Zoom Out Manila, Zoom In Caramoan!

OH YEAH.

So the big Caramoan getaway is due to happen tomorrow morning and I'm freakin' perked up. There are a million things that are running through my head right now I don't even know where to begin.

I'm gonna start by saying that the trip sounds promising. I'll go with two good friends--Cookie and Lene, just sad that Weng is unable to go. We'd be there for five days and five nights. We'll be taking early morning flights to Naga (Thursday) and back (Tuesday). We have already looked into the possibilities activity-wise and some that came up are snorkeling, wakeboarding, visiting some caves, island hopping and, of course, swimming. There is also a church that we can visit.

I'll try to take some travel notes and post it when I get back. Oh, and pictures too. Until then, I've got some packing to do, Ciao!

Starting the Year Right and Other Stories

The holidays are officially over and so is 2008. This is my first blog entry for 09 and I just hope this year means a great one for everyone.

Anyway, the first of January did not turn out half as bad as I would've thought being that I had to work the previous night to hell and would not have had the energy to really do much stuff after. It actually turned out great with a couple of things I'm really happy about. Anyway here are the first moments of my 2009 captured when my workmates and I went out of the building and joined the crowd in welcoming the year:













After work I went home and waited for my nephew to come over the house and visit. They came right in time for lunch and I spent a little time with him. He is growing so fast that I almost never recognize it is the same baby. But he is just a darling! In fact, I want one myself. Oh yeah. I never thought that I would actually say that, but I do.

I thought about it over and over in my head why I would ever want such big a responsibility but I can't answer it. Maybe subconsciously I want to compete with my brother. Or maybe it was because I was looking for someone to take care of me in the future when I get older. On the second thought, I can never ask another person to take care of me cause I think the only person that should be responsible for myself is me. I should not need anyone to depend my life on. Or maybe it's just because my nephew's cute and I should get over that.

Anyway, heres a couple of pictures of Dexter Draco I took when they came over:





I spent the evening of January 1 with my friend Vince and we went to O bar (since Palawan was closed) and had a blast! I met the guy that I have been checking out at work and that was a lot of fun. He's cute. Now that's what I call starting the year right!

Speaking of starting the year right, here's a funny video a friend in Minneapolis sent me which I think is worth seeing. it's about a town in Austria called Fucking:

Stop me, somebody!

Okay. These past few weeks I have been dangerously addicted to an application in facebook called MyFarm (to you reading this, you gotta try it but don't say I didn't warn you). You plant crops, trees and stuff to increase your cash to be able to buy infrastructures. I am totally addicted!

My room looks like shit, I've got tons of paperwork due for my masters and loadsful of dirty laundry that are not getting any cleaner. Somebody has to make sense of my life and have me start doing things already! But seriously, I have got to chill with this facebook stuff. =(

On the positive note, the year is ending and I am so looking forward to '09. Next year has got a lot of things lined up for me. I have been paying for a condo unit due to be built sometime on March, so that's cool. Around the same time is my completion due date for a couple of subjects that I took a couple of sems ago...that's a little scary.

I'm gonna start my year right with a trip to Caramoan with a couple of friends mid-January. I am very excited about it and I promise to post pictures soon after and tell you all about it.

Well work has been kind of a bummer. A lot of things are not going right there. I don't want to talk about it. Let's just say year-end is not the best time for our team.

Oh and yeah...I found my new year themesong this morning while watching Jamie Oliver's cooking show Oliver's Twist. It's my latest Now Playing post, see below. I love the energy of the song and the positive vibe it creates. Love it (and Jamie, too) *wink! He plays in the band, Scarlet Division, too.

Oh well, I am gonna have to start doing some stuff now. Ciao!

Now Playing

my new year sountrack--
=)

Just the Start*
by Scarlet Division


In this world of mine,
A million things run through my head,
I Gotta take some time,
To do the things I always set my heart on,

Coz I don't know where i've been,
I got lost there somewhere,
There's so much I haven't seen,
Would you take me there?

No matter who you are,
Won't you come into my world,
Like a shooting star,
Take this journey with me to the heart,

Gonna reach that high,
And turn this world right upside down,
I'm gonna cross that sky,
On a silver cloud but I don't know which one,

Coz I don't know where i've been,
I got lost there somewhere,
There's so much I haven't seen,
Would you take me there?

No matter who you are,
Won't you come into my world,
Like a shooting star
Take this journey with me to the heart,
Can't you see that this is just the start?


*Sountrack of Jamie Oliver's cooking show, Oliver's Twist. He's cute BTW. ;)

Now Playing

Santa Baby
by Eartha Kitt


(baboom baboom baboom baboom)
(baboom baboom baboom baboom)

Santa Baby,
Just slip a sable under the tree
For me
Been an awful good girl
Santa Baby, so hurry down the chimney tonight

Santa baby, a '54 convertible too
Light blue
I'll wait up for you, dear
Santa baby, so hurry down the chimney tonight

Think of all the fun I've missed
Think of all the fellas that I haven't kissed
Next year I could be just as good
If you'll check off my Christmas list

Santa Baby, I want a yacht and really thats not
Alot
Been an angel all year
Santa Baby, so hurry down the chimney tonight

Santa honey, one little thing I really need
The deed
To a platinum mine
Santa Baby, so hurry down the chimney tonight

Santa cutie, and fill my stocking with a duplex
And cheques
Sign your 'x' on the line
Santa cutie, and hurry down the chimney tonight

Come and trim my Christmas tree
With some decorations bought at Tif-fa-ny
I really do believe in you
Lets see if you believe in me

Santa Baby, forgot to mention one little thing
A ring
I don't mean on the phone
Santa Baby, so hurry down the chimney tonight
Hurry down the chimney tonight
Hurry...tonight

A Hundred Years of Education and No One Seems to Have Learned

I can't believe the premiere state university, the University of the Philippines, has been around for a century. Disclaimer, this fact is NOT GOOD.

So I pretty much have planned today between going to UP before lunch to settle some stuff and doing initial christmas shopping after. I got there around 10am and submitted this letter, got it endorsed but it needs to be signed over at the dean's office before I could do anything more. I got endorsed but the guy at the dean's office asked me to come back after lunch cause the person whose to sign is in a meeting. So i had pretty much 2 and a half hours to kill since I really wanted to be done with this responsibility. I was glad CAL atrium had wifi so I just hung around checking email and facebook and stuff. I saw an old friend and we had lunch and coffee afterwards. I got back around 2pm with a big disappointment. The freaking letter is STILL NOT SIGNED. And the guy informed me that it will not be done until later this afternoon.

Are you effin kiddin me? I went all the way and waited for more than 3 hours for nothin?

I mean, if it was not gonna be signed today, at least set my expectations. I would've come back some other time and did the rest of the things I have planned today. YOU DON'T OWN MY TIME.

Now this university is going gaga over its centennial. You'd think after 100 years it would have mastered the art of dealing with people. Apparently, somebody forgot all about that. It's so disappointing to see how the institutional character of UP has taken over the humanist thrust of pedagogy altogether. It seems that 100 years of existence does not guarantee expertise after all.

I'm not blaming the guy at the dean's office. He doesn't know any better. For him, I bet, that's just how they naturally do business. I'm not even blaming the dean's office, CAL, or even the university. This seemingly petty instance is an issue of how the entire Philippine educational sytem, in both the academic and the hierarchy levels, is falling in deep shit. The thing is, the government is set at neglecting this sector through ignoring it's budgetary needs because, since the government is the biggest business there is, it just doesn't make sense to invest in something not profitable like education in the business sense.

That sucks. And while the university celebrates 100 years of existence, people sleep well at night knowing that another 100 years of the same shit will not make it any better for anyone.

Now Playing

It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas
by Bing Crosby

It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas
Ev'rywhere you go;
Take a look in the five and ten glistening once again
With candy canes and silver lanes aglow.
It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas
Toys in ev'ry store
But the prettiest sight to see is the holly that will be
On your own front door.

A pair of hopalong boots and a pistol that shoots
Is the wish of Barney and Ben;
Dolls that will talk and will go for a walk
Is the hope of Janice and Jen;
And Mom and Dad can hardly wait for school to start again.
It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas
Ev'rywhere you go;
There's a tree in the Grand Hotel, one in the park as well,
The sturdy kind that doesn't mind the snow.
It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas;
Soon the bells will start,
And the thing that will make them ring is the carol that you sing
Right within your heart

Umberto Eco on Christmas

Alright--Christmas is just around the corner and everything's just becoming all Christmas-y.

Here's a little article Umberto Eco (my fave Italian novelist and theorist) wrote back in 2005 about the relevance of this cultural event:

God Isn't Big Enough for Some People
By Umberto Eco

We are now approaching the critical time of the year for shops and supermarkets: the month before Christmas is the four weeks when stores of all kinds sell their products fastest. Father Christmas means one thing to children: presents. He has no connection with the original St Nicholas, who performed a miracle in providing dowries for three poor sisters, thereby enabling them to marry and escape a life of prostitution.
Human beings are religious animals. It is psychologically very hard to go through life without the justification, and the hope, provided by religion. You can see this in the positivist scientists of the 19th century.
They insisted that they were describing the universe in rigorously materialistic terms - yet at night they attended seances and tried to summon up the spirits of the dead. Even today, I frequently meet scientists who, outside their own narrow discipline, are superstitious - to such an extent that it sometimes seems to me that to be a rigorous unbeliever today, you have to be a philosopher. Or perhaps a priest.
And we need to justify our lives to ourselves and to other people. Money is an instrument. It is not a value - but we need values as well as instruments, ends as well as means. The great problem faced by human beings is finding a way to accept the fact that each of us will die.
Money can do a lot of things - but it cannot help reconcile you to your own death. It can sometimes help you postpone your own death: a man who can spend a million pounds on personal physicians will usually live longer than someone who cannot. But he can't make himself live much longer than the average life-span of affluent people in the developed world.
And if you believe in money alone, then sooner or later, you discover money's great limitation: it is unable to justify the fact that you are a mortal animal. Indeed, the more you try escape that fact, the more you are forced to realise that your possessions can't make sense of your death.
It is the role of religion to provide that justification. Religions are systems of belief that enable human beings to justify their existence and which reconcile us to death. We in Europe have faced a fading of organised religion in recent years. Faith in the Christian churches has been declining.
The ideologies such as communism that promised to supplant religion have failed in spectacular and very public fashion. So we're all still looking for something that will reconcile each of us to the inevitability of our own death.
G K Chesterton is often credited with observing: "When a man ceases to believe in God, he doesn't believe in nothing. He believes in anything." Whoever said it - he was right. We are supposed to live in a sceptical age. In fact, we live in an age of outrageous credulity.
The "death of God", or at least the dying of the Christian God, has been accompanied by the birth of a plethora of new idols. They have multiplied like bacteria on the corpse of the Christian Church -- from strange pagan cults and sects to the silly, sub-Christian superstitions of The Da Vinci Code.
It is amazing how many people take that book literally, and think it is true. Admittedly, Dan Brown, its author, has created a legion of zealous followers who believe that Jesus wasn't crucified: he married Mary Magdalene, became the King of France, and started his own version of the order of Freemasons. Many of the people who now go to the Louvre are there only to look at the Mona Lisa, solely and simply because it is at the centre of Dan Brown's book.
The pianist Arthur Rubinstein was once asked if he believed in God. He said: "No. I don't believe in God. I believe in something greater." Our culture suffers from the same inflationary tendency. The existing religions just aren't big enough: we demand something more from God than the existing depictions in the Christian faith can provide. So we revert to the occult. The so-called occult sciences do not ever reveal any genuine secret: they only promise that there is something secret that explains and justifies everything. The great advantage of this is that it allows each person to fill up the empty secret "container" with his or her own fears and hopes.
As a child of the Enlightenment, and a believer in the Enlightenment values of truth, open inquiry, and freedom, I am depressed by that tendency. This is not just because of the association between the occult and fascism and Nazism - although that association was very strong. Himmler and many of Hitler's henchmen were devotees of the most infantile occult fantasies.
The same was true of some of the fascist gurus in Italy - Julius Evola is one example - who continue to fascinate the neo-fascists in my country. And today, if you browse the shelves of any bookshop specialising in the occult, you will find not only the usual tomes on the Templars, Rosicrucians, pseudo-Kabbalists, and of course The Da Vinci Code, but also anti-semitic tracts such as the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
I was raised as a Catholic, and although I have abandoned the Church, this December, as usual, I will be putting together a Christmas crib for my grandson. We'll construct it together - as my father did with me when I was a boy. I have profound respect for the Christian traditions - which, as rituals for coping with death, still make more sense than their purely commercial alternatives.
I think I agree with Joyce's lapsed Catholic hero in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: "What kind of liberation would that be to forsake an absurdity which is logical and coherent and to embrace one which is illogical and incoherent?" The religious celebration of Christmas is at least a clear and coherent absurdity. The commercial celebration is not even that.

Now Playing

A Little Too Not Over You
David Archuleta


It never crossed my mind at all.
It's what I tell myself.
What we had has come and gone.
You're better off with someone else.
It's for the best, I know it is.
But I see you.
Sometimes I try to hide
What I feel inside,
And I turn around.
You're with him now.
I just can't figure it out.

Tell me why it's so hard to forget.
Don't remind me, I'm not over it.
Tell me why I can't seem to face the truth.
I'm just a little too not over you.
Not over you....

Memories, supposed to fade.
What's wrong with my heart?
Shake it off, let it go.
Didn't think it'd be this hard.
Should be strong, movin' on.
But I see you.
Sometimes I try to hide
What I feel inside.
And I turn around,
You're with him now.
I just can't figure it out.

Tell me why it's so hard to forget.
Don't remind me, I'm not over it.
Tell me why I can't seem to face the truth.
I'm just a little too not over you.

Maybe I regret everything I said,
No way to take it all back, yeah...
Now I'm on my own..
How I let you go, I'll never understand.
I'll never understand, yeah, oohh..
Oohhh, oohhh, oohhhh..
Oohhh, ooohhhh, oohhh.

Tell me why it's so hard to forget.
Don't remind me, I'm not over it.
Tell me why I can't seem to face the truth.
I'm just a little too not over you.

Tell me why it's so hard to forget.
Don't remind me, I'm not over it.
Tell me why I can't seem to face the truth.
And I really don't know what to do.
I'm just a little too not over you.
Not over you, oohhh..

11/11: Archuleta (Album) Comes "OUT"

Okay. So I like David Archuleta. He is young, very talented and I'm waiting for his big coming OUT moment. I still think he's gay, although he still hasn't admitted it. At least his album is coming OUT this Tuesday. LOL. Here's behind the scenes of his photo shoot for the album: