#7: Daydreaming about the future

When you see me staring blankly at a distance, I'm in some sort of a trance, dreaming about the future and thinking of where life will take me several years from present. I'm silently planning things in my head and building up strategies on how to turn them into reality.

Have you ever done that? Daydreaming, yes. Perhaps, a thousand times. But planning your life while in that state, I don't think so.

Many people don't follow a plan in living their lives. Either because they don't believe in plans and they think that they just complicate things, or because they just want to play it safe and they think that when they fail to get to where they intend to go, they will just feel disappointed and live the rest of their lives in despair.

Others are just too lazy to plan, so they just live life as it is without any goals of making it better. Still others think that planning makes life boring. For them, doing what they feel to do at the moment gives more thrills and sends them to great euphoria.

They're not seeing the point. Planning doesn't necessarily mean that we must follow a pattern to reach our destination. We plan to discover more opportunities and explore other possibilities that are greeting us on the way. Plans are reference points, the starting line of the track towards our goal. If we don't get there the way we want to, at least we know where to go back. We won't have to start from scratch.

There are a lot of turning points along the way. Life is not a straight line. It has curves and forks and winding roads. So, if you don't device strategies in taking your journey, you'll get lost.

Take some time to plan your life and plot points where you can return to when all else fails. When you have a plan, you are sure that you're not crossing the Rubicon. A life that is played safe is more boring, you know.

#3: Playing GTA

Grand Theft Auto is not new, but for someone who isn’t a game enthusiast, it will always be. I’ve known it for a number of years now, and yet, the missions in the game are all new to me.

So, when there’s nothing to work on, I click the application and enter a virtual world of stealing cars and accomplishing missions.

I have two versions of the game on my computer—San Andreas and Vice City. There are four (or five?) already, but I do not know where to get the other versions (perhaps somebody out there can help me?).

What I love about this game is that I can be a rogue for an hour or two. Of course I don’t want to be a bad guy in real life, I don’t want to commit sins and spend my precious life behind bars, so might as well get the experience from a game. Also, I’ve found my drive in playing this game from my love for action movies. I love doing those chasing scenes and firing guns—just in the game.

You can shoot the police when they're chasing you.

The cheat codes make the game more exciting. With a few taps on the keyboard, I can obtain items that I want to acquire. I can also be instantly rich by just typing a code.

Steal and drive fancy cars around Vice City.

You can steal police cars and do vigilante missions.

Type "J-U-M-P-J-E-T" and get this jet on San Andreas. That's my favorite, actually.

Drive around winding roads and highways and perform insane stunts--just like in actions movies.

The game’s really exciting. Just don’t steal cars and kill people in real life. What you do in the game must stay in the game.

#2: Reading novels

"No matter how busy you may think you are, you must always find time for reading, or surrender yourself to self-chosen ignorance."

-Confucius

If you want to be taken to another world, portraying a different character, one you’ve always wanted, day dreaming won’t be enough. You need descriptive words carefully arranged in a manner artistically fit for narrative and are figuratively jumping out of the paper to really feel that you are in another world. A world inspired by life’s experiences and realities and made more beautiful by imagination.

My love for reading novels started in second year high school. During break times, I would go to the library and skim titles of prospective finds. When a title caught my interest, I would borrow it.

The novel I most recently read.

The first novel I read back then was something about a frightful summer. I just forgot the title and the author. The plot went on with the main character (a girl) meeting another girl who pretended to be her cousin whose parents died when they lost their house to a blaze and who turned out to be a witch (it was found out that she wasn’t appearing in photographs).

The passion grew more when I read such famous titles as “Memoirs of a Geisha” by Arthur Golden and “The Da Vinci Code” and “Angels and Demons” by controversial author Dan Brown. All of these have movie adaptations which make them more interesting.

I also sank my intellectual curiosity on the world phenomenon Harry Potter by J.K. Rowling. I would always snub it before, thinking that the series was just a nonsense children’s magical fantasy, but when I read all seven books in second year college, I realized that the epic tale of Harry Potter was more than just a children’s story book. Since then, I’ve become a Potterhead. I so love the plot I always imagine myself as Harry James Potter, cursing death eaters and counterattacking Voldemort’s Avada Kedavra with Expelliarmus (yeah, I’ve memorized several spells I read in the books).

Great things happen out of the ordinary. Harry Potter sprang to life when J.K. Rowling started writing his story on tissue paper. Making my heart race when the climax comes, reading novels has always been an entry in my “to do” list when I’m not busy. It always ignites my imagination and carries me to different worlds I can only dream of. I will never stop reading. And someday, I will write my own novel and fascinate other bookworms like me.

#1: Eating 'tokneneng'

It’s pretty clear that I cannot use my size and weight as proof, but believe me, I love food. That is why whenever I have nothing to do, it’s the first thing I look for. And talking about eating when not busy, the first that comes to mind is tokneneng.

For those who don’t know what tokneneng is (perhaps they come from a very wealthy family and the street food they know is the one that’s coming from fastfood chains, or there might be foreigners reading my blog whose curiosity has been ignited), it is a boiled duck egg colored orange and covered with water-and-flour mixture which will then be dip-fried.  Sold on carts along sidewalks, it has become a regular snack of many.

And I’m one of those who have fallen in love with this protein-rich delight. In fact, it has already become my comfort food, giving me a jump in my heart and my taste buds some kind of pleasure it craves for after a day’s hard work. Dipping it in vinegar spiced with red chilli just makes it more delicious and undeniably mouth-watering. 

Add to that the happiness you get, not just from the food itself, but from that moment of eating it with your friends who have also been looking forward to spending quality time with you.

And the best drink to gulp down after consuming a mouthful of tokneneng? WATER. (Burp)