Term 1.
seven, six, six, six, four, six, six.
A good start.
Hope I’ll do better next time.
All choices become wrong in the end because, as time passes, all the things you lose become the best.
Twenty-day holiday.
My laziness somehow overwhelmed me last night, which eventually led me to watching another episode of “I’m Sorry, I Love You” (Thanks a lot, Carmen. ^^)
Watching it just made me realize how much I have been getting so childish these days. Amanda was happily scolding me on the bus today, saying that I’ve become so childish. But I can’t help it. On one moment, I get emotional, then on another I get so hyperactive, to the point that it’s not fun to watch me making a fool of myself anymore. Guess it isn’t childish. Guess it’s just sheer weirdness.
*****
I can’t believe it. Twelve days more and I’m going back to the Philippines. This is absurd. Half of me wants to go back, and of course the other half wants to stay. I can’t just possibly split myself into two. That would entirely wipe my existence out of this world.
After two years, I have learned to completely annihilate this irritating and annoying habit of mine – homesickness. I do miss my parents and my siblings, I miss them a lot, but this time I have learned to resist myself from those crybaby nights of mine way back in my secondary school days. Truly, the combined efforts of the immense workload in school and warm and wonderful company of friends has enormously contributed to my “moving on”.
And thank you for making my heart sing each and every day. You know who you are.
I actually drafted some of the things that I’m going to do during the course of my 20-day holiday in March.
1.) Eat, eat, eat, and eat.
2.) Eat more.
3.) Never stop eating.
4.) Sleep early (11pm)
5.) Sleep more (wake up at 12 noon)
6.) Watch cable TV
7.) minimize internet usage (Rowland appears to be offline).
8.) go to my great granny’s house to pick some star apples for Sarah.
9.) go to my great granny’s house to breathe some fresh farm air. ahhhh… although we sometimes can’t avoid getting a whiff of carabao shit. Never mind. It’s organic in its entirety. It’s safer than inhaling smoke from belching cars.
10.) do homework. Duh.
11.) do more homework. Duh.
12.) playstation 2!!
13.) go to church.
14.) meet old friends.
15.) shopping (if possible)
16.) travel far, far away from my city.
17.) learn a bit of driving.
18.) do tutorial for my lazy siblings.
19.) takuyaki festival at KCC.
20.) Get buff. hahaha
Close proximity.
It means so much to me.
To gaze at your eyes, even for a short while.
To feel you’re there even though we’re parted by the bitter reality of life; that I am here, and you are there, and I can’t be where you are.
It seems too early to feel this way.
But
My heart pounds, my mind blurs, my palms sweat, my knees shiver, my blood flow stops just to treasure my every moment that you are around.
I can’t believe you made me feel this way.
You practically did nothing anyway.
******
We have but a moment to fall in love, one moment that is ours, then it is gone. Taken on a breeze delicate and fragile, never to return. If it happens, it happens then, in that one moment, in that breathtaking second as eyes meet, speaking volumes. No words needed. And we know? we only have one chance, one moment to say I Love You. Take that moment. Embrace it. Make it yours.
As if it’s so easy.
Summary.
I can now officially call this day as a BORING day.
Yes, it bores me deep inside. Today is like a cork borer trying to screw itself deep down inside my defunct life. What an irony. Defunct life. Sounds like a breathing corpse blogger. Well, in actuality, the word blogger itself wholly identifies the prospect of a breathing corpse. Talk about people who have nothing else to do but blabber in cyberspace. There’s so much more out there in the real world, people.
Anyway, I would like to summarize what I did today because it’s so easy to do so. When you practically had done nothing in a day a 150-word O Level English summary format would provide more than enough space for you to write phrases such as Once Upon A Time or And They Lived Happily Ever After. However, I have learned to move on with my life (thank goodness), and so I am never going to do another similar summary shit ever again.
I would like to give a beautiful recount in the form of photos and captions.
Off I went to shower. Almost had third-degree burns as I accidentally turned the heater to maximum.
and picked my shoe (Adidas, upper left) from the skyscraper shoe rack.
Nalaka, John and I went to Church. We managed to go out by successfully unlocking the gate shown in the photo.
Went back after church, and gazed in front of the window for a few minutes, contemplating on whether I should go for a dip into the pool.
John went for a dip.
I didn’t.
Lazy dude I am. Unfolded bedsheets. Scattered books.
But a concerned environmentalist. Used electric fan instead of air-conditioner.
A late lunch. Sunday Times paper and SJII PE shorts not included in the meal.
Number of words: 22,465.69 (pictures are worth more than a thousand words).
Rejection.
We were ultimately jobless today that we spent most of our forsaken afternoon walking along Orchard Road while talking about usual stuff about life – school, money, homework, love, and school, money, homework, and love. We were so depressed that we actually enjoyed our time walking and talking and going in to Paragon pretending that we were out shopping for a new pair of Calvin Klein undies and a pair of white Triumph brassieres for Amanda.
This very memorable day began when I woke up at ten in the morning, to the reverberating sound of some Afghan music playing in Niko’s laptop; he was watching The Kite Runner. Although I loved and cried over the book twice, I was totally uninterested to watch the movie. Off I went to turn on my laptop instead, in the hopes of her being online. She was not. Good morning, Rowland.
We then went to 11A to take money from Auntie Jo so that I can buy my plane ticket. I’m going back in March, by the way. She gave me a plain $1000-bill, a large piece of paper which if I had lost, would have cost my entire life. Yes, my entire life. Well, I managed to buy my ticket today, and to my extreme delight (duh), I’m traveling by the Singapore-Cebu-Davao route. Yeah. At least I’m going back.
We went to Sixth Avenue, around the Bukit Timah Area, to grab a lunch at some Chinese stall there. To my utter dismay, the stall was not ready to serve any food until four in the afternoon, so I had to bid bon apres-midi to that effing stall and effing walk away with an effing empty stomach with Nalaka. We effing decided to eat at Orchard instead. KFC is truly an effing heavy and fattening meal.
And we got rejected six times today.
In chronological order: Joey, Juns, Jixseylo, Ryan, Tanya, Danusha.
But it was a very fun day, I must say. I got to reflect about a lot of things in life with my good HOT buddy.
*****************
If there is something you must do and you cannot do it, you cannot do anything else. ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic’s Notebook, 1960
Homework factory.
I am a homework factory.
“Okay, I want all of you to hand in this work by Wednesday,” the teacher said.
Like any other factory, I have deadly deadlines to catch.
“I want you to to make fourteen graphs showing the shift of a demand curve.”
Like any other factory, I have a lot of demands from my customers.
“I want you to specify the uncertainties for all the values you have obtained.”
Like any other factory, I have a lot of uncertain, customized orders to suit the needs of my customers.
“I want you to do it again.”
And like any other imperfect factory, I sometimes encounter faulty products and dissatisfied customers.
But unlike any other factory, I don’t make profits out of making homework.
For the past two months I can barely estimate the number of sleepless days and nights that I have spent doing homework. The workload in the IB is overwhelming – in the sense that it does not give me a sufficient amount of time to relax and unwind in a faraway, secluded beach during the weekends, or go clubbing late saturday night in Zouk (ha ha kidding, I don’t go clubbing, I’m still 17) – although surprisingly, most of my homeworks are manageable and doable, and fairly easy.
Okay, it’s quite ironical to say that “I can barely estimate the number of sleepless days and nights that I have spent doing homework“, and at the same time announce that “most of my homeworks are manageable and doable, and fairly easy.” Well, I have recently noticed (take note, recently) that Windows Live Messenger has become an ominous and omnipotent piece of distraction in my academic life. It is the best thing my laptop has in store for me, but it’s the worst denouement in my every day life; I begin my night pondering about my homework, but as the moon makes its way across the evening sky, I inevitably find myself immersed under a stream of endless online conversations in msn. Then I go sleepy:
RowLand says:
Hey, im sleepy… 
Rowland says:
I gtg sleep
Danusha says:
Okie rowly
JOOOEEEY! says:
good night!!
juns says:
nightt
Sleeping Forever says:
:]
Buddhika Warnakula says:
Okies
weijie! says:
good night
mary says:
goodnight rowland!
ChRiStOpHeR says:
Tanya says:
Banana!!
RowLand says:
good night!!
And poof, there goes my homework, collecting dust beside the dustbin (not in the dustbin). There’s just too many friends online every single day, and it seems like they’re magnets attracting me to chat with them until all our eyes and back and fingers get exhausted.
But I still love my friends. I love you all!!!
*******
And don’t get me wrong: It’s unbelievably fun to do homework. I don’t know why, yeah it’s weird. But it’s fun.
Disillusioned.
I’ve got an unprecedented mood swing tonight.
I’m totally pissed off.
How could I fail to see that I’m actually making a fool out of myself.
****
Illusions commend themselves to us because they save us pain and allow us to enjoy pleasure instead. We must therefore accept it without complaint when they sometimes collide with a bit of reality against which they are dashed to pieces. ~Sigmund Freud
Post-statistics homework.
I have never been this happy since I came to Singapore two years ago. Now I have found what I have been looking for – a co-ed school (finally, after two years), a highly challenging yet at the same time fun education system (of course that would be the IB, duh), and a warm and comfortable place that I can now comfortably call my home (86A Lor N Telok Kurau Road). Although I am away (again) from my parents and siblings, I never fail to remember them each and every day of my life; their absence has made my heart grow fonder, and here I am trying to alleviate myself from another possible homesickness pandemic by eating lots and lots of food. You don’t know how much eating makes me happy (but I never get fat!).
Then, I have moved on from a bitter past experience of love.
Now, I can say that life has never been better, with a company of food and friends around, rather than with just the TV one intimate acquaintance. Life is much more fulfilling and fun with friends, talking and laughing and making a fool out of almost anything. It’s something indefeasible. Having a girlfriend doesn’t seem to be just the right thing yet. Single-blessedness is currently the best civil status to have in school.
And it’s really good to know that there’s a 24-hour wi-fi here.
Or else, I wouldn’t be able to do all my research and finish all my projects on time.
And life becomes so fulfilling when there is someone to like and to love.
********
God is good, all the time.
Eye to eye.
Just a quick glance, and you see her looking back.
Just a quick connection.
It makes a big difference you know.
The heart immediately jumps for joy.
Lub dub, lud dub.
The lips instantaneously express a wide and genuine smile.
Like they’re gracefully pulled to the limit at opposite ends.
To know that for that single moment of the day,
you know she looked at you,
and you looked at her.
Just that one glance.
Just for that single moment.
Although you won’t ever know what that really meant.
*************
Life has taught us that love does not consist in gazing at each other but in looking outward together in the same direction. ~Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Wind, Sand and Stars, 1939, translated from French by Lewis Galantière
Procrastination.
Someday is not a day of the week.
There is too much food produced in the world – millions of tonnes of food worth billions of dollars are wasted by the human species. But there are still people suffering from starvation and malnutrition because of poor food distribution, such as the case in Africa where a multitude of people die everyday because they have nothing to eat, and in the Philippines where one out of every three children suffer from malnutrition.
Yes, and you may be wondering what the hell is the connection between time and food. Well, I don’t know myself, it’s just that there is too much time in the world to do a lot of things, but poor time management and the evil art of procrastination in so prevalent in the society that work seems to never end and seems to never let us get ourselves out of the idea of “I do my work at the same time each day – the last minute.”
Teachers have been hearing about complaints from the students that there is an excessive flow of homework and projects given to the teachers, but I might have to disagree with the rest of my batchmates and support Dr. Hjorth’s viewpoint that there is a problem with time management. Yes, I know I might sound like an antagonist now, but the fact that I can clearly visualize myself inside my head, doing my tasks and finishing them on time if and only if I can manage my daily schedule of activities, makes me think about this, of breaking off from my peers’ consensus of the situation.
The dirtiest world in the world.
I changed the title though.
Politics, it seems to me, for years, or all too long, has been concerned with right or left instead of right or wrong. ~Richard Armour
Under democracy one party always devotes its chief energies to trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule – and both commonly succeed, and are right. ~H.L. Mencken, 1956
When I was a boy I was told that anybody could become President; I’m beginning to believe it. ~Clarence Darrow
Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it whether it exists or not, diagnosing it incorrectly, and applying the wrong remedy. ~Ernest Benn
Politicians are people who, when they see light at the end of the tunnel, go out and buy some more tunnel. ~John Quinton
We hang the petty thieves and appoint the great ones to public office. ~Aesop
Politics are almost as exciting as war, and quite as dangerous. In war you can only be killed once, but in politics many times. ~Winston Churchill
Love.
In the words of a Persian sage:
Love is a disease no one wants to get rid of. Those who catch it never try to get better, and those who suffer do not wish to be cured.
February 14.
Have you ever felt so happy in your life?
I just did.
You know, when you smile with that genuine smile. When you are not afraid to express yourself, your feelings, ideas and emotions. When you know that there is someone who inspires you. And when there are friends who care for you as much as you care for them.
When you know that your life is doing something productive. When you know that you have a purpose to fulfill. When you know that you are an inspiration and a hope to somebody else. When you know that God is always beside you to help you in life.
I couldn’t ask for more. No money and no other earthly possessions can replace love, friendship, and God’s grace and mercy. My heart has its mind of its own. And it’s telling me how grateful it is for every single moment that it beats for the love for God, family and friends.
I love you, you, and you, everyone. And I love the movie. Not because it makes me realize that Juno is way better, but because I wasn’t watching alone.
Happy Valentines Day.
**********
You make me smile.
Honeymoon.
It just came to me the realization of the kind of pathway that I took. More than a month has passed, and still I have not come to the jeez-what-the-hell-is-going-on point of my life. Well that is until today, when a teacher announced in the assembly this morning that “Honeymoon is over,” and “It’s time to get down to work.” I was aghast and surprised with what I heard, and without any conscious rumination I burst out a loud and short sinister laugh.
Wasn’t I working all this time?
Honeymoon. By the IB definition honeymoon is the process of getting that ‘little’ taste of the forthcoming cavalcade of homeworks and projects that the programme has to offer to students. Talk about executing acts of generosity to other people. I thought I was already on the verge of divorcing with the IB. I just realized today that I was still honeymooning with it.
But my studious alter ego says, I’m excited for the big challenge ahead.
Numb.
Nothing beats a monotonous and spiritless holiday.
Now, imagine that you are all alone. No one else to share the gluttonous moments. No one else to watch movies with on the internet. No one to swim with you. No one to play NBA Live with you.
No one. No one.
It’s quite a boring holiday, isn’t it?
Not to mention that I got ZERO ang bao.
*ehem*
The real reason why I’m really looking forward to going back to school is because, finally, after this Chinese New Year holiday, I will get to do something ‘productive’. Staying at home having nothing to do is actually a humane form of incarceration. You get to lock yourself up in a conducive and well-ventilated jail cell, away from the busy urban life and stress. It’s fun at first, but gradually it gets draggy and repetitious and, yeah, draggy and repetitious.
*********
I’m going to see you again.
I am glad.
I am glad
At least in my life
I’ve found someone
That may not be here forever
To see me through
But I found my strength in you
‘Cause in my mind
You will stay here always,
You and I.
Never-ending.
Okay, I totally don’t have a clue about what’s currently happening in the dirtiest, ’suckiest’, most villainous, most degrading, and most sickening political world I have ever encountered in my life.
There is this US$329-million ZTE-national broadband network deal that the government has just scrapped, and this deal has led to a pandemonium in the Philippine Senate and Congress for the past few months.
The Makati Business Club announced that this scandal spells the beginning of the end of the Arroyo Administration. Duh.
Jose De Venecia was ousted from hist House Speaker post.
Arroyo’s name, as well as his husband’s, has been dragged (I’m not surprised) into this deal.
There is this new witness working inside the government named Rodolfo Lozada who’s been making anti-Arroyo and anti-administration noises in the Congress and now he left for Hong Kong because he was forced to leave the Philippines.
Bullshit.
Can’t politicans stop making such a fuss about each other? Blatantly making and/or revealing controversies about their political opponents? They should know that showbiz and politics can never be homogeneous. Can’t they leave their political ambitions behind and focus all their efforts in alleviating their citizens from poverty? Can’t they live in peace without their repugnant faces and names posted in every street and road and highway and overpass and lamp post and electrical post they build? Can’t they just humble themselves down, stops their egos from ejaculating around congress and senate halls, cooperate with each other and forget about taking money from the nation’s pool of.. wealth?
Can’t they be good citizens?
Why do politicians need to be so bad?
Why does this have to be a never-ending cycle of hardships and sufferings for the Filipinos?
******
I’m wondering if like is the same as love.
Mister Koch.
I imagined him as a fine young Caucasian man with a humongous forehead, a humongous mustache and an even more humongous beard.
I was right. Helge Von Koch looked exactly like the man I imagined. My ventromedial kept on flickering within the contours of my white and grey matter, producing an incessant flow of luminous neon lights which danced inside my head. This is going to be an interesting project, I told myself.
But this time, I was wrong. I struggled like a baby who wanted to walk so badly on two feet. Von Koch practically ruined my devotion for mathematics. He made my life so complicated. He made me hate the subject. Last night I was wondering whether or not I could finish the project on time. Surprisingly, I did.
And today was the official day of parting, as I bade goodbye to Mr. Koch in a school ritual called “homework submission”. It involves pieces of papers as the ultimate sacrifice offered by the student to the teacher. Upon handing the sacrifice to my teacher then I realized the many many things I have learnt in the project. But that does not mean that I’m ready to forgive Mr. Koch.
******
I still don’t know why I told you
this feeling i have inside my heart
Constantly.
I knew it was there
Though I tried to hide it
The feeling just kept on shining through
Haven’t known you that long
So I try to deny it
But the feeling was much too
Much too strong
Could this be love
Deep down inside
Tearing me apart
I feel it in my heart
Constantly, you’re on my mind
Thinking about you all the time
I can’t sleep no matter what I do
I just keep on thinking ‘bout you
Why do I feel this way
When I know you have someone
That you’re seeing each and everyday
Should I play this game
Of just being that’s not where I want it to end
How could this be wrong
When it feels so strong
Tearing me apart
I feel it in my heart
No I don’t want to start
No trouble
Between you and I and you lover
But I must tell you what I’m going through
Everytime you walk by
I see love in your eyes
rowlandanthony
Recently turned 19, I am an International Baccalaureate slave, a Roman Catholic, now of legal age to vote, to drink alcohol, to drive, to marry, to smoke, and to f*** around. I am manufactured in the Philippines but currently utilized in Singapore. I am the thick-skinned, ingrate bastard who dumped the Government in exchange for a $100,000 two-year private scholarship. Most people in the Philippines call me Row, as a result of a passed down genetic trait that triggers laziness. Actually, my nickname is Anju, which I am really really not so fond of. But I am fortunate enough not to suffer from the ubiquitous Filipino frenzy of naming nicknames with letter 'h's sandwiched between other letters, e.g. Jhong, Jhing, Bhong, or Bhing, and from the usual repetition of the same syllables - usually created by the whole extended family giggling in delight as one utters his or her baby cry while shitting unconsciously and secretively on the lampin, inside the duyan - resulting in stuttering names like Ton-ton, Ping-Ping, Bam-bam, Ging-ging and Don-don.
I am currently having the time of my life.
