Birthday Reflections

1. Masarap mag birthday when it comes on a friday or a monday... kasi extended ang kainan ng 3 days.



2. I hit the driving range last saturday to practice my rusty golf
swing... last time I did 18 holes was 6 years ago... glad to know I can
still hit the ball with decent distance, except that my long irons,
woods and drivers are all off... whoever said golf isn't a sport should
try 5 buckets on a range, lets see if his arms don't fall off with all
the muscle stress!



3. I read somewhere that men's brains and powers of reasoning/logic
don't completely develop until they reach the age of 25... 2 years to
go! haha...



4. I spent last night watching Back to the Future 1 on HBO... which...
has got to be one of the more important movies in my lifetime... While
all my kapitbahays were racing their matchbox cars, I was cutting off
the wheels of my colgate freebie cars and reattaching them facing
down... ala Doc Brown's Delorian... 



5. I'm glad to be 23, and over with the teenage years... come to think
of it, my childhood, from  the time I was born till I was around
10 or 11 was great... Didn't have many friends, didn't have a family
computer, didn't have a lot of toys... what I had a lot of was clay and
really old legos (hand-me-downs from cousins) and a ton of freebies
(the colgate box cars, happy meals, giveaways, etc.) I ended up
building an airport with clay airplanes, and all the leftover legos I
had... it was fun... all that travelling during summer break fired up
my imagination... I was fascinated with airplanes, airports and how
they work... I still am! Little did I know then that I'd end up
designing buildings!



But from 13 to 17 I was so unsure of myself and where I belonged,
studying in a school full of upper-class kids, in the middle of a
high-end subdivision, and going home to a place an hour and a half away
in a suburb in the middle of nowhere rattled my bearings... I didn't
have many friends in my neighborhood, and the ones that I had in school
lived too far away to build better friendships... My parents would also
fear for my safety and not allow me to go out... plus they aren't
exactly the hatid-sundo kind of parents because they were also very
busy making a living for us, I'd feel really bad because things would
have been different had we lived closer to where all the action is...
call it suburban middle-class angst!



6. Although the basic impulse would be to blame others, I realize now
that if all those frustrations, humiliations and failures from my
teenage years did not happen, I wouldn't be who I am now. I learned to
be closer to my family, to draw strength from them and from myself, to
be independent, to learn and improve both myself and others and to
grow. High School was great in the sense that I learned a lot from it,
but the bigger lesson is that there's an even bigger world out there,
with bigger challenges, bigger problems, and more kinds of people...



7. Surprisingly, ngayon ko lang din nafeel yung birthday feeling in
almost 5 years... I realize that college for me was such a time warp,
the holidays, birthdays are all eaten up by work and design
competitions, usually kakasubmit lang ng mga boards or drawings pag
birthday ko, and kadalasan I'm too wasted with work to even reflect...
so this post is one of those little luxuries.



Pahabol na thoughts:



- kailangan ko na iparenew yung license ko

- people can be so unreliable (I'm understating things here), so trust, verify, doubt, and anchor on God.

- birthday din ng pinsan ko, Hey Jason! happy birthday cuz!