I'm burying all the elements of the twisted elements of my past where they belong.

I am also going to be happy where I am. There is no more heavy fear of youknowwho (aww... i've got my own you-know-who) hanging around my things.

We resolved it, in a way. I suppose the correct term would be, in Chinese, 結果, because we never actually "solved it", we just gave it an end.

There we go.

So consider this little hiatus from Tabulas (if I ever even come back) as a way of clearing the cobwebs out of my head and leaving the dust to settle.

Go To Hell by Alice Cooper

For criminal acts and violence on the stage
For being a brat
Refusing to act your age
For all of the decent citizens you've enraged
You can go to Hell

For gambling and drinking alcohol constantly
For making us doubt our parents authority
For choosing to be a living obscenity
You can go to Hell

You're something that never should have happened
You even make your Grandma sick

You'd poison a blind man's dog and steal his cane
You'd gift-wrap a leper
And mail him to your Aunt Jane
You'd even force-feed a diabetic a candy cane
You can go to Hell

You're something that never should have happened
You even make your Grandma sick

For criminal acts and violence on the stage
For being a brat
Refusing to act your age
For all of the decent citizens you've enraged
You can go to Hell

Go To Hell by Samson

Get out, you're not my kind
Sleazy little lizzy thought you'd got another find
Yes I know you're big inside
Loud and proud, I know you're legs are open wide

Life can be so unkind
Bye, bye honey, lovely dovey, took you from behind
Maybe it's just as well
I took your body, blew your mind and told you Go to hell!

Filthy little female, who you married to?
Dirty little lady, I'm creeping up on you
Nice boy what you don't see
Your out of luck, you'll get no truck with me

Lousy little screamer played outside the rules
Took me for a dreamer but you were just a fool
Pretty male plaything made you feel alright
Took you for your money, now I'm off into the night

Go To Hell by Milk Inc.

It's too late
To say you're sorry - you're sorry
It's too late to say that time will tell
Go to hell, bye-bye
Go to hell, it's too late to cry
Go to hell, bye-bye
Cos you let our fire die

Here I am, standing in the light
You're at home, fighting trough a lonely night
This is it, I'm finally breaking free
Don't need you to tell me who I need to be

There you are, I left you in the cold
You lost your rainbow; you lost your pot of gold
I changed the lock, threw out the key
There's plenty more fish in the sea

Take one last good look at me
Cos it's the last you'll ever see

It's too late
To say you're sorry - you're sorry
It's too late to say that time will tell
Go to hell, bye-bye
Go to hell, it's too late to cry
Go to hell, bye-bye
Cos you let our fire die

We are through, silence fills your days
I'm moving on; don't think it's just a phase
It feels good to let you slip away
Whatever you say, it won't make me stay

Take one last good look at me
Cos it's the last you'll ever see

Go to hell, bye-bye
Go to hell, it's too late to cry
Go to hell, bye-bye
Cos you let our fire die

Go to hell, bye-bye
Go to hell, it's too late to cry
Go to hell, bye-bye
Cos you let our fire die

Have a nice hiatus.

Instruction:
The first player of this game starts with the "6 weird things/habits about yourself" and people who get tagged need to write a blog of their 6 weird habits/things, as well as state this rule clearly.. in the end, you need to choose 6 people to be tagged and list their names..


1. I used to be afraid of vampires. Isn't that just odd? I used to hate the idea of the biting and stuff. But then recently, thanks to TV and the like, I've gotten over this fear.
2. I like feeling angry. There's this rush about that empowers me. So when people get in my way when I'm angry, I blow up, and though I regret it in retrospect sometimes, I usually don't.
3. I loved listening to my parents talk as a child. They'd just chat and occasionally babble about work when I was younger, but then they'd revert to other stuff and it used to be nice listening to them be all nice and pleasant and happy.
4. When I eat meals, it usually goes like this. I put the rice on the farther side of the plate, and the viand and vegetables on the nearer side. Then I don't smush the rice from the shape of the bowl, but rather keep it that way. I take two to three first bites from the rice's center, forming a sort of valley-like shape. I put the meat into the this area and continue eating, wherein I crest outwards until it's finished. Then the vegetables come last, cos that's usually what I enjoy.
5. I actually still have an accent when I speak in Filipino. I don't know... I was never really fluent in it.
6. Each class in school has "moods" for me. Filipino has this painstaking, exhausting mood. Math has this foreboding, terrified mood. English is lighthearted and sort of surreal in a sense. Chinese has this anticipative, warm mood. C.L.E. is colored in various shades of blue. Soc. Sci. is the only one that's blank.

The moods sort of derive from the teachers and how they make the class feel. Take last year, for example. Mr. Perez almost absolutely blackened English for me. I think Ms. Magallona is just the person to change that.

I will not ask anyone to do this. Yep, I'm a rule breaker. So there. I don't wanna put anyone through the trouble of feeling obligated to do something like this. But it was fun. If you DO decide to do this, then please tag.

I can't believe you have no idea who you are. And you have the gall to greet me happy birthday.

I'm sick of your childishness.

Aldrin, stay away from my blog.

Apparently, the aforementioned Xu laoshi (look below) is not even a Northerner. He's from Fujian. His family name is 許 which is also Jackie's family name, and she's 3/4ths from Fujian. So now, the Xu laoshi dude isn't Shanghainese like I originally suspected, but pure Fukien. Ain't it cool? We don't get too many Xu's in Xavier... wonder why.

I dragged Henry to bear witness of Fukien conversation between us later on and I asked him to speak Fukien with me.

Bits of the conversation are clearer to me than others, but mostly...

"Di tua ti to a?"

But I heard... "Di tua dit a?"

And I was like WHAT???

Anywhey... he has what the Fukien refer to as a "khniu" or an accent. Either he does, or I do. Why is it that when I speak to my family, I can speak Fukien rapidly, but when I'm with other people (relatives, business associates), I can barely speak properly?

I just have to get used to the thicker, heavier accent of the Mainlandese Fukien. The Fukien here speak it very clearly...

But the weirdest part... was when he said:

"Ni hen ke ai."




...................................




Um.



Okay.

I glanced at Henry... this was really weird. I mean if it's an old grandmotherly type lady saying "Zhe ge hai zi zhen de hen ke ai." (Lydia Uy) then that's okay. But when it's some thirty something year old guy talking to a student...

Err...

Right.

So I was like okay, yeah sure, you too. "Ni ye shi."

And you know what his reaction was? "I?? What..."

Does ke ai mean something that I don't know? Is it like baby-like cuteness or is ke ai really just cute as in "I find you adorable/huggable cute"? Word.

I spent some time pissing laoshi off yesterday... and discussing NJStar Chinese Pen. Okay, seriously, you humans, you HAVE to get this software. It's damn good.

Anyway, it's five am now, so I'm off to get ready for the last day of school for the week. How could I ever forget what weekends are like???

-----------------------------

Elsewhere, there is also the business of the Birthday Card.

It was humongous. Special thanks goes out to Char *cough* ChaI (who bought the card) and Walter (who together with Chai, planned the whole thing), Jackie for her winding, half-page testimonial greeting, Christian, Kenn, Katan, Adrienne, Catherine, Alexis and Bryan (Chua, who just sort of wrote in the card. His greeting made me laugh out loud. Lions... lolness.)

A big, big thank you to you all! I never even expected to get a birthday card, much less one as big as that.

And Jackie's greeting almost made me cry. Imagine that... I was tearing up in the 10 minute supposed-to-be Examen period before Science class started. But then there were good parts too. (Lesbians... wtf! *ROFLs*)

Tapos naki-epal si Pohan. "Sino nagbigay niyan sa'yo?"

"Marami sila e."

"Sino nagsulat ng mahaba?"

"Jackie."

"Jacques?"

Bingi ka ba? Okay, and WHY the f would Jacques write me a card? He doesn't even f-ing know me! "Jackie."

"Sino si Jackie?"

"She's my best friend."

"Duuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuh. *drooling* What's a friend? I've never had one of those before..."

Okay, so I made that part up. That's probably what was running through his mind, though.

Pohan, you brainless airhead, you should just go roll over and die and save the world a lot of future headache. You're like the annoying bigshot with the insecurity issues (and boy, have you got a lot to be insecure about).

But the card was really special, and I loved reading it. I even got a bit confused with Jackie's at the end... but it was all great. I was really happy with it. Wow... it was nice.

I texted to thank everybody for it, except the XS-ians, cos I thanked them in school.

-------------------------------

I slept at seven o clock yesterday.

I met my English teacher too... she's cool. But I was terribly shocked at the whole "But were you as fair as Allen?" comment.

That was just odd.

And I forgot to mention Country music!

Anyway, the introduction was a whole bunch of laughs and then Leigh goes and (forgive the coño-ness) makes-patol on the aforementioned fairness-comment and goes "My seatmate is very white."

But she's cool. Better than Mr. Perez, at least. I mean I like her already, and she has done much to, once more, bring about the Countenance of English Class that Mr. Perez so unceremoniously butchered last year. Don't get me wrong, he was great in his own right. Just not the XS-ian English way that I had so loved. Ms. Magallona fills that in.

English looks like it'll be getting better this year.

I swear. It's like, I went to look for He laoshi and liaotianr with her and I could barely speak without stuttering or realizing that I'd said the wrong word, or the wrong order of words in the sentence with terrible tones and a lousy accent.

Normally, I'd be ecstatic, because I finally got to my goal of making my Cantonese better than my Mandarin (it's gotten to the point where I literally read Mandarin sentences in Cantonese first). But I never imagined improving my Cantonese and Fukien would be at the cost of my Mandarin.

Now as much as I am against the whole Mandarin-Swallowing-Up-Other-Dialects thing, I hate seeing my hard-improved Mandarin just sort of rot away like that while my Cantonese and Fukien reached astronomical heights.

Well, okay, so I would. But being Mandarin-brain-dead might just claim my spot in the Advanced Class this year, and i definitely don't want that. All the airheads in the regular class will start flocking to the fluent people for help. I bet they can't understand squat simply because they refuse to.

So I spoke with He laoshi and then Ye laoshi (who is coincidentally my Adv. Chi. teacher this year) comes along and starts liaotian-ing with us. It's then that I inform her that I don't like Mandarin all that much. I especially hate how it sounds; it's so brittle and unexpressive. Like its ideas are all bound up and filtered into some uber-polite form. No offense to the others... c'mon guys, just an opinion. Fukien is the most expressive dialect for me, from a completely unbiased point of view.

So anyway, she was asking me why I hated Chinese when I corrected her when I corrected her: It's not Chinese, it's Mandarin. I told her that I do love Cantonese and Fukien, and proceeded to explain (rather shakily) that Mandarin will be here to stay for quite a while, but Cantonese and the other dialects might be gone in 30-40 years time.

She doesn't believe me though. I could tell by her tone of voice. To think, when I got home, I heard from Alex that Ye laoshi used to berate him every single lunch that he should be more like me in studying Chinese.

I'm actually feeling pretty guilty right now, but my opinion stands.

Then I met this Chinese Co-Worker of laoshi... I think his name was Xu laoshi, and he came over and told us he was wondering what students were doing out in the corridor in the JR building, because from his trajectory looking out the glass pane, he hadn't caught sight of He laoshi.

So I go "Nei hou." and he replies "Ni hao." Damn... no Cantonese.... wait, maybe he just heard wrong. "Ngo zan m ying sik nei. Cing man nei hai bin wai a?"

He gives me a puzzled look, then turns to He laoshi and says "Ta zai shuo shen me? Wo ting bu dong."

Laoshi replies that I was speaking in Cantonese, and he asks if she speaks Cantonese too. I interrupt with "Dang ran le! Ta shi guang dong ren."

He stares at her like she grew another head or something. "Ni shi ma?" I expected the exorcisms to start somewhere there. Maybe a country-wide genocide of some sort. You know how the Northerners feel about the Cantonese.

Laoshi then informs me after he's left that I was slurring my speech. Heh. It's what the Hong Kong Cantonese do, m'dear.

Anyway, here ends my little tirade. Mr. Santos realized that I recently celebrated my birthday, but I played dumb and made stupid reasons as to why I didn't want to be greeted.

Everyone seems to have their quirks. Mr. Young handed me my flashdrive back...

That's about it for today. I had a whole buttload of work to do at the office. Who knew being absent for two days could screw around with the system?

Kenn gave me the Jacky Cheung Cantonese Special CD. Wow! Nice songs! Kenn has the best taste in Chinese music (along with Char).

I got into Anthropos! Curvature... but my section there is... H2A???

And I have this feeling Filipino is going to murder me this year. I'm so tired of it. I mean, really.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Elsewhere, I was also playing the iPod randomly, when I came across You Were Meant For Me by Bellefire. This was the song.

I had been searching for that one song that would always represent Y to me, but that I forgot about. It had been a nagging feeling in the back of my head, but I found it again.

I almost cried when I heard the song tinkle in my ear. It was like a maelstrom of memories just started randomly fissuring out of my soul and I really almost cried.

Oh, Y.

This has been a recent string of bad luck for me.

I was dismissed at four o' clock today. Joel fetched me at... 6:30.

Apparently, he was supposed to fetch me at 3:30 (as per the instruction of mom) but he thought "Hey, maybe Allen isn't gonna be out by 4:30 yet" so he proceeded to fetch Alex and Andrew first, who were supposed to come out at four.

Mom assumed Joel followed her orders and texted Alex and Andrew that Joel'd get there at six. So Joel waited for the two until six, then dropped them at home before coming to fetch me.

The immense anger had already passed, so I was pretty calm when Joel came back. I just let my head cool off first, so I didn't yell or scream. Although I did go to the office of this girl named Shasha to borrow the phone. She took one look at me and asked "Are you the brother of Alex?"

"Yes. How do you know that?"

"Your name tag is right there."

Helloooooooo???

Does my name tag say Alexander Donald Yu?

"But it could be any Yu."

"I know your face."

Then why didn't you say so in the first place??????????

Sheesh. Tao talaga.

So I called the office... no answer. It's MANCOM day kasi e.

Then I had the Shasha girl call mom's number and proceeded to scold mom in the angriest Hokkien I could muster.

I had the urge to say something like "Tan di kau cu lai, di e ho gua co si!"

Or something.

I just realized the asshole still visits my blog.

I'll go change it again.

Anyway, so finally, I got to go home, and now I have a ton of homework to do because the teachers are evil.

Let me rundown each and every teacher for the subjects I got today.

Mr. Asis is my class adviser, with Ms. Cuevas as the assistant class adviser. That's the second time that my class adviser has been an english teacher, my assistant class adviser has been a filipino teacher, but neither of them taught me.

I need 1x1 color pictures now. Arghit. Thank god for printers.

I have Mr. John Sy as my math teacher, Mr. Claro as my Filipino teacher, Mr. Chua as my Science teacher, Mr. Malana as my Soc. Sci. teacher. CLE is Mrs. Mallo, apparently. Chinese had rumors of Maria Go (insert joke here. Honestly, I was this close to suicide... or homicide. And a dark, disturbed laugh here.) Anyway... I'm gonna go do the stuff I need to. Still have a few stupid things to take care of.

Oh yeah, Mr. Young let me in on a little secret... and he gave me something for my birthday. Aww.

Now what to get him on his...

Strangely, I didn't feel as comfortable speaking with Mr. Santos as I did when I first started speaking with Mr. Young... maybe I was more comfortable with Mr. Young because he was a new too.

I also lent him my flashdrive, since some High 1 student wrecked his. I don't need mine today yet anywhey... so it's all good.丨

I so do not want to deal with this right now. School just bites.

其實每日無盡禮物
多出的經已能幫他
結起紅絲帶提自己共他分可以嗎？

I just realized that 紅絲帶 by 陳慧琳 is actually about poverty... not romance as I'd originally thought. Interesting...

Ugh homework. Here we go again... a repeat of High 2... actually, if college is anything like this, it's going to be a repeat threepeat...｜

I still love you.

When you told me what you did that day, did you mean it?

Or was it a kind, quiet way of saying "goodbye, we'll never meet again"?

Oh, the pain in my heart.

I may be overanalyzing things, but when has that ever stopped them from becoming true?

This was a sort of quiet birthday, skating and texting.

Oh, I'll getcha.. like the wind in my face as I weave through these clueless people. You can't control either of us.

I have to be the dumbest human to have walked on the face of this planet.

I bet if I lost anymore brain cells, 1 + 1 would not make sense to me.

Sheesh. I can't believe I trusted them again. I knew I was going to be disappointed somewhere in the back of my head.

I knew it. But noooo, I had to give them a second chance because they were my parents. I trusted them enough to put the one day that's mine, my own god damn birthday on the line simply because they wanted me to.

This is inevitably going to raise trust issues if I ever get a shrink.

Oh, if it were any other day, it would be fine. Just fine, really. But this day, it was mine. I was supposed to have fun. I wasn't supposed to "learn something new" or "learn how the business works". I was supposed to be happy and play the computer all day. Then I'd be perfectly happy, because that's what I wanted to do.

But I had to go and trust my stupid parents, who have done naught but disappoint me with their pathetic attempts at family time and bonding over the past... oh sixteen years of my existence.

I am certainly not in the mood for life right now. I was thinking about how things were during that two hour car trip back home and as I weighed everything that happened against what could have happened, every single time, I would think "It wasn't worth it. Not at all."

And now, dad doesn't even give a flying fuck that he and my mom have been working the whole day on every single birthday I've had for the past three years. I mean, I just want a damn family-spent birthday. Is that so hard to ask?

So I told myself, hey, why not just NOT celebrate my birthday so I won't have to bother? But no, mom and dad had to insist that it was being "celebrated".

Dad goes "I don't know why you even asked them to come along, Jean. All they did was complain on the ride home." to mom. Well, that's just like him anyway. Blaming mom for everything.

Even for things that aren't her fault. I've had enough of him using me as a way to get back at her. It's like, I'm working in the office, doing my own damn business and mom says something that he doesn't like. So he tells me "This is why so much time is wasted in the office." in an underhanded remark against her. He scolds her in front of the office employees and our guests. Dad, you're an asshole. You piss me off to no end.

And don't think I've forgotten the time you hit me simply because you were having a bad day.

I had high hopes for today. Not originally, anyway. But somewhere along the line, people had texted me Happy Birthday, and I just couldn't help but hope that somehow, I'd get a nice, fulfilling birthday blast.

Now, I realize that I'm just stupid.

So mom wants to "patch things up" because it's "my birthday" so we can go ice skating and eat in Chilis "like always".

Dad? Oh, he wouldn't mind not celebrating my birthday anymore. He wouldn't even mind making me work like a robot. All he sees me is good for doing his work at the office, doing his work around the house and trying to work as intermediary between him and the rest of the family. He has no hopes for me: I am the comparison with all my brothers. I am the failure. I am the weak link.

Alex was in Tagaytay, but on a separate trip.

I wish he were here, the anger and bitterness he feels for mom and dad completely reflects my own. Never again. I will not waste another day waiting for them, or letting them rule my life and make my decisions. I don't care if I make the wrong ones. I'll know that it will be my fault, and I have no one else to blame but myself.

It's better than being forever angry at my fellow human beings, because really, it feels like shit to realize that you've been duped out of one of the most important birthdays in your life, and that you'll never get back.

Sorry, mom, dad. I lost your trust before... you just lost mine.

I'm done with you... and on Independence Day, no less.

My birthday's tomorrow.

Guess the secret's out eh? I am CERTAINLY not announcing this to make people happy-birthday-flog my tagboards and this entry. I am also not looking for people to ask me things about my birthday, greet me, or what-have-you. I am not reminding you either, nor is this a suggestive entry. It's simply what it is, because frankly, I wouldn't give a flying rat's ass if you greet me or not.

In case you don't know, you obsessive Catholics, The Birth Day is a pagan (FYI, in the Catholic world, pagan = demonic) ritual traditionally associated with the power that birth gives a person: to be a catalyst of change.

During the 1600's, the Church adopted over a hundred pagan rituals (all Fiestas are pagan in ancestry) into Catholic services in order to draw more followers. Is that pathetic or what?

Then when THAT didn't work out, they started killing the pagans they stole the fucking rituals from.

Did your C.L.E. teacher tell you that?

Anyway, I was able to throw this into my mom's face yesterday, and she was speechless (since she hates that I'm not a religious Catholic, and celebrating birthdays is sort of like supporting that).

Elsewhere... wow. I'm sixteen tomorrow.

I also almost died of nostalgia yesterday. I saw an ice skating rink with a beautiful background that reminded me so much of Canada.

The skating rink sort of tugged at the back of my head, but I had no idea why. Then this afternoon, it came to me in a blinding flash of enlightenment that I'd gone skating in a rather similar looking rink in Canada, but I didn't initially remember it because it happened during the '03 trip, not the '05 trip.

Walter was tipsy then, too, and I had to wrestle with him (via text) not to do something that he could potentially regret. And things are going great family wise, too.

I'm going to go write something that's been stirring around in my head for a while. Or maybe I'll do it tomorrow, when we're running around and working in Tagaytay.

I am so interested in the Shanghai Dialect now. I am learning Taishanese. My Fukien has been steadily improving. And lastly, my Cantonese accent is apparently like that of a 香港仔, or so says my grandma, the Cantonese Matriarch of our family. Hehe.

Oh, while I was at breakfast with mom's family a while ago (which I just enjoy being present at), the conversation wandered off to meeting their long lost cousins in Thailand one more time.

Click on the break for the full story. If you already know it, skip it.

(The Full Story)

So apparently, the cousins were already getting quite old (70's) and wanted to 見面 one more time before they pass away.

Now, a new visit is in the works. The last time there was contact, it was by my grandma, Ama (I don't care if that's the wrong term... she may be my 外媽 but that's what I call her. The dad's side grandma is called 阿人. Taishanese e! Ano magagawa mo?) and it was only for a few days. The sister was already dead at the time, and Angkong didn't go because he wasn't healthy enough to travel anymore.

So Ama went alone, and now, another visit is in the works. I can't believe some of them are actually less than excited to get to know them! They're family, for God's sakes! Diko David, especially, was all "Di ko naman sila kilala e!"

Anyway, I really want to meet them. You know, see what the other half of my mom's family is like.

It's a shame I never got to know Aye either.

Haaaay. I'm getting exhausted from all the thinking.

My head hurts and it's ten thirty in the evening and I need to sleep. I'll see you all when I do.

And can I just say that I find the NJ Chinese Pen super super cool? The calligraphy quality is BEAUTIFUL.