The Challenge

•October 14, 2015 • Leave a Comment

I’ve realized lately that I can’t seem to finish things that I’ve started. I’m not sure if I have a problem committing with something or it’s just that I get bored easily so I don’t usually see it through. Nevertheless, this has become a problem. I love starting on a project like make a scrapbook, paint something, draw something, make something, learn photography… but all I have are bits and pieces of what I started but no end products. I am trying. I tell you I am. But for some reason, I just can’t make it to the end. How am I going to solve this? Is it because I really lack conviction? Or is it because I just haven’t found something that I really love to do?

Since this has become a problem, I’m going to do something about it starting with this post. I’m going to try to have an entry every day until my birthday, March of next year.  If not every day, at least I can only skip one day. I’ll make this as a challenge to test my conviction. So let’s see!

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Shooting a Dream

•June 13, 2011 • Leave a Comment

I have always been facinated with photos and photography. I’m amazed at how photographers seem to capture the right moments on pictures. While most girls, when looking at fashion magazines, would dream to have their faces in there and be one of those high fashion models, I on the other hand, think differently. Seeing those photos makes me thinkof how amazing it must have been taking those pictures and capturing the beauty not just of the garment, but as to how the model, the background and all the other elements in that picture compliment in each other. Watching ANTM, and seeing those photographers in action,  just wows me in amazement. The only reason why I watch ANTM is to see the photographers and not the models. So I decided to try my hands on photography. Though I never really thought I could since photography is like a really expensive hobby and I don’t even have a decent camera, thanks to my wonderful boyfriend, while listening to me babble about how fun it must have been to have a camera and try photography, on my birthday he surprised me with one of the best gift I have ever received, a canon camera.

Holding on to my camera, I was then  thinking that I could immediately get jaw dropping pictures like those in magazines. I was dead wrong. I thought it was easy, but its not. For some reason, I can’t just capture the right image in my head and turn it into a photo. After my first test shots and not liking what I’m seeing, I left my camera in one corner and hardly even touch it after that. I immediately thought photography wasn’t for me and gave up in an instant. After nearly a month of making my camera sit in one corner, my boyfriend couldn’t help but comment. “I thought you would like it. Photography and the camera”, he said. I immediately replied, “I do, I really do. It’s just that…” I wasn’t even done talking when he interrupted me, “Ahh so you’re already giving up. It’s just like you. You start things and just give up. Did you seriously think it was that easy?” I didn’t say a word. It was not because I was angry at him. But it was because he was absilutely right. He always is. It was true. I never did hate photography, I just gave up without trying, thinking that I could never get a good photo. The I realized, it must have not been easy for my him too. He supported me with my dream, even though he never said it out loud. He helped me start and believed that I have the potential to be great otherwise, he would have just shut me down right from the beginning. So to thank him for his support, I started taking pictures again. And this time, I wasn’t discouraged. Even if the pictures I took wasn’t the same as what I wanted it to be, I still liked it. Nothing can be achieved in an instant is what I thought and now I choose to strive harder, practice and learn and maybe, just maybe, I would see the picture that I took in the magazine where I started to dream.

Here’s a peek of a few of my shots. Warning though, these are noob shots (though deep inside I’m really proud of them. LOL) and I know I still have a long way to go with practice and such. Rest assured, I will practice. So enjoy. 🙂

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A WRITER

•February 24, 2011 • Leave a Comment

What does it take to be a writer? A degree in journalism? A phd in some Ivy league university? A stunning five-page essay with deep, out of this world words that only a select few people can understand? Or is it a heart, a passion for writing that even with its very simple form it penetrates directly to the readers’ hearts?

I’ve noticed that a lot of people nowadays consider writing merely as a job. A job, that when you’re good at it, it brings home not just bacon, but the whole meat section. Writing has been made so commercial, so typical and practical that sometimes it losses essence and emotion. I can still clearly remember what my teacher in high school told me: “Writing makes imagination limitless and emotions come to life”. Though half of the class never really did pay attention, and sad to say I’m an avid member of that half, what she said just caught me. It made me realize how great it is to write. How wonderful it is to put all my thoughts, my imagination into paper and share it to the world. Hence, I started to write. However, I came across with these so-called writers claiming and telling people that to be a writer, passion is never enough. One has to have skills and technical knowledge in writing. Hearing this actually made me feel down. I know for a fact that I am not a master in all the technical aspects in writing. Heck my vocabulary skill is not that amazing either. Then I thought, I’m just a fake writer. A wannabe. I thought merely writing what I feel and what I want would count me as a writer. I guess I was wrong. But then again, no matter how defeated I felt, I just can’t help but wonder… what’s the point of being technically perfect in writing, when the soul, the emotion is not there? Then I felt as if a lightning of revelation struck me. Yes, a writer needs to be technically skilled if he wants money, recognition and gold statues in his living room. However, a writer needs only his heart to get something more than money and recognition…a smile that is engraved in the readers memory.

I am not a professional writer. I don’t work for New York Times and I don’t have a Phd. I don’t know what the heck APA is and half the time I don’t know which punctuation mark to use. I am not technically skilled in writing but I will not stop writing. I am a writer. I make imaginations limitless and emotions come to life.

To those of you who has been told that you are not a writer because you lack technical skills, don’t listen to them and most importantly don’t stop writing. The pen is your life and the story is your soul and no one, not even the greatest writer in the world can take that from you. You ARE a writer.

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Paycheck Over Dreams

•February 15, 2011 • Leave a Comment

Would you choose to follow your dream or choose stability?

I’ve been wondering about this for a few weeks now. Is it better to choose stability over your dream? I’ve been working for almost three years now in a job that I’m not even sure of what it is. (It is a decent job though.) I am stuck in an office for 10 hours a day, staring at the computer and I just can’t help but think, is this really the life I am meant for? is this the only  life I can live? I know this problem sounds cliched. If I don’t like it then I’ll look for another job. Believe me, I thought about it a million times, if not all the time. But what’s really holding me back is the pay that I get from sitting my ass here in this office. The  pay is really, really good and I can’t settle for any lesser than this since my whole family is depending on me. I am the only one in my family that has a job, hence, all the bills, groceries and all other shit that requires money are all shouldered by me. So, in the situation I am in, my job is basically the only reason why we still have food in our table. But the real question is, will this be enough? Is this all I could do? I feel like I am meant to do something more than this.

So, aside from the pay, there is absolutely nothing good about this place. I don’t have medical insurance, my bosses don’t know the meaning of professionalism and respect, and there is absolutely no room for growth and promotion. We are forever gonna be just employees, nothing more, nothing less.My bosses are foreigners and they think that all the higher positions can  and should only be filled by people like them. It’s kind of frustrating because it’s like no matter how hard I work, I know I will only be just that girl on the desk.

So, should I choose my paycheck over my happiness? Or take a risk, be bold, break free from this prison-like desk? I guess, I’ll never know till I pick one then.

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Young Love

•October 17, 2010 • 2 Comments

I want to go back to those times where love was not a complicated issue. Where love and relationships are always associated with cute love notes, little glances and butterflies in the stomach. I want to go back to the time when love was as innocent as I was.

Don’t get me wrong, I am in a healthy relationship now. I am happy with my boyfriend for three years and I can also say that I am pretty satisfied to where I am now in our relationship. But there are just times when I think about how different love was when I was still younger and I just can’t help but smile and think how different those times were.

Young love is pretty as it is. It makes you feel giddy when you realize your crush likes you as well, or when you both start to go out with each other for the first time and spend the first two hours of your date thinking of how to start a conversation. It could also be the love notes you get in your locker from some secret admirer or the secret glances you have for the guy seated in front of the class. The feeling is really different. It’s all exciting and fun. You can’t wait to tell all your friends about how fun your date was, or that he tried to hold your hand, or how sweet he was for using up his month’s school allowance just to give you a not-so-shabby gift. In a young love, every little thing counts. A simple goodnight text message, a “hi” on the corridor, or even just a smile can turn into a five hour conversation in your friend’s slumber party. When you try to convince your dad that you are going to the library to study when in fact Matt the “school crush” was waiting for you in the cafe. And when all of these have to end, when things just started to fall out of place and what you feel was no longer butterflies in your stomach but more like giants stomping on your heart, you just barge in to your friend’s house and cry the whole night. And when you wake up in the morning, it doesn’t hurt that much anymore and you find yourself going giddy all over again with the guy from the basketball team. It was simple. It was fun.

Adult love is not that different from young love. However, it is paired with responsibility. When we are older, we can no longer move on from one guy to the other but we try to hold on as much as we can to what we already have. And holding on and keeping it together requires responsibility. We can’t be as impulsive as we were back when we were still young. We have to be responsible for our actions since one small move can ruin a six-year old relationship. Though the gifts have gone from not-too-shabby to expensive Tiffany earrings, from ice creams to expensive restaurants, it’s still not as fun as climbing over the school fences just to get a bite at the hot dog stand. In adult love, the goodnight kisses, the good morning hugs may already seem to routinary and sometimes we might not even notice that we just fell asleep without saying a word. Dates become just a meal and a conversation and you talk to your girl friends more about your job than your relationship.

Young love is great. It is exciting . But it’s only fun while it last. We grow old, we see the world in a different view and realize young love was just as it is…just fun. We grow up and realize that love is more than just fun. It’s responsibility.

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The Fake Saint

•October 4, 2010 • Leave a Comment

You always come to me with those sad eyes, telling me how hard your life is right now. You keep on telling me stories about all the hardships you went through just for me, the things you sacrificed, how you managed to give the life meant for me, and how you did all you could to give me a future better than anyone else. You often preach as to how I should properly live my life, make good decisions for my future.

How dare you! How dare you tell me how to live my life. How dare you tell me that you have provided me a good future when indeed you provided me nothing but trouble, big problems at an early age. How can you say that you have given the life that I deserve when I know I don’t deserve to suffer like this. You are a fake saint, and a very good one, I say. You only listen to yourself and make decisions good for you and not for me. You blame others for the mistakes you make and think that all you did was right. You are not perfect. You are not a saint! When will you realize this? You should drop the act and get rid of those fake tears. Stop being a fake saint and start doing things that really matters.

A saint is not what I want you to be and you never will be.

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Men Cheat

•October 3, 2010 • 8 Comments

This is what I consider as one of life’s greatest mysteries. Why do men cheat? Is it because of lack of love or just merely self gratification? Don’t get me wrong, women do cheat. I know for a fact that women are totally capable of doing so. But its just that men do it more often than women and it just seems so natural for them to cheat. So why do men cheat?

My cousin ended her marriage with her husband because he cheated. Not just once, but over and over again. Now that they are divorced, my ex-cousin-in-law married the girl he was with while he was still married with my cousin. And now that he is married again, he is having an affair with his wife’s cousin. It’s just so astonishing how he toys with girls like that even with the fact that he is married. To add to that, during my niece’s birthday, he flirted all day long with my cousin (his ex wife) and telling her that he wants her back. As I was looking at him, I just can’t help but ask, why can’t he be satisfied with just one girl? And the most amazing thing is, he is not even that hot or good looking. He is no Keanu Reeves or Ashton Kutcher. He is just so plain and normal and yet girls would fight over him as to who he would really consider as his wife.

I also have this guy friend who claims to be in-love with his girlfriend of 8 years and sees his whole life married to her, have family and such. And yet from time to time, though not so often, he cheats on his gf with random girls. Flirts with other girls, going to dates to some random girl and even ended up going to first base. He then shows up to his girlfriend the next day acting as if nothing happened. As if everything was back to normal and all that happened was just a dream or an imagination.

So what’s the deal? Why do guys do these things? I would guess that the normal answer to this by most guys is that there is something missing in their relationship or that they were tempted with a really hot girl. But like the case of my friend, where he claims to really love his gf, so what would his reason be for cheating? The thrill of it? Self gratification perhaps? or Is it merely just because he is not satisfied with what he has? Is satisfaction in a relationship really that hard to attain?

Well, no matter how much I contemplate on this matter, I just can’t bring myself to a conclusion. Which by the way, is kind of why I’m relationship-phobic. I’ve seen relationship crumble and fail here and there because of men cheating. And I just can’t bear the thought of having to be in a relationship where you can’t trust your partner. I’ve been in that situation before, and as what they say, love makes people blind, so I tend to overlook that matter and act as if I everything is okay when in fact it’s not.

So, why do men cheat? It’s still a mystery.

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It’s not as simple as “bahay-bahayan”…

•November 21, 2009 • Leave a Comment

Being brought up in a country were almost everybody is Catholic, a lot of rules need to be followed. I grew up having to follow certain guidelines as to how I should properly live my life as a good Catholic. Religion aside, I am also living in a country were the people just can’t help but be nosy. I live in a place where the phrase “mind your own business” is unknown and that people have this need to comment about everything even if it doesn’t concern them.

In line to what I was babbling about, I have a story to tell about cohabiting or in lay man’s term “live in”. Everybody in the Catholic world knows that cohabiting or living together with your partner before getting married is a total no no. They see it as an immoral act, a great sin against God. But even in a Catholic country such as the Philippines, more and more people are now venturing this taboo world of cohabiting. I, for one, are one of those people who chose to cohabitate with my partner, disregarding the fact that people see it as something really ugly.

Choosing this path was easy. I never had second thoughts regarding cohabiting. When me and my boyfriend thought about doing it, it didn’t take us too long to decide. In fact, it took us just a few hours to decide that we should live together. I talked to my mom about it and though I know deep inside she was totally against it, she gave me her blessing. As what I said, deciding to cohabitate was easy but experiencing what cohabiting is wasn’t. Cohabiting is not as simple as bahay-bahayan. It’s not a walk in the park. Aside from the vulture eyes and the judgemental comments of shallow minded people that you encounter almost everyday, you also have to face problems and flaws in your relationship. Living with your partner is like living in a world where everything is see through. It’s like you’re totally exposed to your partner and your secrets uncovered. You can’t pretend unlike in an ordinary girlfriend-boyfriend relationship. In an ordinary relationship, you can just pretend to be uptight and really clean and when you get home, you can be messy. In the cohabiting world, you let your bad habits, your vulnerability out and work  hard so that your partrner can fully accept and understand you. And believe me, those statements like “if he loves me, he will accept me for who I am” is not all that true in the real world. In reality, you have to work hard for acceptance. Although this sound so difficult and tiring, for me, having to go through all of it was totally worth it. When you get to the part when you and your partner are just totally comfortable with each other, your eyes opens up to a clearer, more scenic view that despite your differences, the loud snoring at night or the farting here and there, its just wonderful. The feeling is wonderful. It feels good to wake up in the morning where one is complaining about how long you stayed in the shower but at the end of the day you just laugh about it.

So, why does society see this as something really bad? Is it because there’s no formal blessing from God or whatsoever? It’s kind of funny how people judge those who are cohabiting to be immoral when these people don’t even see that there are a lot of married couples in a loveless relationship or has mistresses here and there. Which one do you think will God be more happy with? In a married couple who screams and beat each other up in front of their children or in a couple where they live together without a marriage certificate but they have love and respect for each other? People should clearly think about this. The significance of a relationship should not merely depend on a marriage certificate. Relationship is based on trust, love and hard work. So what good is a formal piece of paper if the relationship is in rubble?

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a student’s ignorance proudly aired on TV

•July 29, 2009 • 4 Comments

I woke up early this morning and tuned in to this morning TV show called “Umagang Kay Ganda”. In today’s segment, they featured students from Polytechnic University of the Philippines and talked about the 2010’s election and Pres. Gloria’s SONA. I didn’t pay much attention to it at first since I was still trying to enjoy the morning breeze from my window. Then, a certain student from PUP caught my attention and I just can’t help but write about it. If I was there, I would have probably stopped him from humiliating himself on national television.

This certain PUP student made some kind of a short documentary film or whatsoever in response to Pres. Gloria’s SONA about her, making roads and bridges for farmers to use. In the short documentary, he featured a certain small barangay somewhere in Luzon wherein the people there used to have this problem about a bridge. They needed a 6 meter long bridge to cross to the other side. The people in the barangay talked to the City Engineer about the bridge but somehow, according to the Engineers, they had another project at that time that was a more priority than a 6 meter bridge. So, the people took the initiative  and spent their own money to build a bridge which they are using right now. And then this is the part where the student showed the nation his ignorance. He then commented about Gloria’s SONA. He emphasized that in her SONA she said that she provided roads then why wasn’t she able to provide this 6 meter bridge in this small, poor barangay. Its comments like this made on national TV that makes me somehow ashamed of being a Filipino. Hey boy, why do you blame it all on the President? Issues like that 6 meter bridge are basically the reason why there is a Government System. Small concerns like that should be raised to the barangay leaders and then to the city leaders not directly to the president. That’s the reason why local government officials exist. They solve the smaller problems so the president could take care of the bigger problems of the whole country. Just imagine if the president would be the one to take care of every little thing thats been bothering all the barangays in the whole country. A four year term or even a ten year term of a president won’t be enough to solve those problems. In Manila alone, there are 897 barangays in total. Just think how many barangays there are in all of Philippines. So instead of using all your effort to sound smart about politics and just end up making a fool of yourself, might as well use your time to coordinate with your local government officials and truly make a difference. You  don’t need to pinpoint somebody’s  pagkukulang to make a difference. So you students should not blame it all to the president. Do you think it easy to run a country? Classroom leadership is not even that simple to handle much more lead a whole country with around 92 million people.  I’m so tired of listening to people complaining, yapping about how Gloria failed as a president when we, as citizen didn’t do much to help our country either. So how do you expect one person, Gloria, to change Philippines for the better when the people itself just keep on complaining and not actually do something to make a difference.

You see my dear student, there’s a reason why our Government has a system. So instead of just yapping out to the public, why not use your intelligence to make a difference than just merely blaming it all to the president and then you might really be smart than a fool.


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Miley Cyrus as Asian Racist

•February 6, 2009 • 3 Comments

miley_cyrus_makes_fun_of_asians1

I was just browsing the net and I came across an issue of Disney’s Hana Montana star, Miley Cyrus. She is alleged of mocking Asian people and was called an Asian racist after photos of her slanting her eyes circulated in the internet. Miley Cyrus addressed the issue and wrote in her blog that she had no intention of being a racist. She claims she was just making a goofy face.

Since Miley Cyrus is pretty popular among the young people all over the world, criticisms greatly arose and tagged her as a bad example to her young fans. A question even arose stating, “how would her Asian fans feel about this?”

Since I am Asian, personally, I don’t think that the photo really screams racist. But at some point, I do agree that they were mocking the Asians specially the guy at the back wearing red. I don’t tag them as racist but rather ignorant. Miley Cyrus is a celebrity and she should know better that issues like this will not be taken lightly since she is popular. I would say that she should have been a little less ignorant and a little more smarter in choosing her actions.

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