BOHICA

brainstorming for my latest (and potentially huge) pitch today brings me to the land of military slang and jargon. here are some of the noteworthy nuggets (actually used by militarymen!) i found on my exploration.

catastrophic success - a particularly vivid paradox under the "iraq-specific" category, for obvious reasons. defined as "military victory coming much sooner than the plan anticipates, which throws off the overall strategic plan."

BAMF - bad ass mother f*cker

CYA - cover your ass

FILTAB - f*ck it, let's take a break

FUBAR - f*cked up beyond all recognition/repair (so much profanity in the military! i wonder why? :P)

HMFIC - head mother f*cker in charge

motarded - a u.s. marines term for being motivated to the point of being retarded. i guess nobody likes an eager beaver.

snot locker - the nose

SWAG - scientific wild ass guess

and my personal favorite: BOHICA - bend over, here it comes again

drei, that one's for you! ;)

Pleased with myself :)

i just had to blog this because i am so proud of myself today!

back story: after weeks of sitting through reruns of the biggest loser every day, marlon and i decided to get serious about losing weight. after all, if these 300- and 400-pound juggernauts could literally work their butts off and get even thinner than us, what the hell was our excuse? marlon took some opportune downtime at work to look for online tools that we could use to help us. initially, he found us a calorie counter widget for igoogle on labpixie, but with some more digging he turned up this website called sparkpeople.

it seemed a little confusing and tedious at first, but basically what happens is that you input your current weight and goal weight (it caps your weight loss at a very healthy 2.2lbs per week), and it churns out a recommended calorie/fat/protein/carb intake, plus a meal and exercise plan for you. 

marlon and i opted not to follow their meal plans (which seem like the most boring, white-people meals on the face of the planet) and just input our own meals into their calorie counter. you can search through their database or input the nutritional info of the brands that you like.  

it then tallies up the numbers and helps you see how you're doing in terms of the recommended calorie/carb/fat/protein range for the day. yep, it helps you get that good old-fashioned balanced diet that you've been hearing about but never really believed worked. 

this is where i had all my breakthroughs, because i've always just starved myself (which actually forced my body to go into survival mode and cling on to the calories) or cut out carbs (which my body needs to burn calories). and i never even thought about protein (which my body needs to build muscle and pump up my metabolism), a bad habit that which became obvious in my first few days as i was always way below the minimum protein requirement. and fat... hah. it was off the charts.

ANYWAY. i could go on and on and on. but basically yun yung back story. the reason i'm so happy today is that after nearly two weeks of trying to balance my diet (and failing miserably on some days, as the spikes below will show you!), i was finally right on target today! 

the light green area is my recommended range. the out-of-bounds spikes reveal when i had a ton of olive oil in my salad dressing, or when we had a big vietnamese dinner with fried spring rolls and coffee jelly!

not only that, i was actually kulang calories and fat... even after eating a big (for me) breakfast, drinking apple juice (which i don't normally have) and having lunch with a full tupperware of brown rice. i actually had to rack my brain for a snack that would put me just within the ideal range -- and it turned out to be a midnight snack of parmesan cheese and ferrero dark chocolate! 

a diet that "forces" me to have chocolate and cheese? i never thought i would see the day. :)

Urquiola preshosha

i was flipping through an issue of home and decor (a local mag that i buy a few times a year) when i came across this gorgeous stand-alone bathtub by patricia urquiola for axor, one of the brands under hansgrohe. every time a bathroom fixture is so pretty/luxurious/unusual that it makes me take a closer look, it turns out to be made by hansgrohe.

the dream home marlon and i are building in our heads most definitely contains a bathtub, and i think this is the one. it's sleek and pretty, with a slope on which you can rest your head or neck while soaking and a built-in slot for hanging towels. whether both marlon and i will fit in it at the same time is dubious, but if we lose enough weight... who knows?


patricia urquiola is one of the few furniture designers who i actually keep an eye on. i first saw her t-table for kartell in rustans shortly before i got married and i fell in love with it. when i showed it to marlon, he said it gave him the itchies.


it was enough to get me interested in her work. i like a lot of her pieces, like this frilly chair (yes that's really what it's called), also for kartell.


i was instantly drawn to her crinoline chairs for b&b italia -- they reminded me of those woven rattan peacock chairs that were so popular in the seventies, but reinvented in a cool and modern way.


then i found out that the weaving was actually done in the philippines! how cool is that!


i wonder if i can actually own one of these pieces at some point in my life.


i can just imagine myself breakfasting on this re-trouve chair and table, enjoying a fresh pot of coffee with the crisp morning air and lush greenery from my open-air patio.

ting! truly preshosha!

Inspirations for the day

i quickly discovered that one of the most useful survival skills for my job is gathering and maintaining a pool of references. from videos to images and (less often for me) music, sometimes simply pulling the right reference for the right brief is enough to turn a hair-tearing creative drought into hours and hours of writing when your fingers can't fly fast enough to catch up with your ideas.

i started maintaining a reference folder on my desktop shortly after joining bda. i was both amazed that my boss could so effortlessly cherry-pick and develop ideas from his seemingly bottomless pit of reference, and frustrated that he had had least a fifteen-year headstart collecting them. i figured if i was going to be useful to him, i had better start catching up.

anyway, today i found two videos in my stash that helped me write a pitch for the army (yes the army here is very media-savvy), something i usually detest doing, in the matter of a several hours. while both videos work on the idea of a missing element, a "what if" scenario that i found interesting, i'm happy to report my finished concept turned out to look like neither of the two! and my bosses liked it!



a quiet, mood and thought-provoking ad for fotoprix.



a hilariously vivid and very panicky (!) football promo for sky sports.

Getting Gaudior

one last note on the unicorn tattoo.

i had given some thought to what kind of unicorn i wanted on my back. the obvious choice was to get one just like the last unicorn. 

however, google images of unicorn tattoos and most of the ones that will pop up first are exactly like the last unicorn. i love the last unicorn, but the sheer ubiquity of her as a tattoo turned me off. and i knew leon wasn't the artist to go to if you wanted an exact copy of something -- it would be a total waste of his distinctive point of view.

finally i decided that i wanted my unicorn to capture the spirit of gaudior, the unicorn from a swiftly tilted planet by madeleine l'engle -- one of my most favorite books ever.

i wanted a unicorn that was powerful enough to travel through time and ride the wind, rear up on its hind legs and fight, yet be gentle enough to sing with the stars and carry a young boy on its back. and while i didn't tell leon this idea or show him any pictures, that's exactly what i got anyway -- from the strong, thick lines of its body down to the wisps of wind and tiny dotted stars in its tail.

Speaking of tattoos...

i just thought i'd post a tighter shot of my unicorn. it's been over two weeks since i got it, and it's healed beautifully. leon told me it would heal much faster than my first tattoo, and he was right. 

what happened with my first is that i barely felt any pain except for the very, very fine lines around my ankle bone. leon compared being tattooed with thick, dark lines to being scraped repeatedly by a large iron nail, and he was right. 

truth be told, after the endorphins kind of died down, i realized that i wasn't 100% happy with some details -- i thought the tail could have been shaped better, and a bit of the shading on the tail wasn't even. i realized i hadn't gotten it in the best of conditions: it was the last evening on the last day of the tattoo expo and leon was dead tired. after a few days of obsessing i accepted it for what it was: not the exact picture i had in my mind, but a beautiful and unique artwork nevertheless.

the pain may not have been as bad as expected, but the healing process was much longer and more uncomfortable. it bled for a few hours immediately after, and was red, raised and tender for at least a week. on the second week, it began to peel, with the thickly inked lines falling off in scabs. i know it sounds gross, but it was looked ok -- kind of like when you have an old black leather bag and it starts flaking off in your hand or on your arm. 

AND it itched like the devil. i had to keep it constantly moisturized, and lotion was one of the few things that gave temporary relief. i also became a master of precision scratching -- using my fingernail to scratch as close to the lines as possible.

with my second tattoo, the lines are so fine that they didn't bleed at all. but the PAIN. according to leon, finer needles really feel more like cuts than anything and i have to agree. i was expecting the worst pain on the spine (something i had heard about from a former colleague) and received a nasty surprise -- it had nothing to do with what part of the body the needle was on, but with how fine the needle was and what it was actually doing. so the parts that hurt the most were the fine lines of the tail and its teeny, tiny stars, as well as the details in and around the hooves. 

but the pain was worth it. leon was at his most focused and relaxed, having a looser schedule and spending a whole week in singapore. we were in a lovely, airy old shophouse with a proper tattoo bed (or bench?), adjustable lamps, enough space to work in and the prospect of beers afterwards. i'm not surprised it turned out as beautifully as it did. of my two pieces of ink, this is the one that i am truly in love with. 

the fineness of the lines has helped with the healing, too. after feeling like a bad sunburn for the first two days, i began to forget that i had just gotten a tattoo. there was barely any swelling, itching and peeling -- maybe 10% to 20% of what i felt with the first tattoo. even now that the thicker lines on the body of the unicorn are going through a second round of peeling, i can barely feel it. 

Disclosure

the nice thing about being married and living in another country is that my mom can't suspend my allowance, confiscate my cellphone, or ground me. she never actually did any of that (because i was such a good girl, har har har), but it's nice to be safe from parental freak-outs all the same.

in this week's call to my mother:

me: i got another tattoo.

mom: aaaaaaa!!! another one? ano na bang nangyari sa 'yo? itatawa na kita! pag may nagtanong sa akin, sasabihin ko "hindi po sa akin yan! napulot ko lang!"

me: ...

mom: maganda ba?

me: yeah, maganda. you'll like it, i promise. cute siya. it's a unicorn.

mom: saan? baka pag nakita kita, hindi na kita makilala.

me: sa likod. it's small lang, smaller than my hand. 

mom: kasi yung una, ang laki-laki, ano ba naman yon. pero sa bagay malaki naman ang legs mo. hahaha!

me: ano ba. it's not as big. don't worry.

mom: baka mamaya pati braso mo, meron na rin!

me: wala, no. never. pinipili ko yung mga areas na hindi tumataba.

well, at least she didn't say mukha akong preso. or baka pag nakita ako ng taga-gang, pagkamalan akong taga-rival gang (which is what marlon's dad says about tattoos). 

Give me that remote

you know you spend too much time watching trashy tv shows when your husband (husband!!!) starts quoting tyra.

this was a yahoo messenger exchange i had with marlon this afternoon while he was on hold with a customer service rep from orbitz, trying to get a refund.

marlon: wow- i'm really using whatever flirting skills i have with this operator. "yes ma'am, I'll wait as long as you need me to, and thank you for the assistance."
me: i'm jealous.
marlon: don't worry. tyra says, "my man can flirt all he wants so long as he comes home and does ME."
me: *FREAKS OUT* OMG WHAT!? WHY DO YOU KNOW THAT?? i've never heard that until this very moment. hahahahaha!
marlon: it was on america's next top model. some girl was crying because her boyfriend had been flirting while she was away doing the show. and tyra was like, "in this business you gotta be STRONG, girl." hahahaha!
me: haha.
marlon: are you scared?
me: my husband is quoting tyra.
marlon: let me join white collar boxing na kasi, i need more testosterone in my life.

he has quoted heidi klum on several notable occasions ("your outfit looks cheap... and uninspired", "...a sad... brown... dress"), but i must say tyra is a new low. time to start watching more bbc...

Goal!

i love being at home, curling up in bed and vegging out all day, but there is something to be said for being out in the open air. today was a good reminder of that. my hunt for athletes for my most recent sports project brought me out to the padang, a huge green open field smack in the middle of the downtown central business district that i never once noticed.

last saturday's casting effort was thoroughly intimidating -- little old me in the midst of a gaggle of about fifty indian cricketers ("remember... you're indian!" marlon whispered to me as a form of encouragement before he left me to go to his martial arts class). plus i had this irrational, niggling fear that all these men would think i was just there to hit on them. so this time, i made sure to bring my bodyguard, cheerleader and all-around production support. who else?

 i told marlon, "para tayong high school. wala kang perang pang-date sa akin, kaya soccer field ang bagsak natin." but it was a nice afternoon -- uncharacteristically cool and breezy for singapore. and the landmarks around the padang may have made me remember just how tiny singapore is (you can see boat quay! bugis! marina bay! raffles city! suntec! the skyscrapers of tanjong pagar! all from one field!), but they made the setting picturesque nevertheless. 

tall building is the swissotel stamford near raffles city. 

marlon and i used to like going to the bar on the 71st floor.

suntec city and the hotels of marina bay in the distance. 

i like how the colors of the setting sun reflect on the buildings.

skyscrapers - mostly international banking and finance companies - lining the river.

the hall of justice -- err the old supreme court building

what made it extra-nice though was that the captain of the soccer team i was visiting had one of those endearing irish (or was it scottish?) accents, and was so warm and friendly i just wanted to hug him. (hindi siya guwapo. parang tatay. linawin ko lang. hahaha.) he introduced me to his teammates with a friendly quip for each one ("this one was mr. scotland 2002!") and made sure, even in the middle of a game, that i had gotten everything (and everyone) i needed.

and it seemed like they were just having fun. i asked a few guys to do tricks for the camera, and a lot of them just joined in for the heck of it. 

quite a few people on the team are i-bankers, not the best thing to be in these times. i can imagine how enlivening these after-work must be for the truly stressed. the competition, the adrenaline, the fun and camaraderie, the kicking and running and jumping and just feeling the wind on your face -- not to mention the euphoria of hitting a goal! must be wonderful after those long taxing work hours. just sharing that today, and seeing how much these guys enjoy it, was awesome.

and as for casting -- well, the haul wasn't so bad either. you know how adorable scottish accents can be... especially when they come with a six-pack to match.