Inside the Lines, Outside the Box

The entirety of this list can be found here at my LiveJournal for your viewing pleasure.

Day 11 → A photo of you taken recently


My roommate's sister gave him this coloring book for Hanukkah. It was extremely surreal because we had only just finished discussing a Hello Kitty coloring book as referenced by Vince Vaughn and Faizon Love in Couples Retreat.

There really is not much more to say about the situation.

Cropped artistically as usual to protect my privacy.

Decades Back

Yay, I actually made it on time! :) The entire list of the 30-day meme can be found here. So, feel free to do it and, if you do, link me!

Today's little detail: Day 10 → A photo of you taken over ten years ago

This is actually a cropped photo but only because my mom and grandmother are standing behind me. This photo was taken a long time ago. I'd say I'm two or younger in this photo, which means this photograph is about 17/18 years old. Daaaaaaaamn. I suddenly feel old.

Presents and Photos

Playing catch-up with this meme that I haven't been very diligent on. It's finals season; I can't really be blamed. :X So, here is the link to the entire list: 30 DAYS.

Day 06 → Whatever tickles your fancy

Well, I kinda wanted to share a few things I want for Christmas. You can even call it my Christmas wish list.

1. Play-doh. Really. Is it so hard to get me a few tubs of Play-doh? ;-;
   
2. THIS. SO. VERY. MUCH.
   
3. Cash. For my class trip to Hawaii in the summer! :)
   

I don't really have many material things I want for Christmas this year. I think I've had a pretty good year barring the illnesses here and there. I'm grateful for all the love I have in my life...for all the people who take care of me when I can't or don't take care of myself and for...the people who don't give up on me when I've given up on myself. ♥♥♥

Day 07 → A photo that makes you happy


I love flowers and they always make me smile. :)
I was going through a very tough time emotionally and was afraid of so many things.
Small things like this just make my day...and my only regret is that I didn't appreciate them more.

Day 08 → A photo that makes you angry/sad

Our faces are blurred out because I'm rather fond of my privacy.
I realize this is actually a photo of a photo but it's still a photo.
My 16th birthday and it had been the first time I had seen him in a long time.
I missed him whenever he wasn't around and I miss him more than ever now.

Day 09 → A photo you took

That should be a wall, not a door.
Just a small amusing thing we found at one of the schools we visited.

There, I am up to date again. I will actually try to keep up now.

Still We Do It

I haven't been updating this as often as I should be and I really don't have a good reason for not doing so other than I simply have other things on my mind. What they are I cannot reveal here but they are simplistic and boring anyway. Thus, I have to attempt to catch up on my days, which means I am doing three days today of the 30-day meme which can be found here on my LiveJournal account.

Day 03 → Your favourite television programme

Joss Whedon's Firefly. It has wit and that's really all I ask from a good television program. The characters are well-drawn and have significantly different personalities, which makes me love them. Inara is easily my favorite because of her class and elegance but I love all of them. I'm glad to see most of them made careers after Fox sabotaged the show by showing the episodes in a really strange order and took it off air.

The Wikipedia article on plot synopsis can be found here.


The cast in costume.


Day 04 → Your favourite book

The Thornbirds by Colleen McCullough. The Wikipedia article can be found here. It reveals the entire plot, though, so that's definitely a spoiler alert. It is an epic novel that spans over 50 years and revolves around the lives of the Cleary family who move from Ireland to the Australian outback. The main character of the story is Meggie Cleary, the youngest child and only daughter of Paddy and Fee Cleary. She falls in love with the handsome, proud and ambitious Father Ralph de Bricassart, which brings about a long and complicated story including life, death, revenge, love, spite and all the sort of things that make a story great.

The title comes from a legend which Colleen McCullough shares on the first page of her novel. I will reproduce this story verbatim because I think I think it is significantly poignant:

There's a story...a legend, about a bird that sings just once in its life. From the moment it leaves its nest, it searches for a thorn tree and never rests until it's found one. And then it sings more sweetly than any other creature on the face of the earth. And singing, it impales itself on the longest, sharpest thorn. But, as it dies, it rises above its own agony, to outsing the lark and the nightingale. The thorn bird pays its life for just one song, but the whole world stills to listen, and God in his heaven smiles. For the best is bought only at the cost of great pain or so the says the legend.

It sets up the story in a fascinating sort of way and ends with: "The thorn bird with the thorn in its breast, it follows an immutable law; it is driven by it knows not what to impale itself and die singing. At the very instant the thorn enters, there is no awareness in it of the dying to come; it simply sings and sings until there is not the life left to utter another note. But we, when we put the thorns in our breasts, we know. We understand. And still we do it. Still we do it..."

I'm a tragedian through and through and I adore the conclusion. Every time we love, we take a chance - we put our hearts and ourselves on the line because we believe in the other person. We know that there is a chance we might be disappointed and, even when the possibility is great, we choose to do it anyway because we hope that somehow it will all work out. We take chances and we survive or we fall - but when we fall, we get up again, brush ourselves off and continue. We accept failure as part of our mortality and keep on walking.


Day 05 → Your favourite quote

"How can we expect foreigners to respect our own women if we set a bad example by not respecting them? And how can we expect the Filipino to be respected if our women are not respected?" - Apolinario Mabini

It is not just the Filipino woman but women everywhere and in any group. Immediately, what springs to mind is a friend whose mother used to work at a certain hospital and they discriminated against her because she was the first female oncologist at their hospital and refused to refer any patients to her. It not only reflects poorly upon the doctors but the entire hospital. She was a brilliant doctor and they were depriving their patients of good medical care. Furthermore, when she left because of the discrimination, the hospital lost a really great doctor.

We no longer live in the Dark Ages. Women have rights that they deserve and fought to earn (despite that it was theirs to begin with). Don't get me wrong, I'm what my friend calls a 'mutualist'. I believe that men and women deserve the same rights and that some will best others but neither as a whole sex is better than the other. Equal rights and equal opportunity, I say.


Feel free to comment on anything I've said in this post and share your own favorites with me! I'd love to hear them.

A Kiss is still A Kiss

This is day two of the 30-day meme I have committed myself to - the entirety of which can be found here at my LiveJournal account.

Day 02 → Your favourite movie

This is a no-brainer. Casablanca simply because. I love the humor of the time. I like the subtle, quirky sarcasm over the slapstick/racist/innuendo jokes of today. It's a preference and film noir has a class that colored films will never have...even if I watched Casablanca again in the colored version and liked that one better than the black-and-white version.

I just love how it's become its own institution in our society. From the iconic "Here's looking at you, kid." to the enigmatic "Of all the gin joints, in all the towns, in all the world, she walks into mine." Everyone has heard of "Kiss me. Kiss me as if it were the last time." "Where I'm going, you can't follow. What I've got to do, you can't be any part of. Ilsa, I'm no good at being noble, but it doesn't take much to see that the problems of three little people don't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world." and, of course, "We'll always have Paris." The parodies and the references made to the movie and the fact that I knew the lines before I saw the movie added to my enjoyment of the film.

Humphrey Bogart is also not difficult to look at. His features are different from the movie stars we have today but he's distractingly handsome. He's the dark, mysterious wounded archetype and Ilsa's the heroine torn between love and duty. The gorgeous setting of French Morocco, the characters (I love Sam and Renault with a passion), the backdrop of World War II -- everything just comes together in this movie. This is a movie that my inner feminist applauds, especially considering it was filmed in 1933. None of your pathetic, simpering seductresses...Ilsa knew her duty, followed it and took an active role in the movie. Of course, my inner feminist rages when she asks Rick to think for both of them but, overall, I am appeased. The duty-versus-desire drama really speaks to the romantic in me. I'm a sentimentalist; I can't help it.

Lastly, but most certainly not the least, that theme song. I mean, COME ON. You must remember this: A kiss is still a kiss; a sigh is just a sigh...Moonlight and love songs - never out of date. Hearts full of passion, jealousy and hate...It's still the same old story: A fight for love and glory; a case of do or die...As time goes by. Tell me that's not timeless.


Who can forget that tragic airport scene?
"You're only saying this to make me go." "I'm saying it because it's true."

A New Career in a New Town

I haven't been updating at all lately, not because I've forgotten but simply because I've been terribly uninspired of late. My muses have abandoned me, even Melpomene. There's simply just been far more to do than there is time for and I no longer have the energy to even try to accomplish anything anymore.

I've also been sick with a stomach flu, followed by midterms, followed by Thanksgiving weekend, followed by *insert keysmash here* I'm physically, mentally and emotionally drained. And simply because of that, there is no philosophy today. In an effort to be more active on this blog again, however, I will actually cheat and participate in a meme that I should have begun yesterday but being a day late won't kill me.

The full list can be found on my LiveJournal blog here but I won't merely cross-reference there because private things abound on my post and my language usage is nowhere near as refined over there. Besides, the list is far too long and I don't want to have to keep reposting it.

Day 01 → Your favourite song

I don't really have a favorite song, per se. I just have been listening to music I've borrowed from other people such as my roommate and my cousin. However, I've been listening to a lot of Nickelback (don't judge me!), Taylor Swift (I said don't judge me!) and Michael Buble (so I don't have the best taste in music at the moment) lately, which are three completely different genres of music and I don't know, it works. When I feel like good music, I put Jimi Hendrix and the rest of my rock music on...or I sit with Hao (my Chinese roommate who likes all sorts of music).

That having been said, the most played songs on my "Up at Obscene Hour" playlist just happen to be:
1) Photograph (Nickelback) - It's hard to say it, time to say it: Goodbye, goodbye.
2) Everything (Michael Buble) - Whatever comes our way, we'll see it through. And you know that's what our love can do.
3) The Way I Loved You (Taylor Swift) - I never knew I could feel so much and that's the way I loved you.
4) Remembering Sunday (All Time Low) - And even though she doesn't believe in love, he's determined to call her bluff.
5) The Pretender (Foo Fighters) - What if I say I will never surrender? What if I say I'm not like the others?

So there's a terribly heavy theme of severe emotional discord, I realize. Though I'd like to point out Everything is a happy song, at least. And, really, I listen to Taylor Swift's song because The Way I Loved You is so absurdly hilarious and...catchy tune, I can't deny it. Still, while typing this out, I've thought of a song that has been a real favorite through the ages. Perhaps it's the fact that I grew up without a father that all these "Dad" song and movies really get to me but I also love Sing Me Your Song Again, Daddy by Jose Mari Chan and My Girl was a heartbreaking movie.

Nevertheless, here's a YouTube video of the amazing and incomparable Luther Vandross singing what I will claim to be my favorite song, Dance With My Father:

The Voyeur of Utter Destruction

And so I turned nineteen. Big whoop. Other than a failed attempt at taking advantage of my free Disneyland day and Microeconomics finals the day after, there was nothing too significant about the day itself. This, of course, led to deep thoughts about the significance of age.

While I'm loathe to say age does not matter (because it does), I don't really see why people make such a big deal about birthdays. I mean, congratulations on the anniversary of your successful exit of your mother's uterus but age is just a number, really. The significance attached to it comes from the belief that you are supposed to have had certain experiences that come with the passing of another year -- yet even that is subjective.

I, with my meager nineteen years (seventeen of which I spent holed up like a princess in my little pseudo-castle in the Philippines), have significantly more experience in life than the four-year old I used to babysit. I, for example, knew better than to climb on top of the staircase and attempt a somersault-double-half-spin off of it. I know this from personal experience. ;) However, my life skills and life knowledge are significantly less than my roommate, for example, who is twenty-seven and used to be in the US Marine Corps. He has been through much more and has seen much more of the world than I am.

On the other hand, despite my having lived a rather sheltered life, I've come to find that while my story is not quite as fascinating as some people, I've grown up a little bit faster than some of my peers -- and even a couple people older than I. I chalk most of this maturity to my mother, however, who deserves every bit of credit for any of the good in me. (The bad I like to blame on my father, who made a very hasty, voluntary exit early on in my life.) But, seriously, no bitterness there anymore - though it did teach me self-reliance and the ability to forgive rather early on in life.

In any case, I believe that the point of the matter is that age must not be confused with maturity, though it often always is. While maturity often comes with experience, growing older is not the same as growing up. Someone can be fifty and still not be a grown-up if they refuse to learn from past triumphs and mistakes.


It's taken me a little while to publish this post (it's been ten days since my birthday) because as I go over it and ponder, I still have not come up with a working definition of maturity to seal my point. Several failed attempts and this has been the best I could come up with:

Maturity, then, is the ability to differentiate from what you want and what you know is right. Thus, it often exhibits itself in self-restraint and discipline and, yet, these two things do not always mean one is grown-up.

Ah, philosophy. To me, the capacity to do so is never enough until you prove it with your actions -- still, someone could just be a sadomasochist and derive some form of pleasure from self-denial. Perhaps, then, my definition becomes completely erroneous and off-the-mark.

At this point, though, I feel I have exhausted all the attention this topic deserves at the time and I leave you all with a question: what do you think?