Tagged by Trish. No idea how to go about this, honestly. Uh. Here I go.

1. My favorite number is nine. Not because it holds much significance for me (other than the fact that it was once my class number), but because of this terrible idea I once had about personifying numbers.

Into women.

Eight would be a curvy lady with a lot of love to give; Seven would be slender, and rather random; Four would be an unpopular teenage girl who wants to be loved; Two would be a woman version of the Okay face or something; One would be a misunderstood bitch who’s got the weight of the world on her shoulders.

Nine, on the other hand, would be pretty normal: not slender, but not quite chubby. A healthy sort of body. She’s got a round face and she’s not overly attractive. I can imagine the loop of the number containing a rather large brain or something (though I am aware that brain size doesn’t denote intelligence). I dunno.

I put too much thought into this.

2. I’ve been blessed (damned) with schizophrenic art skills.

I’ve lied to people about this before, though there is a good reason for it. For the most part, my so-called skills are non-existent. However, depending on the subject and on my mood, I can easily make pretty good sketches and drawings (though I favor just scratching things out on a piece of paper with a Unipin).

Normally, I’m complete crap at art, though. Many who have seen my work will attest to this. I remember this one time where I was asked to draw a horse. The result: a rather large creature resembling a donkey, with bunny ears, an Eeyore tail, and chunky hooves.

Recently, however, I managed to come up with ink drawings of a mountainous landscape, my interpretations of “Pyyrhic victory” and “sword of Damocles”, and three different Pokemon (Mismagius, Dialga, and Volcarona, the latter of which being my favorite pokemon in general).

Case in point: I tried to draw Professor Calculus a few minutes ago. He looked like a Chinese lumberjack. I regret nothing.

3. I have nice hands.

Or so I’ve been told. My father is a photographer (as a hobby, but he makes a bit of money selling pictures on the internet), and he likes using my hands as models in his pictures. He and one of my teachers at school have described my fingers as long, without being too thin or whatever.

Personally, I think they look like sad and wrinkly sausages.

4. My name was supposed to be Stephanie.

My mother is a woman you can get a lot of laughs out of. Not because she has a tendency to get into accidents or trip over anything, but because of the things she says. She’s pretty charismatic, and will often be either incredibly witty or extremely corny. And she’s smart. I can’t forget that.

She’s really smart. She’s got a good (relatively) good memory.

So, to witness her actually do something facepalm-worthy is rare, and I’m glad to say that I caused one of these moments the moment I was born.

For weeks, she had been set on naming me Stephanie. However, right after she had given birth to me, she was so tired that she actually forgot!

[My name is Patricia Anne, just so you know. As you might have noticed, there is a very distinct difference between the two names.]

5. I have a stuffed toy named Pandy the Panda.

One of my first trips out of the country was to Hong Kong. It was there that I met my best friend, Pandy the effing Panda.

[What a creative child I was!]

I purchased the stuffed toy at Ocean Park when I was four, and she’s been with me since then (I’m sixteen now). I find it difficult to sleep when Pandy is not in the same room, at the very least.

She didn’t come with clothes when I first bought her, but I took to buying her little dresses when I was nine. Now, she has a rather formidable set of clothes, with some actually handmade!

A lucky little panda (unlucky at the same time, considering that she probably thinks I’m nuts).

6. I only started writing (relatively) recently.

When I was twelve. I’ve been writing for four years, I’m still crap. Dear God. I’d actually show you the shit I came up with back then. When I started out, I was addicted to Twilight, so it was purely first person vampire romances set in places I’d never been. After that was a work about time travel that had terrible characterization and pretty shallow characters.

A contemporary of those terrible ideas is shitty poetry about virtually anything, with words like “pretty” and “nice” used liberally. All of them rhymed terribly.

I got better. Or I like to think I did, considering that I came to my senses about my poetry: I stopped writing it. On the other hand, I started writing fanfiction. I wrote for Artemis Fowl and for Kyou Kara Maou!, originally. I’ll admit that I pulled a stint with Twilight, too. That ended quickly, thanks be to whatever deity is out there.

Honestly, I didn’t want to join the writer’s club of my high school purely because I didn’t write poetry. Instead, I decided to try out for the school newspaper —terribly ironic, in retrospect! I was actually supposed to be a features writer, and now I can’t write anything (non-academic) that isn’t at least 75% creative. They didn’t accept people that year, though, so I ended up in the crappy film club.

The next year, the school newspaper fused together with the writer’s club. I tried out as a features writer, and ended up in the literary pool by accident. To be frank, I’m not quite sure why they let my rubbish into the club, but for some bizarre reason, they did.

My writing went through cosmetic surgery. I started writing poetry like a maniac, and my prose got better.

The next school year, I was literary editor. Again, I don’t know why they asked me, though I suspect it had something to do with the lack of qualified juniors that had applied for editorial positions (I mean, come on. Asking a useless sophomore to take the position after the summer? They musthave been desperate.)

And it’s all gone on from there. My writing is as crappy as ever, but I’ve got some experience, now that I’ve been an editor for about a year. I’ll be a senior next year.

There are so many things I find wrong with my writingnow, let alone with my work back then. Looking at my work fromlast monthis enough to make my own heart burn a little.

I’ve cast a veil over my progress as a writer. It’s a rather depressing subject of contemplation, and I don’t make it a hobby to throw insults at myself.

7. I’ve visited about fifteen different countries, excluding my own. (Stop-overs not included).

Not to mention the fact that I like going back to certain places and moving around to certain cities or provinces within a country.

I’ll admit that I’m well off in terms of finances (having two very intelligent parents who live separately can do that), but a lot of these were because my mom had a lot of business trips when I was younger. Because of these assignments, I went to school for about two years in Jakarta. Before that, I had been to Hong Kong and Singapore. Sometime during my stay there, I went to Bangkok.

After I came back to the Philippines, I went to several places in the archipelago like Cebu, Boracay, Palawan, Davao, etc.

When I was ten (I think), I visited the States. Several places around California, and in Nevada (no kudos to whoever guesses where).

I went to Beijing for the Olympics in 2008 (my mom got a few free tickets because her company was sponsoring it that year), and joined a tour around Europe the next year. If I’m not mistaken, we visited seven countries in one swoop (eight, if you count the Vatican).

After that, Australia. Twice. Gold Coast and Sydney.

Macau. Hong Kong.

I’m planning on heading to Batanes next week, and Hong Kong again next month. I might join my mom on her business trip to Boston later this year, depending on my schoolwork.

Yes, I am well aware of just how lucky I am, thank you very much.

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Uh. I don’t know many people. I’ll just tag the ones I do know.