wow... this site is dusty...

anyway, if anybody is still checking up on me through this blog, you can go to my hiding place. it's not so much of a hiding place anymore, so i guess you could say i'm coming out of it...

on another note, my nick joaquin post of two years ago is still being flocked by people demanding for synopses, criticisms and summaries of his works. The current count of the messages left there is 128. still, it never fails to annoy and entertain.

so, see you guys on the other side.

 

 

bye everybody.

it's been good while it lasted.

 

 

 

tagged by the shadow that slithers.

Once you've been tagged, you have to write 8 facts/things/habits about yourself, saying who tagged you. In the end you need to choose the 6 people to be tagged and list their names. No tag backs.

1. madali akong madala. i guess its a survival mechanism of some sorts. once i get hurt really badly, i absolutely avoid everything that might lead me to getting hurt like that again. which leads me the next item:
2. sometimes i really wonder if i've ever forgiven anybody at all because even if i don't have any ill-feelings for that person anymore, item # 1 kicks in.
3. i live inside my head all the time.
4. i love taking care of animals. my cat most of all.  
5. i am a chronic procrastinator.
6. i think a big chunk of my soul snuck out and lived in italy before i even got there.
7. i try not to be afraid of anything.
8. i am a whole world of contradictions.

 

i am tagging: my seester, the spoonmark, the joshua, the rheea, the frustrated food critic aka apester, and the lily in london.

i've heard that nearly everything is just about legal in Amsterdam... but they have to stop somewhere, right?

---

Pedophiles to launch political party

AMSTERDAM (Reuters) - Dutch pedophiles are launching a political party to push for a cut in the legal age for sexual relations to 12 from 16 and the legalization of child pornography and sex with animals, sparking widespread outrage.

The Charity, Freedom and Diversity (NVD) party said on its Web site it would be officially registered Wednesday, proclaiming: "We are going to shake The Hague awake!"

The party said it wanted to cut the legal age for sexual relations to 12 and eventually scrap the limit altogether.

"A ban just makes children curious," Ad van den Berg, one of the party's founders, told the Algemeen Dagblad (AD) newspaper.

"We want to make pedophilia the subject of discussion," he said, adding the subject had been a taboo since the 1996 Marc Dutroux child abuse scandal in neighboring Belgium.

"We want to get into parliament so we have a voice. Other politicians only talk about us in a negative sense, as if we were criminals," Van den Berg told Reuters.

The Netherlands, which already has liberal policies on soft drugs, prostitution and gay marriage, was shocked by the plan.

An opinion poll published Tuesday showed that 82 percent wanted the government to do something to stop the new party, while 67 percent said promoting pedophilia should be illegal.

"They make out as if they want more rights for children. But their position that children should be allowed sexual contact from age 12 is of course just in their own interest," anti-pedophile campaigner Ireen van Engelen told the AD daily.

Right-wing lawmaker Geert Wilders said he had asked the government to investigate whether a party with such "sick ideas" could really be established, ANP news agency reported.

Kees van deer Staaij, a member of the Christian SGP party, also demanded action: "Pedophilia and child pornography should be taboo in every constitutional state. Breaking that will just create more victims and more serious ones."

The party wants private possession of child pornography to be allowed although it supports the ban on the trade of such materials. It also supports allowing pornography to be broadcast on daytime television, with only violent pornography limited to the late evening.

Toddlers should be given sex education and youths aged 16 and up should be allowed to appear in pornographic films and prostitute themselves. Sex with animals should be allowed although abuse of animals should remain illegal, the NVD said.

The party also said everybody should be allowed to go naked in public and promotes legalizing all soft and hard drugs and free train travel for all.

---

this is a joke, right?

i can't believe it's already mid-may and storm season has officially begun. where has 2006 gone? it's been a sweat-blurred, heat-stroked year so far until the rain crashed in, with equally blurry memories. no offense to matt who was here for over a month just recently... but as i sit here playing hooky from the manuals for a while, i can't seem to grab a hold of one memory that i would remember years from now if a grandniece or nephew (i am this close to giving up on having children, let alone grandchildren) asks me about 2006.

(well, i guess i could tell them about that time i fell down the stairs...)

so, i'm making a list of all the things that i want to do for 2006 and try to cram them all in the six months left of the year:

1. get a scuba diving license
2. travel out of the country
3. lose 15 lbs
4. go to sagada
5. be a vegetarian at least once a day
6. be a regular contributor to a travel magazine
7. find a regular job or get enough rackets not to have to get one
8. finish that project i'm working on with joshua
9. start or be part of a young professional cell group in imus unida
10. go on a blind date

there. i'm sure i'll think of more things that i want to do later, but at least i have a list that i HAVE to follow for now. i'll keep you guys posted if or when i cross off an item on this list.

following kat's example, i'll ask the question back to you:

so what do you guys want to accomplish in the year 2006?

 

 

 Lord, You know that I love you, it's just that my heart is all tired and lethargic, but it knows that it still beats for you.

it has too.

 

 

she had a friend who liked to call himself edgar back in high school, and he christened her emily. they used to write poems then. almost every week, they'd pass notes to each other in the hallway in between classes (he was two years ahead).

they became friends because she saw him outside the door and wrote a poem about him. not a love poem, please. it was just one of those impulse verses whenever she had a pen handy. they never talked before she wrote the poem and gave it to him. she still doesn't know what made her do that.

he was the one who introduced Emily Dickinson to her. he said her poems (long lost now) reminded him of Dickinson's poetry. emily didn't really like all of dickinson's stuff, but she thought this described her exactly:

 

I ’M nobody! Who are you?
Are you nobody, too?
Then there ’s a pair of us—don’t tell!
They ’d banish us, you know.
How dreary to be somebody!
How public, like a frog
To tell your name the livelong day
To an admiring bog!

 

a decade later. Edgar is happily married. If he still writes poems, they're most likely for his wife and baby.

Emily went out into the world. wrote. got hurt. left alone. fell in love. got hurt. went home. alone again. if she still has poems in her, she keeps them to herself. she spends her days writing for others and never feels like going out if she could help it, except to watch the day end.

You Are a Dreaming Soul

Your vivid emotions and imagination takes you away from this world So much so that you tend to live in your head most of the time You have great dreams and ambitions that could be the envy of all... But for you, following through with your dreams is a bit difficult You are charming, endearing, and people tend to love you. Forgiving and tolerant, you see the world through rose colored glasses. Underneath it all, you have a ton of passion that you hide from others. Always hopeful, you tend to expect positive outcomes in your life. Souls you are most compatible with: Newborn Soul, Prophet Soul, and Traveler Soul

i wonder if there are only a definite number of words God allots to a person.

when i first started learning how to write, like the other kids my age, our textbooks showed us the correct forms of the letters of the alphabeth. my teachers corrected my grip on the pencil and i began to approximate the letters i see on my books. practice makes perfect. the blue and red lines on my pad paper guided my lines, and i made sure that i never go over the lines.

i graduated from print to cursive. cursive a's are hard because my pencil had to make that big circle that's slanted just so and then go down to make the tail curved just right.

once i got the writing down pat, and my teachers stopped correcting my handwriting, i started mixing things up. first, i wanted my handwriting to look like my mom's-- which was perfect in my eyes, and because sherie could do it effortlessly. but my hand can't seem to get those curves and peaks and loops just like my mom's and eventually i found out that my capital letters look just like my dad's. so i wrote in all caps and got tired of that after a few years and started mixing capitals and lower cases. then i put bubbles over my i's and j's, then stars. then i changed my a's and g's to look like the ones on the typewriters. and i've stopped trying to meet the lines on my notebooks. instead, my words floated between the lines.

those years my friends started calling me weird. they left me alone, in a respectful and friendly distance, allowing me some space. i wrote in my own world, furiously printing my reality on old notebooks. i kept those notebooks in boxes under my bed, no one's allowed to see them except for me. i quickly abandoned any story that's been read without my permission. my handwriting changed according to my stories and how long i'd been writing. i enjoyed the loops, and the lines, and long graceful stems of my letters. i liked it even better when my words stretched for as long as they could. sometimes a four letter word can be a couple of inches long.

in college, i preffered unlined pages. i'd buy blank books and write tiny lines of words on them. i liked the feel of the depressions the force of my hand and pen made on the otherwise smooth pages. i loved the look of squiggly lines filling the page from top to bottom. sometimes i'd draw-- trees, bottles, stars, and the moon-- breaking the lines of words and just enjoying how they'd look. words enveloped me in my college years. i felt safe and secure with them, no matter how hard it eventually got, i knew i was where i was supposed to be.

now, my words appear on the screen of my computer. i don't even have to look at the keyboard anymore. i don't have to scratch out mistakes, instead, i just press the delete button. my fingers glide almost effortlessly over the keys and the rhythm of the click clacking keys urge me on, encouraging me to churn out more words because it sounds so good in the silence of my world. nothing beats the feeling of finishing an article after hours of work. a fresh page printed out, with its clean lines and margins and paragraph breaks, is just a work of art.

my handwriting's still good, though i hardly write anything by hand anymore. i am now a writer by profession, i have my own laptop, and two desktops at home. 

but i also have a blank book i bought from a stall in florence, italy, that i should have just given to my sister since i only wrote on its first ten pages; a leather bound journal with acid-free paper given to me by my more recent ex-boyfriend  with its first few pages sealed up; and a small notebook for notes at work. but my hand is too tired and it's getting harder and harder to squeeze out words to write on them.