I will never again want anything as keenly, never again be willing to hurt so deeply, and so never again know such happiness. I guess this is how you die slowly, a heartbeat, a breath at a time.

Sir Arthur C Clarke wrote The City and the Stars in 1956. It is basically a rewrite of his earlier novel Against the Fall of Night, updated to take into account the then-nascent Information Revolution.

I think it’s just a matter of time before reality decides to bite me in the ass. I’ve been skating by these past few weeks, trying to desperately catch up on some direly needed sleep, and failing to do so. Tomorrow I am once again on call, and I know for a fact that I’m never going to shake this damned cold. And sadly, my next full weekend off isn’t for another week and a half.

I have always been someone who backs the underdog and have very little use for the de facto Establishment. I am, perhaps, overly idealistic and at times unreasonably dogmatic, but this instinct has driven many of my trivial and not-so-trivial decisions. For example, OS choice: so it was that I decided to run with Linux in 1998 sucked into the Open Source hype, then Mac OS X in 2002, still attached to GTK and GNOME apps. I had long grown weary of Microsoft and their works. Browser choice: I continued to use Netscape, then Mozilla, then Galeon, then Camino, eschewing the bug-laden, unfixable mess that is IE (and while IE on the Mac is much nicer than its Windows counterpart, it is now ancient) I continue to be a resolute Dodger fan, and can’t help but find the Cubs endearing. And I chose Pediatrics as my specialty, because I want to help those who can’t help themselves—that is the nature of children, for one thing, and I feel that pediatricians tend to work more with underserved populations: minorities, immigrants, the undocumented.

Now, granted, a good number of my friends are artists, so that is what my ideas are informed by.

This sequel sucks.

So the Americans want to come back for a rematch. There are fewer things more deadly than a guy running amok. Let’s hope the Philippines isn’t the first to taste W’s new policy about nuking countries he doesn’t like.