I do.

I just do.

Increments

There is one word that often comes in my head whenever I feel overwhelmed.

Increments.

Life is a huge process of increments. Little nudge. Tiny movements.

Don't think big. Savour each little moments. Life happens in increments.

Small joys. Simple happiness.

Akala

Bakit ganun? Kung minsan, akala mo, meron nang liwanag ung mga akala mong malabo at madilim na sandali ng buhay mo, saka naman pala mali ka. Saka naman pala isang malaking akala mo lang pala ung inaakala mong liwanag. Mali ka nanaman. Parang hindi ka na naging tama.

Ang hirap. Kasi kung kelan na ang akala mo, tamang tama ang pagdating nitong taong ito, ng sandaling ito sa buhay mo habang ang lungkot lungkot mo, na akala mo yey, tapos na ang dilim ng sandali, tapos na ung haba ng gabi, saka naman pala maiisip mo na hindi pala.

Nakakapagod na. Tila parang gusto ko na hindi na lang mangyari kahit kelan. Na habang buhay ko nang isasara ung puso ko, hindi titibok, hindi aasa, hindi magmamahal. Baka dun lang pala ako maswerte, ung hindi makakaramdam.

Ayoko na.

If I Could Reach You

I have had my share of frustrations in life. A huge chunk of share, if I may say so. In restrospect, these frustrations are all but made me who I am, the woman I have become today. A large part of me was born out of every single frustrating moments of my life. Losing. Letting go. Failing.

I have had another frustrating moment in life that happened recently. This guy I really really like, whom I have gone out before turns out to be dating someone else already.

The frustration? I really REALLY like this guy. Another frustration? I didn't do enough to make this guy see me for who I truly am. Another one? I didn't think this guy truly liked me, whether he sees the real me or not.

More than ever, I am frustrated on myself . It was me anyway who fell for the stupid lines. It was me anyway who, despite my repeated tune of not having any expectations after the supposed date, fell for him. It was me who thought and hoped and wished and prayed something more will happen between us. It was me who expected that he likes me like I liked him when in fact, it may just be gas. Yup, the stupid ol' little me.

I learned from the vines that this girl he's 'seeing' (yup, girl who is eight years younger than I am! -- another frustration? maybe!) is someone who knows what she wants and who knows how to get it. And so she did! Me? I just know what I want. Getting it is the hazy part. Or is it? I dunno. I have thought all of my wrong moves, all the wrong moments that I failed to follow through. The moments when I felt I didn't do anything and the moments I thought I may have done too much. I was just swinging my ways of awkwardness and ineptitude, hoping I did what I needed to, the very moment I have to do it. Whether it's right or wrong, I don't know anymore. It was the real me and I rest on that thought. It was me who wanted to try to do what I can to make him feel I like him (which apparently seems not as obvious as I had hoped it was). It turns out it was not enough. Or maybe it was just not me he likes.

I dunno how else to reach him. To borrow some lines to a song that makes me remember of my dad (it's one of his faves!) .... "If I could reach you some way. If I knew the magic it would take.... maybe I could make you stay"

It's just frustrating to not be able to know what to do to be able to reach him. I feel like I'm a scared cat who just cowers and hide, not sure of what to do.

I think, more than ever, I am frustrated that he doesn't like me like I like him. That there weren't chances to be with him, to know him, to be friends with him and maybe explore other realm that may be possible to come out of such friendship. None. Nada.

But hey, as I said, I have had frustrations in life and I'm still alive, healthy, breathing. Life moves on. The earth is still spinning on its axis. The world didn't stop. Mine may have skipped in the last few days but it's slowly spinning again, trying to rebuild something that may have been lost and trying to live those I have earned from this moment in my so-called life.

later.

John Mayer

I feel I owe it to John Mayer to find a place in my humble blog for him.

John has been with me especially whenever, for some reason or another, I feel the clouds in my realm is not as blue as I wish it to be.

Thank you, John, for keeping me company while I drive home, crying over my life drama I can't seem to have any control of. Thanks for keeping me company at night when I'm alone in my bedroom thinking things over, going over and over them that I need I want to change but I can't anymore. Thanks for sharing my breakfast. And my dinners. My tea time.

In my own special way, I talk to my friends about your songs, about how great they are and how amazing the guitar play is. I hope I was able to influence them to listen to you. Some did. Some don't. I guess, sometimes, they hear your music and think of how you've become the jerk the media (and maybe yourself too!) has made you to be. Well, sometimes I don't like the John Mayer of the Media. But I have and always will like the John Mayer the music man.

Thanks for the songs, John. One my my greatest disappointments in life was never having the chance to see you last October when you visited Manila.

But hey, the earth is still spinning. Maybe someday soon, I will hear you play live in some corner of the world.


later.

Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Here's an inspiring speech from Steve Job in a Stanford graduation.

'You've got to find what you love,' Jobs says

This is a prepared text of the Commencement address delivered by Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Computer and of Pixar Animation Studios, on June 12, 2005.

I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I've ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That's it. No big deal. Just three stories.

The first story is about connecting the dots.

I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?

It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: "We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?" They said: "Of course." My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.

And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents' savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn't see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn't interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.

It wasn't all romantic. I didn't have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends' rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example:

Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn't have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and I found it fascinating.

None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, it's likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.

Again, you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

My second story is about love and loss.

I was lucky — I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees. We had just released our finest creation — the Macintosh — a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him. So at 30 I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.

I really didn't know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down - that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me — I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.

I didn't see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.

During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the worlds first computer animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I returned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple's current renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together.

I'm pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn't been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don't lose faith. I'm convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You've got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don't settle.

My third story is about death.

When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: "If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you'll most certainly be right." It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: "If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?" And whenever the answer has been "No" for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.

Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn't even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor's code for prepare to die. It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought you'd have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sure everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.

I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started crying because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and I'm fine now.

This was the closest I've been to facing death, and I hope it's the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept:

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960's, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.

Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: "Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish." It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.

Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Thank you all very much.

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Related To This Story
Video of Steve Jobs' Commencement Address
2005 Stanford Commencement coverage

and I quote ...