observe & retort

woke up, couldn't return to sleep, decided to blog... but with two conditions. the first one is i must write ten sentences or more. the second one is to be kept secret, which hopefully visitors will find out themselves by the end of this post. this exercise might be difficult for some but those with clever minds or keen eyes will surely spot the puzzle quickly. if you know the solution, put it in the comments. you win nothing, however, except for the pride of figuring the mystery out.

i'm not sure i'll write enough so i'll just include some nonsense. 1 to 999. i love odd numbers. crocodiles on tv. dinner tonight is porkchop. the bell curve sucks. sherlock rules!

googling isn't prohibited. not sure it would help though. unless someone else did this before me, which isn't impossible. how to look for it, now there's the tricky piece. still, i don't think i'm the first one to do this on their blog, but if so, then the better it serves my scheme. so people of the web, i implore you, use your intelligence to decipher this condundrum. the clock's ticking. time limit: one week.

p.s. i dont know where i got this from. someone committed suicide in my subconscious world then i opened my eyes to this concept which would not let go lest i digitize it. do i think it's cool? yes. will it be news/link worthy? i doubt.
p.p.s. guessed it yet? do not give up though. clue: something very common is missing from this post.

ii

day after tomorrow, my daughter turns two years old. day after today is when we'll celebrate it. day after yesterday, i post my blog opener for the year and as i flip through my memory tome, i realize how much has changed. iaine has grown a lot as a little lady and i have grown a lot as a man.


during my bachelor years, i often questioned my purpose. i went from job to job, none of them lasting for more than a year. i'd withdraw my salary and spend it all. then i'd be broke and alone and i'd space out contemplating my life. i was trapped in that cyle for too long with nary a penny put aside for the proverbial precipitation period. even when jeean came into my life, i still lacked that special skill to cope with workplace bullshit.


when iaine was born, something was triggered in me. when i saw her for the first time, i knew the answer. suddenly, my life had reason. that i had to man up and take care of this child. it was my chance to prove i was worth something. no more impulse buying and pointless splurging. no more happy-go-lucky, devil-may-care attitude. no more quitting when the corporate heat is unbearable. iaine is my north. iaine is my bottomless hero drink. iaine is my gravity. iaine is my 42.


now, i have a stable job and i could provide for my family with more than enough to spare. i have had two promotions and very much inspired to pursue the next rung on the ladder. it has been two years of watching a slice of evolution unfold before my very eyes, of bragging about her early milestones and pwning parenthood copycats, of going home tired and sleepy but staying awake to watch her dream, of feeling complete. im sure that as time goes by, she'll have more ways to make me happy, amazed and proud as a father.

happy second birthday, iaine. i love you very much.

perchance to dream

the other day, my dream was in english. also, it was an episode of walking dead. some of the characters from the show were there. some were my real-life relatives. and they were speaking english. it ended with rick grimes turning into a zombie himself. then his head grew really huge and he started eating everything up a la langoliers.

i dream of having a dream with subtitles someday

a sticky situation

lately, traversing the information superhighway has been a bumpy ride. our dsl at home has long been disconnected (4k bucks reactivates it, which i'm actually contemplating on). my sister's myfi is luck-based. and the wifi in my dad's office is no faster than dial-up. seriously, all it needs is the modem sound and im back in '90s.

and so halfway through no-shave november, i decided to get globe's superstick. after several trips to the local mall, i got the sleek gizmo the other day. but i didn't get to use it until today because of the sim activation period of 24-48 hours. and when i did finally get to use it, the laptop i was using (my dad's) shut off by itself. turns out, the power adaptor went kaput. so i went out and bought a new one. and when i did finally get to use the darn superstick, the connection kept breaking that i couldn't even finish a speed test.

do you know when it finally worked glitch-free? when i was dressed for work and about to leave. with less than half an hour to enjoy the fruits of my labor, i watched my downloads disappear from the queue. the speed wasnt as high as advertised but it was fast enough, faster than that time when it was raining hard and flooding everywhere and the bandwidth gods gave me magic internet for a day.

hopefuly globe holds their end of the bargain and keep it up. else, this thing is getting shoved up someone's pooper.

uno dos stress

in the movies, when someone wakes up from a nightmare's climax, they usually bolt up in bed screaming. never happened to me. usually i stay in the dream to find out what happens next but sometimes it would be so scary i'd have to wake myself up. and it's not even like when it's an extreme close-up of the eyes and they suddenly open up accompanied by a sound effect. nope, i simply slowly open my eyes.

anyways, when i woke up today, i didn't want to go to work. not that i hate my job (excluding that one guy, i love it). it's just that lately i've been feeling so stressed. sporadic headaches, abnormal crankiness, irritable bowel syndrome, and tired feeling even after enough sleep. i contemplated texting my team leader about not coming in. instead, i put on my glasses, got up and dragged myself to the bathroom. it used to be so easy use the big invisible book of excuses and skip work. but things have changed and i now earn the dough for my family. so yeah, screw my shitty sick shtick. off to the beehive i go.

but seriously, this stress thing is getting way worse than i can handle. so much that as a person who hates depending on medicine and doctors, im actually open to the idea of taking vitamins.

(the text above was typed on the blog post date but i was too stressed out that i never finished it. so now i am.)

as always, time with my beautiful family cured me. i remember a few weeks ago, jeean and iaine came to manila for my youngest sister's graduation lunch. when i came home from work that morning, i opened the door to a very happy iaine running towards me saying poppa. and that was it. that was all i needed. i had to man up and survive the stress week, go home and find solace in the sweet loving limbs of my wonderful wife and disarmingly cute daughter.

monochrome optique

my ludovico project is near culmination. i actually feared i'd fail to hit the target what with the scarce personal free time of a working family man. i managed to finish the movies during bathroom breaks, idle time at work and several moments pre and post sleep. right now, the focus is on black and white movies, squeezing in one or two colored ones. if you're bored, interested, or insane and want to check my progress, you can flutter by my twitter by stabbing the chocobo on the right with your mouse pointer.

anyways, i bet this one's never crossed your mind: when people do countdowns, say 1-5, why do they always count like this: 1, 2, 3, 4, 4 1/2, 4 3/4, 5? why not 1, 2, 3, 4, 4 1/3, 4 2/3, 4 3/4, 5?! why do they always skip 2/3?

i seriously think that a law against giving atm cards and driving licenses to idiots should be passed. what a quick cash withdrawal and diaper purchase turned into an expletive-laden test of patience due to these intelligence-deprived creatures. these imbeciles have some sort of belief that they're special and important and so they make you waste your time waiting for them as they struggle to accomplish a supposedly simple task. typical atm routine of a moron: insert card, check balance, get card, look at receipt, decide on amount to withdraw, insert card again, take a while to figure it how much to withdraw, time runs out, get card, look at receipt again, insert card again, withdraw cash, get card, look at new receipt, decide to withdraw again, insert card, withdraw cash, get card, look at receipt and for some apparent reason these motherfuckers have exclusive knowledge of, they complete disergard the long queue of irate people behind them and insert the atm card for the last time to check the balance again! somebody please murder these people.

p.s. yes. random shit again. but this relaxes my earlobes.
p.p.s. hmm i guess hard work does pay off sometimes. i hope this goes on so i wouldn't have to leave this country and my family.

climbing mount molehill

day three of my battle with general sniffles and his mucous army and i decide to pick up my imaginary pencil and make the blinking cursor vomit words into a blog post. with the digital dust and web cobwebs cleared, i type the first thing that comes into my mind:

i hate the duke of bloomberg.

don't want to talk about that so let's move on to the second thing that enters the thought theater:

"practice makes perfect. nobody's perfect. so why practice?"

contrary to what you might be thinking, i do not approve this piece of flawed logic. i have seen and heard it countless times and frankly my dear, i think it's a crock of bull. the first time i encountered it was in grade school, read it off a pocketbook of jokes because that was the stuff i was into during those years, along with burning paper edges and discovering porn. back then, my young smoke-filled and porn-baptized brain believe it was brilliant. it was right. it was three puzzle pieces perfectly connecting. and then i grew up and realized i've been misled, round the same time i found out santa claus didn't actually exist.

anyway, i hated it when the gears clicked and rang "bullshit" and i hated it even more when it got passed around through text messages. (and may the flying spaghetti monster have mercy on the soul of any person who deems it proper to use as a facebook status today) but the instance i hated it the most was when a local movie used it in the main character's speech because the writers couldn't come up with their own and simply hoped someone who had lived under a rock would at least giggle at it. but the movie's facepalm-worthiness did not end there. i did not watch the darn thing, so how did i know that the quote was in it? because they had the gall to put it in the trailer. yes, they honestly believed that the most effective way to sell the comedy movie to the public was to use an overused quote that wasn't even funny.

so what makes this logic wrong? the fact that it assumes that the things described as perfect in the first two sentences are the same. let's look at the second one first. nobody is perfect. what this simply implies it that no "person" is perfect. now, to the first sentence. practice makes perfect. what do you practice? singing, dancing, murdering, etc. with enough time and effort, you can perfect the singing or dancing of a particular song. sure, the perfection is subjective to the viewer or listener but that song was made in a particular way and that by achieving the same level of performance the song was meant for is considerable as perfect. so practicing can in fact help perfect a certain "action".

so sentences one and two don't really connect as perfectly as i had once thought. both are true but do not contradict one another because they do not pertain to the same thing. practice makes perfect because you can keep practicing until you perfect an "action" but no one can't practice being a "person" because that's just who you are. so even though nobody is perfect, it has no relation to the question practicing because you still have to practice to be perfect at something.

yes, this is me overthinking the mundane. and yes, this was a long and pointless exercise, apart from the idea that i needed to update this decaying blog. so,  thank you for wasting your time with me.


p.s. most trailers of pinoy movies are badly edited. especially comedies, where they pack all the jokes they have in them. i admit to have watched these kind of movies before but when i did, i definitely did not laugh at the jokes previously showcased in the trailer. a large majority of the moviegoers did, however, and i was like, wasn't that in the trailer that was on tv every fucking hour?!
p.p.s. my blog has risen from the dead. it is now a zombie blog. or a zomblog.