Wanting to Cheat

Perhaps the best way to flee this melodramatic conviction is to get a razor blade out of that little china cabinet at my bedside and slash it upon my wrist… but that would be cheating.

I have speculated several times that I have disappointed you at almost all facets of your many splendored dreamcoat of glories. You didn’t have to rub it in.

But who’s to blame? The answer is me.

I blame myself for being so incompetent and substandard. I am not like the others who have a cornucopia of prowesses- masters of all trade. You had your hopes on me for fulfilling one of your dreams but to no avail because my mediocrity slammed the doors shut which occasionally presses me to entertain the thought that the answer is not only me but also you. You are equally culpable as I am because it was you in the first place who imposed such statuesque expectations. Yes, your expectations were surmountable. It’s just that God sent you me. I may be your price to pay for all the villainy that you have done. I am the most preposterous diversion that you have never endured until now.

I feel bad for you. I do. A damn shame, really, that I had to have you and that you had to have me. It can't be easy having me. Nothing can ever prepare someone for this kind of disappointment.

I pamper the feeling of being a malfunction in your could-have-been perfect life. I spend my nights with damp pillows filled with my tears of chagrin. How do I get by? I DON’T.

That razor blade is lonesome in that little china cabinet and using it is as enticing as a mouth-watering triple chocolate mousse. I want to use it. I want to cheat my way through life or shall I say, cheat life by deliberately catapulting by body six feet under.

But I shall vindicate myself. A flicker of hope is slowly devouring my remorseful heart.

That razor blade will be kept hidden in that little china cabinet because someday, you’ll see that I will make you proud and it will be the most excruciating slap-on-the-face you will ever taste!

The Wannabe's

Idle minds covet evil thoughts, indeed. 

So we were at the Granada Eco Park yesterday for the culmination of our school's Summer Fest and as we were waiting for our ride home, we got too bored and guess what we came up with? Some of my classmates asked me to take photos of them as they pose for action photos with the usual stuff that you would see in action movies where a super hero combats a super villain. In our case, we only utilized the resources that were available namely: a gigantic native fan and a monobloc chair.

You can’t blame us for being so amateur-ish. The result? The photos are extremely hilarious and downright ridiculous!

Here are some of those photos that I wouldn’t ever forget (look and laugh):

Mel with the hair-flying effect as precious hits her with the fan

Precious looks like she's gonna dance or something

Ready to kick some ass

oh, their facial expressions!

Nico was in character while Carla was merely having fun doing jumpshots

Mel looked like she was high on weed, Precious, ready for combat while Carla, just enjoying

I already posted these on my Facebook account but I want the best photos of the album to be duplicated here because they really made me laugh like hell as I repeatedly scanned the album and reminisce the moment when we redundantly desperately trying to be action stars. Epic!

My Sweetest Downfall

The most challenging, honorable occupation anyone can ever have is the job of a mother. Doctors, lawyers, and teachers have no say to what mothers can do.

My mom is a superwoman because she is not merely the woman who bore me out into this world but she is the encapsulation of all the other occupations. She is a doctor, for nursing my wounds from knee scrapes to guileless paper cuts, a lawyer, for defending my side whenever I pick a fight, a teacher who aids as I cram for my exams and a nanny for attending to my needs.

a photo of me and mama during my 18th birthday

I remember one time when my mom and dad had a big fight; my mom told me that no matter how much agony dad was giving her, she never regretted having married him because by marrying him, she gained the two most precious gifts- me and my sister. She may not say it but I know in my heart that her children are her number one priority.

You may have read in my preceding posts of how I despise my mom and how she makes my life a living hell. The truth is, I just hate her because I hate myself. I hate myself for falling so short of her expectations. So since its Mother’s Day today, here is a letter I wrote for her:

Dear Mama,

I’m sorry for all the times I answered you back and for thinking that my opinions are more important than yours. Thank you, Mama for being my inspiration. I may not tell you that I love you everyday but I know you know that my love for you is as unconditional as yours to me.

That is why sometimes I am ashamed of what I have become because people might think that you didn’t raise me well when the truth is you did a very great job. You never failed to warn me about all of life’s complexities. You and Papa worked hard to send me to the best schools and provide me with my needs and most of my wants.

I grew up to be a very strong person for having been surpassed all of those trials over the years. Whatever it may be, I am confident that I’ll get through it but when it comes to you and I, I am suddenly debilitated because you are my sweetest downfall. Whenever we fight, the hurt that I feel is twice as much as when I have fights with random people. Maybe because other people can never hurt me the way my loved ones can. It’s always the people closest to my heart who cause me the most excruciating pain. It ridicules me on what started the aloofness that’s continuing to happen between the two of us. How can two people, who love each other so unconditionally possibly, end up in a fight? But no matter what the bases and the consequences are, I know that we remain to love each other mutually, a love which is far beyond words.

No amount of THANK YOU can suffice for everything that you sacrificed for me. I know that you could have bought some of the things that you dreadfully wanted but you didn’t because you were thinking of me and my sister’s welfare.

I promise you this: SOMEDAY I'M GOING TO MAKE YOU PROUD.

I love you, Mama. Happy Mother’s Day.

How I wish I was fearless enough to not just publish it here but give this to her personally but to no avail because I’m reluctant and I don’t want to go through the melodramatic scene. 

Despite all the drama, I still consider my mom as the most important person in my life, even more important than my dad. She is my idol because she is the epitome of a superwoman.

All I am and all I ought to be I owe it to my mom.

by far the happiest photo I have with my mom,
 and needless to say, my favorite

PS: Sorry… Late post. I’ve been a busy bee.

Antidote and Mediator in One

It’s amazing how a cup of coffee refashions the usual way of things.

I had my first sip when I was a whimsical lass at six with nothing to worry about but the dresses of my little paper dolls which I unfailingly tended. Its hotness coincided with its bitterness. I thought it was a perfect tool to keep a sleepy soul hypervigilant which is probably the reason why my grandmamma necessitates at least a cup whenever she feels like dosing off. But now that I’m already 19, a cup of coffee means so much more to me than only that.

I do not fancy grandiose coffee shops with sophisticated ambiances. I would rather go for the delectable taste over the eminent brand. Believe it or not, the best cup of coffee I have ever tasted can be bought in an infamous spot here in our city- a side street. But that doesn’t keep me away from posh coffee shops whenever I need a quiet place to study or a venue for my regular pondering/decision making.

An invigorating cup of coffee at Business Inn

Coffee is not just a mere antidote to combat sleepiness but to me, it serves as a mediator. It binds me and my prized friends despite our busy schedules. We have our random coffee rendezvous just for the purpose of sharing and knowing the ensuing updates about our flamboyant lives. We don’t want to miss out on anything like the latest sexual venture of one or the demise of the love affairs of another. Each coffee session is unplanned which makes it even more thrilling.

Anika, me, Fea and Nikki during one of our random coffee rendezvous

Yes, it keeps me awake to lambast those forbidding deadlines, invigorates my animo and slaps me really hard to face back reality when I already hear the words, “Earth calling Sophia” and I’m already being summoned in the midst of my daily daydreaming. However, beyond those conspicuous reasons rises the oblivious fact that without it, I might not be able to see my friends that often. We all have our own itineraries to attend to and having a cup of coffee functions as the perfect alibi to escape from all our worldly obligations and be one of the rumormongers in “Blabbermouthlandia”. But, we don’t just talk, we also listen. We open our ears while simultaneously opening our hearts to hear each story and give our emphatic sentiments.

Yes, it’s truly amazing how a cup of coffee refashions the usual way of things and as years go by, I hope to have countless coffee sessions with my girls no matter how busy we’ll be.

P.S.        I thank the kind and understanding attendants at Business Inn for religiously refilling our cups with more coffee even before we call them to do so, complete with the package of creamer and fresh milk to set the mood.

Give-and-take

This afternoon I was invited to participate in the focused group discussion of our adopted community in a small barangay here in the city. They are our Muslim brothers and sisters whom our predecessors have been visiting over the last two years and I personally want to resuscitate the legacy of being a philanthropist in my own right regardless of whether or not this will be a part of our curriculum.

Gawk at some of my snapshots.   

Meet JOY. She was the most endearing of them all and unlike others, she was low-keyed yet dynamic during activities. She deliberately posed for my camera several times over so I guess we have a rising star right here, a cam whore at the age of four?…. Naaaah, I’m just kidding!

Lopez Jaena Elementary School. I am not an alien to this place because this is where I cast my vote during local and national elections. However, it was my first time today to see the place free from the entire hullabaloo. I only go to this place whenever there are church activities or other programs where it is usually jam-packed with people; which is why I took this photo where the place is free from all the swarming of the busy-bees. Tranquil and silent.

During the FGD itself, I was astounded with the responses of the Muslim parents. When asked how they regard Catholics, one of them said, “I have high regard for Catholics because it is better to worship a different God than worship no God at all.”

That’s JOY again wearing her irrefutably captivating smile right after she was asked her full name for the registration. She is my favorite because hearing her name prompts me that there is really something that we should be happy about every day no matter how life gives us hell.  

Unlike other fora, our FGD was partaken by both male and female. Actually, even the gays are well-represented because there was one gay guy who attended the dialogue. Not to mention, he was fashionably late so he stormed in the room wearing spaghetti straps but nobody seemed to mind. I love how open-minded people are nowadays. 

Introducing: CLAYZAH, a vivacious young lady who really stood out among the rest. She is garrulous bordering to infuriating but I am a very tolerant person so I just put up with it. I love this photo of her because it reminds me of the book LOLITA. Clayzah is one of those outgoing young lasses who manage to stun people with her effortless unambiguous charisma. 

I really hope that the Communication Department of our school will consider continuing the service-learning activities. The way I see it, it is an unceasing give-and-take process. 

IMPORTED

Long before Facebook and Twitter ever existed, we were all fervent aborigines of a fabled global village called Friendster. There were no photo tags and no games (Farmville, anyone?) yet we were enraptured by the pygmy-like diversion and networking that we got from it. Not long after, our thirst for social networking became insatiable so we registered to other sites such as Tumblr, Multiply, Plurk and thanks to Marc Zuckerberg, our parents can now surveil our every move by simply logging on to their Facebook accounts.

As of today, there are over 500 million active users who each spend over 700 billion minutes per month on Facebook. But we should never really neglect our seedbed, the mother of them all (or at least here in the Philippines) - Friendster.

The other night, I saw in a newsflash that Friendster will be closed after a month. I wasn’t really agitated because I know that most of my friends in FS already migrated to Facebook just like yours truly. But I still logged into my FS account, just for the heck of it. And I found out that my last shoutout was January 3, 2010 and my last testimonial was December 30, 2009 which means that I haven’t really visited my Friendster for more than a year.

I breezed through my ancient, retrograded profile, my albums (only 8) and some of the testimonials and right below my testimonials was my blog. I admittedly forgot that I used to maintain a blog in Friendster. I am cognizant that I maintained a journal or a diary but not in electronic form. So I clicked on one of the posts and read it. I skimmed through the previous posts until I was able to finish reading every single one of them, yes dating back to 2007.

“WOW! I CAN’T BELIEVE I WROTE THIS!” and “CRAP! I CAN’T BELIEVE I WROTE THIS!”—the two reactions I had after reading all those posts.

There were really ones which looked like they were written by Ms. Smarty Pants but there were a lot of those which were downright deplorable! Reading all of those posts was very entertaining. I can’t help but laugh after reading some of them because the mode of writing was so amateur-ish, not that I’m a really upright writer/blogger now…It’s just that I’m better than before.

Here are just some of the things that I noticed after reading my “maiden” blog posts:

·         *princess sophie*- there is this some kind of TM or byline of mine “princess sophie” because all of my former blog posts were usually synched with my Multiply blog which had the address of princesssophie.multiply.com and simply because I am such a FEELER, wanting to be a princess (just let me be, at least in this little kingdom I call a blog)

·         Comments in our vernacular- some posts have comments from my friends and we were so canny that we exchanged banters in our own dialect, after all, it’s only Friendster

·         Grammatically erroneous- there are some (very few actually), posts which are grammatically erroneous because let’s face it, what do you expect from a 13-year old? (at that time)

·         Excessive number of emoticons- there was one point in my life when I was hooked to emoticons because I consider myself as an emoticon as well, with all those facial expressions I am capable of making

·         Excessive and inappropriate punctuations- where can you see a sentence or a word with more than 15 exclamation marks after it? Only my sentences! And I am not proud of that.

·         Language, in general- some sentences can be considered “jejemonic”, some are hyperbolic in a drama queen kind of way and some are just downright gay!

I am remorseful but I won’t modify any of the imported posts content-wise but I will certainly revamp the typography so that it would be more delectable to the eyes and less bothersome (because some had font colors of neon pink and neon green). I will go through every single one of them and see what I can do about the construction, aesthetically speaking ONLY.

So after reading the posts, I went through the aggravation of importing those posts here in Blogger and after several hours of having that scowl on face, I finally did it. For the nth time, technology saved the day! I just refashioned some of the colors and the configuration so that they would be fine-tuned with the Blogger format.

Now anyone of you is free to pester on the obscure, uncelebrated specifics of my juvenile past life by simply clicking on one of the posts of 2007 or 2008 right from this same site (but you can spare yourself by doing otherwise).

Imported blog posts make me smirk of what was then and what is now. Things have changed and they will keep changing over the years and my only desire is that they will change for the better.

Who knows, I might stumble upon this very blog post and be entertained a hundred times over.