It’s not your set, folks . . .
J-J-J-Jaded
Sam and I are in a taxi heading for Robinsons Ermita and this song is playing on the cabbie’s radio:
I could spend my life in this sweet surrender
I could stay lost in this moment forever
Well, every moment spent with you
Is a moment I treasure
And again we ask each other a question that has come across our minds before and have often discussed:
Bakit ba pag adik ang gumawa at kumanta ng love song asahan mong tatamaan ka talaga? Dagdag pa ni Sam, “Imagine-in mong kinakantahan ka ni Steven Tyler niyan, maniniwala ka bang seryoso siya?”
I don’t wanna miss one smile
I don’t wanna miss one kiss
Well, I just wanna be with you
Right here with you, just like this
I just wanna hold you close
Feel your heart so close to mine
And stay here in this moment
For all the rest of time
I wouldn’t mind, I answer. He don’t look so bad. These jaded eyes see past the papain-treated skin and the moussed up hair of these newbie singers, talented though they may be. These ears strain past the sugar-coated grace notes that seem to say “listen to me mama, I sing so good.” Not for me these singers who seem to focus more on perfecting their vocal techniques, no. I want someone who will sing to me from the depths of his being. And Steven Tyler, he reaches out to my jaded soul, takes my hand and tells me “it’s ok, everything’s going to be fine, and i’ll break the neck of anyone who tries to hurt you.”
And no soul could’ve been more jaded than mine, at one point, half a decade ago. Tortured with the angst and legalistic twists of annullment and the anguish of being denied the company of my sons, I was up in my flat alone, down with the flu and pharyngitis and refusing to take antibiotics because they did strange things to me. A doctor who knew my aversion for them tsk-tsked over the phone earlier while I was still at the office and prescribed Strepsils and Bactidol. Another friend called shortly before I decided to give up and go home, and I told him about the Strepsils and Bactidol prescription, but not to worry because there was a pharmacy along the way to my flat.
And that friend showed up, later at my flat, armed with Strepsils and Bactidol, because wouldn’t you know, I forgot to stop by the pharmacy on my way home. And he fed me the lozenges and made me gargle, and put me to bed and I closed my eyes at the sight of him watching over me. When I woke up in the morning he was still there, in the exact same posture as he had been when I fell asleep, watching over me.
And wouldn’t you know, he’s still here with me holding my hand, in the taxi heading for Robinson’s Ermita.
I don’t wanna close my eyes
I don’t wanna fall asleep
‘Cause I’d miss you, babe
And I don’t wanna miss a thing
This is my 100th post, Sam. This is for you.
I’ve never Kippled
I have always pessimistically thought that putting up a blog was an invitation for people to throw rocks at you. I was thinking exactly that when I first put up my blog at blogspot. That’s why it is always refreshing to get kind comments from readers who happened to drop by, and even those who were referred by other people who have dropped by. I have yet to encounter a bastos commenter (knock on wood), but there was a minor pest once (diba ralph). I got rid of the pest asap without him even knowing it. I didn’t ban him, no. I just made the next few posts so uninteresting to him that he disappeared altogether.
Blogging takes your private life out into the open for all to see. Enabling comments is like putting a bucket of stones in front of your readers. Let he who is without sin… But even then the readers who have passed by (at minsan din tumatambay) have been very kind. That’s why I think I have become accustomed (di pa naman addicted pero siguro malapit na) to blogging. I have the caterpillar to thank for that, it was she who introduced me to blogging late last year, when I was a home-based housewife in Iligan with an internet connection, and she a masters degree student at UP.
Blogging may be therapeutic, but I must admit my blood pressure shot up more than a few times because of stuff that I’ve read in other blogs, to which I have reacted by blogging. Blogananginangyan.
And then again there’s Sam who at the time kept telling me to write again. Blogging entails a lot of writing, so it became an excuse to write. Exercising my rusty literary abilities became second fiddle to just plain jotting down thoughts, and every now and then coming up with layman’s explanations to internet stuff that have been heretofore greek to some people. The people who’ve read those have been kind as well. Nakaka-denggoy parin pala ako every now and then.
And then there’s the occassional blogwar we become witness to. Now that can be fascinating to some extent, when I wonder about the intricacies of relationships (there has to be one to have a war, otherwise walang paki-alaman, ergo walang war) some bloggers have with each other, like a telenovela I sit in on midway, but caught my attention so that I start asking the people why the leading lady is in such a tizzy and why the leading man is an asshole …
One can be part of all that when one blogs. And sometimes one can be caught in the crossfire. And when one does, lines from Kipling (Q: How do you like Kipling? A: I dunno, I’ve never kippled) come to me:
If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you;
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or, being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or, being hated, don’t give way to hating,
And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise;
People like bing and sol and delish in their blogs and comments recently have kept their heads. Would that all of us can do so.
Di ko nga lang gusto ending nung poem na yun dahil “You’ll be a Man, my son” napaka male-oriented. Ayoko ng ganyan . . .
Anonymizing
One utility that has been on the internet for a long time — but of which I have just recently discovered the use — are anonymizers. What’s an anonymizer?
It’s a website where you can go and enter a URL to browse. It’s like a browser within your browser, but instead of broadcasting your IP address to the sites you’re surfing, it gives the anonymizer’s address instead. Anonymizers were first developed for security reasons, so that spurious sites cannot remember your IP address and do malicious things to your server or provider. It also makes you untraceable.
For the uninitiated, your Internet service provider (ISP) gives you an IP address each time you connect to the internet. This IP can be the same each time you log in (static), or it can be different every time you log in (dynamic). But either way, your IP address is a way you can be traced, as it will reveal who your ISP is and its location.
Using an anonymizer takes away that possiblity.
But another use I’ve discovered for the anonymizer is getting on to websites that somehow I cannot access with certain ISP’s. I have had, for the longest time, intermittent problems accessing batjay’s and gelay’s sites if I surf to them direct from my browser. However, if I use an anonymizer, I can see their sites no problem.
Also, I discovered that iCable IP’s have been banned from Haloscan, as well as a few other commenting systems because iCable runs an open proxy. But if I comment on haloscan through an anonymizer, my comment gets published.
The Anonymous Browsing Quickstart Page can be found here. From here you can choose from several anonymous browsers. My personal choices are Anonymouse and Anonymizer because their frames are unobtrusive and the ads negligible.
It’s worth a try, especially if you’re having the “domain expired” problems while accessing some sites, and clearing your browser cache doesn’t work.
This anonymizer is, of course, different from those who write ugly comments on other people’s blogs under the name “Anonymous”. Good thing about WordPress is that it logs commenters’ IP addresses, the same way Haloscan does. I’ve never used Blogger’s commenting system, so I wouldn’t know if Blogger logs IP’s too. If you ever get any spurious comments on your site, find out what the IP address of the commenter is. Chances are you might find out where it came from.
Unless, of course, the commenter used an anonymizer.
About Me
