do you like my new skin?

i am meeting jeline later for pizza at cpk in morato. i have no idea how to get there yet but jeline says it's in a little glass building with salon de manila on the third floor and mario's restaurant nearby. this should be interesting. i just hope the cab driver can find it later.
meanwhile, i'm in the office, trying to catch up on some work. last week, i've been complaining about not having enough to do and filling my work hours with blogging and surfing. now, i have to spend extra time to catch up and i've neglected my blog, but not too much since i managed to find time to find a nice template and customize it for my blog.
you should check out the skins designed by this girl.most of her skins are kikay and have this "cartoony kiddy" effect that i like from emily the strange to mashimaro to popsicles to a nightmare before christmas to fortune cookie.basta, just check it out if you're in the mood for a new look for your blog.
i emailed sir john (despite his insistence to call him john, i still can's shake off the sir) yesterday after not hearing from him in a while. i love sir john. i've probably said lots of times to a lot of people, most of who just reply with polite silence. but i really don't mind because i really love the guy.
he's one of those people i really, really admire and would hate to disappoint and more importantly, i would want to be friends with forever. i met him during freshman year when he was my teacher in my two of my english classes. during the first semester, he introduced me to james joyce, franz kafka, edith tiempo and in the following semester, it was william butler yeats, elizabeth bishop, marjorie evasco, eric gamalinda and many others i couldn't even remember now. but more importantly, he reminded me how much i enjoyed literature by introducing me to new ways to appreciate it. if there was one person who greatly influenced me to take up writing again in college, it would be him.
at first, i was afraid of him because he was this seemingly uptight and serious teacher who had all these rigid rules about requirements. plus he had that wicked smile that says, you can't mess with me, i know what you're up to. and he liked teasing my classmates in class and i for one, don't deal with fame of that kind very well. so i tried to be as quiet and as invisible as i can in class. but a few weeks into the course, i had to talk to him about a quiz i missed because i had a meeting with my scholarship's benefactor. when he learned i was scholar, he was immediately sympathetic, apparently because he was a scholar in college as well. and so our friendship began. and so did his teasing of me in front of the class. but it was ok.
after freshman year, i seriously considered shifting to a creative writing course but he was the one who convinced to give it some thought and made me realize that my life doesn't have to be defined by my degree, that i can still be a writer even if my diploma says i'm a computer science graduate, that i don't have to choose between art and science. he was right, of course.
from then on, i would drop by his cubicle in the english department to ask his opinion about a new book or writers i coudl read for my interest at the moment or to show him my works. sometimes he would have a book for me that he picked in one of those secondhand bookstores. at other times, he has a cup of tea or a stash or banana cupcake ready. or we would be workshopping my poems which were filled with purple, green and red inks from his comments. but whenever i leave his corner, i always felt a little better, a little happier and more certain that i wanted to earn his respect and keep it.
when i didn't make it to heights during my second attempt, he was the one who made me snap out of my self-pity and encouraged me to pursue writing on my own. i spent the next few months rereading the poems he made us read in freshman class and hounding the library for new authors to read and learn more about the aesthetics of poetry. and i worked on my poems secretly because i was still worried he's find my works too juvenile. i didn't tell him that i submitted a folio for the heights workshop.i figured, why tell him? i'll just tell him if i get in. but he learned about it from dm anyway, the director of the workshop, when he told him that i got in. when he told me he was going to be one of the panelists for the workshop, i was excited because he'd be there when i get to strut my works.but he was unable to attend the workshop because he caught the flu that weekend.i might have been too vocal about my admiration for his talent or i simply talked about him too much that weekend that dm started referring to me as john's student after that.and i couldn't stop smiling, pathetic i know, but who cares.
anyway, i didn't feel too good about being associated to him after i didn't get the dean's awards. i felt that i let him down somehow although he never pressured me to get into workshops or win awards or get into contests.he just wanted me to enjoy my writing and be better at it.i felt bad about that and i don't know if it has something to do with why i have lose interest in writing.i just know i felt i didn't have the right to call myself a writer, that the past two years meant nothing because i didn't get the affirmation i wanted, that i badly needed before i set out into the "real world".and so here i am, still dodging the issue of why i lose interest in writing.and i feel even worse because i'm beginning to think that maybe i'm never gonna be a good writer, or maybe i never was, that i was merely into it for the novelty.ouch.