Happy New Year, WordPress!

I hope you had a great 2013, and I hope you’ll have a 2014 just as great.

After Dark by Haruki Murakami

I decided to get back to reading again, now that I have the time, and I’m actually looking for a little inspiration.

Since I loved 1Q84 and Murakami’s style in general, I chose After Dark, which had an intriguing synopsis. It made me want to know more. I don’t think reading this book is going to take a while, so I plan on reading classic literature after I’m done.

Weekly Photo Challenge: Joy

This pretty much sums up my entire year. I would never have enjoyed my 2013 without these two. These are my two greatest friends, and because of them, I managed to endure the year with a smile. There may have been a lot of ups and downs along the way, but it felt like there were mostly just ups with them around. They are my greatest source of joy, and I hope to spend more wonderful years with them.

This photo was taken on our last adventure of the year, last Dec. 17, 2013. At Tagaytay.

Ninong Talk: “SMP”

Let’s tackle a certain matter that also managed to finally tick me off the way those lists from yesterday did. You see, a few years back, some fad rose and appealed to Filipino, especially the teens, called SMP, which originally meant Samahan ng Malamig ang Pasko (Cold Christmas Society, roughly), until several parodies surfaced later. It refers to the people who are single during the Christmas season, thus making their Christmas cold. And that’s it. That’s how stupid and corny it is, and yet it stuck. I have no idea why, my fellow Filipino teens do tend to bewilder me and piss me off at the same time quite often, you see. Now, I can’t exactly remember where this shit started, but my memory keeps focusing on a local Coca-Cola commercial every time I try to remember where it came from. I’m not really sure.

The problem is how it has affected the mindset of my fellow Filipinos, especially those around my age, since it surfaced. Suddenly, because of this SMP thing, getting a girlfriend/boyfriend became so important to everybody during Christmas, most of the time just to prove a point, that their Christmas season won’t be as cold as others. God knows how many SMP posts I saw on Facebook this season. This causes them to forget the true spirit of Christmas, which doesn’t really have anything to do with puppy love and petty bullshit. I feel so insulted that people would stoop down to a mentality this dense that this makes even beavers fucking smarter than them. It has now become something that they live by every fucking Christmas. That’s what fucking Valentine’s Day is for, dumbasses. I mean, seriously. It’s Jesus’s birthday. It’s Christmas. We’re celebrating the birth of Christ and the spirit of giving, and yet all you can think about is getting some trophy girlfriend/boyfriend just so your holidays won’t be so fucking cold, which really doesn’t make sense to me. It never made any sense to me when it first came out, and it still hasn’t made sense to me now. It just pisses me off so much that I want to talk to each and every one of you and tell you one by one to go fuck yourselves, you retarded pieces of shit. You’re one of the reasons our country can’t prosper and is still considered insignificant by others. You are all a disgrace to the Filipino culture. You are the retards of this generation. And for that, I fucking hate all of you.

Ang landi landi niyong mga putang ina kayo. In fact, SMP should mean Samahan ng Malalanding Pinoy, because fuck you, that’s why.

Ninong Talk: Crossing Out the List

From my point of view, alam kong tibo lang ako, masculine ako at lumaki akong ganito kaya kahit kailan hindi ko mararamdaman yung side ng babae when I’m in a relationship. But what I don’t understand is bakit ang daming shit ng mga babae tulad nitong post ni Anne Curtis, telling boys how they should treat their girlfriends? Sorry ha, I don’t intend to offend anybody, just hear me out. I mean, it’s all over Tumblr, Twitter, and most especially Facebook. Things like: hold my hand, kiss me in the rain, text me at 3AM and tell me you love me, and when I’m quiet, I want you to talk to me. Things like that. Gusto ko lang malaman kung bakit. Sorry, medyo napupuno na kasi ako eh.

First of all, men are aware of what most people call girl logic. It refers to this elusive characteristic of a girl to be unpredictable and most of the time, difficult to read. They’re, or we’re, aware that these are the things that simply make girls, girls. Ganyan kayo eh, and sometimes these qualities make you adorable. So we live with them, so we can show you how much we care. What I don’t understand is despite this, women still want more.

Second is the way you post these things. You post them on social media sites whether you have a boyfriend or not. I mean, you’re girls. Most of the time, boys can’t read all of these posts about how they should treat you, so they won’t be able to do anything about it. So instead of posting things like these, why don’t you tell them straight up how they want to treat you? This now leads to my next point: If you really love your man, why would you want more out of him? Why would you try to change him by making him do these things or at least making him feel obligated to? If he really loves you, he’ll show you his own way. He doesn’t have to feel like he has to follow a certain set of rules para lang pakiligin ka, kasi kung mahal mo talaga siya, isn’t he more than enough?

This is a fantasy. I think this list of things boyfriends should do for their girls to make her feel special were written by people who watch too many romance novels and films. Well here’s a reminder: life is not a movie. You’re never gonna date a superhero. I mean, even superheroes can’t do this shit.

Maybe may nakalimutan pa ‘kong sabihin dito, but I think I pointed out everything I wanted to. Now the reason I said all of these things is para matauhan din naman ang mga gumagawa ng ganitong mga listahan. Girls, simple lang naman ang gusto ng mga lalake galing sa inyo. May nakita na ba kayong lalake na nagpost ng ganitong kalokohan? May gumawa na ba ng list ng mga bagay na dapat gawin ng mga babae para sa mga boyfriend nila? Kung meron man, trip trip lang. Most of the time, ganito ang laman: make me a sandwich, buy me a PS4, do my laundry. But it’s all in good fun. I just want you girls to think about this for a second, and if you have a boyfriend, I want you to appreciate what and who he is. You really don’t need to change him.

There. I’ve said my piece.

Delete Data?

As much as I love everything that went on this 25th of December, something terrible happened to me this evening.

You see, I’ve made it a habit to write daily notes about my behavior since early May this year. The reason is because at that point, my suspicions about having a mental disorder escalated significantly, and so I felt that it came down to me to try and fix myself by studying the things I felt daily by looking back at previous entries, at least until I find proper psychotherapy. It wasn’t such a hard thing, writing these private notes. Usually they’d just contain things like, “I felt angry today for some reason,” “my energy is abnormally low,” “I haven’t eaten much today,” and plenty other things like that. It wasn’t long before I started getting really into it and gave it more of my attention. It was starting to feel like a journal I knew I could maintain. In fact, I never missed a day writing. And the fact that it’s stored in my phone made it so much easier and more accessible, plus it was easier to hide since i contained a lot of things about my mental state that I found uncomfortable sharing with other people. I thought it was the perfect way to document my struggle. I managed to maintain the streak for exactly a hundred and fourteen days, until I bought a laptop and continued the journal from there.

Now, just because I decided to write on my laptop from then on didn’t mean I forgot about the ones on my phone. In fact, I kept numerous backups on my phone and even storage card so that if ever things go wrong, I can always recover them.

But this is where the problem presented itself. Today, I was checking stuff out on my phone when suddenly something went wrong. All of a sudden I couldn’t access the storage card anymore. Now you probably wouldn’t find a shitload of geek talk all that fun to read, so let’s just say I spent a good half hour trying to fix what I thought I needed to fix before finally giving up and accepting that it’s fucked. I managed to retrieve my messages and contacts, but what frustrated me is how I never got to back up my daily notes, which means they’re now gone forever, which is really frustrating. God knows how pissed off I am about it. I even felt like crying because everything for a hundred and fourteen days were there. It was no longer just about the things that I thought affected my mental health. All of my memories were archived there, both good and bad. And this isn’t a big deal simply because I’m very sentimental, but it’s also because it was really nice having things like that to look back to, especially when my mental disorder is affecting my memories and is making me forget a lot of things that I think I should remember, which I don’t think is normal for someone my age. This feels a bit ridiculous for me too, getting so worked up over lost data, but I felt like a part of me was lost too when I lost those entries.

Believe me, I’m still trying to calm myself down and find a silver lining in what’s happened as we speak. So far I came up with the following:

1. It’s Christmas, after all. The New Year’s coming. Time for a clean slate, which means deleting this part of my life can do me some good since it keeps me attached to the past and now that it’s gone, the feeling of freedom actually surfaced.
2. I’ve learned that despite how easy technology is making everything seem easier now, nothing beats old school writing on actual journals. I mean, losing digital information is just as easy as encoding them. Yes, they’re easier to manage, but with just one mistake, even the slightest, they can disappear in the blink of an eye. And when you’re really fucked, they’ll never be recovered.

Now, I don’t know if I’ll ever get those notes back, but now I have no choice but to accept the loss. I get the two things I should think about and I really should look at the brighter side, but I think it’s gonna take a while before I get over this. I can be ridiculously sentimental, after all. Still, I can’t help thinking that all of this is meant to happen. To teach me a lesson. I just can’t figure out what that lesson is yet.

Happy Holidays!

My first Christmas here at WordPress. I look forward to spending more. So, happy holidays to everyone.

Love,
Your Freshest Noob

Too busy being yours to fall for somebody new.

These are lyrics from the Arctic Monkeys song: Do I Wanna Know?

I decided to post this here because it says a lot about my life at the moment. It’s pretty complicated. I’m actually planning on posting a Ninong Talk entry about this. Watch out for that.

Ninong Talk: Buying Gifts For Other People

It’s no secret that Christmas day is coming, which means pretty much everybody is getting busy buying gifts for the people they love. My dad is no different, and I accompanied him to the mall today because he needed to buy gifts for his godchildren as well as the guy who drives his service every morning when he gets to work. Now, going to Toy Kingdom to look for toys for the two kids was the easy part, because I’m still pretty much a kid mentally, so I managed to think of a lot of ideas. I was actually itching to joke around with dad by suggesting a dildo since it’s pretty much a sex toy, but I’d rather not have him punch me in the face in front of a bunch of people. Well anyway, we managed to buy what we need for the kids, which left us with the last gift to look for, which is the driver’s.

Now before dad and I started looking at the department store, he made it clear that he wants to give his driver a polo shirt, which shouldn’t exceed PHP500. At first it sounded easy enough, because I already have a brand in mind, which is Baleno, but I had no idea just how wrong I was.

So let me tell you how things went. As dad and I were looking around Baleno for nice polo shirts that were all below five-hundred, he noticed that the shirts didn’t have logos on one side of the chest like most branded and ridiculously expensive polo shirts do, and told me he wants to buy one with a logo. At first I didn’t think it was too ridiculous, so I went along and tried to find polo shirts that he would like, which raised another problem: all of the decent polo shirts bearing logos on their chests were all sold for more than five-hundred. In fact, the cheapest ones we found falling under dad’s preferences were at eight-hundred at the very least. And dad had a lot of trouble complying because he didn’t have that much cash left, and I could tell he didn’t really want to spend that much on a gift, especially for just his service driver. I can’t exactly tell if this is true, but at the time, it was the message I was seeing. We managed to go on for more than an hour trying to find the right polo shirt all because dad was being too picky, and I noticed that his favorite line all throughout our search was, “Ayoko nito.”

That was when I was slapped in the face by my common sense and realized that dad isn’t even considering the driver’s preferences and taste. He’s only considering his own. I mean, the only thing he considered about the driver is his age, because dad told me that the driver is already pretty old, so we shouldn’t pick out shirts that looked too boyish, instead we should focus on simpler designs, yet all I heard from dad is how he didn’t like the designs I picked out simply because they didn’t suit his taste. I mean, Jesus Christ, seriously, I could no longer tell if we’re shopping for dad’s driver, or dad himself.

And now we’ve finally reached the main point of this episode of Ninong Talk:
Why do we choose gifts based on what we like instead of what the receiver likes?

Believe me, I know a lot of people who think like this. I mean, I’m no hypocrite. I think like this too on several occasions, especially when I’m all out of ideas, which is why I always think it’s better when I bring another person along when shopping for gifts. It keeps my mind in check. It reminds me that I’m buying stuff for someone else, and not myself, which is pretty much the whole purpose of gift-giving. Though I do understand that more people do not think this way, but there are still times during shopping when we can’t help but think about what we want, and we let it linger in our thoughts for too long that it begins to bug our minds more than it should, making us prioritize our preferences over those of the people that we intend to give gifts to.

Now that it’s been said, I’m starting to think it’s really not that big of a deal to be considered an official Ninong Talk topic, but I just want to remind everyone reading this that when we buy gifts, we buy them for other people and not ourselves. Sometimes we forget that. And we think about it so much that we end up buying something that we like and giving it to other people who don’t even have the same preferences. I’m not completely sure if this can help, but the next time you find yourself in a situation like this, my only advice is that you try to remind yourself that what you’re buying is something you intend to give to someone else, and once you have that registered, it can award you with the most wonderful feeling in the world. Also, if you plan on bringing other people on your Christmas shopping trips, make sure not to bug them the same way my dad bugged me. I mean, I love him and all, and what he did today didn’t bother me that much. It just made me think of a bigger picture, which is why I used our little trip as an example.

Anyway, Merry Christmas in advance!

The Peak

 

A photo of us during our adventures in Tagaytay. Taken Dec. 17, 2013.