mahiwaga

Which forgotten animated heroine are you?

You are Pocahontas Take this quiz!

Meh. Although the voice actress behind Pocohontas, Irene Bedard, is one cute Inuit lady.

What kind of weather are you?

You are Snow

You are calm, reflective, and a value peace. You enjoy solitude, and love nature.

Click Here to Take This Quiz Quizzes and Personality Tests

The irony is astounding. On the other hand, maybe I am a cold, heartless bastard.

You’re a Wooly Mammoth!

A little heavy and a lot shaggy, you move a little slower than the world around you. You definitely wish global warming would go away, and maybe even reverse itself a bit. You like long walks on the ice floe, and could even get stuck there without minding too much. Your favorite Sesame Street character is Snuffleupagus. Beware of tar pits… although you really didn’t need to be told that, did you?

Take the Animal Quiz at the Blue Pyramid.

Hmm. What’s with Arctic references. First, an Inuit woman. Then snow. Then wooly mammoths.

You’re Colombia!

You do a lot of drugs, and these have kind of distorted your view of reality, to the point that everyone looks like an enemy.  You keep trying to restore order over your schizophrenic world view, but you don’t even know which goal is your own and which is someone else’s.  You’re pretty sure someone needs to be punished for all this, but who that is changes all the time.  Things would be a lot better for you if you switched to coffee, or even to decaf, but all this money would be hard to give up.

Take the Country Quiz at the Blue Pyramid

In keeping with the Arctic theme, I am the country whose major export is the drug that is sometimes colloquially known as snow. Brilliant.

You’re Ulysses! by James Joyce Most people are convinced that you don’t make any sense, but compared to what else you could say, what you’re saying now makes tons of sense. What people do understand about you is your vulgarity, which has convinced people that you are at once brilliant and repugnant. Meanwhile you are content to wander around aimlessly, taking in the sights and sounds of the city. What you see is vast, almost limitless, and brings you additional fame. When no one is looking, you dream of being a Greek folk hero.

Take the Book Quiz at the Blue Pyramid.

Finally. Something not related to “Northern Exposure”. And yet, this modernist remake of the classic The Odyssey still alludes to a long, tiresome voyage where the hero seems like he’s never going to make it home. What’s funny is that, while I totally dug modernism when I was an undergrad, I never ever read this book. You would think it would be right up my alley. Cryptic, with garbled allusions to classical literature, and an elitist, intellectual sheen. Maybe I should read it.

You’re Hawaii!

When they first meet you, few people can tell whether you want to say hello or goodbye. Either way, most of them will end up saying that you’re their favorite person to visit, if only they could afford the trip. But your soft and warm image is belied by an explosive undercurrent in your personality than can leave you drenched with tears or boiling with anger for days on end. You are rather fond of using plants as clothing.

Take the State Quiz at the Blue Pyramid.

Apparently we are segueing into another theme or two: (1) the prospect of a ridiculously long ocean voyage into the blue, just like how my ancestors apparently spent much of their time before the advent of European colonization. (2) the two states in the U.S. which are not part of the continental 48.

You’re the California Institute of Technology!

You are seen by many as a constantly rising star, but with the amount of work on your plate, you’re afraid of becoming a shooting star as well. Sometimes you take your bottled-up aggression out on pumpkins, or those younger than you, or even just bottle it up in rockets. Though you aren’t much for the opera, Wagner can wake you up in any situation. While many people view you as a Martian, you might be responsible for putting a human on Mars some day.

Take the University Quiz at the Blue Pyramid.

Hah! Yet another reference to a long, tedious voyage, this time among the sea of stars. Interestingly, the European Space Agency is looking for volunteers to participate in a simulated mission to Mars. Unfortunately, I don’t speak Russian. Damn it. Once upon a time, I aspired to be a physicist. I was inspired by the Caltech professor Kip Thorne, namely, by his book Black Holes and Time Warps: Einstein’s Outrageous Legacy. Sadly, I could hack it through calculus, barely passing a semester doing integrals. (The whole “Einstein sucked at math” thing is a myth. Just because he wasn’t brilliant enough to utilize a mathematical system that used operators that I don’t at all understand doesn’t mean he didn’t know how to do absurdly complex calculations with lesser tools.)

You’re Obama-Gore!

As Barack Obama, you are seen as the greatest hope in history for your people. You may even save the world before breakfast. Normally mild-mannered and unexperienced, tomorrow you will unearth your cloak and free the entire… Okay, even you can admit that maybe there’s a little hype surrounding your personality at this point. You are dynamic and feel you have a lot of potential, but could you ever live up to the lofty expectations and pressure being applied right now? You hope so. You select Al Gore as your running mate because he wins in that position.

Take the 2008 Presidential Ticket Quiz at the Blue Pyramid.

OK, I admit it. I fished around for this one. But, man, this would be a doozy!

The New York Times published an article about how eldest children tend to be ever-so-slightly more “intelligent” than their younger sibs. (Found on Newsvine.)

(I put “intelligent” in quotes because these findings are based on IQ tests, which many people consider an arbitrary measure that is unable to truly separate out important variables like culture, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, et cetera. What are we actually measuring here? It’s just a composite number, a reification, not rooted in any sort of physiologic process. It does not directly reflect anything about the brain whatsoever, and is basically suspect as a good measure of innate mental ability.)

Interestingly, though, this dynamic seems to kind of hold true in my family.

Now don’t get me wrong. My sibs are by no means drooling morons. Both of them are quite educated and professionals. But looking back, I kind of wonder what sort of frustration they dealt with growing up and always being compared to me. It certainly didn’t help that my brother had a lot of the same teachers I had in elementary school and high school. And even my sister found herself the student of my high school biology teacher.

Ultimately, it comes down to test-taking skills. Game theory. I thrive on multiple choice. I’ve always done well on standardized tests, something that, unfortunately, my sibs have sometimes struggled with.

But we all know that standardized tests aren’t necessary meaningful.

Still, what I found interesting about the article are the theories of why there should be a statistically significant difference.

I like the idea of being the bridge. The conduit. I even wrote my personal statement that got me into med school about this idea.

Being born the eldest, you automatically end up in two worlds. Especially if you grew up an only child for a good long while. My brother wasn’t born until I was four, for example. So I spent my formative years surrounded entirely by adults. This, no doubt, had a strong influence on my vocabulary, and even in my affinity to language in general. Of the three of us, I was the only one to actually learn Tagalog as a sort-of a first language. (Although, by now, my accent is atrocious, and my vocabulary is essentially at fourth-grade level or thereabouts.)

But I suppose a lot of it also had to do with the specific dynamics of my family. When I was learning how to speak, my dad happened to be studying for the board exam in Medicine (the ECFMG, which they administer to foreign medical graduates) I even remember being fascinated by the glossy pages in the Physician’s Desk Reference. (I’m surprised I didn’t become a pharmacist.) And then he ended up in a residency out in the Midwest, and for a little while, it was just me and my mom.

In retrospect, I kind of wonder if that’s why I feel like I never got to completely live out my childhood. Fear, doubt, uncertainty. I think kids just instinctively believe that their parents know how things are going to turn out (even when in reality, they don’t) and that their parents will always be there to protect them from the stark uncertainties of life in general. I think I learned at an early age that there was only so much my parents could do for me, and a lot of things, I would just have to face on my own.

Kind of a weird thing for, say, a second grader to have to wonder about, you know?

But: the whole bridge/conduit thing. When my brother, and then my sister were born, I almost naturally became the fulcrum on which the family balanced. Being a kid, but being more used to always being around adults.

I’ve always been about living in the interstices, I think.

The gap between generations. The gap between cultures (Philippine-born versus American-born). And so it went, the gap between the popular kids and the nerds and geeks. The gap between the hard science/techie guys and the humanities/social science folk/fuzzy guys. (It’s kind of funny that despite being rejected from there, the slang from Stanford has somehow managed to stick with me.) The gap between the mainstream Filipino Americans who were only into hip-hop and modded Japanese imports (so-called rice rockets) and DJ’ing and macking on the fly ladies, and the Filipino Americans on the periphery. The people who didn’t feel the need to always hang out with Filipinos. The folk who were more into activism and less into socializing. The artsy people. The people who had no desire whatsoever to go into medicine or engineering.

Maybe part of it is my passive nature. If you don’t make any effort, you get shunted to the periphery, the interstices. And you get comfortable with whereever you end up.

But it has always stuck with me. What I like is being the translator. The guy who can see two apparently completely disparate things and make a connection. The guy who can see the big picture, the forest instead of the trees. The generalities rather than the specifics. And then you translate. You try to convey the idea from one end to the other, something that people who are more tied to the center would naturally have a harder time doing.

It’s all about living in the periphery of both (or more) worlds.

Ultimately, besides helping people in general, and taking care of the sick, and trying to provide services especially to the poor and the underserved, what I see my role as is the translator. The guy who can put the scientific and medical gobbledygook into layman’s terms that will easily penetrate a patient’s consciousness. In some ways, it’s all about metaphoric imagery. Not everyone knows that the kidneys act as filters, but most people know what filters do, as a trite example.

But anyway. Maybe I’m just playing this up too much.

I just like putting together things that are disparate.

That’s probably why I like mash-ups. I remember in 8th grade, I predicted that we’d come to a point where alternative and hip-hop would somehow merge. And now we’ve got The Roots sampling Radiohead. And Kanye West sampling all sorts of random-ass shit. (I think I even wrote down this prediction somewhere. As if I’ll ever find it.) But whatever.

Some people call it apophenia. I like to think of it (in my own mind, at least) as an Art.

I literally skim through 400+ RSS feeds a day. I kind of wonder where my limit is. The point where it starts to feel onerous, and that I’ll never ever get any real work done.

The reason why it’s anywhere close to manageable is the fact that most of the feeds are blogs and not news sites. The new sites (like Slashdot, and in particular, Digg) pump out tons of articles a day, and there’s no way in hell that I’d ever read them all. (And, luckily, too, most of the stuff on Digg is crap, with shitty headlines, and even shittier synopses, thereby frequently compelling me to avoid reading said pile-o’-shit. Seriously. Don’t say shit like “Title says it all.” These guys need copy-editors or something. Even so-called artificial intelligence could do a better job of making compelling blurbs. Seriously, if you had a Mac, you could just copy an article and feed it to the Summarize service. Screw around with the slider. Presto! Instant compelling blurb!)

Man, is this a flight-of-ideas, or what?

Anyway, the point is that individuals rarely post at a rate where I can’t keep up.

And the whole point of that entirely tangential prologue is that I’ve managed to find blogs of people from college, which is always interesting. It’s neat to see the different paths people have taken, some ten years (!) out.

I know. In a way, it can be creepy. Someone you don’t know all that well reading your thoughts. I mean, sure, you voluntarily posted it there, but there’s still something weird about lurkers, you know?

I kind of wonder if it blogging has decreased the number of spontaneous phone calls people make to long-distant, remote friends. Perhaps the number of face-to-face meetings have decreased as well. I mean, why bother calling to find out how someone is doing, when you can just read their blog from your own cel phone, for God’s sake?

OK. OK. This is what I was going to write. (Instead you get the above freakishly long prologue full of diversions and excursions.)

Olivia, whom I haven’t seen since I left Berkeley nearly 10 years ago, reminds me that today is the summer solstice. The longest day of the year (and ergo, the shortest night of the year, which the way I’m looking at it, since I’ve been working nights for a week now. I blame that for my current flavor of insanity.)

I try not to think about the fact that despite it being the beginning of summer, it’s really all down hill from here.

(Yeah. I kind of dislike winter. December and January are OK, but February starts fucking with my brain, and I’m pretty much a wreck by March. Thank God I’m back in California, where spring actually starts in spring. Damn seasonal affective disorder.)

How will I die?

Your Result: You will die while having sex.  

Your last moments in this life will be enjoyable indeed… hopefully. Do not fear sex. Try not to become celibate as a way of escaping death. You cannot run from destiny.

How will I die? Create a Quiz

Now, dying in flagrante delicto is all right with me. Although I hope it won’t be like these two sad fuckers.

You Belong in 1992

With you anything goes! You’re grunge one day, ghetto fabulous the next. It’s all good!

What Year Do You Belong In?

Ah, those were the days.