Some things build up over time. You get all excited and everything with waiting. Then the day finally comes and it doesn't even come close to what you expected. Oh boy, what the hell was I thinking.
4 days left in August and I still have to watch a movie for this month. I cannot remember the last time a month passed by without me watching a movie at the theaters. If I would have to throw in a guess, I would say it was back in 2000.
Don't worry (Are you even worried?). I am not dying yet, though I could have died months ago and did not notice it.
If I have any strength to go out on Wednesday, I'd catch a couple of movies or more to catch up. Alone most likely. And even if would be the shittiest of theaters which is SM.
There is something at work which could be potentially great and I am more than halfway through it but I have to keep myself from talking and thinking too much about it as failure is always follows me around especially when I actually try and am aware of it. The best things in my life happen when I don't give a flying fuck or when I don't bloody care.
So this should mark the last time, I even vaguely mentioned it. The month would be over before we know it.
Let's talk videogames.
After months of playing God of War on and off, I have finally finished the bloody (figuratively and literally) game. Since I am so bored with my life, I play the game for like an hour every month from the time I acquired a copy. I have to say that the game is remarkable and was a great experience, sadly the copy I got did not unlock the extra features that should have come out when the game was finished.
There are still a ton of games I need to play though which actually work on my PS2, Metal Gear Solid: Snake Eater and Prince of Persia 2: The Warrior Within. I'll try spending more time with them and see if they can suck me in. Honestly, only a good RPG can bring me back to life. One possible exception would be We Love Katamari.
This is the point where I shout and curse every living thing. Why the fuck can't you just let me sleep?
For as far as I can remember, I could not sleep longer than 4 hours. No matter what time of the day, I'd always find myself waking 4 hours (or less) later with an inability of falling back to sleep.
I try but all efforts are lost. I am simply unable to go back to sleep.
Arrived this morning around 6 and slept a little past 7. Found myself awake and kicking (literally, in frustration though) around 10.
Yesterday was the worst.
Arrived at around 10 in the evening after going to the airport and slept before 11 in the evening. I woke up before 4 in the morning and was unable to sleep. Logged online and tried to look for people. No such luck, everyone is asleep or I do not have much friends.
Decided to try and go back to sleep around 8 in the morning. Success. Unfortunately, it was short lived. I woke up around 9 again unable to sleep right away. Since I was too lazy to get up and do anything else, I simply lay there and I lost track of time. It was not exactly sleep or it was so light it hardly felt like sleeping, so when I came to my senses, it was around 10 in the morning.
This scenario repeated itself until 3 in the afternoon, a time at which I really had to start preparing for work. It was not a nice experience. Good thing that it did not work performance at work.
I just want to sleep some more and as it is the best place to be in right now. Feeling, thinking of nothing. A great escape from reality.
No dreams please since as of late, they have been quite unsatisfactory and just rub the fact that I can't have certain things. Why the hell do you have to do that now? I already get the bloody picture.
Now that I am awake, I might as well eat, another thing I have been missing out lately and having less lately.
An Hour: Too Short For Foreplay
Wednesday mornings are like short trips to hell. For the past two weeks, I have been unable to sleep. Last week was bad as I did not sleep at all. This time was fairly better as I was able to sleep at around 9 in the morning.
The mood did not change though when I woke up.
Something is severely wrong. I used to love Wednesdays as new movies are usually released on this day, I have even dubbed it as Movie Day Wednesday where in I'd go out and try to catch up by watching a couple (or more) movies at the theaters alone. Yes, I am that much of a loser.
The sentences above are supposed to be for a blog on Wednesday, but I never was in the mood to finish it up.
Day-offs are pretty boring and I actually prolonged my agony by applying for leaves until Sunday. Not a very grand idea. I may have less than five leaves available and I do not see myself taking anymore especially if things continue to be like this.
I have lost all desire to go out of the house. I don't even feel like going to the next town and visiting the bank how much more to travel to Manila to watch a movie. There are a number of movies I want to watch and have missed already. I don't believe Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is showing in any decent theater anymore. SM Megamall, despite the recent renovation of the theaters is still crap. There are gigs tonight which I could visit but right now am not sure I even want to go out.
Thing is after 14 years of living here in Pililla, Rizal, I have finally realized how far home is from anything. Malls, theaters, decent schools, decent places to hang out, friends, fast-food delivery, high-speed broadband connections, pollution, the list goes on and on. If it weren't for a big chunk of Rizal considered as Metro Manila, we would have had a different area code, and that would have been dead a long time ago.
For years I have been justifying that it only takes an hour with no traffic to reach our place. Now, when I really think about it, so much can be done in an hour. This "just an hour" mentality has led to me writing-off an hour as an extremely short amount of time, too short to do anything. Too short a time to play a game on the Playstation. Too short for a quick nap. Too short to exercise or play a sport. Too short for a phone conversation. Too short to log online. Too short to sit down and learn some CSS, PHP or HTML. Too short to play with Photoshop. You get the picture.
As a result, I always find myself slacking off more and procrastinating until it comes to a point where I find myself saying there is so much I want to do and no time to freaking do anything. Which is exactly how the past days have been.
Thought about visiting the bank, then the time a roundtrip would take sunk in. Around an hour would be wasted and I suddenly thought that it was not worth it. Imagine how long it would take for people in the city to visit a mall would take, 15 minutes, 30 minutes tops. I have even formulated a theory(?) before: if it takes more than 30 minutes for one to get to a decent mall, he/she lives too far from civilization.
I look outside the window and see our hill, full of trees and greenery. Remember times I'd go up the hill and breathe the fresh air and enjoy the scenery. They used to be my reasons for forgetting the hassles of traveling, not to mention the PC, Playstation, stereo component, DVD player and the decent sized TV, plus of course my family.
After two years of traveling to and from work everyday, the distance is now under my skin. Fresh air, I travel everyday via public transport and inhale more smoke than people who actually live in Manila. Add the smokers into the equation and no amount of fresh air would make a freaking difference.
Everything has to be planned out in advance, around two to three hours before leaving, which would explain why I am never late unless a trailer fell down the slopes of Antipolo.
It feels like I have been and am continually being deprived of my life here, the joy, the pleasure, the ease to just shower and go out and be somewhere all in less than an hour. The ease of visiting someone just because you want to without any much effort being exerted, eliminating (at the least, reducing) any ideas that there would be an ulterior motive behind it.
Flexible Like Mister Fantastic
In a blog a few days ago, I was asking for some consistency with the work schedule and in some obscure way I got part of what I wished for.
The schedule from last week was retained but it seems that we are fillers for other teams as well. Two out of five working days start at 3 in the afternoon, the other 3 days start at 7 in the evening. Well, at the least they did not change whatever schedule we had last week.
Anyway, I am on leave from Thursday to Saturday so I shouldn't be complaining as much. Plus, with this schedule whenever we transition from 3 in the afternoon to 7 in the evening, we would have longer hours for R&R (Rest and more Rest).
Come to think of it, I don't even have anything planned up for those days. The last day-offs I had were pretty bland.
Two weeks ago I agreed to do this essay for one of my ex-girlfriends. With nothing better to do, I agreed. It was partly done and I only needed to add a few points into it.
This week, it was blander still and with rain ruining any interest of actually going out and catching a movie, I decided to have a haircut which am hoping would be the last haircut I'd be having this year.
Now that I think about it, I am not sure why I took those days off. Well, my brother is leaving on the 20th and that would provide some time with the family. Right, like we haven't already.
I might as well buy a copy of Atelier Iris: Eternal Mana, give it a chance and see if it would tickle my fancy and lure me back to videogaming.
"The most overlooked advantage to owning a computer is that if they foul up there's no law against whacking them around a little." -- Joe Martin
It's over. Formatted the other hard drive, installed windows, and as I was setting up the desktop the freaking thing rebooted. Perfect.
Possible points of failure: power supply, motherboard, or processor. Let's not forget the spirit haunting my computer.
It can't be the video card since I have already tried two and they both had the exact same problem. If there was a problem there, it would be on the AGP slot itself. Doubt that it could be the memory as I have tried 3 pairs (2 CRIMMS, 2 128MB RUMMS, 2 64MB RIMMS) in the four slots which are available in ever combination imaginable. So if there would be a problem with the computer accessing the memory, it would be a problem with the slot.
This is just frustrating. I bought the awesome sequel to Star Wars: Knights Of The Old Republic and I can't freaking play it due to these random reboots. I have to be careful as well with how many programs I have at any given moment as it seems that having too much causes the computer to reboot. Right now, the computer has not rebooted in more than 3 hours and I have Firefox, FrontPage, and Winamp playing. There are instances that having these 3 applications still causes the computer to reboot.
Whenever you think the computer is working fine, it would just reboot, breaking your heart with it.
This is no way to spend a day-off. I was actually looking forward to this day-off, but sadly things never work out.
I am stuck at home with an awesome game to play but unable to enjoy it due to the freaking problem, mind you this is a game I purchased months ago.
In the other room, my PS2 is sitting unused, waiting for some play time, but sadly despite quality games which need to be completed like God of War and Prince of Persia: Warrior Within, and new games like Psychonauts and Destroy All Humans!, I have yet to find a game which would completely suck me in. A good RPG would easily do the trick for me.
The last game which did this for me was Shadow Hearts: Covenant. A number of RPGs showed potential but had problems. Star Ocean: Till The End of Time has known issues with older PS2s and would lock up. Xenosaga II was going smooth until the voice-overs would mysteriously disappear and the game also locked up. Full Metal Alchemist was too simplistic and I was already coping with it until one of the anime cut scenes kicked in, it was in Japanese.
I blame SquareEnix for this. They had to release Final Fantasy XI as an MMORPG which I could not play due to a lack of subscription to the service and of course lack of a broadband connection at home. On the other hand, Final Fantasy XII won't be released in Japan until the end of the year. I almost passed out when found out that FFXII would not be available until next year.
Here's hoping Radiata Stories would cure this illness of mine and bring me back to my true love, videogaming. Unfortunately, it is not to be released until September.
There are a couple of DVDs I could watch though, Leon (aka The Professional), and Stephen King's The Shining. Also, I could go out and have a haircut.
There is one more issue I would like to blog about, but I'd leave that for later. This blog is insanely long already.
It's 5:30 in the morning, which is around the same time I usually come home from work. I have to sleep now. Boy, I am such a loser.
We can stop hoping now.
The bloody thing just rebooted itself a few minutes ago. This is getting quite frustrating. Once I have the time, I'd be installing Windows on another hard drive which actually was the original one on the computer. Let's see how that would fare.
Damn you Sir William Gates for creating such a user-friendly operating system and monopolizing the market. Good luck with Windows Vista.
As I was typing the line above, the computer rebooted again. Creepy. I guess Kaka was right, this computer is haunted. I need to exorcise the ghost out of this one.
The trend of time waiting for calls at work seems to have continued. Thing is, it was still a weekend so we can expect more calls today as it is a start of a whole new work week for them.
Pretty normal calls for the day except for one sarcastic customer who made me curse in a record time of 20 seconds into the call. My hats off to you, I haven't heard that line before.
So two candidates from the Presidential race of 2004 have died already, I really can't help but ask the question, "Who's next?"
Things at work change so abruptly with little to no warning.
Just when we where getting comfortable with a fixed schedule that usually lasts for several weeks, they suddenly change it. It would have been great if it allowed us more time to sleep or stay at home but when it cuts the time to rest, it is bloody frustrating. After our day offs, the schedule changes yet again. Who knows what the schedule next Saturday would be.
Sadly, there is nothing which could be done but accept it. Working in this kind of an industry poses these kinds of sudden changes.
Right!
As consolidation for this I guess, there are only a few calls during the first 3 hours of the shift. Surely hope that was a normal trend and did not happen at that instance alone.
This computer is still rebooting at random. I really cannot figure out what the freaking problem is. Stripped the system down to the bare essentials, hard drive and memory and it still rebooted. After removing the video drivers and installing the very first ones, things seemed to work great until it rebooted yesterday.
While I was reseating components the last time, I noticed that there was hardly any thermal paste on the heatsink/processor. I believe when the system was sent in for repair of the motherboard, they did not put new thermal paste for the processor. Then again the system worked fine for a couple of years until now.
Was able to get some thermal paste from a friend at work and now the computer is working fine. At least, it is lasting longer than when I tried it yesterday.
The Words In Bold Are Give-A-Ways
I'm sorry. I'm sorry for being so weak but I couldn't help it and I know that no amount of apologies would compensate for what I did. A broken sonnet is still a sonnet and holds meaning.
I was powerless and my guard was bent down and for a moment my mind blacked out and when I came to my senses I already made a decision I knew I was going to regret.
I had seen it in the past and previously I was able to runaway and had control over my senses but this time was different, I was caught at a moment wherein I was quite vulnerable, a time wherein life support had been stopped. Inside of me, part simply couldn't take no for an answer.
If you were here tonight (that night), this would never had happened but it was the day you said goodnight so all I can do now is sit underneath the waves regretting the day I let a blue sky affect my mood.
Another month has been added yet again to the Archives.
Blog-wise, the month of July '05 has been the most unproductive ever since starting this website. A record low of 6 blogs in a months time. Weak. Simply weak.
It's not like I did not have the time to blog as I had oodles. Despite being in the night shift I was able to dedicate sometime to go online once I get home after work. Time dedicated to read webcomics and catch up on other blogs.
For some reason or another, I simply did not feel like blogging despite having the necessary ingredients like time and a story (or at least something to say/express). When I sit in front of the computer and start to blog, nothing comes out anymore. If something does squeeze through, it is so incoherent that I simply stop what I am doing.
Like now, I just lost what I was supposed to say.
This is lame and disturbing.
Do not fret though, as personally I am not (severely) depressed or anything. Regardless of what has been happening and how confusing things are right now, I am actually happier than I was a year ago so that's all good.
Work resumes again today. A little earlier than before, 10 in the evening and with no transportation I have to commute which easily translated to leaving home an hour and a half earlier. I believe there's a buffet at work tonight which is something to look forward to, plus day-offs are on Tuesday and Wednesday.