A news reporter headlined this summer as The Summer of Discontent. Every news channel was all about the rallies, oil, and natural calamities around the world. I looked into the mirror.

Show me that game-face, baby.

Just great. 21 years old and I still had breakouts. It's not that I think I'm a superior being but other people were supposed to get those pimples. Just when I was about to go for my final interview. Then I wondered. What did employers think about applicants who had pimples?

I tried out the blouse I'd wear for the interview. When I opened the buttons it was probably the first time in my life I saw myself like that. It was horrible. This was not a grown woman's chest! Between the breasts that were hidden from the view was a vast desert. 21 years old, at 130 lbs., and I had no cleavage. I was no hermaphrodite! I thought at least when I gained weight this could be compensated. It was fine to gain weight as long as my stomach could not match my breasts in horizontal distance from my spinal column. But if my breasts remained like this, and my stomach was ever growing as if it had a fetus inside, this was dangerous. I would no longer count as "hot".

After hearing me, my friends would often say "you'd been complaining for four years, so what's new?" What's new was that while I was sitting and typing this, I could feel the skin of my stomach pressing against my breasts.

Just a few days ago I decided to decline a high-paying call center job for a more "challenging" work with lesser pay. I might sound like a princess complaining about her cellulites, but the truth is, I'm scared shitless. I am about to embark on a new voyage. Consider it a new dimension entirely. It's not like the line from my childhood will continue. It's as if the end point of that line has been lifted to a different axis and allowed to continue in a new direction. Jesus Christ, I'm talking in planes and figures!

My mother told me that the only way to pull through with work was thinking it was my only means of survival. I needed it, and without it, I'd starve. Worse, I couldn't shop. And so I recited it in my head a hundred times: Do or Die. She cut me short.

"Bear in mind that if you screw this up, you'll be pulling your school's name with you."

University of the Philippines- a breeding place for n00bs.

That was the scarier thought. I couldn't do that to UP.

So I was now four hours away from moving out of my parents' house. For good. My parents had officially lifted the chains. In four hours I was to become one of society's... er, problems. I was about to become one with Reality like having sex for the first time with the lights on. When Do or Die sounded too negative, I'd switch to Love and Fight. It was kind of early for me to conclude about life but for now I decided there were only two things that a person had to do to survive: Love and Fight.

Still, my stomach pressing against my breasts was the reality check I needed.

1. Pick up the nearest book of at least 123 pages.
2. Open the book to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the next three sentences.
5. Tag five people.

I would like to explain to Khonz that I totally forgot I was tagged.  Yeah, such is the busy life of a bum.   

Ahem.  So here I go.  

1.  There are 5 books that are in one pile closest to me.  This means... I am confused.  Debating which to pick up, I examine which one is at least a centimeter closer. 

a: The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People;
b: Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World;
c: Epic;
d: Reader's Digest;
e: Wuthering Heights

I decide on a, not because it was closest, but because of the following:

This book, I never got past chapter two.  And if I play along with this meme, something universal might just be revealed to me.

2-3.  The fifth sentence goes:

An understanding of the principle of our own growth enables us to search out correct principles with the confidence that the more we learn, the more clearly we can focus the lens through which we see the world.

On that, I had recently been reading this book entitled "How to Speak and Write Better".  The author of book A is making us readers suffer, when he should bear in mind we are not that forgiving.  He should have remembered that he was writing for readers who were ineffective in the first place, people who probably had no patience to read that sentence a hundred times. No wonder I never got past chapter two.  This book sucked.  

4.  The next three sentences go:

The principles don't change; our understanding of them does.

The wisdom and guidance that accompany principle-centered living come from correct maps, from the way things really are, have been, and will be.

Correct maps enable us to clearly see where we want to go and how to get there.

I should remove my bookmark from this book already.

5.  Now I tag five people.  If you are not chosen, it does not mean I don't like you, or that you have no place in my heart.  I will be choosing by the following criteria:

5.1- that you will do this meme without a second thought;
5.2- or that you will have second thoughts but will do this anyway because I SAY SO. 

And so I tag...

Lenibee, Racstar, Banuk, Reggie, Isocetin. 

Reggie, it is actually acceptable that you pass.  It is because I play favorites.  

So I started writing, and it was getting good, and I suddenly closed the browser for some reason, without saving my draft, and I'm annoyed, so I probably won't write it again, whatever it was.

Since I'm here anyway, I'll just do an update of my life, for those who care. I'm now officially hooked to golf. I want to play it everyday, if I can only have someone to play with. Playing it alone is scary. It's a war zone out there. These 7-year old kids nail it better than I do.

Other than that I'm on my butt, doing nothing. It'd have been good if I was writing while sitting on my butt, but I'm doing nothing.  Oh wait, I'm not really doing nothing.  I play the Sims 2.  And just so you have an idea how much time I spend on it, this whole town is now occupied with the children of my first family.  And I play all the houses.

Well if I'm in the mood to write a more decent post without clumsily closing my browser, I'll let you know. That's the least I can do.