from woo's page..

You Know You're Filipino If...
(the things in bold are things that i do/have done or apply to me and/or my family)

1. You're related to everyone.
2. Your middle name is your mother's maiden name.
3. Your parents call each other "Mommy" and "Daddy."
4. You have uncles and aunts named "Boy," "Girlie," or "Baby."
5. You have relatives whose nicknames consist of repeated syllables like "Jun-Jun," "Ling-Ling," and "Mon-Mon." [my brothers nicknames= Wewen and Bong-bong and im MaiMai hahaha]
6. You call the parents of your friends and your own parents' friends "Tito" and "Tita."
7. You have four or five names. [yes= Mia, Sweetie, Mye, Maimai, Mimi, Mi]
8. You greet your elders by touching their hands to your forehead. [MANO PO!]
9. You always kiss your relatives on the cheek whenever you enter or leave the room.
10. You follow your parents' house rules even if you are over 18.
11. You live with your parents until and at times even after you're married.
12. You make your children sing and dance to amuse your friends and relatives.
13. Your house has a distinctive aroma.
14. You decorate your living room wall with your family's framed diplomas and plaques.
15. You decorate your dining room wall with a picture of the "Last Supper."
16. You keep your furniture wrapped in plastic or covered with blankets.
17. You have a Sto. Nino shrine in your living room.
18. You keep a fly swatter in your kitchen.
19. Your kitchen table has a vinyl tablecloth.
20. You recycle shopping bags as garbage bags.
21. You have a piano that no one plays.
22. You keep a tabo in your bathroom.
23. You own a barrel man from Baguio (Schwing!).
24. You use Vicks Vapor rub as an insect repellant.
25. You have ageless skin, thanks to the high humidity of the tropics.
26. You eat with your hands.
27. You eat more than three times a day.
28. You think a meal is not a meal without rice.
29. You use your fingers to measure the water you need to cook rice.
30. You eat your meal using a spoon and fork.
31. You cut your meat with a spoon or fork.
32. You think sandwiches are snacks, not meals.
33. You feed all your visitors.
34. You always cook too much.
35. Your dining table has a merry-go-round (lazy Susan) in the middle.
36. You bring baon to work everyday.
37. You keep your stove covered in aluminum foil when not in use.
38. You wash and re-use plastic utensils, styrofoam cups, and aluminum wrappers. [yes sometimes]
39. Your pantry is never without Spam, Vienna sausage, corned beef, and sardines.
40. You love to eat daing or tuyo. [heckkyy yeah!]
41. You prop up one knee while eating.
42. You eat your meal with patis, toyo, suka, banana catsup, or bagoong. [it nevaarr phails!]
43. Your tablecloths are stained with toyo circles. [hahahaha yeah but we clean it up.]
44. You love sticky desserts and salty snacks. [yes, SAPINSAPIN sticky dessert! chicharon bulaklak salty snack!]
45. You eat fried Spam and hot dogs with rice.
46. You eat mangoes with rice--with great GUSTO! [just the thought of it makes me salivate]
47. You love "dirty" ice cream. [yes! manong pabili nga po!]
48. You love to eat, yet often manage to stay slim. [YES!!!!!! I EAT LIKE A DUDE BUT IM STILL SKINNY]
49. You grab a toothpick after every meal.
50. When dining out, you always fight over who will pay for dinner.
51. You put hot dogs in your spaghetti. [hihihi yes]
52. Everything you eat is sauted in garlic, onion, and tomatoes. [yumm GINISA!]
53. You order a "soft drink" instead of soda. [ahahaha yeah!]
54. You eat rice for breakfast. [again, IT NEVARR PHAILSS!]
55. You hang a rosary on your car's rear view mirror.
56. You get together with family at a cemetery on All Saint's Day to eat, drink, and tell stories by your loved ones' graves. [yeah, even leave some food for the "dead" to eat afterwards, really silly tradition..but it's fun]
57. You play cards or mahjong and drink beer at funeral wakes. [i played tong-its once during my grandma's wake. O_O]
58. You think Christmas season begins in October and ends in January. [ahahaha we put up Christmas decors as early as september! hahahaha]
59. You make the sign of the cross before take-offs and after landings and every time you pass by a church.
60. Your second piece of luggage is a balikbayan box.
61. You've mastered the art of packing a suitcase to double capacity.
62. You are standing next to eight boxes at the airport.
63. You collect items from airlines, hotels, and restaurants as "souvenirs." [mhmm]
64. You feel obligated to give pasalubong to all your friends and relatives each time you return from a trip.
65. You can't make a purchase without haggling.
66. You use paper foot outlines when buying shoes for friends and relatives. [ahahaha yes. for accuracy purposes]
67. You're a fashion victim.
68. You point with your lips. [hihi yesss!]
69. You can convey 30 messages with your facial expression.
70. You greet one another by raising your eyebrows or tossing your head. [yes, we are gangsta lol]
71. You hold your palms together in front of you and say "excuse, excuse" when you pass in between people or in front of the TV. [yeah...it's kinda automatic though]
72. You scratch your head when you don't know an answer to a question.
73. You smile all the time for no reason.
74. You ask for the bill at a restaurant by making a rectangle in the air. [yep, sabay sabi, "waiter, yung chit!"]
75. You cover your mouth when you laugh.
76. You respond to a "Hoy!" or a "Pssst!" in a crowd. [sometimes, when called by my friends, but with strangers, barely]
77. You'll answer "Malapit lang!"--no matter the distance--when asked how far away a place is located.
78. You prefer to Mercedes Benz as "chedeng."
79. Goldilocks is more than a fairy tale character to you. [im eating it now. yes, how thoughtful, how goldilocks. cakes and pastries!
80. You refer to power interruptions as "brownouts." [bran awt man gud!]
81. You love to use the following acronyms: CR for comfort room, DI for dance instructor, DOM for dirty old man, TNT for tago nang tago, KJ for kill joy, KSP for kulang sa pansin, OA for over-acting, TL for true love, BF for boyfriend and GF for girlfriend. [AHAHAHAHAHAH YESSS!]
82. You're always late for events and parties. [yes, para grand enctrance! but always on time in school]
83. You say "rubber shoes" instead of sneakers, "ball pen" instead of pen, "stockings" in stead of pantyhose, "pampers" instead of diapers, "ref" or "prijider" instead of refrigerator, "Colgate" instead of toothpaste, "canteen" instead of cafeteria, and "open" or "close" instead of turn on or turn off (as in the lights). [AHAHAHA PRIJIDERRR YESSS!!!! I LOVE BEING PINOY!]
84. You always leave your shoes or slippers outside the doorstep.
85. You use an umbrella for shade on hot summer days.
86. You prefer sitting in the shade instead of basking in the sun.
87. You can sing and dance at a drop of a hat.
88. You like everything imported or "state-side."
89. You love ballroom dancing, bowling, pusoy, mah jong, billiards, and karaoke.
90. You hang your clothes out to dry in a laundry line.
92. You have a relative who is a nurse.

WOW HAHAHA! IM REALLY PINOY. =]

Well at least now my stomach doesn't hurt anymore as much as it did last Friday and yesterday. Thanks to SIMECO. There are some recurrent aching yesterday though but it's a lot more tolerable than that of last Friday.

Seriously, I thought I was gonna get hospitalized last Friday night. I mean, I almost wanted to get myself an ambulance since it really hurts so bad.

Yeah. It's because of my period really that I got gas pain and along with its associated features. Blah.

Yesterday I went to school again for my Social Psychology class. Ugh. We had a reporting about interpersonal attraction.

Mhmm…

In social psychology, obvious and simple things that happen to human beings can get so complicated with a lot of jargons and stuff. Hahaha.

Apparently, during our reporting, I was the only one who had researched on our topic. I once again became the leader at the moment of our presentation.

Oh well.

It was really extemporaneous. But good thing my group mates got the gist of our topic within just 3 minutes of discussion.

However it didn't really went on as smooth and as good as we wanted it to be since most of them are reluctant of their parts. But yeah, at least we're finished.

Indeed.

On the day of my birthday I woke up feeling a lot of pain in my head and stomach. I had a migraine and hyperacidity due to dysmenorrhea. So yeah, I have my monthly period. And it's just a nightmare. It doesn't happen to me all the time whenever I have my period though. Maybe I'm just too stressed out and everything just piled up and my body wanted a day off...Oh well.

What's worse is that, I have to go to school and take my midterm exam in PHILO as I have mentioned yesterday. And I waited for our class in cognitive psychology to take the quiz in that subject too. I'm happy though I'm too sick to take the quiz, I still got an 8/10.

I'm such a "dedicated" student.

Yeah right.

But seriously, I could've just gone home since I was practically in the sullen disposition to pass out at any moment earlier this afternoon.

But yeah. I always told myself whenever I was in the brink of passing out, "Mia, it's just a state of mind...just a state of mind...it will pass." Somehow it helped me push through up until all of my important transactions for the day were accomplished. I guess I was just too stubborn to give up on my tasks for today.

I guess I deserve what happened to me though because I have been abusing my body real bad these days. I need to have more discipline in managing my time so that I could sleep earlier and won't skip meals anymore.

Today is really a medical nightmare for me. Hahaha. I'm not used to getting sick you know. But yeah, my little body needs a day off from my daily abuse. I know I know, I should take care of ME more.

So yeah.

Anyway, people greeted me today. I thanked them. But I'm not making a big deal out of this birthday thing. I'm not in the disposition to be celebrating anything right now. However I am still happy that I have managed to pull through this day despite my current medical condition. Ugh.

I thank God too, for giving me such a stubborn will to live. And so He kept on keeping me alive since then. He knows that I'm too eager to live. Haha.

Not everyone who sees porn will become addicted to it. Some will just come away with toxic ideas about women, sex, marriage and children. That kind of damage is bad enough. And porn isn't the only ingredient in addiction. Usually, those who become addicted have some kind of emotional opening that allows the addiction to really take root.

The porn companies don't mind at all if you become completely addicted to their product. It's great for business. An addicted customer keeps coming back for more. And so they fill their porn with images that will excite you, arouse you and get the hormones flowing. You don't have to shoot up any drug with a needle to get addicted to porn — your body will make its own drugs just by looking at the pictures. Dr. Victor Cline says that sex and pornography can be a more difficult addiction to break than cocaine.

Five stages of addiction

1. Early exposure. Most guys who get addicted to porn start early. They see the stuff when they are very young, and it gets its foot in the door.
2. Addiction. Later comes addiction. You keep coming back to porn. It becomes a regular part of your life. You're hooked. You can't quit.
3. Escalation. After a while, escalation begins. You start to look for more and more graphic porn. You start using porn that would have disgusted you when you started. Now it excites you.
4. Desensitization. Eventually, you start to become numb. Even the most graphic, degrading porn doesn't excite you anymore. You become desperate to feel the same thrill again but can't find it.
5. Acting out sexually. At this point, many men make a dangerous jump and start acting out sexually. They move from the paper and plastic images of porn to the real world.

Are you addicted?

Some of you reading this may have already developed an addiction to porn. If you see any of the patterns I've described above in your life, you need to put the brakes on right now. Is porn beginning to control your life? You can't put it down — you keep going back for more? Perhaps you find yourself needing to see increasingly graphic pornography. You're masturbating more and more often. You're starting to take risks or act out physically for sexual thrills. If you see yourself at any point on this progression, you are in serious trouble, and you need to realize it — and get help.

The third installment of "Saw" wastes little time ripping flesh in nasty places. A couple of characters (they all died, which means Saw II has had it's closure in here) from the previous chapter get to "play a game" with metal fasteners, chains implanted on skins, high explosives and flesh-eating acid. And that's just in the first few minutes.

For a little background in the last two films, a dying cancer patient named John Kramer (Tobin Bell), a.k.a. "Jigsaw," designed elaborate traps for various people who, for one reason or another, don't appreciate being alive. Usually it involves giving the victim a choice between doing something horrendously painful/disfiguring to him/herself to earn his/her freedom and apparently become a changed person or dying in an appropriately gruesome fashion.

In here though, the scheme's a bit different. Jigsaw has captured the anguished Jeff (Angus Macfadyen, who by the way, looks like Russell Crowe crossed with Luke Ford), who hasn't gotten over the loss of his little boy to a drunk driver and spends far too much time fantasizing about bringing pain to those he deems responsible: the driver, the judge, and a witness who never came to testify. Jeff was placed in situations where he can either watch the liable parties die or forgive them and save them. And by the way, Jigsaw has got himself an apprentice now, a former victim (in Saw I) named Amanda (Shawnee Smith), a survivor of a Jigsaw game who has developed a daddy fixation on him and is now learning to continue his work through their current project on poor Jeff. He needs to stay alive to supervise Jeff's game, so with the help of his protégée, he kidnaps a brilliant surgeon (Bahar Soomekh) and hooks her up to an explosive device that's also linked to his heart rate. It means that if he flatlines, she goes boom, so it's in her best interest to keep him breathing.

As an evil villain, Jigsaw stopped being scary as soon as they showed him to us. I believe that's actually Lesson 1 in Horror/Thriller Films 101: Don't put your "monster" in every single scene. Now that he's unequivocally the focus of the story, bedridden yet still remarkably lucid, continuing to ramble on about his elaborate "games," he's downright laughable. I remember the chills of his pre-recorded messages in the first 2 films. Part 3 has nothing like that. There are however some "heartwarming" lessons to be learned in "Saw III," First, that good help is hard to find. Second, that it is important to forgive your enemies and not become trapped in a quagmire of vengeance-seeking, for that way lies bitterness, anger, and possibly seeing someone's head blow up.

So as a huge fan of the two previous installments, I even liked this one more because it made my jaw drop on a regular basis in the course of the movie. The amazingly imaginative ways to torture a person to death with lots of variations just had my eyes glued on the screen—barely batting an eyelash. The judge, for instance, finds himself in a vat slowly filled with the liquefied remains of maggot-ridden pig corpses, which are dumped into what I can only call a huge industrial juicer. The witness is stripped naked in a freezing meat locker, merrily sprayed with water and was literally turned into a human chunk of ice.  For a fan of gore films, I definitely bow down to this one. And oh yes, there are lots and lots of pain, torture, blood and mayhem. Why, there's even an instance of an electric saw being applied to an exposed skull of a living person—and it's not even important to the plot! That one's purely a freebie for gore fans like me!

If you found Hannibal's brain cooking scene a tad too much though you will want to avoid Saw III. However, if you are a fan of the sadistic versions of horror, this will be an iconic essential. Technically the film is admirable, and while there are a few perplexing moments as the back and forth structure whizzes past, the film holds up well as an ever-moving, ever-engrossing, seat-squirming experience. Even the non-torture scenes feel glum and miserable, all over-saturated in dark colors and scored with spine-chilling music, which is definitely my type of a gore film.  Over all, the film is really a uniquely horrendous one. Why, the fact that it contrives to give its torture master the moral high ground (apparently he only tortures his victims for their own "good") is seemingly more perverse than any of its violence.

        We humans are always searching for something in life. That something may be what we can commonly acquire, like the certain kinds of achievements in life—wealth, power, prestige, but still most of us, if not all, are still left in a state of discontentment and emptiness. It's like there is nothing outside of us that can fill this huge void in our hearts. We often ask to ourselves the question: "What's missing?" Then we go our ways again, desperately trying to search for that something and acquire just about anything so as to fill that vacant space in our hearts. This is how I have realized that there is a supreme being than us, humans. This is how I have realized that there is a God and how important it is to live our lives according to this religious dimension of life.

            This God that I have known, however, is not some distant grandfather of the universe sitting in a throne, doing nothing but gaze down at his creatures and have nothing to do with them at all. This God is an interactive God, concerned about our well-being and He is willing to create a personal relationship with each of us all. Some people though cannot fathom living a life for someone who cannot be perceived by the human senses. This is why faith is the first requirement of this kind of wisdom. Then, through this faith we're able to supersede the dullness of our human senses and arrive at a point where we can finally understand our own spirituality and why we have to create a relationship with this God.

            As what I have understood from my faith in the Christian God, He is the one who created the heavens, earth, and all kinds of creatures. I am one of those creatures but I am special, humans are, since we are created in his image and likeness for His glory. Then He gave us the breath of life and therefore we have a soul in each of us. Now, God has placed eternity in our hearts (or souls), and this is why we have this void space inside of us. He placed this eternal hole inside that even if we condense the whole universe in a single pin and stick it into our hearts—we are still going to be found in wanting. It is so because He is the only one who could fill that void, that's why.

Only an eternal God can fill that eternal space inside of us. I think He made us this way so that we are going to depend on Him and I like it that way. He placed us in such a way that we are going to be humbled because of this dependence on Him and that we may not boast on what we are because we can only be something if we abide in Him. Apart from this dependence on Him, no matter what we have achieved or what we have become, we are still nothing—empty and we feel like we are nothing. There is no meaning in life at all. This is what I have felt before I have come to the point of realization of this eternal God. Since I have understood that I am a creature of this Supreme Being, I have also understood the meaning of obedience. Indeed, He gave us freewill but aren't we supposed to use this freewill to express our gratitude by living our lives in obedience instead of rebellion against Him?

            I have also realized why people who have not a grasp of this kind of wisdom lose sense of purpose in life. I suppose it is so because truth is not in them. They just drift away like dead fishes in the ocean of life because they don't have any relationship with God. They don't know what they're here for and would therefore do things that would only make them feel even worse. They act on foolishness, instead of fulfilling the purpose that has been bestowed to them by the God whom they have ignored or forgotten. Maybe it is alright if their foolishness won't lead to destruction and death, but it does. We just have to look around and see how these foolish actions have affected the world we live in. There are people who would resort to murder, corruption, and all other things that lead to destruction all because they don't have a grasp of the truth of God's existence and love for us. This is how important God is in each of our lives. Otherwise, instead of finding life, we can only find death.

I believe that I have found the truth in this kind of wisdom since my life has not only become meaningful, but also I have found out that my reality depends in this God of mine who has a great purpose for me. I must, therefore, live my life for Him because this is why I am created in the first place—to live for Him so that He may be glorified.

(For some reason, I got an A+ which is equivalent to 95+ in the numerical grade. My teacher's reaction was: "I WONDER HOW GOD TOUCHED YOUR LIFE MIA, YOU ARE PASSIONATE ABOUT GOD." I would like to answer to that by saying that, I am  passionate about God not because I am able to write these kinds of things but because He was passionate about me first as He demonstrated that passion 2000 years ago when He hung on the cross. What else can I do then, except to honor Him with all my life? He died for me and  rose unto glory to purchase me from the grave. That's enough reason for me to live for Him............So after all these things, I bring back all the glory to the Lord Jesus Christ.)