Just like everyone else's year-ender post. Only that it's different. :-)

What essentially comes in my mind right now is what Nicole Krauss once said:

“When will you learn that there isn’t a word for everything?”

True that. So, instead of thinking about a word for everything, I would rather put this on by thanking. 

I have here some recipients:

1. GOD

To the Most Highest, I come to You today-- to thank Thee for a year that's done, and Thee also, for the coming one. 

Lord, You have been there to keep me whole throughout the past year and I am counting all the gains and losses with all joy because You made my life purposely driven in Your will. 

You break and make me only to teach me what I have to learn in this life. 

It wasn't a pretty easy year for me, Lord, I know, but Your grace has been ever-sufficient to me. And I can never thank you enough for all these. 

You have kept me walking. You have kept Your precious promises. You have fought and claimed that the battle is Yours. You left me wanting for no more.

And for these, my only prayer is that, once again, make the next 365 days of my life Yours. Take all of me and let it be used for Your glory. :-) 

2. FAMILY

To my ever-dearests, I love you. 

To my mommy who's been my filter and sponge, thank you v.much! I wouldn't be as enduring as I am if not for the things that I've seen in you. It is from you also, whom I draw out my strength. Ikaw lang kakampi ko lagi eh. Haha! 

Just so you know, I keep all the pieces of advice well in my heart and mind and as well as the generic names of those medicines in my planner (Sorry po, I'm really bad in keeping those labels). 

P.S. And for pushing me to wear dresses and make-ups, thanks always. Hihi. You're right, I shouldn't have wished for a pair of chucks and a knapsack. ;-) Prolly a nice and huge shoulder bag and ballet flats instead?

:-) Love you, mother goose!

To my daddy who's been the living rod of guidance in my life, I can only sum up everything by saying thank you. I have learned a lot from you, dad. Read: A LOT. You have always been the constitution personified. Some may not understand you, but don't you worry, your daughter is one of the few who tries to (along with mom, my sibs and a man you know of.) In all good ways, I appreciate the times wherein I have to be under your discipline just because I know from Whom and Where you get all the rules. And you will never run out of ways to make me walk in the straight path. I'm sorry for disappointing you because of my stuborness, but I promise to make it up to you with every chance I get and that will be always :-) 

P.S.

I will always be my daddy's girl. Just growing, maturing, learning. 

You are my mentor, my jedi master. Love you, 'di! 

P.P.S.

To my parents, I saw the love of Christ in you. :-) 

To my brothers Joshua and Paolo-- laugh out loud! Haha! I love you both in all ways! Thank you so much for all the fun and not-so-fun times. I was looking through our kid pictures the other day and I can't help but laugh at how we've grown up together. You see how my look changed? LOL! We've had a lot of countless catfights that we could laugh and learn about now. They say they're normal for kids like us. And I've always been thankful to the Lord for having you both in my life. Thanks also for the love and respect that you're giving me as your ate. :-) High five to that! Here's to more bonding moments! I love, love, you Josh and Siopao!

3. FRIENDS

Should auld acquaintance be forgotten and never brought to mind? 

To those who know who you are, I am glad and thankful to have each and every one o'you in my whole 2010. I won't be naming your names 'cause I might miss out on someone due to memory failure, but as I've said, you can tag yourself here if you're sure that you're my friend. ;-) Okeh? 

My best friends are the photographs that remind me of a lot of memories and more than a thousand words;

My church friends are my accountability partners, my co-fishermen and servants in Christ who I grow up with spiritually. 

My USTe friends are more than my academic tag-alongs, the people I burn the midnight oil with-- they are the few good ones who know about how I deal with my studies.  3 months left for all my journmates and off we soar! 

I love you belly much!!

4. FRIENDLIER

Thanks for Autumn and everything that goes with it. :-) I've known you as God's first and that's the best deal that I love about you.  

The project will always be yours.
I will see you soon. 

Here's to more P.S.es!

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

FOR EVERYTHING, I give all my thanks to the God of my life Who Himself gave and taketh this year away with so much love, grace and faithfulness. :-) 

Semper Fi, You are.

Always faithful.

*Semper fi has been my lappy's password all year round. Shhh.. ;-)

HAPPY NEW YEAR TO YOU!

Q012

I hope you will have a wonderful year, that you'll dream dangerously and outrageously, that you'll make something that didn't exist before you made it, that you will be loved and that you will be liked, and that you will have people to love and to like in return. And, most importantly (because I think there should be more kindness and more wisdom in the world right now), that you will, when you need to be, be wise, and that you will always be kind.

                                                                                                                                                                                              Neil Gaiman

Q011

May your coming year be filled with magic and dreams and good madness. I hope you read some fine books and kiss someone who thinks you're wonderful, and don't forget to make some art -- write or draw or build or sing or live as only you can. And I hope, somewhere in the next year, you surprise yourself.

                                                                                                                                       Neil Gaiman

NOTICE

Henceforth, all posts will be for the new year that's named 2011.

This year, I believe, has a lot of things to look forward to. :-) 

And by the grace of God, all will be well and all will be met. 

God bless you who reads this. 

Q010

Lay me down on a bed of roses;

Sink me in a river at dawn;

Send me away with the words of a love song.

                                                                                                                   The Band Perry

STRAIGHT FROM THE BOOK: MY NAME IS MEMORY By Ann Brashares

Ann*As promised*

• I have seen beauty in countless things. 
• She honored herself with the idea that maybe he needed her, that maybe she was the one who could understand him. 
• "If he liked you, you would know it."
• How many times could you give up on someone you loved?
• "This might be the last time I see him, " she said plaintively. "I don't know what will happen after this. I need to make him remember me." 
• "I thought the year would end and we would all go our separate ways and we could never have talked to each other," she said bravely.
• "I'm so sorry. I love you. Do you know that?" He was holding her, pressing his face desperately in her hair. "I always have."
• He'd push her. He'd scared her. He besieged her. He'd vowed he wouldn't and he did.
• She is my doing and my undoing. She always had been.
• He tricked himself into thinking that she would look into his eyes and remember, that love would conquer all.
• "You were supposed to remember... him." Esme said it loudly and with indignation. "You were supposed to remember how you loved him. He said he would come back, and you promised you would remember him."
• "I thought maybe you finally gave up on Daniel and decided to move on, but now I'm suddenly thinking that's not the whole story."
•  That was the first time I knew her and loved her. I loved her innocently then, I promised you. Even in my mind.
• How much silence was lonely? How much attention was unsettling? How little attention was cold?
• There are short periods of joy you have to stretch through of empty years... You have to make them last as well as you can.
• "You're a good man and I do not understand you."
• When you live as long as I do, always is a crippling distance.
• Smell was like the wormhole connecting you to the other parts. Memories of smell didn't fade, and they short-circuited your entire psychology. It is the closest thing to time travel on this earth.
• As I've said it's desire more than anything else that keeps us coming back for more. 
• "I loved him. He didn't want to leave me. He said we'd be together again. He said he wouldn't ever forget me, no matter what, and I have to try not to forget him. That's why I wrote the note."
• "This didn't happen by accident. You are my first memory every time, the single thread in all of my lives. It's you who makes me a person."
• "I'm sorry for what you've been through," she said. "I can't stand to think of the pain you've been in. You deserve better."
• "I'm a stubborn chit, you know." I held her hard. "Yes, you are. But you are not hopeless."
• "You'll fall in love again. And maybe you'll look back and remember me every so often. And when you come back again, I will be waiting for you. I will find you."
• Please believe him. Keep your heart open to him. He can make you happy. He has always loved you, and you once loved him with all your heart.
• "You are a hoarder," Ben said to me once. "You hate to let go."
• "Attachment disorder" it said in big, sharp print at the top.
• It was the thought of her that kept me moving forward.
• "Love who you love while you have them. That's all you can do. Let them go when you must.if you know how to love, you'll never run out."
• "You love your memory but you need to love your girl," she said by way of parting. "You remember what is lost, and you forget what's right in front of you." 
• "Next time?" "Next time,"she said. It was a ritual between them. It was always next time. She wanted something to hold on to so she could believe in next time.
• Some chances you really did lose.
• "I still love you, and I think about you all the time. I'm not down there. I'm right here."
• He loved it because he'd been loved.
• It was not a smile but like a smile.It wasn't a face of fear.It was an expression of faith more than anything. She had faith in him and the things he promised her. She trusted him.
• No! If you don't have a choice, you had to make a choice. If you didn't have options, you made some. You couldn't just let the world happen to you. 
• "I know I said I'd let you, but I can't."
• He had to fight. That's all he had. Not memories, nor experiences, not skills. He had a will. And his will was to fight until he couldn't fight anymore.
• Don't you go yet, he begged his heart.

"I need to tell you something."

"Okay."

"I'm glad you told me."

"Yes, because now I can tell you that it's okay."

"What Daniel taketh away, Daniel giveth."

"What do you mean?"

"You gave more than you took, my love. We're all square."

• I get defeated or discouraged, and I die because I've figured there's always a new life and it will be better. But nothing can be better than this life, because I have you.
• You promised me, she said to him in her thoughts every morning and night and a thousand times in between. I love you. I won't give up on you.
• Love demands everything, they say, but my love for you demands only this: that no matter what happens or how long it takes, you'll keep faith in  me, you'll remember who we are, and you'll never feel despair. Yours forever,...

RUGRATS

Me and my brother Pao | Before going to the clan's Christmas party,
we stopped over a flower shop in Tagaytay to buy lola some flowers and pots.
Yeah, we were left inside the SUV. Thus, this. 

STRAIGHT UP

Yes, this space badly needs real updates. I've been such a busy bee lately (yessir, even on a Christmas break) due to thesis. :-)

Well anyways, since I'm already here, I'll just tell you about how I was while I'm out of here:

1. As to what I've said, my partner and I are currently taking care of the last 2 chapters of our thesis. And with that being said, it has been my daily grind to go to The National Library to gather data or to stay somewhere (usually in Starbucks) for at least four hours to tally the results from our coding sheets OR to do both. So, I usually leave the house at 7:30a.m. and go back at 9/10p.m. It is quite tedious, but I am keeping my hopes up that by the grace of God, we will be able to finish it on time (2nd deadline, I mean, on January 8).

2. I already got my Starbucks 2011 planner last Monday (20 December-- 5 days earlier than my deadline). Huzzah! :-)

3. My daily Cavite-Manila-and-back trips are being spent up very well on reading. :-) Last week, I finished reading Ann Brashares' My Name is Memory in three rounds.

I will post some quotes here, I promise. :-)

3. Just finished reading On Love by Alain de Botton. Man, love philosophized?? Whoa. I am so short of time, seriously, to do a review of it, but anyways, what I can say about On Love is that I saw myself switching to each and every character's personality all throughout the book.

Another thing: You better watch out on going to airports especially when you're single and available. Hahaha! 'cause you might fall in love with a lady named Chloe. ;-)

I'm giving it 4 stars. Please spare some time to read it. :-)

This is one of my favorite lines:

"Every fall into love involves the triumph of hope over self-knowledge. We fall in love hoping we won't find in another what we know is in ourselves, all the cowardice, weakness, laziness, dishonesty, compromise, and stupidity. We throw a cordon of love around the chosen one and decide that everything within it will somehow be free of our faults. We locate inside another a perfection that eludes us within ourselves, and through our union with the beloved hope to maintain (against the evidence of all self-knowledge) a precarious faith in our species." 

4. I had a very merry Christmas with the fambam! We had so much fun time with my ever-so-loved Lola Chol and the rest of the Pineda folks. Sublime!

5. Today, is the 27th of December, a national holiday. That means, we will have another day of break in thesis work and I will start on reading Harper Lee's To Kill A Mockingbird.

So, off I go and will write on till next time! Ciao!

/pardon this entry

REALITY INSIDE A COFFEE SHOP

(Click foto to enlarge)

I KNOW I WILL NEVER BE

... as awesome in cooking as my daddy.
Kekekeke :-p

Who says you can't treat yourself on a Home-Alone Friday? :-)

Grilled pork and honey BBQ fries 

And this is one among the many things that I can't do in the dormitory. :-)

Q009

The heart has its reasons

which reason knows nothing of.

                                        Blaise Pascal

Lord, give me just enough.

Not too much that I'll forget you;
not too little that I'll forsake you;
but just enough.

Just enough to get by.

HOME IS WHERE MY HEART IS

Home = Hope

A haven that vacuums almost all of my insecurities.
A place where burdens grow lighter.

In sheer desperation, I just want to be in the comforts of our home, bury my face on my parents' shoulders and tell them how bad my day went. I wanted them to know that today, I am unwell and traumatized by what had happened earlier and how I opted not to tell the people around me why I am like this.

I need my dad's advice.

I need my mom's comforting words.

I badly need to go home.

But where am I now?
About 60kms and 3 hrs away from my mom.
Countries away from my dad.
And yeah, actually, just a day away from them.

This is the  time when I just wanted to be a daughter, let alone being a student who needs to stay here in the city to meet some deadlines.

P.S.
Of course, I know I'm not the worst, the farthest, and the saddest. And that I should be thankful about. Still.

P.P.S
Thank you, Heavenly Dad, for Your saving grace that keeps me on looking forward. I love you.

P.P.P.S.
/EDIT *phone rings* It's daddy.