this seat is taken

{ GOALIE }

February 29, 2012

I spent half of the day attending a class on Time Management. It’s one of the free classes that my company is willing to offer me instead of stand-up classes abroad. I badly need some lessons on time management because I am a professional procrastinator, slacker, multi-tasker, and crammer. I am pretty sure that I am not the only one who’s professional here because procrastination has been a common practice that it could have been a sport or a course in college. I reckon that in the near future.

To be honest, I really enjoyed the class. It gave me a lot of insights and tips on how to manage my time efficiently. Well, I just hope that I have the full willingness to apply it to work come tomorrow. The most helpful lesson that it taught me, and that I would like to share to you fellow procrastinator, is the Time Management Matrix. I have decided to make one for myself tonight. It seems like Quadrant IV, the Not Urgent-Not Important zone, will be full of trivial activities that I do. With that, maybe I’ll just share mine another day. You can start with this matrix so you have an overview of the things that eat up most of your time and evaluate them. I hope it works out for you.

So I will end this post with a quote shared to us at the end of the session earlier. Talk about goal setting and making it happen.

If you can dream it, you can do it.

– Walt Disney
{ Who Cares About Sunday? }

February 27, 2012

I’ve always been a wuss.

I am terrible at sports and at any activity that requires exerting effort more than that required of lifting a cup of hot coffee. Of course I am exaggerating. But I have arms like that of a gibbon’s minus the fur. I guess what I am trying to say is that I’ve always been seen as a “fragile girl” (Galeria, 2012). Well, if you say fragile, you don’t run around, scream, guffaw, or show any activity of molecules in your body.

As much as I would like to blather about the state of my so-called fragility and gibbon-ish arms, I have more interesting story to tell. Again, not really a story but more of a photo gallery (Part II). I was invited by a college friend to a local amusement park last Sunday among with the rest of our college friends.

I felt like a kid again. As a wuss, I am easily daunted by the hideous rides that could make me flip and pee in my pants. But I forgot about me being fragile on that day. (I hate my friend who reminds me that I am somewhat fragile. Of course I kid.) :p

There’s something about the looming cloud and the twisted ropes of steel that made me pause for a moment.

This is one of the monstrous rides that I never thought I would allow myself to entrust my life to. But after this shot, I was actually thinking if we could be friends.

Jack Sparrow should have been there.

Looks ominous, eh?

Bulbs. I find them attractive.

More bulbs.

And some more bulbs. Bulb-appreciation post.

Officially a bulb-appreciation post. They glitter like stars.

Surreal

Now that I think of it, bulbs everywhere! (Of course, idiot. This is a theme park!)

1) Bulb-appreciation post 2) Chucks-appreciation post

3) I sat on one of the horses in a twinkling-slash-magical MERRY-GO-ROUND.

My feet were tired. But I had fun. Lots of fun!

We’ve ridden every ride that we saw in that park. We didn’t care about the long lines. We didn’t care about the humid air and the sweat. We didn’t care that we were the only grown-ups in a sea of kids running around, excitedly pushing their way against the others in a labyrinth of a line. Most of all, we didn’t care that it was Sunday and we will be going back to reality the next day.

P.S. Please forgive my blurred and grainy photos. All were taken using Instagram. I brought my toy camera though. Films are still undeveloped as of this writing.
{ On Film and Affinity }

February 25, 2012

Hello, little space. Time to dust you off. It’s one of those rare moments when I feel like sharing. So as long as my shell is 3 feet away from me, let me tell you a story.

Well, not really a story but a pile of (scanned) film photographs I took during my trip to Palawan last year. Boy, how I miss the place right now. I took a 3-day leave off Manila just to breathe some fresh air and unwind from the stress and mundaneness of my current life, that is, my job actually. Besides, I’ve always been lying around in my shell after work and that’s not healthy. In the comfort of your own shell, life can be drab.

Leaving Pandan Island, where I tossed my vanity aside because I fell in love with the sea and the life underneath it.

Arwa. One of the two strangers we befriended on our trip. She was collecting shells on the shore.

Everything cerulean.

Mangroves. Brackish water that reminds me of crocodiles and nasty creatures.

Those rays of sunlight that calmed me.

A stranger crashing with the ripples.

My favorite photo of the trip. An abandoned boat.

Who wouldn’t be spending a memorable trip without your best buddy?

I have to admit this set of photographs is the second roll of film I had developed since 2010, when I first acquired my first ever vintage manual camera. I’ve just ventured to film photography in 2010 and did not immediately dive into it. I got busy with work, the usual lame excuse of lazy uninspired people like me.

Three months have passed and I still long to visit that place again. It feels like home. I know it’s probably too early to claim such affinity with a small town. But I don’t know. I have a gut feeling we’ll meet soon.

Puerto Princesa, Palawan

November 11-14, 2011
{ Black and Wild }

October 9, 2011

I love posters, and fonts, and black and white images. Put them all together with a sentence or phrase that nobody understands but you and that’s your logo that will always remind you about a particular moment in your life, or in this case, a person and a nasty secret. I used to make this during my free time and getting-to-know-you days with Illustrator back then. If an event is memorable enough, I make a poster or a logo for it. I just make sure that no one understands the meaning subtly created with it.

*mountain image used nicked from ffffound.com
{ Brainchild #1: The Futuristic Bookmark }

October 8, 2011

*This is a late post, but as the cliché goes, it’s better late than never, anyway.

A week ago, I was going through a pile of mess in my room when this overwhelming urge to do something creative out of the scraps of paper and stash of brochures from random shops drove me mad. I call this “creativity attack”.

I noticed that whenever I am stressed, I just flip and experience this fit of creativity. From there I just grab whatever I could reach on my desk and make something out of nothing. I scan through pages of ignored books, cut words out of hifalutin paragraphs in a magazine, vandalize our corporate publications, and borrow my brother’s art kit.

My brainchild is a personalized bookmark from a Starbucks brochure, a roll of developed film, bus tickets, and our company’s centennial publication (which I think our company should have just converted into cash).

Photos above show the two sides of the bookmark. The second photo is my favorite because it has a photo of a police car in Tokyo, and a polaroid-ish image of an astronaut. It also has cut out numbers and bar code label. The product took me almost an hour to finish. The adrenaline rush left me exhausted though I know it looks like as simple as a grade school kid’s art project in the photo.

The last time I made a bookmark was in first year high school. Oh, I remember it clearly now. The short bookmark was made out of an old folder, blue stationery paper, stickers, and was hand-printed with a name I dare not mention here. :p

So now you ask what is the significance of all this babble, eh? I want to prove to myself that I still have a life out of my mundane corporate duties. I want to feel alive and dreaming again. I used to have this passion that I lost a year ago. I’m afraid my creative brain juice has ran dry. Nevertheless, I am not quitting. Not this time.

Hello, it’s been ages since you’ve last heard from me. 🙂
{ The Inevitable B }

August 30, 2011

We are all running away from something. If you agree with me, you already know what it is exactly that you are running away from. Otherwise, you don’t know it yet and that’s worse.