"Never doubt..."

"...that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it's the only thing that ever has."
- Margaret Mead

"The future..."

"...will soon be a thing of the past."

Moments ago I was watching a video on TED today where Robin Chase was talking about starting a wireless peer to peer infrastructure, er a "Mesh Network," using the existing car system in the US.

While the concepts were intriguing and all, and my mind was racing to imagine how this idea could be plausible in a Philippine setting, I immediately remembered one of Robin Williams' monologues in the movie Man of the Year. In it he said that networking, and the advance of technology is nice and all that, but what we should really be scared of, or watch out for, is the possibility that in the near future our fridge will be talking to our microwave.

Can you imagine your fridge telling your microwave to not cook that microwavable lasagna because the fridge's been tracking your calories for the day and it says you've gone way overboard?

Now take Robin Chase's model. Imagine when your cars start talking to each other? Spooky ain't it? We don't even have to go that far into the future to find worrisome scenarios if it gets implemented. Imagine getting spam in your car when you start it up in the morning on the way to work.

Sigh, when your inbox becomes your glove box...

"Life... is a series of dogs..."

At the moment I live in the fear of internet-powered social networking. Well, it isn't really fear, it's just that I've learned that I'm too much of a scatterbrain for my own good. I learned that I'm a person who's easily distracted.

Essentially, my almost 24/7 online status on Trillian wasn't a good thing for me. Access to thousands of software and cracks for which on Torrents weren't a good thing for me. So now, I limit myself to observation instead of participation. In the age of RSS feeds, and services like twitter, I try to keep my footprint on the web to a bare mininimum.

I try my best to keep the urls of my blogs to myself. I troll more than I post. I read about online games and other forms of generic techie-based geekery, instead of downloading clients, and wading in various private servers. The only game in the home PC at fairview is a ten-year-old RTS, and my only vice geekish soul right now involve monthy purchases of one or two collectibe game cards.

I know I need focus right now, and I do my best to avoid the Wired. It's a space that swallows me whole.

Work on work days. Family on weekends. Love after shifts; and my once a week bouts of online manga, collectible card-game news, and classic PC gaming. I have my life in schedule right now and it's moving like clockwork. Sorry. No distractions for me right now. No new online projects, no access to the wired world, no conventions or conflagrations... just smooth clockwork.

I hope people who find out I'm annoyed when they know my blog URL don't take it personally.

"Foozrabah"

There. I feel better.

No, I'm still ill. I'm no longer flustered over what I read though. I'm happy where I am now, and more importantly, where we are now.

No need to pick at old wounds.

...Be happy with what you have, everything else will follow.
...Know in your heart that everything is alright, and everything will be.
...Work hard because you are content, not because you are in despair.
...Love others.

"What are you allergic to?"

"...everything"

I'm sick. My right ear is currently diagnosed with swimmer's ear, and my left ear seems to coming down with the same condition.

So far the pain and swelling part of the symptom checklist is manifested in my left ear. No, pus or hearing impairments yet - which is what my right ear is currently going through. It's damned annoying and it's damned distracting. It's like having a swollen potato for an ear.

Anyhow, the pulsating pain is making it difficult for me to complete Kristine's layout for her LJ and her WordPress on her 110mb account. What makes my day worse is that last night while I was uploading stuff, the power cut. That kinda ruined half-a-day's work. It also made the second floor of our house hot and humid as hell.

The heat forced me to find one of those mattress things that's half an ottoman, half a day bed, and place it beside a reasonably cold window and try to get some shuteye there. Come around 3am, I wake up because that's the hour I have to apply some eardrops on my pulsating orifice, and I discover that my allergies have acted up again.

So that's where I am right now: I have a throbbing useless ear, and half my skin area is covered in allergy induced sores. I'm drunk from the Benadryl. I'm half deaf from the eardrops. My other ear is in pain. My taste buds aren't working due to the pain-killers - that seem to have lost their effectiveness at things other than making watter taste weird. My muscles are sore. My back is popping. My eyes feel like oddly shaped rocks some idiot picked up from some arid dessert and stuffed into my eye sockets.

I am ill.

It's annoying because Kristine wants me home, and she still wants her layouts done. It's exasperating because I have work on Tuesday, and I have bills to pay on Friday. It's such a pain because I and I still have to explain to her why her layouts aren't done, why we can't buy a PS2 at the end of the month, why I don't think I'm psychically fit to make a 2 hour journey from the north of Quezon City to the southern corner of Makati.

The blog post I read, didn't help either.

The ref, the cabinet, the closet, the PC table, the TV, the bookshelf, the clothes drawer, half the sandman books, and the DVDs are mine. I found the apartment where we're living in right now. I covered the deposit of the apartment we used to live in. I paid for you for two months without holding it against you, when you were the one who was looking through job listings. But I don't say that do I?

I'm unhappy because, whenever I have something to do for myself, you feel like throwing a hissy fit that demands all my attention, but I don't say that do I? I'm annoyed that you when you're angry, by default, I either try to appease, apologize, or comfort; when I'm angry, you cry or you get angry back. Don't you see? I can never, ever, ever tell you that I felt that you did something wrong without you being mad at me for it.

I'm annoyed that after we discuss plans to save money, or spend certain ways, you just want things... for no reason other than that other people have them.

I'm annoyed that you're never happy with what you have, I'm not even talking about stuff... I'm talking about your mom and dad.

I'm annoyed that you say I don't listen when you try to say things, but you never answer my questions or even look me in the eye when I try to talk - you only talk when I'm already past the point of frustration with you, or when you're already in the mood to shout, and demean. But I don't say all that do I?

They say "through thick or thin." Well, I think in our case it's "be happy when it's thick, and go nutters on him from time to time when it's thin by telling him he's 'not trying hard enough', until it's thick again."

I'm trying just as hard as I am now, than I was at the start of the year. Only now my salary is larger than yours, whereas back then my salary was nil. So what's the difference? Why were you more unhappy back then than now? It certainly wasn't the effort was it? It's the results that's appreciated right? Not the effort. Perhaps the though process here is that I go carry my body weight, and you go carry yours. Well, that's now how it works, if I'm wrong and it is; well, that's not how I want it to work.

I probably should spend most of my mental time someplace else now. I should follow my own advice, that some things are only problems when you think they are.

I think I'm starting to get allergic to all this.

"No day but..."

"...today."

One of the things I hate about being a twenty-something is that it is the age range wherein formalized gatherings usually mean that somebody is really, really sick, or someone just died.

Usually these gatherings are initiated by relatives or close friends. Sadly, the past few gatherings that was brought to my attention involved both death and sickness - the later being less direct than the former as the agenda of the gathering.

What's worse is the inevitability of the later leading to the former. The time between now, and that fatal conclusion though is where faith comes in. Faith mind you not, spirituality or religion. Although both spirituality and religion could both involve faith, faith itself could be divorced from massive doses of introspection or wisdom required by spirituality, or dogmatic beliefs in specific higher powers that religion asks of you.

The simple belief that everything will turn out okay, or is already okay, can move mountains.

Faith, the purest form of hope is what we - is what I - turn to during times like this.

"Why is the word ambulance..."

"...written backwards on the front of an ambulance?"

I found it extremeley amusing the other day that on the TV trivia show I was watching, so many were asked the aforementioned question and so little managed to come up with a decent answer.

Yes, I have pathetic means of self-entertainment these days. A crammed product training period does that to you. The spare time I've got, I've been spending it on sleep, or food, or even more sleep. I'm pretty thankful though that the spare time I have is still a gigantic sum compared to the amount of spare time that everyone else my age has.

I think it has more to do with my body clock adjusting to my new schedule than the amount of hours I have away from work. I did after all come from a regular 9-5 position.

Speaking of my body, I currently feel gravely ill. Since around 1am this morning, while I was listening to sample calls and making notations on our tools for my assigned account mentor, I've been getting the uncomfortable urge to vomit. My eyes feel like they're on fire, my joints ache, and whenever I squeeze my joints or flex my limbs I could swear there's some form of battery acid in there eating away at my cartillage.

Not that I've been comfortable with my body when I was feeling healthy several days ago. The short of the long of it is this: I'm getting fat.

I could feel my double chin pressing down on my larynx even if I'm not pushing my chin against my colar bone. My face is several milimeters wider than it was 4 months ago. I 4-story-climb up a flight of stairs is enough to knock the wind out of me. My pants still fit me, but the tire around my waste is starting to spill over my beltline.

Thank God the fat hasn't moved to the area near my bladder, otherwise, I'd have to buy several new pairs of pants.

I'm ill, I'm fat, and I'm draining by the requirements of my new occupation... isn't there a trivia show on some channel that gives you the solution to this?

"Drill, drill!"

I missed out on posting here for around a week. The reason behind that is pretty plain: nothing much happening in my domestic life for now.

Life's pretty much settled into a routine. Now routine doesn't mean monotonous though. I'm still going through several stages of upheaval. Work at the new company started today, and lunch break was delayed a bit, so I'm here posting away. Other changes in my domestic life include, calculations for savings, plans for living come end of apartment contract, and the required previous occupation clearances.

The Fairview slice of life's pretty much the same. The only major change I could think of is the fact that Noah can now inch himself off his pillow - much to the delight of his older family members. Oh, that and the fact that we're pretty much surprised by the realization that my driver's license hasn't expired yet.

That's that. Back to work. Back to driving practice. Back to drilling. Will my drill be the "drill that will pierce the heavens?" With enough work, who knows.

"What do you stand to loose?"

Nothing apparently.

Basically, I've been doing some math and the budget that we've got for the rest of the year can't be supported by the salary that one gets by working as a subtitler for a post-production company.

So what's one do do?

What else, walk into random buildings in Makati and apply.

After all, who cares if five companies says "no" to you, as long as one says "yes," right? And so, after 3 hours of waiting around a badly carpeted lobby, and about 40 minutes of walking up and down Buendia, I'm now a supposed employee of another BPO company.

They pay well. Can you blame me?

I'm not saying that we couldn't have lived of my previous salary. It's just that I've been a drain on my parents finances since I've been asking for support since the robbery. Also, we want to have some savings on us.

We're going to be moving into the newly-upgraded Fairview household come the end of our appartment's contract. So I want to move in with something significant to contribute.

That, and God willing, a new handheld/PC/laptop by the end of the year.

"There's no place like home..."

I was watching an episode of CSI the other night.

It was that episode in season 7 where a man mistook a house for his home. He was confronted by the actual residents when he tried to enter his supposed "house." In his confussion -- and he didn't have much of a mental state to begin with -- he ended up executing the residents of the house.

I've been spending a whole lot of time away from home lately. Home, mind you, not house. There's a difference.

I wonder if there will come a time when I walk home and open the gate and I'll be surprised by the presence of people I barely know; confronted by scared people who have nothing else but their own security as their highest priority.

In the show, a notebook of the psycho was found. In it were scriblings that said, "There's no place like home." It said that Bart Simpson style, over and over again, up to the very last page. I wonder if my similar planned repetition would prove to be a good profolactic measure.

Well it should be, right? Familiarity and consistency are the best mortar to build bridges with after all.

Enough blathering, back to business.

"...Round and round, like a hamster in a cage."

"Hey, look world, I'm no longer a mall-loving thirty something oddball. I'm a health-buff! Plus, what I'm doing isn't just healthy, it's AN ART!"

Why is it that I find mall walking particularly disturbing? Is it because it feels like an odd post yuppie, semi-hippie, gen-x justification for being a mallrat?

I'm thinking it's probably because I listened to too much Carlin in my youth.

Of course, the wikipedia entry I just linked to isn't the worst of it. Try googling up all the mall walking associations that have sprouted up. Trust me, you'll feel a shiver up your spine.

Here's what's truly grotesque about it: in the aforementioned wikipedia entry there's a line under "Advantages to mall owners" that says, "After walking, mall walkers may well stay on and shop the stores or patronize the mall's food court, increasing the traffic in the mall during what would otherwise be the very slow opening hour."

Can you feel the irony? Can you smell the pretension?

After showing off to the world that you're Mr/Ms Healthy, and that you've "burned some calories," you're fully willing to waste all of your hard work walking around the mall by eating fast-food garbage that you'd get at a food court.

What's worse, is that if you're really serious about it, and you're not a pretentious health loving yip, then you aren't really helping the mall out. That's because all you'd be buying from the food court is a small pack of prepackaged fruit salad. That, and imagine how your sweaty, smelly, sweat-sock infused, nasal-aura will affect the other mall patrons?

There are reasons why some people like to eat in a food court during the early morning, and sitting beside a fat sweaty slob in gym shorts isn't one of them.

"Politicians are like diapers."

"They should be changed frequently, and for the same reasons."

I can afford two posts today. This is due to the fact that I'm currently at a location where the connection is virtually free, and the access isn't restricted by workload that is under a tight deadline.

Anyhow, the quote above is from this movie that had Robin Williams play a comedian named Tom Dobb - a comedian that ran for the position of president of the United States of America.

As you can obviously tell by now, the movie struck a chord with me. Maybe, because of its similarities with Stephen Colbert's satirical campaign, and my devious wishes that it was something a little more than a lampooning.

However, in retrospect, I think the fascination on my part is mostly due to the ability of William's character, Tom Dobb, to walk away from something without fear. Sure of himself and his detour, as long as his previous direction went against things, concepts, and values he held dear.

He said it all so concisely and more effectively in a different scene in the movie. Unfortunately, I can't quite quote it exactly at the moment. The verbage elludes me. So pardon me for my pathetic attempt at paraphrasing it.

He said, in essence, that jokes loose their meaning if you run fake laughter over it.

Upon hearing that from him, I sat, I thought, I drank my glass of water, and I smiled. Now that's entertainment.

"For everything else..."

Formula for bout of depression and loss of faith in humanity: watch The Future of Food, Robert Newman's A History of Oil, and Idiocracy in succession. Yes, at times I find myself with time by which I can do stupid things to my psyche.

Formula for dose of pure, spasmic joy: carry 5 week-old nephew in arms until he falls asleep. Mastercard got that advertisement of theirs dead-on. Some things/moments are priceless.

Good night little monkey. May you not grow feathers.

"That which I would do, I do not..."

"...and that which I do not, I do. Oh, wretched man that I am, who shall deliver me from this depth?"

I really hate it when I'm getting torn in multiple directions. It's been proven time and again, that I collapse under stress when I'm in a situation where so many things in my life try to pull me in so many directions.

Right now, I really just want Kristine to understand that she is not separate from the family; rather, she is a part of it, and that she needs to be comfortable in it, and she needs to live her life in it, and share her spirit with it.

Honestly, I'm still disappointed that I haven't seen her carry my nephew in her arms. But, that's just me being a shallow, overtly-proud uncle.

The truth is, I truly understand her point, and her point of view. I see where she's coming from. And I know in the depths of my heart that she deserves my time and attention. Still, I hope that she understands that there are places I have to be, and there are relationships other than ours, that I have to fix.

I just wish that she would be more willing to part with me from time to time.

Family are the only guaranteed people to be around you until you age, and you don't want your relationship with them to sour, or be too far detached from what it originally was.

Entropy dictates that everything will break down. I truly believe that. Based on the time that I've been away, I've a lot of ground to make-up for, and to cover.

I hope she understands that I'm trying to do what the prodigal son did, and come back home, in a sense that is just more than the physical.

She already knows that unlike her relationship with her father, my relationship with my family isn't as open -- at least on my part. It's something that I have to work on. It's something that I am currently working on.

It's also something that I'm not good at.

It's something that will take, and demand, my time.

I really hope she understands.

PS. It was Trinity Broadcasting Network, not The Bible Network. It might as well be, though.

"A man needs his rest."

Okay, so far, I'm still at work, and I'm pretty much annoyed that I'm required to be visible (well, most of the time) on Yahoo Messenger. The reason behind the aggravation being, that people I don't really want to get into contact with are buzzing me messages and what not. The reason behind being stuck at work being, that I'm only about two thirds into my 120 minute subtitling project.

This is approximately the latest that I've been holed up at work. Not that I don't mind, and not that there's much history to compare to. I mean, after all, I've only been here for about three weeks. Tomorrow, being my fifteenth day.

So what else to rant about? Oh, yeah, before I forget, the actual quote that got me ranting yesterday was this: "Aren't you glad he is using talent for the lord tonight and not for Satan, singing secular songs." So, my bad, I actually misquoted Paul Crouch Jr. last night. Not that it makes a difference.

Take that secular heathens.

My PC clock says 7:03; time to head home. It'll be a walk tonight. No spare change in my pocket, and I don't want to break my bills as I'm reserving that for the weekend and for my trip North to see my monkey of a Nephew.

I still wish he was named Rowan.

But hey, you can't argue with the mother. That, and Noah has a nice ring to it. Makes you think he'll be a leader someday.

I'm about to head home looking forward to dinner with K, a batch of DivX movies burned onto several DVD-R's, and much needed rest.

Good night internets. See you tomorrow.

PS. Call James E. when you reach the North.

"If his lips move, you should see text at the bottom."

New year, new job, and once again, new blog.

I've decided that I'll really try to do my best - yet again - and maintain a truly personal, today-I-ate-spaghetti, class of blog. While at the same time, funnel all of my geekery related posts into a separate blog.

That way my constant rants and ramblings about the recent games I've played, or the movies or shows I've seen, do not contaminate my daily I-ate-spaghetti posts.

I'm still contemplating where I should dump all my work related brain farts and musings, but for now, it seems like its lumping with the domestic topics is likely.

That aside, let's move to a topic that every self-respecting domestic "dear diary" should cover: How am I doing right now, and what's up with me so far.

Well, so far, nothing much is up.

I'm now a monkey's uncle for one thing. My sister gave birth a few dozen hours shy of Christmas, so that's definitely worth blogging about.

I lost my stay as an Amazon.com Customer Support Agent - for reasons I don't wish to discuss, ever - some time ago. But, no worries. I'm still not-so-gainfully employed.

I'm currently a subtitler at a production company called Twenty Plus. It's decent work. I just got promoted from trainee status to probationary status a week ago. Been there for around three weeks already, and so far I've subtitled an episode of New Adventures of Old Christine and an episode of Dallas. I've cleaned up several scripts for that CBS show, Medium. Also, fortunate for me, in my spare time, I've been able to observe my coworkers slave away on spotting (that's production jargon) subtitles for several episodes of the third season (I think, I'm not to sure) of Numbers.

My current project is something that aired on TBN (that's The Bible Network. for all of you secular heathens out there) last tenth. I think it's a show called Praise the Lord or something.

Anyhow, some crackpot named Kim Clement is on it, and so far it's been a hoot. How bad is it? Well the worst I've run into so far is actually hearing the host say to the audience "Aren't you glad he's singing Christian songs, and not helping out Satan by singing secular songs?" The host said this right after some guy named Michael English sang his guts out on stage.

But I digress.

Let's go back to the oddity at hand, which is: secular songs help Satan. Well, methinks you can't get anymore secular than Happy Birthday to You so yeah, a nice yearly jingle-ritual in front of an arbitrary number of candles and baked dough is an act that furthers the cause of El Diablo.

Go figure.

Whew. I think that counts as my work-rant for this post. Let's see if I could sneak a few more come the next one.

Anyhow, back to the domestic stuff. What else? Well, our apartment got robbed some time ago, but that's old news. Hmm. K and I spent our anniversary digesting her cooking and enjoying the wonderful combination that is vanilla ice-cream and boiled strawberries. Er, yeah. What else?

.
..
...

That's that I guess.

I have to close Notepad now, and cut and paste this block of text into blogger and go up and greet my girlfriend and tell her that I'm home from work.