Letting it ALL OUT

This won't be inspirational or anything. I just have to air out some things and put them in my blog so that once I've gone through all these, I'd get to read this particular entry in the future and laugh at myself for ranting about tiny things which seemed so BIG at this point.

Last night, I felt so SWAMPED by work, research, school, and other little things that I do that started to pile up and eat me whole. And it's not because I'm not doing them. I actually work extra hard. I've been typing the entire day but I've only finished half of the work for the day. And each day, there's something else to do, adding up to what I haven't finished. Imagine a pile of papers piling up. higher. Higher. HIGHER. You're surrounded by all these papers and you try to start from the top but you just get to scrape off the tip coz another one gets piled on top of it. HIGHER. HIGHER. HIGHER. And then someone shouts at you "Ahh---" but you couldn't hear him and you keep on saying "what?" while trying to work... until you realize that he has been warning you... AVALANCHE!!!!!"

That's how I felt last night until Franco told me the best advice I've ever heard. SLEEP.

P.S.
I've been out of the dance floor and out of the zipping field for quite awhile. And it's driving me crazy. By hook or by crook, I'm gonna dance and zip next week!!! I'm gonna finish all these and I'm gonna dance and zip as much as I want to!

YEAH, that's the spirit!!!

AD SPACE

The countdown begins... In a week or two, you can get your copy/ies of ALL ACCESS at any Bench Store and take a peek at the behind-the-scenes photos of the Bench Fever show!

Cover photos by Hans Villarica.

Hans is the same photographer who took that photo of me wearing a white dress and flaunting my hairy forearms. ;) If this photo doesn't ring a bell, click "About Me" on the left of this page.

To HANS, the one and only Regal Shocker, *clap*clap*clap*!!! (Louis, I'm borrowing your CLAP CLAP CLAP!)

ONE MORE pahabol AD:
Watch out for SOUL MIX next month, a production of Jesuit Communications... wheeee! :) I'll keep you guys posted about the time, channel, etcetera etcetera. ;-)

Just in time

Expect this entry to be chopped into eensie weensie bits and pieces. No, not chopped. Minced.

HELLO FRIENDS! If you've noticed, I've been gone for a long time. LONG is such a relative term. More than a week of not blogging is already a record breaker for me so that's relatively "long" (atleast in my standards). But then again, I just started blogging last March so it's not really that difficult to break my own record at this point. (I began blogging a few minutes before the transition period between February 28 and March 1 to be exact. Midnight-ish).

ANYWHOOOO, I think I'll be getting busier with the research stuff so I can't promise my usual high frequency blogging... :p

But enough of the "small talk". Let me share some of my floating thoughts that would make this entry minced into pieces as promised earlier...

I had a WONDERFUL LONG WEEKEND. Franco came home. And we had mini-reunions with our friends. :) The Saturday night photos are with Duke and I'm not sure how I'd get them but I'll post them once I get hold of them. The Monday brunch photos are with Sarah and I'll post them as soon as I feel like uploading them. Haha, sorry, bitin.

My weekdays pass me by so fast that I always get surprised each time I get reminded of the date. Ha? Tuesday na? Ha? August 23 na? Ha August 24 na? Ha August 25 na? I know you get the picture... And whenever I hear Manang R say "Ang bilis ng oras"... I just nod in agreement! To those who are not familiar with Manang R, she's our (in)famous cook whom we've been with since time immemorial ;-) Yiheeee, you'll be famous Manang R!!!

Anyway, I promised myself that I'll blog something before the end of the week. Anything.

So after reading my swiftly written and minced entry, I'm leaving you with something else to read and ponder on...

Here's something I wrote which I've almost forgotten about. The time and context are not important. The entry itself is timeless, I think.

ON WRITER'S BLOCK
Sometimes life’s blocks are similar to what writers experience when there are so many things to write about but nothing substantial finds its way on paper or on screen.

Everything is in a halt. Then you realize that not everything is in a halt. You are.
You just let things flow, move, and pass you by. People move on and continue with their lives. And you’re just there standing in the middle of things.

There are so many people, so many things, and so many events. But for you, they’re just there. They’re like smoke around you. You could not touch them or clasp them in your palms. Even if you try, you could not capture them. Not even by words. And so you just keep on watching them as they float around you. You could not write.

Amidst all the thin smoke, you see light from somewhere. It seems far but you just could not tell whether it truly is or it’s just your mind telling you that it is. But whether it is far or not, you still see light. Or are those moving lights? No, dancing lights.

But you’re still not moving.

When you decided to pause at the start, you thought you could just easily move once you decided to move again.

But you don’t.

It’s like your feet have been glued on the ground. And you just keep on watching the smoke.

Then what happens to you?

You look back at your life. And all the superficiality and shallowness of it are haunting you left and right. You want to close your eyes and escape. You want to change. Tired from all these, you just want to rest and start anew.

You want to be in deep slumber because your soul is craving for nothing else but sleep, peaceful and calm sleep. But your lids, although heavy, could not and would not let you do so. They want you too keep on writing.

But nothing happens.

Nothing comes out right.

And then for some reason, that nothingness that you felt, you wrote, and you read, slowly turns into something.

And before you know it, you have written once more. It may not be the best in the world but you can call it yours. And because of this, because it is yours, it is beautiful.

philosophy 101

Ling and Kring

My youngest sister's best friend, Kring, came over our house to discuss Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle with me for her Philosophy exam tomorrow. I tried my best to recall my own Philo classes and helped her with the things that I could remember.

Did I ever mention that the Philosophy of the Human Person was one of my ultimate fave subjects in college? :p So even if I had a pile of observations to be transcribed for the research I'm currently helping out with, I was more than willing to extend my help to my "other younger sister". Although admittedly, the topics Kring had in class now were different from the ones I took up so I only helped her a teeny weeny bit.

While helping out Kring, we both saw this quote from the internet and I just had to share it with all of you:

"Excellence is an art won by training and habituation. We do not act rightly because we have virtue or excellence, but we rather have those because we have acted rightly. We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit."
- Aristotle

ON A DIFFERENT DAY OF THE WEEK

A LITTLE PUSH AND A LITTLE NUDGE
So much to do. So little time.
For the first time in history, I overslept and was late for class because of oversleeping. And the class was at 5:30PM. Ok, before you judge me, I'll just share how my day went. I was up before 6AM for my research project. I observed from 6:17am until 8:40. And then my partner and I met up with our professor to discuss some issues. And then I had another appointment at 9:30 and a very brief meeting about an article at 10:30. And then I joined the World Youth Alliance discussion and had lunch with my old college blockmate, Tammy Tan, whom I haven't seen since graduation. I missed Tammy and her Tammy-ish way of calling me "Lala Jaraaa" whenever we saw each other. When I got home at around past 3, I fixed some schedules with Franco over the phone, reviewed the rest of my schedules and papers, reviewed my notes for my evening class, and lied down on the sofa to rest for a while... and fell asleep.
When I woke up, it was almost 6pm. Ack!
I literally dashed to school. The few minutes of getting to school was a blur to me. Before I knew it, I was in my class and copying down notes as if I didn't fall asleep at all. Has that ever happened to you?

Now, I have lots of things to finish and I'm asking myself if there's enough time.
But maybe there really is enough time for everything because I still found time to blog.
Ok, now you can judge me :-)

The world is not block and white

This is my friend, Meg.

Meg and I first met during the ORSEM (Orientation Seminar) in Ateneo back in June 2000. And since then, she became one of my good college friends. She has been an oh-so-reliable benchmate who fought for our tables and carried our benches from far away places back to our area thus earning the name "Amazona". She has been my arnis teammate whose left-handedness was an asset to the team. And of course, she has always been one of my favorite divas and musicians (Jewel style) who would sometimes burst into a song wherever we were. ;)

She's in law school right now and would like to focus on issues regarding our environment in the future. (That's my kind of girl!)

I distinctly remember the first time I bonded with her as I was tinkering with her own concoction of a lip balm. (Another thing that bonded us: our being kikay cowboys.)

Anyhoo, we were discussing her love life (ahem2x) while in the library because we still didn't have a bench during the first day of class (haha!). And I guess we ended up bonding about one of the issues that we faced while growing up. We actually shared this with our other blockmate and friend, Therese. Together, the three of us became vocal about this in college: BLACK IS BEAUTIFUL. But then if we really think about it, maybe it should have been a campaign that said "Brown is beautiful". But then if we really THINK about it even more, it should have been a campaign about "learning to love and appreciate what we were born with".

It's funny (actually, NOT FUNNY) that for a people whose ancestors were kayumanggi (slightly dark skinned), we put too much emphasis on wanting to be fair-skinned. Meg grew up getting teased as "Megra". And I had my own share of slight discrimination both during my grade school days and my adolescent years. The most striking was when it was just bluntly said... "but she's too dark!" For a high school student with soaring hormones at that time, my retort to that was "WHAAAAT?". And I immediately wrote something about the issue afterwards. It's still in one of my notebooks somewhere in my drawer at present. I explained there why black (or brown) is beautiful as much as white is.

And now, several years after, I'm blogging about it. ;p

I actually felt that times have changed through the years. Although we still see a lot of whitening products out there (and still a lot of people patronizing them), there are also those who speak up about this issue. For one, there's CAT who I remember to have effectively spoken up/written about this. You can also find her viewpoints in her blog.

Although I don't have enough media mileage for this campaign, I have this little land right here (in my blog) where I am requiring all of you to say to yourself that...

"Black is beautiful."

"Brown is beautiful."

"And variety is beauty in itself."

Isn't the world even more colorful now?


Photos by Louis Fojas
My favorite green earrings courtesy of Sweet (AS walk, UP Diliman)

Tiklado

When I was a kid, I wanted to avoid my piano classes. I had my own reasons and they were... uhh, childish:
1) Back then, I didn't want to play the piano because I couldn't read the notes as fast as the others. My music sounded like badly chopped melody.
2) Playing the piano meant that I couldn't play other games/toys as much as I wanted to on weekends.
3) Playing the piano meant I couldn't watch my favorite TV shows as well [and to think that we were banned to watch TV during weekdays! house rules.]
4) Playing the piano meant we were forced to perform during reunions instead of running around with other kids.
5) Playing the piano meant I had to perform in recitals, wear those itchy dresses, and fear that my fingers would freeze right in the middle of everything and I'd end up not finishing my piece.

But while growing up, I learned to appreciate the only musical instrument I knew how to play. (Remember, proximity and not distance makes the heart grow fonder :p)

Right now, I still have a few piano pieces stored in memory. But the best ones for me are the ones I play that remain unwritten. They're the ones that come out of nowhere. They're the ones that I play when noone is around.

As I allow my fingers to run on the keys on their own, I create my own music.

Pianississimo.
Pianissimo.
Piano.
Forte.
Crescendo!
...Decrescendo..
Decrescendo...
Crescendo!
CRESCENDO!

No notes to read.
No boundaries.
No memorization required.
I find it therapeutic.
Sheer personal enjoyment.

...Decrescendo...
Piano.
Pianissimo.
Pianississimo.
Fin.

The music ends on its own.
And when it does, it's done.
The next one's all new and different.

And for me, the BEST PART when noone's around to listen is that there's noone to tell me that my music sucks ;p Coz really, I PLAY LIKE A KID!

I know it sounds selfish that I play this kind of music just for myself. But sometimes I play for my dad too. He sings along with whatever music he hears. And for my mom coz she says "bravo" at the end of every piano piece. :p

When it comes to REAL piano pieces however, I now actually prefer the ones that I always thought sounded "old" back when I was a kid. ;)

P.S.
I just wanted to share Louis Fojas' photo of me.
And I just had to blog today. ;)

Question for the week: So what do you do when noone's around? :)

HAVE A BEAUTIFUL WEEK, EVERYONE!

Inspired

My life for the past few years has been a collection of bits and pieces of this and that. Unsure of where my life was taking me after college, of where I was taking my life rather, I have been trying out various things.

Did I want to become a preschool teacher and put up my own preschool? Did I want to host and turn into a media personality? Did I want to be a dance teacher and promote the love for this art to everyone, both young and old? Did I want to become a real writer and publish hundreds of children's books and novels? Did I want to finish my graduate studies in Psychology and be in the academe? At one point or more in my life, yes, I wanted ALL THOSE.

But after dipping myself in those directions, I realized how difficult it was (atleast for me) to stay in one place and fulfill one of those dreams at my age... And when I say the word "fulfill", I want you to imagine a glass brimming with water where water represents the experiences garnered in those fields. Once the glass is already brimming, the only way not to waste water is to pour them into other similar glasses in the world.

But of course, even if I focused on one field, I am still young at the age of 23 and my glass of water would still be far from being full. But the case is, I think that because I have not been focusing on any single one of the things I mentioned above, I've then collected several glasses, each with droplets of water.

I wanted to TRY EVERYTHING.

Contrary to what this essay may seem, I am not ranting about losing myself and heading towards quarter life crisis. (I've been there too but I don't want to focus on that now.) I'm actually embracing the beautiful mistakes and errors I made in life that made me unique. Without them, I wouldn't be looking for more inspirations and for THE WILL TO BECOME MORE.

Tonight, as I sat in front of Dr. F.G. David (who just had his 69th birthday yesterday), I was struck by his words. Not so long ago, I was driven to go through this MA course that I took. I had the drive to study and perform well in class. And I think I did. But somewhere in the middle, I've learned to try out other things that sometimes cut right across my classes (literally and otherwise). But as with most things, it was a matter of balancing them. I think I did well with the balancing part until very recently.

Just recently, I didn't have the same amount of drive that I used to have. I didn't care as much. And I didn't know for sure where I wanted to be afterwards. Has this ever happened to any of you? What do you do when this happens?

As for me, I just did what I enjoyed doing, which of course were only made up of the FUN stuff. And oh boy, I ENJOYED!

And then I had my examinations. I knew I could have done better afterwards. But I wasn't even thinking about the scores. I think I've grown older now and just thought about learning per se. I was asking myself if I were in the right direction... if I were choosing the right course... the right path.

And then yesterday, I started gathering data for a research. It was raining and I didn't have my car with me. I commuted and hitched in my classmate's car from one place to another in the morning. I haven't done it for so long. And it felt different. "Mobility" earned a new meaning for me. I got the colds the entire day but I tried to finish all the errands I had. For me, the colds gave me the real hassle. Without speaking much to Franco last night, a little sacrifice we had to make, I rested early and cured myself with water therapy. And then this morning, I woke up early to catch a 6am class that was part of my data gathering. The sun was shining, my colds were almost gone, and I just felt good because of what I was doing. It actually made sense and for the longest time of not having felt this, I felt purposeful in a different light.

After all these, I attended my class under Dr. David. My statistics notebook then had the phrases "incessant motivations" and "competing with noone but yourself" on its margins. They were unrelated to the subject matter of Psych 212 but sir David had this knack of combining life's big lessons with derivations. And for me, the former actually made me appreciate this particular class even more. I was learning about life.

For some reason, with his words and with the experiences I had for the research that just started, I went home feeling DRIVEN again.

Now, I'd like to believe that I have clearer goals in mind. Real ones. Ones that involve not just myself but others as well. But I won't elaborate on them tonight. Let's just say they're still like vapor that would condense in time. It will turn into water and pour like rain. Although slowly and painstakingly, I believe I'd have my own share of water soon. And eventually I'd get to fill my glasses with water to the brim.

Oh, I still have questions to ask. I always have. Each of us always has. And maybe the next line could help you too whenever you find yourselves in those moments of confusion. It was sent to me by a good friend and ever since, I've never forgotten it. Maybe because it worked for me.

"Sometimes your purpose in life is bigger than your dreams"