blue room

My sister is throwing me out of the house. Can you believe that? She actually wanted me to go out today, go to the mall or something (wherever I want daw basta out of our room). Why? Because she said she’s going to concentrate on studying her lessons for tomorrow’s prefinal exams, and apparently she can’t concentrate when I’m around. OK, so why the sudden determination to study? I’m guessing she got very low midterm grades (she didn’t show me her grades for the first time). That’s what she gets for being late all the time (despite my nagging her to get up and hurry) and for reading manga instead of lessons. She is trying to get an average of 4.5 (with no grade less than 4.0 in any one course) for this semester coz I gave her a quite nice incentive. Our agreement is that, if she gets an academic scholarship for next sem (based on her grades for this sem), I’m going to allow her to stay with me here in Cebu for the summer (she doesn’t want to go home coz she gets bored there) plus I’m going to pay for Japanese language lessons she really want to take (I think due to her being an anime and manga fan). So that’s why she’s getting serious with school work. As the one financing her tuition fees, of course I want her to get the scholarship (big savings for me) but at the same time I’m partly (teeny weeny itsy bitsy microscopic only) hoping she wouldn’t so I wouldn’t have to keep my promise to her for this summer (coz summer means famine for us faculty with so few students and so few summer load). Hahay! I guess I’m gonna have to start saving now, huh?!

(This is my way of saying to a very dear friend that everything will be alright but it would be too cliché-ish to say it directly.)

Isn’t it a wonder how we always come alive out of our darkest, most painful, most desperate and seemingly hopeless circumstances? Sometimes it may seem that we are in the middle of a very dark tunnel and there seem to be no way out, that the pain will never go away, that we will be living a desperate life forever. But before we know it, we are ok, we have gotten better and back on track, we are living again.

We are aware that living in this world, no matter how much we love it, also means having to encounter adversities, feel pain, frustration, despair yet we never seem to expect that these will happen to us. We aren’t always prepared to deal with these negativities. We are always ready to give advice to other people who are feeling down yet when we feel down ourselves, we tend to get lost in the feelings of hurt, frustration, despair that we do not know what to do to get them out of our system. Many people then tend to dwell on them and wallow for a while. Others live on autopilot, doing anything they can do and keeping themselves busy with stuffs other than thinking about and feeling the pain. Whichever route we take, we seem to always end up back in our own road, the one we have been travelling in before we got sidetracked by negativity, the one where everything is in its own place. I guess life really does find a way to live, all it takes is time.

Give thanks to the LORD because he is good, because his mercy endures forever.
- Psalms 107:1

Today is a special day of Thanksgiving to the Lord for all His love to me the whole year through. Though I don’t deserve it because of all my shortcomings in performing my duties and my stubbornness, He never ceased to bless me. I can never pay Him for all His goodness to me, my family, and everyone I care about. All I can do is thank Him for all His blessings.

This year, I thank the Lord for giving me my masters degree, for keeping my family intact, supportive and loving, for giving me friends who care for me dearly, for keeping me strong physically, mentally and spiritually, for making me wiser, for getting me through all the challenges, for still allowing me to perform my duties to Him, for this life He continues to lend me, and many many more!

Thank you, my God!

Seconds ago, I received a “FREE HOROSCOPE” from my cellular service provider which says, “There will be an improvement in your lovelife this coming holidays. Enjoy this great gift.”
LOL. Just how can something non-existent improve?

Why do many people refer to Friendster as “FS”? Lately I’ve been noticing this and it’s bothering me! I mean, really, how come? What does FS mean? I thought it’s “Friendster Site” but something tells me it’s not. It must be “Friendster S-something” (whatever!), otherwise, what would it be? I would understand if they refer to it as “FP” for “Friendster Profile” because you know, isn’t Friendster just a network of personal profiles? But why FS? It really buggles me.

I sure hope it’s not as dumb as “Friend-Ster”!

Last Sunday, November 30, I celebrated my 25th birthday. I know, I’m getting old but I feel more blessed as my years accumulate. And so on that day, I gave all my thanks to Him. I thanked God for blessing me with a very supportive and loving family, great friends, a good job, a heart full of love and hope without regrets and happily performing duties to Him and serving Him, for challenges that make me strong, for keeping my faith, for my life’s twists and turns that I never dreamed would ever happen….for EVERYTHING!

After church, my choir buddies and I had a hearty breakfast of barbecue and tinolang fish and shared stories and planned for our outing later in the day. It was also Nhery’s (seniors choir leader and close friend) birthday the day before so it’s just time for us to celebrate. Besides, there aren’t many chances for us to bond coz we’re all busy with work after choir practices and duties.

So at noon we met at Gaisano Metro before going off to Lapulapu City for our beach outing. The agreement was that we bring friends we want to bring as well as cash. I invited great friend Vicky, and they invited their friends. We didn’t hassle ourselves with preparing and bringing food. We bought all the food and stuffs we need on the way to Ocean Pearl, where we rented a room instead of a cottage so that we don’t need to watch our things in case we all want to soak in the sea, we could just lock the room. I had a lot of fun; everyone had a lot of fun bonding, chicka-ing, eating, singing the videoke, eating again…it was great! We went home at 9pm. By then all my energy was spent, I was dozing off at the jeepney (we had to take 3 rides going home), glad I still made it home. Though tired, I went to sleep with a happy heart and thanked God for the great day.

Please…please…please…don’t say “Thanks for the add” because it gets on my nerves. I may not be an English major or anywhere near English expert but I’m pretty sure that the article “the” is followed by a noun. I don’t think “add” is a noun. It just doesn’t sound right. Why don’t you just say “Thanks for adding me on your friends list” or “Thanks for accepting my request”? I know those are longer but at least you aren’t being a ‘tard.

One more thing: Text speak on the Web is downright retarded to me. Text speak is for texting, not for posting comments and testimonials or private messaging or posting shoutouts or replying to forums. There is more than enough allowable number of characters for you to say what you want in there. You, most likely, won’t get the message across clearly AND you are showing everyone in the cyber world that you are not smart enough to spell words right. OR maybe you really can’t spell and you are hiding it by text speaking. Well, do not fear because most web applications come with spell checkers. But if they don’t, there are online dictionaries available.

So, please…?

Today is a beautiful day. After performing my church duties, I went home and did nothing but relax, listen to music, eat, and read. I didn’t even do the laundry because I don’t know what has gotten into me last Friday that I decided to do the my 2 weeks worth of laundry in the middle of the night. So now I’m laundry-free…yey! I didn’t even text, my phone didn’t even receive messages (not that I don’t want receive messages from my friends) because I told everyone that I have no load (although I still have like 5-peso balance but that’s for emergency). I believe I really deserve this day…after weeks of work and yesterday I started with school as a student again and doing my all duties in church and everything, I do need some days like these to relax. Right?

I attended a seminar-workshop on Natural Language Processing (NLP) yesterday. The following were my thoughts while listening to the speakers:

• Speakers are people from SIL International. White men. Very tall. One has nice blue eyes (but old). They are very good at what they do.
• Introduced to SFM (Standard Format Markup), CC (Consistent Changes) Program, a stream editor, Lexique Pro
• I’m very sleepy, so so sleepy, my eyes are dropping.
• I’m having a nosebleed, especially the linguistics part.
• Long word: antidisestablishmentarianism
• New to my ear: computational linguists vs. ordinary linguists
• NLP is quite interesting but I think it’s kinda tedious.
• I know I should be interested in this, after all I have taught Automata Theory andFormal Languages and I know it’s not the first time. Unfortunately, I really don’t see myself getting into NLP research anytime soon.
• This is like exploring other possible research topics.
• CARLA - Computer-Assisted Related Language Adaptation
• I think that if a computer scientist wants to concentrate on Natural Language Processing, it would really help to study linguistics too, except maybe if he is a native speaker of the language he is concentrating.

That constituted half of my day yesterday. The other half was mainly battling against a very bad sinusitis attack while giving lectures.

As you might know, I’m a college instructor. My professional life is actually a 5-month semestral cycle, just like the academic life of a student. It starts when classes start and ends when classes end. In every semestral beginnings comes excitement and anticipation (even when the subjects you are gonna teach are not what you dream of) brought about by the commencement of a new professional life: new faces, new courses to teach, new preparations, new experiences, new blooppers. And every semester (much like every New Year), I make resolutions. I always look back the previous semester and see what has gone wrong (believe me, something always goes wrong like not being able to submit grades on time or being habitually late) and ponder on how to prevent things from going wrong again and promise to make things better for the coming semester and swear to myself to keep them. But, well, like New Year’s resolutions, new sem resolutions are never kept either. I do try so hard to though (that has to count for something, right?).

So this time, I thought of posting my resolutions for this semester (which has just begun) so that there is evidence that I made some and that you, dear non-existent readers, can remind me of them. Ok, here it goes:

* I will submit grades on time.
* I will come to class on time all the time.
* I will check papers immediately so that I can return them to my students immediately.
* I will be more organized with my portfolio, and just be organized with everything.

I guess that would be all for now. I don’t want to make so many of them coz that would be so many unkept promises. I know those are what a “good” teacher is supposed to do. Oh well, we all have our shortcomings, right? Hehe…justification?!