Morbid Thoughts: Zeroing In On Mortality

This year I came to learn about a new and faster way to die of cancer. No offense to the victims of this dreaded disease, but it definitely sparked a new sense of fear to anyone of us who could be diagnosed with this kind of disease.

About three months ago, I met a Filipina and she narrated to me how quickly she lost her husband in six weeks time to pancreatic cancer. Then about a month ago, I happen to look for a good book to give for Father’s day and bumped into one best seller “The Last Lecture” by Randy Pausche who also passed away a month ago to pancreatic cancer. May his soul rest in peace.

On July 25, we celebrated our fiesta for our tiny city somewhere in the western hemisphere of the Mindanao islands, but sadly a good friend and neighbor of ours couldn’t make it after she lost her battle with the dreaded pancreatic cancer two days prior to the city celebration. Nobody knew how it all went but just last March she was full of life and vigor with no sign of an impending fatal ailment.

Death is certain but its timing is uncertain to any one of us. It could be sooner. It could be later. But we all have to face death at some point in our life. Its wrath will remain a mystery to us, until we come to our end.

How long do you want to live? You are probably hoping to say, “Forever.”

If you ask me, my answer will be, “All I want is to be able to live a fruitful life—short or long it doesn’t matter for as long as I’ve lived all of my life’s worth.”

I came from a small community in the western part of Mindanao. I loved growing up in the neighborhood where my home was. I know most of my neighbors because it is such a small community and everyone was always up someone’s nose.

Anyway, one thing that I love to do when I am geographically available which in other words would mean that I am not twenty thousand miles away from home, is to celebrate Christmas and New Year with my neighbors—young and old alike.

It’s one thing that I truly enjoy doing and sharing with the less fortunate people in our area. I am not rich but I am able to afford a few luxuries than most of them. That doesn’t imply though that I have a much better life than them. I still struggle just like any of them or any of you out there but probably in a much different level or dimension. I don’t consider myself any much better than the rest of them or you, thus, when I spend time back home I always reach out to those people like I used to, growing up in the same neighborhood.

If by chance you ask these people what they want to do for that time of the year, they would tell you that they look forward to spending the night away on the roadside, cheering , eating, dancing, playing with real people and having just pure clean fun for once. Of course, on top of that, they wish I would come home, because I’m like the honey that brings the ants together.

It is something that I treasure in my heart. The time I get to spend with these people are real special to me. Why?

These people are real and selfless.

Most of the people I know and met on the other part of the planet are of a different breed. Most of them are selfish, money-hungry, vain, and superficial and some of them even probably think that they are immortals.

Death is real and certain to every mortal being and that includes me and you and them.

Sadly, in this day and age, we don’t even get to stop and ponder on our mortality. We breeze through life the same way we zap frozen dinners in our microwave. We are too busy collecting every material stuff as if we would be able to create a hotspot once we are in our dead zone from six feet under. Mind you, it doesn’t even bother us that the only way for us to get a good night sleep is to take some sedatives or some sleeping pills. For some of us wasting away our life is okay for as long as our bank account is growing or for as long as we are able to surround ourselves with tangible things that spell our status symbol.

Listen people. If I have the money to live a comfortable life, I would, but I would stop awhile, and smell the roses, or probably attempt to count the stars in the sky or help a caterpillar morph its way to butterflyhood or just take the time to pick up a pebble and throw it into a pond and enjoy the ripples it creates.

The one thing though, that I would love to do, if I have the means is to help feed and educate the young and get other capable beings to do the same in their own little way. Then I would have lived my worth in life.

Most of the people that I used to know in the community where I grew up are either dead or dying. Some of them are younger than me.

Some of them just wilted quickly almost untimely in my own scheme of what is due and what is not. It’s a sad feeling to realize that the circle of people I used to know is not the same since some of them are no longer with us.

Well to me, life is all about the journey. If it was a wonderful trip all along then you probably will get to your destination, a happy soul.

Some of us though are misled and tried to concentrate on the material pot of gold that is promised at the end of the rainbow. Some people get to it fast, some people don’t get there, but for those who get there and find the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, it’s a lonely spot to be. After all, it is far more enjoyable to watch the rainbow from afar than get to its end.

Excuse the lengthy wordy metaphors, but what I am trying to impart in this blog is really about life and mortality. Since I have unnecessarily exhausted you with what I think life is all about now let’s tackle mortality. Yeah, we’re just getting started.

You think you’ll live a long life?

Factor in these things—nations are threatening each other with weapons of mass destruction; global warming is a growing issue; energy crises is a looming problem; the crime rate is growing at an irresolute pace; the ailing economy is bringing about all kinds of restless speculation; pollution is getting worse than ever; the food we eat is genetically modified beyond what is healthy and fit for human beings; new strains of viruses are breaking out which are highly resistant to drugs; your temper meter is constantly challenged; you make enemies on a daily basis and that’s the only thing constant in your social existence; you are over exposed to different electromagnetic fields brought about by all electronic gadgets that you collect; you constantly for no good reason need to miss some sleep just to be at par with your high-tech life; and yes, if you drive a car, factor that in to taking into consideration the fact that when you’re on the road you are surrounded by tons of metal moving at high and oftentimes reckless velocity. Do you smoke? Do you drink? Do you take drugs? Are you constantly surrounded by violence? Are you violent yourself? Do you suffer from any kind of abuse? Do you abuse someone? Are you harboring any ill wills against your neighbor? Does your gene carry some history of family disease? Are you sexually promiscuous? Are you an ego-maniac?

The answer is, some of us wouldn’t be so lucky to make it past today’s sundown.

The reality of life and death is that harsh. Immortal? Think again.

Dead Zones: A Mobile Dilemma

You probably oftentimes see on TV, one mobile service provider’s ad about dead zones.

I really didn’t pay much attention to dead zones until I was immersed in one. For the last seven days I was basically incommunicado—no internet, no phone lines, no mobile phone signals. You don’t realize how awful it is to be totally disconnected from the outside world. At the same time, there’s this restful feeling of serenity brought about by the absence of all your technology gadgets that most of the time, unbeknownst to you, robs you of your precious time.

The most awful thing about being unable to communicate is when emergency happens and you need immediate help and you’re basically left unaided. The second most awful thing about being unreachable is the feeling of being helplessly unable to vent out your thoughts to your peers and relatives and share some exciting news.

Well, we recently relocated from the west coast to the east and the address where I live now is a total dead zone. Imagine my frustration when I couldn’t make calls even if I have on one hand an iPhone subscribed with AT&T and a Blackberry subscribed to T-Mobile on the other.

Even the most sophisticated phones and the most promising mobile providers in the nation could not be of use where I was at. Both phones show the same thing—No Service.

I was telling myself how useless it was to have subscribed to both services.

I went to RadioShack to look for a high-speed router and happen to bring out my dilemma to one of the store attendants. I was actually thinking of getting a cell phone signal booster antenna. The guy told me that they don’t come cheap. Ballpark figure would be around $400. He suggested that I use Skype phones so I can make calls from computer to computer for free, as if I didn’t know that all along. Actually for those of you who don’t know you can just utilize most internet messaging services like Yahoo messenger to do the same provided your PC is equipped with a microphone and speakers.

He said, what’s the point anyway of using a mobile phone to call from home when you have a regular phone line. True, but the point is, mobility is a sweet little illusion. With cell phones you get this illusion that you have a surgically attached communication device that makes you within reach even when you’re in the deepest corners of this planet and that includes your home.

Well, that’s the bottom line—mobility. It’s always an ego-fattening illusion to think that you are always connected anywhere, anytime.

My point is, mobile phones are just as basic as when you use them outside your home as when you use them indoors, even if you have a regular phone line because there’s a million other things that you want to do with mobile phones that you cannot do with regular phones, thus, it’s a precious thing to have a detectable phone signal in your home.

As of today, I don’t have a landline phone connection yet, but I am less crabby than the last seven days. My stint of being without communication service has ended after some guy installed my internet connection yesterday which changed a lot of things.

The major change was my T-mobile phone was resurrected from the dead. Yup, my Blackberry phone was one of T-mobile’s hotspot@home-enabled phones, thus, it is able to receive and initiate calls using Wi-Fi signals from a home network. The phone went from no service to one that shows ‘UMA’ (unauthorized mobile access) and yes they were in big bold letters, thanks to Linksys Wireless N router that provided a good ‘N’ spot around the house.

So far I’ve made countless calls with T-mobile’s hotspot@home service and none of the calls ever got dropped. I think voice clarity is superb and the signal is probably better than getting a few bars of intermittent cell phone signals from cell sites and or repeaters.

Thanks to T-mobile for introducing the hotspot@home service. It made a huge difference with my connectivity issue.

As to my other phone subscribed to AT&T, I managed to connect it to my home network, watched YouTube with it, browse the net, check the weather and other stats using Yahoo Go but it remained an unusable gadget for mobile phone communications.

Now, let me give you a bird’s eye view on how I take advantage of the convenience of communication technology.

If you use the hotspot@home service to make calls you don’t use up your minutes cause you are basically not utilizing a regular cell site to transmit your signals. It’s almost as if you bypass other cell repeaters and make the internet as your path of communication. You can probably compare it to VOIP (voice over internet protocol) which is a growing trend in phone communications.

But with or without the free calls, you can also take advantage of unlimited calls using services such as myfaves. Just make sure that you register the number that you’d be calling often.

And to add drama, I use a VOIP long distance service to call my home place—the Philippines.

It’s not only much cheaper than calling from regular phones; it is also more personal and less conventional, which I like.

How many people would call other countries from their cell phone using Wi-Fi signals to call an access number to initiate a long distance call that also uses the internet as a signal path? Get it?

Using the hotspot@home service I call Pingo’s access number for free from my cell phone, and since Pingo utilizes VOIP I pay less than regular international long distance rates. Clarity is remarkable and connection time is efficient. And best of all I’m on my cell phone.

You might ask, why don’t I just get services like Skype, Vonage and save myself the hassle of going through several channels.

You’re right, but it’s a matter of preference. I prefer it better this way.

1:45 a.m. And Still No Shut Eye

I have this room. I call it chaos--my comfort chaos. It's where I spend hours in front of my computer, or just hours spent fidgeting around my electronic gadgets and accessories. I love the sense of disorder in this room. It gives me freedom to mess up and still be able to find my way around things as I channel all my creative energy into pure solitary moment of isolation from the world and relaxation in the deepest chambers of my being.

Well, I was still up past 12:00 a.m., but the truth is, I did spend the whole night being up and about when my room of chaos challenged me to some horrid test.

I love my Sony T7 camera. It's so easy to use and it takes good pictures. Of course I've enjoyed it for years now since it was given recognition for being an exemplary new product when it was launched.

I keep my photos in the pro duo memory stick. The name alone for the media device sounds exclusive and of course, it is pricey.

But I just love to keep my photos in there. It is easier for me to keep an archive of my photos in those neat little media sticks.

I must have collected some ten or more of them already from a size of 32 MB to 4 GB since I first used them.

Then what? I couldn't find my most recent memory stick containing a sizeable amount of good memories that I haven't uploaded to my computer yet or shared to my relatives through Pando.

I just went nuts. You see, I was busy doing a lot of chaos--packing, cleaning, doing artwork, browsing the internet and doing some senseless other stuff. I don't even know which order it all went.

Plus, I gave my Sony T7 a silent treatment, after I got all excited when I got Canon's duo flash memory enabled video camera--the Fixia HF10. That's my karma for being technologically needy and greedy.

Photographs and memories mean so much to me and to lose track of a bunch of them wrapped inside some silly media stick that you cannot even locate with your GPS is a nightmare. I hope one day, they'll make one with some radio detection and ranging.
It's much easier for me to find a phone handset using the intercom locator than rummaging through the chaos for some 2-inch long media stick.

Call it stupid and reckless. I do have a lot of extra GB of storage in my WD My Book external drive but I didn't pay much attention backing up my data until I felt really threatened to lose them.

Anyway, I stayed up all night until my attention was redirected to a fresh bag of trash that luckily I didn't put in the trash bin yet.

What a victorious moment it was for me when somewhere at the bottom of all the debris inside the trash bag, every little bit of the blue-colored media stick slowly emerged still intact in its media stick adaptor.

Yeah, a 4.0 GB pro duo stick is worth more than 24 hours of no shut-eye if indeed, inside it resides days of wonderful and priceless moments that cannot be recaptured in time.

I found the stick after missing a sizeable bag of zs. Stupid!

Happy Father's Day: The Father I've Grown To Respect

Today we celebrate father’s day. I consider myself lucky to have both a father and a mother while growing up. It is a privilege not shared by all of us. For some, it’s their harsh reality that they ended up with just one parent raising them and for some unlucky beings, to be raised without any parent at all.

I am grateful, indeed, for being lucky knowing that I always have two faithful supporters and cheerleaders on my side—my father and my mother.

I have already previously attempted to paint a picture of what my mother is, so today I’ll take this opportunity to make a colorful description of the father I’ve grown to respect and love as a father over the years.

Physically my father looks like a cross between Arnold Schwarzenegger and James Brown though my father probably has 70% more likeness to the latter. Can you picture a morph of those two images? The flat nose is very prominent and very infectious as well. In fact, of all seven of us, none of my siblings was able to do away without the flat nose. It is almost like a characteristically indelible genetic link that we all have to inherit from our father if we were to be considered his sons and daughters.

My father though has that almost always sympathetic, down-to-earth, no-mean-bone, I’m-here-to-help look and demeanor. Every time he talks he always lets out a silly grin and giggle to finish off a phrase or a statement. It could be annoying and insulting for some people but for those who know him, that gesture always gives the aura of a relaxed, welcoming atmosphere.

If you ask me about the one most influential person in my life, that would be my father. He basically taught me life’s most noble and profound lessons. Whenever me and my siblings would argue, I’ve learned to shut up because my father would always say that “shallow waters are noisy”. All the while growing up, I have to come to acknowledge the truth to this simply because most people who are vocal are usually not logical per se. The loud ones are usually the empty ones up there.

My father also taught me to be kind and giving especially to the lowly ones. He always has a heart for the less fortunate ones. He mourns over other people’s sorrows. He easily tears over sad things that happen to other people especially to the real helpless ones. He always feels bad when the already disadvantaged people are exploited by the merciless in our society.

And this is all because my father grew up without a parent or a sibling. He calls himself “the son of a bamboo tree’s crack”, if you know what I mean. It simply connotes that he is the son of nobody—that he just came out of some silly crack from some silly tree and ended up in this world without people he can call and own as a family.

He had probably the hardest life than most of us. Without a parent to take care of him, he learned to tend for himself at a young age. He learn to farm, to fish, to find food, to entertain himself by making toys made out of palm leaves, banana stalk, coconut shell, twigs, seashells, wood trimmings, empty cans, sea debris and probably from the mere mold of his imagination and creativity.

With utmost respect to my dead grandmother—my father’s mother, she died not knowing that she left a son.

Her own story was a tragedy that can only happen in fictional layouts. She was a pretty, fair-skinned, tall and shapely lady at a young age who suffered from occasional epileptic seizures. She regularly goes into the deep woods to pick up twigs for firewood and to gather fruits in the wild for food. On one tragic occasion, she was burning some wood alone while clearing up weeds from a shrubby area and she unfortunately had a seizure attack that helplessly threw one side of her body to the burning ember. Half of her face was burnt and a portion of her cranium was burnt too. I don’t know if there is any medical explanation for this, but she did lose her sanity after the incident.

With the loss of her sanity, she still went on to do the things she used to do and wandered off in the thick forest. Then some heartless bastard (my grandfather that we never came to know) must have stalked her and sexually molested her because her tummy was slowly growing in size and nine months later, my father was born. And there wasn’t any word or any clue that my father’s mother left about who was my father’s father.

My father never felt the warmth of love from a mother, either. It was clearly etched in his memory that every time he was put beside her mother so he can lactate as a baby, his mother always pushed him away. At five years old, all that grew in him was the pain of rejection from a mother and with the innocence and trauma of a young child, he would then one day hit her mother’s forehead with a hammer, the strength would be equal to the might of a rejected five year old kid.

To this day, my father would tell this sad story, and he would acknowledge that if there’s one thing he won’t forgive himself of, it would be that one moment when he hit his mother with a hammer in the forehead, though understandably it didn’t cause any fatal blow but the emotional pain left by the incident is forever haunting my father. But what better does an unloved child know?

My father though used to being on his own and was basically growing up with the knowledge that he was unwanted by the rest of the world, grew up to be a smart, creative, efficient and compassionate person. The pain of rejection didn’t kill his spirit instead it nurtured him to become a better person than what his predicament would have allowed him to be.

I always adore my father and respect him so much, that it is even impossible for me to talk back to him or refute his sometimes twisted views because I know that somewhere deep within his core is a true believer of his convictions and a truly humble and “ego-less” person.

He is a simple man, who is always enriched by new philosophies in life. He has never rendered himself a slave to materialism and the greed for money. For him, being able to eat his regular meals everyday and live a peaceful and harmonious life with his neighbors is richness far more valuable than any material possessions this world could offer.

When I was a little girl, I remember getting wounds from running around with other kids in the neighborhood with my bare feet. One time the sole of my foot got pricked by a rusty nail and my father nursed the wound like any quack doctor would. He would brew some guava leaves and washed the wound with the warm guava leaves concoction. Meanwhile he would squeeze out the juice from a clove of garlic and rub it to the wound as some kind of antibiotic. Whenever the wound would get swollen due to infection, he would take some banana bud leaf and wrap it around the wound. It did work all the time, giving me some cool comfort to a wound that would almost turn to gangrene. I would be able to sleep despite the throbbing pain of the swelling, and by the following morning, as we take off the banana leaf wrapping, the obvious relief is undeniable with the pus being sucked out and the swelling and redness dramatically reduced. Or he would crush some penicillin pill and apply it to the wound. This process, he would continue to do, until my wound would heal. I don’t even remember my mother ever doing any of that for me.

My father is practical and creative. One time, we went to visit his land somewhere in the coastal area off of the city of Dapitan. All we had was a bolo and a match stick to burn weeded-out dry grass. By noontime we were hungry. I thought I would starve, but my father cut off a bunch of ripe bananas from the tree, covered it with wood, grass, and dried twigs and actually cook the bananas on the ground without any kitchen utensil. That memory has taught me to be creative and ingenious. It made me think every time, especially when I am trying to accomplish something, that there is always a solution to every problem and about eight hundred strokes to kill a cat with nine lives.

Now, my father is in his mid 70’s but he is still able to laugh about things and he has not changed a lot. He is still not a slave of this material world. In fact, if you would ask him what he’d want for his birthday, it would be something that he can build, enjoy and share with his much less fortunate friends.

I would probably be less of a person now, if I had a rich, famous dad. If I have to do life over again, I would still choose to be raised by the same father that raised me as a person all these years.

Mothers build the strong pillars of our character being someone we always look up to, but the fathers are always the ones who reinforce those weak corners in our lives—those hidden corners with too much load but with less supportive structures. The fathers always take care of making sure that those uneven corners of our foundation as a person are well bracketed, so we will be nourished with strength and level-headedness as we brace ourselves to partake in the real world.

My father always knew the inner workings of things. He’s a good logical thinker. But he has a bigger heart than most people I know, thus, he often sets the logic aside and let his emotions rule.

I adore him and respect him, not just as a father but as a faithful mentor who molded me into the person that I am now.

A great salute to my father who has always embraced his difficult life—one who sees neither gloomy skies nor the silver lining, but the grandeur of life in every day that comes, rain or shine.

David Cook: Season 7 American Idol

Awesome! There is justice in this world, after all.

Penzu: Your Free Online Journal/Diary

Today, I just stumbled upon a free online tool called Penzu which allows any registered user to keep an online diary or journal for free.

In this digital age, anything that resembles writing on paper still makes an impact. To me, it has to do with my undying love for pen and paper and the need to feel the illusion of still keeping records in paper format even with the evolution of e-copies and e-books.

Penzu does a good job of keeping it simple and the look is that of a real journal. You simply type an entry which is already dated by default and you can lock it, save it, print it, share it and you can even insert a picture to your journal entry.

It does give that journal feel as you type in your entry. The only possible improvement is if this application will be able to incorporate inking as a method of data entry. Then we will have the feel of pen and paper in our hands.

If you are not aware, Microsoft OneNote is a much better journal that is available with your Microsoft Office 2007 package and it does give you the illusion of getting the book-and-pen note keeping because it allows inking which you can easily do using tablet and pen computer accessory.

The only advantage of keeping one online is the fact that you can access your journal anywhere for as long as you have an internet connection.

There are issues though that you must carefully consider like the security of your data and how much data integrity is provided with a free service.

As of this writing Penzu is obviously still in the works and still on Beta. You can check it out at Penzu. See for yourself.

Simon Cowell to David Archuleta: “It was a knockout!”

Tonight’s American Idol Finale between the two phenomenal Davids was a disappointment for me not because the contestants didn’t do well but because the judges were already calling on who won the title.

To Simon Cowell, who’s always been an exceptionally accurate critic to every contestant’s performance, David Archuleta won the night. Randy also hinted after the third round that David Archuleta is the new American Idol.

Paula on the other hand was tight-lipped about her Idol choice because to her obviously it was too close to call and more than anything else, it’s the voting public who picks the season’s winner.

I usually agree with Simon Cowell’s judgment, but tonight I beg to differ. I think David Cook did a better job of showing more talent by choosing to go beyond conventions and showing his versatility as a performer. To me David Archuleta chose to stay on the safe side by singing a song that he already performed and to me it didn’t spark that much excitement. David Cook meanwhile performed a very touching third song which Simon Cowell didn’t like and hoped to have been replaced with either ‘Billie Jean’ or ‘Hello’. On the other hand David Cook humbly accepted the unfavorable comments meanwhile admitting that he believes in progression, thus, his decision to perform a new song.

To me David Cook encompasses the spirit of a true artist and so deserves the title, American Idol.

But with the Idol title or not, one thing is certain, David Cook, you will rock the charts and the airwaves stronger than any Idol contender had ever done.

I am one among countless fans out there who can’t wait to hear a David Cook single.

The excitement has just begun.

Morning Feast: Pump-priming My Day

I love to eat. I also love to cook. I really don't know which one came first, but I really love the idea of having the right color, texture and taste for anything that I put in my mouth--that is food. Just food, don't get me wrong. Somewhere at the back of my head, I have this prejudice about what a meal should be in order for it to be complete. Just give me the right combination of carbs, protein and veggies and my meal will always be complete. So, needless to say, even for breakfast, I appreciate a complete meal. At times though when I am in a hurry, a bowl of fiber-enriched cereal with soy milk and fresh fruit chunks will do. And still it is as complete as can be. But when I have all the time in the world to fix a sumptuous breakfast, this is what I come up with. I love scrambled eggs(semi-omelet style), slices of multi-grain bread and a handful of fresh fruit on the side.

Unlike most morning scrambled eggs out there, I choose to make mine a little more exciting. How?

1. Melt half a tablespoon of butter on a non-stick pan.




2. Whisk three eggs in a bowl.




3. Cook the eggs in the pan with the heat set to the lowest settings, stirring it occasionally so it doesn't dry up.




4. While letting the eggs cook, slice some sweet cherry tomatoes, and as soon as the eggs start to get a little thick, put the sliced tomatoes in.




5. While still a little moist, add some nuts (e.g., slivered blanched almonds or some roasted pine nuts) and mix it up a little.




6. Heat up the eggs a little bit more and sprinkle some shredded cheese on top always making sure that the eggs don't dry up.




7. Take the pan off the heat and fold in some crisp fresh green baby spinach leaves into the cooked eggs. The spinach leaves will add a fresh crunchy texture to the eggs.




8. Immediately transfer the cooked eggs into a dish. Remember, the heat from the pan will dry up the eggs.

Add a few slices of healthy multi-grain bread with your choice of fruit and wallah...you have a kingly breakfast at your fingertips! I usually water it down with a glass of low-sugar fruit-based beverage. My favorite is diet cranberry juice.

Starting the day with a healthy breakfast is always an exciting undertaking. And if there's any one meal that I'd rather fill up on, it's my breakfast because I have the entire day to burn up the extra calories. Oh yeah, I don't eat all three eggs. I only eat half of what the three eggs make.

And if you are worried about your cholesterol levels, do enjoy other breakfast alternatives that you can eat to start the day. Just keep it healthy and delicious. This way, you can never go wrong.

If you want to keep a healthy weight, the one meal you shouldn't miss is your breakfast. It pumps-prime your metabolic engine early on the day.

Ignoramus Tales: Poking Fun At Naiveté…Err…Stupidity

Big Mall Day.

A mall just opened in a remote municipality. Everyone was so excited to finally get to experience the fun of mall hopping. The entire community supported the grand opening by taking the time to check out the new mall.

Dilemma: At mall closing time, chaos erupted. Everyone who went inside the mall was looking for his/her flip-flops that he/she carefully left behind by the mall entrance when he/she entered the mall.

Lesson: Go to the mall barefoot. You can breeze in and out in your bare toes.

The Key Word.

A guy, who never went to the city before, decided to finally experience a feel of the city life by seeing tall buildings, watching a movie and dining out. It was lunch time when the guy decided to take a meal break in one of the food chains available inside a shopping center.

Dilemma: It was his first time to see the foot-pedaled water dispenser. He was getting thirsty but he didn't know how the machine works. He was watching closely as everyone paced his way to the water dispenser and bent over slowly as the water poured out from the spout. Somehow, he had a hard time figuring it out so he said to himself that maybe there is some secret word that you say to make the water come out. Slowly he went to the dispenser, bent over and whispered, "Excuse me" basing on the way other people kind of bend over in a slow apologetic fashion. Nothing happened. He said, "Excuse me" again. Still nothing happened. There was a long line of people waiting to drink behind him, then all of a sudden chaos ensued and he was pushed off by somebody and accidentally but unknowingly stepped on the foot pedal while hearing the word, "Sorry" from behind him. Water came out of the spout and what a glorious realization.

Lesson: The key word to the water fountain was, "Sorry" not "Excuse Me". Try again!

How did it know?

A very poor guy, who was so technologically deprived, won the lottery so he decided to buy all the latest technological innovations like HD TV, Wii, computer, refrigerator and a mobile phone. The mobile phone was his favorite because he feels like he had this magical power because somebody can call him everywhere he goes, even when he goes freeballing on top of a tree. Then he decided to call a friend.

Dilemma: He went to his wife with an astonished look on his face and said, "My goodness, this thing really has a special power. It even knows that I just won the lottery. Here listen," while handing the phone to his wife. "It is saying, 'The subscriber cannot be RICH'. And the wife agrees, "Yeah, that's strange!"

Lesson: If you win the lottery, don't buy a cell phone. Get a tutor that can tell you the difference between REACHED and RICH. And maybe some hearing aids, too. Sorry all circuits are busy now. Please try your call later.

Table Etiquette.

T he same guy who won the lottery decided to live the good life. On his wedding anniversary he took his wife and a bunch of family and friends for a dinner in a fancy restaurant. Everyone enjoyed his dinner, while the lottery guy was keenly observing all the guests around the table so he can proceed without embarrassing himself. He wanted to at least be able to show some class. After all, he should know how to handle his higher monetary status. The dinner gladly ended with him being able to use every table accoutrements properly by just imitating the invited guests' every move.

Dilemma: After dinner, all the guests took their toothpick and were playfully picking on their teeth to get rid of any morsel of food caught in between. The sad part was whoever used the toothpick had to cover his mouth as some sort of good table etiquette. The lottery guy attempted to do the same. As soon as he dropped his table napkin, his nose was bleeding.

Lesson: If you don't know what a toothpick is for, use dental floss instead. In that way, even if you push it up your nostrils, while covering your face with a napkin, you won't get a nosebleed, guaranteed. But hopeless stupidity, you will. Who among you here ordered and ate the ambience? The waiter just told me why the bill is too much. He said I paid for the ambience too. How did it taste like? Anyone?

Coded Lingo: Reading Between The Lines

Click here or click on the box for a readable view.

Read the boxed text. If you can decode the underlined words, then there are only two possibilities.

Either you are smarter than most people I know or you happened to grab hold of the same book I'm reading at the moment.

Either way, you're off to a good start, more so if writing is one of your passions. Being able to speak in metaphors or at least in some strange way of verbal sophistication sets an edge that almost always captures the reader's undivided attention and most certainly creates a thought-provoking process.

Below you will find the simpler version of the phrases contained in the box. After learning the underlying meanings of these words and phrases, imagine yourself just being handed a pocketful of verbose tricks that you can share to your peers to project the brainiac that you are not. Oooppss, sorry . . . I must have hit you right where it hurts. Actually, I mean it. I mean the 'sorry'.

Where to? I ask myself. Somebody just handed me a nix, cancelling on me. Take a look. I'm just a young individual who usually wanders at the mall always looking as if I am up to no good who knows nothing about the fine details of the ruthless competition. I was hoping I could go to rehab and get a cure for my alcoholism. I envy those who are safe and successful whose only dilemma is the battle to lose weight around their mid-section. I don't even have a home. My ex-wife had it on 'for sale by owner' for a while now. Yeah it's hard to even get some sleep. I would do anything to get out of this no-win situation. If only I can "Keep it simple, stupid!" (my life) and not let other people keep on poking me on my vulnerable side. Now I am on the run from the police after I acted prematurely on somebody who threw an "Examine your zip!" at me, like I was on some sacred territory. Am I super sensationalizing my story? I am a mere divorced father who hardly gets to see my children who is losing energy. What do you think? I don't know, either. What you see is what you get. But, yeah, this excessive talk is making me sick.