terb’s world: my favorite things

You may want to check out this book. I wrote one of the stories included in this anthology. Book launching is on November 6, Thursday, 6 pm at Powerbooks in Greenbelt 3 (Makati City). It costs Php250.00 each.

As it says in the poster below (sorry I know it’s not easy to read), the book is an anthology of personal experiences of everyday volunteers culled from the Hands On Manila Volunteer Chronicles writing contest. It was I think the first writing contest I joined – aside from school contests of course. My essay was actually what I wrote for HSBC after being sent as an Earthwatch fellow to Oxford, England to spend my time watching badgers and catching mice, which I think was the title of my piece. It won honorable mention in the contest, and the chance to be published in this anthology.

The book contains stories from celebrities such as Karen Davila, Marc Nelson and Chris Tiu. I can’t wait to get my hands on this book just to see my name in print, and to read the volunteer experiences of other people.

I was a late bloomer - or should I say, a late blogger.

I’ve only begun blogging two months ago – on the 14th of May 2008, to be exact. Ever since I’ve heard of blogging nearly eight years ago, I’ve wanted to try it out. However, finding that most blogs turned out to be some sort of online diary – which I didn’t want for myself (being a rather private person), I decided that it wasn’t for me.

That is, until I needed to find someone to talk to on how much I love the movie Step Up. So I decided to start blogging, which I realized I actually enjoy. It was supposed to be about my favorite things (like favorite movies, favorite books, etc) but I noticed that lately about 90% of things I’ve written is related to Narnia.

So I decided to make a separate Narnia page, but I couldn’t figure out how to do it in Blogger. I’ve also had other problems with them, such as the line spaces going crazy (I’ve had to edit manually using HTML tags) and the blog title disappearing when you open my blog. So I finally decided to try WordPress, which I’ve heard is better. I guess we’ll see about that.

So far, I’m satisfied with WordPress. I particularly like that it has its own dashboard, unlike in Blogger where I had to add an invisible hit counter so that I can monitor my visitor statistics. If this works out, I’ll do the other blogs I need to make (for my church) here as well.

Last Friday, I read an article in Time Magazine that mentioned Randy Pausch’s lecture on YouTube. Curious as to what it was about, I searched for it the first chance I got. After all, the last time I searched for a YouTube video mentioned in Time Magazine, I saw Young@Heart’s performance of Fix You, which really made me tear up. For those of you who don’t know about them yet, Young@Heart is a singing group composed of octogenarians, which covers contemporary pop tunes.

So I was optimistic about checking out who Randy Pausch is. He’s got to be interesting and big enough to be mentioned in Time Magazine. And he is – or at least, he is now. I don’t want to give a detailed biography, since it’s all in the Wikipedia article about him, but the reason why he’s so popular now is because of his LAST LECTURE. It seems that there’s a lecture series in Carnegie Mellon University, where he got his doctorate, called “Last Lectures,” wherein they invite professors to talk about what they would try to impart to the world if it was their last chance to talk. For the then 47-year old Randy Pausch, it was a particularly appropriate topic since he was diagnosed with terminal pancreatic cancer in August 2007 and has been given just 6 more months of good health. In September 2007, he gave his last lecture entitled, “REALLY ACHIEVING YOUR CHILDHOOD DREAMS.” It became a YouTube hit soon after.

It’s a 76-minute lecture, but I strongly advise you to watch it. You wouldn’t even notice the time; Randy Pausch is such an inspiring and highly entertaining speaker. It really made me think about my childhood dreams and what I’ve done to pursue them.

Here are some of my favorite thoughts from the lecture:

“Remember, the brick walls are there for a reason. The brick walls are not there to keep us out. The brick walls are there to give us a chance to show how badly we want something. Because the brick walls are there to stop the people who don’t want it badly enough.”

“When you’re screwing up and nobody’s saying anything to you anymore, that means they gave up.” (quoting his football assistant coach)

“Experience is what you get when you didn’t get what you wanted.”

Here are the links to the YouTube video, the lecture transcript, and his personal website.

RANDY PAUSCH’S LAST LECTURE ON YOUTUBE

RANDY PAUSCH’S LAST LECTURE TRANSCRIPT

RANDY PAUSCH’S WEBSITE

Postscript: Randy Pausch died last July 25, and I pray that God will sustain his family.