr. Jugo, "that's a bunch of crock" (hehe tell that to your parents!). It's caused by the inability of your pancreas to secrete sufficient amounts of insulin that converts glucose to glucogen (Type I diabetes) AND/OR the inability of the peripheral tissues and cells to absorb insulin although the pancreas secretes sufficient amounts of it. Type I is treated by insulin secretions while Type II is treated by insulin-sensitizing drugs, although diabetes is usually a combination of both types.

NB # 2: Bangungot is caused by the rupture of your pancreas (pancreatic hemorrhage) due to a blockage in the duct (I forgot the name). Thus, pancreatic secretions can't go out of the pancreas, and they collect inside it until it explodes. Unfortunately, the secretions are for the digestion of protein, fats and carbohydrates; thus, when they bleed out of the pancreas, they eat away at your whole digestive system. Thus, people who die from bangungot have a large stomach due to inflammation. Incidentally, it's the males who generally die from this; there are very few cases of females having pancreatic hemorrhage.

That's comparative vertebrate anatomy for you. :)

The last gasp!

2006-09-26T17:13:00.000+08:00

Because I'm feeling mentally lethargic

2006-09-18T20:13:00.000+08:00

Tagged by Migs.

List seven songs you are into right now. No matter what the genre, whether they have words, or even if they're not any good, but they must be songs you're really enjoying now. Post these instructions in your LiveJournal along with your seven songs. Then tag seven other people to see what they're listening to.

1. Dream Theater - Hollow Years
2. Sonic Youth - Chapel Hill
3. Joe Satriani - If I Could Fly
4. Nine Inch Nails - Closer
5. Iron Maiden - Wasted Years
6. Soundgarden - Black Hole Sun
7. Def Leppard - Two Steps Behind

Tagging: Ysel, Ron, Peachy, Tammy, Jen, Carol, Issa (hehe)

Procrastination is the key word here

2006-09-13T21:58:00.000+08:00

Tagged by Mia.

Open your playlist, pick songs that start with each letter of your username, but the songs have to mean something to you. Don't just pick a song because it starts with a letter in your username. Post the list to your journal, if you want you can explain why the songs are important to you, but it's not required. Tag at least five other people to do the meme.

G - God Save The Queen by the Sex Pistols. The ultimate punk song.

R - Rollercoaster of Love by Red Hot Chili Peppers. The cheesiest rock song I know.

E - Everybody Thinks You're Crazy by Itchyworms. Yes they do, don't they? Hehehehe.

E - Eruption by Van Halen. Proof that Eddie Van Halen is one of the greatest guitarists ever.

N - New Skin by Incubus. Brandon Boyd knows his biology; the dermal cut bled!

L - Let There Be Rock by AC/DC. The anthem of all hardcore rock fans.

I - If I Could Fly by Joe Satriani. He plays with much more feeling than his admittedly more popular student Steve Vai.

G - Goodnight January by Sandwich. Raj's favorite song because of the drums at the intro.

H - Have A Nice Day by Bon Jovi. My favorite song to play when I'm pissed off. :D

T - Teenage Riot by Sonic Youth. A milestone of alternative rock.

S - Smooth by Carlos Santana and Rob Thomas. Santana's guitar SINGS.

A - A Change of Seasons by Dream Theater. A masterpiece of rock instrumentals at 23 minutes and 8 seconds.

B - Bullet With Butterfly Wings by Smashing Pumpkins. Despite all my rage I am still just a rat in a CAAAAAAAAAAGE!

E - Even Flow by Pearl Jam. Eddie Vedder's voice is sooooo... distinctive. Haha!

R - Rape Me by Nirvana. A testament to Kurt Cobain's twisted and lovely mind.

Tagging: Jen, Carol, Tammy-chan, Issa, Peachy, Steph Aves

2006-09-06T21:14:00.000+08:00

This was stolen from Jenny.

If you are boyish, supposedly...

[ ] you own a jersey
[ ] you like being sweaty
[ ] you love mud
[ ] you've played at least one sport on a team
[X] you've played more than 1 sport for fun
[ ] you hate pink
[X] you love hoodies and jeans
[X] pranks are fun
[ ] dogs are better than cats
[ ] its funny when people get hurt

total = 3

[X] shopping is torture (kills the feet, but rewarding nonetheless)
[X] pulling heads off dolls isnt creepy..its fun
[ ] you dont cry
[ ] sad movies suck
[ ] girl drama is stupid
[ ] painting your nails is weird/stupid
[ ] you have a ps2
[ ] you have an xbox
[ ] you have a gamecube
[X] at some point in time you wanted to be a firefighter
[ ] you own a psp
[x] video games are fun
[ ] you play online games

Total = 4

[X] you used to be obsessed with power rangers
[X] you watch sports center
[X] you watch sports on tv sometimes
[ ] horror movies are the best!
[ ] you arent scared of anything
[ ] you take part in "male bonding"....
[ ] you only go to your dad for advice
[ ] you own like a trillion baseball caps
[X] you're not sensitive
[X] no pain no gain

Total = 5

[X] you like going to football games
[X] night games rock
[ ] spiders and bugs are cool
[X] you like to freak out your sister or brother
[ ] you used to or do collect basketball cards
[X] saggy pants are cool
[ ] you get sports illustrated/other sports/ guy magazine
[ ] fire is cool
[ ] you don't babysit
[ ] you're immature

Total = 4

[ ] its kinda weird to have sleepovers with a bunch of people
[X] green, black, red or blue or silver are your favorite color(s)
[X] romantic comedies are boring
[ ] you hate dressing up
[X] you dont care about your hair
[X] you love to go crazy and not care what people think
[X] climbing is fun
[X] contact sports like football are fun
[ ] you own a skateboard/you skate

total = 6

Now add the numbers up and multiply by 2. Re-post with your score as: "I'm X% boyish".

If you are girlish, supposedly...

[X] you wear lip gloss.
[X] you shop
[X] you wear eyeline
[X] you buy different colored shirts
[ ] you wear halters and tube tops...

total: 4

[ ] you dont like shopping at hot topic
[X] you wear the color pink
[ ] you consider cheerleading a sport
[ ] you hate wearing the color black
[X] you love hanging at the mall

total: 2

[ ] you like getting manicures and/or pedicures
[X] you wear jewelery
[X] skirts are a part of your wardrobe
[ ] you take a long time doing your hair
[X] shopping is one of your favorite hobbies

total: 3

[ ] you hate the movie star wars?
[ ] you cry in movies
[ ] you are/were in cheerleading, gymnastics, or dance
[ ] it takes you more than 1/2 hour to get dressed and put on other accesories
[X] you smile a lot more than u should

total: 1

Add them up, multiply them by 5, and post as "I am X% girlish".

So I guess I'm 44% boyish, 50% girlish. What happened to the other 6%? Hermaphroditic/androgynous? Hahaha.

Show me how to live

2006-09-02T17:16:00.000+08:00

To those who conquered their Hell Weeks, I salute you!

But it hasn't all been about academics. The parties have been so frequent lately that my feet, respiratory system and auditory canal are all but dead. It's only now that I realize that Ateneans (especially the burgis ones) are such party animals. And drinking! it's like I've been drinking every week now. Even I'm being surprised at myself sometimes. A few years ago I couldn't imagine myself drinking and partying every week...yet here I am now. I grew up, and it's scary!

Four weeks ago was [[aMp]]'s Rites of Passage. The new bands played, and they were really good! Mia and I got shifts with the HR people. It's really not easing checking attendance in a crowded room with loud rock music blaring throughout. Congrats to us since the logistics was the best in years! Good job to us!

Three weeks ago was the Bionight, by the Biological Organization. Costume party, so I went as j-pop; Maxx went as Avril and Karen went as a cowgirl, so basically we represented music genres (pop, rock, and country). Coolness. Sir Ron as Magneto was priceless! Sad though that only us, Jen, Exo, Erwin, and BJ represented the sophomore batch. I also got to hang out in Karen's dorm, and I saw her *gasp* buang side, haha!

Two weeks ago was bj's birthday. So there was a drinking party at carlo's dorm - complete with red horse, tequila, rum, gin, and stuff that bj mixed with chocolate ice cream (haha it was good). Only problem is, it was on a thursday night, right after the cat dissection. So friday's word for the day was SABOG. And carlo, be proud: you gave me my first shot of tequila. Gaah!

A week ago was Halikinoise, also an [[aMp]] event. Sad that out of our block, only Jen and I were able to go. And the venue was so hard to find; 6 Underground literally was underground! After going to Glorietta from Katipunan via LRT and MRT we were supposed to have ridden a taxi towards Palanca street, we decided to walk since that effing taxi driver told us that the place was just two blocks away. No such luck; the place turned out to be ten blocks away and we went back and forth along the street twice coz we weren't sure where exactly the bar was. Not only was the venue obscure; it was crowded, smoky, small and hot. Jen and I had to go out to the street just to breathe "clean" air (Makati isn't known for its lack of pollution). Despite that, the event turned out okay since the bands were good :). Congrats to Jen for greeting the happy drummer! However, since Halikinoise was on a friday and I got home really late, I was too tired to go to NSTP at 7am. Used up one of my precious three cuts already! :(

The day after that (Saturday) was the fundraiser event at katipunan. So I listened to noisy rock bands again. I also got to hang out with the Management people and I got to see my batchmates from St. Paul. I also drank. Hurrah for me.

Last night was the batch party at Citrus' bar in Glorietta, also a fundraiser. The Makati area seems to be jinxed for me since I got lost again in the Glorietta complex trying to find the place. In fact, the event seems like a repeat of Halikinoise (i.e. small place, loads of people) except that there were no bands. I actually thought that there was going to be a manageable number of people since the tickets were sold out (I assumed they sold a limited number, since not everyone was able to get). Interestingly, there were a lot of people there who were definitely not from the second year; actually some weren't even from Ateneo. Good job! And although there was a one-hour open bar, I only drank half a glass of punch since I didn't like the taste (it was spiked with gin). The place was so overflowing that come 12 midnight, we went out of the place and ate, of all places, at KFC and McDo. Hahaha!

It's definitely been a busy month for me. Next week will be Rock-U (rock bands again) but I don't think I'll go. I'd like to take a break from the busy life, thank you.

Anyway, I learned three things from all of this:
1. It's ironic that we like to feel philanthropic by holding a fundraiser party but we rejoice when NSTP (an activity that involves actual effort) gets cancelled because of the dengue risk.
2. If it's a big party and the venue is small, do not wear heels. Chances are you'll never get to sit on a chair all night.
3. I don't like beer. It's bitter.

P.S. Congrats to us for faci-ing the first ever [[aMp]] listening session! The only things lacking were promotions and food. :)
P.P.S. To Jen: now you'll have to update your blog too! MUHAHAHAHA! *evil laugh*

Let the good times roll

2006-08-29T17:02:00.000+08:00

So I swore I would update once the hell week is over. It isn't, actually; there's still the compa ana lec exam to worry about. But so far, it's been all good. :)

All the sweat, frustration, mental breakdowns, and sleepless nights I dedicated to the exams paid off in the end - except in biostat, which is an effing anomaly where normal rules of study don't apply. But chem and compa ana have been pretty good lately. History has been great; Karen and I hope to be exempted from the finals. :) And most impressive of all, I haven't been late in theo class! Whohoo!

It's funny; I've been getting used to so much stress that I actually feel kinda bored right now. As in, "Whaat? Only one long test to study for?!" We've all noticed that there hasn't been a day lately when we haven't been studying during breaks and studying stacks of papers scattered across our caf table. As a result, I've had intense mood swings, memory lapses, and temporary deafness. Yeah, bio does that to you.

But in retrospect, I think I handled the hell weeks okay. :D Despite the humongous academic requirements, I actually found time for other stuff. We hang out at orgs more often, what with always studying in the PMSA MVP room and becoming active in [[aMp]]. I signed up for ANI (should be fun, right?). I've been hearing lots of bands: from the Bionight and Rites of Passage to the Halikinoise and that fund-raising thingy Jodie took me to. I guess my temporary deafness was caused by that too, haha.

This whole month has been intense, exhausting, sleep-depriving, and adrenaline-consuming. But - though my eyebags got as deep as the Grand Canyon and my coffee consumption actually exceeded the available supply at home - all's well that ends well. Let the good times roll! :)

------

Rock and roll ain't noise pollution - in fact, it's hard work, thank you very much. Kuya Benjie's making me memorize guitar scales; I can hardly find space for them in my brain saturated with compa ana! Apparently those mind-numbing scales guitar legends play are all based on scales; unfortunately there are a lot of them, and it's really hard to memorize all. I mean there are all kinds of major, minor, diminished, pentatonic, etc etc scales for all 7 notes, and each covers the whole fretboard! But it's ok; apparently if I'm able to memorize the scales and play them really fast I'll have an easy time learning solos. I'm polishing up that solo of Deep Purple's Smoke On The Water (I'm really getting tired of it haha, I wanna learn a new one!).

In other words, apparently the road to rockstardom is anything but easy. You just gotta admire the likes of Steve Vai who seem as if they sold their souls to play like that! As for me, I need practice, practice and (ugh) more practice. Let there be rock!

Passin' through the highway to hell

2006-08-27T18:16:00.000+08:00

This has been the weirdest and most stressful week ever.

I never did get to update from my last post as promised. Suffice it to say that the word "busy" cannot aptly and completely encompass how hellish these hell weeks have been. If this goes on for the next ten years, my life won't be my own anymore. But then again, we were prepared to face that consequence the moment we chose to be in bio. I guess we didn't fully comprehend how demanding it would be.

I promise I will update as soon as hell week, part II is over. Really. In the meantime, coffee is my new life's blood.

We will conquer this. We've always had so far, and hopefully we always will. :)

**Just aced the compa ana lab orals on muscles and the history group paper. Woot! I'm crossing my fingers for a streak like this all the way...

Mood swings

2006-08-16T20:19:00.000+08:00

What is your favorite album?

Wow, tough. I'd hate to choose between Incubus's Morning View, Smashing Pumpkins' Siamese Dream, Urbandub's Influence...and maybe Sonic Youth's Rather Ripped.

Favorite song to sing?
Maps by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. Beautiful song. :)

Favorite song to dance to?
Summer Romance (Anti-Gravity Love Song) by Incubus.

Favorite song to make-out to
Yikes, I don't wanna think about that yet. :O But just to answer the question, maybe Pink Steam by Sonic Youth and Quiet Poetic by Urbandub.

Favorite song to listen while driving
Well, Drive by Incubus. :) And maybe Gold Lion by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs.

Song that makes you heartbroken
I and heartbroken don't go in the same sentence, sorry. :) But again, just to answer the question, "Endless, A Silent Whisper" and "A New Tattoo" by Urbandub.

Song that you hate the most
As of now, Paris Hilton's "Stars are Blind". It's not so much the song as the music video. Ick.

Song that you like but wasn't sung well
All AC/DC, Pink Floyd, Rolling Stones...70s rock in general. The guitar work is great and really memorable, but the vocals sound too much like American country music to my unaccustomed Asian ears.

Song that changed your life
The Greatest Love of All. The anthem of my childhood days. :)

Song that calms you down
Southern Girl by Incubus.

Song that makes you smile
Slash (of Guns n' Roses) live rendition of The Godfather theme. It just won't quit! And Paranoid Android by Radiohead.

Song that makes you fall in love
Stand Inside Your Love by Smashing Pumpkins.

Favorite lyrics
"Fool enough to almost be it, cool enough to not quite see it" - Mayonnaise by Smashing Pumpkins. "I'm a creep, I'm a weirdo, what the hell am I doing here?" - Creep by Radiohead.

Favorite Song of All Time
I have none. I always have Flavor of the Months when it comes to songs. :)

Classical or jazz?
Classical music, especially when incorporated with the electric guitar!

Rock or Rap?
ROCK. Definitely.

Emo or Punk?
Punk, although the border between the two gets more blurry by the day. I prefer old-school punk, though. :D

Funk or Blues?
Funk

Pink Floyd or Led Zeppelin?
Led Zeppelin!

Coldplay or Radiohead?
Wow, hard choice, both are equally great. I'll choose Radiohead though, coz' they're weirder. :P

John Mayer or Jack Johnson?
John Mayer

Eminem or 50 Cent?
50 Cent

Britney Spears or Christina Aguilera?
Er...none of the above? :D

Backstreet Boys or N'SYNC?
Backstreet Boys.

The Beatles or the Rolling Stones?
The Rolling Stones.

Electric or acoustic guitar?
Electric! :)

I'm in the CTC complab now and I'm about to leave in a few minutes to meet up with one of AMP's HR officers for the practice listening session. Let me just say that today is one of the weirdest days ever. I seriously do not recommend not taking a bath for almost two days, waking up at 7:50 when your class is at 8:30 (and you've lots of cuts already), getting up with a jolt, and not brushing your teeth because of lack of friggin time. Weirder still is the fact that Maiqui, Mia, and I all had our second day yesterday. We even brought the same brand of pads. Hahaha. At least we could emphasize with each other's mood swings. I swear, today I felt so irritable that I wanted to sock certain annoying people (if I actually could, given that my physical strength is not much).

Beware to the people who will piss me off today. I am in no mood to expand my fast-disappearing supply of patience.

I will continue the story later after I get home. Promise.

Trouble on the home front

2006-08-16T20:18:00.000+08:00

Do I really have to be the one to solve their problems??

They're adults, goddamnit! Supposedly they should be able to handle this! I shouldn't have to be the mediator!

Then again, he's is being an immature and selfish d***head. I can't blame her if she's depressed. She's being abandoned, for crying out loud! He's being a total coward just because she's safely thousands of miles away, and all for some stupid bill. He really needs to get his priorities straight.

Now the awful responsibility to convince him that he's wrong (or at least to be rational about the whole situation) just landed on my shoulders. How the heck am I going to do that? Is he even going to listen to me? I bet all I'll get from him is a smack on the head for being a smart-aleck kid.

I hate this. How would you feel if you were stuck between two of the people you love most in the world?

Blogthings galore!

2006-08-16T20:17:00.000+08:00

I wouldn't have posted them here if I wasn't struck by how much they're on target.

You Have a Phlegmatic Temperament

Mild mannered and laid back, you take life at a slow pace.
You are very consistent - both in emotions and actions.
You tend to absorb set backs easily. You are cool and collected.

It is difficult to offend you. You can remain composed and unemotional.
You are a great friend and lover. You don't demand much of others.
While you are quiet, you have a subtle wit that your friends know well.

At your worst, you are lazy and unwilling to work at anything.
You often get stuck in a rut, without aspirations or dreams.
You can get too dependent on others, setting yourself up for abandonment.

What Temperment Are You?

You are a Self-Discoverer

You're not religious, but you've created your own kind of spirituality.
Introspective and thoughtful, you tend to look inward for the divine.
You are distrusting of all forms of organized religion.
You especially dislike religious gurus and leaders, who you feel are charlatans.

What's Your Religious Philosophy?

You Are 52% Open Minded

You are a very open minded person, but you're also well grounded.
Tolerant and flexible, you appreciate most lifestyles and viewpoints.
But you also know where you stand firm, and you can draw that line.
You're open to considering every possibility - but in the end, you stand true to yourself.

How Open Minded Are You?

You Are Somewhat Machiavellian

You're not going to mow over everyone to get ahead...
But you're also powerful enough to make things happen for yourself.
You understand how the world works, even when it's an ugly place.
You just don't get ugly yourself - unless you have to!

How Machiavellian Are You?

The case for lesbianism

2006-08-16T20:15:00.000+08:00

Before you ask, no I am NOT a lesbian. This is a product of that interesting conversation I had with Ain and Mia yesterday morning at the NSTP venue.

There is about one man to one woman in the world; thus men are about 50% of the population (gee, congratulate me for my brilliant math!). So let's pretend you're a girl looking for a good boyfriend, the kind you'd be glad to show to your parents.

So you look at the other half of the population. But of course, you do have realistic standards; your boys have to come up to scratch, right? So you narrow the field down...

Narrow it down to fairly decent guys...

Further narrow it down to cute guys...

Further narrow it down to nice guys...

Further narrow it down to smart guys...

Further narrow it down to responsible guys...

Further narrow it down to humble guys...

Further narrow it down to understanding guys...

Further narrow it down to straight guys...

And there will be next to nothing left! Haha!

There is no such thing as a perfect guy. Yet so many girls are praying to the gods of fantasy and chick-lit that someday their princes will come. Nope, contrary to the "wisdom" promulgated by Disney and the Sweet Valley twins we avidly gobbled up when we were kids, this ain't gonna happen. That is why there is a social "premium" put on seemingly "perfect" guys as if they were pieces of real estate. The larger population of girls have to settle for only so much.

OR...

Turn to your own half of the population! Aren't all girls considered to be understanding, thoughtful, responsible, etc etc? Besides, isn't it said that a relationship will work great if both parties think alike? Well, girls definitely do. Haha.

Disturbing thought, isn't it? By no means should you take this seriously. Although, it would definitely be amusing to see how the guys of the world would react if they discovered one day that all their women had turned into lesbians... Let THEM experience the shortage for a change! Hahahahaha

Let me repeat and emphasize that I'm not a lesbian, despite me coming from a school known for the lesbian inclinations of much of its student population. In fact, that's what sparked this discussion in the first place, what with Ain and me having a mini-reunion (we never really had one since we graduated). I'm just getting a woozy head trip. :P

The great Kurt Cobain once said, "I'm not gay, but I wish I were just to piss off the homophobes." So let's piss of the guys for once as payback for the many times they've pissed US off! Hahahahahaha! *evil and maniacal cackle*

To move, or not to move?

2006-07-30T20:18:00.000+08:00

Maybe I should quit posting here... I like my livejournal too much. Besides, I can always manually move my older posts...

What do you think? Keep both, or just the Lj account?

I just wanna say "d'oh"

2006-07-27T16:23:00.000+08:00

What do you do when you think you've given something your all, but it still wasn't good enough?
1) You haven't really given your best effort. You didn't try hard enough, so you try harder next time. But what if next time, it still doesn't measure up?
2) Continue giving the same amount of effort. Accept the fact that you've found your limit. But how do you know if you've found it? What if the limit does not exist?
3) Stop trying altogether, and let the world go HANG.

We just had our compa ana lab exam a while ago. Although I studied my butt off until 3am last night (night? morning?), I still kept on having superb mental blocks, so much so that I even sometimes forgot which skeleton belonged to which animal (let alone its minute parts!). Needless to say, I didn't do as well as expected; everything went fine as I reviewed the pictures and terms on paper, but the real skeletons (and the time limit) was a different challenge altogether. And this is just the skeletal system; there'll be OODLES more terms to memorize once we get to the other systems (especially the muscular and circulatory sistem). Oh joy.

That said, why am I even trying so hard? Is a number on a piece of paper worth my psychological well-being and happiness? I feel like such a nerd, what with my grade-consciousness and all, but I really can't help it. I really wish that I could just ignore people's expectations of me (myself included) and say HAKUNA MATATA, but something inside me prevents me from doing so at the last minute.

It's like having Multiple Personality Disorder (also known, to those who took the psych elective at St. Paul 2 years ago, as dissociative disorder). One of the personalities is a lazy, devil-may-care procrastinator, while another is a merciless mental slave driver. I don't know; is it conscience (wow, I actually have one? harhar)...

My motto once was "don't settle for mediocrity". But mediocrity gets more and more attractive every day. Reaching a goal means achievement and fulfillment, but the bar keeps getting raised higher and higher. It will never be enough. When will it ever stop?

I'm so tired of trying.

I wonder what it's like to live Homer Simpson's life?

15 years ago...

2006-07-25T03:00:00.000+08:00

Tagged by Maiqui:

(1) Where did you go to school?
THEN: I wasn't going to school yet.
NOW: Ateneo de Manila University

(2) Where did you work?
THEN: I wasn't working then.
NOW: Ateneo, coz studying is really HARD WORK. Hahaha.

(3) Where did you live?
THEN: In a small townhouse in Mandaluyong City.
NOW: In a galaxy far, far away.

(4) How was your hairstyle?
THEN: Apple cut (did anyone ever go through childhood without having one?)
NOW: Short again after five years of excruciatingly long hair.

(5) Did you wear braces?
THEN: No.
NOW: Yes. :(

(6) Did you wear contacts?
THEN: No.
NOW: No.

(7) Did you wear glasses?
THEN: No.
NOW: No.

(8) Who was your best friend/s?
THEN: Mom, Aemie and Gian
NOW: Mom, Aemie, Gabs and L2. :D

(9) Which of your pets were still alive?
THEN: My white and fluffy robotic toy dog. It was alive in my imagination. :)
NOW: Raj, more destructive than any pet I could ever have.

(10) Who was your boyfriend/girlfriend?
THEN: None.
NOW: None.

(11) Who was your celebrity crush?
THEN: I can't remember if I had one.
NOW: Brandon Boyd! :D

(12) Who was your regular-person crush?
THEN: My neighbor. Harharhar.
NOW: Some cute guys here and there. There are a lot of them in Ateneo. ;)

(13) How many piercings did you have?
THEN: 2.
NOW: 2.

(14) How many tattoos did you have?
THEN: None.
NOW: None.

(15) What was your favorite band/singer?
THEN: Donna Cruz (You are the sunshine in my life...) and whoever sang "The Greatest Love of All"
NOW: Incubus, Smashing Pumpkins, Urbandub. Looking at the difference between then and now, you could see that somewhere along the line I lost the naivete. Disillusionment, anyone?

(16) Had you smoked cigarettes?
THEN: Nope.
NOW: Nope. Hopefully I never will.

(17) Had you gotten drunk?
THEN: Nope.
NOW: Tipsy, but not stone drunk.

(18) Had you DRIVEN?
THEN: Uh...a kiddie car? :D
NOW: Yes!

(19) If so which car?
THEN: The kiddie car. It was green, steel, and manual (i.e. it ran on MANPOWER). Hehehe.
NOW: Some Toyota car at the driving lessons center. This time, it was manual in the proper sense of the word.

(20) Looking back, are you where you thought you would be in 2006?
I honestly don't know if I thought that much about my future back then (I was one year old 15 years ago, for crying out loud). But then again, I think that where I am right now is where I should be. So no regrets here. At least, no major ones. :D

(21) Who do you want to take this test?
Everyone who reads this (if they haven't taken it yet). Yes, YOU.

Old School

2006-07-22T18:47:00.000+08:00

I suddenly have this liking for old school rock bands of the bygone decades. Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Smashing Pumpkins, Guns n' Roses, Radiohead...all of these sound much better than many of today's popular rock bands. I don't want to name names, but they really are saturating the hit lists of MTV and various radio stations. All they do is strum some repetitive power chords, write angsty lyrics about their ex-girlfriends and BLAM! you now have a song which can legitimize their rocker-dude image.

I want something different and more complex than that; I want songs with killer guitar solos, complex and layered harmonies, weird instruments other than the guitar (like church bells, turntables, African drums...), and lyrics that actually have something interesting and meaningful to say. I guess I found those qualities in the songs of 80s-90s hard rock bands. I would have liked 70s rock too - like AC/DC, Led Zeppelin, etc. - if their songs didn't sound a little like country music to my Asian ears, although their guitar work is memorable.

I found a lot of great old songs in my blast to the past (courtesy of Limewire and Amazon.com). My favorites are:

Nirvana - Smells Like Teen Spirit, In Bloom, The Man Who Sold The World
Pearl Jam - Garden, Alive
Guns n' Roses - Sweet Child of Mine, November Rain
Smashing Pumpkins - I of the Mourning, 1979, Stand Inside Your Love, Cherub Rock, Today
Radiohead - Paranoid Android, Let Down, Just

I wish I could've heard them sooner; but then again, back then I was happily caught up on whatever the Spice Girls and Backstreet Boys served up. If you ever want to take a break from today's mainstream, listen to these bands. They blew the crap out of my mind, hehe. ;)

And oh yeah: the Smashing Pumpkins are now one of my favorite favorite bands, second only to Incubus. :D I love their combination of electronica + dream pop + heavy metal. Can anyone buy me the Siamese Dream and Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness cds? Pleeeease?

A cute conversation

2006-07-20T22:21:00.000+08:00

This was an exchange between my two lovable and precious siblings at dinner: Tammy-chan and my little bro Raj.

Tam: Raj! How are you?

Raj:....

Tam: What is Raj doing?

Raj: Raj eat.

Tam: Raj eat with....?

Raj: Raj eat with Ate Tam.

Tam: Very good Raj!

Raj: ....

Tam: Raj! Where's Mama?

Raj: No spilling!

Tam: Raj, no! Raj, where's mama?

Raj: Mama........ go America!

Tam: Yeah, mama go America!

Raj: Raj go America later! Raj eat na!

Tam: Uhhh, okaaaay....

Raj: Raj go America, eat Mcdo, KFC, and Jollibee!

Tam: De lang, walang Jollibee as US ah...

Raj: Raj watch Deal.... or no deal!

Tam: Okay Raj! I love you Raj!

Raj: I love you Raj!

Tam: Raj, you say "I love you Ate Tam!"

Raj: I love you Ate Tam!

I got this from Tam because I wasn't at home yet when they ate dinner. Sad really; I seem to go home late more and more often (due to lab). If I am home early, I'm too busy studying to talk to, let alone eat with, my siblings. And here I am supposed to be a responsible ate.

Anyway, whenever we talk to Raj about America, he only says two things: One, that Mom is there; Two, that he will eat fast food once he gets there. Bless him; I dread the day when we'll have to put him on a 12-hour plane flight. Funny the way an innocent mind works; I wish I had that clean a slate so I'd have a carefree "hakuna matata" attitude.

Anyway, conversations like this prove that my brother has a ONE-TRACK MIND, especially when it comes to food and vanity. Boys will be boys.

-----

Compa Ana Lec long exam tomorrow. I'm scared; I have 8+ hours worth of lecture recordings and 6 powerpoint handouts to review. I really really wish I had a photographic memory. Nucleous pulposus; sebaceous glands; acanthostega gumari; archaeopteryx... This is information overload to the nth level.

And I thought the worms in Zoology (Wuchereria bancrofti? Macracanthorhynchus hirudinaceus?) and the frog organ systems (latissimus dorsi? buccal cavity?) last year were hard. Turns out, they're actually EASY AS PIE compared to this.

God help us.

Aftermath of the World Cup

2006-07-16T16:03:00.000+08:00

I think Italy deserved their win. Really. They showed that they were a strong team in both the group and final stages. It's impressive how they won despite the match-fixing scandals threatening to demote the top football clubs in their country. But I hoped France would win if only to send Zidane's career off on a high note (it'd also be my indirect revenge to Italy coz they painfully beat Germany in the semis).

Alas, there was the Headbutt from Hell. I guess the whole world is now obsessed with what exactly Materazzi said to Zidane to make him react so violently. Hell, I've even read somewhere that the media people are employing expert lip-readers to decipher the headbutt footage. Anyway, the headbutt will really cost him a lot; far from ending a brilliant career on a high note (a loss, but a dignified one), his headbutting will live on in infamy.

Then again, that's one way to make a legend. Already the French people consider Zidane a myth, and their loyalty to him has only been reinforced by the headbutt scandal.

A lot of football luminaries said their goodbyes after the World Cup ended. Other than Zidane, there's Thuram (France), Luis Figo and Pauleta (Portugal), Oliver Kahn (Germany). Coaches of more than half the teams, including Lippi of Italy and Klinsmann of Germany, are also retiring.

Anyway, after all is said and done, Germany 2006 was a great show (haha, take that, Brazil!). I can't wait for South Africa 2010!

I posted Germany pictures on my Multiply: http://stephiedoo.multiply.com/photos/album/9.

-----

Courtesy of our newly-bought broadband router (linksys, Php3500), I am now connected wirelessly to the net. Yahooooooo! :D

Mom's gone now

2006-07-15T20:20:00.000+08:00

Mom left for the States last Monday at 10am, and she won't be coming back for a year. The house feels strangely empty now she's gone. I have to restrain myself from looking for her every time I get home from school. It's funny how human nature only lets us realize how vitally important a person is in our lives after she's gone.

But I'm not too sad. Since this is the second time that she'll be gone, we're all emotionally prepared for it. Even Raj knows how to say "America" once we ask him where Mom is, although I doubt he even comprehends the concept of another country thousands of miles away from home. This time around, I'm not too scared of stepping up to the extra plate of responsibilities. Even Dad comes home earlier now (last Tuesday he got home at 8:30pm, which was really disorienting). Besides, come next year we'll have our dual citizenships; Raj can seek better therapy, Tam and I can easily get scholarships abroad, and the future will look just peachy.

Two years without Mom is a small price to pay for the rest of our lives happily and comfortably together. A small price, but painful to pay nonetheless.

I'll miss you, Mom. :(

-----

This is from Tammy's Multiply, posted some time after Mom left:

Today is probably one of the saddest days of my whole life. Probably even sadder than the last day of Trumpets (although masmasaya un, since I didn't breakdown in school every after 5 minutes, but enough about that).

As you'd probably know, today is July 10. Hurray. So many requirements, so little time. But today's highlight isn't about that.

Today, I go to school with a mother, and I go home without one. (Ona pangit na)

She was the first one that I saw when I woke up this morning, because, uhm, she was the one who woke me up. I asked her the day before if she can bring me to school, so that I'll have a memory of her before she... you know. We left the house at around 6 am. Pretty weird, actually. I was still thinking that when I come home, she'll be there. Stupid me.

I was pretty silent they whole time, except for the occasional coughing. I kept thinking all those times when I was still in the 1st year, when I had to struggle without her. I kept thinking of how much fun my life actually became with her around, and that I never really saw it until she left. And now, that again, she, um.... you know, I have only begun realizing how much she really means to me.

When we were already near the school, she gave me something that really really made my heartstrings tug. It was a gift, FOR ME, for MY birthday, since she won't be able to be here again for my birthday. I was touched, not because of how cute my gift was (not telling you what it is!), but because of the fact that she remembered how sad I was because of that fact. And for the first time after a whole month, I cried over something that had made an impact in my life.

So, she wiped my tears for the last time, and hugged me for what seemed like minutes. I was too reluctant to let go, and I could have sworn I felt my heart trying to burst at that moment. But alas, I had to let go. It was the only way.

So, together with my school books and some bits of dignity left, I finally gathered the courage to finally let go of her. I went out the car, and inside the campus.

And that was the last that I saw of my mother.

Right now, I'm actually finding it hard (again!) to type. I cannot count how many times I broke down and cried today. Maybe, I'll never know. There's this voice inside my head that tells me to be strong, but yet, my heart refuses, and is slowly tearing apart... again.

But wherever you may be right now, even if you are halfway across the world, you will always be with me in my heart. Even if you're not beside me, I can still feel you. I will try to be strong for you, and I will do my best to make you proud.

Right now, the reason I exist is for YOU. :)

Wherever you may go, whatever you may do, always remeber: I will always love you mom. :)

(I actually made this in an hour, since I had to go out and get some air for my red puffy eyes. Great.)

Currently Listening to: The electric fan
Currently thinking: I already miss you. :(

-----

This was my reply, posted on the same Multiply page. It's by far the longest comment on any page I've ever seen:

Wow chan, I never knew you had it in you to be so senti and EMO. That post read almost like one of those tearjerker novels I hate so much.

Haha just kidding. :D

Yes, Mom will be gone for a year (again). Yes, Mom won't be here for your 14th birthday. Yes, we won't have any girl-bonding/shopping weekends anymore. Yes, she won't be able to guide you through your second year. And yes, the one person who guides, protects, and loves you the most in the whole wide world is GONE.

Sad, isn't it? Makes you wanna cry, huh?

BUT...

It's only for a year. She won't be gone forever. Before you know it, she'll be back. We've been through this before, and we can wait again. I didn't say a nice goodbye to Mom on Monday morning because I know that we're gonna see each other again soon enough (besides, I'm a cranky morning person and I was running late for school). Besides, what's two years compared to the rest of our lives?

Anyway, like what your friends here said: never count the days. Instead, just focus on your studies and your Trumpets and your other whatevers, like Mom would want you to. Responsibility is the key word here - that word really really sucks...I hate it myself! *sigh*) - not just in school but in the house. Though granted I'm not as nice and sweet as Mom, I'll try and fill her shoes in taking charge of the house and caring for Raj. It's a big responsibility and I need you to help me. So yeah, I'll really be sure to get the nagging part right. :D

It's true that no one can ever take Mom's place, be it your friends or your siblings. But don't sit on your ass and wail like a baby just because she's away. Besides, I bet Mom wouldn't want us to wallow in melodramatic sadness and self-pity either. She trusts us enough to let us (the family) function without her temporarily, and that's what we're gonna do.

A great man named Arnold Schwarzenegger once said, "I'll be back!" (complete with accent). And Mom will. In the meantime, let's just suck it up, shall we? :)

Your loving, Charo. Este, Onee-chan. :)

-----

That's right, I now play the role of universal comforter, consoler, motivator, shoulder to cry on, etc. etc. It's one of the job requirements of being an ate/onee-chan (others would constitute nagging and bossing around). But that doesn't mean I don't need my share of comfort too. Sometimes I just get tired of putting on this brave face so everyone around me doesn't get scared. Alas, I'm not allowed to just quit; I'm now (partly) responsible for everyone in the house. At least I don't pay the bills.

I just wish this year would pass by faster than a speeding bullet. Yes, faster even than Superman.

More soccer stuff

2006-07-15T20:19:00.000+08:00

Lukas Podolski is Best Young Player for Germany 2006!

Yay! :)

View article here: http://fifaworldcup.yahoo.com/06/en/060706/1/8mta.html.

Soccer stuff

2006-07-06T20:17:00.000+08:00

I know I have a history paper to do, but I can't help posting this.

Zinedine Zidane rules!

I hope France will win in the finals. Zidane, who'll be retiring from football after this tournament, deserves to go out with a bang. His name deserves to be placed among the football legends the likes of Diego Maradona. For him, age is not a hindrance; instead it is the measure of experience that made him a true football maestro.

Go France! :)

P.S. Here's hoping Miroslav Klose will win the Golden Shoe... :D

Weird thoughts

2006-06-25T22:34:00.000+08:00

Courtship is a preparation for mounting.

This will certainly turn out to be one of the most memorable lines I've ever heard. Dr. Jugo, our illustrious prof in Comparative Vertebrate Anatomy, said it while discussing Charles Darwin's requirements for the survival of species (namely: reproduction, competition for limited resources, and survival of the fittest). You get the picture. It was a shocker, really, considering that Dr. Jugo is a self-confessed gentelman who you'd think wouldn't discuss, erm, sensitive topics in a frank and in-your-face manner, however scientific he made it sound. His message to guys: if a girl rejects your suit, take it personally because it means that you're not man enough. Riiiiiiiight.

Anyway, I pulled one of my over-analyzing stunts over this interesting statement, and guess what: I formulated a conspiracy theory based on it! Cool, huh? Observe that the themes of most of the products of art (e.g. music, theater, literature, etc) are based on or related to love and courtship. These products of art form an integral part of human culture and identity because they are expressions of the collective experiences of the society. Thus, does it mean that human culture and civilization is driven, or at least majorly influenced by, the desire to mount?

Scary thought. If Sigmund Freud, God bless his soul, had heard of this, he would've had a field day. What do you think? :)

Weird habits

2006-06-20T22:19:00.000+08:00

Tagged by Mia:

First, you state the rules of the game. And the rules are:
1. State the rules.
2. Make your list of "6 weird things/habits"
3. Pick 6 people you wanna tag and have the world see their names at the bottom of the list.
4. The 6 people you tagged are gonna have to write an entry about their list.

6 weird things/habits of Steph Jordan:
1. I have difficulty sleeping before 12 midnight.
2. I love tea. As in pure herbal tea, with no milk or sugar. (Unusual for kids)
3. Disney, Nickelodeon, MTV, Discovery Channel, and HBO are the only TV channels I watch.
4. I think nerds are cute.
5. Chuck Taylors are my only rubber shoes. I have different colors of them (magenta, blue, light blue and yellow, orange, black).
6. I have insane powers of concentration when reading a book I like. I can read a full-length English novel (even the ones with insanely small fonts) for about 5-6 hours straight. I once stayed up from 10pm-8am reading Anne Rice's Blackwood Farm for the first time.

Tagging: Everyone who happens to read this. Yes, that means YOU.

Movie life

2006-06-11T16:09:00.000+08:00

From Mia

SUPPOSEDLY if you've seen over 80 movies, you have no life. Mark the ones you've seen. There are 168 movie titles on this list. Put your score in header and repost.

( ) Rocky Horror Picture Show
(x) Grease
(x) Pirates of the Caribbean
( ) Boondock Saints
( ) Fight Club
(x) Starsky and Hutch
( ) Neverending Story
( ) Blazing Saddles
( ) Airplane
( ) My First Mister
( ) The Virgin Suicides

Total: 3/11

( ) The Princess Bride
( ) AnchorMan: The Legend of Ron Burgandy
( ) Napoleon Dynamite
( ) Labyrinth
( ) Saw
( ) Saw II
( ) White Noise
( ) White Oleander
( ) Anger Management
( ) 50 First Dates
(x) The Princess Diaries
( ) The Princess Diaries 2: Royal Engagement

Total: 1/12

( ) Scream
( ) Scream 2
( ) Scream 3
( ) Scary Movie
( ) Scary Movie 2
( ) Scary Movie 3
( ) Scary Movie 4
( ) American Pie
( ) American Pie 2
( ) American Wedding
( ) American Pie Band Camp

Total: 0/11

(x) Harry Potter
(x) Harry Potter 2
(x) Harry Potter 3
(x) Harry Potter 4
( ) Resident Evil I
( ) Resident Evil 2
( ) The Wedding Singer
( ) Little Black Book
(x) The Village
(x) Lilo & Stitch

Total: 6/10

(x) Finding Nemo
( ) Finding Neverland
(x) Signs
(x) The Grinch
( ) Texas Chainsaw Massacre
( ) White Chicks
( ) Butterfly Effect
(x) 13 Going on 30
(x) I, Robot
( ) Robots

Total: 5/10

( ) Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story
( ) Universal Soldier
(x) Lemony Snicket: A Series Of Unfortunate Events
( ) Along Came Polly
( ) Deep Impact
( ) KingPin
( ) Never Been Kissed
(x) Meet The Parents
(x) Meet the Fockers
( ) Eight Crazy Nights
( ) Joe Dirt
(x) KING KONG

Total: 4/12

(x) A Cinderella Story
(x) The Terminal
(x) The Lizzie McGuire Movie
( ) Passport to Paris
(x) Dumb & Dumber
( ) Dumber & Dumberer
( ) Final Destination
( ) Final Destination 2
( ) Final Destination 3
( ) Halloween
(x) The Ring
(x) The Ring 2
( ) Surviving X-MAS
( ) Flubber

Total: 6/14

( ) Harold & Kumar Go To White Castle
( ) Practical Magic
(x) Chicago
( ) Ghost Ship
( ) From Hell
( ) Hellboy
( ) Secret Window
(x) I Am Sam
( ) The Whole Nine Yards

Total: 2/9

(x) The Day After Tomorrow
( ) Child's Play
( ) Seed of Chucky
( ) Bride of Chucky
(x) Ten Things I Hate About You
( ) Just Married
(x) Gothika
(x) Nightmare on Elm Street
( ) Sixteen Candles
(x) Remember the Titans
(x) Coach Carter
( ) The Grudge
(x) the Mask
( ) Son Of The Mask

Total: 7/14

( ) Bad Boys 2
( ) Joy Ride
( ) Se7en
( ) Ocean's Eleven
(x) Ocean's Twelve
( ) Identity
( ) Lone Star
( ) Bedazzled
( ) Predator I
( ) Predator II
( ) The Fog
(x) Ice Age
(x) Ice Age 2: The Meltdown

Total: 3/13

( ) Independence Day
( ) Cujo
( ) A Bronx Tale
( ) Darkness Falls
(x) ET
( ) Children of the Corn
( ) My Boss' Daughter
(x) Maid in Manhattan
( ) Frailty
(x) War of the Worlds
( ) Rush Hour
( ) Rush Hour 2

Total: 3/12

( ) Best Bet
(x) How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days
( ) She's All That
( ) Calendar Girls
( ) Sideways
( ) Mars Attacks
( ) Event Horizon
(x) Ever After
( ) Forrest Gump
( ) Big Trouble in Little China
(x) The Terminator
(x) Terminator 2

Total: 4/12

( ) X-Men
( ) X2
(x) Spider-Man
(x) Spider-Man 2
( ) Sky High
( ) Jeepers Creepers
( ) Jeepers Creepers 2
(x) Catch Me If You Can
(x) The Others
(x) Freaky Friday
( ) Reign of Fire
( ) Cruel Intentions
( ) Cruel Intentions 2
( ) Cruel Intentions 3
(x) The Hot Chick
(x) Shrek
(x) Shrek 2

Total: 8/17

( ) Swimfan
( ) Miracle
( ) Old School
( ) The Notebook
( ) K-Pax
(x) Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring
(x) Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers
(x) Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King
(x) A Walk to Remember
( ) Boogeyman
(x) The 40-year-old-virgin

Total: 4/11

GRAND TOTAL: 57 movies

Wow, I actually have a life! But where are the Star Wars films, pray tell?

X-Men: The Last Stand and The Omen

2006-06-11T15:16:00.001+08:00

Watched these two movies with Jodie this week, and I thought I'd review them (ala-Sir Ron). Just my two cents, that's all. Warning: Spoilers ahead!

I didn't watch X-Men 1 and 2, so I won't be comparing them to X-Men 3. However, after reading reviews on the internet, I gather X-Men 3 is widely considered as mediocre compared to the previous two (it was even compared to the third film in the original Star Wars trilogy in this respect). Taking into consideration the film on its own merits, I'd say this is true. Sure, we get all the amazing effects, loud explosions and testosterone-charged fights required in a high-budget blockbuster action flick, but the characterization is lacking. There were just too many characters; although I guess this would illustrate the scope of the mutant issue and would be cool service to us comic- and cartoon-obsessed, you feel like they were just really pawns in the whole war thingy. Angel's backstory was shown in the first part of the film, but after that he disappears (despite him being featured prominently in the trailer). Other supporting heroes and villains looked as if they were just given 10 minutes to show off.

Now on to the major characters. Storm? Pffft. I didn't feel any leadership or power from her whatsoever. Cyclops? A broken man, but why was his death off-camera? Jean Grey definitely strutted her stuff, but she wasn't that intimidating as Phoenix. She just stared at the camera with her hair going poof (the veins and yellowish eyes were a nice touch though). I liked the scenes at her house (i.e. Professor X's death) and at the medlab, but during her time with Magneto she was just standing around looking pretty. Wolverine was great (of course). Cameron Bright really owns the role of the ethereal child. I'd have to say that Patrick Bateman and Sir Ian Mac-gay-en (hehe) did the best jobs with their characters; Magneto and Prof X looked like they were having the time of their lives being manipulative DOMs.

The fights were great. Mutants and humans kicking butt (oh wow). Iceman vs Pyro: who's hotter, fire boy or ice boy? I liked the chase scene between Kitty and Juggernaut; it proved that Juggy is a big lumbering eeeeediot (Don't you know who I am? I'm the Juggernaut, bitch!). It was really weird when Magneto moved the bridge to Alcatraz though; one moment it was the day, then the next it was night. And why'd he have to move the bridge anyway; shouldn't he just have asked Jean to levitate them there? And where was Angel during the fight, huh?

X-Men 3 is an okay movie, as expected from its big budget. However, it suffered from featuring too many characters and storylines (i.e. the mutant cure, the Dark Phoenix saga, the war, the love triangles...) in just 1 hr and 30 mins.

The Omen. I've been told the original movie was creepy as hell, but this one just ended up funny. The subject is overused; how many times have we watched/read something that warned that the end of the world is coming? The prophecies describing the "son of the devil" were too forced; the boy emerging from the "sea of politics"? A photographer predicting his own death based on a random picture he took of himself? Ridiculous. In the end, the psychological torture of Julia Stiles ended up more interesting than the whole omen storyline. A lot of questions were left hanging: Why did the hospital people kill the ambassador's real child? What was the reason behind the priest's paranoia and desire for repentance? Why did the nanny commit suicide? If the mark of the beast was on the child's scalp, shouldn't the parents have noticed it early on when the child was a bald infant? Who really were the nanny and the dog?!

The ending of the movie had implications, though. The son of the devil being the adopted son of the US President, making him a future power player in the world's leading economy? Just peachy; the "sea of politics" indeed! And how does that lead to the end of the world, exactly?

Thus, instead of giving me insomnia for many nights to come, The Omen earned more cynical scoffs from me than a true horror flick deserves. The apocalyptic mumbo-jumbo sounded implausible, a lot of plot elements were simply pointless, and the movie failed to give a larger scope of catastrophes than you might expect from a self-respecting devil. And oh yeah, was it just me, or did the kid look scary mainly because of his extremely dark eyebags?

Like father, like daughter

2006-06-09T22:09:00.000+08:00

It was my dad's birthday last Saturday. We didn't have a party; we didn't even have a special family dinner in some fancy restaurant. My dad is the epitome of the workaholic; he doesn't take vacations if he can help it. I guess he was working all day during his birthday (but maybe they did throw him a bash at the office...not sure though). So we didn't really get to spend time with him. In fact, the only time we spend "quality time" with dad is during Sundays.

That said, I kinda had difficulty thinking what to write in the birthday card we were supposed to give him. I mean, I don't know what exactly was going on in his life; I sure as hell don't understand business-speak (like IPOs, investments and all that crap). But then, I know a lot about his character, because he's a lot like me. We're extremely private, we value our "alone-time", we're not expressive of our feelings, and we generally do not meddle in other people's business. We both tend to act like know-it-alls, and we aspire for achievements because they bolster our self-esteem. We feel that other people don't really need to be updated on every new development in our lives; it's just important that people trust that we have responsibility for our actions. I guess I don't really mind the distance, because I understand him.

My mom pointed out to me that I'm becoming more and more like my dad as I grow up, as shown in the similarities in our behavior and personal preferences. I've started to read his magazines (Time, Fortune, and BusinessWeek), and I'm as hooked on them as he is (I'm starting to understand the business-speak). When we're working or watching TV in the living room after a stressful day, we tend to shoo away people in order to relax in a quiet, peaceful, solitary environment (poor mom, she always gets shooed away, but we tell her not to take it personally). We both like action/suspense movies and hate sappy romances. We're careful when it comes to money and meticulous about saving it.

Of course, we do have differences (since I'm my own person after all and I also have my mom's genes). I highly doubt that my dad will ever read gothic horror Anne Rice novels (if he did, he might forbid me to read them ever again...heehee). He detests cartoons because he thinks they're juvenile and backward. He doesn't love Star Wars as much as I do (I inherited the Star Wars, Anne Rice and comic book mania from my mother's side). Although, it kinda surprised me when he started to like Justice League after watching some episodes with me, even going so far as to implicitly declare that Superman was his favorite character (maybe he identifies himself with him...oh the ego of men).

So my dad is mostly passive and I mainly feel his influence through the behavioral qualities we share. But that doesn't mean he didn't spare me the fatherly pep-talk we all go through. As private as he is, he often gives me and my sis advice because he likes to feel that he has done his share of guidance. Because of the similarities in our outlook, I've rarely heard him say anything I didn't already know (my mom's the one who teaches me the more practical stuff), but of course it's nice to know he cares so much, especially about our future. His favorite quote is "history man, history," that you should rise above mediocrity in order to leave a legacy, thus giving meaning to your life (of course, we don't take this too seriously).

So when I had figured out all this, I wrote to him that although we don't spend a lot of quality time due to his responsibilities at work, and although we don't normally express our feelings due to our loner behavior, we're always assured of our trust and love for one another. For us, parties and chit-chat aren't that important; words are less important than the understanding and empathy we share.

In the mood for music

2006-05-21T04:46:00.000+08:00

This is a Modernist blog. I write out of unabashed self-centeredness, narcissism, and the need to analyze my own psychotic problems. I take no responsibility to write about socially/morally relevant issues; I write about my own personal life. Blame The Pepo Fever for this new take on blogging.

Thus, I now feel justified to write about whatever I want in this poor self-mutilated webpage. That's right; don't complain if the entries bore you, piss you off, or make you puke. This is MY blog. Autonomy of art, beybeh!

Since it's almost 5 in the morning and I am (again) suffering from a bout of insomnia, I wanna do an interesting tag I found in Tammy-chan's blog.

Anyway, HERE IT IS:

1. Put your music player on shuffle.
2. Press forward for each question.
3. Use the song title as the answer to the question
even if it doesn't make sense.
NO CHEATING!
4. Tag 10 people to play this game too.

How are you feeling today?- Ulan by Cueshe. Of all the songs to show up first, it just HAD to be this one. Argh. Needless to say, I'm feeling pretty optimistic today, thank you very much.

Will you get far in life?- Come as You Are by Nirvana. So I'm supposed to be myself to get far in life...??????

How do your friends see you?- Beer by Itchyworms. Okayyyyy...I'm really not taking this test seriously anymore.

Will you get married?- The World is A Vampire by Smashing Pumpkins. Alrighty then, I guess that goes without saying that I'll join the grisly ranks of the Undead, and thus lose my ability to, uh, procreate. :D

What is your best friend's theme song?- Alert the Armory by Urbandub. Yikes, I don't even know anyone to whom I can relate that with.

What is the story of your life?- Comfortably Numb by Smashing Pumpkins. Finally, a song that got it right!

What is high school like?- Wild Horses by The Rolling Stones. ALLLRRIIIGGGHHHTT! I knew High School in St. Paul was a whole lot of fun, but this is the first time I'd describe my admittedly crazy batchmates as animals.

How can you get ahead in life?- Fruitcake by Eraserheads. My brain is melting now. Can a conspiracy theorist out there help me find an intersection between these definitely parallel functions?!

What is the best thing about your friends?- Echo by Incubus. A vague title, but I can say my close friends echo some of my neurotic perceptions in life.

What is today going to be like?- Just That Good by The Calling. Okay; so not bad, but not excellent either. Just good old mediocre good. Geeeeee, thanks.

What is in store for this weekend?- Don't Stop Me Now by Queen. Hehe, tell that to my parents!

What song describes you?- Battle Theme by John Williams (part of the Star Wars Soundtrack; instrumental background music). DOESN'T MY iTUNES KNOW ME?! I AM A PACIFIST, ALRIGHT!

To describe your grandparents?- Our Lives by The Calling. Ohhhh yeah, they're definitely pushing into our lives, more than necessary.

How is your life going?- Soul by Matchbox Twenty. And no, I am NOT concerned for my soul in the slightest. I am thoroughly, unabashedly materialistic.

What song will they play at your funeral?- Angie by The Rolling Stones. Is this REALLY my iTunes player?! I'd be deeply offended if somebody played a song on my funeral that wasn't about me. Dammit; Angie should get her own funeral!.

How does the world see you?- Mr. Self Destruct by Nine Inch Nails. For the last tiiiiiime, I am NOT morbid NOR suicidal!!!!

Will you have a happy life?- The Game of Love by Carlos Santana. Hrmmmm....

What do your friends really think of you?- Biglaan by 6cyclemind. So I'm supposed to be spontaneous......? I highly doubt that.

Do people secretly lust after you?- Exodus by Evanescence. So I guess it's far from that; they'd actually go so far as to part the friggin' Red Sea just to get away from me! Niiiiiice.

How can I make myself happy?- Thirty-Three by Smashing Pumpkins. Maybe 33 is my lucky number??? (clutching at straws here)

What should you do with your life?- Enter by Within Temptation. Wow, that's profound.

Will you ever have children?- Wet Sand by Red Hot Chili Peppers. I won't even try to understand what this means.

Based on the results gathered from this simple activity, I can only conclude that:
1) My iTunes have been mysteriously taken over by alien life forms;
2) My iTunes wishes me to have a morbid life filled with suicidal fantasies, and;
3) This meme is completely pointless and time-wasting.

Bite me for my lack of creativity and coherence. AUTONOMY OF ART. :D

Summer has never passed by this fast

2006-05-14T18:02:00.000+08:00

Okay Mia, an update for you. Matagal ka na yatang naghihintay. :D

Gone are the days when summer vacation meant blissfully whiling away hours in front of a computer/tv in an airconditioned room, eating junk food loaded with cancer-inducing preservatives all day, and basically transforming into a couch potato with atrophied muscles and neurons. The beautiful weeks wherein all the (academic) worries would be lifted clean off your shoulders, and all you'd have to worry about is how to prevent boredom by doing things you actually like to do.

Oh those carefree days...!

(nostalgia trip)

Taking summer classes in Ateneo is another reminder of our transition from the worry-free world of kids and into the frightening, responsibility-ridden world of adulthood where "vacations" are few and far in between. Summer classes eating into your precious and long-awaited fun time, loading your figurative shoulders with workload intended to be spread out throughout a full-length sem and thus made more intense. What was originally a time for rest and relaxation is now a hell of heat, calculus, and extremely loooooong filipino reading materials (yes, my three worst enemies).

Oh joy!

But I guess the advantage of this setup is the continuous workout it provides your brain. Because we're forced to study everyday due to the teacher's crammed-in lesson plans, my brain will never have the chance to blissfully erase from my consciousness everything related to dreary academics. The mental faculties won't atrophy and rot due to overexposure to tv (although I still watch Simpsons and Justice League though!). Also, I won't spend as much as I used to, since I wouldn't have time to go shopping.

Most important, however, is the fact that summer classes distract me from boredom. Because we always have something to do, time passes by twice as fact. In fact, sometimes I forget that it's summer and I think that I'm in the middle of a sem. The connotation of "summer" as work- and problem-free is simply gone from my head. Now, summer is nothing more than a season.

It seems only a short time ago that we went in our customary family vacation in Ilocos. There, we lived out the real spirit of summer vacation just like you see it on tv: white powdery beaches, blue glittering seas, cold drinks, parties... But that time was short-lived. For me, "summer" ended on the first day of class.

That's why I couldn't help laughing as I saw the "back-to-school" ads that are usually posted around Megamall at this time. I thought, "lucky bastar...i mean, kids, I already AM in school!".

Electric guitar lessons

2006-04-01T21:30:00.000+08:00

Haha, my parents finally let me take electric guitar lessons!

Good thing I already know how to pluck strings, classical-style. It'll be much, much easier to pluck on an electric guitar because the strings are softer and nearer the fretboard, and because the frets are smaller. My parents have already agreed to buy me an electric guitar, so long as I make the noise levels really soft when practicing at home.

Yehey, rock-stardom, here I come! Wahoooooooooooooooo

Obsession

2006-03-28T22:07:00.000+08:00

I WANT AN iMAC

I went to the Apple Store in SM Megamall a while ago with my sister, and can I just say that I was hopelessly bedazzled? Freakishly obsessed? Dangerously infatuated?

I WANT AN iMAC

It's incredible how Apple crammed all the components of a CPU (including the CD drive) into a gorgeous white monitor that was barely one inch thick.

I love Apple.

ONE OBVIOUS DOWNSIDE? The iMac costs Php100,000+.

I hate Apple for making their products so expensive (although it is justified, believe me). I hate Apple for making me this obsessed.

I also got to see and try out the PowerBook at the store, and I almost salivated on it. Literally. Shit, it was so freakin'...freakin'...gorgeous. Microsoft's Windows XP user interface looks hopelessly second-rate and cartoonish next to Apple's Tiger OS X. Arrgh.

The PowerBook also costs more than a hundred thousand bucks.

Why is it that we always want something we can't have?

2006-03-28T19:24:00.000+08:00

Anybody know of a Korean needing an English tutor? Or anybody needing one who's willing to pay, for that matter.

I want to have a summer job. I want to teach English to anyone who's willing to pay me big bucks. I can do it. I mean, my vocabulary is pretty wide, I read lots of books, my grammar is okay, my English grades are fine, I can help with writing papers...and I've still got leftover English reviewers from the long ago time when I took college entrance test review classes.

I can't teach just anyone, though. The people whom I'd like to teach would preferably be:
1. Somewhere in my age group (high school/college students). I DO NOT have the patience to teach kids.
2. People who live in/around/in proximity to Mandaluyong/Pasig/Katipunan. Anywhere beyond that is just too far for me.
3. Willing to pay me reasonably.
4. Nice enough not to overwork me.

I can tutor for 1 hour a day, two-three days a week for the whole summer(actually this depends on the schedule of my summer classes). I'll post them as soon as I register in school.

TAKE NOTE: I am offering to tutor people in English, NOT to do their papers or homework (I can help and edit, but that's about it). I wanna be paid to teach an individual (with the above qualifications) basic/intermediate English that he/she can use in order to better accomplish requirements. I wanna develop the skill; I don't want to be a secretary.

I can do it. Really. I can expand my patience level if you'll pay me enough. :)

So, if anyone needs an English tutor...just call/YM/text/email me!

I am abnormal...almost, but not quite

2006-03-27T00:09:00.000+08:00

You Are 52% Abnormal

You are at medium risk for being a psychopath. It is somewhat likely that you have no soul.

You are at medium risk for having a borderline personality. It is somewhat likely that you are a chaotic mess.

You are at medium risk for having a narcissistic personality. It is somewhat likely that you are in love with your own reflection.

You are at high risk for having a social phobia. It is very likely that you feel most comfortable in your mom's basement.

You are at medium risk for obsessive compulsive disorder. It is somewhat likely that you are addicted to hand sanitizer.

How Abnormal Are You?

I have a Multiply

2006-03-26T03:03:00.000+08:00

Okay. So my bandwith ran out because I posted too many pictures. To solve my problem, I've posted all my pictures in my new Multiply site.

http://stephiedoo.multiply.com

Midsummer Night's Dream production pictures and L2 block party pictures are posted there too.

Just add me! :D

Microsoft bashing

2006-03-26T00:47:00.000+08:00

What if Microsoft had redesigned the iPod box?

This video, although a parody, does say some truth about Microsoft's design ethos. This is the box containing the Microsoft XP Operating System sold in Japan:

Look similar to the box in the video? They're both designed as if the people buying them are completely dumb, since every spec is outlined on the outside. Although Microsoft software is aimed at the mass market, there's no need to be patronizing; heck, everyone knows that Windows upgrades are basically just face-lifts of previous ones anyway. Setting the package up in neon lights far from encourages people to buy the product; in fact, it makes the thing look like an eyesore and gives the idea that the product itself was made in the same careless slap-dash way.

Microsoft could really learn a lot from Apple. Less really is more; products that are streamlined and designed in a subtle way really speak volumes over those littered with cartoonish graphics, large company logos, and exclamation points outlining why you should buy them. A more soothing and simple design would show that the product prioritizes usability and customer satisfaction, instead of boasting about new features (half of which we don't understand and use anyway).

Here's a nice article that expresses it really well: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/g/a/2003/10/01/notes100103.DTL.

I actually stumbled on the video while searching the Web about Windows Vista, the newest upcoming version of the Windows OS that promises to "revolutionize" the PC experience. I learned a lot from trolling tech sites that tested and reviewed the beta version; apparently, aside from being another major face-lift from XP (Vista will look like Mac OS X, enabling transparency, 3D graphics, and those cool glassy icons that light up during mouseover), Vista will feature major security overhauls, upgrades of the Media Center, better network connections, a sidebar for widgets, faster and more integrated search, improved Start menu (yes, it's still there!) and navigation system. And yes, Internet Explorer 7 will finally feature tabbed browsing.

Windows Vista makes for great eye candy.

However, upgrading to a new Windows OS has a price. A very expensive price. Using Vista won't be cheap; in order to enable those special glassy and transparency effects, your computer will need to have a super-fast and advanced graphics card. Your computer will need to have lots of memory too. In fact, the only way you could use a Vista and not have your head fume is by buying a new computer with the OS preinstalled. New Computer + New OS = Big Money. Is it worth it?

Rarwg. I wish I can switch to Apple. I'm sick and tired of Microsoft's upgrades, patches, and monopoly.

I hate Bill Gates.

Block bonding

2006-03-24T23:44:00.000+08:00

Last Wednesday, L2 had a block inuman party at Erwin's condo (thank you Erwin!). It was a sort of baptism for me since it was my first time to drink. I drank 4 shots, 2 of gin and 2 of vodka. Alcohol doesn't taste nice at all; in fact it's icky and burns your throat, but the tipsy feeling you get is fun.

L2, mahal kita! (Sir Ron was there too, and he got the honor of drinking the first shot.)

Though I was a little freaked out by all the sex talk happening during the truth-or-shot game, it was hilarious and fun anyway. The block got to bond as a whole, not just among peers or cliques. And though people were puking spaghetti all over the place (lesson learned: never eat spaghetti before drinking!), I could just feel the love and carefree-ness. I can't really describe it here in mere words; but L2, you know what I'm talking about! :)

My first shot ever: Gilbey's vodka. Nic was handing me the chaser. Vodka tasted like Green Cross alcohol, blech.

Being one of the less tipsy people in the party (after all, as BJ said, I didn't really drink), I ended up taking care of the ones who were drunk. Mia, Tans, it's OKAY. :) How can I not feel concerned for my friends? I love you guys. :)

R37, my lit block, bonded too because of our play. We practiced like hell in extremely hot venues for three weeks. We put a lot of effort and creativity in it and it really paid off because we got (according to Maam Prixie) "a very high A!" Thanks to our director BJ; because of all the crazy things he made us do - like the ho-ha-hes, the push-ups, the dances, the perky uh-huhs - the play became a blast. I was really amazed at how the block gave its all-out effort when we finally presented the play. During english and lit classes we usually are very quiet, sleepy, and just downright lethargic, but when the play showed all our inner wackiness came to the surface. Thanks for a great year guys! I'll miss you. Just call me (wahahaha)!

Anyway, I'm happy to end this year with a bang! Happy Three-week Summer Vacation!

Second Year, here I come!

I'm wired

2006-03-20T02:40:00.000+08:00

01. 7 things that piss you off (in no particular order)

1. My sister's messy habits
2. Insensitive people
3. Condescenscion
4. Novelty songs
5. Abusing EDSA/People Power
6. "Teeny-bopper music": Boy bands and Britney Spears
7. Windows and everything Microsoft (especially Bill Gates)

02. 7 things that make you happy

1. Neatness (yes, I am very OC)
2. Empathy
3. Justice League
4. Rock music (like Incubus)
5. Fantasy/futuristic movies (like Star Wars)
6. Shopping and having lots of money to do it
7. iPod and everything Apple (somebody buy me a Mac, please...)

03. 7 things that you wish you could get paid to do for a living

1. Editing movies (HAHAHA!)
2. Making websites
3. Sleeping
4. Procrastinating
5. Receiving spam texts/email
6. Memorizing bio terms (1 peso for every term = A very very rich Stephie)
7. Controlling my temper and exasperation

04. People to tag

1. Tammy-chan
2. Tantan
3. Maiqui
4. Carlo
5. Jenny
6. Jodie (update ka naaaaa!)
7. Exo

Sleep is a scarce commodity

2006-03-19T04:01:00.000+08:00

I didn't sleep last night because I was editing our documentary for Zoology (about exotic food. Dumb, dumb, DUMB of me to think that I can cram for a roughly 30-minute movie in one night.

But then again, I didn't have time to do it because of HELL WEEK! What with a Zoology lec report, a Chem Long Test, a Zoology Lab comprehensive exam, a PE 101 long test, an English memoir and a Fil research paper, I couldn't exactly cram in video editing. Shucks, my eyelids are twitching just thinking about this inhuman workload. Needless to say, I was internally worried about the documentary, among other things, all week.

But the punch line came today. As I said, I didn't sleep at all because I edited the film. I even came late to class AND completed it while other groups were presenting. I thought we were so lucky that we were the last group to present because it'd buy us time to finish the film.

And we did finish it. But then, as we were reviewing the film for the last time, Sir Ron announced that the last group (we) wouldn't be presenting at all due to lack of time.

Rarg. Edi sana natulog nalang pala ako.

Mia cried. We were all kinda devastated, since we put a lot of effort into making the film enjoyable for the viewing public (i.e. Blocks L1 and L2). But Sir did compromise with us, though; he's gonna let us present the film during the block party on Wednesday night. So its okay, it wasn't all for nothing. But still...

Disappointment is a reality no one can escape from. It's just that if I had known that we were presenting on a later date, last night would not have been so nerve-wracking. I wouldn't have verbally slaughtered my sister, I wouldn't have cried, my stomach wouldn't have turned over, and I would have freakin slept.

Well at least I did do one thing kinda positive. I drank Lipovitan for the first time. It tasted like Tempra (yeccchh).

Sleep is a scarce commodity these days. The less you have, the more valuable it becomes. I bet it'll become more and more valuable to me as my studies intensify. 2-hour hospital shifts, anyone? Basically, it'll be like hell week, and worse, for the rest of my frickin life.

Maybe I should just hire myself a superproxy?

The Ninth Circle of Hell

2006-03-16T03:53:00.000+08:00

It's 4am. In 2 hours and 30 minutes, I'll have to wake up for the COMPREHENSIVE zoology lab exam.

I accidentally slept while studying (again!) so my brain is a void.

I repeat, the exam is COMPREHENSIVE.

God help me.

________________________________________________

Mia goes: Why don't you go to hell to meet my good friend Satan? (a stat message)

I reply: Oh but I've already met him, Mia. To hell with hell week!

Procrastination is my curse

2006-03-12T16:34:00.000+08:00

A) Bold the names of guys you'd definitely shag.
B) Possibly shag after a little persuasion, put in italics.
C) Leave the ones you don't know of or wouldn't want to shag alone.
D) ~~Strike the ones you wouldn't touch with a ten foot pole.~~
E) ADD ONE OF YOUR OWN AT THE END

Tagged by Mia.
1. Stephen Dorff
2. ~~Wesley Snipes~~
3. ~~Denzel Washington~~
4. ~~Samuel L. Jackson~~
5. Hayden Christensen
6. Ian Somerhalder
7. James Van Der Beek
8. ~~Ashton Kutcher~~
9. Sean William Scott
10. ~~The Rock~~
11. ~~Brendan Fraser~~
12. Oded Fehr
13. John Hannah
14. Hugh Grant
15. Colin Firth
16. Liam Neeson
17. Daniel Day-Lewis
18. Leonardo Di Caprio
19. Billy Zane
20. Harry Connick Jr
21. ~~Sean Astin~~
22. Dominic Monaghan
23. ~~Karl Urban~~
24. ~~Vin Diesel~~
25. Paul Walker
26. Joshua Jackson
27. James Marsden
28. Shawn Ashmore
29. Hugh Jackman
30. Will Kemp
31. David Wenham
32. Viggo Mortensen
33. Elijah Wood
34. Tobey Maguire
35. James Franco
36. ~~Alfred Molina~~
37. Harrison Ford
38. ~~Sean Connery~~
39. Shane West
40. Stuart Townsend
41. Richard Roxburgh
42. Ewan McGregor
43. ~~Jonathan Rhys Meyers~~
44. Christian Bale
45. Jared Leto
46. ~~Colin Farell~~
47. Ben Affleck
48. Josh Hartnett
49. Bruce Willis
50. ~~Billy Bob Thornton~~
51. ~~Dennis Quaid~~
52. Jake Gyllenhaal
53. Patrick Swayze
54. Keanu Reeves
55. Gary Oldman
56. Tim Roth
57. Steve Buscemi
58. Michael Madsen
59. Rick Yune
60. Pierce Brosnan
61. Robert Carlyle
62. Jonny Lee Miller
63. Jude Law
64. Matt Damon
65. ~~Clive Owen~~
66. Ryan Phillippe
67. Benicio Del Toro
68. Johnny Depp
69. Orlando Bloom
70. ~~Sean Bean~~
71. Eric Bana
72. Brad Pitt
73. ~~George Clooney~~
74. Mark Wahlberg
75. Jason Statham
76. Edward Norton
77. ~~Ben Stiller~~
78. ~~Owen Wilson~~
79. Vince Vaughn
80. Joaquin Phoenix
81. ~~Russell Crowe~~
82. Billy Boyd
83. Paul Bettany
84. Heath Ledger
85. ~~Mel Gibson~~
86. Jason Isaacs
87. ~~Alan Rickman~~
88. Kevin Costner
89. Christian Slater
90. Antonio Banderas
91. Tom Cruise
92. Ving Rhames
93. John Cusack
94. John Malkovich
95. Charlie Sheen
96. Kiefer Sutherland
97. Emilio Estevez
98. Rob Lowe
99. Matt Dillon
100. Kevin Bacon
101. Adam Brody
102. Andy Serkis - That should be interesting, my preciousssss.
103. Alan Cumming
104. Josh Groban
105. Sean Biggerstaff
106. Zach Braff
107. Harry Sinclair
108. Gerard Butler
109. Marton Csokas
110. Jeremy Sumpter
111. Sean Patrick Flanery
112. Cillian Murphy
113. Hugh Dancy
114. Ioan Gruffudd
115. Mads Mikkelsen
116. Enrique Murciano
117. Jamie Bamber
118. Craig Parker
119. Dean Cain
120. James Marsters
121. David Boreanaz
122. James Spader
123. Kevin Spacey
124. ~~Al Pacino~~
125. Jim Caviezel
126. Josh Holloway
127. ~~Will Smith~~
128. Matthew McConaughey
129. Patrick Wilson
130. Milo Ventimiglia
131. Jason Dohring
132. BRANDON BOYD

And I told myself I wouldn't post anything until Hell March is over. I am such a hypocrite.

Temporary abstinence

2006-03-03T22:46:00.000+08:00

I'm going on leave from writing in this blog starting today until the end of March. Nothing, not even the most dire national crisis and the State of Emergency will impel me to post here (though I really really want to!).

I'm gonna be buried in tons of requirements. My life is not my own anymore, what with a research paper, a documentary, lots of group reports and long tests, a lit play...it's enough to make you wanna be Sleeping Beauty at least for the month of March.

In the meantime, I'll be watching my eyebags get deeper and deeper by the day. Seriously, my eyebags will soon be getting bigger than my eyes themselves.

Godspeed, stephie!

Due to a creative drought...

2006-02-23T23:08:00.000+08:00

...I am posting a survey once again.

Thanks mia!

1) Bold what is true about you.
2) Italicize what you wish was true about you.
3) Add one true thing about you to the end of the list.

* I miss somebody right now.
* I don't watch much TV these days. --except for Justice League
* I own lots of books.
* I wear glasses or contact lenses.
* I love to play video games.
* I've tried marijuana.
* I've watched porn movies.
* I have been the psycho-ex in a past relationship.
* I believe honesty is usually always the best policy.
* I curse sometimes. As opposed to constantly.
* I have changed a lot mentally over the last year.
* I carry my knife/razor everywhere with me.
* I have broken someone's bones. --frog bones too, mia!
* I have a secret that I am ashamed to reveal.
* I hate the rain.
* I'm paranoid at times.
* I would get plastic surgery if it were 100% safe, free of cost, and scar-free.
* I need/want money right now.
* I love sushi.
* I talk really, really fast.
* I have fresh breath in the morning.
* I have long hair.
* I have lost money in Las Vegas.
* I have at least one sibling.
* I was born in a country outside of the U.S.
* I have worn fake hair/fingernails/eyelashes in the past.
* I couldn't survive without Caller I.D.
* I like the way that I look.
* I have lied to a good friend in the last 6 months.
* I am usually pessimistic.
* I have a lot of mood swings.
* I think prostitution should be legalized.
* I slept with a roommate.
* I have a hidden talent.
* I'm always hyper no matter how much sugar I have.
* I have a lot of friends.
* I have pecked someone of the same sex.
* I enjoy talking on the phone.
* I practically live in sweatpants or PJ pants.
* I love to shop and/or window shop. --for shoes!
* I'm obsessed with my Xanga or Livejournal. --Blogspot
* I don't hate anyone. I dislike them.
* I'm a pretty good dancer.
* I'm completely embarrassed to be seen with my mother.
* I have a cell phone.
* I have passed out drunk in the past 6 months.
* I've rejected someone before.
* I currently like/love someone.
* I have no idea what I want to do for the rest of my life.
* I want to have children in the future.
* I have changed a diaper before.
* I've called the cops on a friend before.
* I'm not allergic to anything.
* I have a lot to learn.
* I am shy around the opposite sex.
* I'm online 24/7, even as an away message.
* I have at least 5 away messages saved.
* I have tried alcohol or drugs before.
* I have made a move on a friend's significant other or crush in the past.
* I own the "South Park" movie.
* I have avoided assignments at work/school to be on Xanga or Livejournal.
* I enjoy some country music.
* I would die for my best friend.
* I'm obsessive, and often a perfectionist.
* I have used my sexuality to advance my career.
* Halloween is awesome because you get free candy.
* I have dated a close friend's ex.
* I am happy at this moment.
* I'm obsessed with guys.
* Democrat.
* Conservative Republican.
* I am punk rockish. --I can't stand most pop music.
* I go for older guys/girls, not younger. --I don't have much of a choice! Haha
* I study for tests most of the time.
* I tie my shoelaces differently from anyone I've ever met.
* I can work on a car.
* I love my job.
* I am comfortable with who I am right now.
* I have more than just my ears pierced.
* I walk barefoot wherever I can.
* I have jumped off a bridge.
* I love sea turtles.
* I spend ridiculous amounts of money on makeup.
* I plan on achieving a major goal/dream.
* I am proficient on a musical instrument. --I'm out of practice for the guitar
* I hate office jobs.
* I went to college out of state.
* I am adopted.
* I am a pyro.
* I have thrown up from crying too much.
* I have been intentionally hurt by people that I loved.
* I fall for the worst people and have been hurt every time.
* I adore bright colors. --Neon green, Neon blue, Neon pink!
* I usually like covers better than originals.
* I hate chain theme restaurants like Applebees and TGIFridays.
* I can pick up things with my toes.
* I can't whistle.
* I have ridden/owned a horse.
* I still have every journal I've ever written in.
* I talk in my sleep.
* I've often thought that I was born in the wrong century.
* I try to forget things by drowning them out with loads of distractions.
* I wear a toe ring.
* I have a tattoo.
* I can't stand at LEAST one person that I work with.
* I am a caffeine junkie.
* I am completely tree-huggy spiritual, and I'm not ashamed at all.
* If I knew I would get away with it, I would commit at least one murder.
* I cosplayed or know what cosplaying is.
* I have been to over 15 conventions.
* I will collect anything, and the more nonsensical, the better.
* I enjoy a nice glass of wine with dinner.
* I'm an artist.
* I am ambidextrous. --That way I can write Zoo notes faster.
* I sleep with so many stuffed animals, I can hardly fit on my bed.
* If it weren't for having to see other people naked, I'd live in a nudist colony.
* I have terrible teeth.
* I hate my toes.
* I did this Meme even though I wasn't tagged by the person who took it before me.
* I have more friends on the internet than in real life.
* I have lived in either three different states or countries.
* I am extremely flexible.
* I love hugs more than kisses.
* I want to own my own business.
* I smoked.
* I spend way too much time on the computer than on anything else.
* Nobody has ever said I'm normal.
* Sad movies, games, fics and the like can cause a trickle of tears every now and then.
* I am proficient in the use of many types firearms and combat weapons.
* I like the way women look in stylized men's suits.
* I don't like it when people are unpleased or seem unpleased with me.
* I have been described as a dreamer or likely to have my head up in the clouds.
* I have played strip poker with someone else before.
* I have had emotional problems for which I have sought professional help.
* I believe in ghosts and the paranormal.
* I can't stand being alone.
* I have at least one obsession at any given time.
* I weigh myself, pee/poo, and then weigh myself again.
* I consistently spend way too much money on obsessions-of-the-moment.
* I'm a judgmental asshole.
* I'm a HUGE drama-queen.
* I have traveled on more than one continent.
* I sometimes wish my father would just disappear.
* I need people to tell me I'm good at something in order to feel that I am.
* I am a Libertarian.
* I can speak more than one language.
* I would rather read than watch TV. --except for Justice League!
* I like reading fact more than fiction.
* I have pulled an all-nighter on an assignment I was given a month to do.
* I have no piercings.
* I have spent the night in a train station or other public place.
* I have been so upset over my physical gender that I cried.
* I once spent Christmas completely alone because there was a miscommunication on wh parent was supposed to have me that night.
* I've been married and am now divorced.
* There have been times when I have wondered "Why was I born?" and may/may not have cried over it.
* I like most animals better than most people.
* I own a collection of retro games consoles.
* The thought of physical exercise makes me shiver.
* I have hit someone with a dead fish.
* I have written/read erotic stories. --Anne Rice
* I am compulsively honest.
* I was born with a congenital birth defect that has never been repaired.
* I have danced topless in front of dozens of complete strangers. And not been ashamed.
* I have gone from wishing I was a boy to revelling in being a girl to feeling like a boy again in the span of five minutes, and not cared a whit for my actual sex.
* I am unashamedly bisexual, and have different motivations for my desires for different genders.
* I sometimes won't sleep a whole night or eat a whole day because I forget to.
* I find it impossible to get to sleep without some kind of music on.
* I dislike milk.
* I obsessively wash my hands.
* I always carry that something significant around with me.
* Sometimes I'd rather wear a wig in day-to-day life than use my own hair.
* I've pushed myself to become more self-aware and thereby more aware of others.
* Even though I live on my own I still cry sometimes because I miss my mother.
* I hand typed all the HTML tags in this document.
* I've liked something which a majority of people claimed was either bad or weird.
* I have been clinically dead for a brief period of time.
* Instead of feeling sympathy/empathy with people and their problems, I simply become annoyed.
* I am a virgin.
* I participate/have participated in auto drag races and won.
* I do not 'get' most comedy acts.
* I don't think strippers are money-greedy or slutty for dancing.
* I don't like to chew gum. --they get stuck in my braces
* I am intrigued with history/historical things and can't wait for someone to build a time machine so I can be the first to use it.
* I can never remember for the life of me where I parked the car.
* Had the TEEN ANGST thing going for at least 2-3 years.
* Wishes people would be more empathic and honest with each other.
* I play Dungeons and Dragons weekly.
* I love to sing.
* I want to live in my mother's basement when I grow up.
* I have a custom-built computer. --I want one. :(
* I want to have a certain someone's babies, even though there's a 0% possiblity of ever achieving it. --Brandon Boyd's, maybe? HAHAHA
* I occasionally cling to someone's boobehs... online.
* I have fallen out of a tree.
* I am possessive of my friends.
* I made a gay couple in the SIMS, and they sleep together too.
* I am going through a potentially life-changing dilemma as of this writing.
* Nerd.
* People have complained of the smallness of my handwriting.
* I know all the lyrics of 80% of all NSYNC's songs.
* I get to flunk almost 85% of my grades for one quarter.
* I can successfully twirl a pen.

FACT: I wish I have a great and expensive electric guitar.

Personality

2006-02-20T01:55:00.000+08:00

The Enneagram is an ancient system used by spiritual teachers and mystics used to classify personality times. Nine personality types are arranged in three triads, with each triad occupying one row (thus making a 3 x 3 table). Each triad (feeling, doing, relating) consists of three personality types that have in common the assets and liabilities of that triad. One of the types overdevelops or overexpresses the characteristic faculty of the triad, another type underdevelops or underexpresses the faculty, and the third is out of touch with the faculty.

This was taken from my English handout. I couldn't make it into a table because the space is too small.

A. Feeling Triad
1. Personality Type Two: The Helper
The Caring, Mothering Type: Concerned, helpful, possessive, and manipulative.
2. Personality Type Three: The Motivator
The Success-Oriented, Pragmatic Type: Self-assured, Ambitious, Narcissistic, and Hostile
3. Personality Type Four: The Artist
The Melancholy, Withdrawn Type: Creative, Individualistic, Self-absorbed, and Depressive

B. Doing Triad
1. Personality Type Five: The Thinker
The Intellectual, Analytic Type: Perceptive, Original, Eccentric, and Phobic
2. Personality Type Six: The Loyalist
The Committed, Traditionalist Type: Likeable, Responsible, Dependent and Masochistic
3. Personality Type Seven: The Generalist
The Hyperactive, Uninhibited Type: Enthusiastic, Accomplished, Excessive and Manic

C. Relating Triad
1. Personality Type Eight: The Leader
The Powerful, Dominating Type: Self-Confident, Decisive, Dictatorial, and Destructive
2. Personality Type Nine: The Peacemaker
The Easygoing, Phlegmatic Type: Accepting, Reassuring, Passive and Repressed
3. Personality Type One: The Reformer
The Rational, Idealistic Type: Principled, Orderly, Perfectionistic, and Intolerant

Do some of these ring bells? Some sound so like me...

Personality Type Four: The Artist: The Melancholy, Withdrawn Type: Creative, Individualistic, Self-absorbed and Depressive. Personality type four is the type in the Feeling Triad that underexpresses its feelings. Because their feelings are often shameful, chaotic and "dangerous", average to unhealthy Fours have learned to keep their feelings to themselves, partly so that they can sort them out, and partly to spare themselves from humiliation or punishment if they were to reveal what they actually feel.

Personality Type Five: The Thinker: The Intellectual, Analytic Type: Perceptive, Original, Eccentric and Phobic. Personality type five is the type in the Doing Triad that has underdevelop its ability to take practical action. Fives tend to substitute thinking for doing, feeling that they cannot risk acting until they have first carefully thought about what they might do, learned as much as possible about the task at hand, and foreseen every possible outcome if they act one way or another.

Ohh shucks. I keep my feelings inside, and I think about them too. It's a surprise I haven't exploded yet.

Natamaan lang ako. :)

Pinoy exotic food fear factor

2006-02-18T22:15:00.000+08:00

Let me just say that I did not expect baboy damo and ostrich salpicao to be sooo damn delicious. Tapang usa was okay; the frog legs were too except that the meat was hard to get off the small frog bones. Believe me, after the frog dissection I automatically saw the frog legs anatomically; as I was eating them I automatically thought about the terms femur, triceps femoris, tibio-fibula, tibialis anticus, and gastrocnemius. Well done, Zoology lab.

Surprisingly, kuhol sa gata beat them all. :) I honestly thought that snails would taste slimy and disgusting, but they actually tasted like oysters and clams. Cool. Let's add Phylum Mollusca Class Gastropoda Order Pulmonata to my list of favorite food then! Hahaha!

I didn't get to eat isaw though. Maybe next time!

I love my groupmates. They're creative and lots of fun (yes, that means you! :D). Doing projects is less of a chore with them, since the boys make it into one big laughtrip. Though it is slightly freaky to see the boys mock-cuddling, we the girls (the minority) actually feel comfortable with them.

Exo, Erwin, JA, Mia, Ralph - you guys are so great, baby talk and all! Ooooh you touched my tra-la-la!!.

I think we did a freaky job filming the fear factor segment. The food wasn't at all disgusting, as we had to pretend it would be; in fact, as I said it was actually quite delicious despite its exotic-ness (is there such a word?). Also, we acted in lots of verbal abuse to pretend to insult and discourage our opponents in the challenges, so we had one hell of a fun time filming that part!

I just hope that the finished film will have as much content as comedy. :)

It really was a shame that Krocodile Grill didn't allow us to film inside their restaurant. That was a serious setback, since we were hoping to interview the manager and film the food as it was being cooked. Oh well, we should have expected that since Krocodile Grill is a high-end commercial establishment. I really really hope that we'd be allowed to film in the exotic food restaurant in Kapitolyo, or else we'd have to search for restaurants outside Metro Manila (which would be a huge hassle!). I'm keeping my fingers crossed...

And by the way Mia, I only acted like a teenybopper. It wasn't me. The day I really become a teenybopper is the day I have Multiple Personality Disorder. :P

"Oooooh you touched my tra-la-la! Mmmm, making ding-dong!".

Sheer hilarity!

Hell week

2006-02-17T04:06:00.000+08:00

I think I might drop dead here and now from lack of sleep. It's so amazing that I can even type in this condition...

Argh. My brain hurts.

Overkill. Information overload. Triple X. Meltdown. System crash. Mental paralysis.

Somebody please write me an eulogy.

A survey taken for sheer fun

2006-02-11T00:29:00.000+08:00

ATENEO SURVEY
The Rule: Answer honestly and tag other Ateneans to answer it as well. Have fun :)

Q: Was Ateneo your first choice?
A: For a while my first choice was UP, then it became Ateneo. My mom convinced me to change my mind.

Q: Do you know what your ACET score is?
A: No. It's enough to know that I passed.

Q: What was your first choice in course?
A: BS Biology

Q: Second choice?
A: BS Human Biology (of course everything has to be bio-related!)

Q: What turned out to be your course upon entrance?
A: BS Biology (congratulate me!)

Q: Did you have any plans of shifting?
A: Nope.

Q: Are you Chinito/Chinita?
A: Yes.

Q: Taga-Ateneo High?
A: Uh...no! :)

Q: Did you have fun in your Orsem?
A: Yes! Bio L2 and our TNTs were the best! Thanks Kuya Tantan, Kuya Sabz and Kuya Jez!

Q: Which Gate did you enter during the first day?
A: Gate 2, and it was freakishly traffic.

Q: Ever had an F in your grade report?
A: No, and I hope I never will. Pray for me!

Q: How about an A?
A: Botany Lec, Botany Lab and Taekwondo. Haha!

Q: Highest grade?
A: A

Q: Lowest grade?
A: B for Filipino. It will always be my Achilles' heel. :D

Q: Worst experience in AdMU?
A: Girl emergency (you know what it is!) and getting stranded in school since the driver didn't show up. Thank God that I know how to commute by myself now. As for the girl emergency...it always takes me by surprise. :D

Q: Do you always attend class?
A: The only subject I cut was PE. And that was just once, though I had been sorely tempted to do it again for other subjects ever since...

Q: What was/were your org/s?
A: PMSA (Pre-Med Society of the Ateneo). I'm a doormat member! I don't participate in any org activities. It's sad, yes, but I'm just too busy.

Q: How many units have you passed?
A: Everything! (17 units)

Q: Nangangarap ka bang maglaude?
A: Why not? HAHAHA! I wish I can...

Q: When will you graduate?
A: 2009.

Q: Fave subject/s?
A: Zoology Lecture

Q: Worst subject/s?
A: Filipino and Zoology Laboratory

Q: Fave landmark sa AdMU?
A: The caf. I'm always there.

Q: Fave kainan?
A: Eyrie (cheap but filling) and Beef Teriyaki (Chicken Strips and Tang!)

Q: Are you always at the lib?
A: Only rarely. I prefer the computer labs. :D

Q: Ever gone to the infirmary when you were sick?
A: Nope

Q: Did you have a crush in campus?
A: Yeah, and I still do. I'm not telling, though...:D

Q: May balak kang mag-MS, PhD?
A: M.D. (Isn't it a master's degree?). It's always been my dream to be a PhD though, but I probably wouldn't have enough time to get it. An M.D. in Neurology alone is long enough, thank you very much!

Q: Have you ever watched a graduation ceremony?
A: Yes, my sister's.

Q: Do you know the "Song for Mary" by heart?
A: No.

Q: Memorize mo ba ang Fabilioh?
A: No.

Q: ...ang Halikinu?
A: Yes.

Q: ...ang Blue Eagle Spelling?
A: Yes, coz I know how to spell (of course!)

Q: Are you part of Team Ateneo?
A: Nope.

Q: Who's your fave UAAP basketball player?
A: Chris Tiu (surprised?)

Q: Ever had a perfect score in an exam?
A: Zoology Lec long test, 51/50! Oh yeah!

Q: Ano ang ayaw mo sa Hell Week?
A: Everything.

Q: What do you like about our school?
A: Decent people, supportive teachers, efficient way of running things.

Q: Ano ang ayaw mo?
A: Extravagant and snobbish people (and the way all Ateneans are stereotyped as such).

Q: Have you ever bought anything at the A-shop?
A: Nope.

Q: Maganda ba ID pic mo?
A: NO. I hate it.

Q: Done anything illegal on campus?
A: Nope, unless forgetting to wear my ID counts. Haha.

Q: Bought anything at National Katips?
A: Yes

Q: Ever gone to Starbucks Katips?
A: Yes, but only once.

Q: May nakaaway ka na ba sa school?
A: Yes, but not a big all-out fight. It was more like a...misunderstanding.

Q: QPI?
A: 3.65. Should I aim for a flat 4? HAHAHA!!

The short happy life of The Frog (aka Rana pipiens)

2006-02-09T18:31:00.000+08:00

For clarification, italicized parts are in the point of view of the frog while non-italicized parts are in our point of view (the students who were dissecting it). Thanks very much. :)

It was horrible. It was bad enough that my whole identity - and those of others like me - were crammed into two unpronounceable tongue-twisting "scientific names" (and take note, my tongue doesn't twist easily because it's attached on the posterior end). They just had to kill me and subject me two four whole weeks of torture and humiliation. Even in death, my body was preserved, limbs and face contorted as if killing me had caused the ultimate pain...which it had.

It was disgusting. It was bad enough that we didn't get to dissect animals per phylum so that our Zoology Lab sessions would be in sync with our Zoo Lec sessions. Our lab teacher had to be THAT mediocre to subject us to a whole month of dissecting just frogs. Such boredom; it would have been much more exciting to dissect leeches, molluscs, earthworms... Pity we didn't work on live frogs - now THAT would have been much more fun. Although, when we picked up the dead frogs, we did kinda feel sorry for them, especially with their body contorted in that awful way. But oh well, it was in the name of science. So we picked up our frogs, dutifully removing first the skin, then the muscles, then the organs...week after week after week, until all that's left were the bones. The frog was icky and slimy and yucky and messy and made us smell like formalin afterwards. Finally, we lost all our pity for the hapless frog, because the twisted position of its limbs made it much harder to scrape off their muscles...

I was dead; I couldn't feel anything more no matter how hard they pricked and poked at me. But couldn't THEY feel anything for me, not even pity that my death was all for the purpose of a grade in their 5 x 8 index cards? Why couldn't I have just decomposed in the soil or water like some decent frog? For four weeks I had been subject to the utmost indignity as they gradually stripped my body off its every system. I was made to feel even more little when they poked at me with that sharp metal thing, identifying every single part of me with more of those unpronounceable names. If I were alive then, I'd certainly have jumped out of that filthy and vile-smelling dissecting pan without further adieu. Gastrocnemius? Pectoral girdle? Latissimus dorsi? Do those terms encompass how I've lived and grown up?

Gastrocnemius. Pectoral girdle. Latissimus dorsi. I'm really hating the stupid frog right now. We had to memorize loads and loads of terms to identify every single facet of its body for the practical exams, which were given in the same period as the dissection. Imagine memorizing over twently unintelligible Latin-sounding terms in thirty minutes - what a mind job.

Test subject. I was a freakin' test subject. How humiliating...

Lab test. We have a freakin' lab test on Thursday about the frog. How useless...

What did I ever do to deserve this sterile and academic death? I looked from above as they scraped at my bones, put colorful pins on my preserved muscles, and threw my organs down the trash...

Oh well. It was all in the name of science, right? Oh, and I think we have to do a homework about it, a color-coded chart on 5 x 8 index cards identifying the axial and appendicular bones in the skeletal system of our Rana pipiens specimen (damn I broke the pectoral girdle).

I wish I knew how to quit you

2006-02-05T20:08:00.000+08:00

I'd like to watch Brokeback Mountain. I think it's premise is interesting and unique; a western + gay movie that made the heights of Oscar success? This I gotta see.

And besides, Jake Gyllenhaal stars (as a gay, though). :D

Haay. Once again, the season of love approaches. On February 14, I am dressing up in black just to show my uninvolvement in That Day of Cheesy-ness. Sure, PDAs are justified for happy lovebird couples, but just don't show them to me. Not smack-dab in my face. And please, if you have mercy for my unromantic soul, spare me the pink heart-y decorations and the red roses. Others may be caught up in the hormone-overflowing and heartbeat-accelerating celebration that is Valentine's Day, but not me. Not me.

But I would appreciate some chocolates, though. :D

It seems like I never go through a single week without eating chocolate. It's an addiction. Every time our family goes to the grocery, I always stop by the chocolate and sweets aisle without fail. I buy Chunky Chocolate Chip Chips Ahoy, Meiji Chocolates with Macadamia Nuts, Time-Out, Crunch, Cloud 9...as long as the amount is that which I can reasonably gobble in a week. It might be fine while I'm still a kid, given my super-strong and efficient metabolism, but who knows what it might cost me when I'm older. I might not get pimples and cellulite due to chocolate right now, but that might change when I'm in my thirties. And heck, my addiction for chocolate and sweets in general might cause diabetes due to my pancreas' incapability to secrete enough insulin to control all that sugar - thus sending me to an early grave. RIP, Stephie?

Chocolate, I wish I knew how to quit you.

Hasty generalization: The fallacy I hate the most

2006-02-04T23:51:00.000+08:00

Would you please, please, PLEASE stop making hasty generalizations on my school!

I know you come from what is considered as the "best state university in the Philippines", but that doesn't give you the right to think that everyone else from all the other schools are beneath you!

Does the fact that Ateneo has no fraternities mean that Ateneans are weaklings? Does the fact that you do mean that everyone in your university is strong and tough? COME ON!!!!!!!!! The presence of fraternities does not guarantee the physical strength or the strength of the mentalities or personalities of all members of the population in your school! On the other hand, the absence of fraternities in our school does not mean that all members of the student population in Ateneo are soft and weak!

Dammit. Dammit. Dammit.

Being "the best state university" doesn't mean that you ARE the best university in the whole country! And even if you are, all I'm asking is a little humility and respect for my decision not to go there! You do not have to berate, criticize, and insult my school all the time! I hate your effing contempt, condescencion and patronization!

So what if more government officials graduated from UP than from Ateneo? They're mostly corrupt anyway! And hazing doesn't indicate that you're "tougher" - it indicates that you actually have the mental shallowness to think that physical strength is an indispensable part of success in life, when I think it's not!

And the worst part is, I cannot argue with you like this. I can't pour out my anger and irritation over your obviously illogical conclusions and prejudices regarding my school because I have to respect your age and status in the family.

But just because I'm younger than you and dependent on you doesn't mean that you are right all the time. I am a person too, therefore I have dignity that DESERVES to be respected, not trampled upon. I have my own opinions too. Despite the argument that older people have more experience and are thus more often correct, I believe that I am right in saying that conclusions should not be drawn from prejudice and incomplete observations.

I only make allowances for you, hiding my anger from you after you leave, because it is my DUTY to respect you. But because of your contempt for my affiliations and the obvious immaturity that you show in your hasty generalizations, I find that my respect for you has been gradually decreasing.

You expect everyone to listen to your side of the story. Why in the hell can't you listen to MINE? Why do you always regard my opinions as if they are inferior to yours, though I've academically achieved more than you ever had?

The only release I get is by fuming behind your back. And the worst part is, I'm obliged to feel guilty because I am supposed to be loving you and respecting you for all the things you've ever done for me.

Why do I always end up on the losing side if it's between you and I???

The woeful lack of common sense

2006-02-04T22:37:00.000+08:00

I can't understand WHY there had been a stampede in Ultra a while ago due to the effing noontime show that is Wowowee.

It's bad enough that they camped out for three days outside the stadium just waiting for what apparently was Wowowee's anniversary to start. Believe me, I pass through Ultra everyday coming from Ateneo, and I know the sheer annoying traffic that the camp-out caused. Hello?? As if Ultra doesn't have enough seats for all of them.

What puzzles me is why people would waste so much effort, and lose their minds over, a stupid show like Wowowee. Why would anyone camp out in the sides of the streets just to be early for a show that features effing dancing girls and a stupid mind-decaying jingle? Does the camp-out show that they have nothing better to do with their time than waste it in waiting outside Ultra for three damn days?

Why would anyone lose their minds over that show to the point that getting prime seats to watch it would be more valuable than the human lives destroyed by the stampede? Does a show like Wowowee justify the cold and uncomfortable nights of camping out, the number of people dead and the children lost?

Are the Filipino masses this uneducated and shallow that a show like Wowowee would be worth all this? Does this incident show the low-grade kind of entertainment that the Filipino would give up so much - even human lives - for?

It's funny, but death by stampede would be more associated with the fleeing of mindless animals from their predators (think the Lion King Mufasa's death caused by wildebeests rampaging from hungry hyenas). It's ironic that although we humans pride ourselves on our ability to transcend primitive instincts and our tremendously advanced mental capability, it seems that there's still a bit of animal nature innately present within us, especially when it comes to competition. Except that this time, the goal is purely materialistic and fueled by a first-come-first-served basis. Adding to the irony is the fact that the Wowowee anniversary show in Ultra was cancelled anyway due to the masses' stampede, thus rendering the camp-out and the deaths useless.

Those people didn't have to die if only the people realized that human lives are more precious than a few hours of watching Wowowee. Use your common sense, people! And more importantly, make better and more productive use of your goddamned time!

No wonder the state of the Philippines is constantly seen as stagnant and hopeless. If this incident shows us anything of the mental state of the masses, it is that they are held under a stupor by fantastical and nonsensical noontime shows just because they provide relief from the harsh realities of poverty. Wake up and smell the coffee, people! Running away from poverty doesn't accomplish diddly-squat; get up and do something productive, for God's sake!

Oh God. If this incident encapsulates the mentally-deteriorating state of the Philippines, I can say nothing else but...God help us.

Confusion and indecision

2006-02-01T19:42:00.001+08:00

To take or not to take Math 195?

The course, entitled "Seminar in Problem Solving Techniques," sounds like something from a horror movie. You would have thought that I wouldn't have any hesitation to refuse the subject altogether just because it sounds so DAMN scary, especially right after complaining about the toughness of Math 11. Moreover, taking Math 195 along with Math 17 (calculus, no less) during the summer would spell a freakin' death sentence for me, since who in their right mind would take two hellishly hard math subjects together?

Still, despite these arguments I feel that it would be such a waste to refuse this opportunity, especially since Fr. Nebres and Dr. Lee-Chua (Ateneo's very own Dumbledore and McGonagall, respectively) are going to teach it. Also, if Exo, Mia and the others firmly believe in my capability to handle it, then why shouldn't I take the friggin' chance?

Argh. Argh. ARGH. I need to decide tonight, as the subject's gonna be closed soon. What will Tantan's decision be??

To compensate for my lack of ability to articulate this dilemma, I will post the email I sent to Dr. Lee-Chua last night, and her reply that I've read just now:

Hi maam,

We would like to take Math195g.1 for this summer. However, we do have questions and apprehensions which we hope you will clarify for us.

We would like to know what topics and requirements the subject entails. We are worried that the subject and its workload will be too hard for us, especially since we are only incoming sophomores and we will be taking Math195 along with Math17. Thus, if possible we would like to take either subject next year instead.

Also, one of us has to take other subjects, namely Lit 14 and Eng 12, in the coming summer/semesters because she was placed in a basic English class last sem. We are concerned that she might lag too far behind us if her English subjects were left too late because she replaced them with Math195. We would appreciate it very much if you could provide suggestions on how this problem could be remedied.

We have already informed our department head (Dr. Merab Chan of the Bio dept) of our concerns. However, she suggested that we might get a better response from you, especially those about our apprehensions regarding the Math subjects.

We are sorry because of the late response to your letter. It took us quite a long time to make up our minds because Math195 sounds like such a challenging subject. However, we thought that it would be nice to make use of this opportunity to learn more and be taught by great teachers. :)

Thank you very much!

From:

Karen Abalos
Kristan Angeles
Stephanie Jordan

I BS Biology Block L2

From Dr. Lee Chua:

The requirements are perseverance, dedication, and not giving up :)

You will learn math techniques (you don't even need calculus) and most importantly, go through the experience of tackling challenging problems. Your grades will be based on problem sets, individual and group work (no tests, since the problems are not standard).

I suggest that the person with basic English should take English instead, but for the rest, take the class this summer. We will offer this class again, but I cannot guarantee the invitation, since we will be looking for a new batch.

Good luck. The class is about to be closed, so I need a reply from you soonest.

What am I going to do now?

Euphoria: An orgasm of the hearing sense

2006-01-28T21:24:00.000+08:00

Cersa's variety show last night was a total blast.

It wasn't because the ultra-cheap tickets, though it was a major force in convincing me to go since I paid only 150 bucks to watch lots and lots of bands for nine hours (6pm-3am).

And no, it wasn't because the chance to stay super late in school for the first time. And it wasn't because of the chance to scout out for cute boys either. And it definitely, definitely wasn't about the beer (I didn't drink any, honest!).

It was actually because my respect for the Filipino local music industry was restored. Unlike some people I know who remain adamant that the local music industry sucks to the nth degree without exception, the show proved that not all bands are sellouts, and that some are actually have talent. In other words, Filipino music is not just about Sandara Park, Sarah Geronimo, Sam Milby, and popular bands such as Hale, Cueshe and Bamboo that are getting increasingly, sickeningly mainstream and overplayed.

In fact, I've just realized that the hope of the Philippine music industry lies in independent bands such as I've heard last night. Aside from increasing the roster of talented local musicians in the scene, they keep music fresh, varied, inventive, and competitive. We really don't need any more winners from search-for-a-star (who seem to sing only song revivals) to take over radio airplay or the concert circuit, thank you very much.

In a way, it was like an exposure trip thingy for me. I, a stickler for foreign rock bands such as Incubus and Green Day, am actually starting to like local bands in the same genre. Last night was the first time that I've heard Urbandub, and I'd have to admit that they're quite good (this goes for both lyrics and melody). Splitcide, an Ateneo band, actually sounds like Incubus to me, what with the weird guitars and the presence of the DJ. Imago was great too, especially their vocalist, though their song "Anino" mildly irritates me. Sandwich was........energetic (they were like in a high; nothing much aside from that could be said about them).

There were other bands that I didn't really like though. One of these was Pedicab,which I hear was an awardee/nominee in the NU Rock Awards; though they were lively, the lyrics just struck me as kinda...uhm, well, let's just say that my nerdy preferences extend to music. Same goes for Cambio. I was also kinda disappointed in Pupil, a band that lots of people seemed to rave about, since I was turned off by their excessively heavy and dark music (the guitarist rocked hard, though); this was probably because Ely Buendia struck me as somewhat crazy and depressed.

It still surprises me that so many people could be big fans of Rivermaya. After that act (which was sometime between the middle and the end of the show), a lot of people left the building as if they stayed just to hear them. The band, although dubbed "Banda ng Bayan", seems to me more like a glamour band (if there is such a term); just look at the way their posse/technicians overly fussed over the equipment during the sound check. It seems to be promoting itself as a very patriotic and motivational act to the point that the lyrics of their songs might have been taken from a Christian inspirational self-help book. And to be honest, I don't like Rico Blanco because his ego is too big (he even wore a "Bawat Atenista Bayani" shirt in what may be interpreted as an act of motivation and self-glorification) and his lips are too red and puffy in the Joker style. Even though the peculiarities of the frontman shouldn't be used to judge the whole band, I just write it off to preference which by the way cannot be logically debated about. Though the lead guitarist with the funky hair was good...

Anyway, the point was that I got my fill of music last night. I heard some good bands, some mediocre bands, and some bands that just sucked, while my whole perspective on Filipino music changed along the way. The Filipino music industry is not total crap; in fact, the proliferation of good alternative bands may signify that Filipino musical talent thrives outside the constraints of profit-driven and talent-exploiting record companies. Though I'm betting that the better bands out there will be eventually snapped up by those record companies, hopefully their talent won't be diminished by increasing airplay and commercialization.

Yes, my faith in the Filipino talent is restored. And not because of Manny Pacquiao either (nevertheless, kudos to him).

And yes, I do think Raymond Marasigan's eyeliner rocks, Green Day-ish. :P

Surprise, surprise!

2006-01-24T19:49:00.000+08:00

It seems that fate has suddenly taken a liking for springing unexpected stuff on me all this week.

First, I guess that I'm not the only one pressured to be a DL this sem. Blockmates of mine who need to take extra units during the summer (because of taking basic subjects during the first sem and/or failing subjects in the first sem) need to be on the dean's list this sem so Ateneo could let them take the subjects that they missed during the summer, else other subjects for the next years would be dislodged or pushed forward. Also, my scholar blockmates really need to be on the dean's list for this sem in order to maintain their scholarship, else they would have to transfer schools (or so I hear). I guess fate has an extremely cruel sense of irony; the laid-back and free-loading attitude during the first sem would have to be paid for by living in bloody, brain-wracking, and social-life-obliviating Nerd Land.

Actually I'm one of those who need to be a DL this sem. If I want to take Math 195 (which I hear is going to be taught by Fr. Nebres, Ateneo's very own Dumbledore), I'd need to be a DL to justify overloading during the summer. However, not taking Math 195 is perfectly fine with me; the pressure of having to be a DL comes from continuity - I'm already characterized as "the DL person" by my family, my friends, my blockmates and my teachers, and I guess I'm gonna have to live up to their expectations no matter how much effort is required of me.

However, if you think that's bad, others have it worse off than I do. I totally sympathize with Mia, who needs to be a DL this sem in order to take her Lit subject in the summer. The fact is putting real pressure on her, especially since her QPI last sem was 1.7; to be a dean's lister, a QPI of at least 3.35 is required. If she doesn't make it now, her schedule in the future might get messed up. Worse off still are my scholar blockmates, who might have to leave Ateneo if they don't meet the expectations required of a scholar. Good luck to you guys; you can do it!

Also, I got my advisory marks yesterday. Surpise, surprise, I got an A in Chem! I really didn't expect that because my quizzes really suck. Luckily I got an A in the first long test because the prof reduced the overall test score by thirty points; plus, I got a lot of bonus points (Bonus question: name four Christmas songs with names of elements in their lyrics. That was the most unusual bonus question I've ever encountered in my life). I got an A in Zoology too (a 96, actually...was that really me?!?), with which I was really, really, REALLY overjoyed (yeah, Steph, it's your birthday!). The real work would have to be in maintaining the grade. Yeap, my brain is up for a real bout of memorizing (Zoo + Chem = Brain Freeze).

Speaking of Zoo, we had our long test on Protists, the Phyla Porifera, Cnidaria, Ctenophora, Platyhelminthes, Nemertea, and Gnathostomulida today (God, I feel like such a genius just typing that!). I think...I hope I did well. I got three bonus questions (favorite bonus question: Who is the lead singer of Green Day?). I really have to aim for an A in the subject.

I think I need to go home now. I'm in Ateneo's CTC Computer Lab and I've been waiting for the rain to stop so I can commute home. I think it's stopped now.

Mental note to self: I need dissecting equipment. That's the final surprise: we're gonna dissect the frog on Thursday for zoo lab (finally, some REAL lab work!). Poor frogs, though. Oh well, it's all in the name of science anyway. :D

Cheerios!

Eulogy for an iPod

2006-01-22T18:45:00.000+08:00

I can feel it. My iPod should conk out any day now.

The other day I charged my iPod for about two to three hours. Yesterday, after I played it for less than thirty minutes, the logo on the upper right hand corner of the screen showed that there was only a sliver of battery life left! (Take note: I do not turn on the backlight).

How the hell can thirty minutes of playing consume nearly all my iPod's battery, when an iPod mini's battery life should have been about 18 hours?!

Maybe it's just the screen logo fooling me. After all, I played my iPod for about three hours today, and the battery measure still looked the same. But then again, it would mean that my iPod is at least defective, if not totally dying out on me.

I'd hate to lose my iPod. :( I bring it with me almost every day, and is as much as an extension of myself as my cellphone (yes, I love my gadgets that much). If it dies, that would be $200 down the drain, though nobody could say that I didn't use it to its fullest extent while it was still up and functioning.

Also, if it conked out now I'd have to buy another one, which would mean that I'd have to save money for it (highly unlikely, since I only get 500 pesos a week), or I'd have to ask my dear pater to shell out 15,000 to buy me one (highly unlikely too, since my dad already bought an iPod nano for my sister and I think that he has no desire to undergo the wallet-wracking experience again).

I can't say that I didn't see it coming, though. First the left earphone was making weird crackling sounds (because apparently the bass mechanism was damaged; however, this was easily remedied by sucking on the earphone - yup, you read that right!). Then a scratch appeared on its blue surface. Then it was the click wheel, since for some unknown reason the stop/pause button suddenly became harder to press.

I can live with those. Really. As long as the iPod still plays music, I won't buy a new one. So please, please hang in there, iPod. :(

But somehow, I can hear the sputtering sounds of its battery dying...

In defense of Earth's finest (fictional) heroes

2006-01-12T18:13:00.000+08:00

Watching animated cartoons does not mean that I am regressing to the mental capacity of my former four-year-old self.

And for that matter, not all cartoons have stupid juvenile brain-rotting storylines.

While I was watching the Justice League and Static Shock on Cartoon Network last night, my dad said that I was "retrogressing" (he probably meant to use the word "regressing") to a child-like mentality, since he thinks that those cartoons are dumb and juvenile.

In my opinion however, his opinion is pure prejudice, balderdash, codswallop, and poppycock.

Again, let me reiterate that not all cartoons are juvenile, and Justice League is a prime example. Anybody who has watched it would agree that, although it is animated and showcases the world's most famous animated superheroes worshipped and idolized by preschool fan boys, the storyline is far too complex and mature for it to be called a kid's show (just check the internet forums on the subject if you're really doubting me). Even the cartoon's producers say that the show is aimed for an older demographic (such as teens and young adults) than one that would usually watch, say, Dexter's Laboratory, The Powerpuff Girls, and Sabrina the Animated Series (heaven forbid!).

Themes in the Justice League episode are anything but juvenile. Instead, they are realistic and political, to the point that the preschool fan boys whom my dad thinks are the only ones who should watch the show can only appreciate the fight scenes (in other words, the parts where the superheroes "kick butt"). There are issues of euthanasia, feminism, loneliness and isolation, government corruption, Greek mythology, superhero insecurities, betrayals, exile, teamwork, etc etc. For example, when tyrannical and agressive aliens bent on destroying the Earth out of war and self-interest come under the guise of aid and benevolence, they proclaim that in order for the Earth to be protected and saved, no one should question their authoritarian rule and violent methods (Iraq, anyone? It was a perfect illustration of Machiavelli's famous statement "the end justifies the means"). Also, in the current storyline, a confidential government program known as Project Cadmus seeks to eradicate the Justice League in all ways possible because they find their superpowers to be a threat, not a safeguard, to the world. Now if that isn't a new perspective on the usual "the good guys fight the bad guys and kick their asses" routine, I don't know what is.

Maybe I'm just being a defensive conspiracy theorist in finding issues like these in a cartoon. But then again, I doubt if I'd be able to find themes and concepts in the same level as these in a show like Ed, Edd, and Eddy (again, heaven forbid!) and Rugrats.

Again, what I'm trying to say is that not all cartoons are juvenile. Some, like the Justice League, actually have substance that egoistic and high-and-mighty people like my dad shouldn't turn their nose up against. That would just be prejudice, since who can instantly pass judgment on something that they don't know about? Call me a hypocrite, but that seems to me to be very immature, the total opposite of what my dad tries to be with his condescending air. What I wish most of all is that he (and others like him) would try to keep an open mind and respect people's preferences without thinking that they are always better than everyone else; after all, since everyone is unique and each one has a different mindset, preferences should not be debated (like what I did just now) out of pride, defensiveness, or anger.

Who's regressing now, huh?

Brand new laptop!

2005-12-30T14:04:00.000+08:00

This is my first journal entry in my brand new laptop! Whohooooo!

It feels great finally having a laptop. I actually was initially disappointed when I discovered that Dad didn't buy me the smaller and more portable ebox laptop (whose screen size is 12''), but when I discovered the features that this laptop has, I became more and more convinced that Dad made the right choice.

For starters, even though the screen is bigger at 15'' (and thus the laptop is heavier and more difficult to bring to school), watching DVDs turns into a very cool experience with the big LCD screen (I think that this laptop's screen is at least as big as our PC's monitor!). I guess that this is the time to savor widescreen computing. Haha, finally I can watch the Interview With the Vampire DVD that I bought in the States, because for some reason it won't play on our DVD player. Also, this laptop has a more reputable brand; its Compaq (by HP) brand is much more trustworthy and has greater quality than the ebox laptop I initially chose (I don't even know the brand; I don’t think it's global). Therefore, I can safely presume that this laptop is of better quality than the ebox, and therefore has less chance of conking out after years of use.

Also, this laptop comes packed with many features that the ebox doesn't have (at least, its spec sheet didn't list them). For starters, it actually has a Memory Card Slot, which means that I can transfer information such as music files and pictures from my phone to the laptop and vice-versa without using Bluetooth. Also, it comes installed with Advanced Norton Anti-Virus which, together with the Opera Browser I intend to install, will effectively keep nasty viruses away from my beloved system. To my surprise and delight, I also found that a muvee Movie Editor is installed in the laptop, which means I won't have to download a demo version of it - perfect for our Zoology documentary project!! Most importantly though, the laptop comes with built-in Wi-Fi (though I think I still have to subscribe to a service, or get a router), Bluetooth, and LAN connection, which the ebox doesn't have and which will come in handy for on-the-go internet surfing. Yahoo!

The only thought that nags me is that this Compaq laptop costs about 70,000, which is 10,000 pesos more than the ebox I originally chose. This is because this laptop costs the same as an Apple iBook, which is my dream laptop. But maybe if I had the Apple iBook I would have had some sync issues. And let's not forget: the Apple iBook does NOT have the Microsoft Office suite of applications, which are the programs that I most need in a laptop since they are utilized for schoolwork. Also, there are much much fewer downloadables available for Macs than for Windows operating systems. I suppose the iBook just looks sleek but it just lacks the necessary things that I need in a laptop. Also, its white chassis gets dirty so easily (the ebox also has a white casing), and a laptop that would be brought to school should get ready for some travel wear-and-tear (thus I am happy with the Compaq's plastic exterior but sleek silvery metal interior).

In conclusion, because of the great features it comes installed with, its wider screen that is more conducive to a cinematic DVD experience (not to mention a bigger screen means not having to squint to see the smaller letters that would be seen from a smaller 12-inch screen when typing long papers for long hours), and its overall usability compared to the Apple iBook and the ebox laptop, I think I'm gonna have some great times with this baby (its heavier weight notwithstanding; it would probably be a more enjoyable experience to use a laptop with a wider screen anyway). That is, if RAJ doesn't mess with it.

More than that

2005-12-23T16:53:00.000+08:00

I am more than just a DL.

It's not that I'm complaining. I'm actually overjoyed that I've made it, like I've finally seen the fruits of my long, hard, sleepless labor during the first sem. But this achievement puts the bar of expectation higher, because everyone seems to expect more from me now that I'm a DL.

For example, when someone in our family asks if my studies are going well, my dad immediately buts in "Oo, dean's lister nga yan eh", and he never fails to rub it in to everyone we meet. I understand that he's only being proud of me, but I resent the fact that this achievement has made me a like a glittering ornament to be shown and appreciated, but never understood. And of course, when somebody hears it, they say "Wow, ang galing! Keep up the good work!", which implies that they'll be expecting me to work harder than ever and they won't accept any excuse for mediocrity.

If I study until late at night, it's because I'm a DL. If I always carry a complete supply of pens, paper, staplers and erasers as if I were an outlet of National Bookstore, it's because I'm a DL. If I get a perfect score in a quiz, it's because I'm a DL. It's like my whole personality, motivations, insecurities, and hard work were simplified, made superficial, and crammed into those two enigmatic letters.

Even though I am a DL, I get sick of studying too. I too get afraid that someday I might not be able to meet the high standards and expectations that everyone sets for me. I too get afraid of disappointing people. I too want to take a break from all the long tests, projects and papers that are continually loading our backs. I too have a fear of failure. I cram and procrastinate, sometimes I copy and paste material from the Internet. In these, I am just like everybody else, and maybe my being a DL is just due to the fact that our Botany grades were curved.

In short, being a DL is not the end-all and be-all of everything. I have to work twice as hard now to maintain it and meet everyone's expectations on what I have to achieve. Everyday I'm afraid that somehow I'm going to fall short of this, what with the hellish Chem...

Don't just judge me because I am a DL. I'm more than that. I'm a person too.

Back with a vengeance

2005-12-09T21:48:00.000+08:00

Well well well. After an uncharacteristically long hiatus in blogging, I am glad to say that I'm back! Finally.

We've just moved to another condo unit, thus we didn't have phone, cable, and internet connections for about two weeks. It was just like being thrown back in time to the Paleolithic age (well, not really!). It's funny how relatively recent developments in technology such as the Internet and Cable TV are already so assimilated into our lives that they're almost necessities. At least for me they are.

I'm so glad to have my internet connection up and running. I hate using our school's internet connection because it's too slow for me. Also, now I get to use my great Opera browser, which I believe is faster than both Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox (not to mention it has mouse gestures which I subconsciously use when using other browsers!).

I've been reading my past blog entries and it amazed me how depressing they are. I guess I'm now back in reality, with my two feet planted firmly on the ground. Whatever delusions that were feeding on my brain back then are gone now, what with the restoration of comforting normality and day-to-day routine. Looking back, the dreams and fantasies that have haunted me then are pure poppycock (with British accent!).

I am my old, apathetic, cynical self now. Hurrah!

I am back to earth. Back to reality. Back to alternating between stress and boredom. Back to commuting to school every damn Friday via MRT and LRT.

Back to my insufferable I Wonder Why's...

Zoology. It has definitely replaced my last semester's first love, which was Botany. I feel as if we're studying ever more minute details of the Processes and Metabolisms of Life by the day. For example, as if Interphase, Prophase, Metaphase, Anaphase, and Telophase of Meiosis I weren't enough (yes, there is a Meiosis II! great!), Leptonema, Zygonema, Pachynema, Diplonema and Diakinesis just had to be studied under Prophase, which are apparently all about the pairing up of homologous chromosomes, the replication of sister chromatids and the crossing-over of non-sister chromatids (God, it makes me feel like such a genius to write all these highfalutin terms and actually know what they're all about!). I suppose whoever invented the terms in science must: a) have an unrealistic measure of common people's intellect and capacity to memorize; b) be intellectual sadists who'd like to see the brains of students bleed from memorizing such tongue-twisting terms; and/or c) have a superbly inflated ego who'd like their names permanently and obviously associated with scientific concepts for posterity (Okazaki fragments and Avogadro's number, anyone?).

Filipino. Fil 12 isn't as bad as I thought it would be (or maybe it was just Prof. Coroza of last sem's Fil 11 scaring us). Though still a definite eye-opener, the subject has actually become enjoyable, more so because the teacher is personable and humorous. Also, if it weren't for the subject I wouldn't have watched the great Filipino indie film "Ang Pagdadalaga ni Maximo Oliveros", a deceptively simple movie with a great plot that made the most of its low budget.

Paramita. Thanks to the efforts of Mia who introduced me to non-mainstream Filipino music, I've grown to like the sad, soulful, reflective, sometimes angsty and always lovelorn songs of this indie band. I've heard that their lead singer's been nominated for Drummer of the Year at the NU Music Awards last week because she plays the drums and sings the vocals simultaneously. Whoa, man. Whoa.

"Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West". Everyone familiar with the Wizard of Oz story knows that the scary, crazy villain is the Wicked Witch of the West, famous especially for her death via being thrown with a bucket of water. In this book by Gregory Maguire, the Wicked Witch is given a name, an unhappy home life, unappreciative parents, a desire for equality between social classes, a vendetta against the tyrannical and despotic Wizard, and a tragic love life - all motivations that led her to her destiny as a Witch. The book poses questions about good and evil, since what we are usually led to see and fear as a one-sidedly evil and demonic character may be originally good but led astray by negative circumstances (think Freud's theories). After reading this novel, I'll never think the same way about fairy-tale villains again.

I could write lots more, but I can't. I'm too tired from my long commute from school a while ago. But before I end this entry, I'd like to leave a final (teaser) question...

Why is it that the lines for the MRT ticket counters that say "Exact Fare Only", which are presumably the equivalent of Express Lanes (10 items or less) in groceries, actually have LONGER lines than ordinary ticket counters?

Human nature.

Catharsis

2005-11-02T20:20:00.000+08:00

Definition: (according to google.com)

An emotional purging or cleansing experienced by an ancient Greek audience at the end of a tragedy;

The emotional effect upon an audience resulting from a re-living or re-experiencing of a remembered emotion;

A way of emptying oneself of frustration and misery (in therapy).

My emotions have been purged.

I'm sick of that roller-coaster ride of emotions that I've been going through for the past week. My friend was right; I am being too emotional and downright cheesy, when there is virtually nothing to be worked up about. It's all here in my head, it's just my imagination, and it's high time I pinched myself hard on the arm and tell myself that it's all just a delusion.

For the past few days I've been alternating between euphoria and anxious depression bordering on bipolarity. My will was totally getting out of control. I need to harness what's left of my reason and put a stop to this.

Finally I have awoken to the fact that the world is depressingly normal, that nothing and no one is going to deliver me from this tiresomely dull world which I know I should be lucky to appreciate but from which all I want is out.

The tragedy is that for the past week I've been feeling that those delusions were utterly real. I've been treating them as the bread of life, but as soon as I'd digested them I've felt their insubstantiality. And as soon as I've realized the fatality of what I've been doing, I had almost been too weak to emerge from that morass of confusion and dangerous obsession.

I should realize that books, movies and songs are not real life. It's time to face up to the bare, harsh facts of mine. It is painful to come back to reality, what with illusion so much stimulating and desirable.

Because I am alone.

The power of illusions

2005-10-28T01:33:00.000+08:00

A few days ago, I read "The Art of War", Sun Tzu's military treatise. As much as I was disgusted at the amorality of some of the principles he put forward (such as not providing an obvious escape route while the army is in desperate ground so that the soldiers would be motivated to fight to the death, thus leading the army to victory, to the satisfaction of the power-hungry generals and kings), I was really struck by some of the things that Sun Tzu said about knowing yourself in order to be successful in battle.

"If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle."

The battle currently raging inside my head? Will vs Imagination.

I hate my imagination. It's indispensable in life all right; sure it's what makes us human (it enables us to dream and have goals and make inventions and so on...) but these past few days my imagination is running wild and contriving fantastic scenes inside my head that invade my peace of mind. Everyday I'm besotted with delusions that I would desperately wish to come true but which I know will never happen. And somehow, I find myself deliberately blurring the line between illusion and reality in order to indulge myself in dangerous feelings. The real boundaries of the situation is so indefinite for me that it's so nice to extend them a little further, especially with my mind idle this sembreak. It's daydreaming on steroids. And I think....I'm succumbing.

I won't say anything more here; it gets too awkward for me. Anyway, you get the picture.

I tell myself that this won't last, that it'll be over once my mind is occupied again with the mundane subjects I'm gonna be taking up in the second sem. But somehow I feel that these thoughts will have some consequences on me someday, one way or the other. The worst thing for me would be when the real secret behind these vague references is revealed to everyone, seeing that I'm really secretive about issues like this. It would be doubly worse on my part if the other doesn't share the same thoughts. But that's just the point - I don't know now, and that's where I get the liberty to create illusions and to succumb to them.

Something bad will happen out of all this. I know it.

But you're in my heart
I can feel your beat
And you move my mind
From behind the wheel
When I lose control
I can only breathe your name...

My will is slowly losing the battle...

A moment of infinite possibility

2005-10-24T00:13:00.000+08:00

I like that title. It makes me feel so profound.

But I didn't make it up just to seem profound.

I was rereading Veronika Decides to Die by Paulo Coelho last night (or was it morning? it was 2am), and apart from the interesting insights it gave on conformity and sanity, it made me reassess my life and the way that I've been living it. The question is this: Am I a cistern that merely contains, or a fountain that overflows?"

The actual quote was "Be like the fountain that overflows, not like the cistern which merely contains." It was a quote from the Bible delivered by Mari, a character in the novel who had an extended tenure in a mental hospital because she felt comfortable living in a world where everything is tolerated and you don't have to accept responsibility for your actions because you are judged "insane". She and the other characters realize that ultimately "sanity" becomes a question of fitting in, thinking conventionally, and basically acting as though you're the same as everybody else. Sanity therefore holds down passions and dreams- passions that may seem so crazy and pointless to manifest, and dreams that may seem so impossible and unrealistic to carry out. Thus people lose enthusiasm and the will to live because they refuse to take risks and face their desires. These people are the cisterns, because they hold themselves back just to conform or to retain their dignity. And I think I'm one of them.

I was thinking about the many times that I've been presented opportunities but refused to make something about it. Would my life be more worth living now if I had taken risks and made something about them? Often I'm on the passive side, letting things take their course and hoping and praying that somehow things would happen the way I want them to.

Just two days ago I think something like that happened, and once again I didn't take action. I wish now that I had given free rein to my emotions, that I hadn't been afraid and I'd never stopped to think about reasons, consequences, or outward appearances. Because there had been a possibility.

Carlo and I were ym-ing about it the other night, and he said to me that "you shouldn't just wait for things to happen". If I hadn't waited, if I hadn't been passive, if I hadn't been afraid, then perhaps that moment of infinite possibility would touch my life and become real and concrete.

People have masks which hide their true natures and desires from the world under the facade of dignity, conventionalism, and good manners. I long to tear off my own mask to be free to express myself without limitations, without inhibitions. I long to grab the moment of infinite possibility because it isn't everyday that I have it in my grasp. However, all that I can feel now is regret...

I should have been the fountain.

Make a move

2005-10-22T00:21:00.000+08:00

I just came from Marj's debut a while ago (it's now 12:30 am, the party ended at 11pm). It was really an event planned for, evident in the smooth flow of the program, the speakers' ready-made speeches, the videos from her relatives in Canada, the song and dance numbers, not least her (gorgeous!) dress. Marj must be really lucky, having a family rich enough to afford all that (in the Bellevue hotel, which is I think a five-star hotel, no less) but generous enough to spend for their only child.

The event was memorable in that in spite of my lack of energy and sanguinity due to a late-night turn-in at 4am and my early-morning call at 9am (thanks to my dad, who was pestering me about my write-up of Asialink Corp.), I made new friends. Yes, I, Steph, the quintessential dead kid and perennial sleepless zombie, made new friends in a party. Interestingly enough, they were siblings, but I never really knew that until later. One was a girl, a third/fourth year college student at the UA&P, studying education (I was amazed by that). We two were the only girls in our table, so naturally we had to bond with each other so as not to feel out of place. The other one was a guy, who I'm sorry to say tried to get me to dance in vain (me, Steph, the quintessential dead kid, dance?). He's still got the pouch that contained my bracelet, though (a giveaway from the party), since he was interested in the bracelet in the first place; I thought he might be secretly gay...But then, it seems that nowadays all guys are presumed secretly gay or unconsciously effeminate.

These events took me by surprise because it showed me how much of an introvert I really am. Does my being a perennial sleepless zombie deter me from socializing or making friends? Granted, my being a "zombie" does not mean that I do not have a brain, however damaged, short-circuited, and deteriorated (to the hapless idiot: I am making Figures of Speech); I make friends because friendship is a meaningful and rewarding experience. In other words, I don't make friends for the sake of making friends and being popular. But still, does this attitude keep me from having a social life?

Gaarg. I feel so confused.

I'm having second thoughts about being a doctor. Sure I still want to stick to the field of biology, but I thought that it would be cool to move into the field of research. It would be cool to spend time in labs, handling high-tech equipment, contributing to the general body of knowledge for the good of humankind, and getting MSc's and PhD's in the process. It would be so cool to be able to publish researches (but still about the brain though; I haven't changed about that) in books and magazines. Except that...in the Philippines, where poverty is rampant and scientific researches get scant government funding, this move would probably be suicidal. Honorable, maybe, but it would annihilate my dreams of um, future riches (the zombie IS alive, after all).

Am I losing my grip on myself? Am I losing the motivation to be proactive? Am I letting my decisions be carried away by thoughts, second thoughts, and temporary feelings?

God, I need to put some life back into my lonely existence.

They're funny, but I'm not laughing

2005-10-18T01:55:00.000+08:00

It is 2 am, and I am listening to my noisy iTunes playlist.

Finally, after weeks and weeks of conformity and mediocrity due to my settling to one of those predesigned blogger layouts, I have finally made a new one.

I stayed up late because I didn't want to leave this job hanging until the next day. It's funny how I'm so goshdarn determined on finishing a blog layout, but when it comes to accomplishing schoolwork such as an English essay or a lab report I'm such a procrastinator.

There were many things that drove me to make a new layout. Foremost of them was boredom. It's funny how I complain in the middle of Hell Week that I can't wait for the sembreak and to get my life back, but now that I have loads and loads and loads of free time I suddenly find myself at a loss of something productive to do. Hence the obsession over HTML perfection. Another reason was that I reminded myself to make a new one since I was told by a friend through YM not so long ago that he didn't like my using a predesigned layout. Oh well. Here it is, then.

So what will our beloved and supremely bored protagonist do now when she is finding herself disturbingly free of papers and deadlines? And Botany?

Agenda for the sembreak

Make a blog design
Make a website for Block L2
Enroll for driving lessons and taekwondo
Revise Asialink's write-ups and letters (and all that sleazy marketing crap
Reread all the good books in the house (again?!)
Watch all the DVDs and VCDs in the house (this I haven't done...yet)

Bottom line: be bored to death.

Funny how both excessive stress and excessive boredom can be so threatening to sanity.

It is in these moments, when my mind is unoccupied and idle, that I think of my mom. I found myself crying a bit, sometime after I woke up and I was lying aimlessly in bed, since I was thinking of how much I missed her and the long separation that we're going through just for the uncertain prospect of financial well-being in the future. And yet, when she called at around 6pm, I was only able to bring her up to date on the mundane events in my life; I never got to say any of these things that are bothering me now.

I know this is such a cliche, but isn't it funny how you only appreciate something or someone after they are gone from your life? Isn't it funny how the most meaningful and deeply-felt thoughts are the hardest to express?

Shucks. This post is sounding like one of those insanely forwarded emails asking you to "forward this to twenty people within one minute so that your wish will come true", or something like that.

But still, I'm not laughing.

But wait - I actually AM getting paid for it!

2005-10-13T22:28:00.000+08:00

In fact, I'm getting paid a LOT!

Apparently Ms. Evelyn So-Lao, the General Manager of Orange Innovative Technologies, Inc. (one of those people whose profiles I edited in the write-up), and my Beloved Pater thought that the revisions I made were really good. So good, in fact, that they will pay me P1000 for it!

Now that's what I call easy money! Haha! It's the easiest money I've ever earned in my life (which isn't saying much, considering that I've practically never earned anything in my life, but still). They say that they pay me big to get me motivated on editing yet ANOTHER write-up, this time regarding First Magellan Overseas Corp. Interestingly, this write-up/letter/sleazy effort to present a credible image and to sell, sell, sell was actually written by my Own Dear Uncle, the said corporation's marketing director. Editing this albeit rather long write-up would be fun; it'd be great throwing my Dear Uncle's usual criticism (usually delivered through annoying, crass humor) in his face.

Backstabbing galore! But in the meantime, I shall revel in the realization that I'm actually paid for doing easy stuff! Coolio!

By the way, the first issue of National Geographic magazine (from my mom's gift subscription) arrived this week. The articles were very illuminating; stem cell research could be so promising if only people would give up their conservative qualms about it. Also, who knew that by sending two probes to take pictures of Martian rocks, scientists could infer whether there had been water, and thus life, on Mars?

Thanks Mom! You always know exactly what I need. I miss you. :(

I found my cellphone!!

2005-10-13T09:05:00.000+08:00

This time, I think I shall have to do some explaining.

Apparently, I left my cellphone at the Filipino Department before our oral report to Mr. Coroza. So, after an agonizing morning of calling and texting my own phone (thanks Tammychan for letting me use yours!), finally the guy from the Fil Dept. answered and directed me to go there.

Needless to say, before this episode I was really panicking, because I thought my cellphone had been stolen (note to self: NEVER put your phone in your pocket!). When I told my dad, he didn't go ballistic; in fact he was pretty stoic about it, except when he told me that if I didn't find it, he'll just buy me a cheap phone since I'll lose it anyway.

Okay. Punishment for carelessness received.

All things considering, it's been one hectic week. Though I did lose my phone on account of it, against all odds our group got an A in the oral report! I received a B+ on my Lit long test and another B+ on a paper. Math went badly, though (another note to self: 3P/P is not equal to 2P!). I also think that my Botany finals went badly; I mainly focused studying on respiration and reproduction, while 70% of the exam was devoted to hormones and photoperiodism, which were the topics that our teacher discussed the least.

Ah well. Maybe aiming for a DL is just wishful thinking.

Anyway, now that the semester is finally over, I can hibernate for a month! Finally, all those sleepless nights will be redeemed...

..or not. When I woke up this morning, I found a note from my dad asking me to edit another write-up, this time for the Loan Management System (LMS), a new product of the beloved Orange Innovative Technologies, Inc.

I think I am officially the youngest employee of the Asialink Group of Companies.

Isn't there such a thing called child labor?

I lost my cellphone!!

2005-10-11T21:24:00.000+08:00

Self-explanatory.

This is one of those days wherein I really wish I had magic powers. Or even memory powers.

Now I can't concentrate on studying for my lit finals.

I am not a secretary

2005-10-10T00:32:00.000+08:00

My dad just asked me to revise a write-up made by one of his employees from UP Los Banos regarding his new company, Orange Innovative Technologies, Inc.

Once again, my dad treated me like a personal secretary whose English and typing skills are free of charge. *sigh*

Of course, I am proud that he entrusted me with totally redoing his company's write-up, which will be posted in their website. The original draft made by my dad's employee was horrendous anyway, with lots of grammatical errors, wrong tenses and subject-verb agreement, and an annoying amount of redundant and vague statements that looked as though they were written by grade school students.

Example:

"Mr. [name of CEO] is started the Orange Innovative Technologies, Inc."

Ok. The draft really needed an editor, no doubt about that. But why had it been me? Didn't my dad have other employees to do it? Is this a clue as to how incompetent his employees are, especially as, after he had seen my revised edition of the write-up, he wanted me to make another write-up for another of his companies (Forbes Consultancy Corp.)?

I should really be charged for this. I want an allowance raise!

This is a serious bout of backstabbing. I. Must. Stop.

Meanwhile, I feel so doomed for my Botany lec finals later. I wasn't able to download the handouts of my classmates' reports since according to Yahoo! "the group has exceeded its download limit, please try again later". And when is later, may I ask? After 24 hours? Hello, I damn *@$%^&! need the handouts NOW since they're included in the finals!

Breathe, steph. Breathe. After 3:30 pm later, everything related to Botany can be wiped out of my brain.

The lull between two storms

2005-10-07T19:44:00.000+08:00

An update! At last, at last!

Since it was already established in the previous post that I blog for myself, once again this entry is going to be filled with the mundane happenings in our protagonist's life.

This is the lull between two storms; more specifically, the weekend between Hell Weeks One and Two. Our protagonist set a new record for herself by sleeping for only one precious hour a day due to her preparation for the Botany lab project, the Filipino final exam, and the English and Lit papers. In fact, if you are personally acquainted with our protagonist, you may notice eyebags that are actually larger than her eyes and are as deep as the Grand Canyon. You may also notice that our protagonist undergoes short spells of alternating catatonia, anxiety, mania, and simple yet sometimes ridiculous absent-mindedness.

However, despite our protagonist's perilously low energy levels that may be compared to the low-battery warning persistently flashing in cellphones about to deactivate, she still managed to produce good results in her various endeavors. She is extremely elated, not to say ecstatic and exultant, to have achieved an A in her fourth Math long exam (which covers such inane and insane concepts such as logarithms and inverse functions) for which she only studied 30 minutes the night before, against the chaotic backdrop of Botany presentation practices in her groupmate's exploited condo. Moreover, she is extremely satisfied to have received another A in her English eyewitness paper, which is further amplified by the fact that she did not attend the consultation with the English teacher regarding the delicate form in which persuasive points have to be implicitly developed in the said paper. On the other hand, she is grieving for the mediocre result of the last Botany lab exam (which was a C+); not that she didn't expect it, since she had not studied at all for it due to her focused studying on the minute yet salient points of photosynthesis.

Unfortunately, the adventures of our lovable (?!) protagonist are not yet over (alas for the extinct sleep!). The final exams for Botany Lec, Math, and Lit are looming without the particle of assurance that the questions would be mere chicken feed, while the pressure is upon her to hone her meager ability of verbal expression in Tagalog in order to perform respectably in the oral report for Filipino, which will compose no less than 25% of her already pitiable grade.

This is the lull between two storms, the deep breath before the final plunge in the last days of her first semester in the wonderfully harsh world of college. Take advantage of it while possible, since in the next few days all hell will break loose (from both the obscure and convoluted questions in exams and the sleep-deprived brain of our protagonist).

In other words, don't expect to hear from me for the next few days.

Where is my Felix Felicis?

Currently feeling: as if my dendrites and axons are not working.

Why do I blog?

2005-09-23T21:44:00.000+08:00

It seems like my blog is undergoing an identity crisis.

I put effort into composing meaningful and relevant blog entries. I obsessively debate over the right layout to use. I religiously edit entries whenever I spot grammatical errors in them.

But why do I do it?

Why do I do it when this blog is only an obscure bit of webpage stuck in a little corner of the Internet? Why do I do it when everytime I lovingly scroll down the blog page, I always see that nobody bothers to comment on any of my posts? Why do I do it when I know that nobody reads anything I write? Why do I put so much effort into writing meaningful posts when all of the creative energy that I've poured into the effort will eventually degenerate into senseless bits of gibberish and kilobytes, unread? For whom am I writing? A small circle of friends and family members who, at the end of the day, will get absolutely nothing from and will forget everything about what I wrote?

The truth is, nobody really cares about the mundane, banal, and day-to-day experiences of another person's life. No matter how well the blog's layout is designed and no matter how impressive my writing style and vocabulary is, nobody really cares about what I had for breakfast last Thursday, September 22. Nobody really cares whether I got an F in Filipino, or whether I had been freakishly bored during a two-hour-long break between subjects. The majority of web surfers won't find interest or controversy in the ordinary gripes of an ordinary college student with an ordinary life. There's nothing special about me that I should broadcast to the world; I'm not a PhD, a CEO of a major business establishment, or a famous celebrity or athlete. I am not a person whose life features a lot of achievements or intrigue; I'm not a personality who deserves to be put in the spotlight. Ultimately, what I write in this blog won't make a change and a difference in reader's lives. It won't trigger a cataclysm, spark a debate or even a discussion in a comment thread. Nobody's interested, nobody cares, nobody gets inspired, nothing changes.

So why do I do it?

I honestly don't know anymore. I don't know why I waste a lot of time in writing posts with stupid would-be reflective thoughts, when nobody reflects on them after all. Maybe it's because I can develop writing and critical skills in writing almost daily posts. But then, why publish those posts at all if they're merely meant for writing exercise?

So what's the point of blogging?

Maybe it's because I like feeling that I have a little corner all to myself in the vast virtual world that is the Internet. Maybe this is my way of establishing myself as an identity whose ideas and opinions are just waiting to be read. Or maybe something admittedly more selfish but somehow closer to home: maybe blogging for me is just a tool through which I siphon off reflections, complaints, and anger that otherwise rage inside my head, and publishing is just a way for me to admire the written work itself in a fancy Photoshop-driven setting.

It's time I shed off all pretensions. If for no one else, I blog for myself. For Steph.

And the number-of-page-visits counter can just go to hell.

The next endangered species: SLEEP

2005-09-22T02:11:00.000+08:00

When I'm a PhD, I will tinker with our genes and chromosomes to find a way to scrap the human necessity for sleep to increase work and study time, which will eventually lead to a dramatic increase in productivity, GNP, GDP, education levels, and overall work-efficiency. Instead, people will be in constant hyper-mode given high levels of consumption of caffeine which will serve as their replacement method of energizing.

Hayyyy. I wish people didn't need to sleep.

Botany is a vacuum that slowly sucks all my life away...

Botany is God. And I am the human sacrifice.

This is a serious blog

2005-09-20T22:12:00.000+08:00

Gone are the days when a blog is just my online diary. Gone are the days when this blog is merely a dumpsite of all my jumbled emotions, experiences, failed goals, whatever.

I am declaring this blog a serious blog. I mean it.

It's about time I do something meaningful with this worthless excuse for a webpage. It's about time I attempt to establish some sort of commentary of recent issues that take the world by storm. It's about time to kill the perceptions of people that a blog is an excuse to freely commit wrong grammatical errors and not have a teacher subtracting points every time you do. It's about time I take this blog to the next level, somewhere beyond the mediocre levels of dot-dot-dot and one-whole-yet-discontinuous-sentence-per-post blogs.

Why am I doing this? I got inspired, man (no, I don't have a new crush, haha). During my (relatively) long hiatus from blogging, I encountered really great blogs such as The Sassy Lawyer's Journal (which is one of the greatest and most-visited Pinoy blogs), Mini-Microsoft's blog, and Molly.com whose posts really say something other than the ordinary humdrum of "Today I did [fill in the blanks]."

For starters, let me get started on a much talked-about (and blogged-about) feature from BusinessWeek about the migration of Microsoft employees to Google.

Indeed, there are areas of excitement within Microsoft. One is MSN, the Internet operation, where the search group is the underdog competing against Google. Another is the Xbox group, which is racing full speed against Sony Corp.'s (SNE ) leading PlayStation 2 to win over the next generation of video gamers. It's launching Xbox 360 this Christmas, months ahead of PlayStation 3. "If you take a look at where we're going with innovation, what we have in the pipeline, I'm very excited. The output of our innovation is great," says Ballmer. "We won the desktop. We won the server. We will win the Web. We will move fast, we will get there. We will win the Web."

Here's a blog about that from Molly.com:

The Web is not a prize to be won, and Mr. Ballmer’s attitude is deplorable in the light of what the Web means to the world, to users, to designers and developers and to put it into Microsoft parlance, customers.

The Web belongs to everyone. The Web’s core vision and value is to be platform independent. Microsoft has no right to think it can win a tool that is for the people, of the people, and ultimately - by the people.

No Mr. Ballmer, you will never win the Web for one very good reason: We the people will make sure you never do.

Although Molly (whoever she is) has an admirable People-Power-ish attitude, I can't help thinking that Microsoft actually did somewhow "win" the web, and the people actually allowed it. Case in point: the vast majority of web users around the globe continue to use Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser even though it sucks (see one of my previous posts). People do have the option to use Firefox/Opera/Safari, but they still use IE, and what's more, they even tailor their websites to be "best viewed in Internet Explorer". Admittedly, monopolizing the browser used to view the web is a far cry from "owning" the web itself. But still, given Microsoft's history of bashing out the competition and hogging all the customers with its cheesy virtually-the-same-after-ten-years software (think the Windows OS and the MS Office apps), would the day come when it will actually "buy" and "own" the Web (gulp!).

But then, maybe Ballmer's "deplorable" statement is actually just a pep talk to his not-so-happy shareholders. Haha.

But how dare he say that "the output of our innovation is great"? What innovation? Microsoft nowadays is considered as a big, lumbering, slow fuddy-duddy company that follows on the heels of other smaller yet more creative companies.

One reason some employees say Microsoft isn't innovating enough: It's too busy upgrading Windows. With some of its key breakthrough features gone, Vista's improvements include better handling of peripheral devices, such as printers and scanners, and cutting in half the time it takes to start up. Those are needed improvements, and there's no doubt that hundreds of millions of copies will be sold as people upgrade to new PCs. But the changes are hardly the stuff of cutting-edge software engineering. "So much of what Microsoft is doing right now is maintenance," says Mike Smith, a former software architect at Microsoft who left the company in 2003 to work for a Bay Area startup.

And that leads to an even more worrisome problem: discontent among its software programmers. Instead of coming up with the next great technology, Microsoft programmers have to cater to its monopolies. But top-flight engineers want to tackle the next great challenge. "They want to create new worlds, not defend old ones," says a former senior executive at Microsoft. "They want to storm the Bastille, not live in Versailles."

I can't blame Microsoft employees for wanting to shift to Google/Yahoo. Finally we have the answer to why the Start button on the Windows taskbar has never disappeared since Windows '95. Finally we have the answer to why each update of Windows seemingly brings only software facelifts and nothing more.

It's not the Filipinos who are trashy - it's that letter!

2005-09-05T00:00:00.000+08:00

You probably know about this already. It's the hate letter said to be written by American radio talk show host Art Bell (though it was established long ago that he did NOT write the letter) circulating like wildfire around the web since the early nineties. Whoever wrote that stupid hate letter should be shot, tortured, killed, strangled, frozen, incapacitated, incarcerated, castrated, and basically just never allowed to see the blessed light of day ever again, not only for his apparent lack of logic, but for his outrageous lack of grammatical skills and basic knowledge of geography.

Of course, it is to be expected that I would feel offended by any hate letter directed to our race and our country. It is natural; any person with a sense of nationality and identity would feel that way. But this letter not only offends my sense of nationality but my common sense as well (increasingly we get the sense that common sense becomes less and less common).

To clarify this, why don't I post an excerpt of the hate letter? This is taken from the excerpt in my English module (see, the hate letter's so damn infamous that it even snaked its way into my usually boring English class!).

Filipinos....*make me puke* ("Hate letter against Filipinos")

As we've all come to notice, in the past few decades, Filipinos have begun to infest the United States like some sort of disease. Their extensive involvement in the US Armed Forces is proof of the trashy kind of qualities all Filipinos tend to exhibit on a regular basis. You can see this clearly by studying the attitudes and cultural icons of most Filipino Americans.

Origins of Pinoys/Pinays: Are they really Asians? Well we've come to accept the fact the Filipinos come from a part of the world known as South East Asia. But the term "Asia" is used in the wrong way. You may notice that contemporary Filipino Americans try very hard to associate themselves with groups that we know as Asian. There is no connection and here's why. The Philippines is a Third World country.

Nothing respectable has EVER been created by Filipino people during our entire human history. Young Filipino men in America have become obsessed with "import racing". They have an enormously perverted affection for Japanese cars. It's a common phenomenon. In their minds, these Filipinos somehow believe that they are Asian and that it somehow connects them to Japanese people and Japanese cars. It's even funnier that, in Japan, Filipinos are heavily discriminated against. The only Filipinos that can live successfully in Japan are the Filipino prostitutes. But that's the case for most Filipino people no matter where they live in the world.

Now we've come down to this fact...and it is a fact.

Nothing in Filipino culture can be seen as Asian. They have no architectural, artistic, or cultural influence which is in ANY way Asian. Thinking of the great countries in Asia such as Japan, Korea, and China there is no way you can possibly connect the Philippine Islands. This assault by Filipino Americans to connect themselves with the great peoples of North East Asia is foul and disgusting. Try visiting a young Filipino's web site too. You'll see something called the "Asian IRC Ring". It has to do with the chatrooms. The most horrible thing about this is that these TRASHY people are trying to associate themselves with Asia again!! People in Asia don't act, like this at all. What we are seeing here is the natural Filipino in it's element with full access to technology and this is how they act! You will consistently see this behavior over and over again. They must believe that they are some how related racially or culturally to North Asians. But it's completely WRONG! There might have been some distant contact with China and even less with Japan during World War II, but these people are actually more closely related to African Americans and Mexican Americans. This is the natural "Trash" element in Filipinos manifesting itself. Nothing good has ever come from the Philippines and nothing good ever will.

My initial thoughts after reading this is that the writer must be absolutely stupid. He is closeminded and biased and his arguments have no basis at all. He does not even seem to possess knowledge on the most basic geography. His arguments are so prejudiced to the point of ridiculousness. For these reasons, I disagree with him (of course!).

For one thing, the author seems to be working under the notion that the only Asian countries are Japan, Korea, and China, while other countries that geographically belong to the continent Asia but whose cultures seem to be different from East Asian culture should not be considered Asian. If such were the case, then India is not an Asian country. Neither are Malaysia, Thailand, Saudi, Indonesia, Iran, and Pakistan. But obviously, this is not true (check the world map if you're doubting). Such is the character of Asia - diverse cultures not limited to Shinto shrines, belief in dragons and Chinese calligraphy. So how did the author know that "people in Asia don't act like this at all" given Asia's cultural diversity?! Thus we can see the narrowmindedness of the author.

It is stupid to conclude that the Philippines is not Asian because it is a Third World country. A country's racial and cultural identity should not be compromised by its economic performance. It is true that there are a lot of Filipino prostitutes in Japan, but they are not the only Filipinos who can live successfully there and in other countries in the world. Who does the author think supplies the world with qualified doctors, nurses, scientists, engineers, and a third of the world's seafarers?! Who does he think teaches English to young Chinese and Japanese children, and cares for their senior citizens? Who does he think provides cheap labor to manufacturers so that the profits of global companies would be maximized?! His argument is based solely on observation. It has no basis on objective fact, and is tantamount to racial discrimination.

There are also several points which I find funny. Since when has the Filipinos' involvement in the US Armed Forces a proof of their "trashiness"? Does this mean that all soldiers are trashy just because they are in the Armed Forces? And for that matter, is it really a fact based from objective data that Filipinos are "extensively involved" in the US Armed Forces, or is that based on mere observation? Also, why is it that the author concluded that "nothing respectable has ever been created by FIlipinos" just because they like Japanese cars (which a lot of people, not just Filipinos, do) and because some like to join Asian chatrooms? I am a "young Filipino", and I have a web site (this blog), but I do not join Asian IRC Rings. Again we see that the author's arguments are not logical because they form prejudiced conclusions based on little observations.

Needless to say, the author's intentions backfired on me. Instead of being convinced that Filipinos are trashy, I remain resolute that it's the author - and his letter - who should be chucked in the bin.

It's too late to tell, but I'm going to anyway

2005-09-04T01:16:00.000+08:00

Whew, it's been a long time since I posted here (cleans off the cobwebs and dust).

You might be wondering why I changed layouts AGAIN after using the last one for less than two months (what?! *gasp*). You see, I wanted to scrap the whole Iframe-based concept and change my blog into a tables/div layout. Why? For a lot of reasons: to save space, to make the content centralized (and less scattered among obscure pagehosting sites in the Net), to increase the blog's loading time......AND because I finally ditched Internet Explorer for Opera (Opera doesn't support transparent Iframes, so viewing my blog on that browser is a sort of headache).

You might be asking "why did I change my default web browser to Opera, when it doesn't even support transparent Iframes?". It is because Opera's incapacity to view transparent Iframes is a small price to pay for Opera's speed, better-looking and more space-efficient user interface (it is skinnable and it supports tabbed browsing, meaning my taskbar will never be cluttered again), and security.

Case in point: web viruses, spyware, trojans, malware, etc. These programs are usually directed to Internet Explorer, since it is the most widely-used browser on the planet (about 94% of people around the world use it). Thus, only very few malicious programs get directed to Opera. Thus, I wouldn't be barraged by the usual porn pop-up ads, and my computer won't crash again (yay! my computer crashed two times already because of spyware).

The only problem is, it's hard to make sites that would look nice on both browsers (as well as Firefox). Just a while ago I was admiring this blog's new layout on Opera (Puss in Boots is sooooo purrrfect!), and suddenly it crossed my mind to view it in Internet Explorer, just to see if it looked the same. Lo and behold, the background of the content and navigation divs looked all messed up; I had to put an extra bit of background-repeat code in the internal CSS stylesheet to fix it up.

Oh well. It's just another reason why I hate, hate, HATE Microsoft.

On the lighter side, I have received my advisory marks about a week ago. And here they are (just to be on the safe side, I won't tell what school I come from. that'll deter the potential kidnappers. :D)

Communication in English: B+
Intro to Literature: B
Sining sa Pakikipagtalastasan sa Filipino: C+
Botany Lab: B
Botany Lecture: B
Modern Math: B+
Taekwondo: *

Whaha. I always knew Filipino would be my Achilles' Heel, what with the Terrifying Penguin Hermeneutics-obsessed Ph.D. candidate as my teacher.

Not VERY good, yet not bad at all. :) At least, not as bad the usual gloom-and-doom predictions of most first-year students.

About Taekwondo: it's really senseless to have PE as a subject, because it's grades are not computed in the QPI. HOWEVER, I am rejoicing because after half a year of struggling at the bottom of the Taekwondo food chain, I have finally been promoted to a High Yellow Belt. Yup, I skipped the Low Yellow part. :) Great!

Yes, I know that I'm cramming at least a month's worth of experiences into a single post, but give me a break here: that month was so FULL of long exams, midterms, projects, essays, etc. that I could barely breathe for life.

Weeping over my mediocre grades

2005-08-10T20:24:00.000+08:00

As soon as I got home, I seriously felt like weeping.

Due to the absence of that damn driver who chose, of all the days in the week, a weekday, to get married, I had to commute to school for the first time in my college life(I wasn't alone though; Dad insisted on having the maid accompany me, as if I wasn't in college). I have to admit, though, that because of this I now have a great appreciation for our (private!) car, even though the driver seems to love applying the Law of Inertia (read: sudden braking). I never had a greater appreciation for the MRT and LRT lines than I have now; if it wasn't for their existence (though the MRT looks like a dingy sewer next to the LRT lines), I'd be stuck with slow buses and jeepney OR expensive taxis. I totally admire hard-core commuters now, because I never thought that it'd be THIS hard to walk under the hot sun, in the stiflingly humid air.... not to mention the annoying trike ban along Katipunan just when I needed the tricycles most (the driver will be coming back tomorrow).

Also, I now have a greater picture of my grades in Filipino and Botany Lab...which all seem to spell GLOOM and DOOM. Though my grades (thankfully) aren't a depressing row of Ds and Fs, they average on a mediocre, banal, boring, average B. My english and lit grades could be pretty fair, but I haven't received my advisory marks on them yet. Botany Lab is depressing (I mean, I got a 55.5/70 in one set of lab exercises), and Filipino just HELLISH (although I got a rare B+ on one quiz, the others range from C+ to D). Dammit, am I this dumb or what????!?!.

It is only now that I realize how easy my life was in St. Paul. Though we were constantly barraged with the usual multiple-quizzes-and-long-tests-and-projects-a-day, the standards and expectations are not that high. And besides, low grades were always redeemable through The Miracle of Standard Deviation. In college, however, that blessed "adjusting of grades" is non-existent; in other words, we reap what we sow. Argh, I must have been sowing really BAD plants lately, else I haven't used fertilizer that much (hydroponics, anyone?).

I swear, I AM going to raise my grades. I am going to aim for an A (yeah....riiighhht). And that would mean studying for the Botany Lab exam tomorrow, the Math long test on Friday, the Math midterms (omigosh!) on Wednesday next week, the PE midterms, the Lit long exam, the Botany Lec long exam, the list just goes on and on and on and on....

I swear, when I arrive home tomorrow, I will NOT be compelled to weep anymore.

Let's just hope that I won't faint from sheer stress, shall we?

Harry Potter: Children's Books No More

2005-08-06T19:44:00.000+08:00

I went to this blog to admire my handiwork on the layout when I realized that I haven't posted a review for Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince.

Though I can definitely say that this sixth installment of the phenomenally popular series is darker than its predecessors owing to the maturity of the protagonist/title character, it's too mature and PG-13 for comfort.

I agree that the plot has to get darker and more complex (yes, once again an important character is murdered by someone whose loyalties seem to be ambiguous). I agree that Harry Potter has to have some kind of a love life even though he's marked as a future murderer/victim; I mean, I would have been surprised not to find anything on the typical adolescent fling in a book about sixteen-year-olds. In fact, I actually liked the interesting little emotional skirmishes (case in point: Ron and Hermione). The numerous kissing - or snogging - scenes were overdone and hilarious, at least, in my point of view.

But would the parents of the young Harry Potter groupies be as amused when their kids start asking them what slut means? Or maybe, what exactly Ron and Lavender were doing as they were thrashing around like a pair of eels all over the place? I'll admit, it's never too early to make kids aware of the birds and the bees, but eels??? Come on, people: I know that things can get wild when adolescent hormones surge, but Rowling writes as if her characters had an overdose of steroids. I wouldn't be surprised if (as I found on one website whose URL I can't remember), Harry Potter would eventually bed one of his hero-worshipping groupies in Book Seven.

One thing is for sure: what with its increasingly darker, wilder, gloomier, and death-filled content, Harry Potter is fast evolving from the long-ago time when it was confined to the Children's Section at the back of the bookstore, and some of its most notable content were quirky long-bearded Headmasters and weird Every Flavor Beans. No longer is its audience confined to eager kiddies obsessed (as we all once were) with magic and fanciful unicorns; in fact, the series seems to age and mature with the children with whom the series was first introduced once upon a time. It could even become an adult-worthy classic if Book Seven was dealt with in an intimate yet grand and epic scale worthy of Tolkien's Lord of the Rings.

Actually, I can't help feeling resentful at Rowling, because in spite of the questionable merits of Book Six (I still think that Books Three and Five were so much better), I immediately hankered after Book Seven upon reading the last line of the damn book.

I sure do hope that Book Seven has no more snogging than is absolutely necessary.

Old life, new layout

2005-08-01T20:06:00.000+08:00

Isn't it about time I updated this blog?

In a fit of creative obsession I painstakingly crafted the new graphics in Adobe Photoshop over a whopping four days (and counting). I posted more info about the layout in the about page. I hope you like it. :-D.

Anyway, college life is fast becoming a "fiasco" (for want of a better word). I mean, for the first time in my whole life as a grudging yet responsible and almost law-abiding student, I have cut classes. Granted, it was only Taekwondo class; PE grades aren't included in the QPI. And besides, I already know all the white-belter forms the subject teaches. I felt that I deserved a break, especially since I stayed up until 3am the night before to edit and mutilate (and wholly redo) the lab report made by one of my groupmates (fortunately the one-group-lab-report-per-week scheme was scrapped in favor of individual answers). I am NOT feeling guilty...nope...nuh-uh (denial, anyone?).

I really should be moving on now; that gripe's over and done with. The more pressing issue right now is "How am I going to redeem myself in Botany???". We were just given our project details, specs, and dates of submission last week, as if we weren't busy enough trying to catch up and process the voluminous information force-fed into our brains every session. Yes, I am trying to catch up; I already bought the Bio book by Starr (unfortunately, I couldn't find the pretty colored International Edition version of the book, so I settled with the grimy yet cheap black-and-white Philippine version instead). I hope that next time I will at least have SOME idea what the prof's talking about.

I just read Holes by Louis Sachar for my Lit class. Though it is a children's/young adult's book, it actually has none of the corniness/preachiness/inane nonsense of most in its genre (think C.S. Lewis's Chronicles of Narnia and Sweet Valley Twins); I mean, come on, it's about time a children's book dealt with the harsh, not-so-pretty and magical, but REAL facts of life. It actually touches on the reality of social issues such as child labor, poverty, miscarriages of justice, social stigmas, crime and punishment, etc. etc. The plot has many back stories in it, which in the first part of the story confused me as to their significance to the main storyline, but actually provided some cool bits of plot twists along the way. Actually, Holes strikes me as a Da Vinci Code for kids, except for the fact that the former actually has better character development.

It reminds me of another thing. I have to do my Lit and English worksheets!

But before that, I think I'll edit some of the grammatical errors and typos in previous posts.

Procrastinating.....again!

Bored again

2005-07-18T09:59:00.000+08:00

I think I am deliberately killing myself.

I slept at 3am last night because I was reading Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, the much-awaited sixth-installment of the series. Though my head was pounding and my eyes felt as if they were ripping from their sockets I had insisted on reading one more.....just one more! chapter, so in effect when I woke up on 7am later, I felt so wasted.

The fact that I had a killer two-hour Taekwondo yesterday did not help at all. Granted, I know Foundation Forms 1 and 2 even more than the back of my hand and I can perform them even with my eyes closed, but the killer part was actually the warm-ups which were even more hard than the forms themselves. I think our coaches won't be satisfied until all of us became accomplished gymnasts/street-fighters in their classes; I mean, not all of us could do a split, and they were pushing all of us to the ground for an agonizing five minutes until I thought my ligaments and muscles were torn and permanently disabled for further use. Dammit.

The icing on the cake was that my sister and I just knew that we could have been promoted to the yellow belt months earlier - meaning we wouldn't have wasted this much tuition and we would have advanced more quickly and we would have got to doing much more exciting stuff like sparring.

By the way, I'm writing all of this in the CTC computer lab in the school, because I have a whopping four-hour break to consume until 1:30 and it's only 10:30. I am fast running out of things to do and I hope I don't go MAD in the process!

I can't wait to get home and finish that damn Harry Potter book! It's a lot more fascinating now that Ron and Hermione seems to be getting in a really complicated and totally adolescent love-hate-fight-make-up relationship. Meanwhile Harry has been developing attractions for (guess who!) Ginny, whom he actually jilted during his second year. Yikes.

In the meantime, he and Dumbledore has been piecing together memories of various people of their experiences with Voldemort (a.k.a. Tom Riddle) in order to discover more about his past and thus find out about any possible weaknesses he might have. It's a very old war strategy, actually, reminiscent of Sun Tzu's The Art of War (I actually read the first few chapters; it was a very fascinating book), wherein the old Chinese war advisor wrote that to defeat your enemy, you have to know him first, or something to that effect (in translated Chinese, of course).

I am soooo damn bored. I wish I hadn't stayed up until 3am, because if I hadn't I would have been feeling more alive today. Actually I was only reading until 2am, and I couldn't sleep because of my sister's noise in cutting up what seemed like extremely thick and crisp paper for her scrapbook.

An unexpected thread through seemingly disparate elements

2005-07-15T19:00:00.000+08:00

I never thought Filipino class could be so...ENLIGHTENING.

We were discussing literary theory through a text by Jonathan Culler entitled "Language, Meaning, and Interpretation" which is actually the fourth chapter in his book "Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction"...but I believe I mentioned all this in a previous post where I was complaining that the self-proclaimed short introduction was not really short at all, but long, tedious, tortuous, and hard to understand.

Excuse me? Did I really say that?

I take it all back now.

Although the text explained some pretty boring stuff about the poetical and hermeneutical way of interpreting texts and the fine distinctions between meaning, interpretation, and context (for the satisfaction of critical theorists and linguists), it also put forward some really interesting concepts on the nature of conventions and institutions - why most people mindlessly follow systems without questioning their limitations and weaknesses.

It's the mind-boggling question that have apparently been bothering linguists and theorists for a lot of time as they attempt to concretize and articulate that which can't really be explained through words but can only be felt and experienced. According to Culler, the system of language is an arbitrary convention; in other words its the system used and agreed upon by everyone in the society. Thus language concretely manifests and expresses the ideologies, the principles, and the beliefs of the culture or the society that uses it.

However, language, and thus ideologies, are not without their pitfalls. People can only think , understand and communicate with each other through language, but there are feelings that people can't express through words or phrases. Similarly the ideology that runs a society has weaknesses; that's why Karl Marx proposed communism because the capitalist ideology unjustly upholds the status quo (in other words, it holds the rich capitalists in power and supresses the laborers and the poor). Though some people see these weaknesses, they are called "radicals" or "leftists" because they go against THE SYSTEM FOLLOWED BY THE MAJORITY and propose an "ideological change", or a change in the system that defines and limits the structures of society.

This is actually why the movie "The Matrix" was so sensational and thought-provoking; its plot showed that people are enveloped in a world whose comfortable realities are only CONSTRUCTED and RUN for them by a system, a culture, an ideology, a convention, a machine. However, people would continue to be dumb robots enslaved and controlled by the system unless they get out of it and see it entirely and objectively - thus Neo couldn't grasp the nature of the Matrix until he got disconnected from it and saw those endless human-harvesting fields. More ironically, people who do see the weaknesses of the system have to destroy it by attacking it from within (thus the repeated soujourns into the Matrix by Neo and the other rebels, whom I can't help likening to local communist NPAs).

Thus throughout history there have been what are considered radical groups who have been pushing for change. However, they have never been more heard and more prominent than they are now, what with the emergence of terrorists who crumble the American pride, security, self-esteem along with the Twin Towers with a single bomb. However, much closer to home is the increasing volume of the energetic and perpetually discontented voice of the youth (that means us) who scream out their defiance in the form of rock music through artists like my beloved Incubus who croon and whine out lyrics such as:

Make Yourself
If I hadn't made me, I would've been made somehow.
If I hadn't assembled myself, I'dve fallen apart by now.
If I hadn't made me, I'd be more inclined to bow.
Powers that be would have swallowed me up, but that's more than I can allow.
If you let them make you, they'll make you papier-mache.
At a distance you're strong, until the wind comes then you crumble and blow away.
If you let them fuck you, there will be no foreplay.
But rest assured, they'll screw you complete 'til your ass is blue and grey.
You should make amends with you.
If only for better health.
But if you really want to live, why not try and Make Yourself?
If I hadn't made me, I'dve fallen apart by now.
I won't let 'em make me, it's more than I can allow.
So when I make me, I won't be papier-mache.
And if I fuck me... I'll fuck me in my own way.
You should make amends with you.
If only for better health.
But if you really want to live, why not try and Make Yourself?
Make yourself.

Although we are considered callow, immature, and inexperienced, we do want to be the ones responsible for our own lives, find or make our own opportunities, fight our way through the world. Though we know that we will eventually face obstacles that would seem insurmountable, it is the thrill of facing challenges and breaking senseless rules - breaking the barriers of systems and conventions - that add to our notion of uniqueness, power and self-worth.

Hmmmm...the Terror of the Filipino Department WAS right. Reading unusual and even obscure literature widens your "horizon of expectation" through the fusion and addition of various and sundry standards and principles.

Ha. Don't you wish you know what I've been talking about? Consider it an inside joke of Fil 11 Sec X, and you'll be fine.

Hold the wheel and drive

2005-07-09T18:35:00.000+08:00

Inexorably, time passes by in great dollops and rushes by my consciousness, while the dreaded, stressful HELL WEEK is approaching.

Next week is definitely going to be A Journey to Hell and Back. Yup, I have two lab exams (one for Botany Lecture and one for Botany Lab), an analysis paper, and a lab report. Sigh. Those stressful, sleepless nights in my almost-forgotten High School life do serve their purpose after all.

I am feeling really thankful right now of the training I got from St. Paul. Sure, back then I complained that those unbearably strict and particular teachers were too fastidious and paranoid, but now I see their point. Because of their harsh training and settling-for-nothing-less-than-excellence attitudes, I am now able to cope with college life easily. I mean, at least I'm able to make good reports (I got a perfect score on one of my lab reports! coolness!). More importantly, I know how to work under pressure, a skill VITAL for survival in college. And of course, for coming out on top of the HELL WEEK.

In other words: I can fight the urge to procrastinate. I shall not cram.

I'm listening now to Drive by Incubus (I went on an mp3-downloading rampage last night while I was doing my analysis paper), and its message seems strangely apt for my current situation and resolve:

"Whatever tomorrow brings, I'll be there, with open arms and open eyes, yeah..."

Thanks to my St. Paul training, I'm not groping in the dark, not knowing what to do or how to accomplish these requirements of college life (unlike some people).

"Lately I'm beginning to find that when I drive myself my light is found..."

Yup. Whatever would come, would come, and I'll just have to meet it when it does.

And I'll do a pretty good job of it, too.

The End of the Day

2005-07-03T22:51:00.000+08:00

Ok. The suspense is (figuratively) killing me! We still haven't received our checked quiz papers in Filipino. If Coroza's gonna give me an F (if he hasn't done so already), he should at the very least spare me this anticipation.

On the whole, Ateneo is NOT doing a good job of making itself likable to yours truly. It preferred to wring our Saturdays from us (again) as if summer classes were not enough, and decided to give us a nice extended orientation by way of...INTACT Guidance Center Orientation.

INTACT means Introduction to Ateneo Culture and Tradition (yup, Ateneo really does love its acronyms). All freshmen are required the subject (which has ZERO credit, and therefore USELESS) once a week during their first sem. Its basically like one extended semester-long OrSem, wherein unwilling, grumbling, and begrudging students are stuffed down the throats with the Goodly Ateneo Spirituality fluff - being people for others, being the self-proclaimed "light of the Lord" - all those stuff that have been similarly crammed into my brain ever since I set foot in a Catholic school (which was ever since Grade 1).

Give us a break - I'm suffocating already! I intend to have a freakkin' life.

And Ateneo seems to be DEAD SET on taking it away from me by stripping me off the last vestiges of free time I've got left.

Don't get me wrong though. It's not as if I haven't learned something even remotely useful in that four-hour Saturday session. Since the Guidance Center administered the session, they gave us the results of personality and aptitude tests we had taken previously (yes, in a past Saturday). I received YET ANOTHER confirmation that I was an introvert who basically makes judgments based on her head and not on her heart - does that mean that I am an antisocial geekaloid? I am usually fascinated with personality analysis; we did that a lot during my Psychology elective in my fourth year. But then, I know that personality can encompass qualities more varied, complex, and even contradicting that its nature shouldn't be limited to such dichotomous categories - in other words, personality isn't simply defined in black and white. Like other things, it too has its varieites gray areas.

For example, I know that I'm mostly an introvert, but I think that I can speak and defend my ideas in public better than most of my blockmates. This isn't a vain conjecture; it really happened in my Botany class. I was explaining my essay in the usual bulleted yet connected flow in the way our High School Argumentation and Debate teacher Atty. de Leon taught us, and my blockmates were positively amazed. After that I was usually the one called by my groupmates to speak or report for them.

So I guess that in the middle of all this reflecting and philosophizing, I'm realizing one thing - that a lot of things can be so varied and contradicting. Ateneo doles out considerably less homework than St. Paul, but takes away our Saturdays and summer holidays in retaliation. My blockmates came from different backgrounds and schools, which was why they were drooling at the mouth when I explained something in the usual no-big-deal St. Paul way.

And at the end of the day, it really doesn't matter whether or not I receive my Filipino quiz paper (hopefully devoid of the big red F), or whether Ateneo makes or breaks my precious free time, or whether St. Paul-acquired habits would stay or disappear. Because I wouldn't care either. I'd always find a way to make it work in spite of the varied circumstances that fling themselves in my life.

The Lord giveth, and the Lord taketh away. And Stephanie carest not one bit.

F for Filipino

2005-06-28T17:30:00.000+08:00

I think I am going to have my First Fun, Friendly, Fantastic, Fantabulous F in Filipino tomorrow.

I am soooo looking forward to it. NOT!

Our class was assigned by Mr. Coroza, the Terror of the Filipino Department, to read Language, Meaning, and Interpretation, the fourth chapter in Jonathan Culler's book Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction, because he'll be giving a quiz on that tomorrow.

But wait! Do I hear wondering whispered voices? Because why the hell is Mr. Coroza giving us a Tagalog quiz on a hellish, complicated, and convoluted English article?!?

Because confusing and convoluted the text really is. It contained such a barrage of information and discussions presented in such a technical and over-analytical way that it produced a veritable mind-numbing effect on the reader (who happened to be ME).

Here is an excerpt of the text.

"Saussure distinguishes the system of a language (la langue) from particular instances of speech and writing (parole). The task of linguistics is to reconstruct the underlying system (or grammar) of a language that makes possible the speech events or parole. This involves a further distinction between synchronic study of a language (focusing on a language as a system at a particular time, present or past) and diachronic study, which looks at the historical changes to particular elements of the language."

Now, didn't that get your brain fried?

I could hardly even understand the English text; how in the hell am I going to answer Mr. Coroza's all-essay-type quiz in Tagalog?

That is why I am bracing myself for My First F. Good luck.

Boredom kills

2005-06-27T14:04:00.000+08:00

Boredom kills...the mind. As of 2:15 pm I am officially braindead..

I'm here in the CTC computer lab in our school, killing the 5-hour break time (9:30am-2:20pm) that is the curse of free cuts in filipino and math (free cuts are usually fun, but this is one time that I wish I had classes just to get my brain up and running). Might I say that this travesty wouldn't have happened if I wasn't noble enough to attend the unrequired first meeting of INTACT which starts at 8:30am?! Also, might I say that the computer in this particular lab is really slow?! Man, I thought our computer was bad; this is definitely much, much worse.

Yup. I am officially, clinically, spiritually, mind-numbingly dead.

Who would have thought that free cuts could be so boring, especially when you're stuck in school?

Take note: I spent more time today doing absolutely NOTHING than actually attending my classes.

Think about that. But then again, I'd rather not. As I said, I'm braindead.

How will I ever sit through my next English classes?! Oh, the relentless extension of BOREDOM!

And how will I ever muster enough will and brainpower to do my Botany paper and study for the quiz?!

Maluwag nga sa college. Somehow, I find myself wishing for my high school's strangulation study habits instead.

MICROSCOPES + HEAT = STRESS

2005-06-23T20:53:00.000+08:00

We had our botany lab session today from 7:30-11:30 - FOUR STRAIGHT HOURS OF SQUINTING THROUGH A MICROSCOPE trying to find obscure, elusive, tiny, and TRANSPARENT crystals inside plant cells.

Needless to say, it wasn't easy. And besides, since the session was so damned early, I only got to sleep for FOUR STINKING HOURS. Thus, by 12 noon (and I hadn't eaten by then either) I was almost in a knockout mode. It was a good thing that Dr. Chan didn't show for our Botany lab class at 12pm; I haven't experienced migraine yet and I didn't want to start right then.

But that is only half of the story. Read on.

I had my taekwondo class from 2pm to 3pm. It was easy because I already knew the lesson: downward blocking, upper blocking, forward stance, the kicks. It was totally easy-peasy. So maybe you'll wonder why the hell I was so damned exhausted during that very mild one-hour session when I have experienced far more intense two-hour sessions during my Saturday taekwondo lessons.

Hmm. Maybe because the martial arts room was freakkin hot and stuffy with almost no ventilation. Maybe because I found (to my utter horror!) that my cold and newly-bought water bottle had gone into hiding just when I needed it during the precious minute-long water break. Maybe because the ladies' bathroom and changing room was superbly and fantastically humid such that my sweat would be running like a river if I don't wipe my face every minute. Maybe because I only used tissue (which, curiously, was unabsorbent in this case) to wipe my sweaty face because I lent my beloved and much-needed towel to a blockmate in trouble (though I don't regret that).

And, oh yeah, before I forget to add this little tidbit that will finish of this list of woes nicely:

By using a fair, equitable, and scientific method (i.e. "maalis taya"), our botany lab group selected a leader for the next two lab reports (i.e. the one who will do all the work). And GUESS WHAT? It was me.

I might as well appreciate this early introduction to Report Stress, since lab reports are bound to get harder as the topics deepen. Time to get cracking and press my Brain's on button.

Hmm. Is it just me or does the button refuse to work?

I'm ok now

2005-06-21T19:09:00.000+08:00

I'm ok. I'm ok. I'm OK.

Mom and Dad both sympathized with me over this Lola issue, and they both said the same thing: just ignore her. It's not worth getting on her bad side, because she might just spread her gossipy much-doctored sad story from her side to the whole family such that they'll see me as an arrogant, disrespectful, ungrateful, and spoiled BRAT. Which I am not. I'm just looking out for myself and my siblings.

But this is not going to be Much Ado About Nothing, Part 2.

In fact, this day was actually tolerable, apart from the phone line busting and I had to go to an expensive internet cafe so that I could email my mom and send my research for the lab report to my groupmate in botany.

Ate KC actually got around to cooking my long-desired yet elusive spaghetti with meatballs, WITHOUT interference from my dear Lola (which is a first!). Maybe mom and dad talked to them and set things right for us.

It was our first session in PE 131 (Taekwondo) today. Though it was hot and humid in the martial arts room with my uniform on, we mostly did the easy basics: kicking, punching, stretching, etc. It wasn't hard for me at all because I already know them (and I've done them more times and under more extreme circumstances), though I think my other classmates got really exhausted after the lesson. Plus, by a fascinating twist of fate, my teacher is Coach Jec, my taekwondo instructor in Megamall. Coolers!

We've got a quiz and a homework in botany, though it's not as heavy as the legendary PILES of homework I had to sift through and accomplish during my days in St. Paul. In fact, I'm finding college life rather loose and easy - but EXPENSIVE. We just had word that our blessed Botany book is going to cost a whopping P2000, and we'll only be using it for one blasted semester. Cripes.

I'll go and fill my plate with heaps of that long-desired spaghetti with meatballs. My mouth waters at the thought! Finally, no tocino-like messes for dinner!

Much ado about nothing

2005-06-21T00:32:00.000+08:00

Ok. I had a very WEIRD text exchange with Lola Eden this morning. It started about 7am and it was based on the simple event last night, when raj ate a lot of chippy and quake cakes before 6pm and didn't want to eat his tocino for dinner (needless to say, he CRIED). When this happened, I told Lola "A kaya pala ayaw kumain ni raj. Ayaw kasi niya ng tocino eh." And then Lola said "Si ate kc yung nag handa niyan...blah blah...". However, when tam and I asked him what he liked to eat, raj said "want hotdog!". So tam cooked him hotdog and I watched over raj. (I seem to watch over raj a lot these days.)

It was also brought about by a lot of issues in the house - like the water dispenser being unplugged because papa wanted to save energy because we had 2 refs now. And of course, the thing about raj's chips and merienda being kept by lola in places where he can't get them so that he won't waste and play with them, nor eat his snacks at will.

Ok. Here was the text exchange, verbatim:

Lola: "Gud am. If u thot I unpluuged h20 dispenser u r wrong. If u thot I cooked dat tocino 4 raj rong agen. Kc cooked dat 4 4ajn sed som wud b his baon 2day. If u tink i withold chichiria from raj by keeping it in a place he can c but cant reach at ginugutom ko cya, wrong again. Even babies hav feeding tym. even in school raj is not fed every min. Dey hav fiding tym. remember when u confronted me kawawa naman c raj walang pagkain n i gav u P500? but i tink u did...raj must stil had [enough] fud den. U must also use ur head n not blieve evrything a maid sez or else u go down 2 der level. ok, i mite just as wel giv u anoder chance or else i freak out. hav a gud day. i luv u. u r my grandchild"

Comment: I think lola is getting really paranoid, because 2 out of her 3 guesses were wrong and totally UNFOUNDED. I did NOT think that she unplugged the water dispenser. I was only asking the maids who did it, and in turn the maids asked her, and they told me it was papa. I did NOT think that she cooked tocino for raj last night, because SHE HERSELF told me that ate kc did it. And frankly, I didn't even care about who did what. I just ASKED, dammit! But I DID think that she kept raj's food in a high place, and I WAS NOT WRONG, because I SAW IT myself when I and Tam just arrived from the states. I saw raj's food kept on top of the her closet, still in the grocery bags. I didn't just rely on whatever the maids tell me. I'd be stupid to do that. Lord knows, me and tam changed that na.

Me: "If ure only reluctntly givng us "another chance", then dont, assumng that we have wasted our first ones. D point is not how wel we adjest 2 us, bt how u adjust 2 us."

Am I not wrong? She's just here to take care of US, and not to have her way with everything. I mean, for example, she doesn't cook the food we like. Als, the parquet floor of the living room is sticky because she INSISTS on using pronto to polish it, kasi daw ang pledge pang furniture lang. HELLO?! Pronto is only used for tiled floors!!!! And she insists on just buying one greenex a week to clean ALL OUR THREE BATHROOMS a day. Impossible!

I don't deserve her condescencion, because I didn't do anything to begin with! Her accusations are nothing more than stupid suspicions.

Lola Eden: ***Naerase ko yung message (accidentally), but I remember that she said that the only reason that she stayed in the house was because papa insisted so. "I never wanted to stay. I am old and need peace".

Me: "Then why didnt you tell papa that u didnt want to? Come to thnk of it, why didnt you tel me directly what u had to say, and not through text?"

I hate it when people confront me through text. It means that they don't have the courage to confront and argue with a person face to face. But why is she afraid? For all her condescencion, one would have thought that she deems herself far wiser and superior to me. I really don't understand her.

Me: "E diba you did keep the food where raj can't reach it? For my part i think its impt 2 give raj choices bec he cant always fully communicate his needs."

And that's true. Though raj can speak, he sometimes does not know what words to use to express a specific need.

Lola Eden: "In dis world der is what u call symbiotic relationship, u cant just give n give nor receive and recieve."

Just so you know, that is not the real and complete definition ng symbiotic relationship. But I digress. That's beside the point.

Lola Eden: "Of course in a place he can c but cant reach. What were we there for? 3maids then n me. U mean we eat n raj dont? (Notice her fantastic jump to a weird conclusion). u know d comment of one teacher? He is ok but he seems spoiled. We r der 2 ask n 2 offer. so much is wasted which is also wrong n which may mean nothing 2 him even in later years. We shld prepare him 4 any EVENTUALITY HANDICAP AS HE IS NOW."

That was the part that REALLY REALLY REALLY REALLY got to me. Raj is NOT handicapped! In fact, from my own observation, I think he's smart, sensitive, perceptive, and methodical. Lola seems to underestimate raj's capability to understand, to perceive, to doubt, and to make his own choices. I think (it's not proven ha!) that she sees autism as if it was retardation - WHICH IT IS NOT. Dammit. Raj can't learn anything by himself if you spoonfeed him! Autistic people are SMART and SPECIAL - it's just that they perceive the world in a different way!

Me: "I read a book on autism and it said the best way to make an autistic child independent and self-reliant is to give him CHOICES. But of course they shouldnt be out of place. Please note that me and tham didnt give raj any more fud when it was nearing dinr tym. And when raj didnt lyk tocino, we asked him if he wanted hotdog and he said yes."

I received no more replies to this message. And that was good, because I was in school by that time and I didn't want to be bothered with her suspicious nonsense anymore.

I hate it that she didn't just talk to me directly. Why the HELL did she have to act so CHILDISH?!? She's bearing non-existent grudges in her overimaginative mind, dammit! She's too suspicious! And I hated it that she chose to speak out through the SAFE and UNCONFRONTATIONAL way - through text. Its so CONFUSING to argue with someone through text because you miss out on the CONTEXT - you don't get a clear picture of what the other side is really thinking and feeling because you miss out on the tone of voice, facial expression, the spontaneity, and besides you're too constricted by the limited space you're given to write a text message.

The problem with lola is that she assumes too much!

And because her argument is based almost wholly on suspicions and assumptions, then this whole text exchange is ONE BIG MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING!

And my whole day was ruined, because I received her first damn message right after I woke up at 7 am!

I told papa about this whole text thing a while ago. I said: "Hindi ko siya maintindihan! Why does she hold grudges when I don't really care about her and I don't think about her that way or that much, etc, etc, etc".

Dad said: "hindi ko rin siya maintindihan. Ganyan talaga lola mo, childish ang isip niya. Pati ako nung bata ako hindi ko rin siya maintindihan. Ganyan talaga yan, hanggang cellphone lang din siya sakin. Baka natatakot kasi. Wag mo nalang patulan...It's ok...Don't mind her nalang. Forward mo nalang sakin pag may tinetext siyang ganyan..."

I didn't expect this answer! I really thought that he would be the mama's boy again, that he would side totally and unequivocally with Lola. I never thought that dad would empathize! But it's nice to know that Tam and I are not the only ones in this family who are BOTHERED, ANNOYED AND CONFUSED by Lola's baffling, complicated, suspicious, and paranoid style of argument and attitude.

Hell! I'm not going to let her ruin my life! She's not worth it. She's not worth all this wasted time, energy, thoughts, anxiety.....and RAGE.

my first days in college

2005-06-14T19:36:00.000+08:00

I never thought college would be this much fun.

In fact, I never thought that it would be fun - at all.

During the days before the orsem I was totally apprehensive. Wait, make that nervous, clammy, butterflies-in-the-stomach anxious..because of my Fear of Socializing. I just saw our block list in the Hauoli Yahoo groups, and - wonder of wonders - I was the single damn Paulinian in the block. Damn. I didn't know anyone to begin with. In other words, I had to..MAKE. NEW. FRIENDS. I had to be a newbie l'il freshman all over again, just after I've experienced the joys (and the perks!) of being a senior in high school.

But I guess being a Freshie isn't all that bad (despite our being virtually treated like slave workers with the TNTs' incessant cries of "Mobe! Mobe!"). For one thing, our TNT Tantan was totally cool; his super friendly nature provided the much needed icebreakers during those vital first days (I never thought homosexuals could be this much fun!). And my blockmates were sociable, laid-back, and accommodating - in other words, they were not the snooty vain elitist people I expected to find in Ateneo. Sure, some of my blockmates were rich, but they sure were humble.

It's a good thing I like my blockmates this much, because I'll be spending the next four long years with them.

The only thing I'm having trouble with now is navigating the large campus of Ateneo (and the buildings all look the same too!), and the virtual abscence of AIRCONDITIONERS. Thank God Bio 11 was assigned to one of the few airconditioned lecture halls!

I don't regret now that I went to Ateneo instead of UP. I don't expect that I'll find the same bonds and camaraderie between the fiercely proud, independent, and rather radical people in UP.

But still, this isn't gonna be easy. Chances are....I just MIGHT get a low grade in Botany if I don't pull my act tightly together, because our teacher's a PhD. I think I might have to study harder than ever before, and I'm facing some stiff competition from my apparently smart classmates. I'll have some catching up to do; I'm already expecting the worst; I hope I don't get a C+ on my first sem! (Unimaginable!).

I can do this. I can DO this. College is supposed to be FUN, remember?

I only wish that I knew how to commute on my own so that I wouldn't have to be trapped in a tight schedule with the inflexible driver. In fact, I wish I knew how to DRIVE already. Anyway, college is all about INDEPENDENCE, right?

I miss my mom

2005-05-31T17:30:00.000+08:00

I miss my mom. I miss my mom.

I've never really appreciated what she did for us and for the house...until now that she'll be gone for a year. *sniff*

She was the only one considerate enough not to spare any expense on us, while not making us spoiled at the same time. When she was here, me and sis found it easier to ask for the things we need. When she was here, we didn't have to eat crummy food. When she was here, life was a lot easier, because she was in charge.

Until....now. I never realized how hard it was to have people depending on you, to have people behind your back (like my mom had)...until now. My little sis and bro are looking up to me. I'm the leader of the Baudelaire children, and I'm looking out for them. I have to be the one to see to it that all our needs are answered to. And dad isn't always here.

I hate my grannys. Haven't I said this a thousand times in this blog? They totally defeat their purpose in being here. They're supposed to be the ones looking out for us ; instead, I think WE'RE the ones looking out for them. In the malls, they just sit down and let us do whatever we like. In the house, they mostly just sit around. When they do cook food for us, it often isn't what we want. I'm the ones making inquiries on the amount of groceries left, on our taekwondo lessons, piano lessons, even the damn driving school. They let me take charge of my brother when he's crying and screaming, when the WHOLE PREMISE on their staying here is to take care of him.

They let us do the dirty work while bossing us around. And I hate it. I hate it. Lola #1 cooked burnt, bitter and alien-tasting spam for us a while ago for lunch; Lola #2 tells us to wake up when we're still sleepy or else "we're gonna get sick". I HATE THIS LIFE. I wanna get to school to get away from them, even if I have to face studying which I hate, but less so than THEM.

Sigh. I have to pull myself together. Little sis and raj are looking up to me. But still, I can't drive the feeling away.. I'm afraid...can I handle this, especially when it looks like mom's going to be away for more than a year because she can't find a job yet?

Master Yoda says: "Fear leads to anger, anger leads to hate..HATE LEADS TO SUFFERING."

Spot on, Master Yoda.

I won't LET THEM ruin my life.

I can do this. I can do this. I wanna get away from here. I wanna live in the States. I wanna be independent, and have my own big paycheck, even if it'll take me 10 years to finish the damn medicine course, just so I could WALLOW IN RANK MATERIALISM, on my own. I can do it. I'll try my best.

Master Yoda says: "No!! Try not. Do. Or do not. There is no try."

Yoda rules, as always.

Meanwhile, I've been joining fanlistings and putting their icons in my profile. Just to have something to do, to take my mind off things. I can't bring myself to read a book; I've already read most books in the house (the ones left are too corny).

Hmmm. Maybe I should just make a Yoda layout for my blog.

I don't even know why I'm posting

2005-05-29T00:33:00.000+08:00

EGADS!!!!!!!

I don't even know WHY I'm posting here. I don't even know if someone's looking - no, glancing! - at this blog, let alone reading my posts. I'm so irritated, frustrated, you know, the works- courtesy of my extremely PERFECTIONIST nature.

I was trying to remove the horizontal scrollbar bothering this iframe in the posts and profile page, but try as I might I COULD NOT get rid of the measly little useless pest.

I ALMOST CANNOT TAKE LIVING IN THIS HOUSE WITH THEM. The two grannys, I mean. They are absolutely BOSSY, PARANOID, CONDESCENDING, and basically "BENEVOLENTLY TYRANNICAL". One of them's constantly worried that we might get sick, lost, kidnapped, you know, the whole CABOODLE of disasters that MIGHT EVER, however UNLIKELY AND REMOTE, happen to any member of the race of MANKIND. Another's hiding the snacks in BIZARRE places around the house because she's worried that the maids might GOBBLE them all down.

And the worst part of it is, they are acting soooooooo SANCTIMONIOUS about it all. As if it were for our own good. Sure, it's for our own good, all right, if they want us to DIE EARLY!!!!!!

That's why we've (as in, Tam and I) suggested to our Dad to let us do the groceries instead of those two, because we wanna be in charge of the house. It was just rotten, though, that Dad didn't allow us, saying that "we should be concentrating on our studies instead" and that "we're just kids; we can't be in charge". Mom said in her first and latest email since we got back here that "we'd just have to get used to them; it's hard to teach old dogs new tricks". But WHY??? Is this the kind of sacrifice required from us so we could have our US Citizenship? Make no mistake: I REALLY WANNA LIVE THERE (it's too hot and too expensive here). It's good I do, because if I didn't I'd definitely call mom back and drive out the granns right now!

GOD, IT'S ABSOLUTELY COMFORTING to be able to VENT some of the frustration I've been feeling!!

Meanwhile Me, Tam, and Hyperactive Little Bro are feeling like the Baudelaire children in A Series of Unfortunate Events: harassed (but fortunately not lethally) by our relentless guardians, with both our parents virtually gone. Yesterday Tam and I crossed the street to Robinsons Pioneer to shop for our school stuff...ALONE, in a fit of rebelliousness, because we sort of wanted to try if we could do it.

Oh well. I CAN'T WAIT FOR SCHOOL TO START SO THAT I'LL WON'T BE SEEING THEM FOR THE WHOLE DAY! And besides, Dad told me that I could have a LAPTOP before the start of school!!!!!!!!!!!!!

WHOHOO!!!!!!!!!!! That's consolation enough - and MORE! - for me!!!

Crappy misunderstanding

2005-05-18T11:42:00.000+08:00

Mom and I had a little "misunderstanding" today.

It was like this:

I was playing my sis's Gameboy Advance. The game was Crash Bandicoot purple. It was a hard, tricky game, and my head was hurting and my eyes were popping out from frustration. After what must have been an hour of struggling, frustration, and head scratching, I finally completed a very HARD segment of the game (and got a gem and a purple crystal too!). Naturally, I shouted "Yesss! Sa wakas, tapos ko na rin!".

Unfortunately my mom was in the room, and she shushed me and told me to keep quiet in that awful nagging way of hers. So fine. I kept meek and quiet.

But that's not all. Apparently mom thought that the sound from the Gameboy was too loud too (which it wasn't to me). So she exclaimed, "Hinaan mo naman yan! Natutulog si Kendra. Kaninong bahay ba to...!!!". (Just to remind you: we are still in Portland, and sis and me are going home in 3 days.)

On and on went the diatribe. So, just to close the matter entirely, I turned off the sound coming from te Gameboy. Fine. I realized her point. No hard feelings on my part.

But apparently, mom thought I made a sarcastic move, which it totally wasn't! So then she shouted at me: "O?? Ba't galit ka nanaman?? Palagi ka nalang nagagalit sakin!!! Ay, naku! Di bale, pagkatapos ng 3 araw you'll get rid of me na!!!" (Mom isn't going home with us. She's staying here to petition us.)

CRAP. CRAP. CRAP. I stayed quiet. I didn't blow my top this time, or else there'd be another HUGE ROW that would definitely defeat the point of being quiet in the first place. And what did she think? That I was sarcastic and ungrateful? WHY???!? Because I ended the entire argument on her terms? Did she think I didn't have respect for my tito and tita (who owned the house)????? DRAT IT. I hate arguing with my mom. She gets so volatile and defensive. And I hate it when you're trying to breathe, calm down, step down and give them their way, and they throw the effort right back in your face as if it was no good.

Ohhhhh well. *sigh* *shudder* *sniffle*. At least we made it up afterwards. At least mom drew me aside and kissed my head, and I said "okay!" like it was no big deal. Who would want to prolong a stupid argument anyway? But still, I feel like I HAVE to release my pent-up feelings SOMEWHERE. And this is it.

CRAP. Crap. CRAAAPPP!!! And on top of it all, my head is hurts more, I wanna cry, and drat it! I'm bored!! What CAN a person do in a whole day stuck in the house with Thy Royal Highness Princess Kendra?!? I played the stupid Gameboy. I blogged. I let my mind rot.

LET THE WHOLE WORLD FILL WITH CRAP!!!

What?

2005-05-17T13:32:00.000+08:00

Haha! (laughs triumphantly)

Tom won in the grand season finale of Survivor Palau last night. Yehey! Among the final four, he was (in my opinion) the strongest one and the most deserving to win. He won the most immunity challenges, and at any rate he's not a double-dealer like Ian. Good thing Katie didn't win; she was a TOTAL EMBARRASMENT in the physical challenges. She wasn't even as good as Jenn, and Jenn got voted out (it was a tie actually, but she failed in the tiebreaker).

What defeated me right then was that Katie made it to the final two. HOWWWWW??? Hey, maybe because she was a BACKSTABBING LEECH, who only made it because she attached herself to Ian; and Ian got a noble itch and saved her crummy hide after she was the first to quit the challenge to the final three. Yeesh and Sheesh.

Oh well, enough about other people's lives.

But wait, what IS going on with my life? Well, what about ABSOLUTELY NOTHING? I've just touched up my blog, made some pages for links, edited the color and opacity of my tagboard, fried Spam (the meat, duh. I think I fried it good, though; at least it wasn't burnt). And oh yeah, mom bought 10 BIIIGGGG bars of CHOCOLATE because it was 10 for $10 at Fred Meyer's.

And, yeah: we are back in Her Royal Highness's Princess Kendra's house in rainy Portland, Oregon. For 4 slow freakkin days we shall HAVE to put up with the her SUPREMELY ANNOYING invectives:

Elmo computer! Elmo computer! This is while I'm editing my blog in the Net.

Music! Music! Silly song! While travelling in the car, we are condemned to listen to children's songs. Yup, we endured that for four days, 6 hours each, on the road to Disneyland, California. And more. Yup, that was WORSE than Survivor. I think.

Go shopping! This I can relate with. Absolutely.

Watch Lion King! Watch Lion King! This is while we are watching good, adult tv.

Ate Stephanie! Ate Stephanie! This is every time I want to be alone, but she STICKS to me. Ick, ick, ick!

There is, at least, a challenge to keep my mind from going crazy. We are going back home on Friday (the 20th), and we'd have to figure out HOW EXACTLY to pack the pasalubongs, pasalubongs, pasalubongs, and (guess what?) MORE PASALUBONGS in the luggage. Fortunately, Tito bought us a balikbayan box; or else we would not have space to put our CLOTHES in our suitcases. Yeesh. Our clothes (and shoes!) by the way, are a lot too. Yup, we are NOT exactly packing light. Becky Bloomwood, EAT YOUR PRADAS OUT!

Oh well. Time to GO FIGURE.

Not to mention Tammy has a veritable FORTUNE of.......(drumroll please!)..... weeelll..I shall not mention it. You'll die from a heart attack if you knew (if you were my dad, you DEFINITELY would!). Let's just say a GIANT BLACK HOLE must have been in her wallet, in the name of Gameboy, Epcot Japan, Universal....and of course, Anime, Anime, and more Anime.

Go figure THAT one out. I'm beat.

Changed my layout

2005-05-16T10:24:00.000+08:00

Hey! Greetings to potentially nobody who would be reading this blog.

Guess what: I've changed my layout, and almost wetted my pants!

I've changed the layout of my blog! I'm getting bored with that oldy-worldy parchment-y style of my old layout, so I decided to make this page a bit more....PINK.

It's 7:25 and I'm ANXIOUSLY WETTING THE COMPUTER SEAT IN ANTICIPATION of the final episode of Survivor Palau. It would be SOOOO MUCH FUN to see the four hungry, stressed-out, nerve-wracked survivors wrangle each other's throats in flaming temper!!!!!!! (Evil laugh...muhahaha!) I can't wait to see who would win! Happilly, Caryn got voted of, as she was by far the snitchiest and most expendable among the tribe.

Crikes! I almost lost my head from panic today because I thought that my beloved WHITE iPod earphones were lost! As it happened, they just fell underneath the goddamn computer table. Maybe because I was soooo sleepy yesterday that it happened. Sheeesh.

Actually, I am still on the verge of losing my head right now. The stuff that we bought in Tacoma and in Orlando were just so....MANY. I've never even realized we've shopped for so much things. Egad! We even have to take home a HUGE and bulky balikbayan box! I think, though, that after this experience, I've learned to like living here in the US, in a perpetual state of RANK MATERIALISM and SHOPPING SPREES!!!! God, I'd LOVE to be FILTHY, STINKING, DUMPSITE-LIKE RICH!!!!

I shall have to update you (as in, nobody in particular) on what happened in Universal Studios and Disneyworld, Orlando, Florida. It can, though, be summed up in three words: I GOT DIZZY.

Cheerios!

This way to the stars

I'm leaving this blog...

Holy kamote!

You were never needed in the first place

The need to escape

Holy *German* *Football* Cows

Werder Bremen vs Bayern Munich

Werder Bremen vs Bayern Munich

Boredom

News from the German (football) front

The last gasp!

The last gasp!

Because I'm feeling mentally lethargic

Procrastination is the key word here

Show me how to live

Let the good times roll

Passin' through the highway to hell

Mood swings

Trouble on the home front

Blogthings galore!

The case for lesbianism

To move, or not to move?

I just wanna say "d'oh"

15 years ago...

Old School

A cute conversation

Aftermath of the World Cup

Mom's gone now

More soccer stuff

Soccer stuff

Weird thoughts

Weird habits

Movie life

X-Men: The Last Stand and The Omen

Like father, like daughter

In the mood for music

Summer has never passed by this fast

Electric guitar lessons

Obsession

Advertisement

I am abnormal...almost, but not quite

I have a Multiply

Microsoft bashing

Block bonding

I'm wired

Sleep is a scarce commodity

The Ninth Circle of Hell

Procrastination is my curse

Temporary abstinence

Due to a creative drought...

Personality

Pinoy exotic food fear factor

Hell week

A survey taken for sheer fun

The short happy life of The Frog (aka Rana pipiens)

I wish I knew how to quit you

Hasty generalization: The fallacy I hate the most

The woeful lack of common sense

Confusion and indecision

Euphoria: An orgasm of the hearing sense

Surprise, surprise!

Eulogy for an iPod

In defense of Earth's finest (fictional) heroes

Brand new laptop!

More than that

Back with a vengeance

Catharsis

The power of illusions

A moment of infinite possibility

Make a move

They're funny, but I'm not laughing

But wait - I actually AM getting paid for it!

I found my cellphone!!

I lost my cellphone!!

I am not a secretary

The lull between two storms

Why do I blog?

The next endangered species: SLEEP

This is a serious blog

It's not the Filipinos who are trashy - it's that letter!

Holy German Football Cows