transposable element

enjoy the holidays, everyone! i’ll be offline for most of the holidays, so til next year, then!

maligayang pasko at manigong bagong taon sa inyong lahat!!!

since about mid of this year, jan started getting interested in letters, especially those that make up his name. he then would recognize his name when written in block, and could write his name using the keyboard. he then proceeded to learn to write mama, papa, oma and opa, all using the keyboard. he hasn’t been successful with handwriting these words, though. i supposed that he still lacked the fine motor skills required to control the pen. and since i thought it’s too early for him to learn writing, anyway, i decided not to pursue the activity.

but just last week, he asked me to show him how to write his name on paper. i’m guessing that although he can recognize the letters, he wants to see how the hand can manoeuver a pen to actually write the letters. and this morning, while i was making coffee in the kitchen, he came to show me what he wrote inside a xmas card we made last week:

good thing there are only three letters making up his name! oh, and he says, those black dots are raindrops, falling on a river, flanked by river banks, of course.

i treat writing, as well as all my blogs, as a kind of learning experience, a kind of training the same way i would take a course in photography or knitting. it’s something i enjoy doing and i would love every opportunity to hone it. after all, although there’s nothing wrong with being one, what fun is there in remaining mediocre?

on occassion, i have been tapped to write articles for other websites. the bounty isn’t much, most just enough for bus fare, and i’ve even taken assignments pro bono. that’s not the issue. what i find less comfortable with is ghost writing. you whip something up and somebody else takes credit for it. of course you enter an agreement of relinquishing all copyright and such legalese even before buckling down to work. and, naturally, you get compensated for your efforts. but how much compensation would be enough for you to relinquish all claims to something you made? how much is the vanity of seeing your name on the by-line worth?

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advertisement: while reading biotech-related materials, it horrifies me to read how many drugs are being recalled and FDA warnings being issued on drugs that are out in the market, being used by some people we actually know. of course the most popular is vioxx, a painkiller which has been later shown to double the risk of heart attacks or stroke. if you or a loved one have taken Vioxx and have experienced any side effects including blood clots, heart attacks, strokes or even sudden death, contact vioxx lawyers immediately and see if you can file a lawsuit and get compensated, too.

with just a few days left to the year, i’m wrapping up the last to-do things before i go on a year-end break. and with a lot of loose ends especially from my online tasks, i anticipate cramming until, or especially by, the end of this week. it helps a lot that i enjoy immensely what i am doing, otherwise, these would just be too tedious.

i’d be first to admit that i am not the most efficient person on earth. i have mastered the art of multi-tasking (the only reason why this household is not yet breaking apart), but i get easily distracted. sometimes, willingly so. but i’ve completely uninstalled yahoo messenger, and all it’s annoying accompanying programs from my pc, and my gtalk shows me permanently “busy”. so what’s my greatest distraction?

email… ahh, email! i have a love afair with email since 1995, when i was still using DOS based pathworks. moving to outlook took our relationship to another level, but we had a falling out when i had to rely on yahoo’s limited capacity. gmail re-lit the embers and kept the passion burning. gmail is my clandestine lover: keeps me company in the mornings, and when opportunity permits, the last i see before i turn for bed at night.

i’ve got 241 MB worth of emails sitting in my account and if not for gmail’s conversation feature, i would be lost in the roughly 900 threads (not 900 singular emails!) still unread, and filed away under different folders. there are still emails i have ben meaning to reply to for the last week, at least, but never got to, what with all the new ones coming in. i know i could use some tutorials in improving efficiency as i have no systematic way of attending to emails. i read personal messages first, most of the time, and i think i tend to reply to those stuff which can be settled quickly, and can therefore be archived and forgotten just as quickly. that’s assuming, i get to read it.

sometimes i’m tempted to do the select-all-delete maneouver. but i just can’t bear deleting them unread, even though i know a lot of those would be “junk” (but not spam, which get automatically screened anyway), a lot are one-liners, and a handful would contain just a smiley. but until i get these treshed out, i’ll simply have to let them accumulate and just to rely on gmail’s expanding storage space and hold on to their promise that “you’ll never need to delete messages!”

how many times have you shied away from asking for something– a favor from a friend, a pay raise from your boss, a recommendation letter from a mentor?

even if we honestly believe we deserve something, we are sometimes reluctant to ask for it. in my case, it probably part-discomfiture, part-stubbornness, part-pride. i’d like my efforts to be rewarded automatically, without having to ask for it (you know, the same way i’d like hubby to figure out what my problem is, wihtout me having to say it, haha!). often, i am too worried of inconveniencing other people to ask favors, that rather than asking outright, i would wait for them to make an offer. i realize there’s something faulty in this school of thought, but am probably too scared of rejection to muster the courage to just, well, ask.

it doesn’t work all the time, and we shouldn’t expect it to. but sometimes, difficult and to some point embarassing though it may be, it pays well to just simply ask. yesterday i did, after a lot of fidgeting and thumb-twirling, and today, i received.

i should do this more often. either that, or maybe i should wear one of thosepet tags saying “i need something. please, ask me what it is!”

christmas is rushing by me, and i’m desperately looking for the button to make it all slow down. every way i look, shops are fascinating with their merry decors, people are toting bags laden with christmas goodies, windows are aglow with thousands of glittering lights and trimmings. am caught up in all of it, and yet, if i could make everything pause, i would. savor the rituals and the symbols and not be a passive participant to all of it. what’s the tree for? and what’s the 12 days of christmas all about? the tinsel, santa claus and gift-exchange?

something tells me that i’m not getting it. it’s not in the gifts, it’s not in the glühwein, not even the advent wreath that adorns our dinner table. for the past years, all christmas means to me is taking a breather from the hustle and bustle of the daily grind, and spending a whole week–from christmas eve til new year– just spending time with the family. at a time and place where people see less and less of their loved ones, i’ve come to appreciate this last week of the year the most, exactly just for this reason. no deadlines to think of, no chore that’s more important than simply being with the family, even if each has his nose buried in his own book. this year, though, am almost dreading the week following christmas. i hope my premonition turns out wrong, but i doubt i’d be able to read more than a couple of pages, if at all.

how about you? no, spare me that spiel about christmas being about the saviour’s birth. there’s nothing about the birth of Christ in christmas trees, cookies and overcharged credit cards. if you’re to be honest, what does christmas really mean to you, personally?

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random find: got extra funds? how does precious metals trading sound like? if i had that kind of money, i think i’d rather be called an “angel”, though.

ironically, it was hubby who alerted me to this news last night:

WOMEN have suspected it for millennia, and scientists have finally proved it - men cannot have both big brains and big testicles.

“Because relatively large brains are metabolically costly to develop and maintain, changes in brain size may be accompanied by compensatory changes in other expensive tissues,” wrote Dr Scott Pitnick in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Letters.

bwahahahaha!!! seems that men’s intellectual capacity is inversely proportional to their sexual prowess, eh? yeah, yeah… there are other factors, too, but if it really all boils down to this, then:

women, which would you rather your man have: brains or balls?

i’ve received my first christmas card for this year yesterday. a real one, made of paper and writtten with ink! i retrieved the card from our mailbox (with a key, you know, not a mouseclick) and for a few seconds, i was startled that the words were not written in arial font 10 or times new roman font 12.

i appreciate words written with pen-and-paper. i’ve got a fairly nice penmanship, if i may say so myself, but it’s getting rusty. i try to take the opportunity to write more often, usually taking advantage of the time i spend on the infamous deutsche bahn on my way to and from work every fridays. prior to that, the most i get to write off-keyboard are my grocery lists. writing during the train ride gives my penmanship a bit more exposure, even if it’s on just a piece of scrap, or the margins of the db magazin. i often get frustrated though, seeing how slow i’ve become and how much i’ve missed the backspace key. argh, pathetic, i know.

r is right. sending electronic cards makes more sense, being more environmentally friendly and all. but having been using non-renewable resources to rev up our car (and guilt-free at that) and having used disposable diapers for the last three years, i think it’s a bit ill-timed (not to mention hypocritical!) of me to suddenly claim i’ve become über-environmentally-conscious this month and that i’m deferring use of paper for christmas cards in the name of environmental friendliness. so i’m gonna stick to the old routine of sending real cards. hopefully, i get to send them all out before the 4th advent candle is alight.

who knows, maybe one day, hundreds of years from now, one of my cards will be unearthed and placed in a museum and people will gush:

“oh look here. it’s a christmas card, from the beginning of the 21st century, made of paper and written in ink! notice the tediousness and craftmanship devoted to it. the font used is very similar to script but is less regular… blah…blah…blah”

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incidentally, the january issue of pinoyexpats will be about the influence of technology on the way we communicate and connect. if you’d like to contribute an article, just shoot an email to pinoyexpats@gmail.com. meanwhile, go and check out the nov-dec issue of pinoyexpats on retail therapy!

am not sure exactly who nikolaus is. am getting confused with all the characters of the german christmas parables–nikolaus, weihnachtsmann, christkind, knecht ruprecht— and who’s supposed to do what, when.

i just know that jan has been animated since last evening, reminding us every 2 minutes during dinner that we have to put our winter boots out in front of the door, and explaining the mechanics of the game. “wenn du artig bist, dann bekommst du bestimmt was vom nikolaus!”

he woke up this morning at a few minutes after 6, and his first words were: “papi, i think we have to check our boots out now.” ugh, it’s still dark! but it was all worth it, seeing him wide-eyed with wonder as he inspected the goodies he got from, er… nikolaus.

“der nikolaus ist aber echt lieb!”

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*if you are well-behaved, then you will certainly get something from nikolaus
* nikolaus is really nice

rice is the staple food of more than half the world’s population. or so goes about 90% of the introduction of the papers IRRI scientists have published. or some variant of it, at least. as the opposition against genetically modified crops mount (switzerland just vetoed GM crops in a referendum last week), proponents of GM crops rally their arguments.

monsanto released videos of interviews with farmers touting the benefits of GM crops and the differences it made to their lives. filipino farmer jesus gavino attests,

“With the help of biotech, we can send our children to school.”

IRRI and cornell university rehashes an already familiar story on the iron-fortified rice.

Haas and his colleagues tested the biofortified rice in the Philippines, where they monitored the diets of 192 Catholic religious sisters in 10 convents.

the experimental rice used in the study has four to five times more iron content than commercially available rice in the Philippines.

their results were promising:

“Although this sounds like a modest increase, it means that instead of 50 percent of women getting adequate iron, 71 percent of the women who consumed the biofortified rice, while eating a traditional Philippine diet, met the estimated average requirement for iron.”

in fact, their preliminary results were so promising that, on my first year here in germany, i was helping hubby feed iron-fortified rice to piglets to further verify the effect of the diet on diet-induced anemia. the nun-study was the “proof-of-concept” that hubby needed to receive funding for his experiments. that was five years ago. which makes me wonder why this press release is doing the rounds now. ah, the politics of scientific research…