SUBHEAD: everything you wanted to know (but didn’t ask), but restricted to only what he wants to tell

Guys, this is going to be serious. As I’ve reached a year of blogging, I feel I need to define what I really am and who I’ve become.

I’ll try to make this as accurate as possible, so please bear with me.

And oh, I believe our perception of ourselves is always evolving, so I would change this page bit by bit as time passes. New characteristics would be in green, while those going the way of the dodo will be red for a week to give them a chance to resuscitate themselves, or else they are deleted.

Okay, here it goes…

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Name: Mark Angelo Virly Ching

Birthday: March 14, 1988

Age: 20 years old

Weight: 129lb, 4oz/58.7 kg

Height: 5 feet, 7.3 inches/ 171 cm

Blood pressure: max systolic: 127 - min diastolic: 71 - pulse/minute: 98

Fat Index: 12.5%

Religion: Catholic

School: University of the Philippines-Diliman

Course: BA Journalism

Current Standing: cum laude

Organizations: The Philippine Collegian, UP Scrabble Club

Miscellanea: His real surname is Cheng. According to some accounts, when his great great grandfather, a Chinese immigrant, reached the Philippine shores, he mistakenly wrote down an ‘i’ instead of an ‘e’.

However, according to his brother, he must have mistaken a story the brother told him as the truth in their case. The brother said their grandfather’s birth certificate had been misspelled, and that their grandfather’s brothers and sisters have the ‘Cheng’ surname. Odd one out, he dares to say.

He likes the first story better though. He thinks it’s more noble.

He had always dreamt he was Japanese.

He loves Japanese food, Japanese hairstyles, the Japanese people, Japanese customs, Japanese movies, and everything Japanese.

He’s teaching himself Nihonggo. He knows some words, but only the basic ones, like the ’sore’ verbs.

His real birthdate is uncertain. Entries in his birth certificate are confusing. Under birthdate, the date March 14 1988 is typed in, but under time and date of birth (found way below the document) we can read March 13, 1988. Add to that confusion is the date when the midwife filed the certificate for my mom: March 13. So the question is, can you file a birth certificate in advance for a person to be born a day later?

He is currently 19 year old, but looks older. One of his previous professors called him “Tatang” in class, even having the nerve to ask how much delayed this guy is in graduating college.

He thinks he weighs heavy, though he’s not fat.

He’s a person who loves to be fit. He works-out to have muscles–pecs, biceps, triceps, abs and all. He tries to do more than a hundred each of push-ups, curl-ups and pull-ups a day when he can.

He looks tall, but dreams to be taller, like, being 7 feet tall or something.

He donates blood when he can, but people at blood-letting volunteer centers always restrict him because he has low blood pressure.

His blood pressure and pulse rate are getting worse. A month ago, his minimum diastolic was 79, and his pulse rate was 89.

He was agnostic/atheist once.

By being careless and carefree, (and by being contented in being cum laude) he has hit low grades.

His lowest grade so far is 2.50. He still doesn’t have 5s, INCs or 4s.

His current over-all average is 1.612068966. To be a magna cum laude, he needs to have only 1s and 1.25s in the rest of his stay in UP.

He thinks this will be hard though, because professors in his department do not give those grades often. They grade subjectively, based on your writing style and theirs.

He promises to do his best.

He endangered his life by joining the Philippine Collegian as a layout artist, working most of the time at night. It is very bad for people with low blood pressure to lose sleep.

In the past, he had been very careless with money to the point where he’d lose most of his monthly earnings in a day.

Being touched by The Work changed him though. Now he’s super-thrifty to the point of being a cheapskate.

So he does not eat much when in school.

He likes starving himself while working in the Collegian, even though the four ATM machines in the ground floor of the building can still spare him hundreds.

He can make it through a night just by eating sixteen pieces of fishball. Then he’ll be working in the Collegian overnight.

He’s as independent as he thinks he is. He does not ask money from his parents anymore. He even pays for his own tuition fee.

He loves photography, page design, and writing.

He mostly dabbles in writing fiction.

He thinks he’s a great writer, to the point of calling himself Stephen King’s heir.

Now he’s not so sure.

He loves reading horror stories. He loves making them too.

He’s too lazy to write them down though.

He collects books and reads them. His favorite authors are Stephen King and Dick Francis.

He dreams of reading all the books in the world.

He recently discovered he’s better in poetry when the lights are off. Automatic poetry, that’s what he calls it.

His most favorite art movement is surrealism.

He likes surrealist art. He likes weirder movies.

His favorite weird/art movies are: Dancer in the Dark, Amelie, Amores Perros, Being John Malkovich and Requiem for a Dream.

He likes musicals. He has watched, and fell in love with: Rent, Chicago, My Fair Lady and Singin’ in the Rain.

He likes Asian horror movies better. He can watch Batoru Rowaiaru, Kairo, Ringu, Ju-on and Hongrwa Hongryeon again and again. He wants to watch Suicide Circle, Acacia and Kuchu Teien in the future.

He also dreams of watching the Filipino classics like Insiang, Maynila sa Kuko ng Liwanag, Bona, Kisapmata, among others.

He loves teaching others. He likes helping without asking for anything.

You can call him selfless. He thinks of the sake of others before his own.

He would love to get a third eye, though it would be scary.

He’s obsessive-compulsive in some instances.

He can tell when you’re lying or not. Right now, he believes some people are lying to him outright, but he just plays it out with them.

He loves being brutally honest to people.

When people are not brutally honest to him, he really feels lied upon. Then he gets anxious thinking why that particular person lied to him.

His anxiety attacks are always extreme. It is the first level of his severe depression.

He hopes to confront liars one day.

He normally lives each day being as honest as he can be.

He is a great liar though. He is a master at it.

He hates the bastardization of language.

He types all his text messages fully. It is stupid not to, he thinks.

He believed he was ugly before. He had lots of pimples and his hair was very bad.

He likes to wear caps and hats. He collects them too.

He wears a fedora to school. He says he would also wear his tuxedo if the sun would not be too hot.

He’s not too picky on his food. He eats what he is served.

He doesn’t want to be a vegan. He thinks God created meat for human consumption. What we need to change, he says, is how we kill animals for our consumption.

He’s an environmentalist. He hates dolphin shows and wants to free all animals in the zoos.

He is a pacifist. He hates war.

He can’t help it but believe in his daily Horoscope. He wants not to be superstitious, though.

He doesn’t panic when disasters come. He thinks he’ll stay cool, even enjoying the view.

He worries about the most little things though.

What he prays for is serenity.

He can sacrifice himself for another.

Does he have friends? In the past he had been thinking that nobody needs him, that it was just better disappear.

He can sense people who like him and those who do not. Psychic? No.

He’s deeply empathic and can feel what others are feeling. He can then respond as he wants.

He always has a hard time fitting in a group. Usually it takes him weeks before he gets accustomed to new people.

He hates being rejected, so he makes sure first that the new people won’t reject him before he opens up.

He hates being late.

But he moves slowly every morning.

He loves routine. He likes it when everything he has to do for a day is planned by another for him.

He loves watching Heroes and US reality shows, especially American Idol.

His favorite idol is Fantasia Barrino.

He hates Wowowee because it has fooled people before and then killed them.

He loathes Willie Revillame deeply. This man should be hanged, he thinks.

Surprisingly, he likes watching ABS-CBN 2’s Maging Sino Ka Man (Whoever You Are). He thinks the camera shots (and compositions) are good, and that the dialogue is great. Rosanna Roces and Angelica Panganiban are also great actresses.

He hates Hollywood. It is full of crap, he says.

He has a cold for about 80 percent of the year.

He thinks he has perfect eyesight.

He wants to wear eyeglasses.

So he tries hard to dim his eyesight, but to no avail. He thinks it will stay 20/20 forever.

He hates uncertainty. He hates things he doesn’t know anything about. He hates situations he can’t control, or people he can’t understand. They make him anxious, then depressed big-time.

He loves Math because it works in the land of certainty. One plus one will always be two, and the square root of four is always two. And so on.

He is not in Journalism just because. He is in Journalism not because he can’t do Math.

He is a Math whiz. He’s in Journalism not just because he sucks at numbers, or because his brain’s skill is limited on words only. Untrue.

He believes that because most of the people who go to the media courses today go there because they hate numbers, he would go to media to at least add a number-lover to it. A journalist who loves numbers is a hero.

He loves fine dining.

He would love to learn how to cook.

He’s always dead serious. He deals with life not as a game, but as a job.

He only has a mild interest in politics.

He does not believe in authority. He thinks of authority figures as his equals only.

He doesn’t like following orders. He likes having his own way.

He’s very open to suggestion though.

People abuse this at times. Once, although he really wants to go home at 8 PM, his editor suggested that he stay. He did and went home at 11 PM.

He hated his editor for that.

He holds grudges. He won’t forgive some people for they’ve done to him until now.

He’s great in research. He knows a lot more than what you think.

He’s great in spying on people. He can sit in a room, looking like he’s very concentrated on something, when in fact he hears every sound around him.

He loves to snoop. Journalistic powers, he says.

He never forgets faces and names.

He plays the flute. He’s not great though.

He sings a lot. He doen’t think he has a good voice though.

But he dreams of joining Philippine Idol.

Music is his life. He can’t pass a day without listening to a song.

He can listen to any song in particular, except Pinoy Rap songs. They are only for stupid people, he thinks.

He’ll always stay loyal to songs that boggle him, poetic songs he can’t understand upon first hearing.

Thus he loves Tori Amos’ “Sleeps with Butterflies” and “The Power of Orange Knickers”.

He also loves songs that criticize the Bush administration, like Incubus’ “Megalomaniac” or Pink’s “Dear Mr. President” or Tori Amos’ “Yo George”.

Though it may not be obvious ’til now, his favorite artist is Tori Amos though she sang anti-Catholic songs in the past, like “Father Lucifer” and “Muhammad my Friend”.

He is currently becoming what he so hated to be in the past.

He has taken SocSci 3 (Gender and Sexuality) under sex guru Prof. Margarita Holmes, whom he believed instantly.

Now he’s turning everything he learned from her inside out.

He doesn’t have beliefs etched on stone. Before The Work, he supported abortion, contraception, homosexuality, and hated the Church for opposing the things mentioned. He was also pro-choice, pro-porn.

Now he believes everything on the contrary. He’s now pro-censorship too.

He’s very malleable. He believes very easily.

He may believe about one thing, but this belief can easily be changed by reading critiques of that belief.

He needs help in carving beliefs on stone.

This is dangerous, he thinks. In the future, if a satanist approaches him and talks to him, will he relent and become a Wican?

He prays to God that he won’t.