As of this writing, yesterday was August 8, 2008—a rare date which only comes once every century. (I didn’t feel the “suspense” and “thrill” of it as much as I did on June 6, 2006.) Sure, whatever.

Anyway, yesterday was Friday, but there were no classes for some reason. A few of my friends and I took the opportunity to watch this summer’s most anticipated blockbuster ever, The Dark Knight.

Look, I’m no movie buff, so I don’t think I’m in any position to impartially critique the movie. So I won’t. Here’s the deal, though: all things considered, the ticket for the movie was probably one the best Php50 (~$1.xx) I’ve ever paid. It had an elaborate, if difficult to follow, plot, and its creators put in all the little details that’d make you smirk. The late Heath Ledger who of course starred as the Joker in the movie played an impeccable role. He mastered the American accent so well you would’ve never guessed he was an Aussie, and as always paid meticulous attention to every little detail of the gruesome character he played. It’s the fruit of the marriage of love, politics, power, big guns, and heavily-armored cars that turn into kickass motorcycles. If you haven’t seen it yet, you very well should.

The 2008 Olympics commenced today with astounding opening ceremonies at the Bird’s Nest in Beijing. Two hundred five countries will participate in this year’s 10-day games. All I can say so far is that the folks over there did one hell of a job with the opening ceremonies and I don’t think I’d be surprised to see the Olympics held very smoothly, despite all the buzz about Tibet and stuff.

In other news, the European Organization for Nuclear Research has decided to postpone assploding the world. Their Large Hadron Collider, or LHC, which was supposed to start up today, will now be started up on the 10^th of September. I was reading through the CERN website’s press release for the LHC, and amidst all the geeky words I couldn’t find any reason why they postponed it. Anyway, this should give all the paranoid nerdazoids out there enough time to pack their bags and move to Mars before the world is gobbled up by a dark hole.

I first heard—or more specifically, read—about CERN and its LHC when I read Dan Brown’s novel Angels and Demons, which was the prequel to the controversial The Da Vinci Code. Long story short, the machine smashes tiny particles of matter together at crazy speeds to learn more about the universe. (Hey, don’t look at me. Look at the lab-coat geeks over in Geneva.)

In the meantime I’ll try to finish up at least one blog post for your perusal within the next week. However, periodic exams are fast approaching, and while I will try my damnest to conjure something up from within the forgotten corners of my coconut, I cannot make any guarantees.

Let me take this opportunity to invite you to use Skribit, the little widget you’ll find on my sidebar just above my footer. You can use it to suggest blog topics for me to write about, which is great because I’d love to write about what you want me to write. Go on, let ‘er rip!

‘Til next time,

Dean

I am, as always, confined to the four corners of my painfully yellow room, again feeling the need to write. It could be the boredom of summer afternoons like this, or perhaps instinct — whatever it is, it’s telling me to write.

I write for many reasons — to while away the hours, to keep my writing skills sharp, to express my feelings. Today, I am again held in a trance by my notebook computer because a question just popped in my mind.

What will become of me in fifteen years’ time?

I have asked this out loud before, and my peers have discouraged me from thinking about it. I’ve got my whole life ahead of me, they say. And they aren’t wrong. At thirteen, I still have so much of the world to explore, and so much of my life to live.

But perhaps my greatest fear is that I will live it the wrong way, and that I will look back and regret my actions. Haven’t we all felt regret before? That little, “I wish I did that instead of this.” Didn’t we, at some point, ask ourselves how our lives would’ve turned out had we made a different decision? I have always been afraid to make a wrong decision Now, as I enter the audacious teenage years, and as the rest of my life is starting to unfold, I feel the need to make a plan, to plot things out, so that I live my life to the fullest and the way I want to. I feel that my life is better off prearranged, so that I would not need to worry about it anymore. In other words, I’d be better off without a risk to take.

But today, as I was reading Paulo Coelho’s novel By the River Piedra I Sat Down and Wept, I came across these sentences which told me that having a prearranged life would probably not be the best thing in the world:

You have to take risks…We will only understand the miracle of life fully when we allow the unexpected to happen.

Pitiful is the person who is afraid of taking risks…because when they are finally able to believe in miracles, their life’s magic moments will have already passed them by.

“Magic moments” will be understood by those who have read By the River Piedra I Sat Down and Wept. Essentially, these are moments in our life when a “yes” or a “no” can change it forever. To quote the book verbatim, magic moments

“may arrive in the instant when we are doing something mundane, like putting our front-door key in the lock; it may lie hidden in the quiet that follows lunch hour or in the thousand and one things that all seem the same to us.”

I feel that this was speaking directly to me (although it is highly improbable). If my life were plotted out prior to my actually living it, then everything I would do would become “just another task”; my magic moments would go unnoticed. I realize that although a prearranged life would be devoid of the precariousness and unpredictability of a life lived spontaneously, it would also be devoid of the thrill of a spontaneously lived life. This leads me to another quote from the novel By the River Piedra I Sat Down and Wept:

“The person who is afraid of taking risks…perhaps will never be disappointed or disillusioned; perhaps she won’t suffer the way people do when they have a dream to follow. But when that person looks back…she will hear her heart saying…’So this is your heritage: the certainty that you wasted your life.‘”

I do not want to waste my life. Taking risks is better than having wasted a whole lifetime. I have a dream to follow, and I will follow that dream. I will stumble, and I will get bruised. I will fall seven times, and get up eight.

What will become of me in fifteen years? I will become an accomplished person. A bruised person, but a learned person. A person with failures, but with even more accomplishments. My heritage will not be the certainty that I wasted my life; instead, it will be the certainty that I lived my life to the fullest.

Hi, guys. As I said before, the silence of this blog is too loud to bear, so here’s a post to fill the empty void and break the awkward hush.

So I thought I’d take you guys through a timeline-style tour of how a day in the life of Dean usually goes, just so you see how crazy the world I live in is. Let’s begin after the jump. Continue Reading »