now it's a myriad things invading my mind

a friend emailed me a list of tips to stay healthy and each of them is accompanied

by a cute picture of a kid om-nom-nom-ing.

While filling in forms for US visa application on behalf of my dad, my sis and I discovered something crazy on his birth cert. He was born out of wedlock! which explains the lack of my grandfather's name on it. We burst out laughing after our minds finally processed this fact. Mine was doing the whole nine yards of denying it for a full couple of minutes - frantically speed-reading the birth cert several times for something that would indicate otherwise.

For twenty over years, I never suspected a thing. This is discovery of the day for me..NO, of the YEAR. It's not an understatement at all. Other than this funny find, I didn't do much for the rest of the day. In fact, I spent it taking a freaking long nap (after waking up really late too) and waking up briefly only to stop the rumbling of my stomach before letting my muscles continue to atrophy once again. But nap hours are a bitch. My head refused to let me fall deep into slumber again no matter how hard I tried (sleeping is my favorite activity, or lack of it) so here I am, blogging nonsense while cleaning out my iTunes. Fine-tuning playlists is serious business. You'd know if you have more than 20GB of music stored on a computer and have tried to compress it into a smaller, higher-quality package before. This is taking me hours and I'm nowhere close to done! One wonders what's the iTunes of a music aficionado is like if the average person's like mine.

Anyway, I bought a local girl magazine a few days ago out of sheer boredom and as expected from a fashion/ent mag targeted at teenagers, the articles are peppered with English phrases here and there. It's great that a publication is doing its part to help influence the young to learn/speak more English but it's certainly not doing its best judging by the jarring misspelling , grammar errors and overuse of slang. Never mind the slang if it's used correctly but most of the time, it isn't. The impressionable ones are learning wrong sentence structures et cetera et cetera and it will continue on this way if nothing is done.

I think it's fine to make mistakes when one is learning a language earnestly but how do you differentiate the ones who are trying to learn it earnestly from the ones who are just trying too hard to come off as cool (and unfortunately, FAILED)? There isn't any one standard way that comes off the top of my heard right away right now but I usually gauge this by the formality of the sentences. It's best to write proper sentences in said language of interest before trying to rattle off slang that you don't even have a full grasp on. It just looks stupid.

And read. Read a lot to really improve your fluency.

I'm seriously considering writing a letter to said publication regarding their consistent mistakes in every single new issue. What is the editor doing???????? Miss P. Moran, please buck up! Maybe I should apply to be a part-time proofreader there. Clearly relying on their interns' half-assed English is not helping them scale new heights in terms of quality. I'm assuming it's the interns who are doing the magic peppering on the articles since they are schooled in institutions that teach English extensively (to my knowledge of the education field in this city).

Let's not touch on the copyright infringement problem for using unauthorized images of celebrities on their covers...YET.