and with this post..

...I end this blog.









..and start a new one here!

dilemma

"Life is a series of pulls back and forth. You want to do one thing, but you are bound to do something else.," saya Morrie Schwartz, as documented in the book Tuesdays with Morrie by Mitch Albom.

Sometimes you just can't have what lies at both ends. I've actually thought of or encountered quite a lot of instances of this dilemma, but wasn't able to write them down. One I have recently come accross though is about blogging -- you can't have a personal blog that allows your friends and family to get updated on what's going on in your life, and also write freely, just for the sake of writing, in the same blog. Or you can, if you like to live a life that's more complicated than usual.

under the table and dreaming

Those who are not familiar with the Dave Matthews Band and their song "Ants Marching" might not be familiar with the new title of this blog.

"...his concerns, he forgets them
and remembers being small,
playing under the table and dreaming."

Although I had an..unusual childhood, I can definitely remember times when I played under our old wooden dining table and dreamt. Looking back, I realize that it didn't really matter what I dreamt of. What mattered was that I was able to dream freely.

Had I known what terribly complicated things the world had in store for me back then, things that made you put away your dreams in a small corner of your life, I would have stayed under that table, even for just a little while longer.

The Sun and the Moon

wasted time.
i can not say that i was ready for this.
but when worlds collide,
and all that i have is all that i want
the words seem to flow
and the thoughts they keep running.
and all that i have is yours.
all that i am is yours.

painted skies.
i've seen so many that cannot compare
to your ocean eyes.
the pictures you took
that cover your room,
and it was just like the sun
but more like the moon --
a light that can reach it all.
so now i'm branded for taking the fall.

so when you say "forever?"
can't you see --
you've already captured me.

I've been meaning to blog about this song ever since the first time I heard it. Then this morning, I woke up in tears with this song playing in my head so clearly that I thought it was playing from the nearby computer. I took it as a sign.

And yes, The Sun and the Moon is so beautiful that if you allow yourself to experience it note by note, you could cry. But don't take my word for it. Just listen to the song here. (If you like it, buy the album!)

And no, it's not a..religious song, in that it does not make any direct religious references. But it is a love song, so therefore it can be read as a song of faith. It's art, so there are many ways of interpreting it. For me, it's a multi-sensory aesthetic experience, which is actually what the band's name (Mae) stands for.

on spiderman 3

The greatest battle cheese lies within.

A movie is good when it meets expectations. You want to get your money's worth when you pay to see a movie. When it's a horror film, you expect to get scared. When it's a romance or drama, you expect to be moved. When it's a comedy, you expect a lot of laughs. And when it's the third installment of an action-packed trilogy, you expect it to be just as great or even better than part one and two -- you expect it to end with a BANG.

You don't expect it to be cheesy as hell.

How did the trailers miss all the cheesyness? Or did they just leave those out on purpose? (Marketing can really be evil sometimes) The movie was so cheesy, it was depressing. I was rolling up my eyes so frequently I was afraid they'd roll out of their sockets! And those lines... what happened to their scriptwriter/line producer? Were they high when they were writing? I'd quote the lame cheesy lines here but I am really trying to forget that I ever heard them. And besides, I don't want to spoil the cheese for those who haven't seen the movie.

Seriously, if they were gonna make a movie for the kids, they should've at least given hints that it would be so. I mean, I can appreciate movies like The Incredibles and Shark Tale, but then I had expected them to more or less fall under that genre. With Spiderman 3, I was expecting depth, because of the apparent dark theme. I wasn't expecting cheese.

5 Things I Hate About Treadmills

1. It takes a while to get used to it. I've always had some vertigo after the first few times that I've been on it.
2. No cool breeze, unlike in real jogging/running. This makes for more sweat pouring down your face so you'd have to use the towel every once in a while, which could get you off-balance if you're not careful
3. You must obey the speed in the treadmill. If you want to slow down or speed up, you have to push a button, which could also get you off-balance.
4. There's a speed limit! One time I really felt like giving it my all and sprinting at the last minute, but when the meter reached 15 km/hr, it suddenly stopped!
5. Electric shock. Almost all the treadmills I've been on aren't grounded, which means as you run on the rubber belt, a static charge builds up on you and on the treadmill. This built up charge is released the moment you touch the treadmill, which can be quite painful and annoying.

songs to learn

I'm a guitarist, but I haven't been one lately. The last time I really put my guitar skills to use was three months ago when my aunt asked me to record my guitar renditions of Canon in D (Johann Pachelbel) and Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring (Johann Sebastian Bach). And it was really hard for me then because my skills were really rusty.

So in an attempt to save and improve this talent, I am making a list of songs to learn/relearn. I have this list on my phone so I can easily access it. I'm posting it on a separate location since it's way too long for my blog.

at the grub club

While waiting for my Chicken and Mushroom Panini at the Grub Club, I was bored so I took this picture. It's nice how the room appears to disappear into pure light to the far left..like heaven just lies ahead ^_^

I actually wanted to take photography, but then photography as a profession just won't cut it. (see previous post).

movie marathon

I can't play any decent game over the internet because of the our intermittent connection (PLDT can really be a pain in the neck), so here I am making my weekly post.

So what have I done over the past few holidays? Well, except for coming to work in the middle of it, my girlfriend and I had a movie marathon. And here's a quick review of each film:

Take the Lead - 3/5
Antonio Banderas teaches dancing to a bunch of detention kids. Good movie, although the dancing parts weren't as great as I've imagined.

Fun with Dick and Jane - 4/5
Any comedy with Jim Carrey in it is sure to be fun. This movie does live up to it's name.

The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind - 4/5
The disc cover says something like "This movie is for those who have a past they'd rather forget." Because at the end of the movie, these people might not want to forget after all.

My Super Ex-Girlfriend 1/5
This movie got a 1 out of five because it has good special effects, and the other girl is cute. Other than that, it would've gotten a zero. I'm glad I never spent money to see it in the theaters. It's almost as bad as Miami Vice.

A Lot Like Love - 3/5
A good romantic comedy, though I've seen better.

High School Musical - 5/5
I wish I've seen this back when it was being aired in cable. Back then I thought it was just another kid's movie. But having seen it now, I realized it makes you feel young, and makes you wanna get up and sing and dance. And Vanessa Anne Hudgens is cute too, especially when she is singing.

*sigh*

Sometimes it's really depressing to be in this country. It's when you pause and realize that even with an above-average salary, that middle-class dream of yours is still very hard to reach. When you start thinking about wedding costs, a lot, a house, a car, kids, etc and how you are going to finance all these between you and your future spouse, you get even more depressed.

And then you remember that more than a quarter of your above-average salary doesn't belong to you, but to your government. Then you hear reports that your country is the most corrupt in the world (?), and that 40% of the taxes you pay goes to corruption.

Two of my officemates have resigned to work abroad. And I'm thinking -- maybe I should give that option a little bit more consideration.

a choice

I am going to make regular posts.

But statistics on me (based on many previous attempts) would say I'd just end up not posting here for weeks or months or maybe even years. It's daunting, really, and it makes me feel that it cannot be helped -- that I don't really have any choice over it.

But I do have a choice. And I choose to start posting every week.

Grey's Diagnosis: Which Character Are You Like?

(click to see the larger version)

Only halfway through this quiz did I realize that it was really only for women. But I decided to finish it just to see the results.. at least the description is not way off. :)

Freedom of Choice Is Overrated

A very interesting piece by Dyske Suematsu. It's even more interesting if you've just seen the movie "The Pursuit of Happyness."


Freedom of Choice Is Overrated
By Dyske Suematsu Nov-26-06


Coming from Japan, the abundance of choice offered in America has always frustrated me, not because I don't like having choices, but because many of them are meaningless for me. For instance, a typical diner in New York offers hundreds of items on the menu, but none of them are particularly good. Wouldn't it make more sense to offer a limited number of items, but make them really well? Unfortunately the answer appears to be no. In this country where the concept of individualism is almost sacred, having choice is unequivocally considered as a good thing. No one even questions it, except for a few theorists like Barry Schwartz, the author of "The Paradox of Choice" .

On the surface, when you walk around in Japan, you might see as many choices as you see in the US, but you rarely see any choice for the sake of choice. Because of the multitude of options associated with it, it took me about 10 years to be able to order a sandwich in this country. Type of bread: white, whole wheat, 7-grain, pumpernickel, rye, etc.. Type of meat: turkey, roast beef, chicken, ham, pastrami, etc.. Type of cheese: American, cheddar, Swiss, Munster, etc.. And then you have optional things like tomato, lettuce, onion, mustard, oil, vinegar, salt, pepper, mayonnaise, etc.. Learning what each of these items is is no easy task for someone who came from a culture where cheese is just cheese. It was like playing a video game with many different levels; I would often give up before I could reach the end. And, most of the time, after all this trouble, I would get a mediocre sandwich. There are certainly many places that make excellent sandwiches in New York, but ironically those who make great sandwiches usually offer much less options. This is because they are real artists who could come up with a combination of ingredients that we amateurs could not even imagine. Professional chefs spend their lives thinking about how to make great food. If we want something beyond what we can make ourselves, it would only make sense that we let them decide what they think is good. This is the reason why many Japanese restaurants have an item on the menu called "Omakase", which means you leave it up to the chef to decide what is the best and the freshest. It appears that the Americans seem to enjoy having control over what they are getting, more than they enjoy great food.

Choice for the sake of choice may be a pitfall unique to the American culture. In "The Paradox of Choice," Schwartz describes the term coined by Robert Lane called "hedonic lag": "a tendency of every culture to persist in valuing the qualities that made it distinctively great long after they have lost their hedonic yield." Most good things in life have lines beyond which they are no longer productive or beneficial. In the US, an almost religious faith in the power of individuals to choose has reached the point of being counter-productive. It is about time we move on to something more salient and meaningful for our own times. In fact, the book depicts a grim future if we don't.

The number of suicide per year is increasing. So is the number of people with clinical depression. Schwartz argues that the increase in the number of choices is creating unnecessary feelings of anxiety in us, and, in many cases, this is leading to clinical depression. This might sound far-fetched if we consider only mundane, everyday choices such as choosing a sandwich, a brand of cereal, or a holiday destination, but it becomes rather serious if we consider life-changing decisions like heath insurance and retirement plan. When there were no health insurance or retirement plans, family members, friends, and the people in our community helped each other to deal with misfortunes. Now because of the emphasis on independence, we feel we are on our own to take care of ourselves if anything bad were to happen. In order to make a choice, we now have to study and understand how all these things work. To understand how retirement plans work, one must understand the legal, financial, and tax implications of various plans. It also requires a significant degree of mathematical competence. It is rare to meet someone who has managed to make a fully informed decision. Such a person could in fact make a career out of it.

One might argue that it is still better than having no choice. It actually isn't. As I described above, when health insurance and retirement plans did not exist, we had different systems to deal with our misfortunes. And, since we did not expect to be able to control our misfortunes in the way we expect today, we did not have to blame ourselves for them. We were able to accept misfortunes as part of life. Today, any minor misfortunes are our own faults (for not buying every available type of insurance). We can't simply get over our misfortunes; we have to regret them.

In the book, Schwartz presents his theories on why the paradox of choice is making us feel miserable, and on how we can prevent it. He has practical suggestions like: "Choose when to choose," "Make your decisions nonreversible," "Practice an 'attitude of gratitude,'" "Regret less," "Control expectations," "Curtail social comparison," "Learn to love constraints," and so on… Personally I do not believe that these strategies work. Like the multitude of diet schemes available today, they sound good and would work for a short period of time, but in the long run, they would not. I believe the fundamental issue is missing in his suggestions.

The worst American "hedonic lag" is not the freedom of choice, but "the pursuit of happiness" which is declared in the Constitution. If we watched nothing but Hollywood movies, one would get the impression that if we have any unhappy moments in our lives, there is something wrong with us, and we have problems to fix. In most Hollywood movies, those problems are fixed at the end, and the characters live happily ever after. We treat unhappiness as some sort of disease to eradicate forever. This is the main cause, I believe, of the growing number of suicide and clinical depression.

In the book, Schwartz states, "in Japan, per capita wealth has increased by a factor of five in the last forty years, again with no measurable increase in the level of individual happiness." What he may not realize is that in the East, most people expect their lives to contain 50 percent happiness and 50 percent unhappiness. So, if you ask them to rate the degree of their own happiness in general terms, they would tend to give 5 out of 10, even if they are happy or miserable most of the time. They assume that whatever their situations are now will change sooner or later. In other words, they do not expect the degree of happiness to go up with their material wealth, at least not to the degree the Americans do.

If you read about the classic Chinese philosophy, I Ching, this becomes easier to understand. Life as explained by I Ching is a wave of upturns and downturns like a sine wave. It accepts constant change as part of life. In contrast, Westerners see life as a linear progression, something that should get better in time. Technological advancement, for instance, is viewed as something that made, and will make, our lives better. In the East, there is no expectation of that. Unhappiness is a natural part of life for Easterners. The following Taoist tale illustrates this view of life:
One day this farmer's horse runs away, his neighbor says to him, "I'm sorry to hear that you lost your horse." "Well, who knows what's good and bad?" says the farmer. The next day, the farmer's horse returns to his stable, and it has brought along another horse. The neighbor congratulates the farmer, but he replies, "Who knows what's good and bad?" The next day, the farmer's son rides the new wild horse, gets thrown off of the horse, and breaks his leg. Their neighbor offers condolences, but the farmer once again says, "Who knows what's good and bad." On the following day, his son gets drafted to the army, but he is excused because of his broken leg. The story goes on forever in this manner.

When you look at life this way, the concept of "unhappiness" becomes relative depending on the time and the place. By preventing unhappiness, you might be preventing happiness that follows it. When I reflect on my own life, what I consider as beautiful memories are from the times I struggled. Those struggles made me stronger, wiser, and appreciate life more. After all, if it weren't for human struggle, pain, and suffering, we would not have most of the great novels we appreciate today. What happens when we prevent ourselves from feeling unhappy, is that we make our lives boring. In other words, it is a surefire way of making us feel depressed. If we did not expect to be happy all the time, we naturally experience half and half. If we expect to be happy all the time, we end up getting the opposite result. This is the main cause, I believe, of the general trend towards unhappiness in America.

Most of the suggestions Schwartz presents in his book are ways to avoid feeling unhappy. His approach, I would argue, would have the opposite effect in the long run. He suggests, for instance, ways to avoid feeling regrets. He explains why we feel regrets, but leaves out the most important one: Because we expect to feel happy. Suppose I need to buy a cell phone for the first time in my life. After careful considerations, I choose one, but I become unhappy with it. I have no choice but to keep it for a year, but after that, I switch to another company. This time, it is much better. But, if it weren't for the first company, I would not be able to appreciate how much better the second company is. I now have a range of experience that I could share with others. I am able to put various cell phones in a proper perspective. Had I chose the best cell phone the first time around, I would not have gained this wisdom.
We have to experience negative counterparts in order to fully appreciate positive counterparts. Someone who has never tasted bad wine does not know good wine either. In this way, if you prevent yourself from experiencing unhappiness, you would eliminate your chance to appreciate happiness at the same time. You would guarantee your life to be dull and mediocre. The problem of choice does not lie in making the wrong choice, but in our expectation of feeling happy about every decision we make. If we want to appreciate life fully, we should expect (in fact we should want) half of our decisions to be wrong. In this sense, if you want to make the process of decision-making easier, just flip a coin. I am not kidding; I often randomly choose things in my life. When I chose my college, after I narrowed down my choices to a certain degree, I decided that whoever responded first would be my college. I figured, "Who knows what's good and bad?" And, it all worked out fine.

on the way to work

Me: Boss, sa Ayala po.
Taxi Driver: ah, sige..
[I get in the cab]
Taxi Driver: saan dun?
Me: sa RCBC Plaza po.
Taxi Driver: ahh..bukas na ang uwi mo nyan noh?
Me: hindi naman po..mga alas-diyes po mamaya.
Taxi Driver: alanganin naman ng oras nyo..yung iba diba dose oras ang trabaho?
Me: ...?
Taxi Driver: depende rin siguro sa produkto nyo yan noh?
Me: uh...opo.

It's troublesome to explain that I'm an IT Support Programmer-Analyst and how that's different from a Telemarketer everytime someone assumes that I am the latter, so I just let it be.

Not that I look down upon call center agents, though. One of my sisters started out as a call center agent and now she has a good position in that company, and I am very proud of her. It's decent work, after all. I'm just not comfortable with people thinking I'm something that I'm not.

jrock and bleach

Lately I've been listening to a whole bunch of japanese rock (aka jrock) songs, all of which are soundtracks of the anime series Bleach. It actually disturbs one of my sisters a bit, since she can't understand the lyrics of the songs. I don't blame her -- if I were'nt a Bleach fan, I probably won't like the songs either.

I guess it's because these songs bring me back to those moments, those themes that I so love about the anime series. Note that I am not an anime fan. Bleach is the only anime that I've ever been a fan of. Heck, it's the only anime I ever really watched.

Again, it's the themes. Of course, the comedy is also a big factor. But what really caught me are the themes of kinship, friendship, forming your resolve, and most specially, facing yourself and overcoming your inner demons. You probably have no idea what I'm talking about. That's alright, because I'd rather you watch the series and see for yourself. ;)

stressed out?

Just because you're stressed out doesn't give you the right to be mean.
Just because you're stressed out doesn't mean you can be insensitive.
Just because you're stressed out doesn't mean people can't politely tell you that you're stressing them out.

Just because people who love you put up with you when you're mean, insensitive and hurtful, doesn't mean they're not hurting. They're just looking beyond the hurt.

So maybe you should try looking beyond the stress.