The Raving Lunatic

I have a copy of Starcraft 2 for weeks and for the life of me, I was always putting off playing the damn game. I remember the first being one of my first games, with me back in high school all stoked up coming off from playing the Warcraft series. Hell it was fun. Friends and I would even go places where we could play on LAN. When I was taking exams for college, we were laughing bout how the game wouldn’t let itself die. About a decade still, I still found myself playing it, but that time with friends at the office. We were all psyched for the second, ever since seeing the announcement. Sir Norms even had the right reason to upgrade his computer finally.

And that’s all that I could remember after playing the first round. It effing surprised me to find the game too “meh,” too boring to warrant my care. I didn’t put too much into thinking why at the start. I didn’t know why I wasn’t excited, and right after finding the game too unfit for me anymore, I just realized that maybe I’ve outgrown my old young self in this regard, or strategy games specifically probably. But that was me, before. Strategy games defined me before I got interested in RPGs. When I found RPGs too dull and repetitive, I found solace in FPSes. I never gave up playing RTSes, until probably now. Loved CnC3 though. Until then, I’ll probably be waiting again for the last Mass Effect. Or whatever.

Filipino.

Too tired a cliche. On the scene, one might also say, there’s an usi, or usis – usiserot usiseras.

Trending topics on social networking sites bug me, not because of the trend in particular, but of the behavior of people expanding that trend.

If that hostage situation happened in North Korea, people would’ve prayed and any means to an end would have been because of Dear Leader’s miracle.

We’re bombarded with all things Western, American specifically, with our notion of reality for everything we haven’t encountered yet bounded on stories we could only experience on TV or in the movies.

So when we have a murder or a homicide in the news, we expect our media organizations to bank on the sensationalism of CSI-style reporting, and we, nonetheless, succumb to the perception that shit like that’s real. Whatever our crime labs can’t accomplish boils down to our incompetency blamed to the usual.

Now it’s not surprising that one August evening, in the age when everyone’s easily able to connect to one another, where it has become infinitely easy to embarrass oneself, one hostage taker took on a path of self-humiliation and was ultimately successful in spreading that one thing he has proven he had to his dear motherland.

And that single incident in one day, outed the flock of Filipinos expert in handling hostage crisis situations I never knew existed the day before.

I released a loud gasp as I saw the first traces of my files after a 2-week scan. It’ll just be only a few hours more…

Dona gave me this WD 1TB Elite External Drive as a gift last Christmas. I couldn’t be happier with more space than what I could have imagined ten years ago. The clumsy me thought that it’d be great to bring it anywhere. Well, I could store everything I wanted in it right? Except that one does realize that no matter how large your drive is, you’ll always find some way to fill it up. Well it’s not that I had it filled up to the brim in no time that made me sad. I one day accidentally dropped it, while it was still running, and the case cracked. I painstakingly tried to bring everything back, and found it working but it was imminent that it would fail. Bad sectors kept growing all the time.

But then, it lasted for several months, leaving me and my friends totally surprised of WD. Until around two weeks ago when I plugged it and realized that it was not getting recognized, and trying different computers led me no luck. I again forced the drive open and took the drive to wire it directly to my CPU. It was still being detected as a drive, but it was unbearably slow. I managed to re-initialize the disk and formatted the whole volume. I then ran my recovery program to scan for recoverable files. The run took a few days, only to my dismay to find out later that the drive was being protected by WD’s 256-bit encryption, you know, the reason why this thing’s expensive and requires me to input a password for it to be usable on Windows. Great. I took the drive out and placed it again in its casing, connecting it to the chip that managed the encryption software: WD Smartware. I took it for a run and just prayed. The drive was still recognizable, and is still painfully slow but a week of scanning gave me my first results.

Waah! I finally saw my work files that would be my source for my promotion papers. Hope the next steps will yield me better results. So sorry Dona :( But at least I’m happy I could still have a chance to get my files back.

I typed this entry for posting two weeks ago. I completely forgot the part where I have to remind myself to actually post it though.

In between the queries and the multiple windows and tabs I have open last night as I scoured for information that could help me understand more my assignment, I was struck by something unusual: how to keep my mind from flying all the time. Somehow, over the past months I’ve been noticing more how I’m getting easily distracted no matter what I do. Concentrate on something: mundane, personal, work-related and a few minutes later I’m lost in another thought. I realize this is an offshoot behavioral reaction from a mind activity I’ve learned years ago, where some teacher told of her own similar experience, which she does on the other hand to generate creative thought. It helps her a lot, as creativity is fuel for her work. It has no room for my case. I know this explains why people who know me get frustrated when I sometimes tend to not listen. For all those times, I could have been probably over-analyzing something that was said. I have been unknowingly doing it to myself and I have been losing myself all the time.

This isn’t an entry about lapses or a critic of my personal attitude, but is somewhat similar. I was stuck in a meeting a while ago, when suddenly, my mind started again to wander on its own. Everyone has his or her own case of something that would make them remember something from their childhood. This particularly uninteresting situation raised up during the meeting made me somehow remember this particular incident when I was in elementary. I remember always getting frustrated, and I also remember keeping thoughts to myself. It’s bizarre when I try to think of myself as a kid. I was described as a silent boy who could answer anything I was asked of. I didn’t talk much, and during exams they could only see me answering exams, with the only time I had to get my eyes off the paper is when I was actually finished. That would mean I barely forgot any answer that I was supposed to know. I also in a way grew up not actually having any chance or avenue to express my thoughts. I remember thinking, I’ll never forget everything I wanted to change as a kid, as when I’m already an adult, I can do them on my own. I couldn’t understand why my ideas won’t get accepted by adults. These cover a terribly wide array. I for instance, as a four year old, wanted to have specific toys, but I just couldn’t tell my parents even if they asked me. Or maybe, I’m just afraid that I’ll get rejected. Thus, I told myself that as a young child, when I grow up, when I have kids, I’ll get them those toys that I wanted for myself. I never thought though if they’d want it for themselves. That’s what parents always gets wrong.

Yes, as a kid, before seven, I always thought that grown-ups had a lot of things wrong. I had ideas that couldn’t wait. Ideas like, why couldn’t anyone fill Pinatubo’s crater with cement and end the problem forever? Some are silly, yet most make me sad. As I battle my increasing forgetfulness, I race to keep remembering these ideas. It saddens me that I’ve rusted so much I’m really just a figment of the glorious me that I saw decades ago when I was thinking that I was even pathetically mediocre.

I have nothing but the mountain to compare this abode that welcomed me a few hours ago. I felt a calm sense pass by, as I spent the majority of this day alone but still doing what I hate most. I saw congregations of bikers and those wanting to be alone, yet still happy on their bikes. It was just last week that I had some form of enjoyment doing Tagaytay. I love biking but more and more I’m missing climbing again. I always wondered when I’ll be able to go back. I’m right now trudging in the mud, wondering why. It’s like the pain one feels whenever breathing is hardest and muscles complain: “Why subject ourselves to something this hard anyway?” Through the climb, one does rest to do anything that can be done when the mountain forces you to do nothing but climb. Sadly, my home has been those few minutes of rest I value most where I have the time to do everything I want, but which will never be enough. Hay. Wake me up to speed things up. Unlike the prospect of that wonderful crater or summit, I find no enjoyment thinking how painfully far away the reward still is. And is it in any way, even rewarding at all?