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

©2010 Deantastic!. All Rights Reserved.

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.

©2010 Deantastic!. All Rights Reserved.

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.

4:40

My day starts when Mom’s cell phone rings. It sounds like someone’s calling, so my still-groggy mother picks up the phone and says, “Hello? Hello?” into the mouthpiece. I wait for her to do that two or three times more before telling her that the telephone-style ringing she heard was the alarm I had set last night. After giggling for a few seconds, I go back to sleep.

5:00

The alarm on my phone rings. I get up, grab my towel, and head to the bathroom. I pick up my tabo (sorry, guys, I don’t know the English equivalent of the word; want to see what a tabo looks like? the English word for it is “dipper”) and splash water on my body and—HOLY CRAP, THAT’S COLD! I had forgotten to pour boiling water in my basin. Okay, I’m awake now.

5:27

So I’m finished styling my hair using some styling gel from Penshoppe. Okay, now to put my clothes on.

5:45

After hastily eating breakfast, I head to the bathroom to brush. Having gotten braces, it’s harder for me to brush my pearly whites. After I’ve made sure every single bit of rice, meat, and who-knows-what has been taken off, I head upstairs to collect my allowance. I’m off to school.

6:09

Crap, classes have started. Well, not really—we haven’t greeted Sir Agustin a good morning yet. Anyway, three seconds after I’ve set my bag down, my classmate blurts out, “Dean, have you done your Social Studies homework?” [Cue: Sad Trombone] I hurriedly start copying my homework off my classmate (who thankfully doesn’t seem to mind).

6:48

Our group finished presenting our (lame) interpretation of Noel Cabangon’s Kanlungan.

7:12

So it looks like we’re going to be discussing Geography this week in Social Studies. Awesome. I coughed up ?20 (~$0.50) for a world map and a blank map, though.

8:23

Mathematics time. I’ve got a bucket in case my nose starts bleeding from all the equations.

9:00

“Goodbye, Ma’am!” Mathematics time over; I received ten recitation points! (Would’ve been 12, if only I’d raised my hand and answered “I don’t know, ma’am” to one of the questions.) English is next; probably one of the least painless subjects we have.

10:03

Nothing much in English. We just discussed the real-world implications of this poem. [Side topic: in today's world, which do you think is more comfortable? Leading a simplistic life, or a complex one?]

10:10

*Mr. Bean grunt* looks like we’re in for another Chemistry test. Hands up if you despise having to convert between SI and Imperial units.

11:00

Finally, I’m going home… about time, my stomach’s complaining already. [Side note: finally, Sex and the City, Narnia, and Kung Fu Panda are now showing at the local mall.]

11:23

Every noon, at around this time, I usually arrive home. The first thing I do is turn on the desktop computer’s AVR (that’s where the DSL modem and D-Link router are plugged in), and then plug my laptop’s power cord into the outlet. I then boot into Ubuntu, fire up Firefox, and begin checking Google Reader. I’ll simultaneously log onto Plurk and Gmail, and maybe check the blog for any spam comments Akismet may have caught. I’ll usually try to write a blog post then end up deleting it not soon thereafter. After that, I take lunch, then head to the bathroom to brush my teeth, wash my face, and pass a bill .

13:15

We aren’t having Electronics for five days (one school week), but today we’re having year-level sub-chapter elections for TLE. I wasn’t elected, which is good, because I’m borderline-allergic to responsibility. (It’s true! The very fact that I save up for domain name maintenance and webspace is, according to my standards, astounding.)

14:34

Excellent! Our Physics teacher just gave us an activity which includes a mock-up map leading to Hiroshima’s treasure. Brilliant! So it says here that we have to reach the treasure from the starting point. We have to pass by the viewing deck, and we have to avoid the mountain. Interesting…

15:12

MAPEH (Music, Arts, Physical Education, Health) time. We’re discussing diseases like diarrhea, dysentery, the works.

16:00

Finally, last period for the day: Statistics. It isn’t a pain in the ass, really, compared to what some people may be led to believe. Maybe the misconception is brought about by the fact that Statistics has to do with numbers? Friends, numbers don’t bite. Math does.

17:24

I’m at the SPED Center to greet my classmates’ elementary teacher a happy birthday. So, we’re going home in about ten minutes. Should be no big de—OH, GREAT, IT’S RAINING.

17:40

We’ve left SPED, now waiting for a Route One jeepney. The rains have downgraded from torrential to drizzling. My machismo has to suffer a little, however, since my girl friend (not girlfriend, mind you ) has this small pink umbrella. [Side note: "At one point pink was considered more of a boy's color, (as a watered-down red, which is a fierce color) and blue was morefor girls." Source]

17:52

Yay! My classmate has paid for our jeepney fare! (Jeesh, Maying, haven’t you heard of the rice crisis?) Thanks, Mar! So I’m at home now. Kiss brother. Boot laptop. Plurk like hell. Open up my blog’s dashboard and begin to write this article.

19:14

Let’s take a little break. Dinner’s here (fish; :yummy:). I’m sitting down in front of the TV and being bombarded with bad news.

20:21

Okay, I’ll stop writing this blog post first. I’m going to do my homework and get some studying done (yes, I know, I’ll try to break the Internet-before-homework habit). Clicking “Save” button now, will continue later.

21:10

Just finished taking a bath.

21:42

Finished with my homework. Let’s hope the classmates are generous tomorrow. Okay, back to the blog post. Right now, I’ve got my iPod nano plugged into the laptop and playing my songs whilst it’s charging. (I especially love The Fray, Fall Out Boy, and Maroon 5.) I’m taking some time to read my feeds, as well.

21:53

LOL. Okay, so I guess that’s it. Right now, I’m charging my cell phone, clipping my nails, picking boogers, etc. At around 22:00 I’ll go to sleep, so right now I’m just scheduling this post for publish at 1:00 AM local time (which would be 1:00 PM in some parts of the US). I’d originally planned on writing another post, but I guess I’ll have to forgo that plan (I might begin writing now, though.) Ta-daaa. A day in the life of Dean.

Wait! Before You Go!

I’ve been receiving some feedback from people who say the blog crashes in Internet Explorer. First of all, I’m not that much of an HTML/Internet geek, so any help regarding this matter would be much appreciated. Secondly, why the heck are you still using IE? I mean, really. You shouldn’t be clicking on that big, blue “e” icon on your desktop. (The very fact that you use Windows is weird, lol.) Please, take some time to download and install Firefox—not just because it’ll help you access my blog better, but also because it’s better for you and your computer.

If you wish to remain a stubborn Microsoft patron, then my apologies for the problems you’re having with my blog. I’m trying everything right now to resolve this problem. Thank you!

©2010 Deantastic!. All Rights Reserved.