Sunday, September 28, 2008

food for thoughts

a perfect reading experience after browsing our phenomenology of love lectures way back in 3rd year (*mushy*), and while listening to the music of beatles.

now, after four years of learning the art of writing, i can really say that there's no greatest of the greatest schools that can teach anybody how to write. how about that then? too bad, professors don't even know how to rate your work. everything becomes subjective. writing classes and all that are just there to develop your taste. the rest is for you to discover...


from reader's digest online: Eight Celebrities Share What They've Learned


DESMOND TUTU - cleric; antiapartheid activist; winner, 1984 Nobel Peace Prize; winner, 2005 Gandhi Peace Prize

"Each one of us can make a contribution. Too frequently we think we have to do spectacular things. Yet if we remember that the sea is actually made up of drops of water and each drop counts, each one of us can do our little bit where we are. Those little bits can come together and almost overwhelm the world. Each one of us can be an oasis of peace."


JANE GOODALL - primatologist and conservationist; founder, the Jane Goodall Institute for Wildlife Research, Education and Conservation, based in Washington, D.C.

"We've been very arrogant in assuming that there's a sharp line dividing us from the rest of the animal kingdom. We are not the only beings on this planet with personalities, minds, and, above all, emotions. We need to be more respectful."


CLINT EASTWOOD - actor, more than 50 films; director, 29 films, including Unforgiven and Million Dollar Baby; winner, 4 Academy Awards

"Great stories teach you something. That's one reason I haven't slipped into some sort of retirement: I always feel like I'm learning something new. There was a time in my life when I was doing westerns, on the plains of Spain. I could have stayed there and probably knocked out a dozen more. But the time came when I said, That's enough of that. As fun as they were to do, it was time to move on. If a story doesn't have anything that's fresh in it, at least for me, I move away from it."

"Take your profession seriously; don't take yourself seriously. You really only matter to a certain degree in the whole circus out there. If you take yourself seriously, you're not going to be able to move forward. You're going to be hampered by always wanting to look in the mirror and see if you have enough tuna oil on your hair or something like that."


LELLA and MASSIMO VIGNELLI - interior and graphic design team, married 50 years; creators, New York City subway signage; contributors, Grand Central Terminal restoration; winners, more than 130 awards

LV: "People ask us, 'Aren't you retiring?' But we really like what we do."

MV: "You need to have passion. The greatest thing I've learned in my life is that there is room for everybody. That's the great thing about art and design and communication. There's room for all."

LV: "Aspiring designers should know about the good things that happened before. Have a little history. Go back and see what was done before."

MV: "Learn from the past if you want what matters in the present. Knowledge is the most important thing. To young people, we say, fill your brain with as much information as you can. Look at everything, know everything, develop a critical mind. History, theory, and criticism are the three fundamental elements to grow in a professional life. History will provide you with the tools for understanding. Theory will be the philosophy of why you're doing it. And criticism will provide you with the ability to continually master what you are doing. Play with these tools and you can do pretty good things."


NELSON MANDELA -
civil rights leader; prisoner for 27 years for his antiapartheid work; cowinner, 1993 Nobel Peace Prize; elected South Africa's first freely chosen president (1994-1999)

"Wounds that can't be seen are more painful than those that can be seen and cured by a doctor. I learned that to humiliate another person is to make him suffer an unnecessarily cruel fate. I learned that courage was not the absence of fear but the triumph over it. I felt fear myself more times than I can remember, but I hid it behind a mask of boldness. The brave man is not he who does not feel afraid but he who conquers fear. Where people of goodwill get together and transcend their differences for the common good, peaceful and just solutions can be found, even for those problems that seem most intractable."


JACQUES PÉPIN - chef; author, 25 cookbooks; founder, American Institute of Wine & Food

"For most kids now, a chicken is rectangular. It's got plastic on top, and it doesn't have eyes or feet. This is scary. You should never eat something you cannot recognize. A simple principle, but important.


JUDI DENCH
- actress, more than 100 plays and films, including Shakespeare in Love; winner, 6 Laurence Olivier Awards, 1 Academy Award, 1 Tony Award

"I get sillier as I get older, so I don't know what wisdom means. I can only pass on something that I've been acquainted with and let whoever it is pick the bones out of it."

Wednesday, September 24, 2008

maybe i'll put a title tomorrow

after six months of having an online newspaper as my homepage, i finally reverted to MSN. yeah, i know... i'm still not for straight, verrry verrry hard news.

i found this article below on their MSN-Encarta features/columns section. how i love the way it was written! errr.. maybe because it speaks for me. haha. now i know, procrastination's not that bad. hello to all fellow planners and daydreamers!


Is Procrastination Healthy?

By Don Asher

Do you put off important work until the last minute? So do I. That makes us both procrastinators. In fact, this article was due weeks ago. But since you didn't know that, you weren't missing it, were you?

Only my editors suffer from my work habits. At least, that's what I try to tell myself.

Procrastination costs the country untold millions -- if not billions -- of dollars, though. Missed deadlines create a cascade of problems in a complex, interconnected economy.

California can't seem ever to turn out a timely budget, scads of Americans recently waited weeks and weeks for tardy stimulus checks, and delayed software releases even have their own name, "vaporware."

However, procrastination is not all bad, and not all procrastinators are deficient performers. For example, graduate students are more likely than undergraduates to procrastinate, in spite of being statistically superior students.

Artists often revel in pulling all-nighters full of blasts of creativity and production. The peculiar genius of desperation and 4 a.m. logic is a fecund contributor to the national product. In fact, a little procrastination may be part of living an ambitious and energetic life.

But what about when procrastination goes critical? When relationships are ruined, spouses feel betrayed, bosses are disgusted, and a person is frozen, frustrated, and disillusioned with that nonperformer staring back in the mirror? That's when procrastination is an enemy to mental health.

"In personal relationships, if you say you'll do something and you don't do it, people begin not to trust you," says clinical psychologist Linda Sapadin. "If they can't trust you to do what you say you'll do, that's passive-aggressive, and it creates a lot of disturbance in relationships."

Dr. Sapadin is a national specialist in procrastination, and author of "It's About Time! The Six Styles of Procrastination and How to Overcome Them." In addition to her private practice based on Long Island, she speaks to corporate audiences nationwide on the costs and cures of procrastination.


Classifying procrastinators

It turns out not all procrastinators are alike. Dr. Sapadin's taxonomy identifies six different types. You may recognize yourself in one or more of these:

Perfectionists -- They want every project to be perfect, and this often causes them to be frozen in fear that they cannot meet such an unrealistic goal, even though they set the goal themselves.

Dreamers -- These people suffer from magical thinking. "It'll all work out," they say, while they do nothing to advance their goals.

Crisis Makers -- They often say they do their best work under pressure, but more accurately, they prefer uproar and crisis to do any work at all.

Worriers -- Their fears consume their thought processes and prevent any real work being done, as they imagine and dwell upon every possible scenario for disaster and failure.

Defiers -- These people may resent the assignments in the first place, and retake control over their lives by refusing to do the work in a timely and cooperative manner, or at all.

Overdoers -- Also known as "the pleasers," these people can't say no, and so take on more and more responsibility without any reasonable expectation of being able to deliver on their obligations.

One of the more fascinating findings in the research literature about procrastinators is that time-management training doesn't really help. Procrastinators know perfectly well how to manage time; they just don't want to do their work that way!

When Dr. Sapadin was considering writing her book, "All the existing books had to do with time management or getting organized, but for most people it [procrastination] related to some glitch in their personality style," she says.

So procrastinators have to change their thinking, rather than improve their knowledge of time-management techniques. For more on this, check out Dr. Sapadin's Web site psychwisdom.com.

For example, perfectionists have to tell themselves, "This doesn't have to be perfect. Good enough is just fine. It is more important to be done on time than to do a perfect job. Perfection is unattainable anyway, and it's not what my boss or professor wants."

Crisis makers may need to tell themselves, "I don't really do my best work under pressure. That's just a habit I have. I can do more work if I start sooner, and I'll probably find that some of that work is just as creative and interesting as the work I might do under pressure."

It is this sort of cognitive reprogramming that leads to change.

Procrastination is extremely common in academic settings. In fact, the overwhelming majority of students procrastinate. The American Psychological Association has a guide for educators on how to deal with different types of procrastinating students, "Counseling the Procrastinator in Academic Settings."

It turns out that procrastination is, in fact, a time-management technique. When it's not a destructive force, it allows workers to be hyperproductive in bursts. It's an antidote to that old maxim, "The assignment expands to fill the available time." It's a way to contain an assignment within a smaller block of time.

To see how procrastination works when it is a force for good, I decided to interview some top students about their work habits. The following students are all top performers.

Ginger White, a McNair Scholar and a senior at Indiana University -- Purdue University Indianapolis, readily admits to procrastinating.

"I do work better under pressure, and I'm easily distracted. Little things get in the way, until the deadline gets near." For the final push, though, she says she gathers all the books and reference materials she needs to do the assignment.

"Then, I sit there. I don't care how long it takes. I sit there. I'm in the zone, and the ideas just come, and if I were to try to do this two weeks early, the ideas just wouldn't be there."
This seems to be working for her, as she has a 3.9 GPA in new media and computer sciences.

Brandon Lewis, a music education major at the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff, and also a McNair Scholar, says he procrastinates "all the time." But he sees a benefit to it.

"When I have a big paper due, I might put it off," he says, but "I'm planning out how I'm going to do it, planning when to do it. I'm thinking about it constantly." So this type of mental rehearsal and preparation helps him get ready to be productive.

Dominique Booker, a double major in criminal justice and political science at Anderson University in Indiana, says her busy schedule of activities sometimes makes her delay schoolwork.

"I have good intentions, but I'm involved in a lot of stuff," says Booker. "I'm vice president of the Multicultural Student Association and a delegate on the legal committee for the Model United Nations, and I take these seriously. There's a lot of work and research for these projects, and sometimes I put these ahead of my regular schoolwork."

But then, like Ginger White, she gets in the zone.

"I get all the library books and articles, and I just do it. I just start reading, highlighting, taking notes, collecting resources and citations, and I work straight through, usually. I normally do it all day, even if it takes several days. I've worked as much as a week straight, usually every afternoon and night, say 4 p.m. to 2 or 3 in the morning."

She recommends academic procrastinators make sure they have all the books and resources they need well before the deadline, or other students may have them checked out.

Then again, there are students like Martsyl Joseph, who is just finishing her Master of Public Administration degree at IUPUI and will be going on to law school in the fall.
"I don't procrastinate anymore," she says. Joseph overcommitted to activities as an undergrad, she admits, but in graduate school she stays on task.

"The key is to know your limit. Understand that you can't do everything, even though you want to. Pick and choose what's most important to you, and stick to those one or two things. And put education first. You'll have plenty of time after you graduate to do all that other stuff."

So, if procrastination is not debilitating, it may be useful. But if it is debilitating, training in time-management skills is unlikely to achieve a change in behavior. You'll need to change the way you think about your work. For myself, I'm going to get on the next article due, right away. Just as soon as I ...

Tuesday, September 16, 2008

borg abunda!

i don't know why, maybe it's because of my addiction to radio programs, but it has become an annoying duty of my bio-clock to bug me very early even after incurring just a couple of hours of good, i mean GOOD sleep.

so here i am, all half-cooked, currently listening to this morning show "Good Times with Mo, Mojo, and Grace Lee," and laughing the devil out of me! seeing that photo down there, i can surmise you're face is already cracking up with hard blows of laughter! let's all be happy today! good times!

here's a verrrry funny entry, posted yesterday on a listener-made blog:



Boy Abunda billboard, photo courtesy of
http://leviuqse.blogspot.com/


Blog reader Chi clued me in to a Boy Abunda billboard that’s now causing a lot of laughter along EDSA and probably some accidents as well… Although I haven’t seen the billboard personally, I did some research and saw a picture of it on the net. It’s for Boy Abunda’s new perfume line and the tagline is a killer: “Kaibigan, nagpabango ka na ba?” ROTFLMAO

Mo asked me to post a picture here for tomorrow’s show and I can’t wait for the reaction from other Good times’ listeners when they see this piece of advertising brilliance, hehe…

Go check it out yourself when you pass by EDSA, according to blog reader Marie, there are some other versions of the same billboard with the same theme located along EDSA near Robinson’s Pioneer…

Definitely some serious competition for the notorious ELLEN billboards…

I can’t wait to shake the hand of the creative genius who thought up this monstrosity, hahaha… And you know what? It’s too early for Halloween!

Damn, tomorrow’s show should be hilarious!

Good times!




*title inspired by one of the hosts, Mojo Jojo: "It kinda reminds me of a character from Star Trek….. parang he’s a “Borg” that mated with Rainbow Brite…. BORG ABUNDA na rainbow edition… oh my! Atesh! I just don’t know where advertising is going to nowadays
At least its “colorful” di b? Hmnnn……"

Monday, September 15, 2008

kwentong kalye #1

i have a big problem with umbrellas.

anyway, in the Philippines, where the weather is as moody as a woman in her menopausal stage, umbrellas are, in a way, strong weapons against sickness. well, can you imagine yourself wearing that Disney-character-inspired raincoat your mother used to embarrass you when you were still a moppet? not to mention your oh-so-redundant mini-umbrella, your shiny, colorful rain boots, and your (uhm, again) cartoon-character-inspired stroller bag with a sheet of plastic cover on—it's like you're in for some mock battle down south! crrrrrazy...

so now that you've earned some respect and an ounce of shame for yourself, you realize that umbrellas and plain logic are somehow enough to spare you from hospital beds. set aside the gangs of virus that flutter in the air. it's hard to escape from their merciless claws anyway.

also, it is only in the Philippines where people can get free umbrellas from fast food restaurants, churches, bus stops, classrooms, and jeepneys, courtesy of their careless fellows. talk about perks, man! but how people love walking with this portable roof on top of their heads, i don't even know. more than that, i can't seem to imagine why grownups, especially the typical women who wear dusters and all that, are so numb, they can't even notice the tips of their umbrellas (yes, tips. ferrule's the one on top. oh, i didn't know that, too!) effing your face like they are in prison! in addition to that "more than that" thing, i will never ever understand why it is so hard for people to shut their umbrellas in a roofed pathway, so as not to cause what i would love to call a "human traffic jam," or hold their umbrellas upside-down if they're already shut, and be sensitive enough not to poke their fellow pedestrians with, ehem, ferrules. people can sometimes be so annoying... and then they get inside the jeepney with their wet umbrellas, their muddy shoes landing on yours, the driver speeding more then ever as if trying to catch up for a date with satan—the heck, fools don't even care if water's drooling from their umbrellas down to your pants! then as you reached your classroom/office/whatever, it's as if you've just entered an umbrella exhibit room, with those canopies lying open on the floor like skirts blown up-ways, and like it takes 12 hours for them to get dry.

well, if you would ask me if i carry one, of course i do. who doesn't? ok, some guys don't... and yey! i just got a freebie last week! sorry, classmate. if it's yours, just approach me. i seldom use mine anyway. an umbrella sleeps in my bag for ages, or that whether or not to bring one is always a self-debate. light rain showers are not alarming for me, unless giants up there start to cry so hard, then it's time to give myself some considerations and be decent-looking enough wherever i'm heading to. i just feel a little ashamed that the way i take umbrellas for granted is a different thing for those who use theirs for shelter... or maybe i just think a lot when i'm traveling.

oh well, an umbrella is still an excess baggage for me! whether or not to bring one is always a self-debate.

Thursday, September 04, 2008

nocturne

he's the song that keeps on playing inside my head

the one i turn to whenever in delight

sound of every string on my blue guitar

sad ivory of my grand piano

lip plate of my old wooden flute

the composer of my song

notes on my music sheet

rhythm of my piece

bars on my staff

staccato

tempo

end


he has, by far, the best melody in this world

the perfect blend of music and poetry

his lyrics found a way to touch my soul...

i'll keep on playing him everyday

until he inspires me no more

until there's no magic left...

still, i'll be listening

'coz until now, i

can't seem to find

a new song

for me

yet