TWEEEET

Since switching to a BlackBerry (because I lost my phone) and subscribing to unlimited social networking and BlackBerry messaging service, a lot of people have been getting on my nerves lately. Of course they don't know it and I won't mention names, but they deserve to know what they're doing wrong. Let's start with Twitter.

1. Using usernames that have "itsme" or "iam" (or "akosi" in Filipino) in them. Because unless you're a celebrity, you're not the John Michael that the masses should be clamoring to follow but really just another John Michael on Twitter. Leave such usernames to Leighton Meester and Ruffa Gutierrez.
2. Retweeting (or quoting) instead of simply replying. Because it's like shouting to an entire room what you should only be saying—normal, non-palengkera tone of voice—to one person.
3. The misuse of hashtags. Hashtags are used to categorize tweets, join in on a conversation about a trending topic, or make your tweet extra witty (note emphasized word). They should be brief, consisting of a maximum of four simple words with no conjunctions, and they should never be used on Facebook status updates, but I digress.
4. The use of the word "mode." Enough said.
5. The profuse appearance of a colon followed by two closing parentheses which on Yahoo! Messenger would turn into the laughing emoticon () but which on Twitter wouldn't, and since it wouldn't, I have to imagine the tweeter repeatedly laughing his or her head off like the emoticon. And that simply isn't a pretty picture.
6. The use of tweet condensers like TwitLonger. It's cool to use them once in a while, but if you have to do so with almost every single tweet, maybe you should consider moving to Tumblr.
7. And lastly, saying (yes, saying too, not just tweeting) "twit" when you mean "tweet." Look up the meaning of the first word. Unless you want to be called that, say it with me: TWEEEET.

Individually, these can be tolerated but make them all come together in the person of someone who tweets like there's no tomorrow, like every action he or she takes must be documented and broadcast, it's maddening. Even more so if the person's an otherwise decent friend. So dear friends whom I follow on Twitter, please tweet properly. I don't want my respect for any of you to diminish on account of your irritating tweets.

TWEEEET.

Happy birthday to me, hehe

Xangsane, Ketsana, Conson and Nesat—locally, Milenyo, Ondoy, Basyang and Pedring—typhoons that ravaged most of the Philippines in 2006, 2009, 2010 and 2011, respectively. In September. During the week of my birthday...well, except in 2010. Fun.

I don't really remember much of the whole Milenyo incident, but everything about Ondoy is still pretty clear to me. I was almost two years into my employment with my first call center and I had just decided I wanted to spend more of my time studying Spanish than commuting to and from work, so I rented a house in Mandaluyong with my high school friend Carlo, a nurse, and a girl named Sienna, also a call center agent. My Saturday shift had just ended and I was going home for the weekend but I decided to wait for Sienna, who was also heading home, because it was already pouring and she didn't have an umbrella. The bus we rode to Baclaran unfortunately got stranded at Gil Puyat Ave. corner Chino Roces Ave. because of the flood, but between the sight of people trying to wade through the muddy waters outside and Frank Peretti's fantastic novel Piercing the Darkness which I had brought with me, I wasn't so bored. Within an hour or so, I was able to finish the book and take a nap. When I woke up to find we were still at Magallanes Interchange, I agreed with Sienna that we should just stop wasting time trying to go home and just return to our rented house.



I let Sienna go ahead by MRT at the Magallanes station because the car for women and the elderly was fairly empty, and we couldn't have possibly succeeded in getting ourselves inside any of the other cars had we insisted on going together. I texted my dad to pick me up where I was but he eventually relayed news that he couldn't get through the flood to come get me. I rode a bus to Mandaluyong and arrived at our rented house to find that there was no electricity. It was my dad's birthday and the following day was mine, and thankfully I was able to finally get home then...to a house that had just gotten flooded.

Basyang of 2010 wasn't so bad and it didn't really occur on my birthday. It was mostly strong winds, which resulted in a lot of fallen tree parts and missing roofs, but the rain didn't really cause any serious flooding...in the areas I had to go to daily, at least. It was bad enough, however, to cause me and my friend one early morning to abandon our plans of going to work together as there were no buses leaving for Baclaran. We simply decided to wait out the storm at my friend's place, and that was the moment we would later refer to when we talk between ourselves as the night we became a couple. The whole shebang's deserving of its own blog post, maybe even a romance novel, but two months thence, just a week before my birthday, the love story, inevitably and unfortunately, came to an end. My first serious relationship, over in such a short time, resulting in my very first almost paralyzing heartbreak. The whole romantic shiz might not be for me after all.

Pedring wasn't so bad either but though my birthday this year fell on my rest day, I still wasn't able to celebrate by going out with friends. I was home alone with my books and my mom who baked me a blueberry cheesecake just to cheer me up.

In less catastrophic news, Zuckerberg and his team of geeks recently updated Facebook. Now you have a news feed within your news feed and you can tweak more settings for your privacy. The way these updates usually go, some privacy settings automatically get changed, and for me one of them was that posting to my wall got disabled. Two weeks earlier I had changed my birthday on my profile because I didn't want my Facebook wall flooded by birthday greetings from people who wouldn't normally greet me without the social networking site reminding them, and this along with my wall being inaccessible filtered the greetings from my friends. Those who really knew my birthday sent me their greetings through other modes of communication. People eventually started posting on my wall after I had enabled the option though. In hindsight, it could have very well been the perfect Let's-See-Who-Actually-Remembers-My-Birthday-Without-Help-From-Facebook experiment.

More interesting than the results of the accidental experiment, however, was how Facebook recognized the birthday greetings on my Facebook wall as posts about "Hehe people," which is "an ethnic and linguistic group based in Iringa region in south-central Tanzania, speaking the Bantu Hehe language." What the heck.


So...happy birthday to me. Hehe.