being nothing

2012-01-20T09:27:00.001+08:00

Tinatamad ako…

Looking for something new…

Spelling Bee!

2011-06-06T10:44:00.001+08:00

I’m a geek, yes I admit it! Yesterday I was watching the Scripps Spelling Bee finals.

Saw this on their website, the winners and the winning words. Notice how the words became exponentially more difficult in the recent years compared to when they started.

YEAR	WORD	CHAMPION	SPONSOR
1925	gladiolus	Frank Neuhauser	Louisville Courier-Journal, Louisville, Kentucky
1926	cerise	Pauline Bell	Louisville Courier-Journal, Louisville, Kentucky
1927	luxuriance	Dean Lucas	Akron Beacon Journal, Akron, Ohio
1928	albumen	Betty Robinson	South Bend News-Tribune, South Bend, Indiana
1929	asceticism	Virginia Hogan	The Omaha World-Herald, Omaha, Nebraska
1930	fracas	Helen Jensen	Des Moines Register & Tribune, Des Moines, Iowa
1931	foulard	Ward Randall	White Hall Register-Republican, White Hall, Illinois
1932	knack	Dorothy Greenwald	Des Moines Register & Tribune, Des Moines, Iowa
1933	torsion	Alma Roach	Akron Beacon Journal, Akron, Ohio
1934	deteriorating	Sarah Wilson	Portland Evening Express, Portland, Maine
1935	intelligible	Clara Mohler	Akron Beacon Journal, Akron, Ohio
1936	interning	Jean Trowbridge	Des Moines Register & Tribune, Des Moines, Iowa
1937	promiscuous	Waneeta Beckley	Louisville Courier-Journal, Louisville, Kentucky
1938	sanitarium	Marian Richardson	Louisville Times, Louisville, Kentucky
1939	canonical	Elizabeth Ann Rice	Worcester Telegram & Gazette, Worcester, Massachusetts
1940	therapy	Laurel Kuykendall	The Knoxville News-Sentinel, Knoxville, Tennessee
1941	initials	Louis Edward Sissman	Detroit News, Detroit, Michigan
1942	sacrilegious	Richard Earnhart	El Paso Herald-Post, El Paso, Texas
1946	semaphore	John McKinney	Des Moines Register & Tribune, Des Moines, Iowa
1947	chlorophyll	Mattie Lou Pollard	Atlanta Journal, Atlanta, Georgia
1948	psychiatry	Jean Chappelear	Akron Beacon Journal, Akron, Ohio
1949	dulcimer	Kim Calvin	Canton Repository, Canton, Ohio
1950	meticulosity	Diana Reynard and Colquitt Dean	Cleveland Press, Cleveland, Ohio, and Atlanta Journal, Atlanta, Georgia
1951	insouciant	Irving Belz	Memphis Press Scimitar, Memphis, Tennessee
1952	vignette	Doris Ann Hall	Winston-Salem Journal, Winston-Salem, North Carolina
1953	soubrette	Elizabeth Hess	Arizona Republic, Phoenix, Arizona
1954	transept	William Cashore	Norristown Times Herald, Norristown, Pennsylvania
1955	crustaceology	Sandra Sloss	St. Louis Globe-Democrat, St. Louis, Missouri
1956	condominium	Melody Sachko	The Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
1957	schappe	Sandra Owen and Dana Bennett	Canton Repository, Canton, Ohio, and Rocky Mountain News, Denver, Colorado
1958	syllepsis	Jolitta Schlehuber	Topeka Daily Capital, Topeka, Kansas
1959	catamaran	Joel Montgomery	Rocky Mountain News, Denver, Colorado
1960	eudaemonic	Henry Feldman	The Knoxville News-Sentinel, Knoxville, Tennessee
1961	smaragdine	John Capehart	Tulsa Tribune, Tulsa, Oklahoma
1962	esquamulose	Nettie Crawford¹ and Michael Day	El Paso Herald-Post, El Paso, Texas, and St. Louis Globe-Democrat, St. Louis, Missouri
1963	equipage	Glen Van Slyke III	The Knoxville News-Sentinel, Knoxville, Tennessee
1964	sycophant	William Kerek	Akron Beacon Journal, Akron, Ohio
1965	eczema	Michael Kerpan Jr.	Tulsa Tribune, Tulsa, Oklahoma
1966	ratoon	Robert A. Wake	Houston Chronicle, Houston, Texas
1967	Chihuahua	Jennifer Reinke	The Omaha World-Herald, Omaha, Nebraska
1968	abalone	Robert L. Walters	The Topeka Daily Capital, Topeka, Kansas
1969	interlocutory	Susan Yoachum	Dallas Morning News, Dallas, Texas
1970	croissant	Libby Childress	Winston-Salem Journal & Sentinel, Winston-Salem, North Carolina
1971	shalloon	Jonathan Knisely	Philadelphia Bulletin, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
1972	macerate	Robin Kral	Lubbock Avalanche-Journal, Lubbock, Texas
1973	vouchsafe	Barrie Trinkle	Fort Worth Press, Fort Worth, Texas
1974	hydrophyte	Julie Ann Junkin	Birmingham Post-Herald, Birmingham, Alabama
1975	incisor	Hugh Tosteson	San Juan Star, San Juan, Puerto Rico
1976	narcolepsy	Tim Kneale	Syracuse Herald Journal-American, Syracuse, New York
1977	cambist	John Paola	The Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
1978	deification	Peg McCarthy	The Topeka Capital-Journal, Topeka, Kansas
1979	maculature	Katie Kerwin	Rocky Mountain News, Denver, Colorado
1980	elucubrate	Jacques Bailly	Rocky Mountain News, Denver, Colorado
1981	sarcophagus	Paige Pipkin	El Paso Herald-Post, El Paso, Texas
1982	psoriasis	Molly Dieveney	Rocky Mountain News, Denver, Colorado
1983	Purim	Blake Giddens²	El Paso Herald-Post, El Paso, Texas
1984	luge	Daniel Greenblatt	Loudoun Times-Mirror, Leesburg, Virginia
1985	milieu	Balu Natarajan	Chicago Tribune, Chicago, Illinois
1986	odontalgia	Jon Pennington	The Patriot News, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania
1987	staphylococci	Stephanie Petit	The Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
1988	elegiacal	Rageshree Ramachandran	The Sacramento Bee, Sacramento, California
1989	spoliator	Scott Isaacs	Rocky Mountain News, Denver, Colorado
1990	fibranne	Amy Marie Dimak	The Seattle Times, Seattle, Washington
1991	antipyretic	Joanne Lagatta	The Wisconsin State Journal, Madison, Wisconsin
1992	lyceum	Amanda Goad	The Richmond News Leader, Richmond, Virginia
1993	kamikaze	Geoff Hooper	The Commercial Appeal, Memphis, Tennessee
1994	antediluvian	Ned G. Andrews	The Knoxville News-Sentinel, Knoxville, Tennessee
1995	xanthosis	Justin Tyler Carroll³	The Commercial Appeal, Memphis, Tennessee
1996	vivisepulture	Wendy Guey	The Palm Beach Post, West Palm Beach, Florida
1997	euonym	Rebecca Sealfon	Daily News, New York, New York
1998	chiaroscurist	Jody-Anne Maxwell	Phillips & Phillips Stationery Suppliers, Ltd., Kingston, Jamaica
1999	logorrhea	Nupur Lala	The Tampa Tribune, Tampa, Florida
2000	demarche	George Abraham Thampy	St. Louis Post-Dispatch, St. Louis, Missouri
2001	succedaneum	Sean Conley	Aitkin Independent Age, Aitkin, Minnesota
2002	prospicience	Pratyush Buddiga	Rocky Mountain News, Denver, Colorado
2003	pococurante	Sai R. Gunturi	The Dallas Morning News, Dallas, Texas
2004	autochthonous	David Scott Pilarski Tidmarsh	South Bend Tribune, South Bend, Indiana
2005	appoggiatura	Anurag Kashyap	San Diego Union-Tribune, San Diego, California
2006	Ursprache	Kerry Close	Asbury Park Press/Home News Tribune, Asbury Park, New Jersey
2007	serrefine	Evan M. O'Dorney	Contra Costa Times, Walnut Creek, California
2008	guerdon	Sameer Mishra	Journal and Courier, Lafayette, Indiana
2009	Laodicean	Kavya Shivashankar	Olathe News, Olathe, Kansas
2010	stromuhr	Anamika Veeramani	The Plain Dealer Cleveland, Ohio

Personalization just got better.
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immediately. You should not copy or use it for any other purpose,
nor disclose its contents to any other person.

2011-01-12T17:00:00.001+08:00

Got a 101 list of things to do to make this year meaningful from my new planner (Navi 2011, Life Navigator) and picked a couple of things.

What I aspire to happen on 2011 (or at least in the near future!)

live abroad for a year (although I feel like I’m too old to do this)
Invest in the stock market (Mutual Funds na lang!)
Learn how to meditate (Pranayama Aaaaauuuuummmmm)
Plan a one-week vacation (I need some tan)
Actually go on that vacation
Take my vitamins (already diligently doing this, more like continue…)
Become fluent in a foreign language (Crossed Fingers! HSK4 is the target!)
Know that I have everything I need (I soooo need this, it’s a journey to contentment)
Ride a transcontinental train (Transiberian Luxe!)
Find myself (The ultimate goal to enlightenment)
See my favorite band play (No concerts lined up just yet)
Ride a gondola in Venice (it’s a stretch! I heard it costs an arm and a leg!)
Sit up straight
Pick a cause to support or volunteer for (already supporting several, want to try volunteering)
Help a stranger (felt warm and fuzzy when I did it!)
Go back to school and learn something fun (KungFu Class! I hope it pushes through)
Become better at small talk (in dire need of this social skill)
Win something (I never win at anything, I take this seriously!)
Make conversation with my seat mate on the plane (I wish to travel by myself this year, hope I raise enough funds!)
Get a pen pal (someone to practice my foreign language skills!)

Calling on the forces of the universe, I’m sending this out there based on the law of attraction.

2010-10-25T20:59:00.002+08:00

quick post!

gosh i've been so out of it, i'm under the impression that i do actually work at the office! haha!

updates soon (yeah right like thousands yung nakakabasa nito who am i kidding?).

heaven knows i'm miserable now

2010-10-15T09:11:00.001+08:00

I’m effin hormonal right now, miserable I don’t know why.

Why am I such a loser?

struggle

2010-10-11T09:43:00.001+08:00

Struggling on this Monday morning, hayyyy.

Dreaming of Buenos Aires.

life

2010-09-22T13:45:00.001+08:00

Impossible to live the high life on a third world paycheck…

MDG's for Beginners ...and Finishers

2010-09-20T15:22:00.001+08:00

Got this from from NYTimes, good read about MDG's

M.D.G.’s for Beginners ... and Finishers

By BONO

I’ve noticed that New Yorkers, and I sometimes try to pass for one these days, tend to greet the word “summit” with an irritated roll of the eyes, a grunt, an impatient glance at the wristwatch. In Manhattan, a summit has nothing to do with crampons and ice picks, but refers instead to a large gathering of important persons, head-of-state types and their rock-star retinues in the vicinity of the United Nations building and creates, therefore, a near total immobilization of the East Side. Can world peace possibly be worth this? Never, never...Eleanor Roosevelt, look what you’ve done ... .

Recent global summit meetings, from Copenhagen to Toronto, have frankly been a bust, so the world, which may not know it yet, is overdue for a good multilateral confab — one that’s not just about the gabbing but about the doing. The subject of the summit meeting at the United Nations this week is one whose monumental importance is matched only by its minuscule brand recognition: the Millennium Development Goals, henceforth known as the M.D.G.’s (God save us from such dull shorthand).

The M.D.G.’s are possibly the most visionary deal that most people have never heard of. In the run-up to the 21st century, a grand global bargain was negotiated at a series of summit meetings and then signed in 2000. The United Nations’ “Millennium Declaration” pledged to “ensure that globalization becomes a positive force for all the world’s people,” especially the most marginalized in developing countries. It wasn’t a promise of rich nations to poor ones; it was a pact, a partnership, in which each side would meet obligations to its own citizens and to one another.

Of course, this is the sort of airy-fairy stuff that people at summit meetings tend to say and get away with because no one else can bear to pay attention. The 2000 gathering was different, though, because signatories agreed to specific goals on a specific timeline: cutting hunger and poverty in half, giving all girls and boys a basic education, reducing infant and maternal mortality by two-thirds and three-quarters respectively, and reversing the spread of AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria. All by 2015. Give it an A for Ambition.

So where are we now, 10 years on, with some “first-world” economies looking as if they could go bang, and some second- and third-level economies looking as if they could be propping us up?

Well, I’d direct you to the plenary sessions and panel discussions for a detailed answer...but if you’re, eh, busy this week...my view, based on the data and what I’ve seen on the ground, is that in many places it’s going better than you’d think.

Much better, in fact. Tens of millions more kids are in school thanks to debt cancellation. Millions of lives have been saved through the battle against preventable disease, thanks especially to the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria. Apart from fallout from the market meltdown, economic growth in Africa has been gathering pace — over 5 percent per year in the decade ending in 2009. Poverty declined by 1 percent a year from 1999 to 2005.

The gains made by countries like Ghana show the progress the Millennium Goals have helped create.

At the same time, the struggles of places like Congo remind us of the distance left to travel. There are serious headwinds: 64 million people have been thrown back into poverty as a result of the financial crises, and 150 million are hungry because of the food crisis. And extending the metaphor, there are storms on the horizon: the poor will be hit first — and worst — by climate change.

So there should be no Champagne toasts at this year’s summit meeting. The 10th birthday of our millennium is, or ought to be, a purposeful affair, a redoubling of efforts. After all, there’s only five years before 2015, only five years to make all that Second Avenue gridlock worth it. With that in mind I’d like to offer three near-term tests of our commitment to the M.D.G.’s.

1. Find what works and then expand on it. Will mechanisms like the Global Fund get the resources to do the job?

Energetic, efficient and effective, the fund saves a staggering 4,000 lives a day. Even a Wall Streeter would have to admit, that’s some return on investment. But few are aware of it, a fact that allows key countries — from the United States to Britain, France and Germany — to go unnoticed if they ease off the throttle. The unsung successes of the fund should be, well, sung, and after this summit meeting, its work needs to be fully financed. This would help end the absurdity of death by mosquito, and the preventable calamity of 1,000 babies being born every day with H.I.V., passed to them by their mothers who had no access to the effective, inexpensive medicines that exist.

2. Governance as an effect multiplier. In this column last spring, I described some Africans I’ve met who see corruption as more deadly than the deadliest of diseases, a cancer that eats at the foundation of good governance even as the foundation is being built. I don’t just mean “their” corruption; I mean ours, too. For example, multinational oil companies. They want oil, and governments of poor countries rich in just one thing, black gold, want to sell it to them. All well and good. Except the way it too often happens, as democracy campaigners in these countries point out, is not at all good. Some of these companies knowingly participate in a system of backhanders and bribery that ends up cheating the host nation and turning what should be a resource blessing into a kind of curse of black market cabals.

Well, I’m pleased to give you an update on an intervention that some of us thought of and fought for as critical: hidden somewhere in the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill (admit it...you haven’t read it all either) there is a hugely significant “transparency” amendment, added by Senators Richard Lugar and Benjamin Cardin. Now energy companies traded on American exchanges will have to reveal every payment they make to government officials. If money changes hands, it will happen in the open. This is the kind of daylight that makes the cockroaches scurry.

The British government should institute the same requirement for companies trading in Britain, as should the rest of the European Union and ultimately all the G-20 nations. According to the African entrepreneur Mo Ibrahim, who has emerged as one of the most important voices on that continent, transparency could do more to transform Africa than even debt cancellation has. Measures like this one should be central to any renewed Millennium Development Goal strategy.

And the cost to us is zero, nada. It’s a clear thought in a traffic jam.

3. Demand clarity; measure inputs and outputs.

Speaking of transparency, let’s have a little more, please, when it comes to the question of who is doing what toward which goal and to what effect. We have to know where we are to know how far we’ve left to go.

Right now it’s near impossible to keep track. Walk (if you dare) into M.D.G. World and you will encounter a dizzying array of vague financing and policy commitments on critical issues, from maternal mortality to agricultural development. You come across a load of bureau-babble that too often is used to hide double counting, or mask double standards. This is the stuff that feeds the cynics.

What we need is an independent unit — made up of people from governments, the private sector and civil society — to track pledges and progress, not just on aid but also on trade, governance, investment. It’s essential for the credibility of the United Nations, the M.D.G.’s, and all who work toward them.

And that was the deal, wasn’t it? The promise we made at the start of this century was not to perpetuate the old relationships between donors and recipients, but to create new ones, with true partners accountable to each other and above all to the citizens these systems are supposed to work for. Strikes me as the right sort of arrangement for an age of austerity as well as interdependence. (The age of interrupted affluence should sharpen our focus on future markets for our sake as well as theirs.)

No leader scheduled to speak at the summit meeting is more painfully aware of this context than President Obama, who one year ago pledged to put forth a global plan to reach the development goals. If promoting transparency and investing in what works is at the core of that strategy, he can assure Americans that their dollars are reinforcing their values, and their leadership in the world is undiminished. Action is required to make these words, these dull statistics, sing. The tune may not be pop but it won’t leave your head — this practical, achievable idea that the world, now out of kilter, can re-balance itself and offer all, not just some, a chance to exit the unfathomable deprivation that brings about the need for such global bargains.

I understand the critics who groan or snooze through the pious pronouncements we will hear from the podium in the General Assembly. But still in my heart and mind, undiminished and undaunted, is this thought planted by Nelson Mandela in his quest to tackle extreme poverty: “Sometimes it falls upon a generation to be great.”

We have a lot to prove, but if the M.D.G. agreement had not been made in 2000, much less would have happened than has happened. Already, we’ve seen transformative results for millions of people whose lives are shaped by the priorities of people they will never know or meet — the very people causing gridlock this week. For this at least, the world should thank New Yorkers for the loan of their city.

Bono, the lead singer of the band U2 and a co-founder of the advocacy group ONE and (Product)RED, is a contributing columnist for The Times.

what-a-monday part2

2010-09-20T15:13:00.001+08:00

The last 2 Mondays never failed to surprise me, last week I lost my ipod and my mobile phone, today as I opened my email I was struck surprised by the subject of one message. I think my computer runs on diesel engine because it takes time before it could be used at any decent rate, to heat up so to say. This particular message came from someone from my college org thru our yahoogroup account. The subject was asking us to pray for the soul of a certain alumna I happen to know and shared time in school with. It was surreal, as my computer wasn’t being cooperative I had to wait for about 30 minutes before I opened the actual email. In a state of shock all I could do was ask ‘why?’ and ‘what happened?’.

Blanks were drawn as nobody could really tell us what the cause of death was; in any case it’s a sad sad event when you loose people among your ranks. It’s a cold bucket of water splashed to your face (a slushy in gleek terms), reality sucker punching you. The realities of life rudely interrupting a routinely run world where events such as what had happened is simply unimaginable. Now I feel so fragile.

Madness! We keep fighting, fight, rage against the dying of the light…God help us all.

whattamonday

2010-09-13T09:26:00.001+08:00

Effindammnitt I lost my phone, I also lost my ipod which has been with me for 4 years. Earlier I was thinking if I should consider it a loss or liberation from unnecessary technology. Well yeah it’s unnecessary but it’s a luxury I couldn’t imagine myself without.

Oh the songs!!!! I’m so confident of my taste in music it’s such a pain that an eclectic mix of songs and artists from decades past and present slipped from my grasp. Now I’m thinking if I have been fastidious enough to back-up the songs in my external hard drive, now I remember that my new acquisitions are not yet backed up. I could only hope that who ever gets it flips his brains out knowing what a treasure trove he came upon rather than getting the device (free!).

My phone happens to be a dual sim, I have 2 active lines in there. What a pain it was just to call customer service of both service providers just to let them know I lost my phone and that they should temporarily disconnect my line until further notice. GLOBE and SUN, please have a dedicated line for cases such as mine just like the credit card companies, usually we’re in a hurry to get our lines blocked so the “thief” or whoever gets it cannot use it to make overseas calls! But this is a double edged sword, earlier we were trying to contact my number, it was still ringing but the person on the other end cancels the calls I texted him just the same, now I wonder if I should’ve appealed more to his human side and begged harder to get my phone back. I just learned that both incoming and out-going calls and messages will be blocked after I requested for my line to be temporarily blocked so all lines of communications are cut from me and whoever got my phone.

Just when I was getting it together! I have this plan of being debt free after 6 months and I was getting actually good at it. Yesterday I saw the shoes I was lusting for (TOMS!) and walked away, I spent the entire day walking around the mall with minimal damage, my only cash out was an 80 Php serving of red mango frozen yogurt (without toppings! I’ve been good haven’t I?). And now my budget shall be destroyed as I have to buy a new phone, I’m getting the cheapest one out there! 1k should be enough!

What-a-Monday!

2010-09-11T21:05:00.002+08:00

had a little chat with college "friends" (whatever that word means?) friday night, as usual labasan ng frustrations. funny lang that we all have this common friend who seems to have it all. all this time we were secretly thinking amongst ourselves how great it must be to be her for a day! haha and now it's out in the open. hayayayay some people seem to have it all, some people seem to get it easy. oh well, that's life for you.

my hamstrings are still all stretched out, reducing my yoga practice makes me feel the effects after linger a bit more. still thankful for yoga and all the effects i have managed to reap from practicing asana.

well, chinese basic4 class just ended today. was secretly hoping to get the highest score in class para makakuha nung confucius institute shirt, sadly it wasn't my day. i managed to get 93%, the highest got 97%, asar lang kasi i could've gotten a higher grade had i studied the night before. arrrggghhh i hate pinyin tone marks! next time na lang haha, jiayou!

zaijian!

obsessed!

2010-08-27T10:51:00.000+08:00

Currently obsessed with 2 T’s!

TOMS and Tod’s shoes! I’m on a shoes phase right now, I think of those brown Tod’s loafers every single day. I want those TOMS shoes, mas realistic na dream yata ito haha.

FW: the long (extended!) road to adulthood

2010-08-19T14:43:00.000+08:00

August 18, 2010

What Is It About 20-Somethings?

By ROBIN MARANTZ HENIG

Why are so many people in their 20s taking so long to grow up?

This question pops up everywhere, underlying concerns about “failure to launch” and “boomerang kids.” Two new sitcoms feature grown children moving back in with their parents — “$#*! My Dad Says,” starring William Shatner as a divorced curmudgeon whose 20-something son can’t make it on his own as a blogger, and “Big Lake,” in which a financial whiz kid loses his Wall Street job and moves back home to rural Pennsylvania. A cover of The New Yorker last spring picked up on the zeitgeist: a young man hangs up his new Ph.D. in his boyhood bedroom, the cardboard box at his feet signaling his plans to move back home now that he’s officially overqualified for a job. In the doorway stand his parents, their expressions a mix of resignation, worry, annoyance and perplexity: how exactly did this happen?

It’s happening all over, in all sorts of families, not just young people moving back home but also young people taking longer to reach adulthood overall. It’s a development that predates the current economic doldrums, and no one knows yet what the impact will be — on the prospects of the young men and women; on the parents on whom so many of them depend; on society, built on the expectation of an orderly progression in which kids finish school, grow up, start careers, make a family and eventually retire to live on pensions supported by the next crop of kids who finish school, grow up, start careers, make a family and on and on. The traditional cycle seems to have gone off course, as young people remain untethered to romantic partners or to permanent homes, going back to school for lack of better options, traveling, avoiding commitments, competing ferociously for unpaid internships or temporary (and often grueling) Teach for America jobs, forestalling the beginning of adult life.

The 20s are a black box, and there is a lot of churning in there. One-third of people in their 20s move to a new residence every year. Forty percent move back home with their parents at least once. They go through an average of seven jobs in their 20s, more job changes than in any other stretch. Two-thirds spend at least some time living with a romantic partner without being married. And marriage occurs later than ever. The median age at first marriage in the early 1970s, when the baby boomers were young, was 21 for women and 23 for men; by 2009 it had climbed to 26 for women and 28 for men, five years in a little more than a generation.

We’re in the thick of what one sociologist calls “the changing timetable for adulthood.” Sociologists traditionally define the “transition to adulthood” as marked by five milestones: completing school, leaving home, becoming financially independent, marrying and having a child. In 1960, 77 percent of women and 65 percent of men had, by the time they reached 30, passed all five milestones. Among 30-year-olds in 2000, according to data from the United States Census Bureau, fewer than half of the women and one-third of the men had done so. A Canadian study reported that a typical 30-year-old in 2001 had completed the same number of milestones as a 25-year-old in the early ’70s.

The whole idea of milestones, of course, is something of an anachronism; it implies a lockstep march toward adulthood that is rare these days. Kids don’t shuffle along in unison on the road to maturity. They slouch toward adulthood at an uneven, highly individual pace. Some never achieve all five milestones, including those who are single or childless by choice, or unable to marry even if they wanted to because they’re gay. Others reach the milestones completely out of order, advancing professionally before committing to a monogamous relationship, having children young and marrying later, leaving school to go to work and returning to school long after becoming financially secure.

Even if some traditional milestones are never reached, one thing is clear: Getting to what we would generally call adulthood is happening later than ever. But why? That’s the subject of lively debate among policy makers and academics. To some, what we’re seeing is a transient epiphenomenon, the byproduct of cultural and economic forces. To others, the longer road to adulthood signifies something deep, durable and maybe better-suited to our neurological hard-wiring. What we’re seeing, they insist, is the dawning of a new life stage — a stage that all of us need to adjust to.

JEFFREY JENSEN ARNETT, a psychology professor at Clark University in Worcester, Mass., is leading the movement to view the 20s as a distinct life stage, which he calls “emerging adulthood.” He says what is happening now is analogous to what happened a century ago, when social and economic changes helped create adolescence — a stage we take for granted but one that had to be recognized by psychologists, accepted by society and accommodated by institutions that served the young. Similar changes at the turn of the 21st century have laid the groundwork for another new stage, Arnett says, between the age of 18 and the late 20s. Among the cultural changes he points to that have led to “emerging adulthood” are the need for more education to survive in an information-based economy; fewer entry-level jobs even after all that schooling; young people feeling less rush to marry because of the general acceptance of premarital sex, cohabitation and birth control; and young women feeling less rush to have babies given their wide range of career options and their access to assisted reproductive technology if they delay pregnancy beyond their most fertile years.

Just as adolescence has its particular psychological profile, Arnett says, so does emerging adulthood: identity exploration, instability, self-focus, feeling in-between and a rather poetic characteristic he calls “a sense of possibilities.” A few of these, especially identity exploration, are part of adolescence too, but they take on new depth and urgency in the 20s. The stakes are higher when people are approaching the age when options tend to close off and lifelong commitments must be made. Arnett calls it “the age 30 deadline.”

The issue of whether emerging adulthood is a new stage is being debated most forcefully among scholars, in particular psychologists and sociologists. But its resolution has broader implications. Just look at what happened for teenagers. It took some effort, a century ago, for psychologists to make the case that adolescence was a new developmental stage. Once that happened, social institutions were forced to adapt: education, health care, social services and the law all changed to address the particular needs of 12- to 18-year-olds. An understanding of the developmental profile of adolescence led, for instance, to the creation of junior high schools in the early 1900s, separating seventh and eighth graders from the younger children in what used to be called primary school. And it led to the recognition that teenagers between 14 and 18, even though they were legally minors, were mature enough to make their own choice of legal guardian in the event of their parents’ deaths. If emerging adulthood is an analogous stage, analogous changes are in the wings.

But what would it look like to extend some of the special status of adolescents to young people in their 20s? Our uncertainty about this question is reflected in our scattershot approach to markers of adulthood. People can vote at 18, but in some states they don’t age out of foster care until 21. They can join the military at 18, but they can’t drink until 21. They can drive at 16, but they can’t rent a car until 25 without some hefty surcharges. If they are full-time students, the Internal Revenue Service considers them dependents until 24; those without health insurance will soon be able to stay on their parents’ plans even if they’re not in school until age 26, or up to 30 in some states. Parents have no access to their child’s college records if the child is over 18, but parents’ income is taken into account when the child applies for financial aid up to age 24. We seem unable to agree when someone is old enough to take on adult responsibilities. But we’re pretty sure it’s not simply a matter of age.

If society decides to protect these young people or treat them differently from fully grown adults, how can we do this without becoming all the things that grown children resist — controlling, moralizing, paternalistic? Young people spend their lives lumped into age-related clusters — that’s the basis of K-12 schooling — but as they move through their 20s, they diverge. Some 25-year-olds are married homeowners with good jobs and a couple of kids; others are still living with their parents and working at transient jobs, or not working at all. Does that mean we extend some of the protections and special status of adolescence to all people in their 20s? To some of them? Which ones? Decisions like this matter, because failing to protect and support vulnerable young people can lead them down the wrong path at a critical moment, the one that can determine all subsequent paths. But overprotecting and oversupporting them can sometimes make matters worse, turning the “changing timetable of adulthood” into a self-fulfilling prophecy.

The more profound question behind the scholarly intrigue is the one that really captivates parents: whether the prolongation of this unsettled time of life is a good thing or a bad thing. With life spans stretching into the ninth decade, is it better for young people to experiment in their 20s before making choices they’ll have to live with for more than half a century? Or is adulthood now so malleable, with marriage and employment options constantly being reassessed, that young people would be better off just getting started on something, or else they’ll never catch up, consigned to remain always a few steps behind the early bloomers? Is emerging adulthood a rich and varied period for self-discovery, as Arnett says it is? Or is it just another term for self-indulgence?

THE DISCOVERY OF adolescence is generally dated to 1904, with the publication of the massive study “Adolescence,” by G. Stanley Hall, a prominent psychologist and first president of the American Psychological Association. Hall attributed the new stage to social changes at the turn of the 20th century. Child-labor laws kept children under 16 out of the work force, and universal education laws kept them in secondary school, thus prolonging the period of dependence — a dependence that allowed them to address psychological tasks they might have ignored when they took on adult roles straight out of childhood. Hall, the first president of Clark University — the same place, interestingly enough, where Arnett now teaches — described adolescence as a time of “storm and stress,” filled with emotional upheaval, sorrow and rebelliousness. He cited the “curve of despondency” that “starts at 11, rises steadily and rapidly till 15 . . . then falls steadily till 23,” and described other characteristics of adolescence, including an increase in sensation seeking, greater susceptibility to media influences (which in 1904 mostly meant “flash literature” and “penny dreadfuls”) and overreliance on peer relationships. Hall’s book was flawed, but it marked the beginning of the scientific study of adolescence and helped lead to its eventual acceptance as a distinct stage with its own challenges, behaviors and biological profile.

In the 1990s, Arnett began to suspect that something similar was taking place with young people in their late teens and early 20s. He was teaching human development and family studies at the University of Missouri, studying college-age students, both at the university and in the community around Columbia, Mo. He asked them questions about their lives and their expectations like, “Do you feel you have reached adulthood?”

“I was in my early- to mid-30s myself, and I remember thinking, They’re not a thing like me,” Arnett told me when we met last spring in Worcester. “I realized that there was something special going on.” The young people he spoke to weren’t experiencing the upending physical changes that accompany adolescence, but as an age cohort they did seem to have a psychological makeup different from that of people just a little bit younger or a little bit older. This was not how most psychologists were thinking about development at the time, when the eight-stage model of the psychologist Erik Erikson was in vogue. Erikson, one of the first to focus on psychological development past childhood, divided adulthood into three stages — young (roughly ages 20 to 45), middle (about ages 45 to 65) and late (all the rest) — and defined them by the challenges that individuals in a particular stage encounter and must resolve before moving on to the next stage. In young adulthood, according to his model, the primary psychological challenge is “intimacy versus isolation,” by which Erikson meant deciding whether to commit to a lifelong intimate relationship and choosing the person to commit to.

But Arnett said “young adulthood” was too broad a term to apply to a 25-year span that included both him and his college students. The 20s are something different from the 30s and 40s, he remembered thinking. And while he agreed that the struggle for intimacy was one task of this period, he said there were other critical tasks as well.

Arnett and I were discussing the evolution of his thinking over lunch at BABA Sushi, a quiet restaurant near his office where he goes so often he knows the sushi chefs by name. He is 53, very tall and wiry, with clipped steel-gray hair and ice-blue eyes, an intense, serious man. He describes himself as a late bloomer, a onetime emerging adult before anyone had given it a name. After graduating from Michigan State University in 1980, he spent two years playing guitar in bars and restaurants and experimented with girlfriends, drugs and general recklessness before going for his doctorate in developmental psychology at the University of Virginia. By 1986 he had his first academic job at Oglethorpe University, a small college in Atlanta. There he met his wife, Lene Jensen, the school’s smartest psych major, who stunned Arnett when she came to his office one day in 1989, shortly after she graduated, and asked him out on a date. Jensen earned a doctorate in psychology, too, and she also teaches at Clark. She and Arnett have 10-year-old twins, a boy and a girl.

Arnett spent time at Northwestern University and the University of Chicago before moving to the University of Missouri in 1992, beginning his study of young men and women in the college town of Columbia, gradually broadening his sample to include New Orleans, Los Angeles and San Francisco. He deliberately included working-class young people as well as those who were well off, those who had never gone to college as well as those who were still in school, those who were supporting themselves as well as those whose bills were being paid by their parents. A little more than half of his sample was white, 18 percent African-American, 16 percent Asian-American and 14 percent Latino.

More than 300 interviews and 250 survey responses persuaded Arnett that he was onto something new. This was the era of the Gen X slacker, but Arnett felt that his findings applied beyond one generation. He wrote them up in 2000 in American Psychologist, the first time he laid out his theory of “emerging adulthood.” According to Google Scholar, which keeps track of such things, the article has been cited in professional books and journals roughly 1,700 times. This makes it, in the world of academia, practically viral. At the very least, the citations indicate that Arnett had come up with a useful term for describing a particular cohort; at best, that he offered a whole new way of thinking about them.

DURING THE PERIOD he calls emerging adulthood, Arnett says that young men and women are more self-focused than at any other time of life, less certain about the future and yet also more optimistic, no matter what their economic background. This is where the “sense of possibilities” comes in, he says; they have not yet tempered their idealistic visions of what awaits. “The dreary, dead-end jobs, the bitter divorces, the disappointing and disrespectful children . . . none of them imagine that this is what the future holds for them,” he wrote. Ask them if they agree with the statement “I am very sure that someday I will get to where I want to be in life,” and 96 percent of them will say yes. But despite elements that are exciting, even exhilarating, about being this age, there is a downside, too: dread, frustration, uncertainty, a sense of not quite understanding the rules of the game. More than positive or negative feelings, what Arnett heard most often was ambivalence — beginning with his finding that 60 percent of his subjects told him they felt like both grown-ups and not-quite-grown-ups.

Some scientists would argue that this ambivalence reflects what is going on in the brain, which is also both grown-up and not-quite-grown-up. Neuroscientists once thought the brain stops growing shortly after puberty, but now they know it keeps maturing well into the 20s. This new understanding comes largely from a longitudinal study of brain development sponsored by the National Institute of Mental Health, which started following nearly 5,000 children at ages 3 to 16 (the average age at enrollment was about 10). The scientists found the children’s brains were not fully mature until at least 25. “In retrospect I wouldn’t call it shocking, but it was at the time,” Jay Giedd, the director of the study, told me. “The only people who got this right were the car-rental companies.”

When the N.I.M.H. study began in 1991, Giedd said he and his colleagues expected to stop when the subjects turned 16. “We figured that by 16 their bodies were pretty big physically,” he said. But every time the children returned, their brains were found still to be changing. The scientists extended the end date of the study to age 18, then 20, then 22. The subjects’ brains were still changing even then. Tellingly, the most significant changes took place in the prefrontal cortex and cerebellum, the regions involved in emotional control and higher-order cognitive function.

As the brain matures, one thing that happens is the pruning of the synapses. Synaptic pruning does not occur willy-nilly; it depends largely on how any one brain pathway is used. By cutting off unused pathways, the brain eventually settles into a structure that’s most efficient for the owner of that brain, creating well-worn grooves for the pathways that person uses most. Synaptic pruning intensifies after rapid brain-cell proliferation during childhood and again in the period that encompasses adolescence and the 20s. It is the mechanism of “use it or lose it”: the brains we have are shaped largely in response to the demands made of them.

We have come to accept the idea that environmental influences in the first three years of life have long-term consequences for cognition, emotional control, attention and the like. Is it time to place a similar emphasis, with hopes for a similar outcome, on enriching the cognitive environment of people in their 20s?

N.I.M.H. scientists also found a time lag between the growth of the limbic system, where emotions originate, and of the prefrontal cortex, which manages those emotions. The limbic system explodes during puberty, but the prefrontal cortex keeps maturing for another 10 years. Giedd said it is logical to suppose — and for now, neuroscientists have to make a lot of logical suppositions — that when the limbic system is fully active but the cortex is still being built, emotions might outweigh rationality. “The prefrontal part is the part that allows you to control your impulses, come up with a long-range strategy, answer the question ‘What am I going to do with my life?’ ” he told me. “That weighing of the future keeps changing into the 20s and 30s.”

Among study subjects who enrolled as children, M.R.I. scans have been done so far only to age 25, so scientists have to make another logical supposition about what happens to the brain in the late 20s, the 30s and beyond. Is it possible that the brain just keeps changing and pruning, for years and years? “Guessing from the shape of the growth curves we have,” Giedd’s colleague Philip Shaw wrote in an e-mail message, “it does seem that much of the gray matter,” where synaptic pruning takes place, “seems to have completed its most dramatic structural change” by age 25. For white matter, where insulation that helps impulses travel faster continues to form, “it does look as if the curves are still going up, suggesting continued growth” after age 25, he wrote, though at a slower rate than before.

None of this is new, of course; the brains of young people have always been works in progress, even when we didn’t have sophisticated scanning machinery to chart it precisely. Why, then, is the youthful brain only now arising as an explanation for why people in their 20s are seeming a bit unfinished? Maybe there’s an analogy to be found in the hierarchy of needs, a theory put forth in the 1940s by the psychologist Abraham Maslow. According to Maslow, people can pursue more elevated goals only after their basic needs of food, shelter and sex have been met. What if the brain has its own hierarchy of needs? When people are forced to adopt adult responsibilities early, maybe they just do what they have to do, whether or not their brains are ready. Maybe it’s only now, when young people are allowed to forestall adult obligations without fear of public censure, that the rate of societal maturation can finally fall into better sync with the maturation of the brain.

Cultural expectations might also reinforce the delay. The “changing timetable for adulthood” has, in many ways, become internalized by 20-somethings and their parents alike. Today young people don’t expect to marry until their late 20s, don’t expect to start a family until their 30s, don’t expect to be on track for a rewarding career until much later than their parents were. So they make decisions about their futures that reflect this wider time horizon. Many of them would not be ready to take on the trappings of adulthood any earlier even if the opportunity arose; they haven’t braced themselves for it.

Nor do parents expect their children to grow up right away — and they might not even want them to. Parents might regret having themselves jumped into marriage or a career and hope for more considered choices for their children. Or they might want to hold on to a reassuring connection with their children as the kids leave home. If they were “helicopter parents” — a term that describes heavily invested parents who hover over their children, swooping down to take charge and solve problems at a moment’s notice — they might keep hovering and problem-solving long past the time when their children should be solving problems on their own. This might, in a strange way, be part of what keeps their grown children in the limbo between adolescence and adulthood. It can be hard sometimes to tease out to what extent a child doesn’t quite want to grow up and to what extent a parent doesn’t quite want to let go.

IT IS A BIG DEAL IN developmental psychology to declare the existence of a new stage of life, and Arnett has devoted the past 10 years to making his case. Shortly after his American Psychologist article appeared in 2000, he and Jennifer Lynn Tanner, a developmental psychologist at Rutgers University, convened the first conference of what they later called the Society for the Study of Emerging Adulthood. It was held in 2003 at Harvard with an attendance of 75; there have been three more since then, and last year’s conference, in Atlanta, had more than 270 attendees. In 2004 Arnett published a book, “Emerging Adulthood: The Winding Road From the Late Teens Through the Twenties,” which is still in print and selling well. In 2006 he and Tanner published an edited volume, “Emerging Adults in America: Coming of Age in the 21st Century,” aimed at professionals and academics. Arnett’s college textbook, “Adolescence and Emerging Adulthood: A Cultural Approach,” has been in print since 2000 and is now in its fourth edition. Next year he says he hopes to publish another book, this one for the parents of 20-somethings.

If all Arnett’s talk about emerging adulthood sounds vaguely familiar . . . well, it should. Forty years ago, an article appeared in The American Scholar that declared “a new stage of life” for the period between adolescence and young adulthood. This was 1970, when the oldest members of the baby boom generation — the parents of today’s 20-somethings — were 24. Young people of the day “can’t seem to ‘settle down,’ ” wrote the Yale psychologist Kenneth Keniston. He called the new stage of life “youth.”

Keniston’s description of “youth” presages Arnett’s description of “emerging adulthood” a generation later. In the late ’60s, Keniston wrote that there was “a growing minority of post-adolescents [who] have not settled the questions whose answers once defined adulthood: questions of relationship to the existing society, questions of vocation, questions of social role and lifestyle.” Whereas once, such aimlessness was seen only in the “unusually creative or unusually disturbed,” he wrote, it was becoming more common and more ordinary in the baby boomers of 1970. Among the salient characteristics of “youth,” Keniston wrote, were “pervasive ambivalence toward self and society,” “the feeling of absolute freedom, of living in a world of pure possibilities” and “the enormous value placed upon change, transformation and movement” — all characteristics that Arnett now ascribes to “emerging adults.”

Arnett readily acknowledges his debt to Keniston; he mentions him in almost everything he has written about emerging adulthood. But he considers the ’60s a unique moment, when young people were rebellious and alienated in a way they’ve never been before or since. And Keniston’s views never quite took off, Arnett says, because “youth” wasn’t a very good name for it. He has called the label “ambiguous and confusing,” not nearly as catchy as his own “emerging adulthood.”

For whatever reason Keniston’s terminology faded away, it’s revealing to read his old article and hear echoes of what’s going on with kids today. He was describing the parents of today’s young people when they themselves were young — and amazingly, they weren’t all that different from their own children now. Keniston’s article seems a lovely demonstration of the eternal cycle of life, the perennial conflict between the generations, the gradual resolution of those conflicts. It’s reassuring, actually, to think of it as recursive, to imagine that there must always be a cohort of 20-somethings who take their time settling down, just as there must always be a cohort of 50-somethings who worry about it.

KENISTON CALLED IT youth, Arnett calls it emerging adulthood; whatever it’s called, the delayed transition has been observed for years. But it can be in fullest flower only when the young person has some other, nontraditional means of support — which would seem to make the delay something of a luxury item. That’s the impression you get reading Arnett’s case histories in his books and articles, or the essays in “20 Something Manifesto,” an anthology edited by a Los Angeles writer named Christine Hassler. “It’s somewhat terrifying,” writes a 25-year-old named Jennifer, “to think about all the things I’m supposed to be doing in order to ‘get somewhere’ successful: ‘Follow your passions, live your dreams, take risks, network with the right people, find mentors, be financially responsible, volunteer, work, think about or go to grad school, fall in love and maintain personal well-being, mental health and nutrition.’ When is there time to just be and enjoy?” Adds a 24-year-old from Virginia: “There is pressure to make decisions that will form the foundation for the rest of your life in your 20s. It’s almost as if having a range of limited options would be easier.”

While the complaints of these young people are heartfelt, they are also the complaints of the privileged. Julie, a 23-year-old New Yorker and contributor to “20 Something Manifesto,” is apparently aware of this. She was coddled her whole life, treated to French horn lessons and summer camp, told she could do anything. “It is a double-edged sword,” she writes, “because on the one hand I am so blessed with my experiences and endless options, but on the other hand, I still feel like a child. I feel like my job isn’t real because I am not where my parents were at my age. Walking home, in the shoes my father bought me, I still feel I have yet to grow up.”

Despite these impressions, Arnett insists that emerging adulthood is not limited to young persons of privilege and that it is not simply a period of self-indulgence. He takes pains in “Emerging Adulthood” to describe some case histories of young men and women from hard-luck backgrounds who use the self-focus and identity exploration of their 20s to transform their lives.

One of these is the case history of Nicole, a 25-year-old African-American who grew up in a housing project in Oakland, Calif. At age 6, Nicole, the eldest, was forced to take control of the household after her mother’s mental collapse. By 8, she was sweeping stores and baby-sitting for money to help keep her three siblings fed and housed. “I made a couple bucks and helped my mother out, helped my family out,” she told Arnett. She managed to graduate from high school, but with low grades, and got a job as a receptionist at a dermatology clinic. She moved into her own apartment, took night classes at community college and started to excel. “I needed to experience living out of my mother’s home in order to study,” she said.

In his book, Arnett presents Nicole as a symbol of all the young people from impoverished backgrounds for whom “emerging adulthood represents an opportunity — maybe a last opportunity — to turn one’s life around.” This is the stage where someone like Nicole can escape an abusive or dysfunctional family and finally pursue her own dreams. Nicole’s dreams are powerful — one course away from an associate degree, she plans to go on for a bachelor’s and then a Ph.D. in psychology — but she has not really left her family behind; few people do. She is still supporting her mother and siblings, which is why she works full time even though her progress through school would be quicker if she found a part-time job. Is it only a grim pessimist like me who sees how many roadblocks there will be on the way to achieving those dreams and who wonders what kind of freewheeling emerging adulthood she is supposed to be having?

Of course, Nicole’s case is not representative of society as a whole. And many parents — including those who can’t really afford it — continue to help their kids financially long past the time they expected to. Two years ago Karen Fingerman, a developmental psychologist at Purdue University, asked parents of grown children whether they provided significant assistance to their sons or daughters. Assistance included giving their children money or help with everyday tasks (practical assistance) as well as advice, companionship and an attentive ear. Eighty-six percent said they had provided advice in the previous month; less than half had done so in 1988. Two out of three parents had given a son or daughter practical assistance in the previous month; in 1988, only one in three had.

Fingerman took solace in her findings; she said it showed that parents stay connected to their grown children, and she suspects that both parties get something out of it. The survey questions, after all, referred not only to dispensing money but also to offering advice, comfort and friendship. And another of Fingerman’s studies suggests that parents’ sense of well-being depends largely on how close they are to their grown children and how their children are faring — objective support for the adage that you’re only as happy as your unhappiest child. But the expectation that young men and women won’t quite be able to make ends meet on their own, and that parents should be the ones to help bridge the gap, places a terrible burden on parents who might be worrying about their own job security, trying to care for their aging parents or grieving as their retirement plans become more and more of a pipe dream.

This dependence on Mom and Dad also means that during the 20s the rift between rich and poor becomes entrenched. According to data gathered by the Network on Transitions to Adulthood, a research consortium supported by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, American parents give an average of 10 percent of their income to their 18- to 21-year-old children. This percentage is basically the same no matter the family’s total income, meaning that upper-class kids tend to get more than working-class ones. And wealthier kids have other, less obvious, advantages. When they go to four-year colleges or universities, they get supervised dormitory housing, health care and alumni networks not available at community colleges. And they often get a leg up on their careers by using parents’ contacts to help land an entry-level job — or by using parents as a financial backup when they want to take an interesting internship that doesn’t pay.

“You get on a pathway, and pathways have momentum,” Jennifer Lynn Tanner of Rutgers told me. “In emerging adulthood, if you spend this time exploring and you get yourself on a pathway that really fits you, then there’s going to be this snowball effect of finding the right fit, the right partner, the right job, the right place to live. The less you have at first, the less you’re going to get this positive effect compounded over time. You’re not going to have the same acceleration.”

EVEN ARNETT ADMITS that not every young person goes through a period of “emerging adulthood.” It’s rare in the developing world, he says, where people have to grow up fast, and it’s often skipped in the industrialized world by the people who marry early, by teenage mothers forced to grow up, by young men or women who go straight from high school to whatever job is available without a chance to dabble until they find the perfect fit. Indeed, the majority of humankind would seem to not go through it at all. The fact that emerging adulthood is not universal is one of the strongest arguments against Arnett’s claim that it is a new developmental stage. If emerging adulthood is so important, why is it even possible to skip it?

“The core idea of classical stage theory is that all people — underscore ‘all’ — pass through a series of qualitatively different periods in an invariant and universal sequence in stages that can’t be skipped or reordered,” Richard Lerner, Bergstrom chairman in applied developmental science at Tufts University, told me. Lerner is a close personal friend of Arnett’s; he and his wife, Jacqueline, who is also a psychologist, live 20 miles from Worcester, and they have dinner with Arnett and his wife on a regular basis.

“I think the world of Jeff Arnett,” Lerner said. “I think he is a smart, passionate person who is doing great work — not only a smart and productive scholar, but one of the nicest people I ever met in my life.”

No matter how much he likes and admires Arnett, however, Lerner says his friend has ignored some of the basic tenets of developmental psychology. According to classical stage theory, he told me, “you must develop what you’re supposed to develop when you’re supposed to develop it or you’ll never adequately develop it.”

When I asked Arnett what happens to people who don’t have an emerging adulthood, he said it wasn’t necessarily a big deal. They might face its developmental tasks — identity exploration, self-focus, experimentation in love, work and worldview — at a later time, maybe as a midlife crisis, or they might never face them at all, he said. It depends partly on why they missed emerging adulthood in the first place, whether it was by circumstance or by choice.

No, said Lerner, that’s not the way it works. To qualify as a developmental stage, emerging adulthood must be both universal and essential. “If you don’t develop a skill at the right stage, you’ll be working the rest of your life to develop it when you should be moving on,” he said. “The rest of your development will be unfavorably altered.” The fact that Arnett can be so casual about the heterogeneity of emerging adulthood and its existence in some cultures but not in others — indeed, even in some people but not in their neighbors or friends — is what undermines, for many scholars, his insistence that it’s a new life stage.

Why does it matter? Because if the delay in achieving adulthood is just a temporary aberration caused by passing social mores and economic gloom, it’s something to struggle through for now, maybe feeling a little sorry for the young people who had the misfortune to come of age in a recession. But if it’s a true life stage, we need to start rethinking our definition of normal development and to create systems of education, health care and social supports that take the new stage into account.

The Network on Transitions to Adulthood has been issuing reports about young people since it was formed in 1999 and often ends up recommending more support for 20-somethings. But more of what, exactly? There aren’t institutions set up to serve people in this specific age range; social services from a developmental perspective tend to disappear after adolescence. But it’s possible to envision some that might address the restlessness and mobility that Arnett says are typical at this stage and that might make the experimentation of “emerging adulthood” available to more young people. How about expanding programs like City Year, in which 17- to 24-year-olds from diverse backgrounds spend a year mentoring inner-city children in exchange for a stipend, health insurance, child care, cellphone service and a $5,350 education award? Or a federal program in which a government-sponsored savings account is created for every newborn, to be cashed in at age 21 to support a year’s worth of travel, education or volunteer work — a version of the “baby bonds” program that Hillary Clinton mentioned during her 2008 primary campaign? Maybe we can encourage a kind of socially sanctioned “rumspringa,” the temporary moratorium from social responsibilities some Amish offer their young people to allow them to experiment before settling down. It requires only a bit of ingenuity — as well as some societal forbearance and financial commitment — to think of ways to expand some of the programs that now work so well for the elite, like the Fulbright fellowship or the Peace Corps, to make the chance for temporary service and self-examination available to a wider range of young people.

A century ago, it was helpful to start thinking of adolescents as engaged in the work of growing up rather than as merely lazy or rebellious. Only then could society recognize that the educational, medical, mental-health and social-service needs of this group were unique and that investing in them would have a payoff in the future. Twenty-somethings are engaged in work, too, even if it looks as if they are aimless or failing to pull their weight, Arnett says. But it’s a reflection of our collective attitude toward this period that we devote so few resources to keeping them solvent and granting them some measure of security.

THE KIND OF SERVICES that might be created if emerging adulthood is accepted as a life stage can be seen during a visit to Yellowbrick, a residential program in Evanston, Ill., that calls itself the only psychiatric treatment facility for emerging adults. “Emerging adults really do have unique developmental tasks to focus on,” said Jesse Viner, Yellowbrick’s executive medical director. Viner started Yellowbrick in 2005, when he was working in a group psychiatric practice in Chicago and saw the need for a different way to treat this cohort. He is a soft-spoken man who looks like an accountant and sounds like a New Age prophet, peppering his conversation with phrases like “helping to empower their agency.”

“Agency” is a tricky concept when parents are paying the full cost of Yellowbrick’s comprehensive residential program, which comes to $21,000 a month and is not always covered by insurance. Staff members are aware of the paradox of encouraging a child to separate from Mommy and Daddy when it’s on their dime. They address it with a concept they call connected autonomy, which they define as knowing when to stand alone and when to accept help.

Patients come to Yellowbrick with a variety of problems: substance abuse, eating disorders, depression, anxiety or one of the more severe mental illnesses, like schizophrenia or bipolar disorder, that tend to appear in the late teens or early 20s. The demands of imminent independence can worsen mental-health problems or can create new ones for people who have managed up to that point to perform all the expected roles — son or daughter, boyfriend or girlfriend, student, teammate, friend — but get lost when schooling ends and expected roles disappear. That’s what happened to one patient who had done well at a top Ivy League college until the last class of the last semester of his last year, when he finished his final paper and could not bring himself to turn it in.

The Yellowbrick philosophy is that young people must meet these challenges without coddling or rescue. Up to 16 patients at a time are housed in the Yellowbrick residence, a four-story apartment building Viner owns. They live in the apartments — which are large, sunny and lavishly furnished — in groups of three or four, with staff members always on hand to teach the basics of shopping, cooking, cleaning, scheduling, making commitments and showing up.

Viner let me sit in on daily clinical rounds, scheduled that day for C., a young woman who had been at Yellowbrick for three months. Rounds are like the world’s most grueling job interview: the patient sits in front alongside her clinician “advocate,” and a dozen or so staff members are arrayed on couches and armchairs around the room, firing questions. C. seemed nervous but pleased with herself, frequently flashing a huge white smile. She is 22, tall and skinny, and she wore tiny denim shorts and a big T-shirt and vest. She started to fall apart during her junior year at college, plagued by binge drinking and anorexia, and in her first weeks at Yellowbrick her alcohol abuse continued. Most psychiatric facilities would have kicked her out after the first relapse, said Dale Monroe-Cook, Yellowbrick’s vice president of clinical operations. “We’re doing the opposite: we want the behavior to unfold, and we want to be there in that critical moment, to work with that behavior and help the emerging adult transition to greater independence.”

The Yellowbrick staff let C. face her demons and decide how to deal with them. After five relapses, C. asked the staff to take away her ID so she couldn’t buy alcohol. Eventually she decided to start going to meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous.

At her rounds in June, C. was able to report that she had been alcohol-free for 30 days. Jesse Viner’s wife, Laura Viner, who is a psychologist on staff, started to clap for her, but no one else joined in. “We’re on eggshells here,” Gary Zurawski, a clinical social worker specializing in substance abuse, confessed to C. “We don’t know if we should congratulate you too much.” The staff was sensitive about taking away the young woman’s motivation to improve her life for her own sake, not for the sake of getting praise from someone else.

C. took the discussion about the applause in stride and told the staff she had more good news: in two days she was going to graduate. On time.

THE 20S ARE LIKE the stem cell of human development, the pluripotent moment when any of several outcomes is possible. Decisions and actions during this time have lasting ramifications. The 20s are when most people accumulate almost all of their formal education; when most people meet their future spouses and the friends they will keep; when most people start on the careers that they will stay with for many years. This is when adventures, experiments, travels, relationships are embarked on with an abandon that probably will not happen again.

Does that mean it’s a good thing to let 20-somethings meander — or even to encourage them to meander — before they settle down? That’s the question that plagues so many of their parents. It’s easy to see the advantages to the delay. There is time enough for adulthood and its attendant obligations; maybe if kids take longer to choose their mates and their careers, they’ll make fewer mistakes and live happier lives. But it’s just as easy to see the drawbacks. As the settling-down sputters along for the “emerging adults,” things can get precarious for the rest of us. Parents are helping pay bills they never counted on paying, and social institutions are missing out on young people contributing to productivity and growth. Of course, the recession complicates things, and even if every 20-something were ready to skip the “emerging” moratorium and act like a grown-up, there wouldn’t necessarily be jobs for them all. So we’re caught in a weird moment, unsure whether to allow young people to keep exploring and questioning or to cut them off and tell them just to find something, anything, to put food on the table and get on with their lives.

Arnett would like to see us choose a middle course. “To be a young American today is to experience both excitement and uncertainty, wide-open possibility and confusion, new freedoms and new fears,” he writes in “Emerging Adulthood.” During the timeout they are granted from nonstop, often tedious and dispiriting responsibilities, “emerging adults develop skills for daily living, gain a better understanding of who they are and what they want from life and begin to build a foundation for their adult lives.” If it really works that way, if this longer road to adulthood really leads to more insight and better choices, then Arnett’s vision of an insightful, sensitive, thoughtful, content, well-honed, self-actualizing crop of grown-ups would indeed be something worth waiting for.

Robin Marantz Henig is a contributing writer. Her last article for the magazine was about anxiety.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/22/magazine/22Adulthood-t.html?src=me&ref=homepage

2010-08-16T10:12:00.001+08:00

I’m soooooo beyond tamad today, I wanna skip working and just study Chinese! Women xia xingqiliu you kaoshi.

Was browsing Lynne Truss’ book “Talk to the Hand”, I find her topics and her writing to be hilarious. Her previous book “Eats, Shoots, and Leaves” was so funny, who would’ve known that a book on correct punctuation could’ve been written that way?

they got they're own little club going on

2010-08-04T10:57:00.001+08:00

I’ve always considered myself an outsider, whatever group or social situation I find myself in. I feel like I’m channeling Camus and Kafka. Absurdist –existentialist eke k.

Random ramblings….

Current tune: taylor swift - you belong with me (WTF?!)

Is it an elitist endeavor to enjoy literature? Is the very essence of reading in any way possible privileged? It so is! Who has all the time in the world to devour books but those who have no work or employment to worry about (unless of course you’re Michiko Kakutani who makes a living giving out critiques on books).

I don’t know what to do with my life.

A Kite That Couldn't Be Tied Down

2010-07-30T17:02:00.000+08:00

A Kite That Couldn’t Be Tied Down

By LISA RUTH BRUNNER

IN honor of Persephone!” she announced, cracking open a pinkish orb. She handed me half and I stared, shocked, at the gleaming maroon seeds. She was plucking them with abandon, letting the juice stain her fingers, not caring. I tried to breathe.

It was winter in Pittsburgh, I was 18 years old, and I had never seen a pomegranate. I’d met her weeks after arriving in Pittsburgh for college. Somewhat randomly her boyfriend had asked me: “Would you like to come to our party? We’re going to have this Balkan band from Albuquerque and a Norwegian folk singer play, an Indonesian shadow puppet performance, and everyone has to bring a pie.”

At a time when other freshman girls were comparing Wal-Mart dorm room décor and giggling over tipsy messages scribbled on hallway wipe boards, an invitation to an off-campus party with artsy 20-somethings was surreal. I went, terrified, hoping at best to merely glimpse the Bohemian lifestyle my run-of-the-mill suburban upbringing had undoubtedly denied me. Instead, I fell in love.

She was a poet living in a castle-like apartment flooded with plants and books I’d never heard of. The details of her exotic childhood, I learned, included an organic farm in rural Texas and a private girls’ school. She did origami and left it hidden for strangers to find, knew the secrets of library basements and overgrown alleyways, and wore vintage hats covered in rusty brooches. She was into queer theory. She got her clothes from the Goodwill Dumpster. She was everything I’d dreamed of but never knew existed.

For some reason she anointed me with her doting approval and took to showing me around the city. She was on a mission to soak up the magic humming just beyond the ordinary and needed a partner in crime.

Enamored, I dropped everything to distance myself from the banality of university life and tag along. I was still very much 18: In my free time I accidentally dated the wrong people (sweet yet mortal music-theory undergrads), went to the wrong parties (where punks pounded Pabst Blue Ribbon) and actually went to class.

She disapproved, but she was patient and mentored me lovingly with carefully crafted book lists and midnight adventures. A year after we’d met, just as I was getting a handle on Ursula K. Le Guin and Anne Carson, she called me: Would I like her bicycle? She’d bought a one-way ticket to Japan.

The only person more devastated than me was her suddenly ex-boyfriend. Our common heartbreak inexplicable to the outside world, he and I mourned together. Only we knew the depths of her enchantment and, thus, the tragedy of our loss. While I sent her letter after letter, he actively plotted to get her back. In one hopeless ploy, he reasoned that if the two of us could lure her into a three-way relationship, our combined appeal might jointly win her over.

At 19 this seemed plausible to me and I went for it, pawing at him in the dark, remembering her. After he’d fall asleep I’d sit in their living room and trace my finger over the books she’d left behind. I ached in the presence of her ghost. Eventually he also took a one-way flight to Japan in an attempt to reunite; soon he was wandering through India without her. And I was left in Pittsburgh, newly alone.

With everyone I deemed important now abroad, I mustered up my newly developed confidence and hatched my own plan: I too would study in Japan and properly declare my love once and for all. When I marched to my university’s study-abroad office to seal the deal, however, I was confronted with reality: Living in Japan was expensive. Prohibitively expensive.

But there was a six-week summer program in Beijing, for which generous scholarships existed. Would I be interested in that? I glanced at the map. China seemed close enough. I applied.

By June I was at Peking University studying Mandarin on an open-jaw airline ticket; six weeks later the program ended and I was standing in Tiananmen Square. And to my disbelief she was there, too, standing next to me, flying a makeshift kite. By then she had quit her Japanese job and come to Beijing with her teenage brother. Her plan was for the three of us to take the Trans-Siberian Railway to Moscow and sort of wing it from there.

Still getting my bearings abroad, I was not yet the type of person who “wings it” — especially in Russia — but this wasn’t about logic; this was about her.

She slept a lot on the train; she also read for hours and barely ate. I bonded with her brother over spoonfuls of Nutella and ruthless make-believe gossip about our fellow passengers. We got to the topic of her ex-boyfriend.

“She only liked him because they read at the exact same pace and turned pages at the same time,” her brother said, rolling his eyes. “Not exactly my idea of romance.”

I swooned at the thought of her reading something undoubtedly wonderful in the adjoining compartment but forced myself to nod. We looked out the window: a herd of camels, for a flash of a second. We were in the Gobi Desert.

Nights were hard. She was inevitably inches away, sleeping peacefully as my desire for her boiled. In Ulan Bator, under a sky thick and white with stars, we decided to sleep in a yurt on the steppe. As her brother slept, she whispered to me: “Have you heard about that hand-built, nine-grotto Virgin Mary shrine some priest spent 42 years piecing together in Iowa?”

I told her I’d build her a bigger one if she wanted.

She laughed and played with my hair, knowing it was true but not wanting to show it. The shrine I had already built for her was painfully exposed; in two years my mainstream existence had been razed to the ground to make room for a garden in which her every eccentricity was welcomed to bloom. What was I doing in Mongolia? It seemed I would follow her anywhere.

The landscape changed as we rode to Russia: an endless expanse of pine trees, one after another, through the train windows. We stopped in Irkutsk to skinny-dip with seals in Lake Baikal, eat spiced pine nuts from the cone, and hike through fields to hunt for mushrooms and shamanistic cave drawings, but I barely noticed. While staying with a family, our kindly Russian host mother instructed us to strip and smack each other with birch branches in a backyard sauna. This is where we finally did kiss, under an orange moon, but her heart was elusive while mine was unsophisticated and greedy.

In the four days it took to ride from Irkutsk to Moscow she somehow found us a place to stay: an office-building basement secretly converted at night into a cheap hostel by a cleaning lady. The catch was that we had to be out each morning by 8.

We whiled our days away in bookstores and second-rate amusement parks, eating hot dogs and forgetting to go to the Kremlin. When she and her brother decided to ditch the train and hitchhike their way through Finland and the Baltic states — all the way to relatives in France — I suddenly felt like an imposter about to be discovered. I wanted to keep going but couldn’t keep up.

I was too afraid not to return to Pittsburgh, not to finish college, not to tell my parents exactly where I was. I didn’t have much money and was too afraid to hitch. She seemed genuinely sad but did not stop me from leaving. As I turned my back on her at the first major fork in the road, I was grudgingly conscious of a painful realization: My life was not one of one-way tickets. Not yet.

OVER the next few years she passed through Pittsburgh many times and we’d always go swimming in a fountain, or stencil poetry onto sidewalks, or cook pizza or kiss, only for a day or two, and then she’d be gone. I’d beg for her ever-changing address and she’d write, inconsistently, sending short stories and watercolors too good to be from someone I knew. One day she showed up with a new boyfriend. The only thing worse than losing her was the realization that I’d never had her.

Recently I came across her biography online. She is now an accomplished writer, the recipient of many fellowships and awards. My first thought: Thank God professional judges of the potential for magic in artists have justified my fanatic obsession. And then I saw it. Among her various honors and residencies, chosen out of the hundreds of cities she has visited and thousands of experiences accumulated, she had written that she once flew kites in Tiananmen Square.

I tried to breathe. There are so many fruits in the world; we can’t remember exactly who introduced us to what. But we never forget who showed us that there were, indeed, more fruits to discover than we’d ever realized.

Lisa Ruth Brunner is a graduate student in geography at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, British Columbia.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/01/fashion/01Love.html?hpw=&pagewanted=print

camus and kafka

2010-07-29T17:43:00.001+08:00

Ever the eternal outsider, don’t seem to fit in anywhere.

Channeling Kafka and Camus, absurd absurd absurd.

No one’s got it all.

Bummer Bummer Bummer

2010-04-07T09:46:00.000+08:00

Bummer Bummer Bummer!

Note to self: Never let your hopes up, Ever!

It's Freakin' Hot Out Here

2010-04-06T16:00:00.000+08:00

It's Freakin' Hot Out Here!

Hindi na ako natutuwa sa weather. I’m like drenched in sweat all day. Doesn’t matter if you shower like crazy, the moment you step out of the shower all hell breaks loose and you start perspiring again.

Spent the Lenten holidays lounging around the house. As in literally I was just lying on my back the whole time. Made great use of time and caught up with my reading. I’m so addicted to the Sookie Stackhouse series right now. I’m on book 5 and I have 4 more to go, I can’t wait! What I like about Charlaine Harris’ books is that they’re so entertaining and freakin’ light to read. Let’s just say she’s no Dostoevsky but her stories are so entertaining. I liked this book (book5) especially, it’s more wholesome! Haha!

Gravitating towards Indian writers, for the past year or so I’ve managed to read the works of Kiran Desai, Vikas Swarup, V.S. Naipaul (well technically he’s not Indian but he wrote about Indians in Trinidad), Jhumpa Lahiri (love her!) and Aravind Adiga who I read last week. The more I read about Indian culture the more I see parallelisms between our societies like how they value family and certain sociological perceptions.

Can’t wait for Glee! Wish I had all the money and time to spend my days reading. I want another non-fiction maybe something about math or history! I want a flip!

I WANT

2010-03-29T10:06:00.000+08:00

I WANT

ü I want that Moleskine book journal where I can keep track of whatever book I’ve read or am currently reading. I want to be more systematic and keep record of my impressions on the stuff I read.

ü I want some Russian literature. I want those names to go back to, greatly enjoyed pronouncing the names of characters from Bulgakov, Dostoevsky and Turgenev. The last “Russian” book I read was Child44 which was not even written by a Russian. I found that to be very pretentious. Complete waste of time trying to digress that book.

ü I want a freakin’ amazing everyday leather bag, any bag would do I just want something big and new.

healthy options is my new favorite store

2009-09-10T13:53:00.001+08:00

Yesterday I had loads of time; I was able to come out of the office earlier than usual. Loads of time usually translates to much needed retail therapy or at the very least spend quality time at the mall, haha! So I entered Greenbelt5 without really any intention of buying anything or visiting a particular shop but walking lead me to Bratpack. I remembered that they sell those Eastpak bags designed by Raf Simons and Rick Owens so I checked it out. I was actually thinking of buying a bag (wala pa kong gift sa sarili ko for my birthday) as a birthday gift to myself hehe. After some time wandering aimlessly at the store I was finally able to see the besought bags. I first saw the Raf Simons back pack that resembled somehow of those old military duffel bags but more refined having leather trimmings and effortlessly chic light blue material, sobrang mahal! My contacts were really blurring my view but I didn’t need 20/20 vision that time to realize the much maligned number of digits reflected on the price tag. Next!!!! Next to it were the bags designed by Rick Owens, I was’t (and still am) not familiar with his work but the black themed bags had a nice look to it. There was a picture of a guy who I presumed to be the designer, clad in a black leather skirt and high heeled shoes. The overall look reminded me of Gian Romano less the high heels. His bags were even pricier so that crushed my plans of buying anything from that store.

I walked out and made my way to the lower ground floor where Fully Booked was but I made a quick change of plans and proceeded to Healthy Options (my new fave store!). the reason being that I remembered my Mum who has high levels of cholesterol in her system and that made me think of getting her something that could help with her condition. The store was nice, everything was white. It was set up like a grocery store having everything organic (I always wanted to use the word organic). I was awed by the number of supplements they had! It was like a full wall stacked from the bottom up with all organic supplements, I saw 2 cholesterol related supplements and 1 that had concentrated garlic essences in them. I wasn’t sure of what to get her so I decided to put off the intended purchase. Then I remembered that I ran out of my multivitamin tablets eons ago so I looked for something along the lines of a usual multivit’s like Centrum. I saw one and immediately bought it haha! For something that had a nice packaging to it and claimed to be made of all vegan sources it was actually cheap or at least at par with those commercially marketed vitamins. I just started taking them this morning.

For that Healthy Options is my new favorite store haha! Looking forward to more visits, I plan to visit the one at Trinoma this weekend.

Cheers @ 25!

Song for the moment : Let’s Just Fall in Love Again by Jason Castro (I so loooooove this song!)

*Reminding myself of blogging about my first itunes purchase experience*

2009-08-30T21:25:00.002+08:00

birthday week

oh here i go again rambling about nothing really. well come thursday (3 sep 2009) this week i'll be celebrating yet another birthday, by that day i would have been breathing and living on this earth for about a quarter of a century. i put it that way because i feel old, like vampire old haha i've been watching too much true blood these days.

i hate that i'm becoming more and more defeatist in my outlook. gone were the days when i was full of ambition, i actually believed that i was capable of doing anything. well those days are over, now i'm just living day by day hoping that i'll survive and get by. *hingang malalim*

anyway mapapalaban na naman tayo sa matinding gastos this week, i'll have an excuse to buy myself something nice bilang birthday gift ko sa sarili ko haha! i'm thinking of buying a holga camera, tingnan natin! at malamang sa malamang nyan maraming tao na naman ang hihirit ng libre nakow patay!

2009-08-23T11:21:00.000+08:00

throwing stuff out.

i find it hard to throw stuff out, i almost associate a memory, an instance, a little piece of my life that passed with every imaginable object i have come to posses. you could say that i'm a hoarder (i think i'm borderline hoarding!).

it's just hard. pieces of paper i used in college, old notebooks, blue books and even the chinese character flash cards i used when studying for exams in mandarin class i couldn't bear throw away. i enjoyed that class so much and i made a lot of friends there. but the flash cards are almost turning yellow! haha.

the mental debate of whether to throw things out or keep it is almost lop sided, the "keep" pile almost wins hands down.

CD's are another problem, they occupy space but they're so useful storing info. just this morning i was canvassing all the CD's i unearthed while packing for stuff (my brothers and i moved apartments just this week). i found data discs that contained old files from college and mix cd's that i used to listen to while studying for exams and commuting at the MRT. music is such a big vehicle to memory lane i just love it.

2009-07-26T11:28:00.001+08:00

i'm weak, i'm but human...but they were 70% off!!!

yes, i've sinned. just as i was just ending the week, starting a restful weekend i came upon these high-cut shoes that were 70% off! can you believe it? 70% off! i was blown away. the store was already on sale for quite some time now but i've been putting off a visit because i know i shouldn't be in a buying mode as i just made a purchase on a similar item (shoes din from the zara sale).

matagal ko na gusto ng high-cut shoes so when i saw them it was just hard to resist. it's like the high-cut chucks but only made of black patent leather with velcro straps in place of shoe laces. hayun i don't think i've ever bought something at a 70% discount! before this purchase kuntento na ko sa 50% off.

i'm such a big fan of sales! with the exception of books (bookstores never go on sale!) i never buy anything on original undiscounted price, why would i buy it now when i can i have it at a lower price later in the year. so for that i consider myself a smart shopper...not! the thing is i would buy almost anything on sale without consideration of the price. nanghihinayang kasi ako sa amount saved! hehe but i'm learning.

*intermission*

ZOMG jake gyllenhaal is oin drag sa SNL doing a song from dream girls! it's just hilarious! maya rudolph is the best sya yung paborito kong SNL cast.

*end of intermission*

anyway i know i'm not going to regret this purchase hehe and i hope to get a lot of mileage out of them!

2009-07-19T21:07:00.002+08:00

After 10 years!

...after 10 years nabalikan ko ulit 'tong blog ko na 'to. after all the hype about friendster, hi5, multiply, myspace and now facebook at twitter (lahat ng 'to pinatos ko!) binalikan ko ulit itong blogspot account ko.

it's actually by accident that i stumbled upon this blog, a few days ago wala akong ginagawa sa office and i remembered a friend telling me of my old blog haha! akala ko nga they shut this down na pero lo and behold it still exists! super funny reading back my entries from back in the day, batang bata pa hehe! it's really embarassing but hey it was the real me who wrote all those sh*t down haha ain't no shame! i even advertised this site to the dearest of my friends; inviting them to read my old entries!

well a lot has happened, it's been like 5 years na yata since my last post. i was still a college student yata and now frustrated laborer sa isang credit card company, funny how life changes. funny how different i was back then writing all those entries but still remain pretty much the same. i'm getting all sentimental na ganyan yata talaga pag tumatanda!

for whatever this is worth i'm determined to keep this blog alive, i plan to revamp it lalo na yung layout! i'm not that dark na pero i'm keeping the tags hehe!

wish you guys all the best...'til then!

2004-11-01T22:39:00.000+08:00

hay finally!! i get to update, sorta, my blog!!!

been too busy at school!!! gosh the last weeks of the first semester was really murder!!! i'm just thankful that now i get to sleep!!

well, the year is rounding up, today is nov 1st and it's all saints day. first time ko magpunta ng sementeryo!!

hekhek wala lang ganun pala ang dame ng tao dame din ng tinda. sandali lang naman kame

hay naku nararamdaman ko na na palapit ang march! no!!!! kung pwede ko lang pigilan ang oras! ayoko pa grumadweyt!!! noooo!!

2004-05-30T21:52:00.000+08:00

Hello!

I’m having another crappy day! started out last night, found it difficult to catch sleep again, it’s so frustrating when you really want to sleep but you just can’t sigh.

Anyway I woke up and started to do my morning routine, which was basically watch tv while I do my exercises for my back. So I turned the tv on, hoping to catch am at ibc the Chinese show where they give out some mandarin lessons, it’s really interesting. So lo and behold wala, ay meron pala but it’s a replay so scanned the channels and ended up with wowow, it’s a Japanese channel notorious for airing porn on the wee hours of the morning hehe. Anyway it’s a good station they always have cool Hollywood movies and art films. This morning they were airing ‘bend it like beckham’ it was really good! Now I know what the fuzz was all about for it had rave reviews back then.

Keira knightly was really good!! That was the first time I saw a movie of hers hehe it’s really entertaining fusing Indian culture with it hehe and all this luvapalooza bout football. All in all I loved it, absolutely loved it!

So anyway last night I went to this reunion thingy and I still can’t set aside my frustrations! Why the hell did I go home early! Heh that was my only lakad this summer, this whole 2 months I was stuck here in our house, I mean I’m not complaining I mean I got a whole lot of rest plus I got to watch my fave shows on a regular basis, er thatwould be everyday. So I got hooked on American idol! Harhar

Well June is comin up that means school for me, I’m quite excited to get out of the house and have money to spend! First up, june 2 registration day, I’m planning to ditch for harry potter and the prisoner of azkaban! I’m a big fan of harry potter books! I started reading it way back in high school when nobody else knew who harry, hermione and ron were. Wala lang just bragging hehe.

Well anyway my classmates were there, and they were like…….grr I don’t wanna talk about it na lang naiisip ko lang kung gano ka-pathetic and lame ang buhay ko! I dunno how things would work out for me wala lang.

2004-05-29T22:41:00.000+08:00

reunion ek ek after blow

haaaaaay today i went to this reunion chu chu, reunion nameng batch sa high school, i had to shell out 180 pesos. for me it was really mahal considering na it was only dinner. that was what i thought bago mag mag reunion, after even worse i think it was really mahal, oh well ok lang naman since minsan minsan lang naman kami magkita kita.

he hayun i was a bit disappointed kasi konti lang sa high school friends ko ang dumating, atsaka after the dinner everone was forming their groups na and they were taking the party somewhere else na eh ako kami nung 2 na kasama ko nag mcdonald's na lang. hay sad talaga feeling ko i don't belong, well back then i had a group to hang out with naman kaso they weren't there hay sadness umuwi ako nang wala man lang nalalasap na 'inom' hay

feeling ko tuloy i'm such a nerd and nobody wants to be with me. it was fun anyway seeing them again, even some of our classmates na na-kick out were there, i genuinely like them. one of them was really good to me ka section ko sya nung first year wala lang basta ambait nya kahit na nerdy ako and everything. groupmate ko sya nun sa pe eh banban ako at walang alam sa basketbal, he really made me feel ok na wala lang laro laro lang yun basta mabaet sya hehehe

more mooning next post tagal ko ma reremember tong night na to!

2004-05-24T22:30:00.000+08:00

hay sad day, our cable is down so i couldn't watch tv! damn it! roland garros pa naman ngayon and i'm just dyin' to see some clay court tennis action! damn and i'm still in the dark about whether juanqui is gonna play! he's had a bad season and i'm really genuinely worried bout his ranking, hay he's favorite player of all time!

anyway, moving on, i'm sad that i still don't have a copy of camile's song on the american idol 3 cd, i heard that she's really great there. thank God! somebody in kazaa has it but i'm still not finished downloading it. camile is my fave american idol finalist! anyway finals is comin up, it's between fantasia and diana. i really don't care who wins both have been really succesful anyway they're sure to get recording contracts naman eh. i heard that camile is in talks with babyface i hope that puches through i'm so gonna buy her cd. the original ones not the pirated copies hehe like the ones i buy when i don't have money!! guilty!

and so wala ngang cable so i'd just have to be content with the online updates that i'm gettin good luck sana bukas meron na kasi bukas ang game ni juan!

hay sobrang lapit na ng pasukan, i can smell it hehehe. i'm really excited coz we're in a new building now wala lang. ano kaya feeling ng bagong relocated hehe

2004-05-23T22:53:00.000+08:00

hay naku!
ang tagal ko na ding hindi nakapag - blog kakainis kasi di ko naman makita ng maluwalhati ang kabuuan ng page kasi puro angelfire lang ang makikita! grrrr kainis sira kasi ang angelfire, matagal nang sira! hay kelan kaya mabubuo yun kaya hayun tinamad na ako magblog

well malapit na ang pasukan at super excited na ko na makareceive ng baon! bwahahaha magkakapera na naman ako!

eeeeeeeek bukas na! ang favorite grandslam ko! ang french open! it's just sad tho kasi yung fave player ko, if u haven't guessed it yet si juan carlos ferrero yun, eh di pa sure na maglalaro. he's been sidelined for the longest time because of illnesses! mean illnesses, earlier in this year's claycourt season nagkaroon sya ng chicken pox tapos nagkaroon naman ng wrist injury and stuff hay sadness talaga! sya pa naman ang defending champ and he's looking to defend his title. i just hope all the best for him. sana malaman nya na ako ang biggest fan nya! hehehe

sobrang saya ko dahil sa wakas nagkaroon na ng 'until you come back to me' ni camile sa kazaa at syempre pa download agad ako!!! hay sana macomplete na!!!!

2004-05-14T23:00:00.000+08:00

briton33 strikes again!!!!

grrrr this guy doesn't know when to give up!! he thinks so highly of himself and considers all plain jasmine trias-voting filipinos as demented, narrow-minded, free-riders!!! the nerves of that guy!!!

hay today i got out of our house!! hurray!! i went to UP to visit and get some news, i was ready to help kasi lipat-tambayan na akala ko e di pa pala, hayun. i'm really excited to see our new tambayan but they say ot's real small and that it's gonna be crowded kasi we'd have to share a room with another org, inis dadalawa lang naman ang org sa stat bakit di pa bigyan ng tig-isang rooms dava?!?!? kung kelan naman dumami ang rooms tsaka lumiit ang mga tambayan! hmph!! grrrr

2004-05-11T22:29:00.000+08:00

whatta feeling!!!

hay! nakaboto na ako! ngek medyo delayed, di kasi ako nakapag blog last night! i was too busy tryin to find ways to improve this blogsite! like adding pictures and stuff!! i'm so insatiable heheh.

i'm thinkin' of enrollin myself in an html class, i really wanna learn all this internet stuff, para na rin may mapapakita ko pag nag-apply ako diba?!?!? i gotta start thinkin of it already. oh no!!! my resume would be totally blank! minsan pag wala ako magawa, may resume template kasi yung isang pc - "family" pc - eh nagpapantasya ako kung anu ano nilalagay ko sa 'degrees' section, aside form my bachelor's degree nilalagyan ko ng mga MS at Ph.D.'s from universities like cambridge, oxford and MIT!!! hehehe i could only wish!

hay tennis season is coming up! the clay season is on a full swing pero i'm rally sad kasi my idol isn't faring well, na-sideline sya sa dami ng sakit na dumating, from chicken pox to wrist injuries!! wawa naman eh roland garros/french open is coming up pa naman e defending champ sya dun!! oh no! i dunno what will happen! di sya masyado nakakapractice! turn na nya ngayon to dominate the men's circuit kasi uber galing sya sa clay!! hay juan!! kung alam mo lang ako ang number 1 fan mo!!

2004-05-09T22:18:00.000+08:00

my first time!!!

haaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaayyyyyyy!!!!!

bukas na!!!! magiging lubos na ang aking pagka-pilipino, makaboboto na ko!!!!! i hope my "first time" would be a favorable one!

at bukas na din!.....ang paghaharap ni shiela a.k.a. dugyot at ni dugong!!!!

major improvement in my blog, it's now shaping to be what i wanted it to be!!!! i hope people would visit!! and leave their messages

just sharin this funny text message that i received tonight!
[*]sa darating na eleksyon, wag nating kalimutang ibalik si jinggoy sa kulungan, c enrile sa golden acres, si maceda sa golden gays, at si FPJ sa high school! [/*]

harharhar!!

2004-05-08T22:37:00.000+08:00

well this night is forming to be a shitty one! i don't have anything to do

well election is coming up, it's on monday and today is the last day of campaigning so all i can watch on tv is non-stop election related commercials, nothing more to see than the candidates' faces, it's suffocating. it would be my first time to vote and i'm really excited! well i haven't made up my mind yet on who to vote but come monday i'll make up my mind. i hope this election would be peaceful and i truly hope na walang dayaang mangyayare!

2004-05-07T23:10:00.000+08:00

whew! another day! i'm counting on the remaining days or weeks til i go back to school again. this year it's gonna be tough for sure coz it's my senior year already and i'm expected to graduate in march! that is if everything goes well! i'm crossing my fingers!

but all these graguating thing is really making me anxious. i'm not sure if i really wanna graduate and enter thye work force of this country, or another country for that matter. i'm like really afraid of graduating, plus i'm really enjoying my life as a student. heck my parents give me money and io don't have to work for it. i mean i've always enjoyed school ever since and i can't actually imagine myself out of school! well it would all be swell for i don't have to cram every now and then for an exam but the thought of leaving school is sending chills down my spine!

i really don't know what to do with my life, what i want to do with my life, i think i'm a floater just goin wherever life takes me. to tell you the truth i really can't see myself working, anywhere! my plans are only limited up to march of next year, any time beyond that i really don't know. for 16 years or so, my routine was just to go to school , that was the plan and now the plan would be fulfilled and io need another plan! fast!

i'm afraid of being unemployed! i'm afraid that it would upset my parents and that they would be disappointed at me!

i mean. i busted my ass off studying and i damn well deserve a nice job, but what if it doesn't happen?!?!? huuuwaaaahhh!!! magtricycle na lang kaya ako?!?!?

2004-05-06T23:14:00.000+08:00

hay!! another day!!

today i went to my grandmother's funeral, my grandma from my dad. sa totoo lang di pa nakaka-isang buwan mula nung nilibing naman yung lolo ko na asawa nya. since then, na-open na naman ang buhay ko sa mga pinsang matagal na di ko nakikita! when i say matagal, i really mean matagal! dude i'm talking about a decade here! actually more than if i'd be so obsessive to be exact. so after a multitude of re-introduction, a thousand manos and smiles we got acquainted and got along with them. i'm not complaining but it's just that i can't help but think that my lofe sorta kinda changed, ewan ko but come to think of it life is all about change.

almost all of my cousins are married now and everytime i go there sumasakit ang tenga ko sa ingay ng mga bata!!! ang dami dami nila!!! ang sakit sakit ng katawan ko dahil ginagawa nila kaming living swings!!! huwaaaaaaaahhhhh!!! ang sakit pramis buong araw ka ba namang magpasan ng bata, kumandong ng bata at makipag habulan!! hallerr 20 years old na ko!!! haaaaay kakapagod talaga!

i'm rantin' coz of many things!!!
-i had to miss reading!!! i have assigned to read 2 chapters everyday of crime and punishment, so now i'm behind!!
-i missed john stevens' interview and PERFORMANCE on Entertainment Tonight!!! *major grrrrrr moment*
-i missed american idol on channel 5, it was country night and i so loved camile's DESPERADO there, i also wanted badly to see john stevens' KING OF THE ROAD!!! grrrrrrr!!!
-learned that our new tambayan would be very small!!! and we would hardly fit in the room that they assigned to us, we have to share it with another org pa?!?!?! i don't know how things would work out at that new building!!!

i'm ravin' coz
-i have this blog site!!! hehehe i found a site that offers codes to change the template and background!! yahooo!!! mag-eexperiment na naman ako!!!

somethings wrong with my kazaa ewan ko ba?!?!? di ako makadownload!! di ko tuloy matapos-tapos yung jamie cullum songs na i'm so raving about!

2004-05-03T23:15:00.000+08:00

grrrrrr!!! this briton guy is making me go nuts!!!! he totally misses my point.

first it started with him entering this american idol forum which i frequent, we were totally happy there until this guy appeared and making all the bruhahaha about voting for jasmine just because she's filipina and not because of her talent. so then people reacted and i gave him a piece of my mind! i sad,

"why?!?!? what's wrong with "finding comfort in the thought that a half- or quarter- or part-filipino is doing something really well somewhere"?!?!?! e kasi naman feeling ko represented tayo or should i say kami, na that kind of talent somehow sprung from a this small part of the earth. just let us be.

basta i'm proud of her just knowing na she has filipino blood, kahit di nya aminin o anu man!"

i mean i'm totally entitled to my opinion right, and then the next thing he/she posted id

"represented kayo? insert snicker here*

well, my point is, if you personally think jasmine deserves to be the idol because she has talent and personality, then i say vote for her. but if u wanna vote for her only for the reason that she's filipino, i say you're nothing but a demented free-rider."

why not diba?!?!? i'll take it!! hell this is a free country! i can do whatever i want. and who is he to talk about talent and all this stuff!! grrrrr talaga kainis!!!! how i wish mabasa nya to!!!! grrrrrr to the millionth power sayo!!

a demented free rider?!?!?!? grrrrrrrrr!!! to hell with you whoever you are, i bet he/she is not even filipino! that's why he/she don't get it! i can surmise by his nick which happens to be briton!!

aaaaaaaaaarrrrrrgh!!!! to hell with you! our forum used to be nice and all supportive of our amercan idols!!!! grrrrr!!!

feeling sya!!! halleeeerrrrr peyups addict yata ako eh samantalang sya hamak na member lang! hmph! che!

2004-05-03T15:06:00.000+08:00

heyah!

monday, sedate monday afternoon without anythin to do but to log-on to the internet,
as i was doing my routine of cheking my mail and checking out new posts at , an online community for UP students, i was enranged by a post! grrrr the nerves of that guy, he was questioning why filipinos vote for jasmine trias at american idol, just because she has filipina blood!!! grrrr i bet that guy's not even filipino coz he doesn't understand. well if you don't it's like this. we vote for her because we identify with her! and we're so glad and proud that she has filipino ancestry.

i don't really like her as much as i like camile velasco, who happens to be another filipina, and john stevens. i liked them because they have unique voices that set them apart from the other contestants!!

i'm raving for jamie cullum!! can't wait to download and sample some of his songs!!!

rock on!

2004-05-01T21:22:00.000+08:00

yey!! i'm so excited! this is my first try in 'blogging' hehehe hopefully many people would visit and leave their comments!

uhmmm it's summer time here and we have no classes, that means i mope all day in our house watching tv and logging on to the internet

i'm currently in to american idol, but all of my bets have already been eliminated first camile velasco, then john stevens. but! jasmine trias is still there all of the filipinos all over the world are hoping for the best for jasmine! please vote for her. camile velasco is also filipino -american and she's really talented, i so love her voice!!