i've got troubles but not today

i still think the best part of watching tv is the commercial, and the best thing about the commercial is the song, what can i say, i'm a soundtrack junkie =) here are some of the new tracks i've added to my ipod that are inspired by tv ads, they go under my adtunes playlist

7. on the bus by hello gumption (nestle drumstick)
8. wash away by joe purdy (dawn)
9. all you need is love by grayson matthews (blackberry)
10. fly me away by annie little (amazon kindle)

chasing the desert sun

For a lot of people, Thanksgiving is a time for family. After getting an invite to meet up with my cousins in LA and counting my free miles, I decided to skip Vancouver's rain in favor of the desert sun.

Ging picked me up from the Van Nuys fly away and we went straight to Jollibee to sample the chicken joy meal I missed, then to her mom's place for beef sinigang. The vacation was proving to be a gastronomic treat.

The next day, we braved two and a half hours on the freeway to Palm Springs. It almost felt like we were chasing the sun. Palm canyon is a nice getaway equipped with all the distractions to keep any vacation fun. I enjoyed hanging out at the pool and playing hoops at the gym.

Our turkey less thanksgiving dinner was a hit. I missed reconnecting with family, and being surrounded with a rowdy bunch chased my blues away. The morning after, we hiked the calories off and explored the quaint downtown scene. We got lost looking for Cabazon and found ourselves on the Morongo wind mills. It didn't really look like people were hardly hit by recession when we visited the outlet malls to witness the Black Friday madness, the store lineups were crazy long.

Aerial tramway - that was the highlight of the trip. Imagine being on a rotating gondola that was going up to 8000 feet of elevation, 5 towers, and 4 different kinds of climate in 15 minutes - sensory overload for sure. The scene change from desert to snow capped peaks was truly breath taking. At the top, you can do cross country skiing and snow shoeing, there's also a restaurant, and a theater. For 20 bucks, I could do this every week, if only Grouse was that cheap.

Too short - that's what I thought, but then again that's what makes vacations more valuable, something to look forward to. I guess if everyday was like this, we would appreciate it less, that's the tragedy of being human, sooner or later we get bored of utopia and want something new.

For now I am intoxicated by the blur of the past 5 days - I hope the buzz stays..

your love never fails

Your Love Never Fails
by Jesus Culture

Nothing can separate
Even if I ran away
Your love never fails

I know I still make mistakes
But You have new mercies for me everyday
Your love never fails

You stay the same through the ages
Your love never changes
There maybe pain in the night but joy comes in the morning

And when the oceans rage
I don't have to be afraid
Because I know that You love me
Your love never fails

The wind is strong and the water's deep
But I'm not alone in these open seas
Cause Your love never fails

The chasm is far too wide
I never thought I'd reach the other side
But Your love never fails

You make all things work together for my good

good things get better, i know they do

Be merciful to me, O God, for men hotly pursue me;
   all day long they press their attack.
My slanderers pursue me all day long;
   many are attacking me in their pride.
When I am afraid,
   I will trust in you.
In God, whose word I praise,
   in God I trust; I will not be afraid.
   What can mortal man do to me?

Psalms 56:1-4

dear God,

and the plot thickens, people are spreading words against me to bring me down and mar my years of hard work, dedication, and commitment to the team. this is rather distressing but You know the truth and You know my heart. and soon it will come out that i did not do anything to purposely destroy something that i devoted my time to help build. their accusations will prove to be nothing but lies.

i am just human and powerless, i cannot fight this battle alone, but You are God and You know what is just and righteous. You know what's best for me, redeem me Oh Lord from this pit and enlighten my detractors. may they be touched by the Holy Spirit and may they have an encounter with You that will enrich their lives, soften their heart and remove their hatred and biases.

in Jesus' name, i pray.

Amen.

"‘Cause good things get better I know they do
Yeah they do, I know they do
Good things get better for me and you
And that's true, you know it's true"

- keaton simons, "good things get better"

tragedy

"Every human being on this earth is born with a tragedy, and it isn't original sin. He's born with the tragedy that he has to grow up. That he has to leave the nest, the security, and go out to do battle. He has to lose everything that is lovely and fight for a new loveliness of his own making, and it's a tragedy. A lot of people don't have the courage to do it."

- Helen Hayes (1900 - 1993)

after this great tragedy of betrayal, of hearing bad words from the most unlikely people, and of being promised something then being let down with no explanation, i feel blindsided, like a train wreck. now i am left with pieces to pick up and debris to clean and throw to the trash.

i wish i can say: "i quit, this is too much for me to handle, i give up." but then it's not over until it's over, and for me, sadly, or fortunately, depending on which half of the glass you want to look at, it's not done yet.

i am now stranded halfway across the globe, all because i believed in something that vanished into thin air. i am now banished because i wanted to communicate and share how i felt. i am now labeled because i am misunderstood. will wonders ever cease? will tides ever turn? we'll never know if we don't stay until the curtains fall..

and so the show must go on,

true blood

"Never underestimate the power of blind faith. It can manifest itself in ways that bend the laws of physics or break them entirely."

i've always thought that the best way to get to the bottom of things was to confront them. but if the other party refuses to, then it's quite a dilemma. I have too much on my plate right now to deal with this. Dear God, please get this burden off me.

using my right brain this time

when i was in nursery, i remember using my left hand to write and draw but then my teacher "corrected" me and told me to use my right hand, and so i learned to write and draw as a righty but with all other activities like sports, i'm still a lefty by heart. i've read somewhere that right handed people live longer and that there's a lot of prejudice against lefties. and so to be a well balanced person, i decided to be ambidextrous.

for the past couple of weeks i've been teaching my left hand to draw by enrolling in an art class. and last summer, i've trained my right hand to play tennis. so far, my quest for being truly ambidextrous is well underway. i guess this means i will live on the average and be equally prejudiced =).

i've always thought i was more of an artsy person than a techie, i liked writing, music, and drawing when i was growing up, i thought i would be a published poet or novelist, or a song writer, or a concert pianist or a charcoal painter but education drove away the creativity in me, and then i fell in love with numbers and incomplete gamma functions. i dreamt of one day making my own theorem or creating solutions for unsolvable math problems. but of course dreams bargained for reality, and sooner rather than later, i found myself working with computers.

on my sophomore year in university i got interested in slr photography and web design. i created personal homepages for friends and websites for school and small businesses. i thought my future would be in graphic design or animation, but then i got sidetracked again and woke up doing back-end server side stuff for a telecoms company. it was a good experience, it brought food on the table, but 10 years later i feel i missed out on some stuff i used to like. i guess i could have equally divided my time between work and hobbies but i just lost track of everything, where did all the years go? now i think i want a field that deals with or manages people, maybe a psychologist or a guidance counselor or a professor? this is how i know i'm getting older.. i'm getting weirder every day..

focusing on doing one thing at a time is a challenge for me, my mind always wanders and somehow i find something else to do when i'm supposed to be finishing another, so i end up with a couple of half baked, half started projects. now that i have time in my hands, i'm tying some loose ends and pursuing some paths that i've decided not to take back when i didn't really know any better. the sky is limitless, it stretches on to forever, so many possibilities yet to unfold, so many futures to choose from.

right now, i'm reading 2 samuel 18, reflecting on the passage and praying for revelation so i can share something in cg next week when i'm not feeling sick anymore, i'm also reviewing road sense for drivers so i can go on a road trip - from west to east, i'm also setting up eclipse and spring on mac just for fun, editing some photos and videos, composing a musical score in garageband, writing a short story, drawing composition on my sketchbook, designing my personal website, migrating my geocities pages before they close down, and wondering why i'm not getting any email or sms response from someone. that's how distracted and disorganized my brain is right now. to top it all off i just received instructions to finish a programming assignment in two hours.. a day after the deadline has passed.. obviously i need to check my email more often, such is my life without a mobile phone - totally disconnected from the world.. well almost..

ok i guess i have to load my ide, this is a sign to stop blogging..

this terribly significant business of other people

"You fight your superficiality, your shallowness, so as to try to come at people without unreal expectations, without an overload of bias or hope or arrogance, as untanklike as you can be, sans cannon and machine guns and steel plating half a foot thick; you come at them unmenacingly on your own ten toes instead of tearing up the turf with your caterpillar treads, take them on with an open mind, as equals, man to man, as we used to say, and yet you never fail to get them wrong. You might as well have the brain of a tank. You get them wrong before you meet them, while you're anticipating meeting them; you get them wrong while you're with them; and then you go home to tell somebody else about the meeting and you get them all wrong again. Since the same generally goes for them with you, the whole thing is really a dazzling illusion empty of all perception, an astonishing farce of perception.

And yet what are we to do about this terribly significant business of other people, which gets bled of the significance we think it has and takes on instead a significance that is ludicrous, so ill-equipped are we all to envision one another's interior workings and invisible aims? Is everyone to go off and lock the door and sit secluded like the lonely writers do, in a soundproof cell, summoning people out of words and then proposing that these word people are closer to the real thing than the real people that we mangle with our ignorance every day? The fact remains that getting people right is not what living is all about anyway. It's getting them wrong that is living, getting them wrong and wrong and wrong and then, on careful reconsideration, getting them wrong again. That's how we know we're alive: we're wrong. Maybe the best thing would be to forget being right or wrong about people and just go along for the ride. But if you can do that -- well, lucky you."

- Philip Roth, American Pastoral

island retreat

Weekends are for getaways, and Galiano island was the next dot that had to be pinned. My mom just left and I'm still trying my best to avoid bad habits by hanging out with the right people, so I said yes to this excursion.

The heavens looked dark and impenetrable on the ferry ride but soon a ray of light forced its way through the thick clouds and we saw a hint of blue skies. The cottage where we stayed was very cozy and the rocky beach surrounding it was conducive for soul searching.

We hiked a lot during the trip, exploring all the nooks, walking along shorelines, climbing mountain tops and checking out the local art scene. It was nature overload in the mornings and lots of sharing and bonding moments in the evenings.

Everything would have been just perfect if not for the mishap on the afternoon when we were supposed to leave. Coming back from Serenity by the Sea to check out some art work, we realized the battery on our car keys died. We tried to open the door manually but the lock was broken - we were trapped in the middle of nowhere. Amidst debates on whether we should break the window or just leave some people with the car while the rest find the way back to the cottage, we decided to go seek shelter from the cold.

We did find serenity by the sea despite the stress brought about by our misadveture. We found things to play with while waiting for someone to slim jim their way into our van. I napped a bit and dreamt the keys were working and when I woke I felt better.

First weekend trip this year with people who speak my language, I've been out of touch with them for so long, it feels different hanging out - but different in a good way - like somehow I belong.

less than zero

today i stayed home alone with my thoughts from sun up to sun down, it can be fatal i know, but i survived, somehow. i started the day thinking i would do my laundry, work out, join the trip to lighthouse park, throw the trash, do groceries, clean my room, play with rapidweaver, decode the google phone.. but of course i ended up doing none of those. the day is just too short to do anything, i don't know if everything is on fast forward here or i'm just really slow. i can see how easy it is to let the world spin by while i stay in place and not move forward in this life. at times like these, i can hear my friend's voice saying "you have no concept of time". i woke up before 6am and 14 hours later i'm still in bed, counting the skytrains passing by.

last night we had a nice walk along english bay and had dinner at a jazz place that burned a hole in my pocket. it was fun to catch up with people from the past and to recall the good old days. my former cubemate asked me why i changed my mind about staying here. she reminded me of what i said before about finding another place to explore once my work here is done, but something happened somehow, and now here i am, trying to make some semblance of structure so i can survive this concept of permanent residence. when i close my eyes and ask God for a picture of what life would be like for me, all i see is black.