Windows of opportunity

Apologies for not updating as often as I should. PLDT has basically given me the shoddiest DSL ever and it's become nigh-impossible to catch it working at home.

I am in a fascinating time. There are so many opportunities and activities opening up for me that I can't help but get excited at all the potential I'm smelling.

For three weeks now Mav and I have been jogging at Bonifacio High Street. We basically thought of turning to running as a way of keeping ourselves fit and maybe lose some weight, but so far we've been enjoying ourselves pounding away at the hard-packed concrete sidewalks. Mav is steadily getting better as she gets used to the demands of jogging.

Team Flat Out also invited me to Don Pastor's plan of making what they call a "gentlemen's racing series" - basically an open wheel-to-wheel racing class for daily driven cars and amateur drivers who have no racing licenses. If you can imagine what Keiichi Tsuchiya and his fellow race-driver co-hosts do on every episode of "Best Motoring" around Tsukuba Circuit, I reckon you wouldn't be far off.

Also when I try figuring out what I want to do with my life, it seems everything points to the direction of cars. Summit Media, that publishing giant with its offices just three floors down from mine, had a number of job vacancies, and Mav encouraged me to send in my application. Sadly there was no opening for "Top Gear Philippines" but maybe I could start elsewhere with that dream of being an automotive journalist in mind.

My only reservations revolve around leaving my comfort zone, I suppose. For better or worse I've adapted to my current situation pretty well, and there's a part of me that's fearful of leaving something that's already pretty secure. Then again I seem to have hit a wall and have stopped growing...perhaps because I've grown tired of my daily work grind.

So many opportunities, yet so many insecurities as well. It's an exciting time to be alive.

Death of a dream?

People who've known me from my high school days know that I've had real experience doing the dirty work of writing, designing layout and preparing to print a magazine. Indeed, all this experience really influenced me in choosing my courses in college. I tried to continue my enthusiasm for the magazine into college, but got tripped up by my inability to follow beats in preparation for writing a decent news article.

College aside, my time with Counterpoint was definitely one of my most productive spells I've ever had in my lifetime. As layout editor, I was in love with the entire process of making a magazine from a bunch of articles and photos, trying to synthesize all of them into one cohesive, attractive-looking whole. Working with Adobe PageMaker and InDesign since the sixth grade taught me the importance of a proper "preflight" check of a project before sending it off to the print shop, and the creative power one can wield with only two inks -- usually black and PANTONE 121 CVU for me (a bright yellow to everyone else).

Fast forward to today, and I am saddened by the realization that the Internet has saturated our lives so much that entire magazines and newspapers such as the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and San Francisco Chronicle are closing up shop, opting to become entirely "Internet-only" publications.

I never really got the hang of HTML. Sure, I hard-coded an entire website once in the past with nothing but Notepad, but I found the whole process exceedingly clunky and nowhere near as intuitive as using PageMaker/InDesign. I am aware that the Internet opens so many other ways of turning a web page into eye candy, but most of the animated banners I see on websites do them no favors as coherent wholes. Novelty for the sake of novelty, I'd say. From a design standpoint, I've always believed in keeping things simple -- my tools involving nothing more than typefaces and drawn objects.

Back in high school I thought I could make a living as a layout editor for a magazine. That probably isn't the case in the US any longer, with magazines slowly slipping into obsolescence, taking one of my greatest ambitions along with them.

Of loneliness, insignificance and Macross

By all accounts, I should be sad. I just conceded whatever chance I had with Denise. I should be mourning.

But you know what? I'm not sad at all. Maybe I've grown a bit in all those years. I refuse to get bogged down by heartache and disappointment any longer. I can close this chapter of my life without regrets because I know I tried my best. Perhaps it took me too long to call it quits, but that's no longer important.

Next to what happened to PJ, my troubles are nothing.
===

I got a welcome surprise on YM the other day. My old friend Grace buzzed me...and after some distance between us over the past few months, I truly missed her.

We've had our misgivings and problems, but underneath it all I guess she and I are kindred spirits. We both know how demoralizing loneliness and sadness can be, how it can push us to do really stupid things in an effort to get it out of our system. Although we're doing better now, we still have bouts of that evil emotion from time to time.

Perhaps this time, we can be each other's crutches.
===

I want to watch Macross again.

I want to believe that a love so pure and untainted truly does exist, even if I already have too much knowledge to the contrary.

I want to meet my own Misa Hayase.

I want to believe that love can prevail even in the midst of sheer disappointment and after lots of effort, the same kind of effort Misa put in for her beloved Hikaru.

Macross is a boyhood dream, I guess. What's so wrong in believing in it once again?

When a flamboyant performer goes shy...

When love breaks up
When the dawn light wakes up
A new life is born
Somehow I have to make this final breakthrough...
Now!

I wake up, feel just fine
Your face, fills my mind
I get religion quick
'Cause you're looking divine
Honey you're touching something, you're touching me
I'm under your thumb, under your spell, can't you see?

If I could only reach you
If I could make you smile
If I could only reach you
That would really be a breakthrough...oh yeah

Break through these barriers of pain
Break through, to the sunshine from the rain
Make my feelings known towards you
Turn my heart inside and out for you now
Somehow I have to make this final breakthrough...
Now!

Your smile, speaks books to me
I break up, with each and every one of your looks at me
Honey you're starting something deep inside of me
Hone you're sparking something, this fire in me
I'm outta control, I wanna rush headlong into this ecstasy!

If I could only reach you
If I could make you smile
If I could only reach you
That would really be a breakthrough
If I could only reach you
If I could make you smile
If I could only reach you
That would really be a breakthrough...

- Queen, "Breakthru"

Dreams and drinks

Dreams and drinks

The planned drinkout on February 9 isn't pushing through, sadly. Aileen has to be in Singapore on that date for work, and it was all a little sudden. The plan was to have the drinkout at her place.

So you can imagine my surprise when she invited me to go out for a drink last night. She wanted to relax with a weng-weng. Jajah and Denz were supposed to come along but we ended up just the two of us at 19 East. There we were holding hands (in a "frigid" way, mind you---Aileen's words), talking about life, interviewing each other about our lives and basically laughing our guts out.

Thanks, mare. Here's to Puerto Galera in March...and I hope it pushes through.

===

I had a wonderful dream about you Thursday night.

I had decided to forego asking people about you and just directly ask you out on a fairly casual date. You said yes and we basically had a wonderful time. You were finally opening up to me, finally comfortable with how I am, as I listened to everything you had to say. You were smiling all the time, that same cute way you always do, but the fact that it was because you were with me made them all the more special.

The only disappointment I felt was that it was just a dream and I had to wake up from it. But now I feel like making that dream a reality. It'll take longer than I thought, but it'll come.