Just Posting

Kumusta na?!


Anong bago?!


Ilang linggo na rin pala na wala akong dalang balita...


Magtatapos na ang Hunyo...


Nagdaan na ang Birthday ko...


Gasgas na ang pagkakuha ko sa Trabaho...


Eto parin ako!


Hayaan nyo kapag nagka-oras ako, susulat ako...


Sadyang malungkot lang and buhay na sinisimulang tahakin ko.

IF

If you can keep your head when all about you

Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,

If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you

But make allowance for their doubting too,

If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,

Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,

Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,

And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:

If you can dream–and not make dreams your master,

If you can think–and not make thoughts your aim;

If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster

And treat those two impostors just the same;

If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken

Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,

Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,

And stoop and build ‘em up with worn-out tools:

If you can make one heap of all your winnings

And risk it all on one turn of pitch-and-toss,

And lose, and start again at your beginnings

And never breath a word about your loss;

If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew

To serve your turn long after they are gone,

And so hold on when there is nothing in you

Except the Will which says to them: “Hold on!”

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,

Or walk with kings–nor lose the common touch,

If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you;

If all men count with you, but none too much,

If you can fill the unforgiving minute

With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,

Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,

And–which is more–you’ll be a Man, my son!

–Rudyard Kipling

Pili Not

Araw ngayon ng kalayaan ng Pilipinas... Mabuhay ang mga Pilipino... Pero wala akong maisip i-blog patungkol dito... Hayaan nyo nalang akong magbuhos ng ilang bagay na gumugulo sa aking mumunting isip.

Minsan sa buhay, hindi natin maiiwasang maharap sa isang sitwasyon kung saan kailangan tayong pumili. Mahirap lalo na kung ito ay sa pagitan ng dalawang bagay na sa tingin natin ay parehong may mabuting maidudulot. Pero gaya ng mga exam sa eskwela, bago matapos ang inilaan na oras ay kailangan nating magdesisyon kung nais talaga natin makakuha ng mataas na marka.

Kamakailan lang, naharap ako sa parehong sitwasyon. Isang desisyon na magdidikta sa aking kinabukasan...

Siguro para sa ibang tao madali lamang itong pagdesisyunan. Pero para sa akin, isa ito sa mga bagay na lubos akong nahirapan. Alin ba ang mas makakabuti para sa akin: ang mag-aral muli sa pag-asang balang araw ay may naghihintay na mas magandang opurtunidad, o ang simulan na ang paghahanap sa swerte at unti-unting ipundar ang mga pangarap? Mahirap sapagkat lubos akong napamahal at pinapahalagahan ko ang pag-aaral. Mahirap sapagkat masyado pa akong bata para magtrabaho pero kinakailangan.

Salamat sa payo at yakap mula sa isang espesyal na kaibigan. Ang sabi nya sa akin, "Aw. Huuugs. Siguro ganito nalang, kung 50:50 ngayon ikaw. Kapag nakapili kana kung ano talaga. Do your best to make that 50% a 100%. Para no regrets in the end."


Sa tulong niya'y nakapagdesisyon akong piliin ang pangalawa. Hindi ko alam kung bakit, basta sa mga panahong iyon kumapit nalang ako sa paniniwalang magaling at mahusay ako. Tiwala lang sa sarili ang pinaka-kailangan ko.

Makalipas ang ilang araw, heto na naman ako. Muling nahaharap sa parehong sitwasyon ngunit magkaiba lang ang pagpipilian. Ang sabi ko noon, "Sa panahong kailangan kong pumili, kailangan ko lang isipin kung alin yung mas makapagpapasaya sa akin kaysa doon sa pinaka best." Ngunit mukhang hindi talaga sa lahat ng bagay maisasabuhay mo ay iyong mga paniniwala. Sa sitwasyong ito'y pareho silang makapagpapasaya sa akin, sa magkaibang aspeto nga lang. Oh kay hirap pumili: passion without any costs or work with fulfillment?


May kalabuan kung titignan. Maganda siguro kung dadaanin natin sa lenggwaheng karamihan sa atin ay nasa edad na para maintindihan... Ganito yun!

Parang pag-ibig lang, alin mas pipiliin mo sa dalawa?! Yung tao na lubos mong mahal at matagal mo na ring pinapangarap pero sa kabila ng lahat hindi ka naman magawang suklian kahit kakarampot na pagmamahal. O kaya naman, sa isang tao na minamahal at pinapahalagahan ka, at sa tingin mo'y hindi naman malayong mahalin mo rin.

Sagot ng isang kaibigan, "Ang hirap naman. Pero sa tingin ko, dun parin ako sa una. Hindi naman kasi  kailangang suklian ang pagmamahal . Siguro magiging masaya nalang din ako kapag nakita ko siyang masaya kahit sa  piling ng iba. Baduy pero sa tingin ko iyon ang ibig sabihin ng tunay na pagmamahal."


May punto siya...


Opinyon naman ng isa pang kaibigan, "Hindi mo masasabing pagmamahal ang isang bagay kung may isang taong nasasaktan. Kaya nga siguro may mga taong pilit na kinukumbinsi ang sarili na okay lang ang lahat kahit hindi naman. Sa tingin ko, ang tunay na pag-ibig ay ipinaglalaban sapagkat hindi ito isang bagay lamang na kapag hindi mo na kayang hawakan ay basta mo nalang bibitawan."


May punto rin naman siya...

Ako? Ano namang masasabi ko patungkol dito?! Siguro gaya nalang ng paulit ulit kong sinasabi, "Ang pag-ibig kailangan magsimula sa sarili. At sa pagtatapos ng araw walang ibang makapagsasabi kung sino ang nararapat para saiyo, walang iba kundi ang sarili mo. Hindi ang nanay mo, ang tatay, kuya, ate, tito, tita o kung sino mang poncio pilato. Ikaw ang mas nakakakilala sa sarili mo higit kanino man, IKAW dapat ang may alam sa kung saan o kanino ka tunay na magiging maligaya."


Hanggang sa ngayon wala pa akong pinal na desisyon. Hindi ko pa mahanap ang aking sarili upang magdesisyon para sa aking sarili. Kahit alin man siguro ang piliin ko sa dalawa, naniniwala parin naman ako na lahat ng bagay ay nagtatapos ng maayos. Mukhang masyado na naman akong sinisipagan magpahayag ng aking mga saloobin. Bago pa mapunta ito sa kawalang kwentahan, maiging tapusin ko na dito. Makakapili rin ako!

Ngayon, Ang Hangin ay Amihan

Let it rule me

I am not a firm believer of God. I actually have hundred times told myself that there is no such thing as God. But just in case, there is, I will “LET GO, LET GOD” rule this life that I have.

Yet to come

Life has not been so friendly to me lately (lately?) no it's been 79 days and counting already. As I have said previously, through my status in different social networking sites or maybe somewhere along this blog: "I am not yet ready to summon myself to the world of greediness" ----  "I am not ready to face reality, yet",  and "I am not ready to surrender, yet"

The Choices Before You

________________________________________________________________________
President Fr. Jun Viray

CHED Region V representative Dr. Manuel C. Mendoza

Academic Vice- President, Dr. Rebecca C. Torres,

The daughters of charity, Bulawan na Bikolnon Service to Bicol Awardee

Academic Deans, members of the faculty, dear parents graduates, and fellow- alumni

It is more than a pleasure to be with you here today. It is a distinct honor that I never imagined would ever come to pass. Fr. Viray`s letter came as a complete surprise.

You bestow on me this afternoon, an honor that is reserved for those who have achieved more than what is expected. I firmly believe that what I have done in life as a media practitioner is that I did what I enjoyed the most. Usually, you don`t deserve an honoris causa for doing what is fun! Besides, I thought a Ph.D to be beyond reach. My Mother, sister and brother are titled PhD`s and I always felt left out of the count... But today gives me bragging rights and I thank you for the distinct honor.

I did what I believed in, what I was passionate about, and perhaps, what others would have considered foolish because I was like that stubborn little train in the children`s book "The Little Train That Could" who kept telling himself, “I think I can" when the going got rough.

Like Kermit my favorite frog says, “it`s not always easy being green.” Neither is it easy to be passionate, to remain steadfast and unswayed by the crowd all the time.

But to digress a bit, allow me to share with you a few stories about the quarter century career path I chose. We started our independent company right after martial law when investigative reporting was not popular nor looked upon with favor.

Quite understandably, this genre of programs was not in the agenda of stations because there had been a 20 year history of media censorship and control. There were many stories about abuse, corruption, moral decay, and fundamental change that had happened in those 20 years that needed to be told.

We had difficulties getting airtime, we were called " boring, not yet quite our time, unmarketable, and not the most pleasant kind of show to view." By the looks of it, we were not meant to last very long.

Amidst all the "big trains" of the major stations rushing around us, we chugged along. We set up our first office in our house. My eight- year old son`s bedroom became our editing room.

In one honest- to- goodness conversation with my husband, I asked him if we could afford to pull our savings together for this " dream" and he did. We bought our first set of equipment, we had a hard-working team of four, did our story on the Marcos gold, spending days and longer nights at Intramuros going underground, in search of our story- without knowing for sure if we were ever going to see it air on TV.

That uncertainty went on for months until we covered the Dona Paz tragedy close to Christmas in 1987 when over four thousand people died at sea. It was a time when the news covered stories from the point of view of what happened.

We wanted to tell the story about how and why things happen.

Looking back, we were dogged in our determination and realize that passion propels. It can be done.

That small team of four people continue to forge ahead today. Maria Ressa went on to be CNN correspondent of the region and has now started a new media company called Rappler. Luchi Cruz-Valdes heads News and Public Affairs of TV-5, and Angie Cruz is now with the TV news service Reuters in Europe.

But forging ahead coupled with the unwavering, uncompromising and steadfast support of my secret weapon—my husband of 43 years, provided the anchor upon which I leaned on from day one, and throughout the 25 years we ourselves never imagined we were going to be on the air. So far, by our count, The Probe Team has been the longest running investigative newsmagazine on record on Philippine TV.


CHOICES

I recently bought a game board called “Life.” As I was putting it together and reading the game rules, I thought about your graduation day from College and the relevance of a board game to you as graduates of the Ateneo de Naga University.

What is the connection between a deck of cards, plastic car tokens, the roll of the dice and you? Can your life—marked by this day when it opens up to a bright future equate to a game?

I would like to take the time to draw your attention to the word, “choices.” At every point in our life, we are given the chance to make a choice. But not everyone is given a choice. In fact, it is reserved for the few blessed with an education. And those blessed with a good education have better choices. Every choice we make in turn, is determined by events, experiences, value systems and traditions that have shaped who we are up to this point.

In the game board of Life, players are given options, choices to make at every stop that the roll of the dice gives each player. Each player has a car as his token and moves along the path of life as he is asked to make choices. Every choice has a consequence. In fact, one of the options after elementary and high school is to go on to College or take on a job that pays you well. When you make the choice to go to school, you incur debts- much the same way your parents saved, borrowed and invested in your Ateneo education. Once you finish school, there are debts to pay and you start afresh in a new chapter in your young lives.

Graduation marks the end of one chapter and the beginning of another. It gives us the opportunity to take stock of how far we have traveled in life. We can go back and review what we learned from the course we chose, identify what opportunities we missed out on, and be happy about the confidence you now have to move forward. It is a crossroad, in the real game of life, and you are now faced with yet another set of choices to make. What job to take. A job with the highest pay offer, or a job you want regardless of pay. The ideal of course is to take on a job you want and get paid for it. Like they say, if you enjoy what you are doing, you will never have to work a day in your life.

But just as it is in real life, there are trade-off`s in everything we do. Chances are, the job you enjoy will not pay very much. The job that pays you the highest, will only be good for its pay.

Every step of the game offers a challenge and it is up to us to respond to that challenge. It gets more complicated. The more the choices, the greater the need to be sure about what we believe in, to be passionate about those beliefs and to hold fast to those beliefs.


SOCIAL MEDIA

In a very short span of recent history, media has changed so dramatically from where we were just a few years ago that if you were sleeping all this time, you would not recognize what has happened in the meantime.

More than ever before, today`s media is about choices. And the smorgasbord is full!

It comes by a new name.
Social media. Considered by those who study it as the biggest shift since the industrial revolution.

Is it a fad as some say it is?

For us who were raised in traditional media (or sometimes called old media now,) it is a challenge to reinvent ourselves, to adopt, to transform. We are told that we are now moving from the age of authority to the age of authenticity.

What does the new media picture look like?

Just the other day, I was sitting in a subway in Singapore and in came a young girl, hair all dyed blond. She walked in---earplugs in place, her MP3 connected to her iPhone hanging by her neck, and furiously texting with both fingers, unmindful of the moving train, and then walking right out the subway car three stops later without looking up a single second to see where she was.

I thought to myself, is she the “new” media archetype?

Wired and connected? Or trivialized and shut out?

Consider the world you are in:

-50% of the world`s population is under 30 years old.
-96% of generation “Y” (those born in the `80`s) have joined some network.
-Social media has overtaken pornography as the no. 1 activity on the web.

-FB tops Google for weekly traffic in the US.
-FB added over 20M users in less than a year.
-If Facebook were a country, it would be the third largest in the world, behind China and India.
-There are 60M status updates on FB everyday.
We no longer search for news, it finds us. We no longer search for products and services, they will find us through social media.

-1 out of 8 couples who married in the US met via social media.
-It takes years to reach 50 m users- but social media has done it in less time than traditional media has been able to reach.
-Radio-takes 38 years/ TV-13 years/internet-4/ ipod-3 years
-Twitter has 85 million users.

-Ashton Kucher and Britney Spears have more followers than Sweden, Israel, Switzerland, Ireland, Norway and Panama have citizens.

-Wikipedia has 2.8b pages of info on average. If there is an error, the crowd will correct it.
The mantra is, “publish now, and correct later.”

The way we communicate has changed the way we perceive events and has given us a direct voice in participating in those events.

As you sit there wondering what I am talking about, you can like, tweet a pic, blog, friend or unfriend anyone at will, comment, mount an information campaign, start your own webpage, sell products, inform your 20,000 followers about the food you ate today, find a long-lost HS classmate on FB, upload and instantaneously share it with the rest of the world---numberless, faceless millions—all “potential” friends.

Crowd sourcing is a new "buzzword." It means making a lot of people take a small action—something they cannot achieve on their own but together produce a ripple effect, often resulting in waves--maybe even causing a tsunami.

There are examples from recent experiences in the use of social media.

President Obama of the U.S .acknowledges that he won the U.S. Presidential elections largely from his use of social media with people using it to make small contributions to his campaign. Many international events specially in heavily- media controlled countries, were impacted by social media as the alternative channel of getting the news out- quickly and unfiltered but not without risk.

When the Iranian government closed down all their TV cameras, the revolution there was started via Twitter. Like us in 1986, it was people power that went around by word of mouth, today just 26 years later, by world of mouth on digital steroids!

What does this mean?

New media has taken the discipline of professional journalism and combined it with the speed and emotion of bloggers. What was difficult to access before is now easily available. The “old” tools we used, teletype, heavy cameras, bulky tape recorders—are now reduced to palm-sized, telephone cameras whose video images can be instantly uploaded on the net in real time, for the audiences you want to reach.
The traditional gate-keepers have lost their function. We don`t have editors checking facts, double-checking the correct spelling of a name or a place. We publish now and correct later.

Instant gratification is the name of the game. We live in a NOW generation where information must be instant or be lost. Bloggers are faster than news that has to be distilled through filters and editors. We don`t go to the news, the news “comes” to us. With over 300M bloggers worldwide, 34% of who post opinions about products and brands, word of mouth has become “world of mouth.”

New media has also opened up limitless possibilities for the entrepreneur in you. Owning your dream store is now your e-palengke right in the privacy of your home with the possibility of expanding it into a mega- store by sourcing your goods at your fingertips that travel the world. They call it the phenomenon of the "long tail" where there is no longer pressure to have high sales per square foot of store space because you sell to the Internet and you do not have to have physical inventory at the point of sales.

Studies show that 78% of consumers trust peer recommendation as opposed to only 14% who trust ads. We build on information by gathering what is called the “wisdom of the crowds.” Despite the wisdom of the crowds however, not all are fully participative. It is estimated that at least 80% of social media are bystanders.

But the explosion of access, the number of unlimited choices has a cost. Fr. Adolfo Nicolas, the Superior General of the Society of Jesus last year expressed the fear that what is happening is the “globalization of superficiality.” And, as others have articulated, the “loss or privacy.”

In Abraham Maslow`s "Hierarchy of Needs Study," he identified the greatest need of man after survival and security, as the need to feel accepted. In many quarters, myself included, there is thought about losing your privacy, losing depth and trivializing everything by chronicling on Twitter or Facebook, your every whim, thought, observation, real or imagined and opening up your every move to anyone who has access to your account.

At the same time, the need for “Acceptance” is a strong motivating factor that propels us to behave in certain ways to achieve acceptance. It is at this fork in our game of life, when we are faced with the “choices” we have to make.

Acceptance for what reason and at what cost? Does it come close to who we are, our passions and our beliefs?

As we look back at this chapter in our life and look ahead to the gates just opening before us, a few reminders about our stake in this game of life.

More than any other time in your life, you have choices before you. The media milieu you now live in has never been as wide open nor given us all an opportunity to make a difference.

Seize that opportunity to make a difference. Make your choice in favor of the less fortunate, the ones with less choices in life. The ones you see on your way in and out of this University on a daily basis.

Hold on to your passion. Hold fast to the principles you believe in. Let us not lose sight of the fact that new media is only a tool. It is not an end. Don`t be impressed by the new toy. It is still you who determines what is right. It is you who determines the rules of the game.

Use it for good. Go beyond your own self-interests and expand your horizons to live your Jesuit education. Be a man for others. And if I may make an unabashed plug- put your good fortune to use for the benefit of the Filipino. For this country.

If there is a single lesson that my own life has taught me, it is pride in being Filipino. I have had occasion to see it proven time and again, that while there is much to improve there is also so much more to be proud of.

To all of you, congratulations.

May the winds be always at your back and may your choices be always as clear as your consciences!

Me, my beloved Ateneo and You

Like any other student that came from an uncivilized barrio and then suddenly went across rivers to study civilization...

The first day of my college life (ORSEM 2008), coming from an unknown and open-space public school, I was kinda afraid and nervous not because i'm scared of getting lost from the tall buildings that surrounds the campus, but because of the unfamiliar and strange faces that might belittle me. I feel so small and unnoticeable that very moment. I am so quite the whole time until I realized I went to a wrong group of students. It was the group of Education majors where I join, but I don't mind. As minutes, hours, days and years passed I finally found the right place in the university where i should belong (Media Studies Dept.).