One of my philosophy professors lectured wildly about love once, yelling: “When you’re in love with someone, that person is the lighthouse of your universe.” (I scrawled it inside Science and Poetry in pencil—lighthouse of your universe—as if I would ever forget that phrase.)

He was a delightful caricature of his position. I could swear he literally tore his hair out while howling at us. He went on, “Nothing means as much without that person.” 

One of the men in the class repeated, incredulous, half-laughing, “So you’re saying you can’t enjoy, like, a vacation, without someone if you’re really in love with them?” 

“Of course not.”, the professor replied. “Not completely. You recognize beauty, but beauty means less if they don’t witness it with you. Beauty is less. You see something sublime and your first thought is that they should be there with you. It’s not as good without them. They illuminate. They make everything more.”

...basta sagot niyo tuition ko ;) Yay!

“You can go through life and make new friends every year - every month practically - but there was never any substitute for those friendships of childhood that survive into adult years. Those are the ones in which we are bound to one another with hoops of steel.”
— Alexander McCall Smith (The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency)

(more pictures here / tropa, right click on the image to save)

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(I wish I have some more)

She blessed us with the F word:

(more jumping here!)

I read about The Girl Who Has Infinite Karma in The Inquirer today. The 'karma' being referred to here is Plurk Karma. Plurk is a micro-blogging site where members can reap karma points when they post regularly (but your karma can also take a notch when you gain Plurk friends, change your layout, etc.).  The higher one's karma is, the more Plurk features he or she gets. The girl, Hazel Danielle Santos, in the article was not able to reach Plurk Nirvana, which is equivalent to 80 points, because she never got the chance to fulfill that.

She was the happiest woman on earth, as she exclaimed about it in her Plurk post last October 12. She got engaged on that day, but, unfortunately, also got into a car accident with her fiancee after the engagement party.

When Hazel died, someone appealed to the Plurk management to freeze her karma, since it had saddened everyone to see her karma points dwindling down. Well, she can't update her posts now, can she? The management was understanding enough and, in response, placed an infinity sign beside the karma on her page.

This may sound strange, but reading the article has moved me. I've always played with the thought that those who have lived with the Internet may experience a different kind of death compared to those who haven't. Now, seeing how it is with Hazel's death, I think there really is a contrast.

I mean, it's different because when we die, people can still get to know us through our online accounts, unlike before when people only learn about history and the lives of the dead through word of mouth or written text rummaged through old dusty cabinets. Now we have the Internet consisting of digital autobiographies of the future dead (I'm sorry if that sounds grim).

I've always believed that it's important to chronicle our own experiences (based on our own selection of experiences, of course) in the Internet, may it be by creating blog posts or uploading photos, because that is the most convenient way we have now to make future generations understand how things were in our lifetime.

If you can't make a mark in the world, at least try in the world wide web. That is my goal, before time will come that someone has to appeal to the Plurk management to give me my own infinite karma, which, upon thinking now, can actually count as a death wish.

Click the links to see more:

Day 1

Day 2

Day 3

(We already left at 11 am for the airport on our 4th day, so there aren't any really interesting pictures for that day.)

COMPLETE SET

"The very least you can do in your life is figure out what you hope for. And the most you can do is live inside that hope. Not admire it from a distance, but live right in it, under its roof."

—Barbara Kingsolver (Animal Dreams)

Once when I was a kid, my birthday wish was to be allowed to skip blowing the candle on my cake because I already wanted to play with my new Barbie doll. I longed to skip the festivity so I can stay in my room instead and play in Barbie’s world; I could zoom into the future to the time when I am 21, same age as Barbie’s I supposed. By then, I will imagine myself in pretty, colorful clothes and a posh car. I would cook breakfast in the morning in my pink kitchen and I would go to work in my classy designer suit. This gave out a natural high; it felt good to think of me being like Barbie. I was chic, independent, and successful.

3 days from now, I will be 21. I would’ve loved to tell you that I am in close range with my Barbie-self, but I’m not. I had a job which could not even allow me to buy a used car (not that it matters; I’m afraid of driving) and I’m going back to school again, thus my savings will depend again on the weekly allowance from my parents. I still have the same wooden closet and it’s now filled with clothes which couldn’t fit me anymore. 3 days from now will be the day I’ve always dreamt of. Who was I kidding?

Now I get it, why those who are growing old are afraid to be reminded of their age. Another year has passed and there could be dreams still left unfulfilled and a pile of resolutions yet to be observed. A year from now, you will have to blow another candle, and before you know it, another year will come on top of another, and you’d ask yourself, while thinking of a birthday wish: Have I become who I wanted to be this year?

You let out a sigh, blow the candle, and tell yourself, "Maybe next year".

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But of course, I’m not dreaming of becoming like Barbie anymore.

CLICK FOR MY BDAY WISH LIST :)

In Tabango, Leyte:

This was before we stepped into the pump boat to a remote island during Halloween.

CLICK FOR MORE :)

We left Tacloban at around 1 o’clock in the afternoon, ate lunch in my uncle’s favorite kiosk along the way, and at around 3 o’clock, we arrived here:

Batan’s Farm at Brgy Belen, Leyte, Leyte

CLICK TO CONTINUE READING...

Just finished reading Alexander McCall Smith's The Right Attitude to Rain. I'm a follower of McCall Smith's Isabel Dalhousie series simply because it feeds me with thought-provoking lines like these:

In the context of eternity, this is nothing, as are all our human affairs. In the context of eternity, our anxieties, our doubts, are little things, of no significance. Or, as Herrick put it, rosebuds were there to be gathered, because really, she thought, there was no proof of life beyond this one; and all that mattered, therefore, was that happiness and love should have their chance, their brief chance, in this life, before annihilation and nothingness to which we were all undoubtedly heading, even our sun, which was itself destined for collapse and extinction, signifying the end of the party for whosoever was left.

But she knew, even as she thought this, that we cannot lead our lives as if nothing really mattered. Our concerns might be small things, but they loomed large to us. The crushing underfoot of an ants' nest was nothing to us, but to the ants it was a cataclysmic disaster: the ruination of a city, the laying waste of a continent. There were worlds within worlds, and each will have within its confines values and meaning. It may not really matter to the world at large, thought Isabel, that I should feel happy rather than sad, but it matters to me, and the fact that it matters matters.

---

"I'm very fortunate," she said. "I'm well-off. I was left money. That's where it comes from. But I try not to splash it around, I assure you. I don't live in great splendour or anything like that."

"Pity," said Miranda. "I would, if I had money."

"You don't know that. You might find that it made no difference. And it doesn't, you know. Once one has the minimum required for reasonable comfort, any more makes no difference to how you feel. It really doesn't."

Isabel watched them return to the counter. For each of us, she thought, there is our completeness in another. Whether we find it, or it finds us, or it eludes all finding, is a matter of moral luck.

And BBC recently aired the 2-hour pilot episode of McCall Smith's No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency. I've been searching for that title in National/Fully Booked/Powerbooks, but it's always out of stock Anyway, I'm downloading the episode now to see how it goes. :)

Currently listening: Keane's Somewhere We Only Know
Currently feeling: thirsty

One of the subjects Weiner interviews, Larus Johannesson, explains it as follows: “Failure doesn’t carry a stigma in Iceland. In fact, in a way we admire failures.”

Of course, this isn’t an entirely good thing, at least as far as artistic endeavors are concerned. “There’s no one on the island telling them they’re not good enough, so they just go ahead and sing and paint and write,” begins Weiner. “One result of this freewheeling attitude is that Icelandic artists produce a lot of crap.”