misguided by voices

this is why i'll die of hunger

2009-01-03T16:32:00.000+08:00

the room/house i really want to have is hugh grant's in about a boy. because of the cds. that's a dream life really, but we know it was boring, you know the crap. and actually, put the cds anywhere and it'd still be the most amazing room ever. well, for me.

there's something about cds that's almost charming. i know they'll be extinct one day, like dodos extinct; everyone downloads everything from the net now. jesse mccartney is huge in amazon (or itunes whatev) but his latest album doesn't sell. not a fan of his music. just read the news on yahoo! or somewhere which was about exactly this, the end of cds. i'm more a fan of jesse as, what, a thought, maybe an idea. right.

i was saying cds charm me. it's one thing listening to the songs you download that's like knowing the story of a book without having read it. having the actual thing in front of you, there's something there. this is useless. i'm a poor describer of the abstract.

bought four cds today. three were jonis, two would complete the four joni albums i always wanted to have. the other two i got as a christmas present from my friend tetel. i need more tom waits cds. i'm not a huge fan if i only have mule variations.

my first cd ever was jagged little pill. or the unplugged one. that or come on over. i of course grew up and learned one must not write shania twain in one's profiles if one thinks of appearances. which doesn't help at all because in the end when one is essentially unlikable, that's it. nothing changes.

non-bohemian, non-poet

2009-01-01T18:58:00.000+08:00

if you really think about it, the new year shouldn't change shit about you, as a person, as a freaking living human being, because. but that sentiment is overused, and no one really cares anyway. it's fun and freaky and you're expected to do a lot of things: open doors, figure out what the next year brings, my mom says i should eat, turn on lights, clean the house.

i've no plans, one cannot plan bumming around. well, that's still one plan alright but plans are detailed and specific so maybe my plan does not qualify as a plan plan. roberto bolaño says poetry is homosexual; he goes on describing poets as sissies, faggots, fairies. it was one of the best pages of a book i've ever read. happy new year to me. and it's jd salinger's 90th today, happy birthday!

22 days na lang, jobless na ako!

2008-12-30T05:01:00.002+08:00

nasa manila na after ng lima, anim na araw na bakasyon. trabaho na ako ulit bukas/mamaya. medyo nakatulog ako sa bus kaya di pa ako inaantok. summary ng pasko sa beach:

1. para akong turista kasi parang department of tourism sina alanah, well, si tita eva talaga. ang sarap lang ng pagkain. nakakamangha ang ham at bacon na di galing sa mall.

2. naglakad sa beach. kaso walang banana pancakes. nakatulog ako ng matagal nung pupunta sana kami para magbanana pancakes kanina/kahapon. kaya wala na. pero masaya sa beach, ang drama lang ng sunset.

3. natulog ng napakatagal. ang haba pramis. ang tawag pala dun, tulog-mayaman. yung matutulog ka ng alas-dose tas gigising ng alas-dose ulit.

4. eto ang di dapat mawala: inuman. may tequila rose si alanah. kahit na pagirl, medyo inaantok din kami pagkatapos uminom. kulay pink sya. mukhang lasang calpol pero masarap naman. mukha lang lasang calpol. rumedhorse pala ako sa inuman sa beach. o ha. dalawa lang naman. wala rin naman akong abs ganyan, beer pa.

5. nagyosi kami tita sa labas ng bahay. kaya lang eto ang masaklap, di ko pa nauubos yung isa, nahilo na. grabe na lang, kala ko ang cool cool ko na. e nahilo. wala, jologs.

6. nanood ng sine, magpapahula sana, nag-plaza, kumain sa plaza, may batang gusto mang-agaw ng ice cream ko sa plaza.

7. nagupload ng piktyurs sa multiply, kummoment, nagfacebook, nagblag, meron pa yatang iba na nakay-vylett pa. nasan na ba kasi yung usb na yun.

ps. masamang pangitain (hala, pangitain) yata yung naloko ako ng taxi driver sa bus station. pero ako naman yata yung nagpaloko. e yoko na maghintay ng ibang cab kaya sumakay na ako kahit ayaw magmetro. mahanap nga yung manghuhula dito sa teachers village. pangitain pala ha. four years na yata na laging malas ang year of the tiger. kawawa naman.

what's your favorite word?

2008-10-10T23:50:00.000+08:00

to force myself to write the paper i have to submit tomorrow, i am in the nearest starbucks, and have paid a hundred bucks for wifi even though i have net connection at home. i slept all day, and one more hour of sleep before twelve noon tomorrow may lead to some illness; i firmly believe in the research findings about oversleeping being bad for the health. also, i have to finish the paper. when i'm home i see the old dvds and i watch them. i wish i could write a paper and watch a show at the same time. technology prevents it, i guess.

i was in coffee bean earlier but they've no power outlet, not one, so i had to go somewhere else. wasted two hours talking to alanah, because that's who i am, i cannot write two hours straight without some break or something. see now i'm blogging. another wasted hour. i don't know if my paper makes sense, i get it and i know what i'm talking about but i'm a bad writer and i always need good editors.

a funny/embarrassing thing happened at work two days ago. the blog entry i edited had a title that was so grammatically incorrect i can't even decide if i should laugh or cry. i started reviewing past articles i've written and i found out that i've used the word "fake" like a million times. this is bad. end-of-career bad.

apocalypse later

2008-10-09T03:10:00.004+08:00

five-time academy award winner kirk lazarus: check it out. dustin hoffman, "rain man," look retarded, act retarded, not retarded. counted toothpicks, cheated cards. autistic, sure. not retarded. you know tom hanks, "forrest gump." slow, yes. retarded, maybe. braces on his legs. but he charmed the pants off nixon and won a pingpong competition. that ain't retarded. peter sellers, "being there." infantile, yes. retarded, no. you went full retard, man. never go full retard. you don't buy that? ask sean penn, 2001, "i am sam." remember? went full retard, went home empty handed.

when tom cruise did that horrible horrible movie vanilla sky i was convinced that the guy's a, well, a monster. only a terrible actor, or person, could really fuck a cameron crowe film like that. jerry maguire is a great movie because that was the pre-tom cruise tom cruise we were seeing there. and even then you could fault the acting.

almost famous is that film which i think is closest to my heart, the scorseses and the altmans need all your faculties, so the only explanation i could give myself about vanilla sky is that it's one of those magic realism moments you read in books, where you have no idea what just happened, except it did. and to you. horrible.

so that was my story, until an hour ago when, watching a ben stiller film, i realized i was charmed by the tom cruise performance (it's the performance, not the actor, let's make that clear) and thought i might consider taking back the monster description. watch tropic thunder. the hiphop dances, i swear; do i have a low mp3 somewhere. and then robert downey jr. those three words. the movie with tobey maguire was just genius. if i were the oscars he'd receive not just five; give the guy thirty, please. everyone's smart in tropic thunder because everyone plays the fool.

and we all liked jay baruchel, oh so cute. he was in almost famous, too. small role, but he was there. there's another tom cruise movie i liked, magnolia, but i don't think he was acting there. by the way, which came first, was it magnolia? or vanilla sky?

my life as a groupie

2008-09-26T02:58:00.006+08:00

because. sir danny started this online campaign. and i had a sudden urge to write about college. and i really love this badge designed by ate kate. so.

i have two maskom stories here. or narratives. story seems a little restricted. they're about my life as a groupie. groupie as defined by penny lane in almost famous, that should be clear.

the first one is about the struggle for the favorable regard of the professor luis teodoro. the overused phrase "reputation precedes him" would always have a place in the lexicon because there's no other way of saying it. the mind has to discover the subtleties but language unfortunately has its limits. there. reputation: übermensch. and i learned that several days before i actually met him.

he gives me a 3 in the first class assignment. better than 4.5 or, well, 8 (either i saw a paper with this grade in it or this is the most vivid dream i had ever) but definitely not acceptable. the opinion article fared better, but the sem ended with a 2 on my class card. the struggle begins. i enrolled in another class under the professor teodoro (trust me, the the is not so korni when you're a student slash groupie) and when he quoted albert camus i made sure i submitted a paper with some reference to the absurd. i did my internship in a community newspaper. to be different (at least that's my story).

and then. opinion writing class. the professor in his usual lecture mode, the subject is capital punishment. he remembers an essay by albert camus. he looks at me and asks, "you know reflections on the guillotine, mr soriano?" yeah i died.

the second story is about the other celebrity (as we've already used the word groupie, whose meaning we defined earlier), yvonne chua. she gives fifty assignments every meeting, they say, and thirty of those get a 4; the remaining ten maybe a 2.75. i'm exaggerating. it's not really fifty, maybe forty or something. ok, it stops there.

oh, i loved the assignments by the way. in a weird way, i did. i almost cried (almost because i don't want to say i did cry) when the storm milenyo damaged power lines and caused a blackout and my laptop's battery was empty and there's not an open internet café near my house. i can't remember how i finished everything but i did.

it doesn't end there. she picks my thesis proposal one semester later, she is to be my thesis adviser. friends flooded my phone with text messages that range from genuine concern to more creative crap like pag pumasa ka maganda nga thesis mo pero wala ka nang kamay. the appendages would change. again i can't remember how i finished everything but i did: 1.25.

these are trivial stories, this is a trivial entry. but that is the point. i'm not in the position to be preaching about what i learned (learned seriously) because ironically one of the things i learned in cmc is that the application of learning is more important than learning itself. i graduated just last year. i've no right to be talking about the purpose of life or the meaning of my past experiences. i'm still trying to figure that out. so i take refuge in nostalgia. but that nostalgia, i'm sure, helps me figure things out.

ps. my favorite luis teodoro joke is this: "i saw a sign that says, 'keep this door close'...and your enemies closer." i never believed i lost weight until professor chua told me in one thesis consultation session: "just pull a chair. we'll talk in my office (she shares it with professor simbulan). you're slim naman e."

lesson from hannibal

2008-09-25T03:27:00.001+08:00

i have a fascination with reflexivity. without it there'd be no musicals, adaptation would be all about flowers, postmodernism would never be possible. of course i'm writing this at three in the morning; i didn't do much at work today but still, this hour has some logic-twisting crap so maybe i'm wrong. about reflexivity.

here's the point: sylar telling claire "that's disgusting" is the funniest heroes line ever. and it's not even morbidly funny, i laughed because: 1. the question was unexpected and absurd, therefore funny, and 2. the answer was either supersmart or superoutofcontext, which made it, well, funny. no more f word from me. reflexivity's the point.

so sylar and peter and nathan are brothers (in a beauty contest nathan would win, at least for now). angela petrelli's really some woman. what happened to west? is that it? gone forever? ali larter has the coolest power (three am, three am). ando's going to kill hiro in the future. mohinder? hank mccoy?

by the way is it really called reflexivity? or does that word mean something else? now i'm confused.

research

2008-09-23T02:54:00.004+08:00

found another lee pace fan yey! i thought miray was just a fan of pushing daisies but when she expressed her fear of watching soldier's girl i had my epiphany.

see it's not sexism or anything, i totally get it: here's an incredibly talented and tall (those are the only adjectives i'm letting myself write but believe me i have like a thousand in my head right now; and tall's very important) juilliard alumnus who's so perfect you don't want to see him kiss another man onscreen. that's not sexist, i'm just a bad writer and summarizer.

miray also says there may be a future pushing daisies episode where some electric law goes wrong, crippling ned's power for a day. and without those powers...

found this site earlier. bookmarked.

death stars

2008-09-20T01:51:00.000+08:00

pushing daisies has the most amazing premise ever: a boy discovers he can bring the dead back to life by touching them. but because that alone will not make a television series, or a good story, that ability has to come with a drawback. when someone who's supposed to be dead remains alive for more than a minute, somebody else dies. balance, really. the one who dies takes the place of the one who lived. or something more profound than that. also, when he touches the undead again, they die. forever. maybe that's not the most amazing premise you've heard (ever) but i liked the pilot so there.

ned (who i have a crush on, the old one, not the kid) falls in love with his neighbor, chuck, but when ned's mother dies and he revives her, the one who dies after a minute was chuck's father. can't wait for future complications that would result from that incident. so ned goes to sleep, and when his mom kisses him goodnight he loses a parent too, like chuck. they kiss at the funeral and they don't see each other again.

our boy becomes a piemaker. he helps emerson cod, a detective solve cases. it's simple, what he does. he asks dead people who killed them. ned's quite philosophical. he doesn't like calling them dead people. or zombies. when they're alive, they're alive. then chuck's murdered. he touches her cheek and cannot touch her again. he doesn't want head dead. isn't that the saddest thing in the world. the three start solving cases together.

other than, well, everything i'd just written, pushing daisies also looks like a tim burton film. tim burton directs monk. maybe that's better; not saying the show's creators are imitating something, or that it's derivative, no. yo make things simpler, i'll say i love this show. i'm watching another episode after this entry's published.

queerness and the literary imagination

2008-09-18T02:45:00.000+08:00

a screaming instant message informed me five hours ago that the ninth project runway ep's already in the shares. so even if it's two in the morning now i'm staying at the office. i need to watch this. and of course macky's still editing/writing the web threat spotlight article so i have to be here.

kenley's really a bitch! she must not win! she continues doing that thing she does when heidi tells her something (she blames her model for not having breasts!). she does the same thing to nina (garthia) too. korto's still among the high scorers but again she does not win the challenge. she's an aquarian! well, kenley too. i hate her! i want to rip that fake flower in her hair and make her eat it.

the other highlights: daniel (vosovic, not season five daniel who thought drag meant lady) and robert (from first season who alanah believes joined only so he could have more dates) and wesley (eliminated very early in the season, sad). all in this episode.

the first year is the..

2008-09-17T01:13:00.000+08:00

i didn't know samantha who? was so funny until i, well, until i watched it. logic, jake. you're being stupid again. i guess i thought it was one of those shows that were there because heroes only takes an hour and even if you add all the shows you liked it wouldn't fill an entire day. this is the writing equivalent of rambling. it is rambling.

anyway, show's really funny. i guess i've always been a fan of christina applegate. one episode is about sam getting a boob job, or wanting to, before the accident and the amnesia thing. is that some sort of sign? is she ok now?

i need the ninth project runway episode! tin, eric, and i decided we're korto fans: those oversized sleeves are just fab! she should've won the drag queens challenge because that design was really amazing even though the model was, yeah, and tin hates joe, but who's complaining: she's won something and she's always in the top two or three.

we hate kenley because you're supposed to hate anyone who does that to heidi klum. i don't get it, the pinoy project runway's so gay (as if the original's butch, but still). i guess it's the imitation that makes it, erm, second rate. ok that made sense. it's kind of fun though but only because i was judging the show itself. i'm really sleepy. i've no right to judge what's too gay and what's fun tv.

it's september 17! this same date last year was my first day here in trend micro. quitting the first job after working there for only more than a month was really scary, but now that i've been here for a year i think i've no reason to worry. at least when it comes to patience or whatever. work quality, there's your problem.

chekhov's gun

2008-09-09T20:42:00.001+08:00

serena. five years! now serena williams is number one again. she may never win the serena slam in the next few years, but she did once. and her victories now are more than reminders of past glory. she's still here! ana, maria, jelena, please learn from this legend. please earn that number one ranking. ana ivanovic won the french open and became world number one so she's better than the two. she's prettier too.

the power shots! that jump! i've never seen serena so happy. this is why you have tennis idols. this is why you believe in them and admire them and hate them when they lose but continue loving them anyway. tennis requires that you see the bigger story even if it never happens. it is about greatness and destiny: everything is significant.

roger. critics write about him like he's the worst tennis player ever. well here's the big fuck you. roger federer beat andy murray 6-2, 7-5, 6-2, claiming his fifth consecutive us open title. bill tilden was the last man to accomplish that. no one in the open era did. slam number thirteen. but who's counting.

was that anna wintour in roger's guest box? hmm.

improviser

2008-09-07T02:45:00.000+08:00

our drama teacher glenn was in othello, so jeni, carlo, and i watched the play. still haven't slept by the way, well i did, i had like two hours of sleep before going to school, but six hours of sitting and listening and talking, really, even if i slept the whole day before that i'd still be tired and stressed and yawning. that was a weird sentence; no jake it doesn't look great. or right. the point was free tickets, we watched.

iago's one of my favorite characters ever. ok, that was pretentious. really. anyway what's fantastic about the iago we saw earlier was the beyond-evil thing going on there, i guess you can call that charm, or humor, which makes him scarier. that's close to the ideal iago, i think. or at least my idea of iago. there was no attempt to try to explain his actions, even the added final scene (iago kisses the dead othello) was a little, mysterious i think. don't listen to those gay stories they tell you. monsters should not be explained.

poor othello. critics always say othello is othello's tragedy but iago's play. i don't know why i wrote that. what if hamlet and iago were in a single play, what would happen?

event-ness and nostalgia

2008-09-01T00:26:00.000+08:00

until alanah called at around three it was an ordinary saturday. i was in school, worrying about the report i never prepared for. how do you summarize new criticism in a three-page three-level outline? which books, essays, sample works do you read? it does not end there; there's russian formalism, structuralism, semiotics, and marxism. all the digressions! so anyway around three alanah calls and tells me she has tickets to the eraserheads reunion concert.

i'm not a big fan of eheads because i'm terribly uncool. i know most of their songs because these guys are, well, they're like the beatles, i mean, you don't have to be a fan really. shows one how great they were. still, this one is so huge it shouldn't be missed, so i said i'll go.

there was some hesitation after because it was already seven and we were still at the village. but we arrived twenty or so minutes before the countdown began. alanah even brought her laptop and that wireless internet thing so she could participate in her class chat activity while in the cab.

perhaps you've heard about this before but despite the heat, the not-so-good acoustics, the possible rain, there was an almost magical thing in the place. when they sang alapaap it was worth everything we paid for. then there was the twenty minute-break. it felt too long. while waiting we started entertaining ourselves.

magkano ibabayad mo para maging ikaw yung babaeng sumasayaw dun sa video kanina?
pano kaya kung may koreans pa rin kahit dito, no?
pano kaya kumanta si nicole?

and then something amazing happened. when the announcement was made that the concert had ended thirty or forty minutes ago, everyone just left the place. when the organizer asked for a moment of silence, there was an actual moment of silence. i should've been a fan. i wish i were cool. photos here.

the other major event of the evening was musicguy. two years since that afternoon in the college of music caf and more than a year after the revelation of the name. but i'm not counting. nostalgia is so fun!

eh?

2008-08-19T17:04:00.000+08:00

i didn't know jelena jankovic was number one last week. well, i never considered maria sharapova world number one either, when she was the top player before, but that's different. i knew maria's ranking, i read news about it, i hated the fact that this woman gets to be in that position with all the shrieking she does.

justine henin (-hardenne, i miss that second last name), lindsay davenport, venus and serena williams, martina hingis: they deserve the top rank because they won tournaments and had rivals. i'm partial to lousy tennis players who earn the number one ranking because of pure luck and lousier competition. but that's just on women's tennis. i love patrick rafter, in and outside the tennis world. i was a fan of marcelo rios.

now jankovic? please. she has to learn to stop choking. she has to win something big. kim clijsters had (i wouldn't really mind if she hasn't, or didn't, she can do those splits), amelie mauresmo did, twice. ana's number one again now so this is just all blah. and this is all sexism.

faith

2008-08-17T00:03:00.005+08:00

last night.it was the only olympics tennis match i watched, and federer lost. to james blake, who looks like a great person but is not an exceptional player. amazing forehand but cannot win big matches. first time james beat roger in nine (i think) attempts. three olympics! not a single medal in singles.

ironic - but this is good news! - that he wins his first (maybe only) medal in doubles. the federer-wawrinka team beat the bryans earlier today, giving roger his first (at least) silver medal. fun.

tonight. so in his third olympics he finally wins a gold medal. roger federer and stanislas wawrinka beat the bryans (those brothers!) yesterday and just a few minutes ago beat the swedish team to become doubles champions. roger lost the bronze medal in sydney and was beaten by tomáš berdych in athens. berdych is marat safin without a major.

doubles! isn't that amazing? he loses the world number one ranking on monday, but he shows them (them=not us who still believe) he's still king. one thing i never really understood about these stupid critics: they saw something/someone almost religious and dismissed everything when he started losing matches. die, you, you idiots. think happy thoughts. federer's an excellent doubles player. he and marat were partners before (i carefully chose those words, stupid fantasies). ready for the slams, roger?

notes to self

2008-08-11T15:34:00.005+08:00

00:29. break. i've been writing (or editing, depends on the pov) this script for a work thing for an hour now. tour. some japanese big guys are coming and there's a presentation to be made, so. 31 slides and i'm only on the seventh or eighth. i need to finish everything by 2am, maybe 3.

i've no work tomorrow but after everything after 3am would be just plain crap. working and yawning are two things i cannot do together. i guess when you've worked in a company for a long time (relative to, i don't know. i just think it's long already) they start giving you more shit to do. which is both good and not good; like all things. fuck i sound like i should be getting more sleep. or reading more books.

no idea still what i'd like to do, i mean, i like the job and all. there are some problems, uglies, but then where there's people there's bound to be discomfort. or something worse. i wonder what people think of me. scared to know. do i have a five-year plan? sometimes i think i do (or have). but right now, i noticed that my goals are really not the type of goals one would expect from, well, anyone.

they're more: finish a paper by friday instead of have a degree in lit after two years. or submit the script tomorrow instead of be a boss five years from now. when is this forgivable and when is it just plain sloth? completely clueless. i have a thing to write. let's leave the personal trash for now. need to work.

01:37. second break. fuck. tv's fault. some et show on divas and movies. do i have a choice? i have to watch this. i really love diana ross and fuckyou i don't care. not the singer, actor, bitch. it's the celebrity diana ross i love. can i say fierce? ok, now start judging.

15:17. not a big fan of michael phelps but when i saw that swimming relay game whatever earlier i joined the two down, six more to go chorus. phelps was more cheerleader though; the hero was some lezak guy who beat the last french swimmer by a nanosecond. i may be exaggerating again but i seriously think that that was a nanosecond.

thanks to my generous company there's a free pool in the free condo where i could learn how to swim, if it isn't too late for that. tried swimming earlier today. it's not to late for anything. television and envy do that to people. we start having delusions.

concession

2008-08-07T09:30:00.000+08:00

in two weeks rafael nadal takes the number one ranking from roger federer; this title, this thing, roger has held for two hundred weeks. i still care, still read tennis news and "commentaries", my silence on the topic is still a product of the nadal wimbledon victory. oh well, this i guess is moving on.

nadal is a worthy heir, he's been number two for a very long time too, and the oncourt demeanor we soon learned isn't arrogance. he's just that competitive. he wants to win everything and i that's good. this conversion of mine from total nadal hater (ahaha, jologs) to a bit of a fan happened with the ascent of novak djokovic. the serb's a promising player alright. he must earn the number one ranking though, if he really wants it. rafael nadal didn't give up. now it's his.

i still am your biggest fan, roger federer; i will cheer for you in the olympics and the us open.

deathly, definitely

2008-08-03T12:56:00.000+08:00

is it freudian that my problems seem so shallow when i try to articulate them? i mean, they're really depressing and all but how do you say, i totally like this one person and unfortunately blah blah without sounding, one: shallow (there's a war in iraq and economic woes everywhere), and two: really kitschy (danielle steel, anyone? she's better, actually). see, i have to say freudian so even i won't judge myself (freudian because of those id crap, and how being noble is a myth).

freud. kitsch. "philosophy". i swear this is what my professor was talking about yesterday. some bad adjective mosaic. circles. fuck. if i can't organize even the icons on my work pc then no use trying to organize thoughts. or writing. i sometimes seriously want to be writing about real things. i'm always confined. i've created this place, or feeling, or setup. i want things to change but i haven't the patience. so, drama. sucks.

"don't know what i've done but i feel ashamed"

2008-07-30T08:51:00.003+08:00

was that modern guilt? that's it, right? fuck, i love beck! nev mind scientology. this new album has lots of spiritual non-crap i love it. or i think those were spiritual. where does he get all those, sounds?

the two best beck albums, and they're one of the best ever (even though i only have a very limited best albums knowledge: i think at least seven miles davis albums qualify for this), are completely different from the other i'm tempted to say they couldn't have been made by one person.

except i'm a sucker for melodrama. a terrible heartache produced sea change. it's broken loneliest alonest beck. guess i'm doing fine is a masterpiece in pretending and wallowing in despair: "it's only you that i'm losing, i guess i'm doing fine"; in a more popular song beck sings the simplest and saddest words ever: "baby, i'm a lost cause". that's for your one great love. odelay is the true beck sound.

only incidental that my friends and i call each other bek. or is it?

stuck, maybe forever

2008-07-29T23:28:00.000+08:00

so we're still not over the dark knight. alanah says she thought the joker's a victim too when he first tells the story of his scars (that scene i find very scary. chinatown, anyone? except heath ledger's performance is a million times scarier than roman polanski's). when he tells a different story to rachel (with almost the exact same delivery, expression, and tongue movements) her summary, brief and i would have to say accurate, was: gago to a!

they say the best villains do not need explanations. oversimplification. villains escape reason, that's more like it. they do things not because of childhood trauma, or some tragic loss. that'd be trashy psychologizing (what kind of word was that). the joker is evil because of his position as the opposite of good, and this we can say is true for batman himself. that's the only way to define them both. the constitution of self as other. wtf!

i think i'm writing a batman-related grad school thesis, by the way. no, let's call it batman-inspired. it's about philippine cinema, and genre (love!), and parody. maybe some anticolonial narrative somewhere. ideas? help!

maybe the sun

2008-07-28T04:50:00.000+08:00

sick. colds. rain did it. i think. can it do that? rain? honest question. if some virus causes the common cold then the rain couldn't have done it. logic and biology. shit, stop. i'm sure it was the cold weather. causes other things too. don't start. won't start. i swore before that i wasn't gonna do schizo writer but right now, feels ok. words make sense. one second away blacking out. nothing amy winehouse. hyperbole.

two weeks for the virus to go away right. the scariest thing/s in the word, viruses. i'd love it if the plural were virii. would've given the word more, i don't know, character, i guess. then again what the fuck character am i looking for (fword doesn't look natural but for emphasis i won't edit; new thing i'm trying: writing whatever's there).

my friend glenn is having let's call it relationship problems. or emotional. that could work. emotional problems. says he can't sleep. someone didn't text him. looks stupid and shallow and say whatever you want. happened to me once. and i think all my friends had that same life-changing moment. not the easiest thing. they say it depends on the person, or the handling. but i believe it's all about confessions and how much you're willing to admit something. what we say is rehearsed!

we all feel it, we all feel the same thing i mean, but the choice between trivial and noble gets in the way. or maybe i've just read too much freud. my nose is sore. tissue's not, erm, gentle

everyone's smiling

2008-07-25T00:07:00.006+08:00

we all know what to say when we see something like this: a tear fell. something of a joke really, but then what's the difference between comedy and tragedy? let us call that intentional obfuscation. miss you, beks.

erika took the photo so she's not in it. impossible unless she's a mutant or something. there's one with all four of us but something's wrong with my eye there so i chose this. we watched the dark knight after dinner. alanah went home because, i forgot why.

after we graduated ujp lost its tambayan. the last time i've been to my beloved college was when i claimed my diploma like a month ago. another drama night, why am i not doing my papers?

disorientalism

2008-07-23T01:07:00.000+08:00

much has been said about heath ledger's joker and i think i've talked a lot about it too. watching the dark knight again (third time! there will be a fourth) made me realize (what's another way of saying that?) there's another performance there that needs to be, well, praised (something's wrong with me): gary oldman's.

his jim gordon is so complex (as all magnificent performances should be) and so fragile i kept wishing there were a paul thomas anderson scene somewhere (you know what those are, right? julianne moore in the pharmacy? i've abandoned my boooy?) or maybe a faye dunaway-in-chinatown scene (the mouth-cuttings reminded me of chinatown). he gets to say the best lines too. those last words made me cry.

i need to write about maggie gyllenhaal; need to watch the movie again.

vernacular

2008-07-22T00:41:00.000+08:00

no depression after ecamp. not a seer; who uses the word seer? was one day late, that was an entire day i missed! everyone was drunk or sleeping, or drunk and sleeping when i got there. tin and mayee were already sober and were taking care of everyone. pretended i was drunk, too. easy.

won a star, finally. yeah, always wanted one of those, to be honest. i kind of envied teammates who've won before. not the creepy envy kind, no. the summary's i'm only human, and i can't pretend i don't care. i do. happy i won. there i said it. oh, the star was for writing blog entries four times more than what i was obligated to write. wasn't there, by the way. eric accepted the thing for me. god i'm so self-centered. don't care, this makes me happy. for now.

joined the teambuilding activity on day two (this qualified me for a minor prize in the raffle but even though i insisted on joining, having an entry, i knew i wasn't winning anything; i did not). not a fan of those pop psych shit they tell you after tough games. that's because i pretend i'm cool. and we all know the blah about working together as a team, helping each other out. but when you're there something makes sense. well, something made sense to me.

i'm happy i was happy. dandandan here come the clichés. i should write like this more often.

it made me write this

2008-07-18T02:26:00.002+08:00

if you are watching the dark knight anytime soon, please please tell me so i can come see it again! this is hamlet and othello with gadgets and summer movie stunts. harold bloom says iago isn't just a supervillain, he could be the inspiration for the literary satan. haven't read cormac mccarthy's blood meridian, but i think we have another iago in heath ledger's joker.

we are confronted with these concepts good and evil every time, but this best work by chris nolan asks, and shows us, the shakiness - or is it shallowness - of these mere words. nietzsche, anyone? the joker says: what doesn't kill you makes you stranger. i'm tempted to venture into freud, deconstruction, and maybe spivak again but this is so uncool already.

moviegoers have to learn to manage their expectations. on our way out of the theater mayee and i heard some teen say the dark knight is so much better than harry potter.

diary of hate

2008-07-17T00:13:00.001+08:00

the fact is that the world cannot be populated by just the graham greene-reading, the reflexively funny, or the gorgeous and the überhot. there has to be a point of comparison. the rest of us may remain in the middle, but we are privileged to be judges of those beneath us. ok, i'm being too arrogant. i shouldn't hate so much. i should start considering thinking about liking people for what they pretend to be instead of, you know, not liking them for who they really are. a lot of action words there: first the considering then the thinking, i wonder if the sentence made sense at all.

some people do the weirdest things, you know. and they're annoying. or worse than annoying. they give life at twenty some action, or conflict whatever, thanks, but they should be shot somewhere far. we need that climax. that would be it.

scary day five

2008-07-16T01:16:00.000+08:00

useless trying not to repeat myself; i think i blogged about not sleeping last saturday and then attending two three-hour classes without so much as a five-break between them. i think i was sleeping every fifteen minutes, those minute-long sleeps when you try hard not to close your eyes but they just do, on their own. i think everyone noticed.

the point here: catharsis (thanks, mhwb). i heard "purgation" and "cleansing" and i think i knew what the word meant from previous classes, but i feel like i missed something. i should've coffee-d. fun! as if understanding an aristotelian concept's going to help me when, ah well. four days

hope and mathematics

2008-07-14T01:51:00.001+08:00

how's this for a boring life slash person - that would be my life slash me (how's that for a crappy intro): my blog posts are all about books, grad school, some music, some movies, a lot of tennis (before the french open; it will take maybe years before i write anything tennis again, the slam after the french was really devastating. we will call it that: the slam after the french).

of course there are the emoposts, can't live without drama. they're all true by the way, they sound all campy and shit but when i wrote them they made sense. even this attempt at metawriting borders on the dramatic, hence on the overly uncool too.

i should do a quantitative study of all my blogposts. find out how shitty my life is, or at least the part of it that i'm willing to write about. it may not appear so but i do edit myself, and harshly. i'm just not that good a writer. or editor for that matter. real life is nasty and brutish and short. where'd that come from! real life is shittier than what we tell other people it is.

next week i'm attending a company activity in subic. tried my best to not go but i'm a hopeful person. that or i'm masochistic. said yes last week. the lack of sleep lessened the obsessing, which should have begun five seconds after i confirmed. one friend summarized everything (and this i know is the truth of it all; i just will not put it this way. i'd stick to my moving on, i don't deserve this story): you want to go. i do want to be there. i'm not trying hard enough. is there like a pill for this?

school is a verb

2008-07-13T12:23:00.001+08:00

mom says i maybe it would be a good idea if i didn't grad school (verb, i forgot how she said it) next sem. the schedule's really killing me and i'm a confessing animal: i tell her everything. no sleep at all for the past two days, not two days, just forty hours (no, i didn't sleep at the office: blog - this one, not the work blog - needed some fixing, priorities). the repetitions! you may not read this thank you.

i think i've convinced her that everything's fine though, and that for the next few years i'll still be grad schooling (verb, again). because i've no idea what i'd do without it. it is still a goal. not a big one but it would give the next two or three years some kind of direction.

vitamins will help

2008-07-12T03:42:00.006+08:00

i've no idea if i liked mamma mia or not. on the one hand, the hesitation must mean i didn't, because if i did like it, i'd rave and curse and start throwing hyperboles. on the other hand, i've seen movies that really sucked and i knew i hated them right away.

why did i stop listening to norah jones? maybe it was the lure of the obscure. the rhyme is unintentional. it stays. i don't like writing about the music i love. you listen to music. you say shit about it but that's secondary. this is secondary, what i'm doing.

reading raymond carver's short cuts. a million directors couldn't make a decent adaptation even of a mediocre work. robert altman made a film based on nine carver short stories and one poem. if that wasn't genius, then what is.

i wish i could write about something else. like how my date with this person made me happy. or how i laughed today because someone i really like told a funny story. fiction's an option but that's just sad. and imagination has limits. i'm not that bad, i think. i should be happier.

never wrong

2008-07-07T20:51:00.000+08:00

i've been writing spam articles for like six months now, and i want to think i'm the expert. well, at least when i'm talking to my mom and my sister. so kaye tells us she received this email from a friend, one of those earthquake warnings.

technical writer me was quick: hoax! remember those viagra emails? the greeting cards? let's not panic here, ok. delete the email. do not forward anything.

but mommy did an alan lightman: it really doesn't matter. there will be some quake sometime soon, spam or no spam. it may happen tomorrow, or when you're forty and kaye's thirty nine. it's geological. silence. this happened a week ago. then, last night: earthquake.

mornings and melancholia

2008-07-03T00:21:00.000+08:00

finally talked to my dentist (after two weeks of calling and texting - all her numbers, even her assistant's were not working) and all she said was: ok. tomorrow. thanks. i'm worried about my teeth: the two in front are so brittle i think i woke up earlier and found fragments on my pillow. and the grinding's getting worse every day; my mom heard it when we were talking on the phone! the jaw, too, some problem there.

then the twitches. which must mean i am very ill. a twitch is never a good thing. mayee told me i might be hypochondriac or something. then i started worrying that i might be. she laughed and pointed the irony (or humor) of that problem.

i haven't slept in days. well technically i did. three of four hours. three days. been sleeping at the office, too. this morning i woke up and the it's morning already. the hand and feet cramps were the worst ever. if i'd add that then that'd be seven hours in four days!

this is a part of my favorite vignette from einstein's dreams: a world in which time is absolute is a world of consolation. for while the movements of people are unpredictable, the movement of time is predictable. while people can be doubted, time cannot be doubted... people look at their watches and take refuge in time.

i make no sense. and the writing is really terrible.

pop

2008-06-30T04:58:00.000+08:00

i overslept last night. so now i can't sleep. celebrate, my bosses. i might not sleep at work this night. might. only 4-ish. still plenty of time left, maybe an hour. that was a joke. i don't sleep at work. well, not always.
don't you just hate it when you've done all the not sleeping and the coffee-drinking and the saying no to movies and dinners for a report (two! two reports) and when you think: finally your (you and your red eyes and your seven million zits) turn, the class (classes! classes!) ends (erm, end).

mommy always reminds me to not forget my vitamins (yeah, they're really helpful, psychologically) but i always do. like yesterday. memory problem; hope i could forget other things too, but let's not do that now.

the gang (that was so cool, mayee!) watched wanted last night. i promised i'd watch with them but when i arrived home the bed was there and i seriously needed sleep. so now i'm the loser graduate student with mediocre reports and a sad movieslife. my last movie was still kung fu panda! should maximize cuts.

woke up fourteen/fifteen hours later with a terrible headache. too much sleep kills, right? so cold here at the office. i do not mess with air conditioners though. someone turn it off for me, please. i'm into pop music now, by the way. talk to me. anyone.

performance principle

2008-06-20T10:45:00.000+08:00

i suddenly wished i were bored again; you hate it when you do nothing but you hate it when you've like tons of shit in front of you, too. human nature. or just my nature. i blame the inconsistency on something beyond me, something immune to change.

grad school's giving me the worst time. not that i'm overworked, there are hours when i just lie in bed and do nothing, you know those hours right, you do that, too. i hate oxymorons. doing nothing. i don't read. my house is a mess; a dumpsite'd be cleaner. i think i saw a thousand roaches last night. the bug killer is in the kitchen. or somewhere.

yeah, i wrote school. i always knew it'd be hard. not academically, or anything. hard for me, as a, this became a joke among friends, as a person. managing time, that is the hardest thing in the world. doing things without being told, that has to be the second hardest. but i won't quit. because i never do. frailty. i envy quitters. they live life. i imagine it.

there's an effort to stay away from melodrama, of any kind. skip the lonely tom waits songs. listen to the really fantastic ones. fantastic meaning really fantastic. loud. cuss-inducing. fuck you. there.

livelearn

2008-06-12T02:18:00.000+08:00

roger federer still is the best tennis player ever. no, not forgetting the french open final (or finals: third year now). i realized dents are as important as achievements, and when one faces the best claycourt tennis player ever, a single victory becomes a great achievement (hamburg last year). that was a concession. what would you call rafael nadal if not that? kaye still hates him, she does not get the djokovic intrusion.

i take tennis seriously, it's almost a religion, or it is. we forget the humanity of tennis players, we think of them as gods. roger's almost godlike; clay ruins the perfection. yet remember: steffi graf had monica seles, martina navratilova had chris evert, and evert martina, pete sampras won all those majors and never reached any french open final, bjorn borg kept losing at us open, rod laver had "those" years.

forgiven, roger. after four days. be gorgeous again, what's that thing on your face? been there since monte carlo. maybe earlier. you need a dermatologist.

count the headlights on the highway

2008-06-11T01:07:00.000+08:00

film geeks would tell you their favorite movie scene ever's the shower scene in psycho, or death's first appearance in the seventh seal, or that pause in the last supper parody in viridiana. my favorite: (and no, not calling myself a geek! geeks are cool) the bus scene in almost famous: big fight, tiny dancer plays on the radio, they all sing. why'd i install limewire again? poor makmak.

suddenly had this strange, empty feeling. like there's nothing out there, and also nothing inside me, too. not sad; that's scary by the way. misery connects one to this world of humans. failures grow out of hoping. empty, not looking forward to anything. this is why one shouldn't live alone. i should start sleeping.

brief and wondrous

2008-06-10T11:45:00.000+08:00

the brief wondrous life of oscar wao is only the third book i've read with such, hmm, quickness, and when i finally finished the book i was convinced junot diaz is the best writer ever. same thing when i read the virgin suicides, that ending's so marvelous i had to read it out loud to make sure i got everything jeffrey eugenides was saying. then there's a million little pieces, the one book kaye and i both loved. she used to mock all my anne rice books before (was young, had to have that phase in my reading life), i mocked her for not reading.

sure there are rushdies and morrisons and mcewans, but james frey, jeffrey, and junot i admire because they write the way i want to, or i'd want to, did that make sense? it's like loving almost famous; sure martin scorsese and paul thomas anderson and robert altman make the most amazing movies... not saying cameron crowe's just a popular filmmaker, or that the junot's second rate, i'm stopping.

oscar wao is one unforgettable character, obese and perpetually inlove, you get that that's unrequited, right. i was a second away from screaming "i am so oscar wao" when the adifferentbookstore person said it first. oh well, oscar's way luckier than i am, and that's with his family fuku and all. you think all those junot diaz spanglish wouldn't inspire another melodramatic blogpost, you're wrong.

post-siamese dreams

2008-06-09T19:39:00.000+08:00

trying to save. for cambodia. told mom. says i should go. the trip's an excellent idea, she says. i have to have money, though, you know, for the plane ticket, and maybe food, in case that's necessary. plane ticket tops the list.

cambodia is probably the only thing i'm looking forward to right now. remember thailand, and how you paid all those refund charges for nothing? trying to erase that from memory, except the credit card bill's somewhere in the house; will burn it when i find it. hope nothing goes wrong. school's becoming a major responsibility again, well it should be, but you get my point, right. oh, i'm such a complainer.

the remains of the night

2008-06-08T20:41:00.000+08:00

there's stuff on the floor and a weird smell in the kitchen. and when i got home from dinner with kaye, there's a note on the door. neighbors think there are other people living with me, because the water bill spiked. it doesn't take a philosophy degree (i majored in journalism) to find the fucking error with that statement slash accusation. but then there really are stupid people living in this world, the ones i know use yellowgreen post-its.

not sorry. i value my friends, thank you very much. sometimes i wish i weren't living alone, but i guess i have no choice. i am most comfortable this way, and as long as i pay rent, and pay on time (my mom does actually, but you get the point), i'll sleep late and laugh out loud when someone says something funny.

gained in translation

2008-05-07T00:47:00.002+08:00

now i love jun'ichirō tanizaki. reading the key turns one into a crazy person, or a kid, or a retard, one who doubts everything yet believes everything that is written in the alternating diaries/"confessions" of a seemingly ordinary couple. if everything is real then the opposite of real is real too. husband lusts after his wife, ikuko, who he says is reticent and modest but is actually sexually insatiable. wife tells lies in her diary entries and makes husband jealous, the husband meanwhile knows of the plot, gets jealous a little. they read each other's entries and pretend they don't, or haven't; they have incredible sex, they're not teens anymore.

the translated tanizaki is written in short, uncomplicated sentences. yet if some essence of the original work is retained, we see an irrationality in love and passion, or just sex, that ruins people and also makes them whole. husband and ikuko compete. they both win and they're both destroyed. oxymoron/paradox. one cannot be better than the works one reads, so that's my summary. give me more tanizakis.

weakdance

2008-05-04T20:17:00.000+08:00

done reading rushdie's grimus. for a first novel this one's very ambitious, though not grandly ambitious as rushdie's more famous the satanic verses. here we see a writer whose mastery of the english language, seen in his extreme manipulations of the word, remains unparalleled and unmatched by any modern writer. then he mastered storytelling too. the second novel midnight's children shows us how the folk and the popular can be combined in a single work to give us grand (rushdie is all about repetition) entertainment while making transparent too, notions of self, country, and nationality. grimus is about science and art-philosophy. sir salman would later discover the uses of satire and allegory (midnight's, shame), and would apply those in his commentaries on the political and cultural situations of east and west.

a completely unrelated thought. i'm used to deifying (thanks for the word alanah). which makes it so difficult when, erm, figures you thought would make you feel like trash start acting like ordinary people. then you see right through them, realize they're your equal, and start not liking them anymore. gayatri spivak (i think i've quoted spivak a thousand times already!) calls herself a practical marxist feminist deconstructionist. can we call this practical masochism? haha. tanizaki, you're next.

i disagree michael stipe, living well is not the best revenge

2008-05-03T04:58:00.000+08:00

when i watch movies, or read books, there's always that scene or chapter or page where i say, that's me. i am that character, those words say how i feel! all bs really. some dreamed dream about greatness, and having other people watch you in all your tragedy. the reality of the absent audience is hard for me to accept, but i can't do anything about it. can't change history, but won't surrender either. the albert camus effect, let's call it that. i cannot define myself, i am all donnie smith and sarah mclachlan singing angel live, vladimir or estragon, penny lane (but only when she said "what kind of beer?") and one of robert altman's characters.

i spend hours wishing i were miles davis, or roger federer with a french open title, or steven soderbergh, or salman rushdie with a nobel prize and an oscar for best screenplay. i wish my mom and dad were karen and henry hill, that would be an exciting life. but i'm stuck listening to jazz and not playing it, reading the virgin suicides and not writing it, watching taxi driver, or goodfellas, or even the departed, and not living it. violent lives, i know. i need violence right now.

(and i still like you, michael stipe. i wish i were you too, sometimes.)

just a case of mononucleosis

2008-04-27T07:08:00.001+08:00

tennis is about chaos and order. to be a fan is to subject oneself to the tortures of chaos and the bliss of order. the life of a tennis fan is centered on a tennis hero. my hero's roger federer. i have sort of proto-heroes before roger: guga (can't win a non-clay slam), patrick rafter (too good, and the shirt size), marat safin (genius, but). then wimbledon, 2001. a swiss kid beat the mighty pete sampras in the fourth round. that win is not only material, it is also very symbolic. during the next years that kid started breaking records. tennis fans were quick to revise their assumption that sampras is the best player ever. welcome to the age of roger federer.

today, of course, we're living in that phase they call the changing of the guards. roger's 26, which would make him kind of past his prime. he has won 12 majors already. the thirteenth should have been an australian open crown this year. he lost in the semis. a new kid from serbia beat him. call me sore but i believe the mono story, haha. roger was sick. no one beats him like that.

roger started losing matches after that, which would validate the ailment non-excuse. these observations of chaos are not entirely centered on fed. there was a time when tournaments were won only by either roger federer or rafael nadal. this year these two kept losing to, well, lesser players. then last week, roger won a claycourt title, his first for the season. his opponent retired. could this mark the restoration of order in the tennis world? and just last night, federer and nadal booked their places in a tourney final.

their matches could not have been more, erm, portent-ious. nadal beat nikolay davydenko, who beat him in last month's masters (was it in miami?). federer was trashing novak djokovic when, quite expectedly, the serb retired. breathing problems. we've heard that story before. if you don't know how to handle losses, quit the sport kid. as we're on the subject of portents, nadal wins the final. i'm back to being a federer groupie, but i'm also more realistic now (realistic and superstitious). no one beats nadal on clay. federer did last year, but that was hamburg. at least there's the comfort of order restored.

several hours after. you don't learn! i have actual superpowers! i accurately predicted the outcome of the monte carlo final between roger federer and rafael nadal. nah, it was easy. we all know no amount of coaching would change roger. he'll always be that graceful, beautiful, intelligent player. he must win a few more wimby titles, to compensate for all the french losses (past and future). hay, roger federer. one last appeal. please. don't be a saint, kill your opponents out there! we all know you value aesthetics. but try and play ugly sometimes. we need roland garros.

a myopia slash astigmatism story

2008-04-17T11:26:00.001+08:00

or maybe it was the astigmatism that did it, don't know the difference really. but my story involves mtv and those televisions in public where you see the images but do not hear the sounds.

a little bit of history. always had glasses (not comfortable using the word spectacles, so glasses). glasses were to me as braces were to my sister. they made us freaks really when we were kids. freak is a harsh word, exaggerated in this context, but the only other word that i think could replace freak here would be queer; freak it is. kaye would warn me of the pains of having braces and i'd do the same with the glasses.

when the enemy is genetics one is bound to lose. kaye did have the headaches and needed to wear glasses. i began looking like a vampire and had to get braces (genetics is my excuse). the point was the eye problem. serious eye problem, i would technically be blind without the glasses. the last time i saw an eye doctor was more than a year ago - that ends the history part and also explains why we have this story here.

civilization and all its discontents

2008-04-12T08:00:00.000+08:00

now i don't think the world is absurd at all. changed my mind. it has timing - this world, this universe. when patterns are obvious, there's no absurdity there. some intelligence is involved. god is not silent after all. the greeks may be right. the difference is in the nature of tragedy: ordinary people can be tragic figures.

help me god, err, world, whoever/whatever's out there somewhere. make this that thing rational people call a mid-life crisis. to escape existence at forty would be, that would be heaven.

half smiles of the downloaded

2008-04-10T22:45:00.000+08:00

after seven decades there was, finally, a check beside the taxi driver soundtrack torrent. the score by bernard herrmann was the earliest thing about taxi driver i liked. earliest: didn't get the movie the first time i saw it. high school, surrounded by people, you know, typical happy life. always liked violent movies - kaye and i had this fascination with the silence of the lambs. we would do scenes in what i would now call camp, erm, a campy manner. (the lambsh, they were shhcreaming/quid pro quo docter/good eeveneeng clareeeese). taxi driver has a different kind of violence, though. that kind that goes beyond the physical. of course the only way to show that violence is through physical images and symbols, but this movie transcends even that. there's john hinckley and jodie foster and the reagan assassination attempt.

the twelfth track has the travis bickle diary entries monologues. he talks about the rain washing the streets clean of dirt and blood and that same rain cleaning the earth of all its scum. the first meeting with the angelic woman seems to be a feature in scorsese films; cate blanchett glows when she and howard hughes are first introduced (now i'm mixing names, and the aviator is really a non-scorsese film directed by martin scorsese). betsy has that same radiance when travis first sees her.

there's a similar obsession to john hinckley's and it's the best (not the superlative of good) story in tennis i've known. steffi graf won the golden slam in 1988 (all the majors plus the olympic gold) and was queen of the world. a few years later some teenage girl started beating her. monica seles became world number one. then günter parche, obsessed fan, stabbed seles and steffi was number one again. seles would win only one major after that. whatever, i still love steffi.

this is a piece of crappy writing one does to keep one's thoughts away from the real crappy things that're happening. by one of course i mean me (or is it i, i mean i?).

undo the collapse

2008-04-03T10:52:00.001+08:00

will never be albert camus, or beckett/adamov/genet/ionesco. still, here's an attempt at articulating the absurd. you know you have an existential problem, crisis, when:

1. some cat looks at you in a weird way; you feel judged. you have a feeling that even cats know better than you do.

2. you want to jog around the neighborhood at 11pm.

3. you do jog at 11pm. alone. and only for five minutes, or the length of two and a half songs on your ipod. you suddenly realize the absurdity of what you're doing. you go home.

4. the world has six billion people. you feel alone.

this year's model student

2008-03-29T08:59:00.000+08:00

i have a self-worth preservation ritual which involves forgetting the papers i had written after their submission to the professor. my final paper for the drama class mentions edward albee, existentialism, history, chromosomes, baby-talk, verb tenses. can't remember now what the paper was about.

when you're good to mommy

2008-03-27T10:55:00.000+08:00

my mom has this thing with her skin which we all agree is more an eye problem than an actual skin problem. she keeps saying there are spots on her arms but we (tito, kaye, and i: all three of us) do not see anything there.

so she goes to a dermatologist. dr says she should take glutathione pills, for the antioxidant or whatever function i guess, as my mom already has very fair skin. she buys two bottles and decides after finishing one that it does not solve her skin thing. so guess who gets that second bottle.

hay, wish i could go home every month.

coolness and the literary imagination

2008-03-13T12:42:00.000+08:00

so anne rice is serious about her catholic whatever. saw the new book; the back page was all about the surprising subtlety and simplicity of the book. those are two words you do not use to describe this writer.

i realized i was cooler back when i was an anne rice reader (and i had that book too, yikes). as soon as a new book hit the shelves i had it; well, that started with armand, i guess. now i'm stuck with books that were published at least twenty years ago. the gordimers and the greenes and the mishimas. nothing new now.

some person once laughed at me because i told her i read (past tense) the rice vampire books. i said i stopped reading them after the nth book because of this reason and that. should have told her at least i read the books, not their wikipedia summaries. i honestly think she reads just that.

i miss that self reading anne rice. young and stupid.

great beyond

2008-03-08T23:57:00.001+08:00

sheriff ed tom bell: ..he killed a fourteen year-old girl. papers said it was a crime of passion but he told me there weren't nothin' passionate about it. said he'd be fixin' to kill someone for as long as he could remember. said if i left him out there he'd kill somebody again. said he was goin' to hell. reckoned he's be there in about 15 minutes.

tommy lee jones is the philosopher in no country for old men. and it seems he remains just that: a mind that is able to make sense of the bleakness his universe, but is unable to do anything about it. one character even accuses him of "vanity" for thinking he can actually change anything at all.

the movie is about llewelyn moss, the josh brolin character, who comes across a drug deal gone wrong and decides to keep the money he finds there for himself. for moss, it is not about the choices one makes, but rather how one lives after those choices are already made. he spends no time imagining that other possibility without the bag of money. it's already there, already his. the question is how to stay alive.

and finally we cannot forget javier bardem: anton chigurh (moss thought the last name was "sugar"). chigurh escapes definition. one reason why bardem deserves (and would deserve) every award in the world (yes, awards, we all love them): a million actors can pull off a difficult role, a million of them can show a range of emotions without appearing have a torn cartilage, but only a few can tread in that dangerous territory of the seemingly simple and one-dimensional character, and those few manage to make robots and monsters and puppets (which in mediocre movies are fairly easy to understand) not only charming, but incomprehensible, unknowable, more-than-human and therefore beyond the human faculty for reason. chigurh could easily have been the terminator. well, he is not, never was.

no country for old men is comedy; it's the darkest you will ever see. you laugh and cover your mouth. even when alone, you look around to assure yourself no one saw you laughing.

bum

2008-02-11T12:39:00.000+08:00

one can't be a genius and a saint, can one? roger federer is a saint, that's for sure. the man can't kill on court! he has to be all nice, and graceful, and erm, yeah, pretty.

not saying amy winehouse equals genius here by the way. the grammys are never correct in handing out awards to those who deserve them. billie holiday: zero. milli vanilli: one (was revoked but). that would mean my introduction is a) useless; b) an excuse for dropping fed's name again, after that horrible horrible loss in australia; c) help me think of another.

anyway, amy wins five awards, meaning five women now have won five grammys in a single night: lauryn hill, alicia keys, norah jones, beyonce, and winehouse herself; technically eight women if one counts the dixie chicks girls, who won five last year. herbie hancock wins for album of the year, yey! the white stripes takes home two awards. i was the original fan!

alanah keeps saying burnout, all i want is you/with or without you, breathe, are her songs; try rehab, kidding alanah.

die traumdeutung

2008-02-03T21:26:00.000+08:00

these dreams must mean something: (1) one where there was an actual musical score - so this is the new year dan dan.. (2) one (and not that sure if this was a dream or if indeed there was a voice) where i woke up and thought i actually heard, yeah, a voice that said the bends. death cab for cutie and radiohead (i assumed it was that radiohead album); no madonna, why?

being and somethingness

2008-01-27T10:25:00.000+08:00

i finally thought of one, call it talent. i do well when everything is decided for me; left alone, there's the problem. my mom and my sister and i were talking and mommy began telling lil sis to do this and do that (school-related stuff most of them): these were things she used to tell me before. although i was a mediocre student, i think i did well and beyond my mom's expectations: graduated on time and from a good university.

clueless comes close to a description of the present state of mind, and self, although it does not fully capture what's there. no one tells me to do things anymore! i envy friends who have clear i have to be this after blah years thoughts. can't even think of a decent goal for the next two years! my laptop crashed last week and like a student i called my mom and asked her if i could have another one. current job pays well but i always look forward to the next payday because a week after the previous one i start worrying about living for another week with whatever money's left in the atm. and there's never a single significant purchase! no travels to wherever, no plans even. wanted to make a list but too idle even for just that. where does it all go?

thought once that the diploma was a good place to start. again, did not work (the other meaning of the word was not planned but hey, it's there, so) for me. told myself i wanted a job in media, but only if the workplace was near where i live. did have that job, quit after a very short time. the postgrad thing was another attempt but i now think that there might be something to the basketball team-caf-boys story, that that might be, after all, the only motivation.

my present boss told me before that writing for an it company might not really be what i would want to do; that was quite true, but then what does that mean anyway - wanting to do something? what do i want really? someone answer the question for me, please, haha. try my best to be whatever you want me to be.

there are days

2008-01-09T18:35:00.001+08:00

i think i have ocd. i was already late for the interview thing at school, and i went back to check if i had unplugged anything that needs unplugging. disaster-in-mind beats punctuality. not the first time. there was this one night when alanah and i were having dinner, or jogging maybe, and i dragged her to my house just to check. everything was unplugged, by the way. everytime.

the consolation (and sometimes i do believe this): there is a disparity between one's idea of oneself and what one actually is. alcoholics don't know they're alcoholics, those who think they're crazy probably are not, there's your story. so i have ocd, haha. i keep writing ocd, watched every episode of arrested development, that's why.

reminded me of a classic introduce-yourself-piece. people keep telling other people they're oc. the only intro that would rival that would be i'm non-conformist. big hellooo to that. and then there are the first conversations where everyone has to look smart. would usually start with i love books/i read books/i'm a bookworm. then a perky what books do you read exclamation points. then the answer: the da vinci code/the bible.

not stopping. i once had this conversation with someone who told me she's a big tennis fan. of course i asked her who her favorite player is (singular, the answer should be roger federer).

si, ano na nga pangalan nun? yung maganda?
sharapova? vaidisova? hantuchova? (started enumerated the -ovas)
di eh (long pause) ah, si kournikova.

vulgar, i know. and i pretend too. but please!

ben and sera with an 'e'

2007-12-26T12:20:00.001+08:00

i watched leaving las vegas again last night (last night, which happened to be christmas still, haha). i found the film extremely shocking the first time i saw it. the brutality of alcoholism and sex combined in a single movie - brutal not because of the subject matter, but because of a powerful cast and a very talented director (mike figgis, who also took care of the music and wrote the screenplay) - is almost too much to handle.

i remembered not wanting to watch it again; and leaving las vegas is a bad movie, on the contrary, it shocked me that bad (that would make it an outstanding movie) that to see it again would be to have that same shock i just had. or at least, i thought it would.

it was like requiem for a dream, which i saw some years after i first watched leaving las vegas. the themes were very similar, and also the use of style as a sort-of signifier. these are movies that you admire, you tell your friends about it, but you do not watch it again and again. repetitions are for friends episodes, or for almost famous, or for the silence of the lambs.

and then i watched it again last night, found the dvd while pretend-cleaning. and i realized - leaving las vegas is probably the best love story i had ever seen. forty minutes and i was already crying. i think it was when ben tells sera she cannot ever force him to stop drinking, which would mean she will have to see him die. the movie sometimes borders on camp, with the conversations and the music but it feels so real.

nicolas cage and elizabeth shue star as ben sanderson and sera. ben goes to vegas to drink himself to death; there he finds sera, a hooker who, despite everything, appears to have a passion for living. they meet, they talk instead of having sex, ben moves in with sera, they fall in love. everyone would know that that would never ever end well. and it does not. t think it was not figgis' intention to make his audience cry, but when sera cooks for ben (in an effort to keep him alive), one can't help it but shed tears.

an alcoholic and a hooker. disregarding the definition of tragedy, what could be more tragic?

jird

2007-12-22T14:19:00.001+08:00

pasky called it barugan, i guess that's the proper word for it. alanah, glenn, kathryn, pasky and i had our annual (it began last year so it is annual, fyi) christmas party at kyusinero, this place where alanah and i used to drink almost every night before and where pasky saw me barf. details details.

it was like the ujp tambayan again: we were loud and politically incorrect and, you got it, judgmental, insensitive and un-judiel nieva-ish. i received great great gifts. sorry for just the books guys. promise to get you better gifts next time.

so sad that i had to leave early; why do we have to grow up! why are some things forced on us! why are we supposed to be responsible! i hope the next jird thing happens tomorrow because i miss my friends so much. and you steph. we terribly miss you. bumalik ka na! you made us all cry (inside, haha). thank you beks. photos here.

float face up

2007-12-17T09:07:00.000+08:00

the death of memory is about the past as limbo - dull and white - and making prisoners of its subjects. the keeper guards time, memory, and the four people in misericordia - each with terrible memories they cannot bring themselves to face. the play develops on this paradox and asks us how memories can both be abstract and concrete, distant but engulfing.

the scattered yet coherent violences in the play serve as reminders of the destructive powers of memory left to itself, memory allowed to devour the human instead of human action over it. the situation appears helpless at first. one could not help but think of camus' man - shouting and longing for sound in a world that could only answer in silence.

and then one character realizes that through will and strength - violence against violence - maybe the keeper can be put to rest. by summoning memories maybe they can be overcome. and even when it ends with another victim, another memory, the human still triumphs over the irrationality of the world, imagined or not. the keeper, and she may have a thousand rebirths, can always be conquered and killed.

i, too, can

2007-12-16T11:30:00.000+08:00

elizabeth: the golden age would be a terrible film if one is to compare it with elizabeth. i don't want to. compare. yeah, maybe i will, but i will have to remind you that i like the golden age, despite what almost every critic out there is saying. michiko kakutani once derided (derided!!) toni morrison's paradise. toni morrison: winner of the nobel prize, author of beloved - possibly the best book of the century (possibly, possibly). paradise was inferior, but loved toni still. why am i writing about books?

i liked the golden age because i will always like every cate blanchett film. an error in personality, i guess. what can i do, i like her. i am myself. elizabeth was terrifying in its violence, seriously did not expect that much violence in a movie about a queen (am i sexist? tell me). the golden age is visually compelling. and it had its moments too. samantha morton did an amazing job (the accent! the accent!) and her beheading scene was quite marvelous.

i believe people when they say one shouldn't rate every film as if they were made by tarkovsky. not every film is la règle du jeu. so in this case, a shekhar kapur film is not always a shekhar kapur film. not that kapur is an auteur or anything, but then he made elizabeth. don't judge me, writing at 1 am, need sleep.

no money, still spending

2007-12-11T10:26:00.000+08:00

latest purchase: harold bloom's shakespeare: the invention of the human. am not required to read it (and i don't think i will be able to finish reading all of it for next saturday's class). *sigh, the things we do. had dinner with alanah the same night i bought the book, her reaction was a big eeww when she saw the harold bloom. haha, i get it. the best jacques derrida quote i know is this: to pretend, i actually do the thing. i have therefore only pretended to pretend.

also have to pay for a good scent from a strange mountain, ordered a signed hardbound copy of the book two months ago. the bookstore informed me earlier today that the book had arrived.

and then i look at all my books and wonder how i had spent so much and have so little. are we still talking books here?

loser, baby

2007-12-08T00:55:00.000+08:00

i need to clean my room; last night - technically it was this morning, but i love the sound of coming home at night - i think i saw roaches. it might be the beer, but i only had two, so the thing i saw may really be roaches. there were two, i think. there's paper everywhere - i've only read less than half of what i am supposed to. today is a school holiday, that's my excuse for not reading. next saturday i'll think of another.

katt and lawrence went to eastwood last night. hmm, ok i won't say it, won't say anything. katt will for sure, in the future, keep reminding me of that night when she went to eastwood all the way from makati. peace, pasky. be happy. yihee, you have a thing today. *inggit. (where's the butler book, think i lost it).

the office christmas party's tomorrow. no white stuff to wear yet. i'll go out later, maybe later. tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow. and oh, christmas - i checked the mail earlier and there's one for me, yey! it's from my dentist. she sent me a card.

save me

2007-12-05T06:20:00.001+08:00

so i looked (i think i chose to) at old pictures of jird and sinag, friends that i terribly terribly miss (thanks to my good friend katt's multiply - she has this album with different photos from different times, naks, different times). i remember hating school so much during my senior year; wished i were working, hoped that that day where i'd wear the sablay would come, and come fast.

i guess it did. it came fast. now i miss everything; i actually feel that school has become an excuse for spending time with my friends. ok stop already, you hate melodrama remember. and you usually don't use the second person whatever when writing. save me, erm, aimee mann, i guess.

the deferred

2007-12-03T09:30:00.000+08:00

i suspect the kingdom is a great movie, never mind cultural studies or whatever you want to call it - pc, sensitivity, i don't know. i liked the ending, liked it so much. yeah, cliche, but then again this is not a film by fellini so quit it.

almost fell asleep in the middle of the movie though, and i don't sleep in cinemas. not the movie's fault, it's just i haven't slept in a very long time - slept of course meaning slept for not less than seven hours each night. been working twelve hours for the past two weeks - twelve's the minimun. sometimes there are extensions, self-imposed. you know my reasons.

i should have slept all weekend but then there are readings to be, yeah, read. i am still loving school, thank you very much. (notice the use of still before loving; in anticipation of future complainings and what-have-yous). for my drama class i read palutus' miles gloriosus, aristotle's poetics, some writer's the death of tragedy, and edward albee's the goat or who is sylvia.

not an albee fan, not a fan of drama, actually. knew albee only from who's afraid of virginia woolf, the film, and that was more mike nichols/elizabeth taylor than edward albee. in the goat or who is sylvia, a man falls in love with a, right, a goat. the title says (notes toward a definition of tragedy). tragedy alright.

at least now i have a venue where i can talk about genre and postcolonial thought and maybe deconstruction without boring people. maybe i do bore people. the week after next it's shakespeare.

lambs leading lions

2007-11-08T11:00:00.000+08:00

as we were leaving the movie theater, the topic was those little things meryl streep did which make her meryl streep (and that was the worst sentence ever written).

the point was: acting has had a sort of template, hell, acting has become such a cliche. put several people onscreen and they'll imitate some performance by some previous actor. now here's the part where i rave, and this is a repetition of what others have said before. those tiny gestures by meryl were so amazing we could only count the ones we spotted - one leg scratching the other, the hand checking the armpit.

and lions for lambs was great by the way; what's particularly good about it is that the conversations are not dialogues but are in fact monologues - the characters are speaking their minds; they seem to be conversing with the other characters but they are more concerned with what they have to say that with what they are hearing. did that make sense? after watching a film full of articulate people i should have learned something.

before we watched the movie we all had this idea we were watching it for meryl streep. and as with all her other movies, the disappointment never came.

to pretend, i actually

2007-10-18T11:43:00.001+08:00

so i finished a semester (is it technically a semester? is it called a semester?) of violin lessons, despite, well, everything. teacher josh tells me it takes at least seventeen years for one to perfect whatever is supposed to be perfected when one plays the violin. so that's sixteen years, seven months more for me. someone shut me up.

not that big a fan of jewel but what's trivial is true; yeah simple, whatever.