Lips

Have your lips ever

Adorned words of poetry

If not, they should have.

5 Important Life Lessons from Barack Obama

All around the world, headlines carried Barack Obama’s historic win when he was declared the 44th president of the United States of America. For a lot of people, Obama’s victory didn’t only signify his own. As the first African-American leader of a country with a harsh history of racial apartheid, his win ushered in a new era for American society.

As the US remains to be the planet’s lone superpower capable of influencing global affairs, it is easy to understand the worldwide elation that followed his win. He single-handedly initiated changing how the world viewed the US and Americans.

However, a deeper knowledge of Obama’s life will reveal that his struggle had been as personal as much as it was political. His rise from humble beginnings to become perhaps one of the most highly anticipated occupants of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue is rife with lessons everyday people can learn from.

Lesson no. 1: Dream big

Obama was born in Hawaii to parents who met at the University of Hawaii. He was an offspring of an interracial marriage: his father was raised in a small Kenyan village and his mother was similarly a small-town Kansas girl. When his father eventually returned to Kenya, he stayed in Hawaii with his mother. When he turned 6, he moved to Indonesia and attended grade school at the Southeast Asian country.

When Obama was in third grade, he wrote an essay detailing his dream of some day becoming president. The young Obama said his dream was borne out of a desire to make everybody happy. According to his teacher, he wasn’t sure which country Obama had in mind. Regardless, the interesting anecdote reveals the beginning of Obama’s vision that turned out to be around 40 years in the making but nevertheless bore fruit. Read more

11 Years of Blogging

Today, I celebrate my 11th year of blogging. Yes, I am a pioneer blogger of my generation and one of the first Filipino bloggers. And yes, it’s been 11 years since I transferred from gaudy, ring-bound diaries to the more intangible and amazing cyberspace. I always liked the idea of paperless writing while studying at UP. Hauling volumes of multicolored diaries from one dorm to another was just too much. So blogging became the solution in the twinkling of an eye.

My earliest blogs were on the defunct Blog-city, which lasted for three years. It enjoyed its own level of fame and had a loyal following from all over the world, mostly amateur poets and lyricists. I blogged anonymously as I always dreamt of unfiltered and candid entries. My blog had no major drama and consisted mainly of posts on childhood memories, everyday mundaneness, and my life away from home. I also tried my hand in poetry, which eventually led to my first poetry book to be published.

As days passed and as the number of my readers grew exponentially, I had to look for a blogging platform that allowed layout customization. Blogdrive came to the rescue. By then, I was a law student at the Ateneo. My blog was my cushion and my lonesome ally on many nights at Starbucks (it was when most law students in my school spent hours upon hours at coffee shops) — I was able to vent out frustrations and disappointments in cyberspace while trying to remain incognito. It was cathartic to criticize my professors and the system. My words wanted to break free so badly and when they did, they were unstoppable. I had legions of readers (mostly law students) who followed my entries on a daily basis. Blogging was in a totally different spectrum as writing case digests and it offered a secure place for a law student’s deeper reverie. Read more