music: jimmy eat world "praise chorus" & hot hot heat "get in or get out"

Last weekend my brothers and i went up to the bay to see lolo... he was in the hospital for half a week, and we wanted to check up on him, so we kinda organized the "least expensive road trip ever"... spent only 20 bucks the whole trip (excluding gas), cause we had hella relatives feeding us... mmm. i had a pretty ugly cold/cough the whole week(end) and i bought me some tylenol sinus (day/night). we had a small gathering on saturday night, and had some chinese food... i took the night pills, not realizing that they were to also help you get to sleep. my rationalization was that since it was night, i'd use the night pills. well, after i ate, i went to my cousin's room, and thought to myself, "hey, these pills really work! my headache's gone!"... and then, two minutes later, i pass out. like as if i was drunk pass out. i think i passed out so hard that i was laying down on the carpet with my hand supporting my head (as if to watch tv) and then waking up to a NUMB arm. i then woke up, found his bed, then slept some more.... for like another 1-2 hours.

so anyway, while we were taking care of lolo on our "shift" (the family had shifts to visit lolo, kinda to make sure that he's doing alright), i got to reading the biochem book. suffice to say, i'm a nerd; i was pretty interesed with reading a textbook, of all things. i also revisited a diagram of the velasco family tree to see what additions were made to the tree... after counting, i realized that i have 31 primary cousins and ~13 nieces and nephews in my dad's side of the family! Most of my dad's family lives up north, so i though to myself: my parents were married in san francisco and my dad's side was on U.S. soil before my mom's... excluding other reasons, if my parents didn't have residency in socal, there would have been a very good chance i would have grown up in the bay... crazy how things come to pass.

i saw kami for the first time in a long time... he was hella mad at anna g. (of CCC fame) cause he was pretty much unable to attend just ONE r.e.a.c.h (reaffirming ethinic awareness and community harmony) class... these past two years on puso board kinda exemplifies how "power trippy" she is and why we don't really ask her for much help in the first place.

muwah! i got an e-mail from ryan with incriminating pictures of some of my board members livin' it up :o)... they'll be up on the website soon... muhahha.

link

so tonight i just had MC practice and finished studying for biochem tonight... a little tired, so i'll take another tylenol sinus night pill and knock myself out ;).

~ja matte!

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why'd i write this at 1:22 am?

music: finch "letters to you" & michelle branch "all you wanted" (again)

so one of my friends tells me to get crackin' on these blogs (hi gen! lol, told u.) and i say... "ooooooookay, i guess". woohoo, i have (a) fan(s)!

well, anyway, we had our o chem midterm... i think i did alright, considering that i was nearly 3 weeks behind cause of the conference. stupid conference... ill get to that later. After that was the o chem lab. My lab TA is cool... he's all, "since some of you guys have a chem midterm tomorrow, you guys can leave... and the ones who think they have a midterm can go too". gunny fuy (<--dislexyia at its best... won't bother changing it). Went w/ mcpuggy to danielle and rozanno's birthday party. That was fun... We had green year spop people there, i found out that one of those spopers was in the same spop i attended (whoa!) and i saw ajiemar! man, that's as old as puso people come these days. scary that all of them hang around even after so many years since undergraduates... that's puso love :). So, after rock bottom, we went to the kaba AE @ hooters. eh, nothing new... as usual my kasama family was absent... and once again i felt like an outsider looking in... whatever.

Finished writing my spop application. Its a lot less painless than last year... funner actually, cause i had stuff to say. all i need is a pic of myelf. hmmph...

While writing up the spop apps, charchar and neogeo IM me saying that someone spraypainted "tagalog" on the HH building... For sure its not the p-community - that would be too stupid. Framed? i definitely think so... Just when you think this university was showing signs of progress and true free speech comes some punk-ass possibly sabotaging what we worked 2 long years for. yeah... but wouldn't it suck even more if it was some faculty or even a professor (i.e. Dean Lawrence) that did it with intention to Frame us? that would be hella shady.

so, things i was thinking about: 1. Although i still miss that girl, the board girls (i also realize i get more advice from girls than guys since in board) are telling me to go on... rationalizing the relationsihp, it would be very difficult to have one even if she does come back to the states... potential long distance relationship, so i've gone to bigger things... so that passively looking has turned into a kind of "passively looking - with intent" lol. at least, if anything does happen, maybe my annual S.A.D. could be over... 2. sleep is overrated, but it sure does feel good! 3. when in the world are they gonna finish that 405N -> 55W carpool lane interchange??! 3. and, i really need to clean up my room. If i had my webcam running, i'd show you what a mess with what a Co-Director and a PCN Co-Coordinator can do to a room.

Okay, so on to PHC. Conference was the scariest and most stressful thing i've ever done in my life. Scariest because i concretely knew half the schools coming were definitely coming... the other half was up for grabs, and stressful because of the amount of shit that had to be gone through to get a keynote speaker, schools, and getting a lax public-relations to start doing things. Sometimes, if i had to change things in board, it would have to rearrange the duties of some of those girls. I think that we only got 80 students partly because of lack of publicity. I feel that we had a chance to publicize this event for at least three weeks and we just blew it. The worst thing was explaining to the schools what happened to the lack of people (last year the same thing happened... not enough students... conference ended short) and the schools blowing back fake words of encouragment... "of course ill be here next year..." haha. whatever.

If i had the choice to do PHC again, i'd take it. But i have to do it w/ the other co-coord only because we realize (but a little too late) that we work really well as a team, and we know what we can do to change it and make it a really good conference. but the fourth one is in the books. But lets face it... we had the biggest budget, best food, and even phattest prizes... but no one to be there to see it. ahh.

so after the conference, i get really sick... not flu sick, but just nasty, groggy sick... to the point where i couldn't talk normally... i'm getting better (coincidentally right after i finished my MT) but i still need to sleep... and its getting late (3:10 AM here), so g'nite yall.

~ja matte!

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why'd i write this at 2:28 am?

music: nas "made you look"

gotta get working on this pre-lab... argh o chem. so quickie before i go...

funny how you can express so much feelings with little cylindrical pieces of sodium carbonate :).

~ja matte!

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why'd i write this at 12:37 am?

music: pinback "penelope"

last weekend was pretty tiring. My parents wanted to get a digital camera... so exited as i always am with gadgets, felt like helping out my mom w/ getting a camera. Too bad that every single camera that we wanted were out in the 5 out of the 6 stores we went to... everyone wanted the 4MP sony digicam and i guess everyoen bought all the cameras since the holiday season. But after the camera shopping, its been really tiring all the way into monday.

Yesterday drove back to irvine and waited for the taps teach in to happen. I was pretty impressed how taps transformed that one idea into a full-out game. In the end of the teach-in i was pretty excited yet also kinda apprehensive just cause i had the small feeling that we were (wrt puso) just thrown into doing all this stuff... but later i felt that we have a united cause, and that we should support and help them out, even if it means phone banking or even a rally. Later, we had a PHC committee meeting. I had nothing to say for the conference, so we pretty much just chilled and talked. after that, we had board meeting and that was fun. I think now we got the glitches out and i'm pretty excited that there are people on board that are pretty active and have something to say when something comes up.

So today wasn't so exciting as first week... it seems like first week was like welcome week where everyone was just greeting each other and just asking how their breaks have been... there was a lot less amount of people doing that this week. Its okay though, cause one of my classes was cancelled. So after that, i went to get some food and ate at home... assumed napping position and skipped my last class (doh!). That's the first class i skipped, i hope it doesn't snowball into more skipped classes (that always happens). After that i went w/ kuya and some of his friends to the spectrum to eat @ Red Robin. Jan needed to exchange her shoes over there, so right after, we went to the sports memorabilia store then to the crepes store for dessert. If i would be on a date, i think that would be the perfect place for dessert. That place is just lovely (*said in english accent*)!

SO this weekend is tahoe. Personally, I'm kinda scared at what will happen, especially with what went down last year. i consider myself to be a pretty shy guy, and that kind of environment i feel would probably make me feel very uncomfortable. But i'm going just because i want to see what goes on there and that i feel that you aren't a kaba member w/o going to taho at least once in your college lifetime. Well, we'll see what happens.

btw... i feel soo bad for taking note of the smallest things, but in the director's meeting, angel accidentally slipped, asking me "so, how's your girlfriend??" lol. If i only had one... but i did feel very flattered.

~ja matte!

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why'd i write this at 12:46 am?

music: people under the stairs "acid raindrops"

the period between christmas and new years was quite extensive... a lot happened in between them that i'll just list what happened:

1. sleep (oooh!)

2. my cousin's hook up @ toys r us

3. sad seeing my bro and other cousins going out and having fun

4. learning to play more guitar (i still really suck)

5. having daly city cousins come down and chill... having fun w/ them...

6. driving to barstow to pick up more undies (i calculated too few undies for the vegas trip) then to vegas

7. watching Society of Seven (those Filipino comedian guys... quite interesting) on new year's eve

8. walking, stopping, oooh-ing, and abosrbing the crazy crowds on the strip

9. getting horribly depressed hours before new years... yuck.

10. driving back home, then straight to irvine to go for classes

11. then driving back home again and driving straight to san francisco

12. getting that phone call from one of the board members' mom. worrying like hell for the board member's health (couldn't do anything else for 6 hours)

13. winning $6.00 at the horse races (woohoo!) from my lolo's 98th birt-day

14. driving back home again again, then straight to irvine again for meeting... meeting.

that was pseudo-chronological order. it was quite an emotional rollercoaster for me this past week. consiglieri says to just wait till summertime. i hope i can wait that long. I have cancer detection workshop for my meeting this quarter... i might need to put that to good use very soon. who knows...

so today was class... biochem and o chem... biochem was boring as hell cause the teacher was soooo monotanous. o chem was exciting... we had some diagnostic quiz that i kinda screwed up on, but she made her overview a little complicated at first but in the end very clear. class wasn't as great as MWF, but good. on a sidenote, i wouldn't think math professors would be hot, but my multivar. calc. professor is mighty tasteful. good eye candy to keep me "focused" lol.

anyway. after class we had our general meeting... i felt soo bad for forgetting one of our member's names that one second (chris) and totally not recognizing a member that was there since fall quarter (jun) and that was a real big kick in the glutes... but our meeting went well. our members had fun, we all had fun and it was great to see some of the alumni come back again. after that was the after event and i was surprised as well that there were a lot of members attending. bondfire was fun as hell... perfected the art of smore'ing.

finally, in keeping w/ the quiz tradition a la Heyitsjaz, i took an emode quiz (the classic star wars test) and im obi wan kenobi. how funny... fits my character... emode didn't have anything to paste, but interesting test. here's the link The Classic Star Wars Test

~ja matte!

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why'd i write this at 12:06 am?

music: nelly "arrr frrrce ones"

dude... my cousin gave us the hook-up from toys r us! lol. sweetness. lets just say that 20 bucks was enough for everything... heeh. anyway, we just came from a causa dinner/elections thing, and i'm finally glad that my bro's term's over... took him forever man! but yea, it was good times... it was cool seeing causa people i've never seen before step up to become in board. funny cause this party was like a kaba meeting - there were old people representin' their hometown... like "i'm so&so from the town of calolbon!!! w000 w000!" but now that tehre's a new set of leaders for the youth, that means that i'll be the advisor to the advisors :).

tomorrow we're going to las vegas w/ some family from up north... it's gonna be hella fun. can't wait to see what's gonnna happen in sin city during new years... if only i were a year older (o_O)...

since i had nothing else to do at home, i picked up the guitar and started practicing... good that i have a cousin trying to learn as well, so at least i won't be the other n00b trying to copy tabs from the internet. :)

~ja matte!

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why'd i write this at 6:50 pm?

music: phantom planet "one ray of sunlight"

i'm here at the apartment. Finished cleaning up the place. yesterday, at home i was looking through really old photo albums. i dunno what made me do it, but there were a lot of good times in those. i wished i was back at some of those memories, like in the phil. chillin' w/ the young folks during our medical mission, or when we had the family road trip to canada and were in our pimped out volvo rental or when we celebrated my lola's 90th a couple of years ago in san francisco (rest in peace lola). There were also some ugly times - pictures of our accident on our way to magic mountain in the range rover discovery. to recall how many times we rolled over or the mere thought of one passenger crashing out of tge window while it happened in that car is scary. papa also took some battle wounds from the accident. fortunately, no one broke or fractured anything; everyone just had bruises and stuff. I also saw that mama put some of the pictures i kept in one of the photo albums. i've confiscated it :) but i was very nostalgic w/ those pictures, esp. the ones that we did in photography class... there's one that looks like an old picture (actually it was me screwing up w/ the chemicals) of the view from my old school, pilgrim. looks nice... i wanna scan it sometime.

maybe what made me look at all the old photo albums was what was going on with my mom's family. mama told me last friday that one of my aunts (the oldest of the 9, i think) was comatose in the philippines. Looking at those photobooks made me want to just go back to the old days when there weren't any worries and deaths... we've already had one in the past year, we don't want another one to go again. Yesterday night some of the family was at our house debating whether or not to go to the philippines to either be at her bedisde or to pull the plug. A grim sight, but i was lucky to see how much family means to us. fortunately, we got a call that our aunt woke up and (hopefully) is okay. times like these when you treasure life the most.

on the way to irvine i was thinking a lot about that person from the last entry. i can't be scared anymore. somehow or another i need to show it... i hate girls (and having to think about them. grr). lol jk.

i think my break is over already. i need to get back to work on the conference and start mailing out the letters to schools again. it was good having to depend on my peer for work, but now that she's not here, the task is a much heavier burden on my mind. we desperately need a bigger break... so i can at least wach LoTR or something :-/.

~ja matte!

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why'd i write this at 4:56 pm?

It's been a while since i've updated my entries, let alone read my blog, so might as well write something while i'm bored off me ass in this listless void that is winter break. so much has happened in these 3 months (!) - its hard to put it all in a blog entry like this.

i ended up w/ a UC GPA of 2.617 this quarter... phew! i thought it was gonna be much lower cause of o chem, but i'm still fighting my way up since my freshman year (1.5 GPA then)! its cool, cause i was looking at the Guide to American Graduate Schools and a lot of the schools out of state have 3.0 GPA average, and i have about 2 more years left to keep it up... almost there.

it seems that for some reason feelings toward a girl still have not faded away. Even if i haven't seen her since summer, its still crazy that only after a long chat online those feelings just pop right back up. It took a lot of guts for me to explicate those feelings during winter retreat too... i just felt that i can tell anything to anyone in puso baoard now; its great to know that they'll be there to listen... they're family.

speaking of winter retreat... man was it crazy! the four of us directors were so unprepared that when stuff was about to happen, we were like, "uh okay..." I thought that even though i felt that we were unprepared for a lot of things, the way that things actually happened was quite funny, and that's what makes winter retreat so great... the retreat makes you feel like you're with 15 other people who love what they do and love each other - and that makes me feel allll right.

i'm still "passively looking" as ernest calls it ;). again, i'm not looking for a relationship, but it would be nice to have a companion once in a while... there were times when i thought this girl was cute or that girl was cool, but other things just happen.

oh, and i need a job, but my lazy ass won't get myself to look for one. lol. funny me.

my music tastes are changing this year. it used to be rap and all that stuff in the beginning, but i'm starting to oogle over all this emo stuff. lol, turning into a softie, i see. dashboard, bright eyes, maroon5, weakerthans, michelle branch (not that emo, but still goood)... lol. rock's starting to be cool too. why? idunno.. maybe its just a phase, like my j-pop/k-pop (imho k-pop is better, except for utada... she's dope!), or dance/trance... at least i'm experiencing music from all tastes. lol.

one more thing - i took that personality disorder test that consiglieri had up on his blog a while ago... i did it twice too: first time everything was normal except i had a "very high" schitzotypal tendancy (i took that last year). I took it this year and i got high for everything else and still very high schitzotypal (i sure hope that i was playing around). scary... i had an ex-sierran next year make fun of me saying i'm a schizto, but we don't think so ;)

~ja matte!

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why'd i write this at 2:41 pm?