Also, list: 2014 resolution

since we are on the topic of list, i'd like to share my new year's resolution, a list in itself.
as you can see, being a really good planner i did what every aspiring good planner should do: i made a very SMART list. SMART isn't just anything, it's the magic mnemonic for specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and time-bound. i could also make that better by making it SMARTER, adding evaluate and reevaluate but one year i think is too short to be smarter so i'd better stick to just being SMART.


1. Quit my job. I know. This one might not be very SMART and a little difficult to attain. There is a big possibility i'd fail in this but i'll keep the list handy just in case I forget. I've been trying to make up reasons why having a full-time job is the key to happiness but apparently it isn't. studies show that women/mothers are happier without a full-time job. It's true. Apparently, devoting one's life to motherhood keeps the depression at bay. Proof:

See! Women who quit their work are happier than billionaires! That makes me so depressed now. I'm totally doing life and motherhood wrong. Also, a mother without a job saves the household a lot of income since the mother can do what five nannies and 10 household helps can do. imagine all the savings.I couldn't sleep thinking of all those money that could have gone into my children's college fund. i'm so guilty now.


2. Eat more greens. Yeah, i was vegetarian for a while when i was still without children. then son came and all he wants to eat are abodo and pork chops. i felt compelled, even if i know it was very very wrong (just think of all the animals we are killed for this steak!), to serve him these pork, the meat dishes every time. Then i lost my mind and went on with the killing spree by eating the meats alongside my meat devourer son. But I've since "moved" (i am constantly moving, like a hummingbird, or like a bike because bikes need to constantly move so the rider does not fall) to my mother's house i was opportuned with the best things, like my mother's magic garden that sprouts all kinds of greens imaginable. With that, i have no other reason not to eat more greens. if only i could muster doing some actual picking but yes, that has to happen yet. maybe i should change it to "pick my own vegetables" or "bring more greens to the table" because "eat more greens" is just too presumptuous. it presumes i already have my greens at the table and that all i have to do is actually eat them. but i don't and i also rarely cook 'cause I like to spend my day doing nothing and that is why there is a big possibility of my children ending up wasted and that is why my dogs are dying of cancer.


3. Stop biking. Biking's totally made me crazy last year. i think it is the root of all evil so I'm gonna stop doing it for now and see where it gets me. so far i haven't touched that torture device for several weeks now and I have never felt this great in my life! Biking is evil. Biking is masochistic and people who love to see other people biking are sadist. biking makes for a sado-masochistic society! it makes total sense. People pedaling on two wheels are menace to society because they destroy the very thread that binds this society together, which is morality (because they are sado-masochistic). biking is immoral and it is my goal to shoot every fucker i see on bike. oh wait i don't own a gun. Maybe i should just run them over. but i don't know how to drive. I will ride a jeepney and pay the driver 10 times more than what he earns for every fucker on a bike he runs over. Yes, that is what i am gonna do.

4. Take care of my dogs. On my way home yesterday there was a dying dog in the middle of the road. he was hit by a speeding jeepney, 2 cars ahead of us. when we passed by the dying dog, a fresh pool of very red blood was just forming. i almost cried in the jeepney but i stopped myself because it's not right to be emotional in public. then i came home to find our family dog, the best dog in the world, lying by the stairs leading to the main door, wagging his tail like he was asking me to pet him. i never pet the dogs since i had children because both kids are weak in their lungs. but i didn't have my young son at that moment with me because i am an irresponsible mother and i left him with some stranger again, like i always do; i had the chance to come and pet our herniated favorite dog. I saw that one of his balls was slightly larger and misshapen (in addition to his hernia) so i touched it. it felt "lumpy" than the usual and it doesn't move when i poke it. I mean, the balls didn't move which is weird because balls are supposed to jiggle the way a water balloon jiggles when you poke them. But i could be wrong. how would i don't? i don;t have a fucking pair of balls. So i touched my dogs balls (wait, that doesn't seem to sound right) and it felt like there was an avocado stuck inside the scrotal bags. Then I concluded he has testicular cancer and he might die soon. I decided i could devote time to taking care of him. Well, probably after i quit my job. and run over the fuckers on bike.


5. Throw away my old eye make up. I already did. and bought new ones. so this is a success and for that i would like to end this post.


FIN.

Listing down and actually buying stuffs you're not supposed to consume

Listing down and actually buying stuffs you're not supposed to consume Stuffs you can consume if you throw away doctor's prescription  Forget it; you're the healthiest human alive.

so i said lists are cost-effective tools that can ultimately change your life for the better or for something worse-R--but mostly for the better unless you're afflicted with OCD and you continually obsess over the #4 that you failed to make to happen but then that is not my problem anymore. it's time you saw a shrink, i guess.

this is generally how my desktop stickies look like. these are my work lists. my daily things-to-do. that pay. I have a separate list for things-to-do-that-do-not-pay, and for things-to-do/buy-to-burn-all-the-money-i-earn-doing-the-list-of-things-to-do-that-pay. those buying lists are normally handwritten, haphazardly/impulsively and immediately thrown away to the land of forget-it-even-happened after it has been done, so i could get rid of the guilt ASAP.

since we were on the topic of buying, I would like to explain that i am not a shopper. i usually do not shop for my things. my mother does it for me--if she remembers so. So if i needed clothes or shoes or stuffs for very important things (read: work) i just dig into her closet and pay her for whatever's worth her things that I just declared mine. that's how our mother relationship works.

the buying part i am good at though is grocery shopping. i love shopping for food although this sort of belies me because i remain skinny as hell (but no, never underweight), despite the fact that I am practically an emotional grocery shopper. but it wasn't really like that. when i was poor I never went grocery shopping. I wait for my mother to bring me food from our plantation back in the mountains and that's what i fed my kid. if no food come then no eating was done. but that's like a long time ago. i am my own person now meaning i buy my own food and i have the purchasing capacity powerful enough to buy food from the imported canned goods section and not feel guilty about it (except for the poor local farmers whose produce i practically leave to rot for every can of non-local stuff i buy).

i like to buy "fresh" milk. pasteurized milk here is expensive. i mean, when i was poor i didn't buy them because i couldn't make them last for a month. it's not that i couldn't because in reality, they wouldn't. I bought powdered because i could stretch the shit out of it by super-diluting it with water and by dumping diabetic-inducing volumes of sugar and the thing is good to go. It could give me enough energy to last for a day even if i skipped lunch because i didn't have lunch money. So i now buy pasteurized liquid milk, because i now have more than just lunch money. these cartons of liquid milk only last like five days, max. however, while consuming so much of it, i wasn't aware that there is such a thing as adult lactose intolerance. but there is and that's what i've been starting to have since i've consumed these liquid GMOs. so i can't drink it anymore unless i super need it for my constipation. but i still buy it because i like buying milk. i could actually take it off my list but i couldn't. the temptation is just too hard to handle.

i also like to buy sausages with weird names, mostly words i can barely pronounce. they are also expensive. i can like buy 10-years worth of poor people's food with just 10 kilos of those unpronounceable sausages. but i like to buy them and i like to eat them. but i can not really eat them. i mean, i can eat them and forget about the results of my blood work. or i can just feed them to my children since they still have three decades ahead of them before they start worrying about blood work and shits. Actually they are never included in my list, at least not all the time, because there's no need to. i go on auto-pilot when i pass by the sausage freezer and then they just surprise me when i get home. (oh no, did i sleepwalk again to the frozen food section?)

and cheese. also expensive, even the run-of-the-mill mass-produced ones because basic filipino meals do not include italian cheeses so understandably, spending like 2-kilos-worth-of-fish on cheese for no reason (so just you could eat a french baguette margherita in the morning because just so) is just irresponsible. but my children love baguette margherita. but also, i am not supposed to keep on eating cheese. i once consumed a packet of grated parmesan while passing time looking after my sleeping infant child, the second of the 10 dozens infant children i am looking after. it's almost tragic. so, i am an emotional-parmesan-consumer kind of person. i have no life.

so by now you would know that what i am saying is, the capacity of the person to pay for things she wants to eat (possibly) increases as she gets older but the possibility of her actually consuming those things will continue to decrease as she ages. that's the saddest fact i just learned, experience-wise. So if i grocery-shop by my age, i shouldn't even be shopping in the big grocery stores. i should just start my own garden and harvest want i SHOULD be eating, the cost of it is nil. unless you find compulsion to buy your lot to do your hipster urban gardening. but that's another story.

sheesh.

i don't even know why i am talking about food. i'm not even a food blogger.


FIN.

your daily reposted gifs

today we will have something from it's always sunny...

Mac: No, your other left.
Charlie: My other left? I only have one left.

Mac: It’s just an expression. Just move it to the other direction.

Charlie: What would that expression be for? For someone with two lefts?

Mac: No, just move it the other way.

Charlie: Towards your left?

Mac: Your left and my left are the same left because we’re facing the same direction.

Charlie: Eh, we’re two different people so we can’t have the same left. It doesn’t make sense.

click on that whole thing there to see the source.

methodologically planning your life

Planning is a very easy, simple task that everyone almost always messes up. Classic example are new year's resolutions. we all know everyone practically fucks up their new year's resolution second week into the new year and most of it is a result of bad planning.

there are ways to make good plans. one can either be very academic and follow the procedures step by step (beginning of course with problem identification--problematizing--and ending with M & E) or amp it up some more by making very detailed gantt charts or pert cpm or shits that would require one to install a phone app or a software that would cost you an arm that would make it easier to derive figures and numbers and shits so everyone can start deciding whether it's a yes or a no.

or one could just make a list.

making a list is probably the most common since we all make lists. i personally make lists everyday--from to-do's to to-buys. it works half the time, still majority would end up doing badly at them but still at least people made the effort to get some nice steering done (yeah, power!). It helps people feel better about themselves--ourselves (because i am a people, too) at the end of the day. believe me, there's nothing more rewarding that knowing you DID TRY to exert control over your grocery shopping but lost the battle halfway through. (always,we must focus on the positive. yeah?)

so where am i? all right, the list.

i almost bought this book because it felt like me.
and would you believe there's even a page dedicated to grocery lists. heaven. 

i've never felt more powerful than i did five years ago doing grocery than i do now. back when i still had to save up for that can SPAM so my child could have a taste of America. But now, i can just walk in and grab the hell out of the imported canned goods section anytime of the day, whenever i feel like it, especially when i feel the urge to replenish my stock of "food for emergency situation like flooding." It turned out my son despised the taste of America and would want to have nothing to do with SPAM; he could survive eating eggs until he sweat and smell of egg.

also i feel very successful now because i always buy my pork from the branded pork section and not from the generic section where pigs were made to sleep on their own urine before they were actually slaughtered so you pick the pork and you smell it and it smells like pig's urine. yep that's what it always is in the generic pork section. disgusting pigs.

but whatevs. most of the time i feel like a grocery-ing vegetarian because it's the hippest thing to do. i'd stack on so many organic herbs and spices and forget about them only to be reminded three days after by the foul smelling herby-spicy brown mush hidden in the fridge's crisper that would lead me to investigate but it'd be too disgusting to even check out and I end up throwing all the disgusting things away. now, that's really bad planning, because that's practically budget wasted. (but i don't care, i got money to burn, yeah? i feel powerful burning money, yeah?)

so you see, we do not always succeed at this listing things, even me, a self-proclaimed "planner."

okay this is enough. i'm tired. tomorrow i will write about how a list is inversely proportional with age (and assuming that income is directly proportional with age, what we will eventually have here, ladies and gentlemen is a tragic equation).

FIN.

today i am gonna be productive.

from here: http://weiweipon.tumblr.com/post/66566094986/woooo-productivity

james franco gifs made me happy today

from hereS:
http://25.media.tumblr.com/24cd726f5f2acc0bc668c4f61bd48b07/tumblr_mxeozhSefQ1qhuc9do2_250.gif
http://31.media.tumblr.com/9f884bbaf8fe3c14562174f0676a563e/tumblr_mxeozhSefQ1qhuc9do6_250.gif

January is the most terrible-est month in the twelve months.
I just want to disappear. i want to quit my job and hide in my room and just be dead and then wake up when it is already summer. i am so sorry for my two boys for this month. it is all my fault.
I've made it out alive all these times so i might make it out alive this time.


image from: hyperboleandahalf.blogspot.com

The commute

The commute at 5:30 pm from work to where I have been living in the past eight months is chilly but almost always unremarkable except today because today the school girl to my right made me eat her hair. I have been subjecting my right face to rapid hair slaps in the last three Ben Howard songs and I don’t know if I should tell her that I would like to burn her hair down to its roots.

We just passed by the farming communities that borders Sibalom and San Jose. This is the stretch in the commute where the jeepney runs uninterrupted for half a Ben Howard song. Little soon the jeepney is gonna stop for another half a Ben Howard song to pick up some more passengers along the highway, mostly students coming from the public university nearby. More school girls with untied hair will be crammed inside by the driver or his conductor hoping to stretch their earnings to a few more pesos and then some before calling it a day.

Onwards, the jeepney is gonna speed up and it’s gonna be some more hair slapping, hair eating, especially when we get to the bridge. Yes, that great Sibalom bridge.

I correct myself—the commute home is always unremarkable until we get to the bridge. Country bridges with their shimmering snake-like rivers, and rivers with their gently swaying reeds with white, fuzzy flowers in full bloom are always magnificent under the long shadows of the *winter* sun. And this is exactly the kind that i get here. And every time, I look like a silly grade schooler peering outside the jeepney window to have a look at the horizon, where the edge of the river disappears and merges with the coast and shimmering Sulu Sea. i do that for about three to four lines of a Ben Howard song and snap back to reality because we would be at the bridge's end by then.

I came back here just as summer was giving way to the raging rainy season. My first attempt, in April, was foiled by the psychotic episodes of my relative, and I had official reasons, too, because the physical office I was to occupy remained yet to be a storage room. When my relative’s mental health improved, the office was finished in time to be put to good use. I officially relocated, bringing with me 5-month old son, my camera, a box of my 35mm film, my personal computer, my loves, my hates, my idiosyncrasies to this place. I cleaned the room I occupied almost a decade ago, when I was still without children. A month after I moved in, I brought my first groceries that included the required sensodyne because I couldn't bear to use my mother-given toothpaste anymore (I used it for a month and had sensations of my teeth falling off). I bought my own shampoo because the shampoo in the bathroom gave me dandruff so large i could make breakfast oatmeal out of them. I brought in my own *organic/artisanal* soap straight from the city because I was afraid of using orange papaya soap that my mother keeps in the bathroom for general use. When I was done with the inventory of my toiletries, I scrubbed clean an old plastic rack (that might have once contained shoes) and used it as a makeshift rack for my son’s clothes. The rickety wooden console table that belonged to my deceased grandmother I used as dresser and something to hold the baby’s amenities. Then came the Fridays of the week and I always ended up inside the public van, back to the city because I keep on missing my friends and the usual city buzz. I keep on missing smell. I miss the smog.

I keep on missing riding my bike to work. Somehow, in my 10 months of being here I never came to finally deciding to relocate my bigger bike, to bring the bike with me. If I probably did, I would never have had to endure eating someone else’s hair in the jeepney. My commutes would have never been unremarkable and I would probably have had enough time to catch the winter sun setting by the bridge crossing and I would have had a photo of it already. But it never happened and it probably never will, and for that, I would have to learn to either be patient inside the jeepney, or find courage to tell the school girl, “I would like to burn that hair of yours, to the roots.”