35 Months.

35 Months and counting. Wish you could be here beside me so we can celebrate our monthsary. You know who you are. I love you so much! 

35 Accents in the English Language

Can't help myself laughing when the guy imitates us, the FILIPINOS.

"Hay naku, may gas!"

Elijah Kay Ganda!

Just trying the new campaign logo of the Philippine Department of Tourism.

If you also want this, click HERE.

GLEE's Kurt's First Kiss

A while ago, GLEE's latest episode was all about KISS. Kurt Hummel was Never Been Kissed until now. He received his first kiss from David Karofsky, a jock, that has been repeatedly bullying him. I was able to watched it a while ago in ETC (Entertainment Channel) but their kissing scene was been cut. So I need to watch it and look for its video in Youtube.

Dreaming Puppy Makes Adorable Noises

This puppy is so cute and more cute when he makes adorable noises.

Choco Rhumble is ♥

Merienda Time. I usually go for a cup of coffee with my partner Starbucks mug. Checking our refrigerator and there you have it, a Choco Rhumble from Goldilocks. Thanks to my cousin's hubby for bringing it home. 

It really looks so tempting because it has soft, thick chocolate filling sprinkled with bits of crushed nuts, wrapped in frozen chocolate coating. 

Goldilocks' Choco Rhumble

Choco Rhumble is a rhum-infused chocolate rhumble covered with chocolate and drizzled with chocolate ganache.

Choco Rhumble with my trustworthy Starbucks mug!

Don't work. Avoid telling the truth. Be hated. Love someone.

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Written by Adrian Tan, author of The Teenage Textbook (1988), was the guest-of-honour at a recent NTU convocation ceremony. This was his speech to the graduating class of 2008.
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Life and How to Survive It

I must say thank you to the faculty and staff of the Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information for inviting me to give your convocation address. It’s a wonderful honour and a privilege for me to speak here for ten minutes without fear of contradiction, defamation or retaliation. I say this as a Singaporean and more so as a husband.

My wife is a wonderful person and perfect in every way except one. She is the editor of a magazine. She corrects people for a living. She has honed her expert skills over a quarter of a century, mostly by practising at home during conversations between her and me.

On the other hand, I am a litigator. Essentially, I spend my day telling people how wrong they are. I make my living being disagreeable.

Nevertheless, there is perfect harmony in our matrimonial home. That is because when an editor and a litigator have an argument, the one who triumphs is always the wife.

And so I want to start by giving one piece of advice to the men: when you’ve already won her heart, you don’t need to win every argument.

Marriage is considered one milestone of life. Some of you may already be married. Some of you may never be married. Some of you will be married. Some of you will enjoy the experience so much, you will be married many, many times. Good for you.

The next big milestone in your life is today: your graduation. The end of education. You’re done learning.

You’ve probably been told the big lie that “Learning is a lifelong process” and that therefore you will continue studying and taking masters’ degrees and doctorates and professorships and so on. You know the sort of people who tell you that? Teachers. Don’t you think there is some measure of conflict of interest? They are in the business of learning, after all. Where would they be without you? They need you to be repeat customers.

The good news is that they’re wrong.

The bad news is that you don’t need further education because your entire life is over. It is gone. That may come as a shock to some of you. You’re in your teens or early twenties. People may tell you that you will live to be 70, 80, 90 years old. That is your life expectancy.

I love that term: life expectancy. We all understand the term to mean the average life span of a group of people. But I’m here to talk about a bigger idea, which is what you expect from your life.

You may be very happy to know that Singapore is currently ranked as the country with the third highest life expectancy. We are behind Andorra and Japan, and tied with San Marino. It seems quite clear why people in those countries, and ours, live so long. We share one thing in common: our football teams are all hopeless. There’s very little danger of any of our citizens having their pulses raised by watching us play in the World Cup. Spectators are more likely to be lulled into a gentle and restful nap.

Singaporeans have a life expectancy of 81.8 years. Singapore men live to an average of 79.21 years, while Singapore women live more than five years longer, probably to take into account the additional time they need to spend in the bathroom.

So here you are, in your twenties, thinking that you’ll have another 40 years to go. Four decades in which to live long and prosper.

Bad news. Read the papers. There are people dropping dead when they’re 50, 40, 30 years old. Or quite possibly just after finishing their convocation. They would be very disappointed that they didn’t meet their life expectancy.

I’m here to tell you this. Forget about your life expectancy.

After all, it’s calculated based on an average. And you never, ever want to expect being average.

Revisit those expectations. You might be looking forward to working, falling in love, marrying, raising a family. You are told that, as graduates, you should expect to find a job paying so much, where your hours are so much, where your responsibilities are so much.

That is what is expected of you. And if you live up to it, it will be an awful waste.

If you expect that, you will be limiting yourself. You will be living your life according to boundaries set by average people. I have nothing against average people. But no one should aspire to be them. And you don’t need years of education by the best minds in Singapore to prepare you to be average.

What you should prepare for is mess. Life’s a mess. You are not entitled to expect anything from it. Life is not fair. Everything does not balance out in the end. Life happens, and you have no control over it. Good and bad things happen to you day by day, hour by hour, moment by moment. Your degree is a poor armour against fate.

Don’t expect anything. Erase all life expectancies. Just live. Your life is over as of today. At this point in time, you have grown as tall as you will ever be, you are physically the fittest you will ever be in your entire life and you are probably looking the best that you will ever look. This is as good as it gets. It is all downhill from here. Or up. No one knows.

What does this mean for you? It is good that your life is over.

Since your life is over, you are free. Let me tell you the many wonderful things that you can do when you are free.

The most important is this: do not work.

Work is anything that you are compelled to do. By its very nature, it is undesirable.

Work kills. The Japanese have a term “Karoshi”, which means death from overwork. That’s the most dramatic form of how work can kill. But it can also kill you in more subtle ways. If you work, then day by day, bit by bit, your soul is chipped away, disintegrating until there’s nothing left. A rock has been ground into sand and dust.

There’s a common misconception that work is necessary. You will meet people working at miserable jobs. They tell you they are “making a living”. No, they’re not. They’re dying, frittering away their fast-extinguishing lives doing things which are, at best, meaningless and, at worst, harmful.

People will tell you that work ennobles you, that work lends you a certain dignity. Work makes you free. The slogan “Arbeit macht frei” was placed at the entrances to a number of Nazi concentration camps. Utter nonsense.

Do not waste the vast majority of your life doing something you hate so that you can spend the small remainder sliver of your life in modest comfort. You may never reach that end anyway.

Resist the temptation to get a job. Instead, play. Find something you enjoy doing. Do it. Over and over again. You will become good at it for two reasons: you like it, and you do it often. Soon, that will have value in itself.

I like arguing, and I love language. So, I became a litigator. I enjoy it and I would do it for free. If I didn’t do that, I would’ve been in some other type of work that still involved writing fiction – probably a sports journalist.

So what should you do? You will find your own niche. I don’t imagine you will need to look very hard. By this time in your life, you will have a very good idea of what you will want to do. In fact, I’ll go further and say the ideal situation would be that you will not be able to stop yourself pursuing your passions. By this time you should know what your obsessions are. If you enjoy showing off your knowledge and feeling superior, you might become a teacher.

Find that pursuit that will energise you, consume you, become an obsession. Each day, you must rise with a restless enthusiasm. If you don’t, you are working.

Most of you will end up in activities which involve communication. To those of you I have a second message: be wary of the truth. I’m not asking you to speak it, or write it, for there are times when it is dangerous or impossible to do those things. The truth has a great capacity to offend and injure, and you will find that the closer you are to someone, the more care you must take to disguise or even conceal the truth. Often, there is great virtue in being evasive, or equivocating. There is also great skill. Any child can blurt out the truth, without thought to the consequences. It takes great maturity to appreciate the value of silence.

In order to be wary of the truth, you must first know it. That requires great frankness to yourself. Never fool the person in the mirror.

I have told you that your life is over, that you should not work, and that you should avoid telling the truth. I now say this to you: be hated.

It’s not as easy as it sounds. Do you know anyone who hates you? Yet every great figure who has contributed to the human race has been hated, not just by one person, but often by a great many. That hatred is so strong it has caused those great figures to be shunned, abused, murdered and in one famous instance, nailed to a cross.

One does not have to be evil to be hated. In fact, it’s often the case that one is hated precisely because one is trying to do right by one’s own convictions. It is far too easy to be liked, one merely has to be accommodating and hold no strong convictions. Then one will gravitate towards the centre and settle into the average. That cannot be your role. There are a great many bad people in the world, and if you are not offending them, you must be bad yourself. Popularity is a sure sign that you are doing something wrong.

The other side of the coin is this: fall in love.

I didn’t say “be loved”. That requires too much compromise. If one changes one’s looks, personality and values, one can be loved by anyone.

Rather, I exhort you to love another human being. It may seem odd for me to tell you this. You may expect it to happen naturally, without deliberation. That is false. Modern society is anti-love. We’ve taken a microscope to everyone to bring out their flaws and shortcomings. It far easier to find a reason not to love someone, than otherwise. Rejection requires only one reason. Love requires complete acceptance. It is hard work – the only kind of work that I find palatable.

Loving someone has great benefits. There is admiration, learning, attraction and something which, for the want of a better word, we call happiness. In loving someone, we become inspired to better ourselves in every way. We learn the truth worthlessness of material things. We celebrate being human. Loving is good for the soul.

Loving someone is therefore very important, and it is also important to choose the right person. Despite popular culture, love doesn’t happen by chance, at first sight, across a crowded dance floor. It grows slowly, sinking roots first before branching and blossoming. It is not a silly weed, but a mighty tree that weathers every storm.
You will find, that when you have someone to love, that the face is less important than the brain, and the body is less important than the heart.

You will also find that it is no great tragedy if your love is not reciprocated. You are not doing it to be loved back. Its value is to inspire you.

Finally, you will find that there is no half-measure when it comes to loving someone. You either don’t, or you do with every cell in your body, completely and utterly, without reservation or apology. It consumes you, and you are reborn, all the better for it.

Don’t work. Avoid telling the truth. Be hated. Love someone.

You're going to have a busy life. Thank goodness there's no life expectancy. 

Speech taken here. Photos taken here.

Sisterly Chats Make Me Happy

Me, Vanya Mara (elder sister) & Nicole (younger sister)

A while ago, I had read an article about Sisters and Happiness: Understanding the Connection in The New York Times website. Based on the recent study from Brigham Young University, claims that men who have sisters are more happier than men who don't have. The research is supported by a couple other studies that were released in Britain last year. 


After reading the article, I immediately reminisce the things with my two sisters, what we talked about anything under the sun. I am the middle child and my elder sister is two years older than me and the other one is five years younger than me. When we were younger, we always fight and argue. I guess, it was part of our growing up years. 


Today, I make sure that from time to time I can talk to my sisters in a sensible way. But when I am having sisterly chats with them, it differs. It differs in the sense that when I am talking to my elder sister, we talk about life, family, personal issues and future plans. It seems that maturity comes to take in place between us. We make sure that what we talked about remains with the two of us. However, when I am having a sisterly chats with my younger sister, we are talking anything under the sun; mainly fashion, music, TV shows and etc.


I am really glad that I have these sisterly chats with them. Even though they didn't know it, deep inside me, it makes me happier because I have a healthy relationship with them. 

"If men, like women, talk more often to their sisters than to their brothers, that could explain why sisters make them happier. The interviews I conducted with women reinforced this insight. Many told me that they don't talk to their sisters about personal problems, either."

From the NYTimes.

I Wanna Be An ENGINEER!

!

Ang kulit ng kantang ito! Good thing, hindi pa uso ang Facebook ng student pa ako. Multiply pa ang uso nun kaya hindi pa gaanong nakaka-addict unlike Facebook. Hehe!


Pero totoo talaga na masaya ka na kung makakakuha ka ng TRES lalo na kapag nasa majoring years ka na. Alam mo na yun, from 3rd year to 5th year. SINGKO? Haha! Uso talaga yan! Nakakuha din ako ng ganyang grade eh! So nakumpleto ang LIFE ko sa UST Engineering nun. 


Na-miss ko tuloy bigla ang batchmates ko at ang mga kabarkada ko na sina Raine, Tashei at Maffy!

My All Souls' Day!

When I was a kid, my family used to visit our deceased loved ones during the 1st of November. We will visit first my little sister's, Marian Angel, grave here in San Mateo, Rizal. After visiting her, we will proceed to Loyola Memorial Park in Marikina City to visit my mom's maternal grandmother together with other relatives. It's like there's a reunion when we go there. 

As we grow older and gets mature, we learned that we should visit our deceased loved ones every 2nd of November, All Souls' Day! All Souls' Day commemorates our faithful departed while All Saints' Day is a solemnity celebrated on November 1 in honor of all the saints, known and unknown. 

Since 2002, we visit my my little sister's grave every 2nd of November. Today, we visit her grave again at San Mateo Public Cemetery and pray for her soul. If she's alive today, she's already 22. 

My little sister's tombstone. 

You will always be my ANGEL, Marian Angel!

Should JK Rowling write another Harry Potter?

Novelist Naomi Alderman and children's writer Frank Cottrell Boyce debate whether another Harry Potter would be too much of a good thing

• Naomi Alderman and Frank Cottrell Boyce
• The Observer, Sunday 31 October 2010
• Article history

Jim Broadbent as Professor Slughorn with Daniel Radcliffe in the title role of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince.

NO – Naomi Alderman, novelist

Listen, JK. (You don't mind my calling you JK, do you?) Although we've never met, and you probably made more galleons and knuts last week than I expect to see in the next 10 years, you've always seemed approachable and honest, not the kind to stand on ceremony. Don't do it.

The thing is, Harry Potter's story is finished. He's defeated Voldemort. Friends have died, lessons have been learned, Draco Malfoy is all grown up with a child of his own, and Mrs Weasley said the word "bitch". It was beautiful. And now it's over.

I understand the temptation to revisit old triumphs. It feels dangerous to step away from ground where you know you've been successful. Imagine if you wrote something that wasn't quite as good! Or something that didn't capture the imagination in quite the same way. Well, what then? Creators all know that the most dangerous thing isn't to try and fail, it's to stagnate. Maybe not every new world or new set of stories you make will enjoy the huge success of Harry Potter – but a worse fate would be to keep on ploughing the same old furrow, not able to try anything new.

I don't say you even have to invent a whole new world. The world of Harry Potter is evidently vast and you've barely scratched the surface. What about – and I know this is a radical notion – a novel for adults in the same imaginary space? What's going on in the Ministry of Magic? What's up with those dragons in Romania?

If you're still tempted to add to Harry's story, I have two words for you, words that ought to terrify any creator thinking of revisiting a finished opus: Star Wars. The first three Star Wars movies (1977-1983) aren't perfect but they're complete just as they are. Watching just those three, we're left to wonder how a young Jedi could ever have become Darth Vader, to imagine gleefully the history between Jabba and Solo. We didn't need to have those blanks filled in for us – part of the joy of a great fiction is being able to do some of the invention yourself.

If I were able to wipe from my mind all memory of the ghastly travesty of the Star Wars "prequels" and the accompanying "remastered" originals I would. It became ludicrously, painfully clear that George Lucas hadn't understood anything that made the first movies great. Where the first three were grimy and realistic, the worlds of the prequels were ridiculously clean. The dialogue was dreadful. The explanations of the mysterious power of the Force took away all its interest and magic.

JK, I know you're thinking, "I'd never do that. I know my characters, I know my world." But why take the risk? Your legacy is assured. Instead of retreading old ground, with all the dangers that you might uproot what's already planted there, why not take the opportunity to experiment?

Having said all that, if you've got a new book growing in your head, I know you're right – you have to write it. That's what happens. Like wisdom teeth pushing up through the jaw, a book is unstoppable, and will only cause you pain if it can't grow right to where it needs to be.

If you have to write it, then write it. But, just a thought, and without any criticism of the wonderful Harry – maybe the plucky hero could be a girl wizard next time?

YES – Frank Cottrell Boyce, children's writer

It's not as if eight volumes is overkill is it? There are probably eight volumes of Victoria Beckham autobiography by now and when did she last face down a basilisk or foil an ogre?

It may seem a strange thing to say, given the unprecedented sales and the generation-defining excitement her books generated, but I think JK Rowling is vastly underrated. The scale of her success means that it's unfair trying to compare Harry Potter to any other book series. Even the most popular writer can usually find somewhere quiet to think about what happens next. Rowling wrote the last five Harry Potter books right in the middle of the Potter phenomenon, with fans and the media second guessing her next move everywhere she looked. It's hard enough to come up with something. To come with something that no one else has come up with – that's formidable. The only people who have been in that situation are the big, highly paid teams of writers and directors who work on franchises like Batman, Shrek, or Pirates of the Caribbean. Almost always they screw up. Ten minutes into the second Pirates of the Caribbean film, for instance, you knew it was dead. The people making it hadn't the slightest understanding of what made the first one so exciting.

Rowling on the other hand went off on her own, kept her nerve, refused to be distracted and somehow kept surprising and challenging us. The list of people who have managed to keep a character alive that long is very, very short. Anne of Green Gables for instance is, I think, a truly great novel. But does anyone read the other eight Anne books? Sherlock Holmes is probably the only real comparison but it's a telling one. What we want of Sherlock is more of the same. Sherlock himself never changes. Harry on the other hand is a rich, complex character who has – like his first audience – grown up.

I admit it's hard to imagine her writing more about Harry himself. It's one thing to bring a hero back from the dead – that's what heroes do – it's quite another to bring him back from marriage and children, which is where she left him at the end of the seventh and (to date) final book. In my opinion the series' most compelling character was Snape, and it would be interesting to see him resurrected. Yes I do know he died in the books but so did Sherlock once upon a time. In these touchy feely days, it says a great deal for Rowling's skill and courage that she ever gave a central role to such a chilly and morally complex character as Snape.

Usually in these circumstances, people resort to a prequel. I really hope that she doesn't. One thing that distinguishes the series is that patina of history, that feeling that the characters know more than you do, that they have a bit of a past which you might not ever know. Again this is a quality that Potter shares with Holmes. Watson often refers to stories – such as the case of the giant rat of Sumatra – which you will never hear told, or he makes grandiose hints about adventures that must remain secret for reasons of state or heart. If you spell those stories out then you banish the light and shade, and scrub off the charming patina.

The very fact that I can't imagine what form another Potter book would take is the best reason for saying she should write one. I can't imagine it. And isn't that what writers are for? To take us to places we can't imagine.

Article was taken here.