merriment

this month has been good to me

(you know, if you ignore how ball-sticky hot it is every day)

i was so happy about getting my final grade that i didn't feel the need to have a birthday party.

DVD stickers and covers i made for the copies i gave for the library etc :3 i scanned the watercolor images i painted when i conceptualised the sets :3

this was how i celebrated my birthday-eve :) with a boy drink and a girl drink (i guess you could say it symbolizes my wholeness as a person or whatnot but really i just wanted to try these new tanduay ice's) and the cutest christmas tree bottle opener! i love how it goes with my thesis theme haha

i did a lot of catching up with my favorite shows after finishing my requirements. it's been good :) insanely hot, but good.

my "problems" arent over, i still need to know what to do with my life, but at least i'm more in the same stage as most of my friends.. it's one thing to feel lost, it's another to feel deliberately LATE.. if you see what i mean.

i feel like this year will be a great one for me. even though the rest of the world seems to be going crazy (really sad stuff in the USA and Iran and NoKor craziness)... I'm really looking forward to finding out what I'll be doing next.. Even though I'm really anxious too! SOMEONE HIRE ME haha

anyway yeah :) tomorrow i think i'm going somewhere with a nice water thingy (is it a pond?) to celebrate both my birthday and my cousin's move to Saudi. so yeah. the fun continues.

☼☽ things to be excited about ☽☼

ignore sad things! think of good stuff! make a list of exciting things!

stuff to be excited about:

• Graduating - This is a huge one. It's been a while since I last felt that I can accomplish anything big.. Especially because of the fact that there's loads of brilliant people in my university. I try my hardest not to compare myself to anyone, in fact I'm much better at it than I've ever been, but this one has been weighing on me for years now, and I feel like I just want to formally end this chapter and say that I did it, so I can start anew on other things, and be better at those than I was with college. Graduating would just take such a huge load off my shoulders. It hasn't happened yet and I already feel lighter just because I know it's happening. I feel freer to do things, to speak to people, to make things. It's really odd but it weighed on me like a ball and chain, constricting my very being. So yeah sorry bout the gloomy description, but it's the only way I could express how great this is for me! 
• Yoga - I went to yoga again this morning! after more than a month! It was great. I'll have a nice sleep tonight. I'll keep going and it will be awesome.
• Nero - I can edit videos now! hehe. So I might be able to post videos of Sansa soon.
• Disc covers - The fact that mama's extra laptop has a burner has somehow never occurred to me until I had to use it to burn my school film DVDs... i have sticker paper and a working printer! just imagine aaall the playlists!
• My Bday week - coincidentally my first week of freedom from school work! ( there will still be administrative stuff to work on for graduation, but there's no more papers to pass or whatever ) I shall try not to drink or eat much. maybe just one night. hehe. (of drinking)
•  Time for creating freely! - Since i won't be so bogged down by guilt of not being done with school
• My newly improved sleep schedule! - I am pleased to announce that I have been sleeping properly for more than a week now!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! HOORAY
• JUST ALL THE THINGS! THE GREAT UNKNOWN! I DONO WHATS GNA HAPPEN BUT I CAN MAKE IT GOOD AND I'LL MAKE IT MINE

a victorious day

guess what happened!!

clue:

don't say anything about the discarded dress ITS REALLY HOT OKAY

and then i

\

!!!

What, I stayed up all night on FACEBOOK and then printed some random stuff the next day? nonononono i finished my THESIS and printed it this morning!

and then i went to school to submit it for binding!

they planted a bunch of sunflowers at the main road in uni.. i've only been hearing about it on facebook, never really noticed them when i went there.. they said it's for the april graduation ceremonies.. so sunflowers had been a graduation-related meme online. there was an image that went around, a background of just sunflowerheads and in the middle was written:

 tapusin mo na ang thesis mo.

("finish your thesis already.")

at the time i was trying my best to push myself to do just that, so I actually downloaded that image on my phone and used it as a wallpaper. it did help remind me everyday.

and now fast forward to this afternoon.. i was in the jeep entering the uni grounds, and for the first time i made it a point to look for the flowers.. i noticed the hedges.. and sure enough, i saw a first couple of little sunflower heads. greeting me, like hi i know you finished your thesis, good job we'll all see you soon.

it was a feeling that was really thrilling and i felt so excited and i felt feelings i didn't think i could feel anymore.

i remember feeling thankful about my thesis being about children. thinking about the things that make children different from adults really put things into perspective. i find it easier to be happy/pleased when i tap into my child self. i don't call it inner child anymore. i just realised it's still who i am. 

i passed my copies, returned my adviser's book, and i passed by a little sunflowerhead on the way out of my college. i snapped a picture of it with my phone, and replaced the one with the thesis reminder. now it's time to remind myself that the hardest part is over, and that the sunflowers are waiting :)

in other news, i made earrings today!

I've always wanted these and now I have them and it's a lot cooler cos I MAAADE THEM OKAY! there were four pendants in the little baggie so i made two pairs. one for me, one for mama!

also i bought some blue feather earrings that i altered (i used the same chain):

ta-daaaaa, muuch bettor.

all i used was this thingy which i think is used for surgery or whatever who cares it's cool

I almost gave up on finding the perfect chain, because i had something specific in mind.. luckily this really long one came close enough, and still looked cool:

 and i'm going to make other funky pendants for that blue chain i found. it's so cool-looking. i'm thinking i'll screw some loops on some tiny plastic animal/insect/dinosaur toys...

i bought lotsa nice cheap stuff today.. take a look at these AA batteries:

all of those for only 88 PESOSWHAAAT

also, i found this in mama's room and she's reading something else so she's letton me barrow it:

yey to fey

SO YEAH i'm excited and i'm drinking a beer. it's super exciting cos now that it's over i can just look forward to the summer. what's happening in the summer? guess.

clue:

Catching Up

on thursday i went to QC to finally hand in my thesis draft.

*screams internally*

a day before, abbie expressed desire to have a creative brainstorming session over milk tea.

so after meeting my adviser and returning some books to the library, i met up with her at katipunan 

we had lunch at kfc and went to moonleaf

when she first contacted me i simply thought she was just randomly brimming with inspiration and ideas,

little did i know that she just got out of a MAJOR phase of distress in her life! i do my best to keep in touch via twitter and i always make it a point to read her feed when i feel like she's down (i don't to this for anyone else hehe ʕ❀ᴥ❀ʔ) but i thought she was just feeling depressed mood-wise (not to trivialize it of course! moods are just as real as feelings that have an outside cause, they're just easier to treat internally) so i didnt feel alarmed or whatever. but yeah she went through tuff times! but the worst is over and im really glad..

we talked about everything and anything and she was hyper from recovery and i was sabaw from a whole week of not really sleeping (like, i'd take naps of course) and it just felt like we had so much to talk about and it felt really nice. plus, there's the actual brainstorming which - was awesome because we're on the same page about making a channel on youtube! her idea is for us and our cousins/siblings to collab on it, and soon after we were thinking of ideas and concepts for videos. i'm really excited about all this!

i didn't make it a point to tell her this, because i didn't want to make it weird, but inside i was kind of feeling  touched + happy that she wanted to see me, and that we were being so hyper together, and that we spent a whole afternoon together. i lived with her in their house for five years in college, but because we were studying, the time we spent together was usually quiet! we rested together i guess. and i was always the more expressive one. i always wished she opened up to me more naturally, but lately it's been easier to talk to her about that... i used to be scared to say anything about it, because it's not like she's doing it on purpose! shyness isn't something you can cure by telling someone "don't be shy." and i really understood where she was coming from, so i tried not to push her.

but i guess she encountered some sort of change in herself after going through her recent trubblez. she told me that she got to express her feelings to her family at home, and i felt really warm and almost teared up to be honest, cos i felt a bit relieved and happy that she can talk about stuff like that to them. i always worried about her, i didn't like the idea of her suffering more than necessary, just because she didn't know how to express pain. ANYWAYYYYY (/end super dramabellz..im not even going to proofread this because ew feelings)

so it was AWESOME catching up, and i'm really looking forward to spending more time with my cousins this summer, especially to do stuff that involve being creative and laughing one's butt off.

another thing about "catching up": i learned a money lesson today...

you know how you think you know how to do something until you have to do it? i learned a valuable lesson about restraint yesterday. i'm not going to go into details, but the lesson was:

"when you have more than usual cash at hand, think about how much you want to save, and mentally 'delete' it. so that you'll go about your day having a mindset of someone who only has the amount of money that you do want to spend."

it's as if cognitive dissonance had made me simultaneously believe that: 

1) i can afford to spend more cash, and 

2) i will have money to deposit at the end of the day

when in fact, these two possibilities cancel each other out. so yeah. you spend and you spend and it catches up on you. get it. yeah.

anyway, lesson learned, and i don't think i'll forget that one! although, i'm actually happy with the makeup i bought (they're cheap, i just don't really have a lot of money to begin with) so whatevz

kk byby!

★★★

the lovely way there

written @ midnight before easter

today was lovely.

i woke up to the sound of my brother knocking on my door, telling me that mama said we're going out to eat and shop at Paseo. It was my older brother's birthday recently and because he wasn't home the entire time, mama wanted to take advantage of the weekend to buy him something nice.

We had brunch at Cafe Breton. The ambiance and the food was lovely. I didn't bring my camera, and I don't regret it one bit. At times like this a good camera phone would be handy, because I'm simply not willing to lug a giant camera around and ruin the moments as they come. I kept thinking about Emmy and how interesting he would find the place to be, being an actual Breton himself XD I imagined him picking the menu apart... He certainly wouldn't miss the "Bon apetit" on the very cover ^^

We went around to look for jeans for Nikko, but the heat was unbearable and we ended up just getting some groceries (in my case, going around and around and around looking at interesting stuff at True Value after showing them where the dog food was), deciding to just do the jeans shopping tomorrow. However, on the way home Nikko asked mama if she could just treat him with the game he wanted to buy in the first place XD

She agreed, so after going home, Nikko and Monji went back to paseo to buy rice and Nikko's computer game.

Shortly afterwards, Fr. Ernie and a friend of his arrived to have lunch at our place. I prepared a simple salad for them. And then shortly before them leaving came some of our relatives who wanted to go to Tagaytay, who ended up just staying over!


I set myself to write ten pages each day from Today 'till Thursday, but obviously this first day didn't really go as planned. I spent most of the afternoon hanging out with the kids, who I wished, but didn't think, were coming. The teens and adults of my generation hung out at the balcony to drink in a circle.

(from abbie's IG tengs abi)

I joined them too, for a little while, but I mostly just feasted on the snacks and gulped a bit of sprite-vodka and had some laughs and weird discussions about hilarious and inappropriate stuff before I was asked to watch over the kids who wanted to come back upstairs to my room... I love these kids (and it felt weird to drink at a time like this anyway) so of course I came upstairs with them again, and hung out some more. In case you have NO IDEA what "fun stuff" a 22-year old can possibly do with a 5, 9 and 13 year old, there's a lot!:

• weird, surprisingly dangerous bowling with 2L mtn dew bottles and a stuffed soccerball
• a lot of Flow Free (a game which Nica, the 5 y/o was FREAKISHLY good at!)
• while talking about A LOT OF STUFF
• potential creepy, ghostly scenarios
• life in general
• hilarious stuff that happened to us in school (im so happy i can remember a lot from gradeschool)
• embarassing stuff that happened to us in school
• hilarious everything else (kids are funny okay)
• adventure time of course
• some brilliant drum-tap-thing with pens
• drawings

So yeah! Now my room looks like this:

(eep im so happy about the way this nook turned out! there's like, a pathway for the bathroom door haha)

I went downstairs to check on Sansa and saw her in her cage, lying on her back, stretching her front paws towards me like a baby reaching up to be carried. Haha! It was so freakin cute and hilarious, I wish I took a picture! After realising that the belly rubs weren't making her fall asleep, I decided to let her out and rubbed her belly after making her lie down on one of her usual spots beside a sofa. She still wasn't feeling sleepy. She followed me around for a bit as I poked at things in the kitchen and made myself some tea, and then she went to the rug and peed properly. As if it wasn't enough, I opened the side door and she went out to poo at her spot outside!!!! I had applause go off in my head I was so happy!

GOOD GIRL!

And so yeah, even though I probably won't finish 10 pages before I sleep today, sitting here in my spot (well, lying down on my belly right now), thinking about the wonderful day that just came and went, I can't help but feel calmer and not too focused on my ultimate dream of graduating so much that I lose sight of what's important in life and the little dreams that keep coming true every day.

Great family day full of fun activities, having my nieces and youngest cousin around to play and have fun with, seeing my older cousins have so much fun together by just sitting in a circle, having a room I love to bits, being able to borrow a laptop 24/7 even after losing my own, great food, being able to eat healthily even though I'm stressed (fruits in a blender a-plenty), having the special gugo bark shampoo my mom gave me (thank you so much mama) after finding out that my hair was falling out due to stress work SO FREAKISHLY WELL, having an inside dog that is so awesome and loves me so much ~~~ the journey towards the goal certainly is lovely.

It just feels that being able to graduate isn't really for me anymore, because I'm really fine. This life is good to me. Finishing school would be a way to give back to my mom, who has provided me with everything I need and so much more. And that's what should drive me. It's the least I could do, to make her proud.

I really hope I make it!!! Please send me ALL of the good vibes you can muster. I really need them!

xxx

PS: these kids are funny even while asleep. two are sleep-talkers and one is a snorer. hahahaha

like fire

these are the kinds of days where two showers are necessary

and sometimes not even enough

when you wonder if you've been eating more than your share

because you've bloated, and then you realise it's the heat

and that you're expanding

you're pieces of matter after all,

even though sometimes you forget

it's not pretty

to be in between two sizes

you've been here before

a nine year old

feeling sexless and free

only to come home to a mother telling you 

that you need to wear something under your shirt

because your breasts betray the youth 

that has been everything you knew

up to that point

and here you are again

wondering about the next shape you'll take

it's days like these where you try to escape your body

sleeping more often than usual

mind racing, impossible to pin down

to the one task you know you need to commit to

if you're ever to leave this phase

you're hot, molten metal

but your final form is still

peaceful, purposeful

solid enough to permeate 

and to leave a mark.

the sun is testing you

and there is no way out of the heat

for now

to be enlightened, is to be lit

bright enough

to see through the shadow of the discomfort

emanating from the same source

could it be??? (a day-in-a-life liveblog of a day of potential)

7:30 

I'm about to have a normal, productive day after so long?

It's seven-thirty folks, and I've been awake for three and a half hours.

I've jotted down some notes, ate (AND COOKED) breakfast, fed the dog, had coffee and tea and have entertained myself with some youtube.

Look at my sexy suggestive breakfast:

dat face tho

10:30

(Three hours, a few more youtube videos, a "bit" of Tumblr, an actual bit of note-taking and a lot of puppy cuddling later:)

i found a marker and marked my skin, starting with the crown's bigger gem and got carried away much like Ice King's very own lack of struggle against his slow descent to dementia, letting too much time pass again without making much value from it

have i gone too far

yes i believe that i have gone too far

11:00 

snacktime, or maybe just plainly, my second meal of the day, and my mug expressing my sadness because beardy finally went to sleep.

a bunch of dandelion furballs dancing in the air after brushing my dog's fur a bit.. dogs are a wonderful addition to a family and everyone's voices turn musical, their disposition happy and light whenever the dog is in their presence, greeting them with overflowing cuteness, tails wagging in the air, never attempting to stifle excitement over seeing their favorite human.. and at this age of three months everyone is Sansa's favorite human. furry/beardy adorable pups and boys are time vacuums. i must resist.

setting an intention to make noon time count. but a dip in energy approaches. will i make it without being lulled into half-asleep automatic procrastination? (or napping)

maybe exercise will help?

tip: don't touch your face after drawing a penguin on the palm-side of your thumb.

3:00

i cooked this days ago. i'm kinda proud of it

few pages read, lunch, exercise (kinda), yeah.

4:00

doodled, notes, made coffee to stay awake, took a nap. Whoops.

5:00

"Sansaah!" *sits*

woke up, ate pizza, cookie, and the coffee that has already become cold. more puppy lovin.

6:30

End note: I didn't get to do as much as I'd have liked, but the night is long and the fight isn't over! And it's still a lot more than I've been doing lately. Will attempt to sleep "early" tonight and to wake up early tomorrow to have another go at normalcy.

★