When the songbird sings

I’m retiring this blog in favor of a new one, hosted on Blogspot. Go to www.iamkarla.com.

The view from my window

What would have been a long, cozy, relaxing, and stress-free Christmas in my hometown turned into a frenzy of packing, stuff, scheduling, rescheduling, going back and forth, and finally moving to the new apartment. Our lease on the previous place expired and couldn’t be renewed anymore because the landlord decided to sell the unit. I received the news quite late, so there was a mad scramble to find a new place lest we wanted to be homeless come New Year. Good thing, my sister’s contact gave us a slot in one of the rental condo units she (I think) owns.

We cut our vacation short by two days to move into the new apartment, a 25th floor affair which we share with other renters. Think of it as a flat–everyone has her own room (or share rooms), but there are spacious fully furnished common areas. I love the view and I love my own room, with its huge window overlooking the Makati CBD skyline. It’s not exactly EM Forster, but the phrase does come to mind, considering the cave where I spent the past year and a half. I had nice memories of the place at Makati Prime, though. I enjoyed the pizza-and-beer get-togethers with friends before I went to the States in November ‘07, the dinners with my sister, just hanging out watching Mega Thursday and Air Crash Investigation on NGS, and my then newfound way of coping with stress: scrubbing the apartment squeaky clean, you could perform surgery on the floor. OK, I’m exaggerating.

With a bit more of furnishing, I should be all set. Sky cable transferred my connection to the new address with a pay-through-the-nose fee of 1K just for the 15 minutes it took to connect the cables. At least I can watch the Australian Open next week (good luck, Rogi!) I still have no internet connection, as I have given up my old internet service for a hopefully better package. PLDT DSL takes forever to install my network, but I don’t want to have to cough up P1,450 just to have my Bro antenna transferred. Plus, the quality of the wireless service has been absolutely horrible since November.

So anyways, writing gigs are slow and it’s only this week that I’m working on the backlog that has been on my plate since the start of the Christmas break. So dear clients–please bear with me. I will send you all the lovely writings and grand plans for world domination within the week.

My sister and I were walking out of the Makati Prime compound yesterday evening when we smelled something that resembled burnt wires, and then saw dark smoke coming out of a fourth floor unit of the building next to ours. There were only three other people on the street, and one of them was a clueless guard to whom we pointed out what was initially just a slightly ominous dark smoke. He didn’t respond.

I found another security guard and alerted him about the smoke from the unit, and luckily, the guy had a working panic button. He ran immediately to the building and asked for help from the now not-clueless-anymore guard whom we first alerted.

About 5 minutes later, we started to see red flames inside the unit. Someone managed to hose the flames out with a fire extinguisher, but the stubborn flames re-emerged, and by then everybody knew that professional help was really needed. A full 10 minutes passed after the fire was reported when two fire trucks from nearby Makati Fire Station arrived.

I decided to hang around and make usi a little to see if the firemen would be able to put out the flames and stop it from spreading to other units, as well as the nearby building where our apartment was. After knowing that I wouldn’t have to pack my stuff (basically, my entire life’s worth of whatever are in our apartment) and taking a footage of all the excitement with my phone, my sister and I decided to go ahead with our shopping plans. Order was restored in the universe.

Inquirer came up with a slightly inaccurate report about the incident.

“I blame Pride and Prejudice for the fact that the hero of every romance novel is rotten to the heroine the first time he meets her. In my heart, I also blame it for our persistent and anachronistic tendency to regard a man as an embodiment of personal destiny. Well, not Pride and Prejudice alone. But we carry stories around in our bones, and among novels about the sexes, it’s the best there is: Elizabeth snagging Mr. Darcy is romantic heroin for the discriminating reader.”

–“The archetypal heroine” on Globe and Mail

Enjoy!

Circle search by Shahram Sharif

“The sensation that defines the search is the sweet, painful feeling that you get when you can’t think of a word that feels as if it’s right on the tip of your tongue. For most people, the relief they experience upon finding it is almost physical. They sink back in their chairs and try not to stumble upon any more difficult words. The person who makes his living searching for the new new thing is not like most people, however. He does not seriously want to sink back into any chair. He needs to keep on groping. He chooses to live perpetually with that sweet tingling discomfort of not quite knowing what it is he wants to say.”

–Michael Lewis, “The New New Thing”

The way athletes express victory–chests puffed out, arms in the air, head tilted back–may have been a result of evolutionary programming, according to research from University of British Columbia and San Francisco State University. Comparisons of photographs of sighted athletes, the congenitally blind, and those who lost their sights later in life show similarities in reactions to winning. This is especially notable among people who have been blind all their lives who express body gestures of winning similar to their sighted counterparts. The study also suggests that similarities in expressions of winning cuts across cultures, and might have been a product of social communication of early humans. By appearing to be larger than the rest, the alpha humans give the impression of dominance and power.

I wonder if Nadal’s grunts have anything to do with his new ranking. Read the article on Live Science.

Top-performing executives and athletes have a lot of things in common, according to Richard F. Gerson’s The Executive Athlete: How Sports Psychology Helps Business People Become World-Class Performers:

• They prepare themselves for the upcoming event and make sure they are ready to perform.
• They plan their activities so that they know what they will do, when they will do it, and what will be expected of them.
• They have a purpose for what they are doing in business, sports, and life.
• They show a passion for what they do. They love what they do so much that they would probably do it for free if they could afford to; and even do it forever if physically and mentally capable of doing so.
• They are persistent and committed to achieving success.
• They are patient as performers because they know that success and high achievement do not always come quickly or easily.
• They practice diligently, consistently, and continuously, with specific objectives in mind.
• They perform “as if” when they are not quite ready to be the best they can be.
• They use personal mastery to help them develop confidence, increase self-esteem, and overcome fear.
• They are proactive performers, rather than passive observers or reactive actors. They more often than not take the lead to get the job done, and they do it well.

From Executive Brief:

“…thousands of white-collar jobs are being shipped to developing economies as companies search for ways to lower operating costs. These white-collar jobs include customer service, R&D, documentation, and not to be missed, software development. Various emerging markets have since been competing against each other in the race to sell (the capabilities of) their armies of engineers, scientists, and accountants–to name a few–to companies based in the North America, Western Europe, and developed Asian economies.

“Because of the increasing number of jobs being off-shored, even those who first supported off-shoring wavered in their conviction about the advantages of shipping back-office operations abroad. Furthermore, there is much talk about workers’ rights, economic damage, and low-quality of work because of outsourcing. “

Is outsourcing purely evil? Is India the only available outsourcing destination? Is China the only other outsourcing destination? Continue reading here.

Image from inju.

Birthday cupcake by emma.c

I celebrated my birthday yesterday in almost the way I had lived each of the days in recent years: went to work, got in touch with friends, finished the day’s business in a not so fabulous fashion. I had a 12-hour workday, which began with a status meeting in the morning and ended with another meeting, paper work and an overseas call in the evening. In between were ten million emails, follow-ups, and cursing the ATMs at Cash and Carry for running out of cash and then debiting the amount that I was not able to withdraw from my account in the first place. And then there was the stupid mishap during merienda that proved for all time that I could not be a domestic diva.

I came up with two birthday wishes that popped right off the top of my head, like in a Freudian kind of wishing, except that the wishes were neither sexual nor violent (remarkably, not romantic). First wish was dashed even before the day ended. Bummer. Second one is still up in the clouds, but I won’t be holding my breath for it. It will happen when it happens, and I am at least thankful that the person who matters in making this come true is on my side.

Thanks to everyone who remembered. Catherine was beaten by Joy, and then Fulton, in the annual competition for who’s first to greet me happy birthday. Joy greeted me at 11PM on August 13. Fancy that, sister! Tina, you still owe me a kitteh. Morguers, thanks for the cake. Top prize goes to my mom for the drama.

UPDATE:

Nice…nice…nice greeting on Friendster from Club.net badminton club. They kinda know the stuff that interest me–books, badminton, food. Not sure about Jose Cuervo, as I had a bad episode with tequila last summer.

This one is quite frustrating because there is no way right now for me to get the Sephora birthday gift. Merci, just the same. I registered last year for the store’s freebies, and every now and then, I get vouchers by e-mail. I just love this store. I had loads of fun trying their fantastic potions and colors last year with Mary and Keng. Je veux à nouveau rendre Sephora.

UPDATE AGAIN:

First wish wasn’t dashed completely. It was granted in a slightly different form, but it still happened.