UnDiscarded

Chalboard boy and girl

Chalk will always have dust. It's a form of limestone, consists mainly of the mineral calcite. Blackboard chalk, commercially produced, are made from the mineral gypsum, compressed and formed into sticks.
No chemical reactions are involved when you write a chalk on the blackboard, no phase change; therefore, chalk remains solid the entire process. Part of it adhered to the board and some of it were released as dust or loose powder. To be technically correct, it's not dustless (meaning: absence of dust) but "less dust" (meaning: lesser dust) .

Of course, I can continue talking about what it should be called. But I know, your teacher would like to use a whiteboard and marker over blackboard and chalk anytime. Or, if you're like me, I pretend that I do chalk art like the ones students occassionally do along the academic oval in UP, except that it's not really chalk and it's not exactly art.

Outlook

The thing about archiving your email in Outlook is that it takes a long while. You need to have patience. You wish that that tiny little paper icon will get from folder A to its destination folder B. And you really cant do anything much to speed up the process.

Back in high school, I had this  freshman English teacher who made me appreciate the language very much. She made me realize that it is a just a tool and therefore one should not be intimidated or overwhelmed. Being a tool, it should be something you can use but does not and should never define who you are.

English was our first period class. First period isn't exactly everyone's favorite. People are caught between finally-flag-ceremony-is-over and how-many-more-minutes-to-recess. The first agenda in class is a spelling test. And these are not spelling bee type of test where they make you spell some words so out of this world you'd doubt if it's ever in the dictionary. Our teacher made us spell simple words. Usually, words that seem to sound alike but not really. Take the word drag and drug, dragged and drugged. Reading it, you would know the difference. But in a spelling test, you need to listen very carefully. The long and short vowel sounds, diphtongs, and all those stuff --- you need to recognize that just listening to the words said twice. It's a simple excercise, really.

It was also in same class that I learned that when reading phrases, group of words, and sentences, there should be a flow, a smooth transition from word to word. We Filipinos, by default, read words separately. The resulting sentace would sound staggered. (And this would be fine, actually. There is nothing wrong sounding that way. We are Filipinos, afterall, and even in a small country as ours, we have hundreds of languages.) But if you are going to do it a different way, you can, for example, say "of" as "ov" , or  "let me" as "lemme".

Which brings me... I've seen ads, and I bet you have too, saying that if you enrol in their class, you'll have an American accent in a month. The target of course, are people who want to have a job in a call center. I don't know why people are so fixated on having the "accent", the "American sound"  and forget that before anything else, one has to learn the rules on basic grammar and correct pronunciation of words. I have heard people who are so proud of showing off their accent, very confident with their twang and all but are terribly grammatically incorrect. They are so conscious of getting the sound and thus, forgetting their subject and verb aggrement.

Alright, I am no linguist. I do not claim that my English is impeccable. I get confused when to use lay, laid, lain and I sometimes say, "It can't be worse, is it?" (It should be, "It can't be worse, can it?"). I just feel bad that we all want to sound "American". I mean, you can still be good in English without having to sound like you were raised in Chino Hills (Case in point: Why do most, if not all, of our FM radio DJ's, sound like they were broadcasting from KCLA? You can listen to any early morning show on radio and you'll know what I mean.)

But then again, the American accent will come in handy just in case you need to work in a call center. Just in case...

Traffic was not bad. In fact, it was one of those rare mornings when traffic was clear. Thing is, I was in a bus whose driver has a penchant for stopping at bus stops for an awfully long time. And when he decides to drive, he drives at a really painfully slow pace, I counted 20 buses and 15 cars speeding past us in 10 minutes. The trip is mathematically possible, including factors such as bad traffic but excluding engine trouble, in a little over than an hour and a half. But that morning, it was 2 and a half hours.

I do not demand the driver races the bus to F1 speeds. I just wanted him to drive and cover as much kph as safely as possible. No, I just wanted the bus to move. I took the bus precisely because it is not humanly possible to walk the distance between home and where I need to be. But, for not a very few minutes, I was seriously considering that.

What can make it worse? If I whined and cussed. Loudly. I mean, I am pissed off and frustrated and all but it's just in my head. I am seated right behind the driver. I see what he sees, including 90% of what's on both side mirrors and about 50% of what's on the rear-view mirror. I can tell that we could go faster. If I whined and cussed, and the driver heard me, and he sure will, he could've done either two things: (1) dismiss me as disgruntled paranoid in heavy eyeliner; or  (2) cuss back at me and start a verbal joust. I didn't want either so I sat there, patiently, quietly, right beside a grandma and her granddaughter

These are drawings, or at least what I call it, that I did some time ago on Paint. You know that tiny little applications on Windows that you see when you click on Start>All Programs>Accessories (Yes, I know you know that. But years of tech support will make you automatically talk that way.) And yes, I used a mouse to draw. I've already posted it some other place(s). I still cant think of other subjects to draw. Perhaps when I get Illustrator on my pc. Oh, well.

P.S. The profile pic is not my drawing. It's way too beautifully done. I got it from deviantart.com.

I was supposed to repost all my previous posts from another blog here but you know how it is when you discover just in time that you actually have an evil twin sister who is more level-headed than you are? Well, evil twin sister suggested that I don't even attempt to migrate my other blog here. But who cares?

*And this is completely foolish, mocking myself and all. The entry above is an actual post. And I am reposting it. Oh, well, I'm terribly trying not to. I've got blogs everywhere. Well, almost everywhere. I don't know why I don't/can't have just one blog and then keep and maintain it. I'd save myself the trouble of reposting. Perhaps I need to consult more with my hyperlogical, clear-headed evil twin sister. Just so I'd have a better grasp of things.