This is DQ, finishing up my week-long daily updating brouhaha with this note:

YOU MUST READ THE ABOMINABLE CHARLES CHRISTOPHER.

Quote for the day:

“Growing up is never easy. You hold on to things that were. You wonder what’s to come. But that night, I think we knew it was time to let go of what had been, and look ahead to what would be. Other days. New days. Days to come. The thing is, we didn’t have to hate each other for getting older. We just had to forgive ourselves… for growing up.”

- The Wonder Years

I have a bit of a Peter Pan complex.

Let me illustrate.

I am twelve years old. My best friend and I are washing our faces at a sleepover, and I notice that she’s wiping off this green sparkly gunk off her eyelids. I am shocked, because (a) I’m with this girl all the time and I didn’t notice anything, and (b) this is grown-up stuff; I am still [secretly] hosting bedroom tea parties with my stuffed animals. Feeling stunted and a little betrayed at the revelation that my best friend is ready to grow up before I am, I try putting on make-up the next day. Some classmates notice, and ask me if I am wearing eyeshadow. I am mortified. I scoff at their faces, avoid eye contact, and before the first class, run to the bathroom to wash it all off.

High school: the girls in my class pair themselves up with their very eager counterparts from the local all-boys high school. I imagine their meetings to be like that centaur mating ritual scene from Fantasia [which, can I just say, is the best centaur courtship scene ever - I can watch it over and over again and it's still magical... *sigh* Disney is behind my unrealistic expectations regarding love and courtship... scratch that, they're behind everything].

My friends try to bring me with them to talk to the pretty [?] boys, but I don’t feel like enough of a… woman to do any of that. To keep my friends happy [i.e. because I am a pushover], I entertain a few textmates. When these boys tell me they want to meet, I stop replying. Story of my life.

Aaaand I take a year off before going to college because I’m not ready.

College: the world is telling me to grow up, and I am too busy being busy to pay attention. I don’t apply for a job until four months after I graduate.

Present day: I am about to start working, about to find my own place, about to begin paying taxes, and you know what? Having to face all this grown-up stuff isn’t nearly as scary as I thought it would be [okay, maybe going through my pre-employment medical exam was a little frightening]. And maybe I’ll never be as mature as the next girl-er-woman, but I don’t think I’m going to be running away from this stuff anymore.

Or at least I’m going to try not to. It’s a start.

This has been Day 6 of my I-will-update-my-blog-every-day-for-a-week resolution!!!

King Rat by Modest Mouse, music video directed by Heath Ledger

This has been Day 5 of my I-will-update-my-blog-every-day-for-a-week resolution!!!

I apologize for the last three posts, I’ve been spending a lot of time away from my laptop [hooray], and when I get home I’m all tired and too sabaw to function. Tomorrow I’ll actually give writing a go.

Quote for the day:

“A baby is God’s way of saying the world should go on.”

- Doris Smith

I wasn’t always like this.

This has been Day 4 of my I-will-update-my-blog-every-day-for-a-week resolution!!!

This has been Day 3 of my I-will-update-my-blog-every-day-for-a-week resolution!!!

Quote for the day:

“The two most common elements in the universe are Hydrogen and stupidity.”

- Harlan Ellison

This was an ad that came out in the States [no, really?] in the late 1960’s.

I think this was a campaign to discourage deviant behavior. But that’s not why I’ve put it up here. I saw this awhile ago and it made me laugh because it made me remember an old classmate who had a mullet.

A MULLET. IN 2008. I KID YOU NOT.

This boy sat in front of me [of course! WHERE ELSE?!], so just imagine my pain, how impossible it was for me to concentrate on the lecture and how hard it was for me to come to class with the knowledge that his hair would be waiting for me.

IKR. WHYYYY?!?!

Okay, it wasn’t that bad, it was more like this:

But even so, every time I saw him I had to fight the urge to dig my nails into his forehead and scalp him – scalp him gooood. That hair only works on Captain Planet, and even he only barely pulls it off.

I dreaded that class because just sitting in the same room with that hair left me so drained. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not a member of the fashion police – I own a pair of pink Crocs for goodness’ sake – but it was just… wrong.

THINK OF THE CHILDREN! THE CHILDREN!!!!

Thankfully for my grades, he eventually cut the offensive hair in time for me to prepare for our final exams. By then I had devoted so much of our class hours staring at his hair that I couldn’t recall 80% of our past lessons… and I also think he thought I fancied him a little. Wonderful, I know.

Our society could use a few good haircuts. Just saying.

This has been Day 2 of my I-will-update-my-blog-every-day-for-a-week resolution!!!

[BGmusic: La Vie En Rose by Louis Armstrong]

Quote for the day:

“LALABAS NA TAYO SA EARTH!!!!!”

- little boy,
after takeoff on a plane from Manila to Davao

Many of you will be pleased to know that after months of searching, I finally have a job. Yes, friends, my six-month stint in limbo is coming to an end. I won’t tell you what company I’ll be working for and what I’ll be doing, because, you know, Google can be very dangerous in the wrong right wrong hands.

I’d like to tell you guys that I have spent these months finding myself, spending hours in deep meditation, coming up with ways to end world hunger, discovering alternative fuel sources, etc. But if this isn’t your first time here in my blog, you probably know that it is highly unlikely that I, the foremost expert in the art of Rest and Relaxation [take note: capital R's], have done anything worthwhile.

Sure, I have helped out with some miscellaneous projects for Campus Crusade… I won’t show you guys because really, I don’t think I’m proud of the fact that in my six months of bumming, I was only able to produce that much output.

But see, in between those days when I was busy doing nothing, I actually went out in the real world and went to several job interviews where I talked about how self-motivated I am, how dedicated I am to my work, and how I love learning new things [I know, kill me now]… I had so many interviews that eventually, all that self-praise went to my head and I actually believed it!

So I decided to learn something new! I really regret not learning any languages in UP [yeah, I took German10 but I forgot everything I learned], so… now I’m learning Japanese! Hurray for me!

Why?

• WAYNAT. Even the internet gets boring after some time, k?
• Wouldn’t it be cool to study in Japan one day?
• I learned how to speak Filipino in Japan! So it’s only makes sense to learn Japanese here in the Philippines!

FUN FACT TIME:

In my first two years of high school, I spoke hardly any Filipino because we had just moved back from England. Anyway, in my junior year, the lovely people at the Department of Education decided to ship me off to Tokushima in Japan for a week-long cultural exchange… thing. There were three other Filipino delegates, and I was worried that they wouldn’t want to talk to me because the kids at my school had a tendency to run away in horror when they found out that I spoke straight English [huhuhu... isso hard to make prens in da Pilipins]. So I literally forced myself to speak Tagalog, and when I got back to school after the conference, my classmates were like, “…haaaaa…?!”, all blown away by my slang-y but exponentially better Filipino. I do love leaving people flummoxed like that.

• Anime and jdoramas: no more bad subtitles!
• ULTIMATE REASON: Takeshi Kaneshiro is part Japanese, and he speaks Japanese! How cool is that?!

Anyway, I’ve been learning via the Pimsleur program for a while now, and I do recommend it for anyone who wants to learn a new language. And no, they are not paying me to blog this. [Ooh and guess what?! They even have Tagalog! My sister tells me our uncle-who-is-German is learning Tagalog with the Pimsleur program too, which is very cool (and cute) of him.]

I am proud to say that I now know how to tell my husband [and wife!!!] that I want to go shopping to buy a Japanese hat. Ho ho ho. Iz very cool.

The only thing is, the Pimsleur program only teaches you to speak and listen to Japanese, so I have to find another program to learn how to read and write. So if any of you know of an effective one, please, do recommend.

Aaaaand I have to wash the dishes now so I’m going.

Sayonara! [FYI: That's goodbye in Japanese - how cool am I?]

This has been Day 1 of my I-will-update-my-blog-every-day-for-a-week resolution!!!

Quote for the day:

My brother: “[Insert philosophical blah-blahs here]…for example, I’m good at bass guitar. Ate Ror [our eldest], you’re good at design. And [DQ]…  you’re good at… *pauses*…sleeping.”

- He evidently thinks a lot of me.
Context: In a taxi on the way home from Life Pursuits,
talking about knowing the purposes of our talents.
Hey, it takes a lot of dedication to relax the way I do.

I started blogging in 2004, a few months after I graduated from high school. I didn’t go to college right away like the rest of the Philippines, but decided to take a year-long break to figure out what I wanted in life [I didn't]. So, while my high school friends were busy warming up to their new lives in university and hanging out with their shiny new college friends, I quickly got reacquainted with my not-so-inner loner.

But the thing is, even natural loners like me sometimes feel the need to tell someone about their day. So I turned to my computer. In my first blog [it's private now, sorreh], I talked about my new violin pieces, how bored I was, how frustrated I was for having ridiculously strict parents, my pseudo-stalkers, being bored, being lonely, being bored again, etc. I was a very lonely girl who listened to very sad music and kept a very angsty blog. [I think I should point out that this was right before the pimple that was the emo movement exploded all over the world.]

Then for some strange reason, people started to comment, and they started to link back to my blog. Imagine that – I had regular readers. I was weirded out by the sudden traffic – save for a link on my friendster profile, I didn’t really do much advertising – but knowing that someone out there found my pathetic life somewhat interesting gave me the warm fuzzies.

So as my readers increased and my blogroll got longer and longer, I started to put more care into my posts. I thought that if people drop by my blog I might as well make it worth their time.

I can think of a few things that led to the downfall of my obsessive blogging:

• Somewhere in the middle of my time in UP, I got a life.
• Plurk. Facebook. Need I say more?
• Bloggers on my blogroll suddenly spamming, traffic-baiting and writing crap posts. [No, not you, you're cool.] WHAT HAPPENED PEOPLE!? WHERE DID YOUR INTEGRITY GO?!

Seeing the state of donyaquixote.com now, you wouldn’t think that I used to update every single day. I kind of miss the days when I’d hear a good song on the radio and talk about how it made me feel, write about the cool things I learned in class, and record each encounter with the crush in painstaking detail.

Dear readers, if you’re still out there, pay attention because I’m about to make an announcement: I’d like to try and update this thing regularly again, if only for a week, and not just because my lack of updates makes me sad.

I seem to have forgotten how to write.

What some of you might not know is that I like to write myself a good bit of fiction now and then. I’ve been trying to churn out stories out of my system and I just can’t. I swear, I think I have some pretty decent stories just waiting to be wreak havoc on my sleeping patterns, but every paragraph I’ve written so far has been so disgusting, I can’t even make it past one page.

This post is no exception – already I’m thinking of not bothering to publish this. But I will, and I have, and that’s why you’re reading it right now.

So, let’s try this again, shall we?

This will be my first and last letter. Enough is enough. I’ve been letting you bring out the worst in me, and I will not make patol to you henymore. I will not talk, I will not write, and I will control my body language. No more drama. No no no no drama.

Sincerely,

DQ