The Pursuit

The coming school year is a make-or-break year for me. Not only is there the possibility that I might graduate in three trimesters' time, I also have to make use of time to finally achieve my goals I have long set yet never tried to achieved years ago. Among them is trying to make myself fit and healthy.

This is one goal that I had ups and downs doing since the moment I first stepped into the neighborhood gym near our house way back July 2005. Yep it's been that long although I was never consistent although one achievement that I had made when I was starting out was when I manage to pull my weight down from 160lbs to a manageable 145lbs and I was able to maintain it up until college.

It was only last year when I noticed that I'm starting gaining weight and all of a sudden 3 months later, I was heavy at 162lbs. Although I don't now what happened, I never really made nnoticed any change in my appearance but people around me keep on making comments of how much "fatter" I have grown. These comments affected me in the way that I really should refocus the way I want to see myself in the future: feeling young inside and out, healthy, vibrant and fit.

It's one thing to say that I want to be fit, it's another thing to actually do it. As mentioned earlier, I have a problem with being consistent that's why I made it a point on not rushing things too much and do it one step at a time. At the same time, I have to revisit some goals that I was able to achieve yet failed to maintain. What worked for me while I was starting out were:

1. No buying candies, or any form of junk food.
2. No soda unless I was served.
3. Order Iced tea.

Eventually, one thing led to another and I ended up messing up what I've started.

Other gray areas that I really need to focus on is my food and sweet cravings. Sweets is something that I can't afford not to have and eating is something of a bad vice that may be half as bad as drinking or smoking but is still an evil vice that I must control.

Controlling the way I eat and stick to a solid eating plan is a way for me to finally rid myself of the belly fat occupying my midsection for so many years. As a rule, I should be eating more of the healthy stuff while lessening the excess stuff  thus I have to reduce my consumption of rice especially when I have my dinner. What I've been doing for quite a while now is incorporating oatmeal into my usual eating habits while I snack on bananas while I'm in school.

The important thing is to make my stomach think as if it's full so I won't have to deal with getting cravings as much.

One half of the plan is sticking to a work-out plan that I should consistent with all throughout. Gray areas include my lack of motivation and my sudden mentality of finding an excuse not to go to the gym. For this term, I have the benefit of time to do this so I shouldn't be worried much about not finding enough time.

My initial goal is to see results by August 31, 2010, which is my 20th birthday. My end goal is to see if I'm still consistent past August 31, 2011 when I turn 21 and which by then I would be graduating from college.

The pursuit for a lifestyle change will start tomorrow May 31. I know there will be bumps in the road but I'm all the more ready to face them. 

I'll be keeping a record of what I'll do so pray that I succeed in this endeavor.

Kaya sana parang Flash Forward ito na nagkatotoo eventually.

The Summer Experience 3: That Frosh RhyThmic Productivity

I must say, this summer had been the most productive for me in terms of actually doing something outside of my usual summer bumness at this time of the year (redundant use of words, I know). No matter how short my actual summer vacation has been, I could safely say that I really made most of the 20+ days of academic freedom I have as I was able to widen my horizons, broaden my scope and limitations, and last but not least, met and made a lot of friends.

Top of my list is being a part of this year's Frosh Orientation Program where my goal since day 1 was to give myself a "sense of fulfillment" and as "my way to give back to the school". Sounds corny but it's true. And boy did I make the right choice. Now I wonder how I would react once my face is seen by the next batch of students in the school come Monday for laughing out loud! Sessionista forever! :))

Second and most certainly as important as the first, me being part of 99.5RT's The Farm has been quite the tremendous experience. It's certainly made me realize of how far I could go to realizing what I want to do after graduation. Although there's no guarantee that I'll be able to continue my working relationship with station once The Farm airs its final curtain in June, the past-half year being in RT is enough for me to be satisfied.

But of course, we're planning two big events before we call it quits, one is a final adieu to the summer before the start of the school year, "OMG IT'S OVER!" to be held in June 11 at Manor Superclub in Eastwood City while another is something we're still in the process of putting it together so better watch out for it.

As I close off this series chronicling my summer experience, I look forward to what the year has in store for what could be my final "CSB Experience".

Goodbye, Adieu, Adios, and Paalam to THE SUMMER EXPERIENCE 3!

The Summer Experience 3: 'Pag NagStarbucks Ka, Sosyal Ka!

Ano nga ab ang mayroon sa Starbucks kung kaya't maraming naaliw na tumambay doon? Dahil ba sa napaka-accomdating nilang mga service crew? Sa serbisyo na madalas ay inaabuso ng mga customer? O di kaya kinikilala ito bilang isang status symbol para sa mga taong sosyal at piling sosyal.

Una kong naransana na mag-Starbucks nung 11 years pa lang ako at namamasyal ang pamilya ko sa grabe-sa-sobrang-lamig na New York nung December 2001. Naalala ko pa nga ang naging unang order ko doon: isang mocha frapp. At talaga namang iyun pa ang inorder ko kahit malamig ang panahon doon!

Di rin naglaon, dumating ang Starbucks sa Pilipinas at biglang naging isang popular a cafe-chain ito sa buong bansa. Since nung unang bisita ko sa Starbucks, iilan pa lang ang mga beses na talagang may binili ako doon. Kung hindi ako nagkakamali, first time kong bumili ng isang maiinom sa Starbucks-Tore Lorenzo sa may Taft nung first year college ako. Di nagtagal, nagorder naman ako nung isang beses sa Starbuck-Trinoma nang makakai't maiinom.

Labis kong di naiintindihan ang kulturang laganap sa mga Starbuck cafes na ito.  Noong bumisita ang tiyahin ko galing San Francisco, CA kamakailan, dinalaw namin siya sa iba't ibang lugar sa Maynila. Minsan, nung ihahatid namin siya sa tutuluyan niyang bahay sa Cavite, naisipan namin na tumigil sa isang Starbucks branch malapit sa Coastal Road. Inisip ko nung panahon na iyon na masubukan ko minsan na bumili galing doon para aking maiintindihan ang kaguluhan dala ng banyagang mananakop na ito.

Nagkaroon ako ng pagkakataon na gawin iyon nung kami ay namasyal sa Greenbelt sa Makati. Dahil sa sobrang init ng araw, inisip ko na bumili na inuming pampalamig sa isang Starbucks cafe sa malapit. Once na nasa loob ako, nag-order ako ng isang mocha frapp at isang sugar-coated na donut.

Tinanong ako ng cashier guy: "Here or to go?", ang sagot ko: "Uhm...Excuse me?". Kaniyang kinilaro: "Take out po sir?", aking sinagot ay "Ah, yes please.". Hiningi niya sa'kin ang aking pangalan. Binigay ko tapos sabi niya antayin ko ang order ko sa isang sulok. Hinintay ko nga tapos may tumawag sa aking pangalan, at kanyang sinasabi na hawak na niya ang aking order.

Ang saya ko dahil na-survive ko ang ka-sosyalan ng Starbucks. Iyun nga lang may kamahalan ang aking mga nabili pero buti dami kong dalang pera nung panahong iyon.

Isang linggo ang lumipas, inisip ko na bumili nang magiging pang-almusal ko habang ginagawa ko ang OJT ko sa isang opisina sa Makati. Buti may nadatnan akong Starbucks na malapit kaya doon ako dumiretso. At nung isang beses din ay bumili rin ako ng pagkain at inumin galing Starbucks sa isang mall. Sa dalawang kapihan ay ginamit ko ang vocabulary na uso doon at mukhang okay naman ang kinalabasan.

Pareho ay masyadong matakaw sa aking bulsa, iyon nga lang pero ayos lang dahil kahit papaano ay nasubukan ko na magStarbucks na walang alinlangan. Siguro kahit hindi na rin mawawala ang pagiging status symbol nito sa mga sosyal at pilit maging sosyal dito sa Pilipinas, hindi maikakaila na mayroong kakaiba ang establishment na ito na talagang nagpapahumaling sa bawat nilalang na dumadaan dito.

The Summer Experience 3: An Escort in a Sagala for 2011!

Every May, every town and city in the Philippine are set in a festive mood where they celebrate feast days for saints, for good harvests, and a trademark for this particular month, flowers. But what they had in common is that they always have a procession of beautiful ladies escorted with men clad in barongs as they walk in a major road for every townsfolk to see. This is what we call here as a "sagala".

My mom like to tell us stories how back when she was younger, her cousins are always getting approached to be their "Queen" for the annual Catholic procession of Santacruzan and/or the more secular Flores de Mayo. How fun it is for the ladies to look at their best wearing beautifully-designed Filipiniana dresses and how lucky it must have been for guys to escort such lasses.

It wasn't until a couple of weeks ago when my family went to Fort Santiago and witnessed an actual sagala that was about to begin (actually the first time I wacthed a sagala was last year). The escorts look stunning on their barong get-ups while the "queens" are jaw-dropping pretty with their very beautiful gowns.

I took some pictures off of them from my mom's digicam and was amazed with the output. It made me think: What if I could be an escort for next year's May sagala?

I know it's much of a far-fetch dream but hey, this past year I had a lot of similar thoughts and ideas coming into reality. The only way I could make this one come true if I could actually make myself "escort-material". And no, when I mean "escort", I MEAN "escort" (and not the locally-twisted we had in our vocabulary).



I have the charm and I have the grace to accompany a fine-looking lady as she walks along the road, and all that's missing is getting the right stature for me to get in one of them. Hehehehe, talaga bang nagyabang? Joke! LOL!

Well, if ever I am to pursue this, I should definitely make this happen. For this thought to come true, I have to make and be that change.

:)

The Summer Experience 3: A Working Vacation

When I was conceiving the idea of writing an umbrella series of blogs for summer as an extension of my still-continuing blog series about my continuing college life, it was under the assumption that I won't exactly going to have a normal summer vacation in my college years.

Up to now, its purpose of existence remains largely the same, save for last year when I had my first and so far only normal vacation with no academic strings attached. But this year, well let's just say that I'm sorta-kinda-vacationing-while-working-and-studying at the same time.

Gets?

Since the end of junior year, I've kept myself occupied with a couple of school-related activities. One was participating on CSB's frosh orientation program (which I recently found out that I'll be in the sec committee instead of logistics) which I want to join since my freshman year but circumstances prevented me on joining until now. The other is being part of 99.5RT's The Farm where I've recently transferred my internship from RT30, the station's flagship chart show.

Working while in the middle of a month-long vacation doesn't seem to be all that bad, at least not yet. As far as I know, the next few days will be critical as me and the rest of the FOP guys will be orienting freshmen in preparation of the new school year while on the other side f the spectrum, members of The Farm are busy planning this really big thing next month. Can't say the exact details just yet but we hope we get the green-light to do this.

People are asking me why I try to make things tedious for me, why I'm making myself so busy when I should be resting. Because I want to engage myself on things that could shape me as a person. It's a learning experience that will teach me a lot of things, getting prepared with the harsh reality that is life as well as passing the torch of wisdom to the new crop of naive students coming into the school very soon.

Here's to wishing I could have a decent summer vacation next year, that is if by then I'll be done with school. Cheers to that!

The Summer Experience: A First-Time Voter's Experience, 1 Year and 5 Days Later

The latest news as I was writing this is that the Commission on Elections extended the voting period until 8pm tonight. This should just be enough time to accommodate late-comers to practice their right to vote. There are also reports of defective precinct count optical scan machines or what people here would like to call in short as "Pi-Kos".

But one hellish nightmare experienced by many of those who went to polling precincts as early as 7am would have to be the lack of coordination and systematic logistics from the many election volunteers stationed and the epic failure that are the "clustered precincts".

As a first-time voter, I was expecting that people would find it hard adjusting to the modernized system of voting but turns out it's the system of "clustered precincts" that had people scratch their heads.

The public school right next door  to our house serves as a precinct for about thousands of voting residents in our barangay. Voters are assigned to different sections to better manage the number of voters coming in at one time. But with the clustered system, the more than 20 sections where merged into five groups, each assigned to vote in a particular voting area found within the school. A "numbering system" was used to helped organize the voters.

Most of what I said in the last paragraph weren't exactly made known to many until today. Imagine the chaos starting from 7am where confusion and heated arguments were filling up the halls as people don't know where they are supposed to go. Here's the major problems I found while inside the school:

1. The list of voters were posted in the school hallways instead of outside for incoming voters to see and make sure that their names are in the list.

2. Senior citizens weren't aware that they will be provided with an "express lane"

3. They were too much election volunteers in the area at one time ma, many of them wearing red and  weren't doing anything but sit around and smoking inside flammable classrooms.

4. The volunteers apparently are making problems for themselves and the voters by their lack of clear coordination and communications.

5. The volunteers are also trying to vote as well but they should have done so at a later time as courtesy for the other voters (because they DID signed up to monitor the elections and not do nothing)

6. Voter confusion stemmed from having people sent to "boarding areas" where they are supposed to be given a piece of paper containing numbers and wait til they are called according to their assigned numbers. Unfortunately in one boarding area, volunteers just let a throng of people to come inside in large numbers only to end up being crowded in a not so spacious room while the volunteer assigned to us kept on moving around passing out numbers instead of  staying one place like the door entrance and have those numbers distributed to people at the point of entry. Imagine I was voter 111 out of 200 people in one voting area alone as of 11am (By the way I'm in 14a).

As for the optical scan machines, the school was given 5 units. One unit had a short-term technical problem because a voter kinda touched a button of the machine. Good thing there was enough tech support to sort things out fast.

The voting process became a lot faster when the school eventually ditched the numbering system and just had us simply line-up until we reached the voting area. Lucky I was able to see my name on the voter's list with my mom since we were asked which number (by order of our surnames) we were assigned to. I was later given a ballot and an election secrecy folder. I sat on a chair near the windows so I could feel the wind coming in and get enough light for me to read the names of my chosen candidates.

Out of the oh-so-many-names I have to choose from to fill in as my choices for various government positions, I only chose 7 names: one for President, another for vice-president, 2 for senators, 1 for Valenzuela City mayor, 1 for vice-mayor, and  1 for Congressional District 1 Representative. I abstained from voting anyone running for the city council due to a lack of awareness of who they are to me as a citizen of the city, and from voting one out of 187 party-list groups vying a seat in Congress because they're just too many of them.

I never understood of the whole party-list system especially on the notion of how exactly do they represent members of the marginalized/underrepresented sectors. And think about it: 187 party-list groups vying for 57 seats with their names filed under "Party-List" occupying more than two-thirds of one side of the ballot alone.

The actual voting process with my ballot being swallowed by the optical scan machine took only a mere 5 minutes, a pint out of the 4.5 hours I have to endure while waiting for my turn just to vote. Fortunately we are here in Arko that the PCOS machine didn't cause any chaos among the populace but it was merely the lack of coordination coming from the election volunteers as I've mentioned earlier.

Now as voting period is at its final few hours until the 20th hour, the only thing that the nation has to wait now is the counting of ballots which should be a lot quicker now. The election commission expects the final results to be out by one week instead of 1 and a half months peple had to wait when we were still doing manual counting.

I just hope that everything will go smoothly.

GO PHILIPPINES!

The Summer Experience 3: When Dorian Lord Became Mayor (An Election That We Want to See)

Mayo a Diyes Dos Mil Dos=May 10, 2010=Ika-Sampu ng Mayo Taong Dalawampu-Sampu

In less than 12 hours, me and some 50-million strong eligible Filipino voters from all walks of life will take part in the first ever fully-automated elections in the Philippines, choosing the leaders who will either make or break the nation's future. Indeed this is history in the making and I am honored as a first-time voter that I will be able to finally exercise my right of suffrage and get to see first-hand how the new system of voting will fare for the first time.

Sure, in the weeks leading to the May 10 national elections there have bee technical problems besetting the recently-held test runs of the Precinct Count Optical System (PCOS) machines with sprouting issues of "automated cheating", fears of possible hacking, and the like. Lemme say that never is there a country this crazy with elections such as ours.

Think of the whole situation like a soap opera, where everything is superficial. From lead characters with over-the-top personalities and says the cheesiest and corniest speeches to the recurring ones who never seem to possess two-way functioning brains and let their emotions take the best of them to the production and PR crew that makes sure that this soap opera is hitting big in the ratings.

I mean, is an elective position something to die for? Vote-buying, ghost voters, tirades, mudslinging, and varying forms of election-related violence, all of these for the sake of winning?

All these mess reminds me of Dorian Lord, a character from an American TV show called "One Life to Live". She's the type of person that people love to hate because of her self-centeredness, always maintaining a clean image despite having a very despicable personality. One good trait from Dorian is that she puts her family first, protecting them from harm at all cost.

There is this one storyline that she was a part of recently where she decided to run for mayor against Viki. She tries her hardest to win sympathy votes by pretending to be that she's a "lesbian" to woo in LGBT voters. She even went as far as "marrying" her campaign manager who is actually a lesbian herself. Although this campaign didn't result of her winning the vote, she became mayor when her closest rival and winner of the mayoral race, Viki, dropped out after her son-in-law was shot to death.

One thing I noticed is that as despicable and hated that Dorian can be to many, she knows her boundaries as a candidate. Never was there an instance of her throwing mud to the other candidates but merely presented to voters her platform as well as her charm to convince people that she deserves to be a mayor. Even on election day itself, she didn't do anything to have the electoral process fall into her favor but merely let the people decide on who they want to be as their leader. Even the way they vote was as simple as pulling down a lever that corresponds to their candidate of choice.

I could assume that the mayor election itself was not even fully automated and by the end of election day, the final tally of the results are made known right away. Dorian, despite having good vibes of becoming mayor initially conceded after learning she lost before she knew she won by default. She never called for a recount (because the votes were counted over several times) nor yelled to the local electoral commission that she felt she was cheated nor threatened to resort with a people powered revolution to protest the results. That's possibly the most mature thing a politician can do to maintain his dignity, pride and civility, something that I wish all the politicos in this country possess so that we could all move on with our lives and become a developed country right away.

We elect leaders to serve US and not to serve themselves.

As a voter voting for the first time, as a member of a generation who will be the first to experience a modernized electoral system, we hope that with one vote, there will be one decision and therefore one change that we want to see, the change that we want to be.

Ako boboto sa unang pagkakataon, kayo?