Minibreak: a sneak peek

enough long weekends spent in front of the tv.

not when there's minibreak paradise on the cheap!

more pics coming up! :-)

Whatnot

sir jojo, this post is for you. pagalitan ba naman ako dahil wala akong bagong blog.

can i just say i hate having to use mozilla firefox. but i know that's because i'm an HTML idiot.

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valentweek. three things i loved about my first valentine's day celebration (which became, like my "birthweek", almost a week-long affair). one: marlon. naturally. two: the fact that he and i had a superfun celebration without killing ourselves to do something bongga. and three: a surplus of love, conversation, companionship, laughter and (unfortunately) food. as always.

peekaboo

valentine's weekend getaway: reminded me uncannily of gutsy's house, with a hint of guano haha

found these on my bed upon my return from my valentine getaway. ipanemas from my sister :-)

valentine bombers. the nasty f*cks lived and stored their explosives on my street. one was arrested in my friendly neighborhood 7-11. so tell me: who are the people in your neighborhood?

constantine. in modern-day los angeles, an immigrant girl is possessed by an evil demon. the immigrant is filipino. of course. the demon speaks tagalog. naturally.

demon: (writhing/projecting terror) patayin natin ssssilaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhh
audience: ahhh. ok.

on the whole, i didn't think constantine was as bad as i heard it was. despite some roll-your-eyes moments, i thought it was better than some comic-book movies i've seen recently. some people thought it was just way too matrix, but i found that it smacked more of sandman than anything else (e.g. balthazar=mazikeen).

rachel weisz is almost as pretty as keanu (egad! he's forty! the icons of my youth are aging!). gabriel (played by emma thompson err cate blanchett este tilda swinton) is hip and more than a bit maudlin. and if anything, the movie at least gave me and marlon some discussion fodder.

in lust. i am currently hatching an evil plot to never return our june cover sample, the elio photojukebox from taiwan's tatung inc. it's a few steps short of an ipod, but it's a snazzy little thing nevertheless. it's not really the sound quality that has converted me. it's more the thought of how this thing is such a far cry from the only portable audio device i ever owned and religiously used (a clunky old walkman).

tatung was nice enough to send us a functioning player, complete with earphones, battery, charger, jpegs of zany taiwanese highschoolers and entire playlists of guns n' roses and shakira (go figure). so i spent a good part of one afternoon with the elio tucked in my jacket pocket, reliving my grade school days with said guns n' roses playlist.

yes, i was an 90's hair band kind of kid--aerosmith, guns n'roses, bon jovi, nelson, the works. one of the biggest arguments between me and my sister was when she actively prevented me from buying aerosmith's get a grip album in fourth or fifth grade just because it was "heavy metal". hah.

anyway. i have now listened to music on a 20GB, hard disk-based portable media player. and my little un-techy world will never be the same again.

birth control. my male dog seriously needs to be neutered. he's gotten our female dog pregnant AGAIN. our little three-bedroom houselet is about to become a kennel. i for one do not care to go through the whole rigmarole of walking my mom through a puppy goodbye. i did this with one puppy (roan, now batangas-based basti) and it was honestly one of the most frustrating experiences of my life. my mom staunchly believes that

1) it is impossibly cruel to separate a litter as this causes the dog irreparable emotional trauma,
2) we must simply bear with the mounting bedlam of five fast-growing puppies and two KSP adult dogs until we become bajillionaires, at which point all space considerations will simply melt away (uh, kailan kaya yon ano?), and that
3) outside of my family, all dog owners are stingy/careless/cruel/sadistic.

ang saya saya ano?

Musicians wrestle everywhere (especially at BOF)

"musicians wrestle everywhere" (words by emily dickinson) is a piece that we first learned for the tolosa repertoire under sir jojo. at first, being the stupid kidlets that we were back then, we hated it. finally sir jojo was like "ang chachaka niyo! kaya lang kayo napapangitan kasi hindi niyo siya maintindihan at ayaw niyo siyang aralin!" which shamed us all into silence. when i listened to the tolosa recordings (of which i was not part) i realized that he was right. it was a really great piece.

i also realized that musicians really do wrestle. everywhere. and pretty much all the time. i once made a collage about my stage fright and named it after that piece. i'm naming this post after that piece too, because nowhere am i more aware of our musical "wrestling" than during bamboo organ festival. seriously.

for one, it is such a physical struggle just to get there. the heat, the traffic, and for us corporate slaves, the stress (and guilt) of shirking work, which suddenly seems to grow steel tentacles in the days leading up to the festival. it's a mental struggle just to fend off these things and keep them from affecting the music. and sometimes (as our second performance of the ives piece proved), it's just one tremendous struggle to get to the end of even just one song.

thankfully, this year's big wrestle is over. and i've got the pictures to prove it. too bad i couldn't take pictures of the brilliant oboe solo during rossini. ibang klase, hindi siya tao.

i love taking pictures of this instrument. pansin ko lang. last time i took a shot of this, its owner was off on his break.

the bamboo morgan himself

scare-latti in performance

the diva herself. i swear i am archiving this for when rina becomes famous. by then, this may just get me a new car or something that i want very badly . or it could get me a tell-all book deal. hehe.

doña scolds maida. "ilang beses ko uulitin, 'day? huwag isama ang puti sa dekolor!"

performing schubert *yawn*

bamboo whoregan >:-)

in other news: double congratulate me--i am "recommitted" and have celebrated my first valentines' day with a boyfriend! pics and post coming soon.

What I learned from the EBU editors' conference

*how a washing machine works (optical sensors and buffer memory!)
*that you can buy extremely good LV fakes in shenzhen for below Php1,000--so good, in fact, that you can bring them to an LV store for repair and the staff won't know the difference
*that in a technical discussion about chips/wafers/soldering/physics, all the women will make snide comments and/or tune out. and only two or three guys will really be left talking.
*that i have big eagle eyes (so what's new?)
*that diets melt in the face of warm bread-and-butter pudding
*that the reason i kept oohing and aaahing over the lunch buffet ("winner! ang daming veggies!") was because i was the one who chose the menu pala.
*that the department secretaries may very well be bordering on piratable as copy eds.
*that i really, really like editing. or professional pang-ookray. same thing.
*that any excuse to be out of the office is good.
*that free food, for that matter, is also good.

More pics!

the presidential table (with flunkies)

editor queen at extreme right trying to restrain herself from intervening

editor queen gives in to her urge

master showman bal: journ 101

EBU editorial feeding program (especially tailored for rech hehe)

erg. double chin=resounding success of EBU editorial feeding program

zuma's daughters

zee fabulous turquoise mango jacket! isn't it loverly?

Special guests

sleeping beauty

sadako

sadako's next victim

the very promising next project for the fab five

Doogie Howser, laos ka

Grabe na itu. Gusto ko rin maging musical prodigy. Pwede pa kaya ako humabol?

This was me yesterday

What Is Your Battle Cry?

Zang! Who is that, sprinting amidst the steppes! It is Currystrumpet, hands clutching a sharpened screwdriver! And with a gutteral roar, her voice cometh: "I'm going to contort you with such wanton cruelty, you will not be able to see straight!!!"

Find out! Enter username: Are you a girl, or a guy ?

created by beatings : powered by monkeys

Eagle eyes at work

well, not really at work. this was taken at a two-day editorial conference last week at one of the editing workshops given by darius and mel. editing on acetate is fun--i wish all our copy could be printed on acetate. plus the big red marker gives you this all-powerful feeling. haha.

anyway, our team (with len, the queen eagle eye herself) won some competition or other related to this workshop. which was nice. i ended up carting home a sh*tload of global sources merchandise: a cap, polo shirt, golf umbrella and trolley bag.

the conference was fun, actually, and pretty useful for a relative newbie like myself. (although i feel that i've been here forever!) more pics to come.

in other news, singapore vacation plans are back on track. especially now that i have this cool trolley bag ;-)

Overwhelmed by nostalgia

*snapshot in my cubicle of an anilao sunset—taken on that out-of-this-world road trip with mic lura, chris de joya, anj and bea. i say "out of this world" mainly because of the mix of people. (let’s just say it’s not a group that you’re likely to see hanging out together in starbucks. or anywhere. ever.) mic drove by for us at 3am in his dying pickup truck (walang aircon, walang side mirrors, walang handbrake, walang kahit ano) and armed with a map that we didn’t really understand, we were off. off to wherever. we got seriously lost and ended up in a rocky little resort in anilao, batangas, where we spent a long lazy day on a floating hut (a.k.a. balsa).

another shot of the sunset on that day.

in the shot stuck on my cubicle, the sea is liquid gold, and as calm and flat as a mirror; the clouds are a moody grayish blue. ah, a time when one could just rush off without any direction, nary a care in the world (that last bit lifted directly from classic old-folks’ nostalgia speeches). it seems like such a long time ago.

*importing contacts from my old yahoo account to my new Hi5 account – so many names, so many people that I didn’t keep in touch with. mostly names from my first Europe trip, each associated with a real and much-savored memory.

anne turner: the big wide master’s bedroom in lakenheath, long stick-straight hair, tables groaning with food, a touch of furtive guilt.

philip manns: "love is the answer" under oak trees outside chateau peccany, in the early morning sunshine.

the riedel family: cappuccino with freshly foamed milk and polite bites of rhubarb cake (in a word… interesting), dusting off brigitte’s black quilted down coat, postcards wallpapering closet doors, marianne turning off the radio in the car so that we didn’t have to hear the news about the abu sayyaf kidnapping germans.

*listening to the corrs’ unplugged radio—brings me right back to frank’s little one-bedroom flat in limburg—sitting on the floor with the heat off, hearing the corrs’ unplugged album for the very first time. frank with his head cocked to the stereo, propped up on one elbow, long legs stretched out on the rug. drinking yellow tea and trying to warm my hands with the sides of the mug. looking up the word "blatant" in a german-english dictionary.

a lit candle on the long console table near the door. bottles of acqua di gio and fahrenheit on a bathroom shelf, a gray cotton t-shirt hanging from a rack. rain sliding down the wide picture window, gray clouds outside. and an immense longing.

cobblestones, "half-timbered houses" (such a musical phrase), sunshine suddenly breaking through storm clouds, and a happy race to take this photo of the limburg dom. the most unforgettable sunday of my young life.

a collage i made nearly two years after that day. i'm even getting nostalgic about just making collages.

ok, enough. this is making me overwhelmingly nostalgic. it doesn’t really help that radio itself is all about nostalgia.

i need something raucous and upbeat. ah, here we are. hello, melissa etheridge! hello, annie lennox and david bowie!