Monday, October 27, 2008

Quiz Time!

Lolz! This is actually quite spot-on about certain things weheheheh...

Your result for Are You a Jackie or a Marilyn? Or Someone Else? Mad Men-era Female Icon Quiz...

You Are a Marilyn!

mm.marilyn_.jpg


You are a Marilyn -- "I am affectionate and skeptical."


Marilyns are responsible, trustworthy, and value loyalty to family, friends, groups, and causes. Their personalities range broadly from reserved and timid to outspoken and confrontative.






How to Get Along with Me

  • * Be direct and clear

  • * Listen to me carefully

  • * Don't judge me for my anxiety

  • * Work things through with me

  • * Reassure me that everything is OK between us

  • * Laugh and make jokes with me

  • * Gently push me toward new experiences

  • * Try not to overreact to my overreacting.




What I Like About Being a Marilyn

  • * being committed and faithful to family and friends

  • * being responsible and hardworking

  • * being compassionate toward others

  • * having intellect and wit

  • * being a nonconformist

  • * confronting danger bravely

  • * being direct and assertive




What's Hard About Being a Marilyn

  • * the constant push and pull involved in trying to make up my mind

  • * procrastinating because of fear of failure; having little confidence in myself

  • * fearing being abandoned or taken advantage of

  • * exhausting myself by worrying and scanning for danger

  • * wishing I had a rule book at work so I could do everything right

  • * being too critical of myself when I haven't lived up to my expectations




Marilyns as Children Often

  • * are friendly, likable, and dependable, and/or sarcastic, bossy, and stubborn

  • * are anxious and hypervigilant; anticipate danger

  • * form a team of "us against them" with a best friend or parent

  • * look to groups or authorities to protect them and/or question authority and rebel

  • * are neglected or abused, come from unpredictable or alcoholic families, and/or take on the fearfulness of an overly anxious parent




Marilyns as Parents

  • * are often loving, nurturing, and have a strong sense of duty

  • * are sometimes reluctant to give their children independence

  • * worry more than most that their children will get hurt

  • * sometimes have trouble saying no and setting boundaries

Take Are You a Jackie or a Marilyn? Or Someone Else? Mad Men-era Female Icon Quiz at HelloQuizzy

Thursday, October 23, 2008

Waaaah! I'm taking the NCLEX tomorrow!

Oh my god! It's tomorrow! God help me. Please, please help me pass.

*insert nervous laughter*

Okay, if you see me, I don't look panicky at all. I'm trying to keep my mind off the fact that I'm taking a $500+ exam tomorrow. To help that, I stopped reviewing since last weekend and started watching several anime series that I have stored on Genrou's harddrive. So far I've finished watching:

- until episode 21 of Saiunkoku Monogatari season 2
- School Days
- a couple of the more recent episodes of Naruto Shippuuden and Gintama
- The Third
- Ghost Hound
- and a few episodes of Jigoku Shoujo Futakomori

I used to absolutely hate Gintama coz of how they started the series. Episode 1, which is an hour-long special, just really turned me off. But then I though why not keep watching the next ten episodes, give it a chance... now I'm at episode 83 and I've gotten used to the Gintama-style humor. I love the characters for their quirks, I mean where else can you find a bad-ass Shinsengumi Vice-Captain who prefers to eat anything by drowning it in mayo (and I mean drowning by emptying the entire bottle's content on a stick of dango kind of drowning)? So yes, I ended up liking Gintama lolz it grew on me i guess... it's a good pick-me-upper after watching a serious show like The Third.

Ghost Hound felt a bit rushed during the end but what a wonderful background music. Like I told Ana-nechan, if she ends up watching it she should make sure she's not alone in the room and it's light out. It's not horror. The show is a psychological/supernatural suspense and the sounds help make it so. It was just so creepy! I mean, sure the boys were going through OBE and stuff but the way they delivered it made it seem so normal, so very plausible. And that's what makes it creepy. That everything seemed so normal and yet not.

School Days... gawds. Why I chose to download and watch it I dunno anymore. At least it was just 12 episodes. I read that there was a lot of noise about the final episode and I'm not surprised. Geez what an ending. I never played the game and so I had no idea that was gonna happen. But lolz! Talk about karma. What happened to Makoto was just... on the one hand I was glad he got what he deserved, but another part of me was sad coz in that way he would never be able to learn how wrong he was and grow up. The girls were victims in entirety. Willing victims albeit, but victims nonetheless. I still can't believe how STUPID they were acting just for a single worthless idiotic boy. Ah well, it's just an anime... but in a way also a social commentary hahahah -_-0

Will be going back to watching Jigoku Shoujo now. Maybe I'll go to the mall later when it opens... do some therapy through (window) shopping ^_______^

Wednesday, October 22, 2008

Bloghopping Moleskine Giveaway: Presented by Avalon.ph & Wifely Steps

I remember buying my first moleskine... the sheer nerve-wracking anticipation as I tore open that plastic cover and inhaled the scent of my new moleskine sketchbook. It was an impulse buy; something that just screamed to me to buy it despite the numerous empty sketchbooks and sketchpads I still had lying around my room. It just called to me, and I unhesitatingly answered. I never regretted that decision.

Anyways, I got an email early today from Mr. Jasper Ong of Avalon.ph which announced their tie-up with various other sites that would encourage bloghopping and give away free moleskine notebooks. Imagine that?! Free Moleskine notebooks!!! I just had to try my luck and see if I could win ^_^

The contest was started off this week (October 22 - 29) by Wifely Steps with her own set of rules for the contest. Rule 1 asks the participant to answer a simple question:

What would YOU write in your Moleskine?


Since mine is a sketchbook, it's half-filled up with drawings and doodles and short phrases that can be considered poems in a way... If I had a Moleskine Ruled Notebook like the one Wifely Steps is giving away I'd write about my one secret... the story of my decade-old not quite-unrequited love for someone I met when I was still so very young. I've always been meaning to write it down somewhere, but I've never felt inspired enough to sit in front of a computer to type it all up. Hopefully writing it in a moleskine notebook would inspire me enough to start writing and fill those pages. In this way, not only will I be writing an autobiography, it would also be cathartic for me so I hope I win that notebook hehehe ^___^

Wednesday, October 08, 2008

LSS

There are two actually... right now, on loop when I listen through either iTunes on Genrou or on Cloud (my iPod).

MORARU no Soushiki (Moral no Soushiki / Funeral of Morals) by Angela Aki featured in Today, her 2nd album. You can find the lyrics here.

I especially love this part which gives me goosebumps whenever I listen to it:

Doujou ga hageshiku unazuki
Hakushu ga okori
Shinjitsu ga risei no mimimoto de itta

“Watashi mo musuko ga ita no
Kibou ga inakunatte mo kare wa ima demo
Mina no naka de ikite iru”


The translation I found translates it like this:

With the nodding of their heads and the
clapping of their hands they show their sympathy.
And Truth whispers to Reason:

“I had a son as well, and even
though Hope is no longer with us,
he continues to live inside of us”


*sigh* Makes me tear up coz I eventually think of the twins... ... ...

Anyways, Chouwa oto~with reflection~ by Kokia is the other one. You can find romanji lyrics here. The other night when I had this on repeat I actually dreamed about it, or a story that could be connected to it. Yes I know the song's already been used in an animated movie (in Giniro No Kami No Agito, to be exact), but apart from there being dragons in my dream the two stories are nowhere alike. Here's how it went, my dream I mean. At least, what I can remember of it.

There's this family of four brothers. I'm not entirely sure about who their parents were but the brothers were a tight-nit bunch. The eldest somewhat reminded me of Chad in Bleach, guess coz he had the same coloring and body type and quietness in terms of personality. He looked different from his brothers coz in my dream I knew that he wasn't connected to his family by blood. The two middle brothers were either twins or looked so much alike that they might as well had been. Think Fred and George from Harry Potter in terms of personality but not in looks. The middle brothers were also dark skinned. But no, not African American dark... more like Latino or Hispanic... if you get what I mean. Tanned. Just like their eldest brother. The one who looked like their mother, very fair skinned was the youngest who was still a teenager and in high school.

What I remember about the dream the most was that the youngest was complaining about why he looked the most different amongst his brothers, that he looked nothing like them. What was more, the brothers had these tattoos on them since they were young. On the eldest, a nearly full torso (back, chest and abdomen) tattoo that looked like a dragon about to fly mixed with tribal designs for the wings. The middle brothers had something similar, but theirs was like the half of each other's... like if they stood side by side their tattoos would look like one whole picture, but on their own looked like gibberish, just lines that one wouldn't be able to make out. Then the youngest only had a small (compared to his brothers anyways) one right smack in the middle of his chest that looked more like an eye with a wing or something like that if one looked really closely. So the youngest was complaining that how come he was the most different of the brothers, why was it only him who looked like their mom and most bitterly he complained about his small tattoo which was nothing, he said, not nearly enough if you compare it to his brothers.

The dream shifts perspective then. I get a flashback that involved the brothers' dad. He was talking with someone I wasn't able to see clearly coz the person was in shadows. He said that each of his younger sons would have to be given tattoos that looked similar to the one the eldest son had. And the tattoos were put on the boys when they were all still too young to know anything about it.

Then the dream shifts again and I was confronting the eldest. He was sitting slouched atop some steps in what looked like a park but it was night. City lights were beyond him at a distance. He was wearing a cotton v-neck t-shirt and I was standing over him from his right side when I saw the top part of his tattoo on his chest. I guess we were friends but new ones coz I was surprised when I saw his tattoo sticking out of his collar. I dropped down and yanked his shirt collar away from him so I could see the tattoo better. He didn't expect me to do that and was so surprised he just gawked at me for several minutes while I looked down his shirt. Then I realized what I was doing and I backed away blushing. Then the dream me for some reason remembered the flashback with the brothers' dad and I realized somehow that his wasn't a tattoo, it was a birthmark albeit it didn't look like one and passed for a tattoo coz it wasn't just one color although it was predominantly black.

And I woke up thinking, ah I finally found the last black dragon. My waking self knew that my dream self knew that because she was one herself, only of the red. And that she had her own hidden birthmark/tattoo as well that looked a lot like the eldest son's. I woke up to the part in Kokia's song wherein she says the numbers: 3 25 15 21 23 1 and I realized so that's the hint to the brothers secret. There are three blood brothers. One was not of their blood but the remaining one of a certain special race. 25, 15, 21, and 23 were the ages of the four guys. *shrug* now that I'm just remembering it, it sounds kinda silly, doesn't it? But while I was waking up it seemed to make a heck of a lot of sense. Well it was a dream after all.

Tuesday, October 07, 2008

Gawds... less than 3 weeks left

Okay... more like 16 days left before I have to take the NCLEX. My insides are starting to coil and twist, and it doesn't feel nice. I'm upping my water intake as well as fiber coz I usually get constipated when I'm stressed, and I want my bowel movements to be at their most normal during the test date itself.

My monthly menses didn't come in September. Yes, sigh... it skipped again. Not that I'm surprised coz I did stop drinking my pills in August. No, I'm not pregnant. Thank you very much for being concerned about that, but really... no. This skipping happens all the time and is the reason why my OB-GYN told me to drink those pills in the first place. Double sigh. It's just that I've been drinking them for more than a year now and I just wanted to check if my darned monthly has become regular. Well, it hasn't. Darn it. Add this to the stress I'm feeling with the test coming and minding Tito Toto... well, like I said, I'm not surprised it skipped.

Which means the additional 5lbs won't come off and that it'll probably add itself to the other five this October... Gah. Better keep a closer tab on what I eat and drink. Which reminds me, I had an agreement with Ana-nechan to lose a minimum of 10lbs and hopefully a max of 20lbs by the end of November. I told her it's a tall order, that heheheh, but we're both gonna try our darned best to succeed. I started a food journal. No it's not online. At least I'm still debating whether I put what I write on it online as well. Well, we'll see.

Gawds... Tita Betty is such a drama queen sometimes. I just received an SMS from her saying: "Kmusta n c Toto? Cra ang PLDT namin, hirap ako climb d stairs. Regards." She's checking in coz she hasn't gone to see Tito in around a week now and Tito Susing (her husband, Tito Toto and my mom's older bro) explicitly asked her to visit him daily. Geeeezzz... it's not like the stairs at Tito's house are so steep and hard to climb! They're actually wide enough and easy to climb even using a cane like Tito (who's suffering from hemiplegia!) does, so come on! Who the hell does she think she's fooling?! Sides, so what if her PLDT landline is busted. She lives two blocks away from here for crying out loud! She can walk the entire length of SM Pampanga without breaking sweat and she can't trudge through less than half that distance to check on Tito? B-f-in-S.

In fairness, I haven't been over since Friday last week. I asked Tita Pes for a two week off from staying over at their house and minding Tito so I can concentrate on studying (CRAMMING!) for the NCLEX. Which reminds me, I better wrap this post up and get back to studying. Waaaaahh!!! I have 16 days left!!! *panic panic panic*