Finally!

HIMYM Season 8!

Episode Quote:

Klaus:	Victoria is wunderbar, but she is not my lebenslangerschicksalsschatz. She’s my beinaheleidenschaftsgegenstand…it means the thing that is almost the thing that you want, but it’s not quite. That is Victoria to me.
Ted:	How do you know she’s not lebenslangerschicksalsschatz? Maybe as the years go by she’ll get lebenslangerschicksalsschatz…ier?
Klaus:	lebenslangerschicksalsschatz is not something that develops over time. It is something that happens instantaneously. It courses through you like the water of a river after a storm, filling you and emptying you all at once. You feel it throughout your body, in your hands, in your heart, in your stomach, in your skin…have you ever felt this way about someone?
Ted:	…I think so.
Klaus:	If you have to think about it, you have not felt it.
Ted:	And you’re absolutely sure you’ll find that someday?
Klaus:	Of course. Everyone does eventually…you just never know when or where.

Source: http://how-i-met-your-mother.wikia.com/wiki/Farhampton

Kim Hyoyeon

sort of hit the spot. sort of.

its 1am and im having trouble sleeping. so what do i do? go to facebook. then a pop message appeared at the corner of my screen and its says "God wants You to know". and here is what God wants me to know, according to the pop-up message: 

"On this day of your life, Tristofer, we believe God wants you to know ... that every time you pretend to love, you impoverish yourself more and more.

Love has great potential to enrich your life. But if you are just playing a role, pretending to love, it's only going to poison you. Because you are teaching yourself that it's just a game, and slowly but surely you will lose the capacity to open in love."

i dont normally read this "God wants You to know" pop-up but since its 1am and im trying to make myself sleepy, i gave it a try. 

i would like to react on the message but since im starting to feel drowsy, i better take advantage of it before it goes away. i really need to go to sleep since i have an early appointment with a client. 

still a Sone

before Psy's Gangnam Style, there was...Carly Rae's Call Me Maybe. since i learned about this song when people already heard too much of it, im not sick and tired of it...yet.

i remember my siblings asking me if ive heard this song and they were surprised when i said i have no clue what the crap they were talking about. whats more surprising is the fact i havent seen its full music video. ive seen parts of it but i havent really watched it completely. the music video doesnt appeal to me. thankfully (or maybe not) someone made a video of visually pleasing entities and added Jepsen's annoyingly addictive song.

actually, im just trying to come up with something or write anything that would allow me to post the video. 

Phase 2 is now in effect

ive been testing theories about myself for months (just being the usually self-centered me). its part of the project called "merging personalities". not that i actually have multiple personalities but i adjust my self to whomever im facing. thats why im such an inconsistent person. or appear to be. ive been trying to pin point parts of those different "personalities" which are worth keeping, and discarding those traits that are...counter productive (or to put it in ordinary terms, determining one's strengths and weaknesses and addressing the weaknesses by getting rid of it). so merging these traits is like creating a stronger, better, faster, harder...me (or again, in simple terms, self-improvement). as if my ego isnt big enough, i had to fortify it with this to make it grow as large as jupiter...but this time i will inject myself with a dose of humility to make thy ego look like the size of what used to be a planet called pluto, or maybe much smaller...like the moon (still big. damn it ego! shrink down!)

i think im done with the theory testing stage. ive confirmed some, debunked some. ive mapped out potentially effective approaches and outlined a mode of action. the difficult part is the timetable. i thought the theory testing will last for a few more months but it seems ive ran out of theories to test. i think its time for phase 2. all systems go!

am i happier or am i happier?

i think i am. im 60% happy. this is an improvement because im usually 50-50 or less, even 30% even. that was my normal state of mind (and i miss it). not depressed. im just naturally not a happy person ever since i changed to my current self way back in high school. and this is a big deal for everyone except me.

the reason i said i think im happier now is because im less cranky most of the time. i think i dont wear my scowl anymore. i would say im 70% happy when i can readily smile with ease, meaning i dont have to think about smiling or having a conscious effort to smile. at 60%, i only have that semi-forced smile. its not like im forcing myself to smile but since its not my natural tendency to do it, i cant express my smile automatically (so im happy inside but i dont naturally express it). i have to consciously switch it on, like "oh, this is where a smile is appropriate". this means my positive emotional level has not reached the point where i can make my smile operate on auto-pilot. for me 80% happy is when i laugh a lot. really laugh. 90% happy is when im extremely excited about something that my body language shows it. i get this with stuff or people i really like. 100% is that point above 90%. i think i have more room for happiness above 90% so thats why there's a 100%. maybe thats when the elusive creature called love hits me with a delightfully soft pillow containing a handful of bricks. thats got to be it. 100% happy is when you have both pain and pleasure and still sincerely smile because you really are happy.

the only thing in sight is what I must do

i believe ive reached the point where i dont think in my work anymore. lawyering should be like rallying an army of brain cells to get the job done. i mean, the reason i took up law is for the intellectual stimulation. now, i just use a handful of brain cells who cares to volunteer to think about the legal problem.

not that i mastered law itself. far from it. very far from it. i rarely master anything. its just my mind would rather be busy with non-legal matters and lawyering has reached a routinary point. like there's a template i can refer to with the kind of legal problems that i encounter. gone are the peculiar cases i got when i was still in the UP Office of Legal Aid (or my initial months in law practice). The cases assigned to me then made people wonder how in whose whatever's name such a case was accepted and why am i the one handling it. that is why a law blockmate joked, the reason it was assigned to me is because its challenging. i couldnt be given anything less. it was dubbed as the curious cases of tristofer troisvallees. my baseless reputation of being some genius precedes me.

i dont know. the older i get, the more i develop an aversion for intellectual stimulation (the same way i developed an aversion for beer and coffee). like, its overrated, its tiring and not worth it. i should spend my time in stuff i enjoy. problem is, what do i enjoy? thinking! well, i used to enjoy it. now, i just want my mind to be blank and be an airhead. sometimes i do feel envious of dumbasses.

this is the problem with merging personalities. i have to face personalities which directly contradicts the dominant personality and try to figure out how to assimilate it. sometimes i wonder whether im doing the right thing. but i already told myself months ago that when i pose such question before me, i should get rid of the doubt and answer "yes!" this has to be done. i think this wanna-be-airhead part of me is the side of me that hated my guts for growing up too fast, for taking life seriously at an early age. the one that asked why do i have to aim for superiority over ordinary people? why cant i let myself enjoy life the way it wanted me to? well, what can i say, idiots really pissed me off when i was in high school and i didnt want to be one of them.

going back to normal in 3,2,1...

i think my usual life has returned. i mean, august was...tolerable but a pain in the ass nonetheless. last august was much better than the previous ones (i wasnt as "unlucky" compared to the augusts of previous years) but maybe because it brought something tragic. my grandmother died last month and it really took me out of my daily routine.

my grandmother has been confined in a couple of hospitals for more than month before she died mid-august. i visited her...i think often enough. i saw her health deteriorate as weeks passed by. well there were times when she got better, then there were just days where her health just abruptly turned for the worse. so when the news came that she passed away, i was half-expecting it already. i mean, she died on a monday morning. i visited her two days before, or saturday afternoon to be exact and her condition then was the worst ive seen since i started visiting her. the next time i saw her, sunday night, she was already in a coma after being revived from a cardiac arrest.

im not close to my grandparents. my grandparents from my paternal side died when i was still in grade school. my maternal grandfather was an "absentee grandfather" and only returned when he was already very ill. he was probably clueless who the hell i was. my maternal grandmother, the only grandparent i really knew, was ok. we rarely talked. i dont know. i just didnt grow close to her and it made me feel like i grew up with no grandparents. only when i was asked to speak during her wake that i realized its not entirely true, i mean, feeling that i grew up with no grandparent.

i acknowledged my maternal grandmother as the head of the clan and in a way, she's the tie that binds all of us in our family. as i said in her wake, my grandmother is prone to favoritism and i am not one of her favorites. she has tendency to love the people around her in unequal amounts but that doesnt change the fact the she loves all of us. i may not be one of those who receives a lot of love from her but i cant deny the fact that she tried to express her love for me, in her own simple ways, no matter how little compared to my other cousins, just to make me feel that she does love me. to receive love from someone who underwent the kind of pain and suffering she experienced is something that should be appreciated for its comes from a person with such a big heart. to ask for more is to ask her to be perfect, which is unreasonable for my part since she has done so much when ive done so little or nothing at all for her. 

anyway, now she is resting in peace with the man she fell in love with and truly cared about. i honestly think she is in a much better place. and i am surprised that despite our very minimal interactions, i am going to miss her

this song will never be the same again...

well, maybe a little tainted. this song will now remind me of that night...i was asked to stay until 2:30am (which i did) despite the fact i have a court hearing/pretrial in a civil case hours later, which i have not adequately prepared for. so the opposing counsel was able to take advantage of the fact that my brain cells werent working that morning. and i risked my client's case for what? well, at that moment, it looked like she was worth it. seriously, its like one bad decision after another. i really gots to get rid of my pair of bad decision jeans.

anyway, i remember hearing this song way back when i was a little kid during the wonderful decade called the 80s. i associate this song with the 1986 movie "The Fly". of course, my memory may not be accurate but from what i remember...i was watching TV, sitting on the floor, channel 9, then there was this commercial about a film starring Jeff Goldblum which has some monster in it, with some night scenes of the 80s, and the background music was Roxette's Dangerous. this memory flashes in my head everytime i hear the song. i also remember the time i lost in a spelling bee when i was in Grade 1 because i forgot to write the letter "o" when i was spelling the word "dangerous".