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First things first, belated happy birthday and a hearty congratulations to my sister Lystra. She's 21 which is practically ancient! Also she was named as one of the outstanding writers of her batch in De La Salle's lit program, an achievement that simultaneously makes me proud and jealous of her.

The new Blogger archive style has opened my eyes to an interesting pattern in my blog. I fervently posted in my blog the first year, tailing off on the second and then it sees a drastic fall in the last two years. Heck, this post makes my posting this year much more proliferate than my writing last year.

When I think back on my emotional status, I think I see an inverse relationship between how much I write and how well I feel. If one trusts this relationship then one is forced to conclude that I am feeling crappier about this year than the last :p

Which is not to say, that I am feeling crappier. I'm just attempting an amusing observation at 5 in the morning. And. Failing. Probably.

Lystra's lit status is kind of cool as I get to bask in the reflected glow of literature, something I love quite dearly. As she mentioned in her blog, I am jealous of her growing bookshelf filled with books of excellent quality.

And I think it also gnaws at the part of me that wants to be a writer, that piece of me that against all logic attempts to string words together to describe beauty that I never know. I hardly know the world and love and most of all people and yet I seem to be under the illusion that I can be its scribe. It's been far too long since I've written anything I consider good.

Like I remarked to a friend, I want to write. I don't quite know what to write about but I will write. Lystra once related how she finds it difficult to place herself amongst local writing because she has no idea how local culture is like how it does not have relevance to her world view and thus her writing can hardly be considered "local".

I think I fall into the same fate except make the scope of the not-knowing-a-single-thing-ness (5 am diction is bad) anything about the human condition. Sure, conventional wisdom says "write what you know" but I fear that I will fall into the trap of writing a Mary Sue character. The story I'm working on has me worried about that.

I just don't know.

I am puzzled over my feelings for her. Reading my entries about my previous crush makes me wonder why I am not breaking out the angst over my feelings for the current crush. It just bothers me that I have not invested myself in her as much as I did previously. I place such importance on words but yet I hardly make attempts at beauty when I write about this girl in contrast with the previous girl who made my blog appear... filthy with my excreable attempts at romantic words.

At least I took... something today.

I'm pretty damn sure Wednesday was a good day for me, I'm just puzzled at how I could not know it's a good day then. I think I suspected it but I couldn't appreciate it as the day progressed.

I was given a couple of offers for work, both a bit in the same field but one guaranteed money for doing basically crap jobs while the other couldn't guarantee but offers cooler opportunities to do something I care about. It brought me uncomfortably close to that question of whether you'll work for job satisfaction or for money. I've never considered that this situation would be a dilemma for me. I've always thought I would be able to choose job satisfaction without hesitation.

It was kinda flattering to think that my programming skills are in demand, no matter how dull I might consider them to be. Well, as compared to the trained students in my school anyway. I think Ronald knows the elite CSIT students. Irunno, kinda intimidating when I think of going up against them.

I start having a minor attack of nerves later that day when I couldn't find anyone else to go with me to watch a movie with the girl. I get to the cinema and I choose to leave a chair between us (her sis was with her) and at that time I thought I was doing the right thing. I don't know, no idea how anything stands right now, I'm just playing this blindly.

But the day after I kinda hate myself for not seizing the day. And then I keep waiting for the bad day that is surely attendant to myself after a good day like that. I don't know why, I'm not superstitious but it just feels right for some sort of balance to exist in the universe.

Finally got the layout finished, after fighting blogspot's templating engine all the way. And then it turns out that the problem was PEBCAK. At least it sharpened m debugging skills some.

It's still not completely done, sidebar items need styling. You will bow before my rule damnit! After this, I've gotta move the stylesheet to an external one and then figure out how to make a stylesheet switching widget. And then a del.icio.us widget. And oh, upload my alternate page layout.

Which is less girly, thank you very much (I'm giving you a "look" cookie) (that look probably is less intimidating and more i've-got-gastric-problems but eh)

So I am finally changing the blog layout, after all these years. Mind the mess, layout overhaul is only halfway done. I'm supposed to have a sidebar and for some reason the blogger template engine keeps mucking around with my naming conventions, the fruit frakkers. Nevertheless I will soldier on, hope to finish this by Wednesday at the most.

Oh, and my main motivation for the overhaul? So I can have tags in my damn posts. del.icio.us has turned me into a tag whore.

I will burn in hell for that bad pun.