transposable element

even before halloween, the stores here in singapore, especially in the shopping districts, have already been decked in christmas decorations. malls have been handing out flyers of their christmas programs and promotions and the papers are already replete of gift ideas and offers of jewelry, designer fashion, techie toys, digital cameras, toys, and all sorts of bric-a-bracs!

i don’t know about you, but i think it’s too soon, though. i know that christmas is coming, and that one has to start early to avoid the rush, but… this early? i don’t know, but for me, there’s just something missing…

hm, i think i actually enjoy the christmas rush after all. the throng of people in the shops, the sparkly shopping bags, the frantic search for that one special gift, the piped in christmas carols, the mad cacophony in the toy stores… that’s what christmas shopping is all about!

so finally, the obstinate tooth was pulled out, and because the permanent tooth that was supposed to take its place was misaligned, jan is now wearing braces, also to keep the gaps between his other teeth intact until the other permanent teeth come.

on the first day (friday), he couldn’t talk properly, couldn’t even swallow, so he had to take it out during mealtimes. on the second day, his speech has improved but still needed to take it off to eat. on the third day, sunday, he was already getting used to it, with minor speech difficulties. we were considering not making him wear it in school, but that would mean that he will need to wear the darn thing for much longer than the three months estimated by the dentist that it will take for his tooth to move into its place if he wears the braces 24/7. fortunately, come monday, jan said he’s ok and will wear it while in school. i was worried that he might be laughed at in school. hubby worried that he might take it off to eat and forget it lying somewhere. but when he came back, it didn’t seem to be such a big deal.

oh well, i just hope that metal piece does it job. i swear i suffered a minor heart attack when i saw the bill. i think that piece of metal wire costs more than our entire khao lak holiday did! and it’s not yet clear whether the insurance will cover it, arrrgh! (it will probably be as difficult as claiming social security disability benefits!)

the idiomatic expression means something like losing your sanity, but for this entry, i mean ‘marbles’ in a slightly more literal sense. here’s an email i’ve been forwarded a while back, and though i didn’t realize it at the time, it made quite a big impact on me. more on that later, here’s the email first:

3900 Saturdays

The older I get, the more I enjoy Saturday mornings. Perhaps it’s the
quiet solitude that comes with being the first to rise, or maybe it’s
the unbounded joy of not having to be at work. Either way, the first
few hours of a Saturday morning are most enjoyable.

A few weeks ago, I was shuffling toward the garage with a steaming cup
of coffee in one hand and the morning paper in the other. What began as
a typical Saturday morning turned into one of those lessons that life
seems to hand you from time to time. Let me tell you about it:

I turned the dial up into the phone portion of the band on my ham radio
in order to listen to a Saturday morning swap net. Along the way, I
came across an older sounding chap, with a tremendous signal and a
golden voice. You know the kind; he sounded like he should be in the
broadcasting business. He was telling whom-ever he was talking with
something about ‘a thousand marbles.’ I was intrigued and stopped to
listen to what he had to say.

‘Well, Tom, it sure sounds like you’re busy with your job. I’m sure they
pay you well but it’s a shame you have to be away from home and your
family so much. Hard to believe a young fellow should have to work
sixty or seventy hours a week to make ends meet. It’s too bad you
missed your daughter’s ‘dance recital’ he continued. ;’Let me tell you
something that has helped me keep my own priorities.’ And that’s when he
began to explain his theory of a ‘thousand marbles.’

‘You see, I sat down one day and did a little arithmetic. The average
person lives about seventy-five years. I know, some live more and some
live less, but on average, folks live about seventy-five years.

‘Now then, I multiplied 75 times 52 and I came up with 3900, which is
the number of Saturdays that the average person has in their entire
lifetime. Now, stick with me, Tom, I’m getting to the important part.

It took me until I was fifty-five years old to think about all this in
any detail’, he went on, ‘and by that time I had lived through over
twenty-eight hundred Saturdays.’ ‘I got to thinking that if I lived to
be seventy-five, I only had about a thousand of them left to enjoy. So
I went to a toy store and bought every single marble they had. I ended
up having to visit three toy stores to round up 1000 marbles I took them
home and put them inside a large, clear plastic container right here in
the shack next to my gear.’

‘Every Saturday since then, I have taken one marble out and thrown it
away. I found that by watching the marbles diminish, I focused more on
the really important things in life.

There’s nothing like watching your time here on this earth run out to
help get your priorities straight.’

‘Now let me tell you one last thing before I sign-off with you and take
my lovely wife out for breakfast. This morning, I took the very last
marble out of the container. I figure that if I make it until next
Saturday then I have been given a little extra time. And the one thing
we can all use is a little more time.’

‘It was nice to meet you Tom, I hope you spend more time with your
family, and I hope to meet you again here on the band. This is a 75
Year old Man, K9NZQ, clear and going QRT, good morning!’

You could have heard a pin drop on the band when this fellow signed off
I guess he gave us all a lot to think about. I had planned to work on
the antenna that morning, and then I was going to meet up with a few
hams to work on the next club newsletter.

Instead, I went upstairs and woke my wife up with a kiss. ‘C’mon honey,
I’m taking you and the kids to breakfast.’ ‘What brought this on?’ she
asked with a smile. ‘Oh, nothing special, it’s just been a long time
since we spent a Saturday together with the kids. And hey, can we stop
at a toy store while we’re out? I need to buy some marbles.

assuming you’d live to be about 75 (quite a feat, nowadays!), how many marbles would YOU have left? i haven’t bought marbles myself (i’d need about 2000+), but ever since i read this email, i feel like i’m constantly being nudged to use my time left here on earth wisely. for every day i spend just sleeping in or doing nothing noteworthy, i feel like i’ve wasted yet another day of my life. i get this visual that my life time is dripping like sands in an hourglass. and in a macabre way, i’d imagine, “what if this would have been my last? i spent it doing nothing.” weekends are worse, because i feel weekends must be spent in a more meaningful way as those are the days that the family is together.

a new year is approaching. 52 marbles. 52 saturdays. how are you going to spend them?

the berks are doing another round of posts, each member answering the so-called proust questionnaire. i hope i can find the time to answer the whole lot myself, but let me start with this one: what is your greatest fear?

like many, i fear death. not as much as my own, but of the people i love, the people around me. whatever will i do without my husband? will the sun shine as bright without jan? and mia– i get nightmares just thinking about SIDS and other accidents that may befall such a vulnerable infant.

the logical side of me says death is as natural as life itself. it’s inevitable. it happens to everyone, it’s just the manner in which it happens that varies. if one’s lucky, you can prepare for it to a certain extent. compare life insurance quotes and get it all sorted out. a memorial plan and a will makes it easier for those left behind to deal with financial issues, too.

but what about the emotional loss? could you help others to cope with the grief of losing you? i suppose there’s only one thing you can do to make death easier to accept: live life meaningfully.

last week, i was amusedly watching the reactions aired on tv regarding the launch of playboy philippines. i can’t understand why people make so much fuss about it. they say it degenerates people’s sense of morality? ah, and those gyrating scantily clad girls on a noontime tv show don’t? what about those politicians who blatantly steal from the nation? is that the sense of morality the nation should emulate? or should we idolize celebrities who openly and proudly admit they go to vicky belo for more than just acne treatment? a few years ago, you are scorned if people find out you went for cosmetic surgery. now, if you listen to the celebrities endorse belo, it’s as if you’re not worth your salt if you’ve never had a vanity op done. is this the sense of values we should try to encourage our people to have?

at the end of the day, it’s literature. it may sell like pancakes, it may flop. if people would rather leaf through playboy than go through more distasteful material in the national papers or television, so what? as if the country has no other more pressing problems to tackle.

having been a scientist myself once upon a time, i am all for advances in medical and scientific research. i appreciate the extent of drug treatments available today for all sort of maladies for which, some decades ago there were no available treatment. i get excited and am hopeful whenever i come across discoveries, big or small, that have the potential to improve the quality of our lives. but this news stumps me: a woman-turned-man getting pregnant.

According to the story, Mr. Beatie was born a woman but decided to become a transgender male and legally changed his sex to male. He had his breasts surgically removed and started bimonthly testosterone injections, but kept his vagina.

Now identifying as male, Mr. Beatie legally married Nancy Beatie, the story says. The pair wanted a biological baby but Ms. Beatie was unable to carry a child. So they decided Mr. Beatie would carry the child.

“How does it feel to be a pregnant man,” Mr. Beatie writes in the article. “Incredible. Despite the fact that my belly is growing with a new life inside me, I am stable and confident being the man that I am. In a technical sense I see myself as my own surrogate, though my gender identity as male is constant. To Nancy, I am her husband carrying our child … I will be my daughter’s father, and Nancy will be her mother. We will be a family.”

what is the world coming to?

it’s been more than 2 months since i joined the bandwagon and decided to write entries in this blog containing links to certain websites and get paid a bit of coffee-money for it. while it hasn’t exactly made me rich, it had at least paid for the maintenance of this blog, as well as two others. the hosting for this blog alone, with its 4-years worth of archives, is no longer insignificant.

that trickle of income aside, i do enjoy writing the entries. i find it can be a creative exercise, it widens my vocabulary (how was i supposed to know festool is a brand of drills, saws and other workshop equipment? i thought was german contraction for constipation, haha!).

but probably the best outcome so far, is that it has provided me the prodding i need to update this blog more often. links withstanding, they are a peek into my day-to-day life, my past, my insights. perhaps with the exception of one or two, the entries i’ve written were no blatant advertisements or endorsements.

or were they?

i received this image via email (i suppose it has been going around, so i’m sorry, but it’s impossible to trace to whom the credit is due), and i just thought it was quite extraordinary, if not downright incredulous. i mean, how often do you see such ads?

click for a larger image

what job do you think would fit the guy? considering his experience, i think he should have been commissioned by the FBI (or CIA?) for their drug bust operations and give him the opportunity to use his background (and contacts, perhaps!) for something positive. either that, or a counselor or even manager of a drug rehab center.

well, it’s been about 7 years since this ad was placed. i wonder what became of him?

the philippines is sending this lady to the miss world pageant.

which elicited reactions from a lot of pinoy bloggers, media, and former philippine beauty titlists:

i disagree with ruffa. proficiency in english does not equate to “having brains”. indeed some of the most intelligent people in the world do not speak english at all.

during the interview, janina displayed an obvious lack of english proficiency. but, so what? that in itself is not an indication of her IQ. however, the fact that she could not even manage one coherent sentence is quite telling, considering that this lady must have had at least 10 years of english classes (assuming she finished high school level at least). nobody should expect perfect grammar, but is it too much to ask for one sentence that makes sense?

on the other hand, connie is right. it’s just a beauty pageant after all, and beauty, she has.

if there’s one thing i’m scared of, it’s being in debt. when i was still single, i had a visa card, and though i found it very convenient to use for shopping cash-free particularly when i traveled, i always made sure i paid the bills in full when the payment was due. i never needed more than one credit card, and i never fell into the lure of spending more than what i could pay.

fast forward many years, and nothing has changed as i happened to have married someone equally nervous with liquidity. we’re not rich, but we can proudly say we’re debt-free.

however, if there’s one thing that would make me overcome this stance, it’s the prospect of possibly owning a place to call home. if one considers the amount we pay each month in rent, money that could have already been used to pay mortgage on a property instead, it simply makes sense.

it’s a scary step, though. where? how? how much? when? what if we buy a property at the wrong time? is there a possibility for a mortgage refinance? it’s a complicated financial strategy, one i’m not well-versed myself, but as i understood it, in home mortgage refinance, one takes a second loan to pay off the old debt in full, and then save some money in paying off the second loan which, presumably offers better mortgage rates. this refinance home mortgage website, for example, offers information on how it works in several states in the US, and a free quote, depending on the location and type of property you want to refinance, and your credit rating.

i wish such possibilities were open to us. i wish we already know where we want to settle down for keeps. i wish we would have the courage to take such a big financial move. i wish.

or should i maybe just wish that i’d win the lotto?