06.06.06. If you rotate it 180 degrees, it looks like go.go.go. So it's a day of encouragement. That's the way each and every day should be - encouraging. If you're not encouraging someone else, then at least encourage yourself.

Steve Westly, current California State Controller and candidate for Governor in the California Democratic primary election, mentioned at a town hall meeting that his father was a World War II prisoner-of-war who was saved by Philippine guerillas. He said that if he became governor, he would fight for the benefits that have been denied to the Filipino World War II Veterans for all these years. That's sure more than Governor Schwarzenneger every promised. Then again, this whole issue rose out of a broken promise. How do we keep him to his word? Political pressure.

I realized last night that my idea of confidence is way off. Confidence, to a majority of people, is a feeling of knowing when something good will result from their action. The thing is, confidence doesn't have anything to do with good or bad. Confidence is knowing what will happen at all. A person can be confident that something adverse will happen as well as something positive. Really, it's one of those words that draws most of its connotation from the context of its use.

I'm not very confident right now. The future is completely unknown to me and I don't really have a game plan to follow. Even my immediate goals have been put on hold because of my filial duty to my lola. Speaking to my aunt, who saw spoke to my lola in Pangasinan, lola's native language and the language in which she is able to best express herself, part of the reason my lola wants to come back is that she is worried about me. It is very sweet, but I wonder who is more worried about the other. An honest analysis would result that I'm in a better position to be more helpful to her than she to me.

My lack of confidence has also affected the way that I interact with people. It's almost like I have a social anxiety disorder. I was at a party the other night, and for some reason, I was very nervous - even around people who I knew. It resulted in me not even being able to say hi to some people, even though I desired to do just that. I would just clam up, like a turtle retreating into its shell. There definitely is something going wrong.

Over the past two nights I've watched a Frontline special episode called "The Age of AIDS." It is pretty eye-opening. I want to order it from the Public Broadcasting System (PBS). One of the numbers that really jumped out at me was that while 2 million people have been treated, another 15 million more people became infected with HIV. Also, the government funding for HIV is expected to run out in 2008. That's only two years out? Those 15 million new cases could spiral out of control. How in the world did Earvin "Magic" Johnson reach a point that HIV is undetectable in his system? It can't be a coincidence that the countries with the highest incidence of HIV happen to be the most poverty stricken countries? 30 million people have died, 40 million people live with HIV, and an estimated 5 million more people are infected each year. The show said that the drugs only manage the virus. If you missed the show, you can go to www.pbs.org for more information and even watch the special.

Before I saw tonight's installment, I caught a free showing of Saving Face by Alice Wu and even ran into a former fellow UC Davis student Andrew Medina, who is doing big things for Assemblymember Judy Chu. The movie was good, exploring relationships and identities within the Chinese, Chinese American, homosexual, and heterosexual community, families, and even individuals. It got me thinking about the two paradigms of Hollywood reflecting reality or reality copying Hollywood. This movie, as most do, ended with a tightly wrapped, happy ending. It's rarely ever that clean and neat. Yet reality typically does not have the combination of often sensationalized scenarios and issues that are presented in movies either. Maybe the problem is that people forget that movies and reality are different. They are not equivalents of each other. It's possibly better to keep them separate, one as entertainment, one as real life.

Saving Face reminded me of another film addressing Asian American homosexuality called The Wedding Banquet. Again, it was very revealing and took a deep long look at the inner being of people and the struggles they face as they form their identity in a typically anti-homosexual culture. I can't say it was better or worse, but while Saving Face centered around the relationship of two women, The Wedding Banquet centered around the relationship of two men. Very different perspectives and results are to be gained from each.