Reward yourself, always.

Celebrating 3 years of being dry!

I quit drinking 3 years ago due to personal reasons. The habit just wasn't working for me anymore and it conflicted with some of my personal beliefs and philosophies in life. Saying no to alcohol wasn't hard for me. Initially I thought that it would take more willpower than I could muster and that it would be heartbreaking to say no to my friends when they offered me a drink but hey, surprisingly, it wasn't... And that's because I promised to reward myself every year that I am dry.

Every October I buy myself something nice as a gift to myself for being able to stay away from alcohol. The gift doesn't need to be grand, it just has to be siginificant or special.

The first year I bought myself an acoustic guitar. I named him Pablo.

Significance: I've never had my own guitar. This led to me buying Gilberto (a tele wannabee from Samick, sounds nice hehe) and Teban that was customized by my brother and a Zoom G2.1u that I am yet to fully use. That marked my return to guitar playing and has then been a reminder that I haven't really grown much as a guitar player haha!

Year two saw me going to Divi to buy a bootleg Master Grade Gundam.

Significance: I was curious. As a long time model kit builder and an owner of a stash of old Gundam kits from way back in college, I was fixated on the idea that I could get my Gunpla fix on a budget. I'm not a noob when it comes to bootlegs, in fact I have been building them since 2003 but this was the first time that I spent more than Php300 on a knock-off to see if it had potential to be displayable. I haven't painted the kit yet but it opened up a lot of possibilities for me as a modeler (hehehehe).

This year I got myself Superion which was ridiculously priced. Yeah... it's very seldom that I buy Transformers on an emotional whim. But I love the aerialbots and I remember my dad buying me one of the jets as a kid so when I had the chance to get this guy I just couldn't resist. I passed up on buying this figure around 4 years ago when it was on sale for Php800 because at that time I was collecting the movie verse and the Animated series and figured that this figure had ugly feet and stupid hands to boot so I really didn't want him. But then I saw what a 3rd party manufacturer did with him and I saw this guy on Youtube who butchered his TF Hulk and came up with a really nice looking Superion. I tried buying him off Ebay but the price was just too high so when Rommel and I went to Greenhills (where I was supposed to buy 4 TFA toys to round up my collection) I saw him and just went ahead and bought him.

Significance: I got for myself a toy where I didn't care much about the price, a very rare Bryan Sevilla moment. Well, of course the price really wasn't that high but I have rules when buying TFs: Either they're 40% off the regular price or I don't get them. I broke that rule when I bought him and now I'm a happy kid.

That was quite long but the lesson is short: Always reward yourself. I do that all the time. When I've hit a career milestone I go and get something that I like. When I'm able to beat a really nasty deadline I go and do something that I want to do. It's that simple, it's a way of disciplining yourself.