an excerpt from Chapter Five of the classic Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte

She looks as if she were thinking of something beyond her punishment---beyond her situation: of something not round nor before her. I have heard of day-dreams---is she in a day-dream now? Her eyes are fixed on the floor, but I am sure they do not see it---her sight seems turned in, gone down to her heart: she is looking at what she can remember, I believe; not at what is really present. I wonder what sort of a girl she is---whether good or naughty?

* * *

you say you love me... so tell me... why are you doing this?

you know it's all retribution.

i wish you'd just let her be. i wish you'd just get over it.

it's your fault. it's all your freaking fault---SO DEAL WITH IT.

if you go through with this... you will have stabbed once again, our already wounded relationship.

let's just hope time does heal all wounds.

* * *

thank you, mio. thank you, sabs.

WORDS OF WISDOM FROM MY FATHER

Dad: I don't mind you having a boyfriend as long as I know about it.
Me: But dad, I don't have a boyfriend.

*inwardly wishing otherwise*

Dad: OK, but when you do, I would just like to know about it. I want to know who the guy is, his background and where he lives. So if he does anything he shouldn't do, I can go over there and scare the sh*t out of him.
Me: *laughs uneasily*

*inwardly thinks: gee, dad, i'm really gonna be telling you now, huh?*

MY THOUGHTS ON ASHLEE SIMPSON'S SNL SCANDAL

i thought it was some sort of joke when cai, YM'd me the link to the video clip of that fiasco. i mean, it's saturday night live for crying out loud. but as i watched it and did a google search on it, i knew that there was absolutely no bull involved in it.

check it out yourselves:
http://www.collegehumor.com/news/ashlee_snl.wmv

i personally have nothing against ashlee simpson. i think her voice is actually nice. pieces of me... is catchy. i don't hate it. she dresses really well and she's a pretty girl. she's not the best actress but she's not exactly a poser. she really does like rock and... well... she's not claiming to be anything but a girly pop rocker.

and it is kind of pathetic that so many people, myself included, are wasting their time writing/talking about such inane things like popstars' lip-synching disasters.

but such things cannot be helped so if you don't want to read about it... CLOSE THIS WINDOW NOW COZ NO ONE IS STOPPING YA!

ok? ok.

so... what do i think about all this?

let's start with the sympathetic side, shall we?

ok... in the real world, lots of singers lip-synch. A LOT. britney spears, avril lavigne, hilary duff, christina aguilera... just a lot of them ok? in fact, i bet all singers nowadays have done so at least once in their lives---not including music videos. a lot of them use pre-recorded backups to give their performances "a fuller sound" too. i mean, that doesn't mean they can't sing. and even if everyone knows they do lip-sych... they obviously still have their careers.

wake up, people. not everyone can sound perfect everyday. she could've had a sore throat or something. you can't cancel on SNL on the day itself. that's just so... rude. and so snobby-diva like.

and everyone makes mistakes. you have off days, i have off days---WE ALL FREAKING HAVE OFF DAYS!!! we all have totally embarrassing moments wherein we would just like to curl up, die, and have our corpses disintegrate into oblivion. and the fact that hers happened in front of the whole world practically... makes it even more pity-inducing to those with hearts still firmy placed and beating within their bodies. i mean, hello... these things happen.

now for the not so sympathetic side...

why did she have to say this: "I'm totally against it and offended by it. I'm going out to let my real talent show, not to just stand there and dance around. Personally, I'd never lip-synch. It's just not me."

why does she have to be so HYPOCRITICAL??? i mean, this is just extra beef against her now. she should have just kept her mouth shut and listened to the wisdom of the saying, "NEVER SAY NEVER".

all reason escapes me as to WHY ON EARTH she didn't just sing live when that tape wonked out. i mean, you know, you're a PERFORMER---do SOMETHING. she could've saved her performance. nobody would've noticed if she had tried her best to cover it up. but instead she thinks it's a pretty BRIGHT idea to hop around like an utter moron who thinks she's a monkey,

i mean, seriously... what is WITH those moves??? she made a complete ass of herself and totally made the situation even worse than it already was.

so what if there was something up with her voice? she could've at least TRIED. but no she walks out on her band, doesn't she?

and get this... this is the thing that really did her in: SHE BLAMES HER FRIKKIN BAND FOR THE WHOLE THING! she goes and says they played the wrong song!!! i mean, obviously they were the only one's who followed the age old rule of the stage "THE SHOW MUST GO ON". they freaking tried to save it. and hello... there's an instrument that just happens to sound exactly like her? please, girl. save it. you should've just apologized than tried your luck on the blame game.

so that's it for my opinion. don't like it? don't agree? WRITE YOUR OWN THEN! GO ON! everyone must start becoming more opinionated. ahahahaha!

i've been relatively silent for a while now. even with the katipuneros. i don't know why. i hope my old spasms of depression aren't creeping up on me again.

or maybe my alter ego is just being more active lately.

or maybe i just don't have anything left to say.

tsss. yeah right.

there's something wrong. i just don't know what it is.

so if i start crying for no apparent reason... please don't ask me what's wrong. because i probably won't know the answer.

* * *

hindi naman ako nagagalit sa mga hirit mo eh.

nasasaktan lang minsan.

pero wala naman akong karapatan eh.

what can i do if you think i'm not good enough for you?

di bale. nawawala na.

another chapter of my life is about to close.

ME: my grandmother was like "my condition for this is that you have adult supervision preferably a mom and a dad. then 4 girls"
FUKNUT: demnet
ME: oh yes
ME: you can say that again
FUKNUT: demnet.

* * *

ME: this is gonna happen
ME: takas till i die 'to
FUKNUT: uy! madadamay rin kami ah!
FUKNUT: does your dad have a shotgun?
FUKNUT: hahaha
ME: no he doesn't actually have a shotgun. but i think he has a handgun. somewhere in his room. but he really doesn't need it. he'll just crush you with his biceps. or fall on you.
FUKNUT: oh yes.

don't tell me we're falling apart...

WHAT IS WRONG WITH ME???

why am i never good enough?

why am i the one they always gloss over?

who do i need to be?

what do i need to change?

* * *
the park had never looked so lovely.

but she could not see it.

the blades of grass touching her bare feet seemed to shrink away from her miserable dispostition. their life seemed to fade away in her presence. the flowers' vibrant colors only hurt her eyes. the breeze was not kind to her. she shivered as she wept.

everything and everyone seemed to pass her by in blurs. they were all so blissfully happy... so in love...

she had no right. she had no right to be one of them. she wasn't good enough, she reminded herself. she had to stay here while the others walked away into ecstasy. it was her fate. it was her destiny.

she gripped her shoulders tighter, wishing for relief from the breeze who only seemed to take out its cruelty on her.
and as she did so, she saw a boy drape his coat on his girl's shoulders. oh what would she give to be that girl?

she began to run. trying to escape... trying to find a place where she did not have to be taunted by that which she could never possess... but the winding paths did not lead to solace... they circled about... and led her right back to where she started:

alone in a crowd.

* * *

Naked -Avril Lavigne

I wake up in the morning
Put on my face
The one that's gonna get me
Through another day
Doesn't really matter
How I feel inside
This life is like a game sometimes

Then you came around me
The walls just dissapeared
Nothing to surround me
Keep me from my fears
I'm unprotected
See how I've opened up
You've made me trust

{chorus}
I've never felt like this before
I'm naked around you
Does it show
You see right through me
And I can't hide
I'm naked around you
And it feels so right

Trying to remember
Why I was afraid
To be myself
And let the covers fall away
Guess I never had someone like you
To help me fit in my skin

{chorus}

I'm naked around you
Does it show
I'm naked around you

I'm so naked around you
And I can't hide
You're gonna see right through baby

SCHOOL IS BAD FOR CHILDREN
by John Holt
Taken from the Saturday Evening Post for February 8, 1969


Almost every child on the first day he sets foot in a school building is smarter, more curious, less afraid of what he doesn't know, better at finding and figuring things out, more confident, resourceful, persistent and independent than he will ever be again in his schooling - or, unless he is very unusual and very lucky, for the rest of his life. Already, by paying close attention to and interacting with the world and people around him, and without any school-type formal instruction, he has done a task far more difficult, complicated and abstract than anything he will be asked to do in school, or than any of his teachers has done for years. He has solved the mystery of language. He has discovered it - babies don't even know that language exists - and he has found out how it works and learned to use it. He has done it by exploring, by experimenting, by developing his own model or the grammar of language, by trying it out and seeing whether it works, by gradually changing it and refining it until it does work. And while he has been doing this, he has been learning other things as well, including many of the "concepts" that the schools think only they can teach him, and many that are more complicated than the ones they do try to teach him.

In he comes, this curious, patient, determined, energetic, skillful learner. we sit him down at a desk, and what do we teach him? Many things. First, that learning is separate from living. "You come to school to learn," we tell him, as if the child hadn't been learning before, as if living were out there and learning were in here, and there were no cormection between the two. Secondly, that he cannot be trusted to learn and is no good at it. Everything we teach about reading, a task far simpler than many that the child has already mastered, says to him, "If we don't make you read, you won't, and if you don't do it exactly the way we tell you, you can't." In short, he comes to feel that learning is a passive process, something that someone else does to you, instead of something you do for yourself.
In a great many other ways he learns that he is worthless, untrustworthy, fit only to take other people's orders, a blank sheet for other people to write on. Oh, we make a lot of nice noises in school about respect for the child and individual differences, and the like. But our acts, as opposed to our talk, say to the child, "Your experience, your concerns, your curiosities, your needs, what you know, what you want, what you wonder about, what you hope for, what you fear, what you like and dislike, what you are good at or not so good at&emdash;all this is of not the slightest importance, it counts for nothing. What counts here, and the only thing that counts, is what we know, what we think is important, what we want you to do, think and be." The child soon learns not to ask questions - the teacher isn't there to satisfy his curiosity. Having learned to hide his curiosity, he later learns to be ashamed of it. Given no chance to find out who he is - and to develop that person, whoever it is&emdash;he soon comes to accept the adults' evaluation of him.

He learns many other things. He learns that to be wrong, uncertain, confused, is a crime. Right Answers are what the school wants, and he learns countless strategies for prying these answers out of the teacher, for conning her into thinking he knows what he doesn't know. He learns to dodge, bluff, fake, cheat. He learns to be lazy. Before he came to school, he would work for hours on end, on his own, with no thought of reward, at the business of making sense of the world and gaining competence in it. In school he learns, like every buck private, how to goldbrick, how not to work when the sergeant isn't looking, how to know when he is looking, how to make hin think you are working even when he is looking. He learns that in real life you don't do anything unless you are bribed, bullied or conned into doing it, that nothing is worth doing for its own sake, or that if it is, you can't do it in school. He learns to be bored, to work with a small part of his mind, to escape from the reality around him into daydreams and fantasies&emdash;but not like the fantasies of his preschool years, in which he played a very active part.

The child comes to school curious about other people, particularly other children, and the school teaches him to be indifferent. The most interesting thing in the classroom - often the only interesting thing in it - is the other children, but he has to act as if these other children, all about hin., only a few feet away, are not really there. He cannot interact with them, taIk with them, smile at them. In many schools he can't talk to other children in the halls between classes; in more than a few, and some of these in stylish suburbs, he can't even taIk to them at lunch. Splendid training for a world in which, when you're not studying the other person to figure out how to do him in, you pay no attention to him.

In fact, he learns how to live without paying attention to anything going on around him. You night say that school is a long lesson in how to turn yourself off, which may be one reason why so many young people, seeking the awareness of the world and responsiveness to it they had when they were little and think they can only find it in drugs. Aside from being boring, the school is almost always ugly, cold, inhuman - even the most stylish, glass-windowed, $20-a square-foot schools.

And so, in this dull and ugly place where nobody ever says anything very truthful, where everbody is playing a kind of role, as in a charade, where the teachers are no more free to respond honestly to the students than the students are free to respond to the teachers or each other, where the air practically vibrates with suspicion and anxiety, the child learns to live in a daze, saving his energies for those small parts of his life that are too trivial for the adults to bother with, and thus remain his. It is a rare child who can come through this schooling with much left of his curiosity, his independence or his sense of his own dignity, competence and worth.

So much for criticism. What do we need to do? Many things. Some are easy&emdash;we can do them right away. Some are hard and may take some time. Take a hard one first. We should abolish compulsory school attendance. At the very least we should modify it perhaps hy giving children every year a large number of authorized absences. Our compulsory school-attendance laws once served a humane and useful purpose. They protected children's right to some schooling, against those adults who would otherwise have denied it to them in order to exploit their labor, in farm, store, mine or factory. Today the laws help nobody, not the schools, not the teachers, not the children. To keep kids in school who would rather not be there costs the schools an enormous amount of time and trouble to say nothing of what it costs to repair the damage that these angry and resentful prisoners do every time they get a chance. Every teacher knows that any kid in class who, for whatever reason, would rather not be there not only doesn't learn anything himself but makes it a great deal tougher for anyone else. As for protecting the children from exploitation, the chief and indeed only exploiters of children these days are the schools. Kids caught in the college rush more often than not work seventy hours or more a week, most of it on paper busy work. For kids who aren't going to college, school is just a useless time-waster, preventing them from earning some money or doing some useful work, or even doing some true learnings.

Objections. "If kids didn't have to go to school, they'd all be out in the streets!" No, they wouldn't. In the first place, even if schools stayed just the way they are, children would spend at least some time there because that's where they'd be likely to find friends; it's a natural meeting place for children. In the second place, schools wouldn't stay the way they are, they'd get better, because we would have to start making them what they ought to be right now - places where children would want to be. In the third place, those children who did not want to go to school could find, particularly if we stirred up our brains and gave them a little help, other things to do - the things many children now do during their summers and holidays.

There's something easier we could do. We need to get kids out of the school buildings, give them a chance to learn about the world at first hand. It is a very recent idea, and a crazy one, that the way to teach our young people about the world they live in is to take them out of it and shut them up in brick boxes. Fortunately, educators are beginning to realize this.
In Philadelphia and Portland, Oregon, to pick only two places I happen to have heard about, plans are being drawn up for public schools that won't have any school buildings at all, that will take the students out into the city and help them to use it and its people as a learning resource. In other words, students, perhaps in groups, perhaps independently, will go to libraries, museums, exhibits, courtrooms, legislatures, radio and TV stations, meetings, businesses and laboratories to learn about their world and society at first hand. A small private school in Washington is already doing this. It makes sense. We need more of it.

As we help children get out into the world, to do their learning there, we can get more of the world into the schools. Aside from their parents, most children never have any close contact with any adults except people whose sole business is children. No wonder they have no idea what adult life or work is like. We need to bring a lot more people who are not full-time teachers into the schools, and into contact with the children. In New York City, under the Teachers and Writers Collaborative, real writers, working writers come into the schools, read their work and talk to the children about the problems of their craft. The children eat it up. In another school I know of a practicing attorney from a nearby city comes in every month or so and talks to several classes about the law. Not the law as it is in books but as he sees it and encounters it in his cases, his problems, his work. And the children love it. It is real, grown-up, true, not Weekly Reader, not "social studies," not lies and baloney.

Something easier yet. Let children work together, help each other, learn from each other and each other's mistakes. We now know, from the experience of many schools both rich-suburban and poor-city, that children are often the best teachers of other children. What is more important, we know that when a fifth-or sixth-grader who has been having trouble with reading starts helping a first grader, his own reading sharply improves. A number of schools are beginning to use what some call Paired Learning. This means that you let children form partnerships with other children, do their work, even including their tests, together, and share whatever marks or results this work gets - just like grownups in the real world. It seems to work.

Let the children learn to judge their own work. A child learning to talk does not learn by being corrected all the time; if corrected too much, he will stop taIking, He compares, a thousand times a day, the difference between language as he uses it and as those around him use it. Bit by bit, he makes the necessary changes to make his language like other people's. In the same way, kids learning to do all the other things they learn without adult teachers - to waIk, run, climb, whistle, ride a bike, skate, play games, jump rope - compare their own performance with what more skilled people do, and slowly make the needed changes.

But in school we never give a child a chance to detect his mistakes, let alone correct them. We do it all for him. We act as if we thought he would never notice a mistake unless it was pointed out to him, or correct it unless he was made to. Soon he becomes dependent on the expert. We should let him do it himself. Let him figure out, with the help of other children if he wants it, what this word says, what is the answer to that problem, whether this is a good way of saying or doing this or that. If right answers are involved, as in some math or science, give him the answer book, let him correct his own papers. Why should we teachers waste time on such donkey work? Our job should be to help the kid when he tells us that he can't find a way to get the right answer. Let's get rid of all this nonsense of grades, exams, marks. We don't know now, and we never will know, how to measure what another person knows or understands. We certainly can't find out by asking him questions. All we find out is what he doesn't know - which is what most tests are for, anyway. Throw it all out, and let the child learn what every educated person must someday learn, how to measure his own understanding, how to know what he knows or does not know.

We could also abolish the fixed, required curriculum. People remember only what is interesting and useful to them, what helps them make sense of the world, or helps them get along in it. All else they quickly forget, if they ever learn it at all. The idea of a "body of knowledge," to be picked up in school and used for the rest of one's life, is nonsense in a world as complicated and rapidly changing as ours. Anyway, the most important questions and problems of our time are not in the curriculum, not even in the hotshot universities, let alone the schools.

Children want, more than they want anything else, and even after years of miseducation, to make sense of the world, themselves, other human beings. Let them get at this job, with our help if they ask for it, in the way that makes most sense to them.

as the last few hours of the night trickle into dusk... you lose your mind in the rush of its transition...

* * *

love is a powerful thing.

hm. too bad i don't know what it feels like.

love for God...
love for family...
love for friends...

it's not the same.

it doesn't make you feel things that you never thought you could feel... do things you never thought you'd find the courage to do. and this love... this love completes and compels you to be the better person you were destined to become.

though all of us are searching... very few of us will ever find it.

it is not some silly infatuation which is like a passing storm... turbulent at first then gone by the next morning.

yes it will keep you up late into the night, your head buzzing with questions that will never be answered... dream dreams that will never touch the hard earth of the realm of reality...

but that's the thing.

these flights of fancy are only meant to remain in dreams and reside in memories...

* * *

are those real kisses?

is that real passion?

* * *

these gluey fingers are for you.

my prayers go with Bea Liwanag tonight...

but you know in a way she's lucky---luckier than most. she died having had thousands of prayers being said for her... others die without anybody knowing they even existed.

i just hope she's in a better place.

even if i don't know her personally. i salute her bravery.

* * *

This is from the e-greeting lorra sent me tonight...

Today I smiled and all at once
Things didn't look so bad.
Today I shared with someone else,
A bit of hope I had.


Today I sang a little song
And felt my heart grow light,
And walked a happy little mile,
With not a cloud in sight.


Today I worked with what I had
And longed for nothing more,
And what had seemed like only weeds,
Were flowers at my door.


Today I loved a little more
And complained a little less,
And in the giving of myself,
I forgot my weariness.

* * *

"is it still there?" he said to me as we hung back and the crowd began to shield us from the sight of the person this seemingly out-of-the-blue question was talking about.

"not so much anymore," i mumbled, quickly cottoning on. i remember thinking how odd it was that i always seemed to know when the discussion would turn to that topic in particular.
i wondered if i had been completely honest. i looked away. did i think i would find my answer if i looked into the distance?

but i think i was being truthful. pretty much.

some things fade away quicker than you expect them to. it's slipping out of my grasp like water in cupped hands.

i simply wonder.

will those pages remain blank?

i'm lost, spent and jaded.

what an incredible waste of my time.

how many of these pointless little distractions will i have to put up with?

don't you just love my new layout? i do. hahaha. i don't know but there's something about october and the moon for me. and plus i just really love this layout and the bgm is simply perfect for it. everything is so magically whimsical.

Moonshadow- Mandy Moore

One, two, three
Hey, hey, oh

I'm bein' followed by a moonshadow
Moonshadow
Moonshadow
Leapin and hoppin' on a moonshadow
Moonshadow
Moonshadow

And if I ever lose my hands
Lose my plough
Lose my land
Oh if I ever lose my hands
Oh if, I won't have to work no more

And if I ever lose my eyes
If my colours all run dry
Yes if I ever lose my eyes
Oh if, I won't have to cry no more

I'm bein' followed by a moonshadow

And if I ever lose my legs
I won't moan, and I won't beg
Yes if I ever lose my legs
Oh if, I won't have to walk no more

And if I ever lose my mouth
All my teeth
North and south
Yes if I ever lose my mouth
Oh if, I won't have to talk

Did it take long to find me?
I asked the faithful light
Did it take long to find me?
And are you gonna stay the night?

I'm bein' followed by a moonshadow
Moonshadow
Moonshadow
Leapin and hoppin' on a moonshadow
Moonshadow
Moonshadow

Moonshadow
Moonshadow
Moonshadow
Moonshadow

* * *

things can't seem to go fast enough. maybe because i partly don't want it to. does that mean i'm still...

but i can't.

i can't anymore.

why, oh why can't you just...

what is it i'm missing? what is it that you found in them that you cannot seem to find in me?

*sigh*

it always ends up this way. and of course, when the storm has passed, i am left to pick up the shattered glass knocked over by the turbulent winds. i must be careful not to cut myself. i don't want to bleed for something as trivial as a fleeting gale.

so this marks the start of another decline...

to hold on or not to hold on is not really the question anymore. more of... do i want to put myself through a battle i will most surely lose or not?

there is nothing left to grasp.

somehow, i think i've known that from the very start...

Kiss Me -Sixpence None the Richer

Kiss me out of the bearded barley
Nightly, beside the green, green grass
Swing, swing, swing the spinning step
You wear those shoes and I will wear that dress.

[Chorus:]
Oh, kiss me beneath the milky twilight
Lead me out on the moonlit floor
Lift your open hand
Strike up the band and make the fireflies dance
Silver moon's sparkling
So kiss me

Kiss me down by the broken tree house
Swing me upon its hanging tire
Bring, bring, bring your flowered hat
We'll take the trail marked on your father's map

[Chorus (repeat)]