Q - Quo Vadis?

Quo Vadis? Where are you going?

This latin phrase came to me today as  I was thinking of an inspiration for the letter Q.  I heard this for the first time  from Mr. P †, my  Journalism  teacher in my Junior year in high school, as he drafted  a speech, which I delivered for a rhetorical competitionI participated in, representing my alma mater.

He was an inspirational mentor, and together with Mr. S † my class advisor and English teacher helped me in cultivating my writing talent.  The latter encouraged me to join the high school newspaper of which Mr. P was the advisor.

Consulting the wikipedia, I learned of the origin of this latin phrase for the very first time.  It seems very apt to use it reflect on it today, very timely for this Holy Week, to ask : where am I going?

My clear answer is, I am going with my family wherever our united endevours takes us.  Yes, that would be my initial answer.

If I think of it from the perspective of being an individual, within the unit of a family, I will reply: where truth, hopes and dreams leads me.

As a writer, my answer would me: where I could connect with minds, soulful spirits,  who wants to inspire and be inspired.

Yes, I have places to go, life's planes to cover,  and excited to be in different soulful journeys.

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This image was taken Easter 2009, and is currently my desktop image

What about you, where are you going?

P - Paglalambing: a Polylingual's choice word

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Today is one of those days that there are simply too many words for the letter of the day, that I want to write about but too little time to focus on writing a coherent post about one particular subject.

Thus, the tag (or as they call it here in Blogger, the label!) preview post was born years ago because this has happened many times to me in the past yeas of blogging, and I am introducing it here for the first time!

I have used this tag previously as I was still blogging anonymously.  If you have been following me from the very beginning, from the other blogging sites, I posted at, you will know about my effort at simplifying my writing.  I aim more for continuous writing versus the aiming for the perfect blog, in an active battle against chronic writer's block and the painful tendency to want to have everythig perfect, that I end up not doing anything at all.

See, as I re-read the paragraph I have written so far, many P words are popping right at you, such as:

Preview
Posting
Perfect blog
Painful

and for me even between the lines I can see so many P words:

Past
Perfectionist
Procrastination
Possibilities

Ultimately, I chose a Filipino word that I introduced to P tonight as we were clearing a misunderstanding.  I felt the word does not actually translate in other languages because of it's cultural meaning.

The word is paglalambing (rough English translation: caress, tenderness) , which when I looked up in Google translate for the Dutch equivalent gave me the word de tederheid as translation.  Automatically, I also look it up in German (Zärtlichkeit) because having lived half of my life in Germany, made me emotionally connected to that language; sometimes knowing the word in German gives me a better way of explaining the emotion behind a certain word I am trying to translate.

I chose this subject to feature tonight because it was the last subject I talked about before the house fell quiet, and I am at peace to sit down and post a blog.  Also, I do love words and languages, and talking about my love for speaking multiple languages.

See yet again, I could have used P for polylingual as a subject for tonight!

Alas, I can't elaborate more on the paglalambing subject because I am passing out even as I write this line!  Therefore, I am naming this a preview post of a subject I will take time to write about when the A to Z Blogging challenge, April 2011 is at it's end!

I can do this...yeah, this is  after all my blog (I have to remind myself of this fact, on more than one occasion!) and I can set the rules and parameters.  Or not have any at all!


Do you speak a foreign language? If you do, why did you learn it, and would you like to learn more?