no words at the beach
Posted at 10:27 AM

somebody didn't get a henna

 

 

 water ho! we don't have to row on land anymore!

 

happily starving... 

the road to fitness is loooong
Posted at 11:38 AM

so i started the summer with this firm conviction to become fit. so that, among other things, joanna can no longer say "yours are the flabbiest calves i have ever seen" - and considering how skinny i am, that's a really disturbing comment.

haha in my whole life i've committed to getting fit and healthy, oh, about 1,276,348 times. guess how many of those i've actually made a good go of it  

but i am slowly making a real swing at it. first i got the weights. now i got the bike. and of course the outfits. and the post-workout flip flops. will be getting more weights... oh yeah, and a trainer! gonna get my first workout lineup tomorrow. whee!

some day i tell you, some day before i die... i will be fit. dengit.

a care bears tale...
Posted at 08:08 PM

i don't remember the care bears. not that i was too young. i was too old i think, when they came out.

but my best friend is a super fan. the superest.

we were at this video stall in greenhills and i was looking through some of the titles when i suddenly heard an incredibly excited gasp/shriek. i looked at the direction of the sound and there was joanna (tabulas.com/~joanfoz) pointing wordlessly to care bears vcds.

'Omigod. Omigod! Omigod...' (in various intonations) were the only words i could get out of her.

then she started to cry.

she was clutching the videos with one hand and wiping her tears with the other. 'Dude, get them na!' i said. but all she could do was clutch at them, look at the blurbs and now and then cry out 'i know this episode! i know this!' the lady at the stall probably thought she was a raving lunatic.

anyway, she ended up getting the care bears ii movie (which i now really really want to watch haha) - with the other titles just itching to get into her collection.

i, in the meantime, continue my hunt for bollywood. more on that next time

not eating there again
Posted at 07:32 PM

so far there are two places on the list. the first is world topps, katipunan - a place i actually did enjoy going to (reasonable with biggish servings) until that last time.

starving from an afternoon workout and extremely frustrated at not finding a dimsum place, we ended up in world topps. ordered the tempura and satay shrimp - seemed safe enough. should've known things were not going to go for the better when the in-house sound system started playing 'careless whisper' by wham.

by the time madonna's 'crazy for you' came on, we had discovered that the satay was, well... odd (redeemable though with a LOT of knorr seasoning). and that the shrimp in the tempura could only be found with patient excavation. by the end of the meal we were close to hysterics, singing about the food to the tune of depeche mode's 'somebody.'

next on the list is heaven and eggs. if you're not the bright and perky type of person, beware. it has a mural of clouds (depicting heaven. and no, there is no egg mural), is very brightly lit, and as we sat down to order, what should start to play but 'the sun will come out, tomorrow...'

i was quite remorseful at the start of the meal having been rude to a waiter and consequently reprimanded. the restaurant staff, however, should also feel a tad bit of remorse for their mashed potatoes. tasted like cardboard. but since the bread did taste like wood - there might be some sort of nature-forest theme going on.

the organic bit, however, stops at the waffle syrups of which they have quite a variety ranging from you-want-me-to-believe-this-is-pineapple to better-put-it-on-your-hair-coconut.

the waffles themselves were quite alright and as we left i told joanna, "if we go back, let's just do the waffles." to which she replied, "go back? nuh-uh. we're never eating there again."

foodie
Posted at 03:33 PM

anybody who's seen me might be surprised to find out how big an eater i can be. i'm too skinny and slightly underweight. all that i eat, unfortunately, seems to stay as fat and accumulate in my tummy area.

but i do love to eat. when i go out of town for work, i'm usually the vacuum cleaner. taga-ubos ng pagkain. i learned how to cook because i have to eat lots of times in a day and didn't feel comfortable having to ask people to cook for me all those times.

a couple of months ago though, my appetite dipped. i'd eat very little and at times even skip meals. tsk tsk tsk.

but...

around a week or so ago, had lunch in chili's and was able to finish one of their burgers - you know, the ones that seem to have half a cow in them. had an early dinner a few days ago in cibo's and went through a plate of pasta and half a panini with ease.

earlier today i was hungry a couple of hours after lunch and had an apple. please. my stomach didn't even realize i had ingested something. had to follow that up with a can of pork and beans and a glass of chocolate milk. that was 20 minutes ago. getting hungry again now. will have a can of corned beef in about an hour.

yeah.

i'm back!

amityville? horror!
Posted at 03:18 PM

while the world trooped to theaters to watch star wars 3, we headed straight the other way to the amityville horror.

 This is a remake of the 1970s flick which was supposed to be based on a true story. What happens in a nutshell is that the Lutz family moves into this house in which 6 brutal murders had occurred some years prior (the entire Defeo family shot by one of their own). Pretty soon, creepy things began to happen culminating in Mr. Lutz getting a shotgun on the verge of recreating those grisly murders. 

It was half-funny, half-startling - yes, not quite frightening. Oh well. Maybe in this jaded age of real-life psychopaths, it's kinda hard to generate goosebumps with the undead. But there was one part that did creep me out, kinda. It was when the priest saw the doll that the Lutz girl was holding and said: "That stuffed bear your daughter carries around, Jodie Defeo was buried with that doll."

It was creepy because the ghost of the little girl Jodie was maybe the scariest thing in the film. It would write things on the etch-a-sketch, fool around with the ref magnets, and go around all shot in the head and bloody.  

So I was willing to live with that effect until i did some googling and found out that the whole amityville thing was a hoax. To top it all, in real life, Jodie was a pig... literally.

method to the madness
Posted at 07:16 PM

my room is messy. hard to find surfaces, most of them have been taken up by books and papers and things.

every semester i clean up and throw out a couple of big trash bags full of stuff. but that's once a sem, on every regular day, everything's just thrown together making a very good impression of a ransacked apartment. but that's just an impression.

see i know where everything is. every scrap of paper, every teeny receipt. i don't think in categories and don't arrange accordingly either. like how i piece together most of my life, i think in stories. i can remember that when i last saw a particular book i was so tired from a full day that i just dropped it on the far corner of the table and didn't return it to its shelf. i'll remember that i bought a particular shirt the same day i had something photocopied and so the receipt must be among the xeroxed stuff.

one day, an enterprising young housekeeper decided to fix my things. everything arranged in little piles. she was new and we had forgotten to brief her about leaving my things pretty much as they are.

everything put together according to category. everything neat.

i couldn't find a darned thing. 

a most satisfying film
Posted at 01:20 PM

(WARNING: Contains 'Sin City' spoilers. If you want to be completely surprised when you watch the movie, don't read this entry.)

"was it full of sex and violence?" my friend robert asks when i text him that i had seen sin city and loved it.

"delightfully so," i replied. "blood and gore... ang galing!"

while i am somewhat a fan of frank miller - batman year one, batman: the dark knight returns, and of course his daredevil stories - i wasn't really able to get into sin city. read one book and it put me off (then again i'm also somewhat put off by hellblazer, so constantine fans, you have an idea where i'm coming from). so in short, i really am not a sin city reader.

but man oh man, the movie blew me away.

in fiction, we are taught that we have to create a world, a most believable world that will draw in the audience. and in sin city, the world is so palpable. so real. in black and white with little splashes of color. beautiful.

splashes of color, but not the blood. the blood ran white. and did it run. sparing nothing in the gore, there are all the torture scenes, shootings, decapitations, a lot care of my favorite old town girl meeho who perhaps carried traces of tarantino's kill bill (he was guest director).

like many a rodriguez and tarantino film, sin city is not structured in linear time and moves around among many narrators. this is a device that's not really easy to pull off, but done here with the same brilliance it came off in pulp fiction.

and the cast. mickey rourke still going great as marv - a most endearing bloodthirsty, sadistic character. rosario dawson rocks as gail, and who knew clive owen could be so... yeah... but something to look out for is reinvention. rory gilmore (alexis bledel) a hooker? and lotr fans watch as elijah wood turns into a cat-like, psychotic cannibal. after all that angst-ridden hobbit stuff, this was actually refreshing.

wonderfully textured, phenomenally constructed cinematic feast. robert rodriguez (and of course quentin tarantino) - you are a genius.

ritual sacrifice
Posted at 04:01 PM

my room is the site where a cockroach cult fulfills its suicide pact.

sure i see live roaches prance back and forth. it's an old house. critters live here. but the strange thing is that around 4 times a week i will see a dead roach body lying somewhere in the room. i have no idea how they die - i certainly didn't kill them.

i've come to believe that they come here to die. that my room is probably built on the site of some ancient roach temple. the spirits of the primeval insect gods dwell here and call their believers to sacrifice their lives on the altar of my floor.

whatever. it's certainly weird...