Some day in the future I’ll be looking back and laugh at myself over this, but that’s OK.

Call me dense, but I’m not good at telling apart jokes that sounded serious or could be a serious request.

The most annoying joking statement I had heard are ones that goes like “you’re so rich/you earn more than I do, therefore you can [do X]”. Seriously. Unless he is a friend whom I knew well, I really couldn’t tell whether is it just a friendly complaint about his financial situation, him being sarcastic or, even worse, a bitter snide well concealed as a joking remark.

Usually I’d just laugh along with it. But with all seriousness I kept a mental note of keeping a distance with these subtle complainers so that I could have a good look at their character.

* Note: This cartoon is inspired by a friend of …

As soon as I read the term “brain fart” in Neil Strauss‘ The Rules of the Game, I’m amused by the term.

In the third chapter of the book, Neil talks about how our voice is our identity and the importance of vocal training and speaking with confidence. The chapter highlights a list of common problems and one of the greatest enemies of speaking with confidence is brain farts, otherwise known as pausers.

He elaborated that we learned to use meaningless utterances of words and phrases like um, uh, like, you know as placeholders to make sure we don’t lose anyone’s attention while thinking what to say next, or as a sonar system to make sure other people understands and agrees with what we are saying.

These pausers, although being convenient, actually …

I like mangoes ever since as I was a kid. And when I got huge, sweet and freshly picked mangoes from my dad, I’m pretty excited!

A few days later, I’m peeling and slicing through one of the mango excitedly – my mouth waters as I imagine the juicy cubes of the fruit melts into my mouth. The smoothness of texture, its sweetness flowing down…

Then I noticed something black with fine brown grains… a rotten patch.

The horror! Shivers goes down my spine, the hand holding the mango trembling. My eyes are projecting hallucinations of seeing worms crawling out of them despite there were none (blame the teachers who insist of drawing a worm crawling out of a rotten apple).

It’s only later then I overcome the feeling that I carefully separated …

For the longest time I had wanted to post this badly. 😛

Direct marketers, who doesn’t like to hate them? In many ways they are “spamming” your time in attempts in trying to sell you something random that you may have not known that you had a need for but decided not wanting them anyway. Like business opportunities in direct marketing or insurance¹. And the worse part of this technology is that there’s no spam filters attached to phones.

Usually the ones that I personally find really obnoxious are the ones whom just plainly refuse to state their intentions upfront and are hellbent to go through the whole script of dubious questions to bait into agreeing with him – and then goes on with a barrage of reasons why I would want whatever that he sells. What’s worse? The ones that either doesn’t …

(Pardon the language; sometimes I have to resort to crude exaggeration to get the point across)

I have a confession to make: I’m starting to notice my addiction for social sites. Mainly Facebook and Twitter. There’s just something about these two sites really. I’d personally would say that they are like sirens which seduces Internet surfers who pass by their territory, drawing them into a blackhole that sucks out the time and energy out of them.

I’m not condemning these two sites by all means, in fact I appreciated the fact they do open up a window of opportunity to get access into the minds, knowledge and social interactions of people I find interesting and admirable.

Just needed to remind myself as common sense goes: take everything in moderation.

In light of the H1N1 outbreak that has been going on for months, it sort of reminded me of an old cartoon that I’d drawn for my own amusement years back (probably also for some kind of a reminder myself).

Occasionally such things does happen to me: especially at times when my own personal problems overwhelmed me to a point which I felt extremely lethargic to even handle it at all. The thing is that as much sleep therapy does relieves the stress and rejuvenates the weary soul, it doesn’t relieve me off my personal responsibility in making decisions and deal with these issues upfront.

So, at the time when I found out that problems looming over my head even when I wake up, I take that as a really serious warning sign.