where to start...

my first new year was spent chatting and posting blank entries in order to synchronize my watch with the tabulas clock for my 12:00 entry. so glad i got that out in the nick of time. even though i am far from the motherland, i still dabbled in the festive spirit of the new year over there. my chatmates gave me a not-so-vivid picture of the new year festivities over there. i hear the fireworks were better this year. and the ayala party was supposed to be good too.

the proper new year was in another house, another get-together with relatives and close filipino families. this time, i didn't spend the better part of the party burying my nose in past reader's digest issues, as i did during the christmas party. the food was better this time, with the lechon and all. the pool table was also fun to hang around, watch, and to have a couple of games on. the fireworks were fun, except that my mom freaked out when my tito tried to get me to light some, which actually didn't go off anyway. and then i see 5-year olds lighting baby rockets without a care in the world.

and what time i didn't spend eating, or watching or playing billiard games, or admiring the fireworks and warding off the smoke was spent ogling a certain vision of perfection, again the child of a filipino family who i think i remember from last summer, all around the house. we know the routine; shifty and watchful eyes all over, the staredown, those beautiful eyes catching mine, the clumsy-trying-hard-to-be-charming smile, the shy glance away. and at the end of the night, i couldn't even bring myself to give a happy new year.

which now brings me to my resolutions. i don't think i've ever made any new year's resolutions ever. or at least made any that i took too seriously, or seriously at all, or even paid attention to at all. just hope that this year can be a change from all that. i only know i've got enough drive and inspiration for this. first is to try to be more sociable, specially in party-type gatherings such as these. being on this side of the world weeks at a time prevents me from making real connections with the people over here. but that's no reason to act all loner-like all the time. i know them, they know me (i guess), so why the silence? i promise to make a move. maybe next time.

the second resolution is simply to be responsible and study harder. yes, college is the real deal, intarmed is a difficult course, it's my future, yada yada yada. but i never got the real push from reality to start giving more, if not my all, to my studies. so i guess i better give myself that friendly shove towards knowledge and medicine.

but hey, it's only been a day. the chem lab report still hangs eerily over my head, but i'm sure an 8-hour dose of queer eye for the straight guy new year's marathon will take the gloom all out.

i'll get to it. sometime.

it's nice to be home.

who'd ever thought i'd miss the hot humid weather, the trafficjammed highways, the glaring ad posters, the local tv, the general pinoy-ness of it all. but seriously, it feels good. it's great to be back in my environment. sure, the us is cleaner, safer, more advanced, more progressive, but nothing compares to that home sweet home feeling i get when i come back home. this is my world.

and speaking of my world... my world right now consists of the night made bright by my jetlag, where time stands still while i make an effort towards my long-ignored acads. i submerge myself in sugar-sweetened hot tea, which i have sorely missed, in an attempt to "increase mental alertness" and to "calm my mind naturally." yes, the pattern holds true, cramming is in my blood. and still, with *counts on clock face* 9 hours left before my return to upm, i still persist, pressing time even more. if you were here and asking me what i had already completed for later, i'd give a toothy smile and shrug it off. 9 hours is more than enough (i hope) to finish assignments for math and soc sci, study for zoology lecture and lab, and get ahead with my chem lab report.

and yet here i am at tabulas.

oh what a crazy night i've had so far.

i went home today to finish my chem lab report, which i was still unable to complete during my last 2 nights of cramming. i got home around 4:30, and i told myself to finish quickly as i would try to return to manila by 8 pm, to try and get some group study action for the chem long exam tomorrow. i worked on it up until 6:30, but still not completing the report (maybe because of tabulas and some other sites). around this time, i felt a wave of drowsiness pass through my body, and felt that i needed to rest up a bit. i realized by this time that it would be futile to return to manila now, so i made myself comfortable and prepared for a long night ahead.

7 pm, yu-gi-oh, found myself in my bedroom hardly paying attention to the card battle taking place because i could barely hold my head up. i vaguely recall waking up around 8, where our maid knocked on the door telling me to eat dinner first before sleeping. i shrugged her off, feeling too lethargic to even get up. the next thing i remember is just waking up in the darkness, the luminescent face of my watch reading 1:20 am. the reality sets in shortly after, with an unfinished lab report and a long exam which sorely needs reviewing for, so i jump out of bed and head downstairs to begin my late night vigil.

clad only in the shirt i wore from up and my boxer briefs, i slave away an hour and a half on my report, finally finishing it this time. since i was too stubborn to take dinner when i was told to, i resort to a healthy bowl of honey bunches of oats (my favorite cereal, brought tons of boxes home from the states). and now, a little tabulas break before i take on the hefty, near-impossible challenge of studying for chem. already my seemingly harmless notebook and module intimidatingly glare back at me. only a couple hours left to go. i'm sure a student like me will have no problem handling this *rolls eyes*.

damned be chem, torture made to keep children up at ungodly hours such as these.

i had a serious entry planned out.

but the tabulas overhaul just caught me off guard. i open my site and what do i get? a great big page of blankness. thank goodness for the import template option, but i still had to do a little tweaking to get it back just about right. and the contentroll option is gone. or is it? anyone know how to put it back?

at least i'm doing this at the college of med computer lab, where the free dsl is making it easier to change and reload my page every other second. and i see that other people have been caught off guard too. and at the very least, all this has shown me something important.

i want a new template.

college sure knows how to welcome back a guy.

not only did the vacation-classes transition start with my sleeping schedule still under the influence of opposing time zones, but it was also complemented by the assault of several (and brutal, i might add) long exams arriving one after the other. zoo lab, chemistry, zoology, geology, a relentless attack with the next one hardly giving enough breathing room after the last.

i've been scraping the bottom of the bowl for spare bits of time, time to use the internet at the comp lab and for a mall run or two. at least everyone else is just as pressured as i am. we even had an overnight study group at the condo thursday night. 4 boys, 3 girls, 3 single beds mashed together, zoological documents and terms flying around all night.

luckily, the worst is over for now (a chem lab practical exam next saturday, but it's the farthest from my mind right now). i've been toying with the idea of changing my template since the tabulas overhaul, but i still lack some basic knowledge on the new templating system, and even more basic web design techniques.

i spent this afternoon browsing for images and things to use, and i found a great anime-ish sketch i found. balanced it out into a bluish tint, made it into a wallpaper, now i just have to figure out the proper way to use tables or frames. i think someone passed by when i was testing it on my site. i know it was messy, but how did it look?

tonight was all about going out with my dad to watch a play by repertory philippines in greenbelt. oh romeo. a farce which plays out the lives of romeo and juliet, beginning with an alternate ending for the original play. they both live, and after 30 years of marriage, the verse and romance come off and are replaced by marital strife and discontent. it even had an appearance by shakespere's ghost himself. was quite funny, sometimes a bit adult-themed, but effectively displayed the life of the married couple, ups, downs, all-arounds.

i'm trying to come up with a more relevant entry than this, but less on that later.

in things, in likes, in loves, in life, the only thing constant is change.

i had my hair cut last weekend. the usual predicament of how to get my hair trimmed arose, but this time i think i got through it with grace and poise. meaning i had it cut it shorter than usual. i avoided short haircuts ever since the lifting of the 2x3 requisite for 4th year cat, and i've let my hair grow rampant and out of control most often than not. from what i see right now, a shorter style seems to fit me better than the long and unruly thing i had going before. and it fits better with my new must-carry accessory: caps. contrary to my belief (and according to a few random compliments), they do fit me.

since last tuesday, there's been a silent craze going on in the imed class, of which i'm a part of. it all started with crochet thread for a zoology lab activity, and now lives as a friendship bracelet-anklet-anything braiding activity. i only learned it first from my partner, and have been doing it nonstop for 4 days. i think i find that it helps me relax and trains my concentration, aside from being an outlet for my obsessive-compulsiveness. i even bought a ball of fading blue thread for personal purposes. and now, so many others have requested for similar crafted items. i'm thinking, is there a business hidden under all this?

and maybe the biggest change of all... a new monitor! no, it's not a flat-screen lcd fancy-type one, just a plain and simple 17-incher. but it's light years ahead of my old monitor, which has seen probably 8 years of wear and tear. the old one constantly blurred up and kept getting worse, up to the point when i convinced my dad to look at newer models. and lo and behold, coming home from upm this evening, should a sleek black monitor look back at me from the computer table. i hope i can fix my new layout soon.

and yet, what doesn't change? my lack of depth in entry writing. i've been itching to get a well-written essay-type creation up for a while, but either lack of inspiration or hectic acad schedule (which by the way, didn't let up this week as i had said previously) has stopped me from doing so. by the rate things are going, a breather period won't come until the summer break, but i hope it doesn't take me till then to make my desired entry.

i hope this brings about a change in my entries soon, a change for the better.

sadly, the puppy is gone.

and what's taken its place is the result of 2 night's worth of browsing, view source code-ing, frontpaging, refreshing, and tweaking. the most rudimentary of templates, but hopefully the first successful step towards a template of my own.

it all started with the tabulas overhaul, where my template got mutilated, but was eventually fixed at the end. it was then that i realized that i wanted, that i needed, a new template that would be much cleaner, nicer, and overall better than what i had before. since then i started searching for images or whatnot to use as a theme for the new template. found it, made it blue, and it's awaiting further editing before it's launched as well.

at the same time, i started to pay more attention to the templating system at tabulas, and overall html coding. i began to understand the construction of tables and the use of the style sheet (but i'm no master, no expert, even no adept by any means). tr and div and other tags suddenly started to make sense. experimentation on dreamweaver and frontpage also backed up my slow self-learning.

last night, armed with a new 17-inch monitor and the most basic of web design skills, i initiated the construction of my new template from the ground up. started from the proverbial scratch. well, not exactly, i copy-pasted the head contents, the entry html and the contents of my sidebar, but the point's there. tonight was about learning the value of the overflow command, of which i've been searching for a long time for. hundreds of width tweaks and page reloads also happened, since picky html just won't do exactly as i say so.

but after all the overdramatized pain and suffering, this is what i have to offer. clearly nothing award-winning, nothing fancy, nothing even finished yet, but something to be proud of and excited about. i hardly did anything myself, but what i did do i am glad to know i did by myself. and i just hope that with time comes progression and eventually, evolution. evolution of both the site and my knowledge.

watch out for the next update.

here's a little treat.

nat sci 2. geology. departmental exam. hard as hell. the prof gives a bonus: to make a 4-line poem with anything relating to geology. bask in my literary genius.

rumblings of an angry earth,
shifting, shaking, sliding.
not only breaking crusts and plates,
but my mind as well.

- brain tectonics -

bow.