Non-negotiables

I guess this was exactly what I was looking for.

I just came home from a five day vacation with my relatives in Antique. During my stay there, I completely disconnected myself from my life here in Manila: I didn’t make any effort to make my cellphone number available, I didn’t go online for that whole duration, and I didn’t text my friends and family that much. Hell, I didn’t even make an effort to fix my fantasy team.

Because of this, I’m now facing buttloads of work to be done. Now that I think about it, I just had five unproductive days. I’ve never been that unproductive for that long in a very long time.

But I’m glad I did this. Doing this gave me the opportunity to really reflect and discern things about my life that wouldn’t have been possible had I not shut myself out from my life here in Manila. I realized things that I would not have realized if my mind wasn’t empty.

One of the things that I set straight while I was there was my non-negotiables in life. These are the things that I want to build my life on; the things in life that I think are worth dedicating myself.

First up, of course, is my family. My family has been there my whole life for me and I’ve known nothing but comfort with my family. True, as a family, we have our fair share of problems. But I think we’ve come to a point where whatever problem we have with each other would be of no threat to the relationships we have with each other. That lesson that I had in Philo two years ago about the family is true. The family is there as the sort of cocoon that you can always fall back into and is a kind of blanket of comfort that protects you from other things.

If I’m honest, I actually think that I haven’t been doing enough for my family—for my siblings and for my parents. That ought to change and it will change. My parents deserve a better son, and my siblings deserve a better brother.

Second, is that I’m going to fully renew my Catholic faith. I feel that I’ve been kind of disconnected from God lately; that I’ve been taking him for granted because of other things. I’m not going to let that happen anymore. I’m going to make it a point to really develop my own personal connection with God and ensure that I maintain and cultivate that relationship.

My reason for wanting to renew my Catholic faith is simple: I happen to agree with most of the values preached in Catholicism. I want to be constantly reminded of the values that I want to attain. Attending mass regularly is one way of doing this.

I value simplicity, social activism, genuine justice, humility, and hard work. Looking at the people around me today, it’s so hard to see these values fully embodied and lived. It’s frustrating how so much people nowadays love to preach that they embody these values: that they’re like this, they’re like that but in reality and in action, they actually aren’t. It’s one thing to say that you embody a specific value and a completely different thing to actually posses these values in action. What I’m going to do is that I’m going to consciously work on attaining these values. Then, I’m going to assess how I am as a person in comparison to how Jesus was like and see if I’m making progress in developing myself as a human being.

I find it a perfectly reasonable plan and I’m going to start on it this Sunday. I’m going to make this act of self-improvement a very personal act. It isn’t for show, it’s something personal.

Third, I have to take care of my body. I have to eat healthy and exercise consistently. My body is how I experience the world. If I ever get sick because of a poor lifestyle, it would diminish my body’s capacity to experience the world. I don’t want that to happen so I’m going to make sure that I’m going to do everything I can to preserve my body and keep it in top shape.

Fourth, and this is related to the my second point, I want to be a person who strives to be a better person, not a person who has more. We’re being wired by our culture to measure success using money as the sole currency. I don’t want that. I want my success in life to be measured to how I am as a person. I wouldn’t mind having millions in my bank account in the future but I don’t ever want it to change me. I don’t want my values to be predicated on how much money I have or make. I want to be simple so I’m going to remain that way regardless of how much I earn. I want to help out other people so I’m going to remain that way regardless of where I end up. I want to be humble, so I’m going to remain that way regardless of how much I have.

I want to be a successful in my career. I want to live a simple life. I want to approach people with tenderness and affection. I want to be honest. I want to be hard-working as hell. I want to be kuripot. I want to always see the bright things in life. I want to be keep on reading. I want to know things. I want to learn how to be patient. I want to always fight for what I believe in.

Last, I want a partner in life who shares my core values. I simply cannot be with someone I am not fully comfortable with: someone whose own personal set of values contradict mine. I want a partner whose values run parallel with the values I have. This is non-negotiable.

I actually remember the girl who inspired me to lose weight. She was my best friend and we liked similar things. But one of the things that really admired about her was how simple she was even though she had the means to not be simple. She shunned brand name goods and the smallest things made her the happiest girl. I remember the days where she would have a bad day and I’d get her ice cream and everything would be alright. It awfully reminded me of how I lit up whenever I get a Butternut flavored from Dunkin’Donuts.

I will not settle for a partner who finds happiness and satisfaction in her brand name things or material wealth. I also detest how it often comes with that boastfulness and pagkayabang. It can come in obvious or subtle ways but flaunting wealth has never been attractive to me. I am too wired to hate girls like that.

I also remember how the tenderness my ex showed me. I have never been intimate with someone as tender as her and it’s something that I want to become in the future. I want to be tender with how I show my affection, with my emotions, and my feelings. I love how it manages to soften up everything and how it stops things from getting out of hand.

My girlfriend is a fighter. She fights for what she believes in. That’s one of the things that I found so attracted to her. And that’s also something I want to become.

I’ve seen so many relationships crumble because the couples valued different things in life. I don’t want to be one of those couples. I want to be with someone I can fully be myself with. That’s someone worth settling with in the long run.

These are some of the things I realized while I was on vacation. I wrote it down here because I want it set in stone in case I forget about it or I’m faced with other things in life. I wrote this in less than an hour so everything I wrote here reflects what I truly feel, without replacing or dampening the way I feel about things.

I just with I become the person I’m aiming to become.

“We’ve got a sort of brainwashing going on in our country, Morrie sighed. Do you know how they brainwash people? They repeat something over and over. And that’s what we do in this country. Owning things is good. More money is good. More property is good. More commercialism is good. More is good. More is good. We repeat it–and have it repeated to us–over and over until nobody bothers to even think otherwise. The average person is so fogged up by all of this, he has no perspective on what’s really important anymore.

Wherever I went in my life, I met people wanting to gobble up something new. Gobble up a new car. Gobble up a new piece of property. Gobble up the latest toy. And then they wanted to tell you about it. ‘Guess what I got? Guess what I got?’

You know how I interpreted that? These were people so hungry for love that they were accepting substitutes. They were embracing material things and expecting a sort of hug back. But it never works. You can’t substitute material things for love or for gentleness or for tenderness or for a sense of comradeship.

Money is not a substitute for tenderness, and power is not a substitute for tenderness. I can tell you, as I’m sitting here dying, when you most need it, neither money nor power will give you the feeling you’re looking for, no matter how much of them you have.”

-Mitch Albom, Tuesdays with Morrie.

MembranBiophysik und Biochemie

Follow your passion.

This is what I tell my students when they come at a crossroad of their academic career. When an 18-year old freshman comes to me and tells me that his/her grades are slipping and he doesn’t find chemistry interesting anymore I always start with “What are you passionate about?”

And 9 times out of 10, this results into a shrug, or an “I don’t really know”. Which leads then to roughly more time of figuring out what to do. Some of the questions linger with what made the choice of BS Chemistry come in the first place. Other questions include, what are his/her skills or even a vision in the short-, medium- and long-term. Why do we need to flesh out these information? Mostly because, it is part of finding out what one is passionate about.

Passion follows hard work

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The Beauty of Nature

I have always been a fan of nature and the beauty of plants.

Ever since my dad introduced me to the entire practice of gardening about a decade ago, I was hooked with the beauty of plants. We had a decent garden outside of our old house. My dad would buy nice plants and nice flowers on weekdays and then during weekends, he would wake up early to plant the news plants that he bought during the week. For some strange reason, he picked me to help him during his gardening sessions.

Of his four kids, he picked me.

Until now, I still don’t know why he picked me. I never showed any genuine interest in plants before. For most kids, computer games and anime tv shows will always be far more interesting than plants. I still remember thinking to myself, “How can plants be interesting? Plants don’t even move.”

However, I was still his son so I had to do what was asked from me by my Dad. So I did what I was told and just did everything that he asked me to do.

To be fair, he didn’t ask me to do that much. He asked me to water the plants every morning and late afternoon— which I did religiously. He asked me to trim the plants that needed trimming, which I also did painstakingly. And he asked me to plant new plants to the soil every now and then.

When I was starting with my gardening chores, I never got that feeling of satisfaction with what I was doing. I just did what was asked from me and I never found the initiative to tend on the garden on my own. My dad had to repeatedly remind me to continue tending to the garden.

But over time, I gradually developed a genuine interest and liking on plants. My garden chores became my refuge and comfort whenever I felt stressed or out of tune with life. It gave me that feeling of serenity and calmness away from the hustle and bustle of my everyday life.

That feeling of affection for the plants and flowers would be short lived. Our factory, along with our house and garden, was foreclosed and we had to move to a different place: an apartment with no physical place for a garden.

So without being exposed to my daily routine of tending to plants, my connection with plants was somehow supressed deep into my being.

To be fair though, that planted the seeds (hehehe. See what I did there? Puns intended) for my affection for plants. Ever since, I started to appreciate nature more. And nature would always have that calming effect on me.

Today, more than a decade since my Dad first taught me the beauty of plants, I find myself seeking the comfort and refuge of plants, specifically flowers.

To be honest, I don’t remember how exactly it started. If I’m not mistaken, I think I was on one of my coffee walks to Mcdo during work when I saw a beautiful flower and decided to snap a picture of it. After that moment, I became more mindful of the beautiful flowers around me. In order to preserve their beauty, I also snapped pictures of these flowers. Until it came to a point when I noticed that I had a lot of pictures in my phone. So I decided to transfer the pictures to my computer.

Lo and behold, when I transferred it to my computer, the pictures came out stunningly beautiful.

That was the exact moment when I decided to blog about it. I’m really glad that my passion for the beauty of plants was rekindled after being dormant for more than a decade.

I guess, at the roots of it, this is one way for me to cope with my insecurities. It’s one positive therapeutic ways of healing me.

What it effectively does is that it completely stops my brain dead on its track. It absolutely stops me from thinking and it makes me focus on the innate beauty of nature. It has that soothing effect of me which removes the negative thoughts in my head. And trust me, there are so much negative thoughts in my head right now because of the whole environment my girlfriend is in.

Now, more than ever, I need the beauty of plants to give me serenity and calmness. I need it to give me a fresh perspective on things and to keep me sane whenever my mind wanders too much in fantasy formation.

I need it, to cut through all of the negative images in my head, which shouldn’t even be there to begin with, and make me come back to the actual person that I am.

Finding Beauty in Nature

 

Two weeks left! Can’t wait to get started on my new blog. 🙂

On Action

Being absorbed by their immediate aims and concerns, not aware of the full implications of their actions, actors are often not in a position to assess the true significance of their doings, or to be fully aware of their own motives and intentions. Only when action has run a certain course, and its relationship to other actions has unfolded, can its significance be made fully manifest and be embodied in a narrative, whether of poets or historians. The fact that this narrative is temporally deferred, that it is at some distance from the events it describes, is one of the reasons why it can provide further insight into the motives and aims of the actors.

 

Interpretation of one of Hannah Arendt’s points on action. Taken from http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/arendt/#ActFrePlu

***

I love how everything makes sense in Philo. 🙂

Fear

Inception.

A while ago, I just remembered everything we discussed in Th131 about fear. Although I took my Th131 around 2 years ago, it’s amazing how much I still remember from that class. I think much of it is because of how remarkable Fr. Dacanay makes his lessons in class stick to the consciousness of his students.

This is going to be a short post so I’ll go right at it.

Fear wasn’t given its conventional meaning in our Theo class. It was defined as something that prevents an individual from experiencing life fully. Fear isn’t bad because of the feelings that it give us: fear becomes a negative thing because of the things that it stops us from doing things that could potentially actualize our life and make it a lot richer. Overcoming fear then leads us to experience life in a myriad of ways that would not have been possible if we didn’t overcome it.

Right now, I’m with the perfect girl for me. Seriously, I have never met a girl whom I’ve met at so many wavelengths in my life. I have never even met a girl whom I considered sharing my entire life with. But around 6 months ago, a girl waltzed into my life and everything between us just clicked in all the right ways.

To be really honest, I’m afraid of her leaving me. And I think it’s that fear that state of being afraid that’s preventing me to treat her the way I treated her before we had issues. I want to go back to that state. I’m working to tackle my demons head-on and fight it. It’s been a really taxing and difficult fight but I think I’m managing to slowly overcome my fear and my insecurities. I know that I’m not over it completely but I know that the improvements are there and that I just have to continue working on them.

But the thing with fear is that as much as one can understand it perfectly in a rational way, it doesn’t necessarily mean that one would rationally deal with it when the moment comes. Right now, I acknowledge the fears that I have. I understand them rationally. Despite this, I still feel that I do such a lousy job of controlling my emotions and my feelings when the moment comes. It’s like my rational being gets chucked out of the window when I’m at that moment where I need to be rational.

At the heart of my fears is that there will come a time when my girlfriend would leave me because I’m not that financially stable. I don’t want that to happen. That thought has just been eating me for the past couple of months now but it has been exponentially getting better with time. It’s better now. She has been constantly telling me over and over again that material things aren’t what she’s after. It’s more of security, a family to be with, love and care, appreciation, and support. I have her those things before. Then I became blinded with my insecurities on the material aspects of life. So now I’m at the process of going back to how I treated her before all of my insecurities came into play.

I really hope I work things out as soon as possible.

I want to and I need to. 🙂

***

“What you are in love with, what seizes your imagination will affect everything. It will decide what will get you out of bed in the mornings, what you will do with your evenings, how you spend your weekends, what you read, who you know, what breaks your heart, and what amazes you with joy and gratitude. Fall in love, stay in love, and it will decide everything.”

-Fr Pedro Arrupe, S.j.

The last time I wrote about this favorite quote of mine, I understood it in such a negative manner. (https://thingsthatbotheroramazeme.wordpress.com/2012/02/19/1236/)

But right now, I’m interpreting this quote again in a different manner. Love, I think, is that driving force which pushes you to maximize your abilities and being. It’s that force that keeps you going even when everything in life is downright awful.

In the context then of a loving relationship, love means bringing out and seeing the best out of your partner. I don’t understand the quote as being too “attached” to your partner. I think at the end of the day, love in the context of a relationship should bring out the best in two people. Harnessing that individuality between two people in order to come up with something special in one partnership.

Okay. Time to do the right things. It’s not enough that I say it or I write it down. I also have to back my words with actions.

That

12 years later, Hybrid Theory is still awesome

 

What do I do to ignore them behind me?
Do I follow my instincts blindly?
Do I hide my pride from these bad dreams
And give in to sad thoughts that are maddening?
Do I sit here and try to stand it?
Or do I try to catch them red-handed?
Do I trust some and get fooled by phoniness,
Or do I trust nobody and live in loneliness?
Because I can’t hold on when I’m stretched so thin
I make the right moves but I’m lost within
I put on my daily facade but then
I just end up getting hurt again
By myself (Myself)

That’s actually really good lyrics right there. Sayang. Linkin Park came up with a really good album in Hybrid Theory then followed it up with fairly mediocre albums. Tsk.

Logically Proud, Emotionally Powered

I finally had the “talk” with my parents yesterday. It wasn’t as bad as I expected but it didn’t go as well as I had hoped. They told me a lot of things that I already realized before but they also made me realize a lot of things that weren’t as clear to me before as it is now.

Our talk focused on two things: the possibility of me getting her pregnant and the inevitable distractions that come with having a girlfriend. Again, I already knew about this even before I talked to them. But the way they talked to me about these things really made me realize that I have been kind of unmindful of these things so far.

I know all of the negative things that come with having an unplanned pregnancy to an unprepared couple. It’s a life -changing event that doesn’t take life into a better direction. Having a baby is probably one of the biggest responsibilities in the world. Giving that responsibility to a couple who isn’t ready for that responsibility will lead to disastrous results for the baby and the couple.

I have to be more mindful of this. I have to always make sure that this won’t happen to me. As my mother pointed out, “Marami na ang nagsabi niyan at marami na ang sumablay. Kaya mag-iingat ka.” When she said these words, it literally shook my ideas on sex to the core. I’m not about to rethink my entire philosophy on sex but I think I have to consider what my parents said about it and I have to rework some of the ideas that I have.

The second main part of our talk revolved around the fact that having a girlfriend inevitably means getting distracted with my general direction in life.

I have always thought of it being a good “distraction” that keeps me going in the things that I do. Generally speaking, my girlfriend does that to me. She has a net positive effect in my life in a way that even if  she doesn’t do it knowingly, she helps me go beyond my limits and achieve things in my academic, org, and social work that would have only been remotely possible without her in my life.

However, on the other side on the coin, she also has the power to distract me from doing these things. As my Dad pointed out, it’s difficult to focus on things in life when you’re emotionally attached to someone. I actually agree with what he said because when my girlfriend and I have fights, it completely throws off my focus on the tasks that I have on that particular moment.

Take for example last Saturday. I was content and happy working in the lab when we suddenly mildly fighting. That bothered me a lot so I ended up thinking about her instead of thinking about my experiment. So what happened was instead of carrying out my experiments in a measured, exact, and calculated way, I ended up doing it in a very sloppy way. Thankfully, my experiment last Saturday was only a kind of trial run for my thesis. If I were working on an important aspect of my thesis, I would have been screwed.

I like telling other people that I approach things in life in a rational manner. I feel proud whenever I say this because I feel like I have control over my entire being. I only realized last night that this is bullshit. In my fantasies, I’m a being who can detach myself from my experiences in life and approach these experiences from a purely rational and logical way.

But in reality, I’m more of an emotionally-powered being: a being who easily gets swayed with emotions and feelings and only thinks after I do something impulsive because of my emotions. I’m more of a hot-tempered person rather than a cold and calculating person.

To be fair to myself, I’m actually a lot better in keeping my emotions in-check today. I used to say so much hurtful things in my fights with my previous relationships that I ended up hurting the person I love instead of resolving our issues. Today, I make a conscious effort to try not to hurt the person I love during our fights with the words I say but I still usually end up hurting her.

I can’t afford to always have these fights with my girlfriend. It’s a lose-lose situation for me. I hurt her and I get hurt in our fights and I totally get distracted from the things that I have to do. I really have to learn to avoid fighting with her. Of course, fights are unavoidable in relationships. But I have to learn to choose my battles and only fight the battles that are really necessary.

***

It’s funny because all of these things are already in my mind. I consciously know about these things. But when the moment comes when I have to apply these ideas, all of them go down the drain and I rely on my emotions instead.

I really have to learn how to lean on my brain more instead of my heart.