One thing led to another

1. Blogger to Wordpress. I don't know when, how, or why I started to entertain the thought of moving to Wordpress, but I did. Maybe I am just bored with Blogger. Or maybe I am just bored. Period.

I might try it out until the novelty wears off. I have already an account in Wordpress, and I'm experimenting on two blogs. I haven't decided yet which one has the wittier URL.

2. Some Wordpress blogs worth reading. Second Struggle by Kris Canimo, Just (Un)thinking Out Loud by Christian Suller, and Cheap Inspector by Don Sebastian Cifra. Cheap Inspector's entries are especially witty, honest but interesting. Too bad he seems out of the loop now. His last entry was last January.

3. Anger. Christian of Just (Un)thinking Out Loud, a UP Baguio professor, wrote a particularly insightful entry on a mass walk-out he joined in about two months ago. The mobilization was against Charter Change and the proposed Constituent Assembly.

The entry made me stop and think of the last time I was angry. It bothers me that I could not remember. Some people say anger is not entirely unhealthy. Maybe this why I am so skinny.

Curiosity very nearly killed this blog

In a bid to be more adventurous with the layout design of this blog, I tinkered with the templates and the HTML and God-knows-what-else. And then when I thought I was done and I wanted a preview, the page wouldn't display. It said something about an invalid xml form.

Good thing, I recovered my old template. I don't know how I did it, but I did. My little adventure cost me the bookshelf picture below my header.

I have learned my lesson. I will never ever ever ever experiment again.

Back on track

Almost two years ago, I was perfectly fine. I was taking a full load at school, was occasionally writing news for the student paper, was earning a very considerable five-digit salary every other Friday, was managing to read at least one book a weak, and was washing my own laundry. Then I became a bit too naive and tried new things I knew little about. I think I was too confident that I will ace everything I set my mind into doing. I was younger and I was still used to being fairly successful at things I want to do. Of course I was wrong.

There is a scene in the movie Juno where Brenda, Juno's mom, tongue-lashes the "ultrasound technician" who says it's a good thing Juno is giving up the baby for adoption.

"What is your job title exactly," Brenda asks the clueless troglodyte.

"I'm an ultrasound technician, ma'am," says the ultrasound technician.

Then Brenda delivers her knock-out, kick-ass line: "Well, I'm a nail technician and I think it's best we both stick to what we know."

I reckon it's about time I take Bren's cue and stick again to what I know best right now: dividing my spare time into novels and writing desultorily on my blog/s. Then maybe, maybe I'll be perfectly fine again.

PS. I'm sorry about the new photo. I wanted a new picture, but the last phase of my cosmetic surgery isn't done yet.

Of Bedouins, blogging, and boredom

I feel strange: sedated and disinterested, like a bored dairy cow. I have a suspicion that if I wake up and find myself, curiously garbed as a Bedouin, inside a tent in a North African desert, the whole incident would hardly throw me into a fit of panic and surprise. This is a very dangerous thought, of course, but not necessarily entirely undesirable. Nomadic lifestyles have their exotic charm.

I am mildly envious of others here in the blogosphere who always write about something. Someone wrote about suicide (again), one on trade barriers and the bovine epidemic, and another on wasted romance. I am almost tempted to write about the possible connections of all three discourses. But all I could blog about is either my half-done posts or my interminable boredom. Ho-hum.

A blogger wrote about an advice given by a common friend, Melane. I wonder why during these sorts of times in our lives, we always feel inspired to invoke her sagely advice.

She told me more than once before: Pinili mo naman yan.

Of Melissa and Matt, proxies, and Orlando, Florida

Sine my long post on Pullum and Strunk & White, I have attempted (in total) four times already to write a new post. The first attempt is about bookstores and the information elite (nosebleed). The second is about how recession can fight the signs of ageing (see anorexia and fasting). The third is a fearless forecast on the Pacquiao vs Hatton fight (Manny: This will be a battol!).

The fourth is about the new hit series Kambal sa Uma. (Back in highschool, I was able to interview Melissa Ricks when she dropped by in our campus to promote some shows. I asked her if she has any shows in the pipeline, and she said she's been promised a fantaserye. That was of course four years ago; she had to wait for Matt Evans to do away with all that hair. The afro takes up so much camera frame space, rendering kissing scenes impossible to film.)

None of these saw the light of the day. I am a very prolific blogger.

***

My previous company has a very limited sense of securing its resources: Coffee gluttons plunder the creamer and sugar packets beside the coffee vendo. Vast amounts of handtowels and toilet tissue disappear mysteriously everyday. At the same time, entering the sleeping quarters at any given time gives one an impression that the company has decided to take up the cause of harboring refugees and the homeless. Accessing the internet is also hardly secured against non-work related activities. All you get when you try to go to Youtube is a page with a pair of monkeys warning you that the page is not secure, which you could avoid anyway through a proxy.

Accessing the internet, however, needs a bit of an effort here in my new work, and may require a considerable store of good proxy servers, which one can use alternately. Still, even when I manage to beat "Orlando" and get to my Blogger dashboard through some server located in France, a lot of links and scripts get lost in the process (and sometimes, because of that, I can neither approve nor view comments since the links wont work properly in some second-rate proxies).

I am beginning to suspect that I might need to save for a laptop. It is a hassle to go home to my mom's whenever I want to manage my blogs. Then I can cease being guilty of hogging the company's bandwidth each time I surf the web.