Slip of the Pen

Those words came from the day’s first well-wisher, Ia. She greeted my blog a happy birthday through SMS, at around one o’ clock in the morning.

Yes, you read that right. Slip of the Pen turns one this day! Not that there are many people who’ll care, but damn is December 29 a special day for this kid, er, corsair. This blog is my very first one, which means that Corsarius the blogger has also leveled up from infant to toddler.

The voyage began simply enough. (Now, that’s dramatic.) I was looking for some place to ’self-publish’ my written pieces, or at the very least, a place where I’ll be forced to write regularly. (Unfortunately, ‘regularly’ can mean every other day or every other week.) Ia — the mysterious lady who goes around visiting (nay, stalking!) blogs while not keeping her own — introduced me to the world of blogging several months before December 29, 2004. At first I didn’t give crap about blogs; heck, even the word “blog” is ugly. (Mabantot na salita, in Tagalog.) So it was a great moment of self-contradiction when I published my first post for my first blog, christened Slip of the Pen.

To all the people who visited this blog, thank you very much. And I mean it. Thank you to the people who regularly dropped by in spite of my oft-mentioned delinquence (for the nth time, my apologies), thank you to the people who perused every entry and burrowed deep into my archives (come on, let the birthday blogger dream), and thank you even to those who only chanced upon this page then clicked on “Next Blog” in a jiffy (it’s the thought that counts). I may have used comical wording, but the “Thank you” is serious. I’m dead serious about that.

To reach 10,000+ hits whilst only posting 62 entries (What’s that, almost one post per week? Horrible!) is quite a source of joy and inspiration for me. And so are the precious tags on the chatbox and comments on every blog entry. I like hearing from readers what they think about this and that piece. Maraming salamat. (That’s “Thank you” in Tagalog.)

Allow me to gratify myself, and present the choice picks for the year that was:

• Sketch. In my own words, “For vanity’s sake, here’s a short vignette about this blogger.”
• Inseparable. My poetic attempt at doing justice to Pepoy’s great pic taken in UP.
• Five Acts of Valentine’s Day: A Postmortem. Dissecting February the 14th has never been so fun.
• The Fall. The Corsarius tries supernatural fiction.
• Dead Cats. An old animal rights essay.
• The Mighty Mouse. In the enigmatic Transience’s words, “This is f*cking hysterical!”
• Habemus Corsarium. I am who I am. Or am I?
• Disjointed Prettiness Ahead. I am playing favorites by again quoting Transience: “Pure f*cking literature.” F-words can be elegant, you know.
• The Filipino Can Do It. My org, UP ACM, wins an international competition. ‘Nuff said.
• The Something of Nothingness. Writer’s block obliterated.
• Deviations. Fiction. Not for children.
• Jupiter Falls. Gold lightning, baby.
• Bottling Up the Ink. A good excuse for delinquent writers.
• Poems: Madness by the Candlelight. A trifecta of senseless verse.

Fortuna dies natalis, Lapsus Calami!

Phantasmagoria
is a big word, and so is
trepidation. Too big for me.
I know hallucination, even discombobulation,
but they’re long, unwieldy.
I’d prefer a single syllable,
the one which goes between
selfish I’s and demeaning You’s,
crafting a phrase entirely unselfish,
entirely exalting.

But I worry that one syllable’s too short —
too short! —
too short that it’s become
cliché.


04:09 AM
December 20, 2005

Hell no, this is not a programming post.

Prof. Paolo Manalo, our teacher in CW 198 (Online Writing) is to blame for this gem of an idea. How many of you are aware of the ‘Book of Answers’? A waste of good paper, I say, but still useful for the utterly bored and/or the utterly listless people. You know the drill — concentrate until you feel you are the nexus of the universe’s astral energies, ask a deep question extremely relevant to your life, then flip open the book. What you read first is what you get; question answered.

Prof. Manalo told the class that this ‘activity’ can actually give birth to a written piece (count the un-literary ones), so I gave it a shot. My Book of Answers: Concepts of Programming Languages, by R. Sebesta. My question (whispered to me by my astral alter ego): What is this blog? More specifically, what are the words which best describe my blog?

With a pompous jerk of my hands, I flipped opened the book. Ta da! The divine answer:

Parameterized Abstract Data Type.

Divine answer all right, straight from the geek gods. If the phrase sounds Greek to you, then take comfort in the knowledge that I, a programmer, was confounded, dumbfounded, and humiliated by the answer. What the hell does that mean?

Life poses many mysteries, and answers can only be found by delving deep into our subconscious and, yes, daydreams. And finally, after much rumination (10 minutes is lengthy prison time for the wandering mind), I have broken down the answer and arrived at the conclusion that this blog, Slip of the Pen, is indeed a parameterized abstract data type.

Parameterized. Everything is bounded, restricted, chained to some rule. Even the free wolf can only roam where there is prey. The corsair can only sail seas where the law doesn’t hold; the cutlass can only remain unscratched when sheathed. Same goes for this blog. What I write here has limitations — you haven’t seen the worst of me, nor the best. You have seen the bad and the good, but not all. Knowing me only in person won’t work either. I’m a writer, so part of me lives in the pedestrian world and another in the pen-world. Know both, know me all.

Abstract. Writers, insert knowing laugh here. Many artists proclaim their work as abstract, and love to hear others comprehend and imbue mystical meanings to their art. I guess the same goes for me (even though I write in relatively concrete images). This blog is an abstraction of its author — it presents to you the Corsarius through a mishmash of vignettes which, oddly enough, have something in common.

Data type. What is a data type? According to E.P. Quiwa, it’s the kind of data a variable may take on in a programming language. Examples are integers (9 and 23), characters (i and x), Boolean values (true and false). To put it more bluntly — it’s a category. And without trepidation, I can say that this blog is a category of its own. Why, every blog is! Each blog has that x-factor, that intangible something which renders it inimitable. My blog and your blog might have similarities, but they are not the same. Don’t be misled by web directories which order you to “kindly place your blog under the most relevant category, e.g. literary, technology, showbiz, etcetera”. They’re only there to give some semblance of homogeneity amongst blogs. Use them, but don’t let them dictate what your blog is all about.

So, there you go, my friends. Parameterized abstract data type. In short, Slip of the Pen.

I gave the Book of Answers a shot. Try it, too. Let me know what profound answer you get, so I can share with your delight (or misery).


(You might be asking: why this blog-centric post? Admittedly, I’m excited about this month. December marks the birth of this blog and my blog-life. 29 is the special day.)