My left eye

I cannot cry anymore. That's the sad discovery I made last month November, and I believe it has to do with the tear duct in my left eye.

It started when I was watching the Strike Witches movie, and I was so happy, I had no idea it was going to be released last month and after the grueling 2 months of worrying about my 1TB hard drive, I was in desperate need of something to be happy about. And I was really happy to see the girls again, so happy I shed tears of joy, I missed the girls, I missed their pantsu, and when we first see Micchan, I was waiting, waiting and I cheered when her crotch came on screen, oh I loved it :D

Strike Witches means so much to me, when season 2 aired back in 2010, it was one of my most followed that Summer, and the girls make me so happy. But when it was all over, and I wiped those tears, I felt something was wrong. I was having that feeling whenever I feel a headache coming on, that all to familiar feeling I've felt many a time before, but this one was different. The pain was concentrated on the left side of my head around my eye, and I thought maybe I am having a headache, and I took it easy the rest of the day. Until the next day came by, and I still had the pain, I thought maybe it's one of those 2 day headaches I used to have, and I was watching less anime and sleeping more. This is when I went out that weekend, and the following week of my great Android kernel milestone I knew something was dead wrong. This pain was persisting. It was getting so bad, my eye started to hurt just like how it did back in April, and I then I knew right away, that it was my tear duct.

I'm not sure if I mentioned this before, but when the glue sealed my eye, it was a very intense pain, it was the most painful thing I ever felt while conscious, and the one thing I'll never forget: I was crying my eyes out. I think it was a normal reaction the eyes do should a foreign substance come into contact with the eye, but my eye was really pouring those tears as if to eradicate the glue in my eye. And it hurt, I remember clutching my head and I wanted to scream, but the pain was too much to even say anything. And somehow, maybe I became traumatized by that incident, in that whenever I cry again, that pain I felt in April come haunting me and severely demoralizing me. After I found this out, any attempt to form tears in my eye yields the same result; the pain in my eye. So that time when I bought my 750GB hard drive, I was looking, searching the nearest drug store for an eyepatch, I thought if there's one thing I can laugh at about this whole ordeal, if I can find an eyepatch like that girl in Chuunibyu, maybe I can take a pic of me twirling my fingers while wearing that thing. But I couldn't find any. In fact there was nothing for the eyes, they had all sorts of bandages imaginable, but nothing for the eye! What the hell kind of drug store/pharmacy is that that doesn't have medical care for ones eyes? (it's Watsons by the way)

This hit me hard, as I'm a rather emotional person, and it is one of the reasons why I don't like to see a girl cry, because it makes me feel real bad. And now, I have to learn to crush those emotions so that I never shed a tear again. That's impossible, the only way I can do that is to become an annoying bastard who takes pleasure in giving other people pain, completely the opposite of my nature. I don't want to do that, and not to mention there is anime with great drama enough to make me cry too, now I can't watch those?

I can no longer spend more than 14 hours awake. I can't do those 18 hour days I so loved to do a few years back, my life has changed. It's this experience that gave me an immense amount of respect for those people out in the world who lost a part of their body, be it an arm, or a leg, and people who need to wear an eyepatch for the rest of their lives, I have mad respect for you folks. You don't ever let it weigh you down, and no matter how painful the pain is, you're still alive, and that's the most precious thing I am very appreciative of right now. I may need to change the way I live my life from now on, but at least I'm alive. I can still enjoy seeing the things I love to look at, and even though it's a lesser amount than before, I'm happy to at least see something instead of permanently losing my eye.

Nov 23 - Dec 9, two weeks of Happyness and despair

On the week leading up to Nov 23, I was going to return to full form and resume my bloggyness. Unfortunately, my cold was getting worse and if there's one thing I hate, that is letting my health spiral out of control. November 23rd was supposed to be my celebration, which so happened to be Thanksgiving Day as well, but being the mangatron is not a rosy life.

My down times started when I went out that weekend before Nov 23, and my main purpose of that trip was to see prices of external hard drives out there so I can make plans for the end of the month. My destination was SM Megamall, and I was horrified to learn of the pricing there. In all the shops I looked in at their Cyberzone (a collection of electronics stores in one place), the average prices for a 500GB drive was PHP3999,99, simply speaking that's $100. One hundred one's for just 500GB? That's pathetic, and the reason why I was surprised was because in CDRKing's website, that's the price for a 1TB, and the CDRKing at SM Megamall had 320GB's over php3000, and I saw one person buying that, my god I felt sorry for them, being ripped off at that mall. I know for a fact it's that particular mall, because CDRKing wasn't alone in those exorbitant prices, other shops selling Buffalo drives had the same ridiculous pricing.

Me not being able to speak the local language makes things harder (yeah not every store speaks english), as I was not sure if they have a "price guarantee" like in the USA. I thought of showing them their site and get the prices down to it, but they didn't have any bigger than 500GB >__>

When the month came to an end, I later knew why it was that particular mall with inflated prices, as I sought out my local CDRKing and their prices were the same as their website. I didn't get any donations (despite hurrying that Android fix ~__~), but I could not pass this opportunity much, I needed a hard drive now as 2 months went by with me stagnating with my 1TB, it was either I end my contributions to the online community or I take the chance, and thankfully I was able to borrow enough for the Toshiba 750GB hard drive (not exactly my proudest moment asking for money >__<).

It didn't take me long to open the enclosure. Full size 2.5inch drive detected! Eat that, WD and your proprietary trite.

Since my Expresscard only has 1 USB3.0 port, the Toshiba drive had to go USB2, which wasn't bad actually. The difficult part was getting whatever data I could get off the 1TB drive, and that took a mother loving 4 days, 2 days at only 12 hours, the latter 2 days I went round the clock copying via SuperCopier, a nice proggy by the way. That was when my new found happiness was starting to turn sour: I had an elaborate plan, see: I couldn't afford a new 1TB drive, no way was I going to sacrifice my health again, and since all I could get was 750GB, I was placing my last bit of faith in WD and their data lifeguard tools to write zero's to the drive once I copied what I could from it. My first problem was I was losing free space fast, 750GB wasn't going to cut it, and I needed backups fast, I hated playing triage with my data and "luckily" I was able to acquire 2 company drives at 60GB each. One drive died when I started to copy to it, and the other one was Mac formatted. My troubles kept piling up when I found out I couldn't copy Windows Mobile ROM kitchen's from the 1TB drive, and I had to say my final farewell to Windows Mobile development, at the hand of Western Digital and their defectively designed [external] drives.