speech disaster

speech disaster

everybody practically knows how much i despise public speaking. and boy was i too lucky to draw #1 on our class lottery (that meant i went first) even after fervently wishing and praying to get any number other than 1. i know... my luck (or the apparent lack of it) is insanely unbelievable. it's almost like being trapped in a Salvador Dali. so absurd. so entirely surreal.

i have always hated being first. second maybe, but definitely not first. there's definitely something about this whole "going first" fiasco that did not quite align with my cosmos.

maybe i hate being the decoy or maybe i hate being the one who get fed first to the sharks. basta, i hate being #1. it's just too much responsibility.

rumors are (and i am living proof that the alleged rumors are true) my speech comm professor is not exactly thrilled by those who deliver their speeches first that more often they get lower marks. lower than the mean score. and because i was first, i did get an emabarassingly low grade. well, apart from being first, i also kind of sucked. he should have cut me some slack though, being first was real tough especially if you have congenital stage fright working against you.

but here's the thing, after all the speeches were over, the man just had to, by some weird twist of events, announce our scores. i mean, come on! i really didn't mind having the lowest grade in the bunch, but you do not have to f*ckin rub it in my face! maaahn... that was so embarassing. especially when everyone else did fairly well in the exercise amd you kind of didn't.

but wait, the torture did not end there, much to my demise. gaahd, this was the worst part. before finally revealing the score, he just had to broadcast his criticisms (constructive or otherwise, good or bad) about your speech. didn't pose much of a problem if you had done satisfactorily and he has actually something good to say about your speech but if you went first and you kind of screwed up the whole performance, it was hell. duhr!!! no matter how polite you say it, it will somehow come out as "you weren't so bad except for this one tiny bit of detail... you made such a mess!". thanks a lot for rubbing it in, harder. now my confidence and self-esteem level is down to -100, great! just great...now how in the world would i be able to get through on more speech?? how!?

but i can't do anything about it now, can i? so i tried to feign disinterest and drown his voice into oblivion, as if i never heard him, although what i really wanted to do was to crawl into a hole or vanish into thin air, whichever event happened first.

i'm not against criticism. if anything, i welcome it.i'm saying this not only for bad reviews but also for good reviews as well. it has to be done in the proper time, place and context. and there's a very thin line separating critique and shaming.

and sir, one last message:

what in the name of heavens were you thinking?!

death forecast

death forecast

a quiz site tells me that i would die an average death on the average age of 67 years old, giving me less than 50 average years to fulfill my average dreams and resolve the average issues of my 40 % normal life , one of which is whether i shall use the name Dona Rosa or Dona Guadalupe, both ridiculous and equally annoying, as my Mexican name, in case i try to runaway to Mexico City from a lawsuit that involves frequently changing my name. in the less than half a century of my average existence i'd be known in Japan as Rei Takana and in Ireland as Fiona O'Conor . in pornstarlandia, i'd be Karen Kung-Fu Grip (wtf!).

but i need not worry, i only have a 17 percent chance of going to hell for being greedy and lazy. nevertheless, i'd die loved and feared by many. if it's any consolation, i'd be buried in a tomb. now that's a treat. x(

lost my phone

lost my phone

i'm almost over, about 97 percent over the fact that my phone got lost by this dude that from now on, for purposes of confidentiality and safety, we would refer to as "brother".

it's funny how when you say the same things over and over, the emotions that come along with them slowly wear off. and then it gets annoying. really annoying. so i'm not telling for the nth time how "brother" lost the phone... which negates the whole point of bloggering(TM) the whole thing. X) the thing was the phone seemed to have mysteriously vanished.

I have theories though something involving "brother" and the word "aliens".

anyway, i'm using a new number, which should be posted on demand. i reckon the dangers of posting it on a public blog such as this would be enormous. i have people running after my neck... hehe. the last thing you'll need would be neck congee on the menu.

mt.banahaw

Mt. Banahaw

had us all fighting for dear life.

not quite.

despite the utter lack of action and exercise in my life, i managed to get out of Banahaw, alive and all in one piece. although one of us, nearly broke a bone on the descent . a day's worth of tour in Banahaw is actually equivalent to nearly 18 yrs of living sedentary`. and the stairs leading to Sta. Lucia Falls was simply hell on earth.

so i came up with a banahaw equation:

(extreme heat + rough terrain)

zero public toilets

= an undefined mixture of exhaustion, contempt and constipation

----------------------------------------------------

unaware of what we have gotten ourselves into...

jeepney

down at sta. lucia falls. this is not worth my 500 steps.

exhaustion overload

madaya si sir, hindi siya bumaba

inside the cave

creepy statuettes inside the cave

outside the cave

Gateway

Gateway

is a relatively new place in the heart of Cubao. it was actually a rather refreshing venue for meeting my friends (kare, kes, bert). the whole place is neat and unlike the uber populated malls in manila, a lot quieter. you'd enjoy walking around though you can almost tour the mall in under an hour. the interesting thing about it is this outdoor oasis at the center of the mall. it's sort of like a mini rainforest complete with real butterflies and unrealistically green foliage on a gigantic hollow tube. the best part was you can lounge at the garden seats there if you're feeling a little nature-sy .

the place was about to close when we decided to leave. it could have been really fun though if we stayed a little while and just let ourselves get trapped inside the mall, that's like my ultimate fantasy maaahn. and then, i'll be off to raid Mango and Fornarina... bwahahaha. and perhaps, a little stop at the supermarket for refreshments after i get tired from all the raiding. bwahahaha. >:D

*Cubao is really scary after dark.

when we are continuosly pestered by oil-price hikes, somewhere else in the world...

Absent husband returns home ... as a eunuch

NEW DELHI (Reuters) - An Indian man who left his wife and two young children two years ago shocked his family when he returned home as an eunuch, wearing garish red lipstick, the Asian Age newspaper said Thursday.

After a fight with his wife, the jobless Nabiullah left his family in Hathipur town in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh in the summer of 2003 to look for work, the paper reported.

During his absence, he got himself castrated and became a eunuch, earning money by singing and dancing, a common form of employment among India's ostracized community of eunuchs.

"I was always fond of singing and dancing, but felt suffocated in my body as a man," Nabiullah was quoted as saying.

His wife, Shama Parveen, fainted when he returned home late last month and now wants a divorce.

"I cannot live with this eunuch and subject myself and my children to social ridicule," she was quoted

* i don't know what to say

** really

*** poor wife...

galera chronicles part 1

galera chronicles part 1

despite all the hassles we had to go through, we managed to have a blastin' good time at the beach.

my mom nearly kept me from going to that galera trip. so in consequence, instead of my usual early self and meeting them at around 4.30am at metropolis, i arrived at around 7-ish thereby delaying the trip for two and a half hours and rendering us behind our supposed schedule. of course, it also meant me having to recite a litany of apologies, for being the cause of such delay.

from there, we boarded the bus to the port where we were supposed to get on a large motorized banca to take us to white beach. the bus ride was (oh gahd) a terrible pain in the butt. literally. i mean, it had to be the longest bus ride of my life and i have been to 12 hr trips on bus. perhaps a combination of excitement and cramped seating space were a cause of condemnation of a 3 hr trip that lasted forever.

reaching the port, we had to wait like two more hours for the boat ride. and when we were finally called for boarding, we were totally scared out of our wits, they were overloading the damned thing and we nearly backed out. luckily, another boat arrived (not the one we were supposed to be in), a much safer boat, although an hour later than the supposed schedule which was 12:15. sayang, we were this close to having cute friends hehe. but they opted to ride the uberly overloaded first boat.and we never heard of them since. we have a theory though, that they were devoured by the sea. but we saw them the following day, they seemed quite okay. so maybe they managed to survive. i knew it. the cooler they dorkily tugged along with them was a self-sustaining rectangular bathysphere. i knew it. damn it i'm right. how else could they have survived such wrath?

well, i slept through much of the boat trip, awakened by the splash of water from outside the boat which soaked the back of my shirt. i was considerably lucky because kester (who was sitting beside me) got wet twice. and we were the only ones in the boat who, by some twist of faith, got splashed with water. it's weird considering the window behind us had some kind of plastic curtain to keep the water out. i actually gave up tryingto figure out how the hell we got wet.

i thought we were never going to see land ever again... so we collectively wished real hard, and prayed, sang hymns and burned incense. after an hour of lip-service we were at the beach. it was 2-ish then. whether the prayer and hymns and incense had something to do with it, is beyond me. i was okay with the fact that we were actually walking on sand, real sand.

then we were faced with a bigger problem. we still had no place to stay. the beach front hotels were all already fully booked. luckily, some locals were willing to share their residential space (if the price is right, of course) to the disillusioned tourists. so we landed paying for a shack among the woods. we literally had to take a hike to reach the godforsaken place. it wasn't the least bit hotel-sy (not that we were actually looking for a hotel-ish place. any airconditioned room could have worked) and we even had to share the house with the owners. while we slept at the rooms (their rooms), they slept on the floor at the living area. it was, well... a house-- a typical probinsya house, i might add, with a 30+ inch cable tv. neat... at that point we were willing to take anything just so there was somewhere we could spend the night (and somewhere, where we could take showers). we figured it didn't really matter because we were going to be out at the beach the entire time.

so we finally found a place, it was 4pm then, meaning we have all forgotten to eat lunch, what with all that looking-for-a-decent-place-to-stay fiasco. by then, i had a really, really throbbing headache and my world was literally spinning before my eyes and then i started throwing up. i felt really sick, maybe from hours of having eaten nothing (i forgot i was not able to eat a decent breaksfast) and the sordid heat that burned the very core of my existence. if i did not have a hat on, i feel all the gray matter would ooze out of my ears in search for a more tolerable weather. so there i went. the whole household hearing the entire episode of me puking in the toilet. really, really disgusting. :P
i was not really in the mood to go to the beach despite the prodding , having