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In my younger days, I had an english teacher. I can't remember her name now but she was simultaneously my most hated and most loved teacher at the time. It's a dichtomy but that's life.

Each week she would make us get fifty new vocabulary words each. Each week she would check our notebooks so see how we were doing.

I want to get better in writing. I think it helps with the creativity and the works of the anacrusis guy just inspires me.

To this end, I've created a new forced writing blog which I call my Vocabulary Notebook. Each school day I will go to dictionary.com's word of the day and write a story utilizing that word. I was meant to start yesterday but I got lazy. So I started today with the word Temporize. I drafted the story in school. I actually liked my draft better. For some reason though, I decided to leave the paper in school, choosing instead to fold it and write the URL of my blog down. Shameless self promotion, yes but I doubt it got read anyway. Probably got promptly thrown in the trash.

So yeah. My writing can only get better. I hope. Onward ho!

To paraphrase: It's my birthday tomorrow. I turn 21. I like games.

Biiiiig 20 today. I am officially old. Hopefully I can open a new blog later today about writing. Stuff. Whee.

Oh. Writing to gush about. Go on. You want to gush. You know it.

I want to write something about two-nought. Too many damn things rhyme with it. Poem kind of things. I am the rhyme master.

"Don't just go through Hip-hop, let Hip-hop go through you"

There are too many paragraphs in this post.

This is a paper I had to do for english class where we had to write a memoir. The prof limited us to a single page because we were all whining for a low minimum page count. That was evil but I decided to add more challenge to it by using the format that Anacrusis uses, that is I limited myself to 101 words per part. Click on read more to read the full paper. I don't think it lives up to the standard of the author of Anacrusis but eh, it works.

I collapsed onto my bed, my mind weary but adrenaline rushing. It's 7 am and I'm recovering from a session of wormage. I look out of my window and realize I haven't really watched clouds in over a year. Cloud watching. To some it may seem like time wasted but I never really thought of it that way. I would spend irunno, half an hour or so just lying on the couch in my living room looking out of the window and gazing at the sublime beauty of the clouds and the sky.

Since my youth (which is slipping through my fingers btw, two days left till I turn the big two-oh), I've been fascinated by clouds. I vividly recall car rides where all I did is stare out of the windscreen as I let my imagination run wild. I would visualize myself running in those clouds thinking that they looked solid and big enough to support my weight. That they would be like fluffy snow. Or I would see whole castles, turrets and windows and all in the shadows of the clouds. They're amazing and I always consider them as one of Gods greater works, being remade almost everyday.

As I watched the blue sky and the clouds piled high, an airliner lazily streaks by. For a while it seems to challenge the clouds dominion of the sky. Mans challenge to God. Who can put into the sky greater, vaster constructs. Which is more amazing an artificial being shaped by man from metal and breathed to life with his ingenuity? Or tiny crystals of ice compelled to come together to form majestic sculptures, suspended in the sky for all to see.

Sadly, we as humans are marring the sky. I can recall the flight into Philippines. All the black smoke that darkened the sky as we came in for the landing. It's depressing. Its like throwing paint on the Mona Lisa.

A thought: an existence decided by groupthink. If no one acknowledges your existence, do you exist? I act weird when I get attention. A classmate says hi in the canteen and I look behind me to see if she was saying hi to someone else. I think I don't exist.

Unasked and unexpected, someone is haunting me again.

Ohhhh yeah. I'm too damn sexy for my blog.

Blogger targeted marketing meets blogger insanity meets viral meme (via Thomas).

Okay, this is a really really really belated thank you note to my friends back in Singapore. They sent me a care package of really cool stuff and I never posted about it in my blog. I feel like a right bastard really.

So to Tom, Edi, Boon, Delon, Justin and Jamie (her name is bolded as I forgot to write her name in the "card") thankyouthankyouthankyouthankyou. I wear the dog tags pretty much everyday. The Geek Pride shirt is my absolutely favourite shirt. And the CD. It made me cry. Miss you guys a butt load. Here's to missing you the whole year round.

Oh, and Tom, about the boxers. WTF? Never thought you thought of me that way. (although I have to admit I'm wearing them now, hence the slightly absurd title.)

Oh. Also via the L^P mofos, The Ladder Theory. It may just save your life.

I'm no Caesar but I have cause to be wary of March coming around. Age has a funny way of sneaking up on you and before you know it, BAM! You've been rear-ended by time out of your teenhood into your twenties. Jeez, I sound like an old geezer. Next I'll be complaining about my bladder acting up or something.

So I'm not that happy about the state of things in my life. Or at least where I am in life now. I'm not leaving my teens with much of a sense of accomplishment. I still have three weeks to work on it though. See, I've managed to move on from crippling pessimism to bleak optimism so I'm making progress.

Oh wait. Could being a guest speaker twice already be called an accomplishment? I guess it only counts if the aforementioned talks given weren't to meh schools and my transference of knowledge made minimal impact. But that's just how I look at it anyway :P Whoops, slipping back into pessimism here.

Midterms was completed two weeks ago. The previous week was college week in my school which was almost a waste if it were not for the seminar that was given by comic artists. It just highlighted so much things that I lacked as an artist skillwise. However, it did teach me things which were useful so that is a great benefit for me. I didn't really know the names of the artists who did the seminar but some of them were working for Marvel (of X-men fame) which is a big thing. I guess.

Comics don't seem to hold that much relevance to me other than being really pretty pictures. The theory behind the storytelling is great and all but I never really personally got into reading comic books all that much. I think it's mostly because I never bought them or knew people who bought comics. I know some of the basics of the comic world and all but go deep and I'm pretty much lost.

I don't really remember much media having a big hold on me though, other than books and computer/computer games. I remember waking up early on Saturday mornings not to watch cartoons but to set up my knock-off NES console and play Super Mario Bros. Watching that little Italian plumber jump across brought me so much excitement as a child. I'd remember literally jumping out of my seat as I played it, stomping on my foes and timing my leaps across the nothingness.

Maybe the nostalgia I feel for video games leads me to froth at the mouth when people attack it and blame it for child violence or somesuch fiddle faddle and nonsense. Bull crap.

Hrmm.. enough of my vapid rambling. I'm probably turning into the people I hate, talking about inconsequential things. Not enough input. My brain has been starved of enriching material. As good as the internet is for a lot of intellectually stimulating activities, I seem to be using it soley for mind rotting entertainment. I need to consume media that is intellectually rich, something to make me think. To this end I have, along with my sister, purchased three good books. Veronika Chooses to Die, Tuesdays with Morrie and Eternal Lightness of Being (much <3 for the latter). I'm on the verge of devouring all of them, if I can find time to curl up with one and actually begin to read. I was sidetracked from starting on Unbearable Lightness from a pretty good conversation I had with sis.

Other lessons learned from Starbucks; I can't pull a prank and keep a straight face and they are making money off addicts. The latter revelation came to me when I ordered a Starbucks DoubleShot (capitalizing the moniker of drink is required, I assure you). It's basically crushed ice, flavouring of your choice (vanilla, caramel or plain) and two friggin shots of espresso. Two. Shots. Maybe it's not the best drink to pick for a long talk cock session in Starbucks but boy does it please the caffeine addict. It's all about taking your coffee addiction to its basest form, dropping all the crap surrounding it. The frappes the mochas and the what have you. They're selling you direct access to your high (cheaper than getting a frappe). And they manage to make it more palatable to the addict; they seek to reassure you, to soothe your nerves that while you're basically admitting that you are an addict, a slave to caffeine, you're doing it in style. You can be assured that you will be distinguished among the sea of anonnymous white paper cups emblazoned with the green Starbucks logo (which still does not make sense) because the cup that you will be holding will be designed specially for your addiction. That the cup you are grasping is used soley for that drink (Starbucks does not have any other special cups as far as I know). And that the cup will look exceedingly cute and disarming that it couldn't quite possibly hold the potent, heady and oh-so-addicting blend that you are hooked on.

On a thought that is off-tangent, I've gotten rid of the faithful stick of RAM that has hung on the lanyards of my ID's from NYP and APC. It feels strange when I think about it. That RAM was an anchor to the world of geekiness, a label which I proudly wear. One could take it as a sign of me maturing beyond labels. Or I could have just gotten tired of it making so much noise when I walked. Maybe Lystra can psychoanalyze me when she gets into the psychology course in DLSU. :P

I let myself down when I didn't complete the script for Art Apre and had to rip off another script from the internet. Feel sort of bad for not getting the script done, like I let myself down the most. I wanted to write it, to have a story done after so long. Oh well. Acting excercises for me this Saturday. I hate acting. Ask Lystra.

Oh March. You herald the culmination of a Year in this country.