Amy’s Plum

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Amy (who can’t update too often right now because she’s on dialup through a non-Mac-compatible PC) has a new still life painting up: a plum.

Update, 2006: I revamped her site and all the Blogger content is lost to the ages. Sorry!

Introversion and Ennui

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Found via Valerie, a couple of missives on introversion: Musings of a Former Wallflower and Musings of a Present Introvert.

My friends from college and after-college can attest to my gradual transition from relationally clueless introversion to relative witty sociability through the course of the years, owing to the influence of a girlfriend plus a fun barkada *, a faith which gave me confidence and optimism, three years with The Guidon, the later development of an ego and sense of professional self-assertiveness, and last but not least, having a weblog. People who’d known me through school barely recognized me a year after graduation due to my greater capacity for laughter and hirit*.

(* Build your Tagalog vocabulary! hirit: witty repartee, verb or noun. barkada: group of friends)

I didn’t turn into an extrovert, heavens, no; but I think I’ve learned some of the lessons that April learned: there’s no harm in taking the social initiative, in extending a hand and saying “Hi!” and risking awkwardness to make someone feel welcome.

Lately, however, I’ve felt rather out-of-my-element, and have pulled in a bit. Not that I ever stopped being an introvert anyway, but some of my old drawn-back ways have returned, and in many social situations these days, I rarely feel like expending the energy needed to reach out and talk. I think the reason is overworkedness. I’m still at the state where I was last month, and the more I fill my days and nights with work, the less time and energy I have to fill my mind and soul with things to share: Scripture, literature, art, music. (I don’t think I’ve actually finished a book in months.) Less in my soul means less overflow to the people around me, which means a quieter, sleepier, more reclusive Pau.

I’ll get through that to-do list of projects. I will. But only by his grace.

More DC Sunsets

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Sunset over the Woodley Park area, seen from the Connecticut Ave bridge over Rock Creek.

Late afternoon’s shadows lengthen through the arches of Union Station.

Setting sun peeks out from behind the Rhode Island Ave Metro station as a train approaches.

(Also see last year’s Monument Sunset.)

Photos taken with a Palm Zire 71.

Mikoid at the Palace

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Very nice: Mike over at Rush Hour Hell is rubbing elbows with people in power at Malacañang (the Philippine Presidential palace), and got some clandestine photos while he was there.

I’ve been to Malacañang just once, on a field trip way back in fifth grade, in 1987, just a year after the EDSA revolution. The most memorable image that stuck in my head was Ferdinand Marcos’ cushioned toilet seat with armrests, just one aspect of the opulence in which he and Imelda lived.

Divisoria Building Collapse

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A building collapsed yesterday in Divisoria, Manila’s classic bargain street-shopping district. The building owner himself is claiming that the collapse was caused by multiple excavations in lots adjacent to the property. That would not surprise me at all; there are construction firms in Manila who could not care less about the effects of their digging. I remember people being concerned that the huge foundation being dug at the corner of EDSA and Ortigas Ave (formerly Tropical Hut) might destabilize the pillars supporting the flyover there, possibly causing it to collapse with the next typhoon. (I also remember hoping that such a disaster could fortuitously happen at the height of the “EDSA III” riot. Hee. Sorry po.)

Gladly, the occupants of the unfortunate building in Divisoria had lots of advanced warning when the whole structure started leaning over earlier the same morning, so no one was hurt — except for a city administrator whose knee was injured in the stampede of usiseros (kibitzers) running from the scene as the structure fell into the building across the street.

Update: Video of the collapse.

Coleus in Bloom

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One of the new additions to my troops, a Coleus blumei, blooms into tiny purple flowers. They’re nice to look at now, but I’ll have to prune off the blooms before they start wilting and dropping invader-seeds into neighboring pots.

Photo taken with an Aiptek Mini Pencam 1.3MP SD.

Back and Busy Uncle

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I flew up to New Jersey for the weekend to go kayaking with Amy and her folks, and now I’m rather busy with several projects, at work and at home. Will be back soon with some words on introversion, moblogging with Flickr, Spiderman 2, and my new nephew! Yes, I’m an uncle now. More on that in a couple o’ days.

“Gross National Slur”

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Dear Philippine Government,

Filipino taxpayers do not pay you to waste time advertising your thin-skinned pettiness by drafting official statements about jokes made by foreign comedians following the shameful servility you exhibited to the world in the face of terrorist intimidation. Get back to work, because you may soon have a rash of kidnappings of Filipinos to deal with, both locally and abroad, inspired by your response to the Khaled bin Al Walid Brigade.

That horrible Jay Leno, making political jokes at other countries’ expense! Clearly, joking about the Philippines’ obsequious appeasement makes Leno a swashbuckling Bush apologist!

I sure hope Leno’s writers get wind of these reports: it could make comedy gold for minutes on end. Welcome, Philippines, to the “laughing stock of the world” box. For the next fifteen minutes, you get to sit beside France. (Sarcastic, double-edged link intended. Besides, Leno isn’t so funny; Conan is where the good stuff is.) And Leno gets to join Claire Danes and Howard Stern in the panoply of American celebrities who have managed to raise the all-too-easily inflamed ire of Filipinos’ media-induced public opinion.

Meanwhile, Filipino troops have finished vacating Iraq, with still no official word from the terrorists on the hostage’s condition. Antiwar and anti-American ideologues are hailing the pullout as an act of “defiance” to US interests on Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo’s part, but defiant courage had little to do with it so much as the fear that a hostage’s head might be cut off by a gang of hooded kidnappers. Right action, wrong reasons, all too late.

Update: Hostage freed! Praise God for little blessings. Now prepare for the onslaught.

oneMoTime

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Good news: (Yay!) The mobile blog, aka “Mobrownpau,” is back, running on Blogger via my GSM phone. Right now it’s on a default template; that will change when I have time to work on it.

Bad news: (Boo!) Blogger’s email-to-post feature can’t take image attachments from MMS, so I’m limited to plain text entries just like I was on the now-defunct AIM Bloggerbot.

Good news: (Yay!) Seeing a tip from Matt, I re-registered with Flickr, and found that posting of photos to blogs — to mobrownpau, in this case — is so easy and seamless that it’s amazing. Exactly the solution I’ve been needing.

Bad news: (Boo!) I can’t get the name “brownpau” on Flickr! Apparently some kind of db hitch kept the username “taken” after I deleted the old account. Or worse, there’s also the slim chance that someone else registered it; WHO COULD BE SO EVIL?! At the very least, my People and Photos pages bear the proper alias. (Update: Just got a message from Stewart, and it’s all fixed: I have my username back. Yay!)

So until I can get this Flickr screen name issue straightened out with support, I won’t be participating in any “friending” activity there; right now I’m on it for the moblog capability. And it certainly is capable; photography, hand in hand with social networking — what a fantastic community idea. Admittedly, the Flash-based rich media chat feature is a bit intimidating to me, and it bogs down older machines’ performance considerably, but the interface — free and open drag-and-drop realtime photo sharing via an IRC-ish interface — is defining the shape of things to come I smell the future in this venture, and it is spicy with the scent of promise.

Google knows it too, I think. That’s why they acquired Picasa. Big things are on the horizon.