1. Fringe: Best show right now, hands down. Well, until LOST returns.

2. Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles: Consistently good week in, week out.

3. The Mentalist: This sizzling new entry is burning up the charts. This show is about Patrick Jane, an investigator with extraordinary powers of observation and suggestion. This show is a lot of fun!

4. 30 Rock: I just hope they don’t get lost with all the star power they’re pumping into the show. I’m cautiously optimistic about that.

5. Star Wars: The Clone Wars: Still solid fun every week. Makes me crave for a New Jedi Order series though.

6. How I Met Your Mother: With Ted all single again, the show is back where it’s supposed to be.

7. The Big Bang Theory: Consistently great and funny every week.

8. Survivor: Gabon: It always gets interesting when they merge. But somehow, I’m not so hot for partisan squabbling. The elections just finished.

9. LOST: The wait now feels like forever.

10. Heroes: How the mighty have fallen. This show has to be fixed.

11. Smallville: The current season seems to be going somewhere. I suspect that the Doomsday reveal next episode will shoot this series back into the top ten.

Not included in the list are The Daily Show, The Colbert Report and Real Time with Bill Maher. These shows are in a different category all together, and they’re all pretty good.

I don’t have to pretend to know what drowning is like. I almost died of it, and from time to time that memory flashes through my eyes. Not in the sense of my entire life before my eyes, but more in the sense of that when the time comes, that is the single moment that I’ll remember. Almost as if nothing else matters.

It was the first time in my life when I surrendered. I let the currents take me, but sturdy arms did instead. I realized then that surrendering can actually be very easy. That is where I am now, I think, hence the heavy sighs. But why not just breathe the water in and be done with it? Because that little part of me who still knows what faith feels like waits for those sturdy arms. When will they come?

I find that it is easy to forgive others — especially those who can kill you. Even when I ceased listening to God so I don’t feel compelled to forgive you, I managed to. But it’s almost impossible to forgive one’s self. I still haven’t. Doing so means that I’ll have to swim for shore myself, but I don’t know how to swim. I suppose that’s why I look up to Superman.

Deep within, I know I need someone to save me.

I’ve always been a serious person; always very goal-oriented and workman-like. I haven’t been writing a lot about teaching this school year because I don’t find the need to. If you noticed, there has been none of the heady idealism that characterized my entries in the past year. But if you read my blog now (THE blog, that is), you’ll see the workman very much alive.

I go to work in the morning, proficiently do whatever I have to do, not waste my time on things that will keep spinning without me, and leave the moment I can. The time I spend out of school I spend conserving my energy, learning new things, and doing other simpler work. Having learned not to spread myself out too thinly, my work ethic has become that of a professional hitman: I come in silently, accomplish my task, and leave no trail behind. I appear dispassionate but underneath I describe it more accurately as ‘detached passion’.

I love my work. Not in the sense that there is nothing else I’d rather be doing, but in the sense that of everything else I could be doing, I choose this. It’s a more realistic kind of love. It’s also less stressful, and yet it’s crazy. I haven’t rolled out laughs this good in quite a while.

I am my own worst critic, and when I look at my work as a teacher, I see a lot of things in the past I’ve done wrong. But mistakes you make when you are unprepared are forgivable and fixable. The mistakes you make when you buy into your own hype is the worst kind. I’ve committed a lot of the latter and so this year I learned to tune out everything I want to hear and focus on those I need to hear.

And thus I’ve evolved to become brutally pragmatic. I think I’ve always been, but I’ve also been a heady romantic with no respect for the impossible. I miss it. But what can I say? We grow up. I’ve channeled my emotional energy into a fuller self-awareness, and this explains how I care for things even more powerfully now without showing it overtly. After all, the truth of passion is seen through its consequences; the reality of love can only be shown through action.

Darn. That sounded rather Darth. Cool.

Can I just say the show has currently the best looking cast on television? Well, until LOST returns.

And I also discovered this feisty little track in YouTube. It’s a metal rendition of the Terminator theme. Awesome.

Download the track here.

Download: http://www.fileden.com/files/2007/1/21/672773/30%20Rock%20Theme.mp3

Learn more about 30 Rock!

Here’s a quote:

In a report released Tuesday, ratings agency Standard & Poor’s says there are 140 large U.S. companies in danger of not being able to pay their bills in the next few months, up nearly twofold from the beginning of this year. Among the troubled firms on the agency’s list are such household names as clothing retailer Eddie Bauer, amusement park operator Six Flags and pizza chain Sbarro. Also on the list are doughnut baker Krispy Kreme and mobile technology titan Palm, as well as a number of the nation’s largest airlines, including JetBlue and the corporate parents of United and American.

Sigh. This crisis isn’t sparing anything. They’re just doughnuts!!! T_T

1. 30 Rock: Season 3 is yet to begin and this show tops everything else currently showing. What can I say? I <3 Tina Fey.

2. Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles: I’m amazed with how they keep their production values so high on this thing, and I’m surprised with how much I’m digging the Terminator mythology. Keep this coming.

3. Star Wars: The Clone Wars: I haven’t enjoyed a good cartoon since Justice League Unlimited. This show is better than I expected, considering the film’s (which I haven’t watched) bad reviews.

4. LOST: Still high on my list just because it’s my all-time favorite. This could be higher if it were showing, but I have faith in Season 5. January can’t come too soon.

5. Fringe: I’m starting to get a hang of this show now that the revelations are coming, albeit slowly. Still, I love how this show is put together week after week.

6. The Big Bang Theory: This is the nerdiest show ever made — and incredibly fun too. Recommended to all Pisay people.

7. Heroes: The dialogue is still crappy, continuity is getting convoluted by the minute, and I watch this show purely for its plot twists. I’m a big picture thinker, so I just like seeing how it all fits eventually. There are too many devils in the details though.

8. How I Met Your Mother: Already in its fourth season, the show seems to have lost direction. Last episode seems to get things back on track, so we’ll see. This show used to be higher on the list; at least a top 5.

9: Survivor: Gabon: This is the 17th season of Survivor, a show I haven’t really watched since season 5 and then caught up with for the China season (15). I usually catch this show on Friday nights, so its a good way to wind down at the end of the week. It’s comforting to know some had a worse week — fake or otherwise.

10. Smallville: Isn’t this show dead yet? Worse — why am I even following it? This show should have ended three seasons ago to keep it truthful to the Superman mythology. And now they’re bringing in Doomsday? I just want to see how this show ends; that’s my only motivation. It’s not a lot to go by, but it’s the most I can say for a show that did have its glory days.

And not included in the Top 10 are The Colbert Report and The Daily Show for they’ll outlive all these shows anyway. I haven’t caught up with other recommended shows such as House and Prison Break, so they won’t be in this list until I do.

So am I not watching something that I should?

“You really don’t have to blog this, you know.”

So when it says otherwise, you’ll hear about it.

It is a spiritual quest in every sense of the word, very much like the quest of the Buddha that oscillated between pleasure and detachment. Her story is a universal one and thus more people would benefit by walking her path.

The video below gives insight into the author. She reads a chapter from her trip to India and answers some questions from the audience.