finding emo

20030214.emo
Originally uploaded by revolver01.

finally, valentine's day is over.

now we could go back to our normal lives.

wait a sec, if emo is for "emotional"... is peter cetera emo?

maybe.

Should we bother?

We are children of passion. Our lifeline flows from the desire to create something out of nothing. To share a piece of our hearts and minds to people is our offering to a world that cries out for something to believe in. Creation stems from the imagination; it only needs motivation to get it off the ground. And when we do, we pour sweat, blood and tears to make it fly.

It is not an easy task. We are forever faced with every imaginable opposition one could think of. Few could understand, after all, the joy and pleasure of the process. It is a natural high that keeps you going. You start working as a team yet you finish as a family. This family makes the process one of the best environments one could encounter in a lifetime. But some people just won't understand it.

They won't understand why we stay up until sunrise for a shoot. They won't understand why we will spend hours and hours editing. They won't understand why we sweat and work our ass off for someone else's project. They won't understand why we put up with everything that is thrown at us, just to finish that shot. We would forever be labeled as the people who had "no life". They simply won't understand that this is our life.

Do they have a point? Are we simply wasting away our life? It is not the perfect profession, but then again, what is? We will forever be pressured and stressed, this is the life we've chosen. We will not succeed all the time. Or fail, for that matter.

If our desire and passion to create is threatened by someone or something, should we succumb? When everything points to failure, should we still practice the craft that taught us to dream? That taught us to believe in things no one thought possible? Should we still keep reaching for the stars when everyone else seems content with the ground? Should we bother continuing even in the face of defeat?

Dare I say it, more than ever.

This is the world we live in.

You are one of about 6 billion people on the planet. The projected human population of the world in 2050 is 9 billion. In 1850, the population was 1 billion.

There are 3 billion people worldwide living on less than $2 a day. The newstand price of a copy of the Sunday New York Times is $2.50.

41% of children under 14 in Africa are employed at least part-time and 22% in Asia. The number is 0.8% for the United States.

The press run of the first edition of Harry Potter and The Goblet of Fire was 3 million copies. There are 1 billion people who can neither read nor write.

There are 1.3 billion people in the world who don't have access to safe water. There are 11 million children under the age of 5 who die each year of easily preventable disease such as diarrhea, malaria and measles.

66% of school-age children who are girls in developing countries have no access to education.

There have been 18.8 million people worldwide who have died of AIDS. There are 34.3 million people more who are presently living with HIV/AIDS.

35.8% of the people in Botswana are infected with HIV.

There are 14 million phone lines in the entire African continent. In every ten Filipinos, at least one has a cellular phone.

20% of the entire world population has access to a telephone. 2% are connected to the Internet. Over 1.5 billion e-mail messages cross international borders everyday.

There are 320 million World Wide Web pages (including this one) on the Internet.

80% of all websites are in English. 10% of the world population understands English. 20% of the world's population live in South Asia. Of all Internet users, 1% live in South Asia.

25 industrial countries hold 97% of all the patents in the world.

(unless stated otherwise, all data are compiled by Kevin Walter and Phillip Tomlinson for the State of The World Forum five years ago)