As I await the addition of one more year, I take a brief look at the years that went by.

10 years ago
—————

I was wrapping up what looked to be the last of my days in Iligan.

I haven’t been back since.

9 years ago
—————

I was wondering whether I had made the right choice.

I hated those 7-8:30 pm classes because the journey home was long and exhausting

8 years ago
—————

During Aikido classes I met wendy. she taught me how to dance.

They said she was a lesbian. Probably she was.

I didn’t mind because she was the only one worth remembering that  summer.

However … In the same class, there was Joyce, a senior Psych. major student.

To date, she’s probably the only psych. major who didn’t try to psychoanalyze me.

How are they?

At the end of summer, I was making plans to enter a research lab.

7 years ago
—————

At Zambales I learned the truth: Not everything that starts well is guaranteed to end up better as well.

6 years ago

—————

A year of heartbreak.

A new hope.

5 years ago

—————

Victory … paid for by inumerable defeats. I have defended my undergraduate thesis.

But the long road to victory had taken its toll:

I lost a lot of sleep during experiments and while writing my draft.

I nearly bankrupted my "savings"

I’ve lost contact with a lot of my friends.

I’ve yet to hear something from them.

4 years ago

—————

Quantum mechanics reloaded.

Electromagnetics popped.

Thermodynamics was a cold play.

That year of teaching in UP would be my last.

3 years ago

—————

I missed the graduation train.

2 years ago

—————

I tried to catch the same train. I missed it again.

I would catch a ride later that year.

1 year ago

—————

revenge of the sith cometh.

star wars comes to a full circle.

May the addition of one more year be the dawning of a better wold.

One final thought - nothing scientific, purely personal. Seen from up here, everything looks different … Time bends and space is boundless. It squashes a man’s ego. He begins to feel like no more than a mote in the eye of eternity. And he is nagged by a question: what, if anything will greet us on the end of man’s first journey to a star? Are we to believe that throughout these thousands of galaxies, these millions of stars, only one, that speck of solar dust we call earth, has been graced — or cursed by human life?

I have to doubt it.

                        —- Col. Taylor, Planet of the Apes (1968)

1. The Movie "Signs" by M. Night Shamalan demonstrated what I’ve long suspected to be the cornerstone of every (countryside) american home: the baseball bat.

2. Democracy is overrated.

3. at the height of paranoia, you’d say: they are on to us.

4. lessons from game theory: fool me once shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me.

5.  the genetic eve predates the genetic adam by more than 100,000 years. it’s time to rethink that old story about women fashioned out of man’s ribs.

6. months after tea emerged as a popular "healthy drink", i saw a billboard touting coffee as containing more antioxidants (than the former), right along the expressway. great. Now I know what Corleone meant by "Just when I thought I was out. They pulled me right back in".

7. ergo, I started drinking coffee yesterday.

8. i don’t remember why i told my grade one teacher how wrong she was about me.

9. if I were to think about a possible (bleak) future, I’d be divided among two possibilities: cockroaches surving a nuclear winter (at the expense of mankind), or one in which i’d find the Statue of Liberty’s head along the beach.

10. when people say goddamn you, do they believe in a god?

11. it just doesn’t make any sense. politics, that is.

12. if i had lived during the time of tokugawa in japan, i would have been selling tofu…

13. i’ve just discovered that we can be pretty stupid at times. it seems invariably proportional to our intelligence. how do you measure intelligence? (* dael walks away *)

14. some nights ago, i was hoping to drop this line: it can’t rain all the time. it didn’t rain at all, that night.

15. a friend asked me whether i had slept at the lab, i told her, no i haven’t had any sleep yet. when she asked me why, i remember telling her, that’s what classes are for!

16. it’s a good thing i got this ROYGBIV thing memorized because I haven’t seen any rainbows for a while. why do i care about seeing rainbows? (you may ask), if the biblical Noah did exist, he would know…

17. I stared at a replica of the Mona Lisa for about 15 minutes. I don’t recall having any revelations similar to those guys in ….

18. angts like: the day seems longer… the nights are endless. i am the lord of midnight.

19. I started taking up HP Lovecraft in my spare time … his Nihilistic view of the universe is …. insightful …. it’s profound …

20. Cthulu ftagn

21. if i had a box like pandora, it would be filled with unkept promises and unfulfilled dues… that’s evil…

22. After many years my constellation know-how improved. i can now identify 3. that’s …. pathetic.

23. we still don’t know the answer to a lot of questions that starting with why