i was tagged..

Tagged by wehmyden.

The rules are simple.

At the end of the post, the player tags 6 people and posts their names, then goes to their blog and leaves a comment, letting them know they’ve been tagged and asking them to read your blog. Let the person who tagged you know when you’ve posted your answer.

1. What was I doing 10 years ago?

1998 - 3rd yr High school. Lokang loka sa Moffatts.. may concert yata sila nung year na 'to na kinarir ko. Hated chemistry but loved world history and literature. member ako ng Blue Flame(school paper). Tumatambay ako sa mahogany trees kasama si shiva, beejay, bette anne, carmina, melay and maybelle. naexperience ko ang JOG (junior outdoor games) in lieu of CAT. nag-aral ako ng self-defense at basketball with Sir Tikyo. Ang allowance ko ay 100/day. Nanalo akong best speaker sa debate.

2. What are the 5 things on my to-do list today?

start reading eclipse
clean room
organize computer files
study retirement and tax
update blog and multiply

3. Snacks I enjoy:

hello panda/pucca. piknik. cheetos. vanilla wafers. bueno. pringles. lays barbecue or sour cream. airheads strawberry.  

4. Place(s) where I live(d):

Manila(Malate). Makati(San Antonio Village). Pasig(Doña Andrea 1).

5. Things I’d do if I were a billionaire:

TRAVEL. invest in stock market. donate to charity. buy prestige cars. buy the house in front of the Osbornes' (they'd make really interesting neighbors..haha).

Tagging: badlydrawngaeile, kylitots, mamsyeb, summericicle, hotinheels, mackecke

greenbelt a while ago..

countdown...

Welcome to the coven..

I stayed up until 6am as I finished the first book in the Twilight Saga. The novel had taken me the rest of the night engaged in its little world.. so wrapped up in a town called Forks where a family of vampires walked the local highschool.

It had taken me back to high school myself. Back in the day when books served as my comfort, my escape for when reality became too redundant and boring.

I have never cultishly followed the Anne Rice novels and I only got a glimpse of her series through the movie Interview With The Vampire which was easily available on HBO. That however, did not compel me into actually grabbing any of her books.

Who would have thought it just took one Wina and one Gaeile to convince me into reading this novel. I had the time and nothing to lose, I thought. If things started to bore me in the first chapter, I said I was dropping the whole idea. And believe me, I hold the record for beginning something I don't really finish.

So there I was, engulfed in the idea that a vampire fell in love with a mortal. It was other-worldly but beautiful. Edward's character encompassed all that a prince charming could ever be and I was amazed at how much I craved for him to be in every scene, just surprised at the things he said and how he said it. It was the endless question and answer between Edward and Bella that left me longing for the scenes to go on and never end. I could revel in their banter all day, friendly at first then boderlining sarcastic and patronizing. It left me feeling the Edward, though immortal, still had a human side after all. His love for her was selfless, unconditional --the kind we can only envy and never fathom how such a thing was possible.

And suddenly it makes sense why people are hooked on the saga.. the idea that two different worlds can meet and the undying faith that there will be a happy ending is gripping. For five hours straight I read on, never leaving the town of Forks, holding my breath (and instinctively knowing) that something good will come out of the situation no matter how bleak. It always almost does anyway. Even in real life.

twilight

Hi.

Just dropped by to test the new lay-out I tweaked a few minutes ago.. I just thought it was fitting since I am at page 40 of the first installment of the Twilight Saga by Stephanie Meyer(as per Wina and Gaeile's adamant request for me to read it) and I am sifting through the pages and finding it amusing. That's a good sign believe me.

However, I have been looking forward to watching the film ever since I found the trailer on youtube a few months back and now I'm scared that the movie will not live up to the book (as I have found most book adaptations). Guess I'll find out in a month.

In the meantime, here's my new theme until I get tired of it. I'll also upload a playlist soon for everyone to enjoy. Okay, that's it. Back to my reading now.

5 friends

back to zero

I went on a tiny vacation last weekend .. I even saw Shiva's Daphne at the Pure Gold branch in Bulacan while grocery shopping for the baked macaroni project Behng and I had in mind that Sunday afternoon. Anyways, I failed to bring a nokia charger for my sun line so there was no reviving it the moment it died on me come Friday evening. Apparently, my brother has been texting me asking if he could reformat the pc since our windows xp black edition was detected by microsoft and we no longer receive updates since our counterfeit version was caught. Of course I never received any of his messages and he probably took my silence as a "yes" and went on to reformat the pc, deleting each and every file I have. Yes my dear friends, itunes is out of the picture..900+ songs all gone. =( 

It makes me sad because I went through so much trouble converting hard-to-find songs at myspace and imeem just so I can have these audio files exported to my ipod.. hours and hours of hard work gone to waste. Oh well. I will get to fixing my music files as soon as I find the stamina to start from scratch. Or maybe I can get Earl to do it. haha.

Oh yeah, I passed my second Compex today. I am happy about it but extremely exhausted as well. Guess it's one of those days.. The entire team did very well with a passrate of 100%. The only team in AWWC who had a perfect pass rate. Ü Pizza next friday guys!

Great, it's 5pm and I haven't slept yet.. must. go. NOW.

Fall Is Almost Here..

..well in the States, it is.

Anyway, I've spent the last 2 hours looking for this song (also embeded on the page -it doesn't autoplay though, sorry) that I'd heard on someone's myspace by accident.  Looking for the song took at least 30 minutes but the conversion from imeem to mp4 format took the longest time because I had to download 3 different programs to finally get the song playing in iTunes. It's worth it though.. you can listen to it here. 

On a lighter note, I spent last night watching Camp Rock on Disney and I was surprised I actually finished it.. haha. It was the first time I watched Demi Lovato and Joe Jonas on tv. I generally don't watch, but I was too bored to do anything else especially 'cuz I couldn't go online. Camp Rock was High School Musical-ish and had that popular boy-meets-invisible girl kind of appeal and I'm sure my cousin Katelynne would enjoy it. I just remember liking the part where the girl was singing by the piano.. i thought that was better than the way the song was performed in the Final Jam night.. Oh well, sorry to those who cannot clearly relate, I'm just finding something light to rant about because it is the start of the week for most working people and I'm sure the following days would not be easy for me. Hell week, here I come!

Non-American and proud

On the way home I kept thinking of the incident that happened at work today. I was discrimated against, just because I lived in Manila. Having been in the call center industry for four years now, I should be used to it, right? Except that I'm still amazed at how ignorant most people are about Filipinos or non-americans in general. First off the racist refused give me his name or his social just to identify his acount and do my job right. He said he had given it earlier to another "non-american", was his term, and he said he had no reason to give that out to non-americans (notice how many times he had to mention "non-americans" like I was daft) and asked to speak with an american instead. After trying very hard to verify him, he finally gave in and grumbled his account number. I then offered to connect the call to one of our brokers in the US but informed him that it might take a while. He cut me off saying he's willing to wait, no matter how long, for an american to apeak with him (with an emphasis on the word -you guessed- "American").

In the last decade or so, our country has enjoyed the boom of the outsourcing industy. Not only has it created jobs for Filipinos, it also allowed us to showcase the fact that we can run offshore customer service/sales line of businesses with ease and with world-class quality. From Sykes, E-Telecare and Convergys, the industry has grown so big I could fill this space with company names and yet we keep on growing.. It's not just plain customer service we are handling now, we even take care of most their banking, healthcare, billpay, advertising and a lot more. And as we keep on growing, we are taking more jobs away from the people of the First World and this is their main source of panic and bitterness leading to discrimination.

I don't know if they've heard that English is our second language and that the Philippines is one of the best English-speaking nations in South East Asia, hence the influx of offshore opportunities in the last few years. Either they hibernated in a cave or are just in denial that we can kick their butts doing the same job yet getting paid at least a fourth of a fraction of what is normally given to them. In a business why would you pay more for something you can get for less (9,000 miles away but still for less)?

Going back to Mr. I-don't-speak-to-non-americans, if his discrimination is his mode of coping with his bitterness that a third-world nation steals jobs from their country, I'd understand why he was crabby. I'd understand that but he can never use that as an excuse to be such an ass or think he was of a higher life-form. Although he should be very afraid because in a few years' time maybe we can compete with India in the outsourced industry and take more and more jobs away from the US for the basic fact that our labor is 4-5 times cheaper. Jessica Zafra's World Domination is now becoming more and more plausible.

By the way, after I had transferred the call, I checked Mr. I-don't-speak-to-non-americans' account and found out that he called to dispute a $0.46 Burger King purchase he claims he did not make.

"Jabberwhorl Cronstadt"

A snippet of the story "Jabberwhorl Cronstadt" from Black Spring

by Henry Miller, © Grove Press 1963

"Don't like that at all," says Jill. "Neither do I," say Jab. "I like the one about the little soulworms that fly out of the nest for the resurrection. Jill's got one inside her too... it's sprouting and sprouting. Can't stop it. Yesterday it was a tadpole, tomorrow it'll be a honey-suckle vine. Can't tell what it's going to be yet... not eventually. It dies in the nest every day and the next day it's born again. Put your ear on her belly... you can hear the whirring of its wings. Whirrrr... whirrrr. Without a motor. Wonderful! She's got millions of them inside her and they're all whirring around in there dying to get out. Whirrr... whirrrr. And if you just put a needle inside and punctured the bag they'd all come whirring out... imagine it... a great cloud of soul-worms... millions of them... and so thick the swarm that we wouldn't be able to see each other... A fact! No need to write about China. Write about that! About what's inside of you... the great vertiginous vertebration... the zoospores and the leucocytes... the wamroths and the holenlindens... every one's a poem. The jellyfish is a poem too _ the finest kind of poem. You poke him here, you poke him there, he slithers and slathers, he's dithy and clabberous, he has a colon and intestines, he's vermiform and ubisquishous. And Mowgli in the garden whistling for the rent, he's a poem too, a poem with big ears, a wambly bretzular poem with logamundiddy of the goo-goo. He has round, auricular daedali, round robin-breasted ruches that open up like an open barouche. He wambles in the wambhorst whilst the whelkin winkles... he wabbles through the wendish wikes whirking his worstish wights... Mowgli... owgli... whist and wurst...." "He's losing his mind," says Jill. "Wrong again," says Jabber. "I've just found my mind, only it's different sort of mind than you imagined. You think a poem must have covers around it. The moment you write a thing the poem ceascs. The poem is the present which you can't define. You live it. Anything is a poem if it has time in it. You don't have to take a ferry-boat or go to China to write a poem. The finest poem I ever lived was a kitchen sink. Did I ever tell you about it. There were two faucets, one called Froid and the other Chaud. Froid lived a life in extenso, by means of a rubber hose attached to his schnausel. Chaud was bright and modest. Chaud dripped all the time, as if he had the clap. On Tuesdays and Fridays he went to the Mosque where there was a clinic for venereal faucets. Tuesdays and Fridays Froid had to do all the work. He was a bugger for work. It was his whole world. Chaud on the other hand had to be petted and coaxed. You had to say "not so fast," or he'd scald the skin off you. Once in a while they worked in unison, Froid and Chaud, but that was seldom. Saturday nights, when I washed my feet at the sink, I'd get to thinking how perfect was the world over which these twain ruled. Never anything more than this iron sink with its two faucets. No beginnings and no ends. Chaud the alpha and Froid the omega. Perpetuity. The Gemini, ruling over life and death. Alpha-Chaud running out through all degrees of Fahrenheit and Reaumur, through magnetic filings and comets' tails, through the boiling cauldron of Mauna Loa into the dry light of the Tertiary moon; Omega-Froid running out through the Gulf Stream into the paludal bed of the Sargasso Sea, running through the marsupials and the foraminifera, through the mammal whales and the Polar fissures, running clown through island universes, through death cathodes, through dead bone and dry rot, through the follicles and tentacles of worlds unformed, worlds untouched, worlds unseen, worlds unborn and forever lost. Alpha-Chaud dripping, dripping; Omega-Froid working, working. Hand, feet, hair, face, dishes, vegetables, fish washed clean and away; despair, ennui, hatred, love, jealousy, crime... dripping, dripping. I, Jabberwhorl, and my wife Jill, and after us legions upon legions...all standing at the iron sink. Seeds falling through the drain: young cantaloups, squash, caviar, macaroni, bile, spittle, phlegm, Iettuce leaves, sardine bones, Worcestershire sauce, stale beer, urine, blood-clots, Kruschen salts, oatmeal, chew tobbacco, pollen, dust, grease, wool, cotton threads, match sticks, live worms, shredded wheat, scalded milk, castor oil. Seeds of waste falling away forever and forever coming back in pure draughts of a miraculous chemical substance which refuses to be named, classified, labelled, analysed, or drawn and quartered. Coming back as Froid and Chaud perpetually, like a truth that can't be downed. You can take it hot or cold, or you can take it tepid. You can wash your feet or gargle your throat; you can rinse the soap out of your eyes or drive the grit out of the lettuce leaves; you can bathe the new-born babe or swab the rigid limbs of the dead; you can soak bread for fricadellas or dilute your wine. First and last things. Elixir. I, Jabberwhorl, tasting the elixir of life and death. I, Jabberwhorl, of waste and H2O composed, of hot and cold and all the intermediate realms, of scum and rind, of finest, tiniest substance never lost, of great sutures and compact bone, of ice fissures and test tubes, of semen and ova fused, dissolved, dispersed, of rubber schnausel and brass spigot, of dead cathodes and squirming infusoria, of lettuce leaves and bottled sunlight... I, Jabberwhorl, sitting at the iron sink and perplexed and exalted, never less and never more than a poem, an iron stanza, a boiling follicle, a lost leucocyte. The iron sink where I spat out my heart, where I bathed my tender feet, where I held my first child, where I washed my sore gums, where I sang like a diamond-backed terrapin and I am singing now and will sing forever though the drains clog and the faucets rust, though time runs out and I be all there is of the present, past and future. Sing, Froid, sing transitive! Sing Chaud, sing intransitive! Sing Alpha and Omega! Sing Hallelujah! Sing out, O sing! Sing while the world sinks...." And singing loud and clear like a dead and stricken swan on the bed we laid him out.