< hmmm... >

   By the way, November 9th is the second year anniversary of this here blog.

   Anyway, some pharmacist friends are suggesting that I take herbal medicines instead of chemicals to cure my, uh, psychosis.  They swear that a regimen of pito-pito will cut short the exacerbations associated with my illness and I'd be get-up-and-go by the time I steep said herbs in hot water.  Right now, I'm taking major tranquilizers, which can really get to my system and have me shivering in the middle of the night.

   Which is precisely the reason why I also hate taking in medicine.  Unless they come across beer-flavored pellets of goodness, I'm good.  However, since that can't happen I have to stick with the medicine I have now.  Now I know what my Pokemon feel whenever I'm drugging them with all sorts of boosters.

< hmmm... >

   It seems that I'm constantly on the verge of anything from a great discovery to a stupid day.  This is a stupid day.

   Today I queued up for two hours to pay my tuition fees and it was a good thing I planned it for the morning, or else I'd be pelted with rain this afternoon.  I still was, on my way to SM to buy a binder notebook.  Well, it's not exactly my fault that things aren't turning out the way I hoped...

   Oh well, 'tis experimenting time.

< hmmm... >

   Seems like I failed a subject.  My dream of a three-unit semester is busted.  Well, at least I can take solace in a seven-unit semester.

   To those of you expecting the e-book of TMX IV, it's on.  Next week.

< must quit making "hmmm..." statements on thought "bubbles" >

   Bangalore, India is changing its name into "Bengaluru," according to a Yahoo! report.  Apparently, in the local language, "Bangalore" means "the town of boiled beans."  I wouldn't want to live in the town of boiled cabbage, either.  Does anyone live in Pinakuluang Repolyo?

   Boiled beans aside, there are a lot of names of places in the world that deserve a name change.  Take Sexmoan, Pampanga, which I always seemed to consider the sexiest town name in the planet - a haven for sexual activities best left to the imaginations of serial rapists in Bilibid.  It all depends on how you would use a placard or a town marker.  "Sexmoan" thus became "Sasmuan," and all I know of it is that it is a town that specializes in sweet goods.  Aside from taking "sex" and "moan" out of the compounded morphemes, it's all good.  Except, maybe, that the people of the town formerly known as Sexmoan will have less sexiness than a prostitute in Angeles.

   Bangkerohan City, Davao del Norte is another Freudian allusion, especially considering the notions of "boats" and "boatmen" in the Filipino language.  Cabisocolan, Ilocos Norte might as well be named "the city of edible snails."  The city of androgynous lesbians is also found in Pampanga: Tibo.

   Maybe I'm being ethnocentric in saying that even my city, Baguio, would might as well be considered the town of storms or, in a more allegorical manner, the town of really bad diarrhea.  When you come to think about it, changing the name of a few roads or cities here and there may be merit to them.  I get confused about the two Marcos Highways in the Philippines, and even changing one into the Palispis-Aspiras Highway doesn't make any sense to me at all.

   Banzai, Pangasinan, which I am sure is a fine, fine town for recreation and perhaps a few flame-grilled bangus, is one cool sounding name.  Burat, Samar, however, is not something I'll be eating flame-grilled anything for those stray pubic hairs that may be found in a dish of roasted scrotum.

   The truth is, I have now unearthed our common problem.  Who would want to live in a nutsack?

< quote me on these >

   Not everyone granted that one day of "All Saints' Day" is a saint.

   Behold, the sarcophagus!  What do you see... a mere block of stone.

   Valor is best left to the living for nobody died because of it.

   Those who wish to be buried are those who cannot let go of living.

< now this is worth blogging about >

   The other day, during our nth class reunion, I came across a very obscure scientific fact: that tranquilizers and tequila don't mix.

   I'm on medication, and as far as I'm concerned I need to be a hell of a lot calmer.  That also means, according to my doctor, that because of the drug interactions between alcohol, Haloperidol and Chlorpromazine, I should stop drinking.  After all, I know I drink too much and I'm probably going to live the rest of my life popping typical anti-psychotics.  So I figured that if I'm gonna quit drinking but go out swinging, I should be wasted.  Thanks to cheap tequila, local vodka and a generous helping of green mangoes washed down with a few cold beers, I got knocked down good.

   I know a hangover like I do an old shoe, so after being carried away to a room where I had toxic nightmares thanks to drug interactions, I took to rationality and decided that if I'm going to be the same old liquor-swilling bastard, I must quit taking the medicines.  The more rational course of action would be simpler: while I'm on medicine, no alcohol.

< romantic experiment >

   A lot of girls I know hate the very idea of playing Warcraft III: Defense of the Ancients.  DoTA, for short.  It's not DoTA, per se, that annoys them, but the very idea of playing a computer game.  It seems like a likely tradeoff, between a real maiden and a Crystal Maiden.  Or, to play on the pun, there's a vengeful spirit behind every guy who plays a Vengeful Spirit.

   I'm used to the whining of many a girl about the mad obsessions of her boyfriend being addicted to DoTA.  But why?  It's a simple-minded game, no more than a point-and-click adventure through a battlefield.  A relationship gone "DoTA" is nothing more than a relationship gone awry because of a simple game of DoTA.  Big whoop.  They say computer games are addictive.  They're not: like smoking, the thought of playing a computer game is addictive.

   Girls: you can't expect your DoTA-addicted boyfriends to respond to your every whim.  To wish only to serve, to gladly obey, to give their lives to you if you're named Ner'Zul.  Ultimately, the choice is often between you and DoTA, right?  Wrong.  You may be looking for time with your boyfriend, a date...

   Come on, just play.

< hmmm... >

   I just had a Pepsi Cino, a coffee-flavored variant of Pepsi.  Even Coca-Cola has one: Coke Blak.  I am now thinking of the next big wave in flavoring a fine cola: one that tastes like urine.

   While urine-flavored colas wouldn't probably make the waves I'm expecting of such a product, you have to hand it to our culture.  We have come to that point in flavoring everything in coffee that you just kind of think about what this says about our lifestyles.  I'm not a coffee drinker myself, but why must everything nowadays taste like coffee?

   I know I'm dealing with extremely babaw social phenomena when I could just as easily write about the economy or how much I hate the President and would do anything to moon her blind, but that's the kind of sociology I bring to the table.  You wouldn't want me to be your teacher.

   Anyway, coffee-flavored things are symptomatic of the character of human society today: a society bound by the rules and benefits of coffee.  Coffee, like its effects, isn't taken in slowly.  The coffee break, heck, even the kaffeeklatsch, lasts exactly fifteen minutes.  That's as much time as we can spare ourselves out of 24 hours.  We become human for exactly fifteen minutes every day, thanks to the coffee break.  Before coffee became so central to the workplace, humanity was far more extended through the continuum of time.  When we started to divide our time based on the clock and its implications to production - say, the length of time it takes to bolt together a machine - we became so time-centered to the second.

   We can't seem to get enough coffee into our system that we start introducing those quick ways by which we can caffeinate ourselves and turn our circulatory systems into a series of pumps and tubes to circulate coffee into our systems.  Had the coffee-flavored candies not been enough (and they aren't), we start introducing coffee-flavored everythings: coffee colas, coffee cakes, coffee chips, coffee cigarettes, coffee wines.  Pretty soon, we start to become enveloped in the entire cultural system of coffee and why it exists: it is the social drug.

   But does it taste good?  Definitely not: we are all naturally averse to coffee.  Like cigarettes, we learn the coffee habit.  We put sugar and milk into our coffee because we don't like the taste of pure black coffee.  But we "need" the caffeine: for all its kicks, for all its social benefits, for the extra energy it gives for us to get through the day and to screw on the next bolt in that system of irrational activities put in that extensive rubric called "work."

   Anyway, back to the Pepsi Cino.  It kind of tasted good, although it seemed redundant for me to drink a coffee-flavored caffeinated drink.  And I wasn't in a hurry.  Pretty soon I'll be sucking on a coffee-flavored candy.

   Hell, I don't even drink coffee.

< hmmm... >

   I remember the time I almost went blind and was losing my balance a year ago, and thank goodness my vision is returning back to the "normal" that still requires my uber-strong eyeglasses.  I still sit pretty close to the TV and I still clutch railings in very unfamiliar places, but overall, I'm good.

   That was until I was wheeled into the emergency room a few weeks back and after further diagnosis on a caffeine-induced daytime nightmare, I was whisked off to a psychiatrist for further testing.  The result?  Suspense... suspense...

   People don't take too lightly to "diagnosis" since it is a prelude to something bad, and in my case it's something really bad anyways.  Lately I've scrapped out the "worry" factor since all the worrying in the world wouldn't do anything to me anyway.  Instead I look for the proverbial silver lining, knowing that things wouldn't be so much of a damn deal anyway if only I take a deep breath and think of the positives.

   OK, I'm barred by medical confidentiality to talk about the illness per se, but suffice to say, I am mentally ill.  It's some sort of a psychotic disorder, and while I haven't been running amok naked or while I haven't been killing people left and right like some neurotic serial killer, I am indeed sick in the head.  It's not curable and the most I can do is to inflict harm upon a legion of people if I left it untreated.

   Lemme see, if I hadn't been given the kind of will that can withstand romantic breakups left and right and countless takes of basic algebra, I would have probably left the shrink's room crying and in a shambles.  But nope, rather than mope I've taken my rather hardened soul and started taking pills.  The hallucinations are still there, and I'd graduate to a new medication soon, but hey, it's not necessarily a death sentence.

   I've always told myself that if it's not enough to kill me, it's definitely not enough.  People respond to these "life changing events" in many different ways to the point that they completely change themselves.  There are those who change the way they eat, there are those who change the way they act, there are those who change the way they think.  To me, life changing events are already enough for you to be changed, you don't have to take radical steps to change.  It's a lot like a polynomial: factoring out things need to be done a step at a time.  Life is not about that shortcut that will get you cured.

< hmmm... >

   Apparently, our President doesn't do much reading.  When she announced that we are now a "Second World country," I was ready to surrender myself to the Philippine version of the KGB for being a reactionary, or for being anything but a faithful follower of the Revolution, a reluctant traveler, part of the bourgeoisie who should be sent into a gulag or a re-education camp.  I was poised by the door ready to be arrested by the government for being either an intellectual or, plain and simply, for being an idiot.

   Further exegesis reveals that the term "Second World," following the fall of the USSR, is "now used" to describe economic conditions.  Shows you how much Gloria Arroyo knows about current affairs.  Following the dissolution of the USSR, experts in international relations skipped the trichotomy of First, Second and Third World and adopted dichotomies like "West" and "East," trichotomies like "Industrialized Countries," "Newly-Industrialized Countries," and "Developing Countries," or in most instances countries are just referred to as countries.

   Our President is an idiot.