skysenshi.com

(Offline Blogging: Saturday, 30 July 2011 at 19.14
Because there is no internet and I can’t complete my thesis.)

I haven’t really been blogging lately and it’s been a while since I have written about something on a really personal level (well, my deepest personal stuff I don’t post on this blog because those are meant only for my LJ, as they’ve always been for the last 10 years I’ve been privately blogging).

Anyway, last week, we had our company management seminar at “Da Farm”, this beautiful farm where we ate really great meals. Our CFO (also the wife of the CEO) is such a wonderful vegetarian cook, I thought she should run a healthy canteen. Aaaaaand the farm animals are…amazing.

Before I go to the real meat of this blog entry (I keep getting distracted by thoughts of food and cute little furries), I better post the photos first.

Tilapia pond. We have a tilapia pond at our Tagaytay farm, too, but it isn’t nearly this big.

The tilapia pond from afar.

The house situated at the center of the vast land. Its contemporary design is in contrast with the hunter-gatherer feel of the area.

A fun place to read.

You wake up to these fat little puppies.

Kulit, too.

Aaaaaand that’s sheep.

It sorta followed me around during my tour of the place.

This is my favorite area, where the goats are.

The huge-ass grandfather goat with a creepy smile. I heard it was imported.

You can touch its horns, but I was too intimidated by it.

Snobby kitteh.

This white cat had one blue eye and one yellow eye. I couldn’t take a photo of it up close since it was too paranoid.

Ok, now lemme segue into the real story I wanted to tell as I’m hoping this could help people (especially graduate students who are also working full-time) find their balance. The seminar we took in this place was about loving your job. Fortunately, all of us who were in that training already love our job. What I realized was that — while being asked about our goals — I have actually worn myself thin over so many things I wanted to do in so little time.

Let’s see. Everyone knows I’m taking my doctorate studies and hoping to finish by the end of this school year. I am also a Game Producer and now also handling the Communications Department. This makes me automatically active in industry organizations such as the Game Development Association of the Philippines (GDAP) and the International Game Development Association (IGDA) and these associations need to coordinate with government bodies like TESDA, CHED, the now defunct CICT (and we’re still talking!) and so on and so forth.

So basically I divide my time like this:

Weekday office hours = Work as Producer and work in Communications, including org meetings that may go way beyond office hours
Week nights (or week dawns) = Try to blog, if I get home before 9PM (which is now rare and I can’t stay up till midnight because I need to wake up at 4AM)
Saturdays = Work on my Philippine Online Chronicle articles, if something industry-related doesn’t come up
Sundays = Work on thesis (the average PhD dissertations here in the country is about 10x as thick as college theses…why so long????)

And whatever free time I squeeze out of that, I try to do some personal art (because I want to compete again this year and hold an exhibit again next year)…which I can barely manage. I barf at my personal works now. They all look and sound so bleh.

Something has to give.

Well. My health did.

So here I am, unplugged, recovering (should have told that nurse that my vein is not a Tetrapak box), and thinking about things I could let go of. Well, that was hard. So, I decided to concentrate on the three goals that we were asked to name during the seminar:

1. To become a doctor by the end of the school year. (This is the key that unlocks a number of other quests, including #3.)
2. To own a museum/gallery.
3. To help the Philippine education system meet industry needs. (This, instead of World Peace, is my Ms. Universe dream.)

So all other decisions or activities I’d be doing from now on must be headed towards those three goals. That is still hard. The decision to resign from The Philippine Online Chronicles was difficult enough but I’m now reserving my writing energy for that gargantuan PhD tome I’m supposed to cough up on September 9. (August 2 Edit: Apparently, I’m now chasing after an August 15 deadline.)

I’m also not accepting any commissioned writing or web gigs from now on until I graduate. I will just end up disappointing/angering clients because my brain is all over the place. I’ve been pretty cranky, too.

Here are the other problems:

• Half of what I’m doing in the Communications Department are related to #3. (In fact it’s ironic that I’m doing more high-level education stuff now that I’m in the industry than when I was in the academe. I guess you can move more fluidly when you’re not tied down to one school.)
• What I do as a Game Producer is what will help me get #1 (and vice-versa). 
• I shouldn’t give up my blogs completely (though they haven’t been updated lately). They will help me get #2 because they’re related to my personal art.
• Social life is almost completely dead, since having one will not lead me to any of my goals. That’s just plain sad.

So…I haven’t really totally unloaded much, except maybe my blogs. I feel bad seeing them decline, as I just watch helplessly. I miss replying to my readers and reading everyone else’s blogs.

But anyway, once I get #1 off that list, I suppose I’ll be able to manage my time more freely so I’m now concentrating on accomplishing that as fast as I can. Until then…I just might need an assistant.

I do promise that I will be back and I will be back with a vengeance. =^.^= In the meantime, maybe you can talk to me about your personal life goals and how you want to reach them? Just drop a comment below so I’d know you guys are still there.

Thanks, y’all!