Watching TV, I saw Anderson Silva beating Dan Henderson in the 185 pound martial arts middle-weight title fight. Watching the best fighters in the world made me wonder what if I had not quit the Ju Jitsu practice that I started as a freshman in college.
Not that I ever had aspirations to be a competitive fighter, but just for fun and be able to wrestle and talk about it more intelligently. It interests me because of its purity.
Mixed Martial Arts had probably already been popular in Japan for a long time, but for the United States and rest of the world, it really started in the first televised competition when I was a freshman in college. That would have been around 1993.
Prior to that, martial arts, to the layman, always had a mysticism to it not based on reality; that nobody in the world could beat Bruce Lee, (which may have been true); that some martial arts, once you get to the secret levels, taught the Dim Mak death touch that would kill somebody instantly; that Japanese black belt fighters were always the best.
The thing I like is that the sport dispels all this bullshit. Get in a cage, with a limited and good set of rules. Rules evolved over the last decade to make the fights interesting, limit serious injuries, and get the sport certified by the different boxing commissions. Simple common sense fighting rules. No biting off someone's nipple, no breaking off someone's finger, no kicking someone in the nuts, no kicking them in the head when they are down.
Think you're unbeatable? Prove it. One strike indefensible knockout punches? Let's see it!
Anyway...
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Our going out of the house last night was not because we looked forward to it, but just so that we would actually get out of the house and not watch television all night.
The only place I enjoy going is this town is Berthold's 'restaurant'. Because I have somebody to talk to. I typically limit that to every other night. The other nights I try to poke around to see if it's possible to make any friends here.
The main problem is that most foreigners here are losers. Or just too old to relate to me.
And I can't find a friendly place to mingle with people here.
I almost stopped in a place last night that could have led to conversation, but I kept walking since the shitty band across the way was blasting the Macarena.
I bought Charito some ice cream, and we stopped in a dive shop bar for two ridiculusly overpriced beers, and to listen to two people at the bar talk about SCUBA diving.
Another reason I won't make friends here. Diving bores the shit out of me, and if I do meet anyone here, it will surely be the topic of conversation. I'd rather go home and watch television.
"People just masturbating about their dive equipment." Who said that? I think it was Aaron Solomons, a freediving instructor in Baja California. I couldn't agree more.
And to teach people to SCUBA dive. Could there be anything more boring? No, could there be anything more boring to talk about at a bar?
I feel that I should dive at least once before I leave this place.
Actually I won't unless I'm nearly guaranteed to see some big animal, it's not work my time and money. I feel lethargic after SCUBA diving, perhaps due to the nitrogen in my system.
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My do to list today:
Fix the sparking refrigerator chord
Swimming
Hiking
Go to music studio
Find a post office
Buy packing tape and some rope
I should just grab my fins and walk down to the beach. That way I get it over with and maybe actually see something nice in the water.
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The books that I boxed up to take away for storage... four books by Paul Theroux that I've read already a couple years ago. And I'm already 'traveling' already.
Three engineering books and my Mathematica programming book. I can read these when I get a job again someday and have to be smart.
Some MENSA puzzle books. I like these, and wish to be good at them, but they distract me from other things I should be doing. So they are just low on the priority list. Not something I want to give up, just a distraction.
The books I kept (worth carrying around):
'A Movable Feast' by Hemingway. A good book, and a two day read anyway if I really keep at it.
'The Universe by Isaac Asimov'. I read some Asimov in high school. And one of my favorite courses in college was 'Philosophy of Physics', which I took to satisfy my rhetoric requirement. This was one of the best classes I've ever taken. 'The Universe' was the type of book that may have been required reading, though it is not as academic as those that actually were. There were seven required books for that course. I didn't get through all of them, and received a B in the course, only due to my weak final paper, which deserved some new material.
I am really bad with new ideas. Maybe I don't have any. Not that I am not creative, just that it never comes from me out of nothing. Many more hours of reading would have been required to get my report to a graduate school level. My report was on Perpetual Motion. I wonder if I had another chance, could I write a better paper?
What if I could write that paper again? What if I could repeat college again? What about my whole life?
Sometimes I ask myself this, and the thought that comes up is that, if I could do it again, I would do everything more or less the same, just keep at whatever I'm doing, don't quit, and stop worrying.
Two things that stop me from continuing things I start in life is my ego and laziness. My ego tells me not to keep playing the drums, and not to play in a band because I am not good enough. Not being in a band makes it a pursuit not fun enough to pursue. I would not enjoying watching a concert where I was the drummer! Ha. That sucks.
Laziness is the other problem. Due in large part to my propensity to get hangovers. At night, rather than continuing to pursue my practices, I turn over to internal and peer pressure and start drinking.
I really wonder what things would have been like if I just kept the alcohol quantity way down since college. High school didn't matter so much. I didn't have any valuable pursuits at that time anyway, except for drumming. I wasn't good at sports. I played baseball in 8th grade and football during my freshman year. I sucked at both.
Anyway, 'The Universe'. I forgot many of the things I learned about Physics, and this is a great concise book on many topics, from Newtonian Physics to current cosmology. The book was written long ago, but big general ideas on Physics haven't changed since then. I've heard that it can take 12 years to earn a PhD in Physics. You have to come up with something new. Hard when the best and most diligent brains in the world have been working on it the last one hundred years.
'The Bantam Book of Correct Letter Writing'
I had the idea of becoming a better communicator, e-mailer, and letter writer a couple months ago, and right after that idea started, I found this book at the used book store. I haven't read it yet. It's going with me.
'Flow' by Csikszentihalyi:
I read this book once a few years ago. More comments on it when I start reading it. Do read it. Should be required reading to be considered human.
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My New Life Rule: When I run out of books, travel somewhere to get a new one. Go to my friend's library. Fly to a bookstore in Bangkok. Go to Cebu and look around. Once I ran out of books to read. No good bookstores where I was. That sucked. I would read the toothpaste ingredients while taking a shit.
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I had good public school growing up. I hear horror stories about the schools in cities like Chicago. But though my teachers may have typically sucked, we had access to good tools and courses in the public schools that I attended. And choices.
My high school had options for music lessons. I can remember playing the xylophone during a required music class. I should have kept that up. I wasn't bad at that one. I just found out that I have a cousin who was a percussionist. Pretty cool.
Our high school auto shop was outstanding. If you wanted to take your car completely apart in there, you could.
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I remember problems with my academic career. I was always naturally above average, which made it so I never failed classes. But I could never be the best. I always forgot everything.
And in engineering classes where the answers came only after a page worth of mathematics, I always made some calculation or assumption error along the way and ended up with the wrong answer.
In high school, when the shop class required us to take apart our parent's lawnmower engine and put it back together, mine never started again. Some error along the way. Some forgotten part maybe, or maladjusted spark plug gap or carburetor adjustment? I never figured it out. In retrospect I should have kept trying. I should have went back after school and tried again.
I really do wish I could do it all over again.
I wish that lawnmower had started! Because I wanted better grades in college? A better job later in life? More money? Actually none of these. I just wished I could get my lawnmower to start! For it's own sake. Because it could have, just with a little more effort on my part.
Damn lawnmower.
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I went swimming earlier today near the beach. Many nice fish and corals. The visibility was just okay, making me thankful that I didn't pay to go SCUBA diving. I still haven't dove in water with incredible visibility like I've seen on television.
While I was swimming a saw some SCUBA divers coming up from their dive. I saw two of them give each other a high-five as they surfaced. How gay. No offense.
This was always a curiosity to me when taking dive lessons. Customers on their holiday would be so excited after their dives. I was always thinking like, whatever! I tried not to tell many people this, especially customers; bad for business. I told Carlos, the owner of the shop this once and he appropriately made fun of me.
But in life, I tend not to get too excited anyway. I went skydiving in college, and I remember thinking it was cool, but no big deal. I didn't 'high-five' anybody.
Whether its swimming rather than SCUBA or riding my bicycle rather than buying a motorbike, traveling under my own power is so much cheaper and better for me. I should stick with it.
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Earlier this morning I ate a piece of toast with Smuckers blueberry jelly. Then later a bowl of oatmeal. The local store had no flavored oatmeal, so Charito put some honey in it so it wasn't so boring. Plain oatmeal would be like eating nothing. Gooey sticky nothing. No pleasure in that.
I just had a piece of bread with Swiss cheese as a snack while Charito is cooking lunch. She's cooking chicken with cashew nuts. Cashew nuts, green onion leaves, chillies, onions, and garlic. Typing the ingredients is making me hungry.
Hemingway talks of hunger in 'A Movable Feast' and how walking down the streets of Paris poor in the 1920's and seeing all the shops and restaurants makes him hungry.
'You got very hungry when you did not eat enough in Paris because all the bakery shops had such good things in the windows...'
"You got very hungry when you did not eat enough in the Philippines because because all the good cooking shows on telivision had such good ingredients..."
For me, watching the beautiful cooking shows on television, especially 'No Reservations' and others in India and Asia make me super hungry and want to move to Singapore or another big city.
Food in the Philippines can be good, but it's also simple and monotonous. You cannot find the kind of markets for ingredients as are in other Asian countries. Grocery stores in Manila have most things, but imported, packaged, and expensive.
Their was a Filipino drama show on television the other day. I could follow this one because of the subtitles. The theme of the show revolved around cooking. I was thinking how silly, since Filipino cooking is all the same, with vary little variations in taste or ingredients.
Meat, onions, garlic, soy sauce, vinegar. Sometime curry. Actually if you are lucky you can find restaurants with a local specialty with unique flavors. Again, if you are lucky. Order curry at most places and you will just get the taste of the pre-flavored packets that you can buy at the Sari-Sari store. You can just make that at home in twenty minutes.
Where I currently live, I've quickly given up on looking for good restaurants. Not worth the money to search. I was told that Hemingway's Bistro had good food, but you if are unlucky to eat there when the head cook is out, it likely won't be worth it.
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I'm making ankle weights for snorkeling. Actually Charito is making them right now. I'm just finishing and adjusting them. I'm using doubled over black rubber strap with one-inch quick release buckles and fishing weights. The fishing weights are small lead tubes, and I couldn't thread the two pieces of rubber strap through the hole. But Charito figured it out. I was using baby oil and everything was too slippery to work with. Her secret, besides more patience, was to use the baby oil just inside the fishing weight then dry her hands and the strap, then stick it in.
My feet float when I swim on the surface, making it harder to swim. I will try these out tomorrow morning.
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Yesterday there was a loud zapping sound coming from our kitchen and I feared it from the Propane tank under the sink. Fear, because I don't know enough about propane tanks to know if there are any safe noises that they might make. Being cautious, I thought not.
Thankfully, it was the power chord electricuting itself underneath the refrigerator. Thankfully, because these are the sources of such sounds that I am familiar with. I unplugged the refrigerator and got tools from the landlord to fix the chord. Being an engineer also, he even had propper wire strippers! One of three pairs in the Philippines I think.
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I just took a nap. I woke up, sat down with some coffee and started reading gain. I can hear the sound of Charito sharpening our one cheap kitchen knife on the terrace. We bought a sharpening stone in the local general store. There are venders here who walk around with a sharpening contraption built like a stationary bike connected to grinding wheels. But to avail of their services, one would have to have the offending dull knife on their person when they run into the knife sharpening man.
Impossible.
So we bought a sharpening stone. I have a couple great kitchen knives. Somewhere.
I still have a persistant cough. I took some Robitussin this morning. Charito's cough was dispensed with using anti-biotics. But I'm too cheap. And I don't trust doctors. And I'm poor.
I'll let whatever is in my chest to die of natural causes.
On the Robitussin box is a detachable tab, Proof of Purchase. How does this proove you purchased it any more than the fact that it's in your hand?
Sometimes when I sneeze or cough some glob of phlegm flies out and lands on my arm or my book unexpectedly.
We have mosquitos. Thankfully not many, and slow big ones. If you can focus your eyes on them you can snatch them in your hand. They aren't fast, but sometimes elusive and if you miss grabbing them, they get lost depending on the background where you are looking. Paint everything white and they'd be easy to swat.
Charito is arranging our new plants. We snatch them from when we're out on walks. Having few other hobbies, she's our botonist.
She just stole a beautiful palm from the planter right outside our house. I had to tell her that it;s better to steal from the neighbors at least two doors away.
ok,
james
