December catch-up post

My blog's readership has grown a lot since my first post. I used to think of my blog as a diary that the world could read but would probably never bother to, and I liked that. That's why when you go scan my archives, sometime around April 2010, you'll find a lot of short, meaningless posts that were the product of an idle, summer-soaked mind. (Like this post, for example, which is nothing but a poorly constructed whine.)

But the more I realized that people did actually come and visit this site, people I don't even know, the more I felt pressured to churn out better posts, to write more coherently, to not be such a goofball online. Plenty of my previous posts were written with an audience in mind. Perhaps that audience has enjoyed reading those entires. But now that I want to return to posting randomness on my blog, I just feel like I can't. Perhaps this is why I've been updating less and less. It's been more than a month since my last post, and I realize that the reason for this is simple: I've stopped writing for myself.

I know some people who will argue that this kind of thinking is selfish and self-serving. Well, what can you do? This started out as a personal blog, after all, and I want it to return to exactly that. This was my blog. This is my blog. I'm making it mine again.

And to informally mark the returning of this once quality blog to its former crappy state, here is a lazily done catch-up blog post about my December:

At UST for the NMAT on Dec 2. I already prepared half a blog post about this,
but I ended up not finishing it out of laziness. The short version of it is:
I woke up cranky and nervous, took the NMAT, and rode trains. 

I was in Cagayan de Oro when Pablo hit.  Look at what it did to our yard.

Mangoes from our mango tree, scattered everywhere. But whatever. We're lucky no lives were lost. 

This is a pixelated picture of the large crowd that gathered over Kauswagan Bridge.
Everyone came to look at the rising river.
There were so many people.

I bought these mouse shoes as a joke. I was supposed to wear white
shoes to my high school graduation, so I picked these out to be funny.
I ended up forgetting about them, and they spent three years
being hidden away in a dusty shoe box. My mom dug them up recently.
(They're broken right now though, as much as I want to keep wearing them.)
Rap thinks they're stupid, by the way. I strongly disagree.

Here lies an inflatable Santa, passed out in front of a Toy Kingdom. It's okay,
Santa. We're all a little stressed come the Holidays.

This is the view from the Clean Air Initiative office in Ortigas. It's way up in the 35th floor of a
skyscraper owned by Robinson's, and I don't think I've ever been this high up in a building before.
Rap, Cheryl, Roch, and I visited CAI to talk about thesis topics. Riding the MRT
is quite unpleasant. People pile into the trains in the same way one would cram
clothes into maletas - by planting your butt on top of the whole pile and pushing down hard. 

This green tangle of straws is a nest that Rap, Jules, Sheena and I made for a Physics
activity. That white thing in the center of it is a chicken egg, which we were meant to protect. We
had to ensure that our egg survived being dropped from the second floor of the building,
which it thankfully did. But it cracked after it was dropped from the third floor. 

This is a bad picture of a wonderful Christmas party with my Health Sci batch.
It was a really nice night, and I had on my nice, improvised Christmas garb,
 which you will never get to see because the only picture I have of myself from that night is this:

That is a green cardigan, okay. And I had a red shirt on inside that too, and white pants!
Doesn't get any Christmasyier than that!

Jules and I put together this surprise birthday trip to Subic for Rap!
 You can see him in the reflection of my shades (which don't fit me
 that well, because they're actually Vito's.)

That's my indoor plant Gibson, being inspected by airport authorities. Apparently,
you need a permit to bring plants aboard a plane.

Here is my face! This was taken after my third visit to the beach in two weeks,
but I don't seem like I'm any tanner. 

My brother Luigi, proudly hugging The Dog Known As Buddy.
We just recently figured out that he's a human from the future named AOADPA(sub 1). 

That's it! I'm gonna go play Little Big Planet with my brother now, who is such a whiny little poopypants.