At age 17, I was certain that this life of mine is gonna be short lived. I wasn’t diagnosed with any terminal disease nor do I have inborn abnormalities. The only health hazard I have is the tons of extra fat hanging on every part of my body. Being well read, I learned early on that my state of obesity triggers a lot of complications later on in life and that if I don’t wanna suffer in old age, probably alone, I should plan a way to end my life at 25 but after 4 attempts at suicide and a new perspective of life, I think the worse thing I can possibly do to myself is to get drunk or have my eyes endure long hours of sleeplessness while surfing the web or reading a good book.

Tomorrow, May 6, will be my 23^rd birthday and like the past years, I spend the day before that, May 5, looking back at my past and trying to come up with a list of the things I have accomplished, the lessons I learned, and trying to look the bright side of the darkest events I had been through. Since I know how a blog, I think I’m gonna start making this a yearly blogging tradition.

Here is a list of what I have accomplished:

• On an entrance test for high school, I got a score of a hundred and twenty one (121) in an Ottis-Lennon IQ Exam. I would have opted for a higher score to qualify for a membership in Mensa but just knowing that I was above average is a big deal already.
• At age 17, I was elected Sangguniang Kabataan Chairman of our barangay and eventually the overall president of the Sangguniang Kabataan City Federation. I was in service for 5 years until the end of my term last Novemeber, 2007.
• Won academic competitions.
• Passed the Professional Governement Career Service Exam in flying colors and even garnered the top post of my batch.
• Initiated the first Maasin City Battle of the Bands which has garnered popularity over the years and has been replicated throughout the province.
• Been to some of the top tourism destinations of the Philippines such as Cebu, Bohol, Davao, Boracay, Manila, Tagaytay, Limasawa, and Baguio.
• Got my first bank loan at age 17. Got a negative net worth 3 years after that and regained financial health 2 years after and gaining a lot of lessons about money management with that.
• Started my online venture at age 22 with no initial capital and now earning an average of $150 dollars every month.
• Invested on my family’s agricultural ventures.
• Got accepted in 3 of Cebu’s top call centers I applied on but eventually took the offer from Convergys.
• Got myself a Converse flip-flop.
• Bought my on motorcycle and PC.
• Read more than 50 novels.
• Learned HTML, PHP and Wordpress through self study.
• Learned to fix my own PC and refurbished an old one into a media server.
• Learned how to see the bright side out of the darkest life experiences and keeping my sanity mostly intact even when my family is dysfunctional.
• Conquered my fear of heights.
• Went river trekking at Hinagdanan Falls, Libagon, So. Leyte.
• Been to all 70 barangays of Maasin City and made friends with the local folks.
• Knew people who inspired me to be successful. Ma’am Essie, Governor Mian, Mayor Maloney, Ma’am Effie and the rest of my colleagues in the City Council.
• Been loved by the people who were in close contact with me and still to feels it even today.
• Made lots and lots of friends everywhere I go to.
• Stepped-up from my racial biases.
• Having loved without expecting to be loved in return.
• Being Agnostic and abandoning the religion my parents gave me.
• Keeping my battle with weight even if it’s a losing one.
• Being at peace with myself.

Here’s what I want to accomplish:

• To be wealthy enough to help others and influence national policies.

I don’t know if I’ll ever gonna have what I want to accomplish and I don’t know how long I’m gonna live either but as far as I’m concerned, every day’s gonna be a single step towards that goal.

Happy Birthday, Bendz! May you find true happiness!

This site will be two months old comes April 9 but I still haven’t reach my target Alexa rank yet. I was hoping to break the 100,000^th place before my second “monthsary” but it’s not going to happen specially now that I’m on the 7th day of Entrecard dropping hiatus and I stopped sending my posts to StumbleUpon and Digg.

My latest project, a local community site I called Maasinsii, is taking much of my time and energy lately. My lack of formal training on php programming and database management made it more time consuming as I try to grasp every new thing I read about the subject.

We now have more than 30 members and much of the marketing efforts are done only through Friendster and Myspace. I’m yet to cover about 7,500 users and leave them with a comment containing the site’s banner and link. I was hoping to find a software that could automate the process but haven’t found one, so far. Everyday, I see about 4-6 visitors referred from Maasisii and hoping to see more of them once I launch it officially comes June, the opening of classes.

Building your own social network or community discussion sites is a good way of establishing reader base or fan base, if you want to call it that, and it’s definitely better than Entrecard and best for your Analytics statistics too but that’s not what this post is about.

My fellow Pinoys who still watch local news may know about this story already and may have blogged about it days ago. (Shucks! I’m always late when it comes current events.) For those of you who don’t, well, here’s the story…

Almost a month ago, March 4, 2008, an Australian guy, Brian Gorrell, started his own blog to try to recover $70,000 dollars of life savings. Allegedly, his Filipino boyfriend, a columnist of a nationwide daily and a member of what they called the “Gucci Gang” composed of people from the Alta Sociedad, duped him into investing the amount for a fancy restaurant in Manila and a tourism related business in Boracay. Along the way, he also dish out the secrets behind their lifestyles which involves, cocaine, deceit, corruption, and the truth behind the death of a socialite a year ago.

The Blogspot hosted blog has garnered closely 2 Million visits and has been featured in several newspapers, TV shows and currently holding the 72,631^st spot on Alexa. It’s worth mentioning that judging from the looks of his blog, the guy is a newbie to blogging and I doubt he knows anything about search engine optimization or other methods most of us painstakingly do in order to get our contents noticed.

Gorell’s blog is proof that controversy blogging is slowly transforming into an established niche just like make money blogs. I’ve seen many of them cropping up the bloggosphere and gaining popularity and reader loyalty as well.

I’ve been harboring on thoughts of spicing up my contents and making it a bit controversial by going against the mainstream, which I usually do in real life, but I’m concerned of how my 100+ subscribers would respond to such move. I’ve worked hard for that number and I don’t want my feed chicklet to plummet.

My previous post about Manny Pacquiao has gained that much of an attention that a fellow Entrecarder posted it on Entrecard blog and accusing me of hitting bellow the belt and a commenter also said I was being a racist. I’ve been called a lot of names, in Tantra Online Forums, I’ve even been called a bitch by someone who obviously don’t know what that word means and I don’t really care about what others think. However, I have plans to make this blog big and would need every single reader I can have to attain that goal so it’s better not to piss them off right?

Well, I guess I’ll save controversial posts and opinions until I get to where I want to be.

Have you written a controversial post already? How did your reader respond?