Contemplating Christian

it's friday evening and i've been zonked out the whole day. having a zonked-out, sick husband at home the whole day gives me an excuse to do this.

i had two interviews scheduled this week and i'm tamad to blog about them. they were both really interesting, to say the least, and i just don't have the mental stamina at the moment.

all i am capable of doing now is contemplating a christian bale-a-thon.

the thought was born a few days ago when marlon and i were discussing our celebrity crushes. (brief digression: i actually have a married friend who is shocked that i "allow" marlon to have crushes on other people, and that he and i are so open about each other's celebrity crushes. heller. we're married but not dead.) i named all of his correctly: anne hathaway, natalie portman, keira knightley and scarlett johanssen. he asked me to name mine, for the record: jamie oliver, dingdong dantes, brad pitt only in meet joe black, jude law only in enemy at the gates, and (what a motley crew!) christian bale.

then i realized i have seen a sh*itload, if not all, of christian bale's movies. yes, even newsies. inulit-ulit ko pa yan. so i decided to look up his filmography and check out which ones (at least within a 10-year cutoff, oa na yung mga prince of jutland era) i haven't seen. i realized that with the exception of american psycho and i'm not there (which is coming to town next week as part of the singapore international film fest), watching all the movies on this list will be a major test of the limits of my love for christian bale.

• american psycho -- the ever-elusive holy grail of christian bale dvds. where does one find a copy of this in asia??? i am almost tempted to buy this off amazon!
• i'm not there -- heath ledger (RIP) as bob dylan is a major, major plus. must see next week!
  
• 3:10 to yuma -- a western? errrr...
  
• rescue dawn
• the new world
• harsh times
  
• equilibrium -- though this looked like a cheaply produced movie from the trailers, muntik ko nang patulan when it first came out.
• laurel canyon -- sounds cheesy. sounds like a girly movie.
  
• shaft -- okay, at least i can get marlon to watch this with me.
• all the little animals -- ano kaya ito?
• velvet goldmine
  

in fairness what an extensive filmography ha. he played jesus christ in a tv movie. interesting.

oh my god wait! he's going to play john connor in terminator 4? *squeals* that's going to be soooo hot. casting coup ito! if there's anyone who can revive the terminator franchise after that last red-leather-jacketed monstrosity and claire danes killed it, it's definitely christian bale.

hmmm. i wonder if the local dvd rental has any of these movies. and i wonder when we'll finally have the spare cash for a dvd player!

Missing bading

if you are what you are nostalgic for, then this speaks volumes about me.



i miss gma! i miss michael v and my other favorite artistas! i miss my beloved badings! i miss being babaeng bakla!

on that note, thank goodness bitchik will be here next week. haha!

Home improvement

talk about cause and effect. the following photos, i realized, aren't just the effects of the latest round of home improvement chez plazo. they also contain the cause of our severe end-of-the-month penny-pinching!

note to self: whenever you wonder all the money went for march, open your eyes and look around the house, won't you?

anyway.

one of the first things marlon and i did when i got back from manila some time ago was nurse my segunda mano hangover. i love, love, love vintage clothes and furniture. my mom and i had spent an afternoon poking around second-hand haven evangelista street in makati, alongside a surprising number of very handsome, very well-dressed, very buff and very gay couples. it was all i could do to not cart back any antique glassware -- imagine the potential mess in my handcarry!

back in lah-lah land, my little hands itched to get on some pre-owned furniture. and with a little scouring on the net, i discovered hock siong waste dealers. ignore the, er, unprepossessing name for a sec and get a load of this -- they have a warehouse full of furniture from hotels and model flats. it sounded great on the screen, but going to the actual warehouse on kampong ampat road totally blew me out of my socks, as the unfortunate kristy lee cook would say.

imagine a really good piece of furniture or painting -- then imagine a hundred more just like it. marlon and i had no trouble getting a pair of bedside lamps, or replacing the shade of one when it tore. of course, you can also imagine a hundred pieces of hideous faux french or overblown oriental furniture. there were pieces that just screamed HOTEL too much to ever be put in any other setting.

so, speaking of other settings, i now segue into the pictures of our hotel finds. out of the hotel and into the bedroom!


our little hotel-ish reading corner in the bedroom. the chair and bamboo floor lamp together cost less than a hundred dollars. after throwing a scarf from chatuchak over the lampshade, it is now dim enough to be a nice nightlight. the scrappy little rug was left behind by the previous tenant, and i wonder why i haven't thrown it out yet!

i can totally imagine this white and chrome lamp on a hotel bedside table.


the flowers are part of a spur-of-the-moment bouquet marlon got me one sunday afternoon. we don't have vases at home, so i stole one of the jars we use to store sugar and salad dressing.

marlon and i never had bedside tables, so now that we do, we have to cure ourselves of odd before-bed habits (i stick things under my pillow while he puts them on the floor). it's great having bedside tables. we now have someplace to put before-bed treats like good books, hot chocolate and freshly toasted coffee buns from bread talk. let me tell you, these things totally make our day.


i think marlon particularly loves evenings like this at the end of a grueling day at the office. here he is in "contented studmuffin at home" mode (pre-highlights, of course).


one of his nicest surprises for me when i got home from manila was a new lamp. he actually devised a whole wiring system for the two glass lamps we carted home from jaipur, and fixed them to a wrought-iron stand we bought specifically for this purpose. i swear i learned about circuits in high school just like he did, but i never would have pulled this off! it must be a boy thing.

he painted the whole thing silver and used a lot of chrome wire, which gave it a nice artsy look. it now stands in a corner of our living room and casts pretty patterned shadows on the wall.


the condo happens to have a special lighting fixture in the living room, the type that paintings are displayed under. it seemed only fitting that the first pieces of art that marlon and i ever bought together be hung there. we bought a pair of miniature paintings in udaipur, the first stop on our honeymoon in rajasthan. these paintings are gorgeously detailed beyond belief and i love that they now have a place of honor in our home.

finally, we dressed up the daybed with some ikea cushions, and bought an ikea paper lamp for some mood lighting.


the daybed will probably need another set of big pillows to get the sinfully stuffed look we want, but it's starting to look quite homey, don't you think?

Point of no return

i truly thought my inner cheapskate would never give in. or that it would at least hold out for much longer.

i honestly believed i would have my salon services -- haircut, color, mani-pedi, waxing -- done in manila forever. i have seen local salon prices. i have converted them to pesos in my head and wept. i have heard the stories of women who saved up their salon must-dos for weeks (possibly months). until their next trip home. i really thought it could be done!

maybe it was the euphoria of finally getting my dependent's pass, or boredom with my perpetual ponytail, or a wildly hopeful belief in creating hireability via haircut. whatever it was, i crossed the dotted line, my own personal point of no return, and finally got my hair cut in a singaporean salon.

and i must say...


i quite love it.

the experience was great -- the stylist was unfazed by my wavy hair. he just knew what to do, and i heard nary a whimper about getting my hair relaxed or whatever (although he did sell me a root retouch). it all felt very expert.

it's day three of the new 'do, and even with the blowdry gone and the natural curl kicking in, it's holding up quite, quite well. it just looks a little more george fayne-ish now. if you've ever read the old hardbound nancy drew books and seen the illustrations of nancy's tomboy-ish friend george, you'll know what i mean.

marlon also had his own personal first that afternoon: highlights!

i've seen that hat somewhere before. tee hee.

very sci-fi.

the process was quite interesting. the colorist started out with highlights (what i personally refer to as the jologs phase of the color job) then did a flat color to tone them down.

voila! highlighted hubby!

as you can see, marlon is quite happy with his new look -- about as happy as i was with mine.

we immediately hied off to adrian's farewell dinner to test our new hairdos' performance in a social setting. shrenik was gracious enough to document our experiment with his camera phone.

we tried to go out and party to celebrate our new looks, but the vodka at adrian's just made us too sleepy. yes, i do believe we're getting on in years. so we just sat by the river at clarke quay with cones of hokkaido soft ice cream (one of my new singapore favorites!) before heading home.

It's official

i'm no longer a tourist in singapore.


i am soooo happy i got this just when i did. my 30-day "social visit" or tourist pass in singapore would have been up on thursday. without the dependant pass, i would have had to exit and re-enter singapore (by way of malaysia would be easiest) just to get another 30-day stay until the dependant pass was approved. yuuuurg hassle.

on this pass, i am considered marlon's dependent, which is pretty much how it is until i get a job. my future employer will have to apply for a letter of consent from the ministry of manpower (every time i say this out loud, i almost say "ministry of magic" -- that's seven volumes of harry potter talking) for me to be able to work.

i am slightly bothered that it's spelled "dependant" instead of "dependent." even blogger spellcheck is flagging it as an error. but whatever. i'm free to stay. yay!

Scary successes

the previous post made me think about what makes a good scary movie for me.

i find that the horror movies that i consider really, really good are those that sear one cinematic moment into your mind. as i mentioned in the previous post, shutter and the ring really did that for me. as did emily rose (the fear of 3am), omen II (the three little numbers on damien's scalp, plus his grey-eyed scowl), the exorcist (two words: spider walk), the others (nicole kidman and the children staring stoically into a window), to name a few.

i even remember one scary shot from early childhood, though i was too young to remember the movie: a white-faced, dark-haired girl trapped in the depths of a well, looking up in terror. (can anyone ID this scene?)

those that didn't pull off this brain-branding were pretty unsuccessful with me, and thus became largely forgettable: dark water, the reaping, the blair witch project, stigmata, gothika.

oddly enough, it must be an image; while i will forever remember the creaky-burpy sound the ghost made in the grudge ("aaa-aa-a-a-a-a-a-aaaa"), i thought that film was a complete waste of my time and money. i have no idea why hollywood picked it up for a remake.

the orphanage seems to be, so far, the only exception to this rule.

what are your success criteria for a scary movie? and what scary moments are stuck in your head, possibly for a lifetime?

p.s. if you're wondering why i didn't link to any of the movies i mentioned here, googling the first few and seeing their movie posters really creeped me out. time to go call marlon.

Not a single scare wasted

marlon and i have just seen the orphanage.

i think it may just be the best ghost story i've ever watched in my life.

i'm still reeling.

i wanted to watch it simply because it was billed as having been produced by guillermo del toro, not to mention the really cool movie poster. marlon, who hates scary movies and only ever watches them because of me, had to be prodded with a reference to pan's labyrinth to even consider it.

i don't really expect much when i go to see a scary movie. maybe just three to four scares, which can range from the cheap and predictable ("turn around, it's behind you!" or peek-under-the-bed type thrills) to the deeply disturbing (shutter's backbreaking shock, for example, or sadako's big moment in ringu).

so i really did not expect layers upon delicate, poignant layers lying under every well-thought, well-played scare. i did not expect to walk out of the cinema and think about love and loss, growing up and coming home, childhood and innocence, responsibility and blame, guilt and forgiveness, seeing and believing, and what truly has the power to disturb and terrify us to our very cores.

what is the greater horror for a mother: a creaky house full of the spirits of dead children, or the inexplicable loss of her own child? are ghosts really scary only because we meet them in our world and not, in a manner of speaking, in theirs?

none of hollywood's pointless scares or ghosts jumping out of closets here.

from a writing standpoint, the movie was extremely neat. not a single scene or reference wasted. if you played connect-the-dots with the script, you could most definitely connect one event in the first half of the film with another that would unfold in the second half. brilliant.

marlon and i raved about the movie all the way from the cinema to the mrt. on the train, he fell into a long-ish, thoughtful silence. then he gave me a sudden, tight hug.

if you want to know why, go and see the orphanage. go. just go!

i hope it comes out in manila. if not, get the dvd.

Getting into the game

i was beginning to get really frustrated with the results of my job search here in singapore. or rather, the non-results. after spending nearly three weeks in couchwifely languor, i had decided to really sink my teeth into the task of finding a job. not just any job, mind you -- one that i love, enjoy and am inspired by. nothing less! (this is also how i am about clothes nowadays. if i don't look spectacular in it, i'm not buying!)

and so i set about creating games for myself, games that i would change around every so often just to keep having fun. the first was the 20 game -- twenty CVs sent out in a week. then there was the 3-to-5 game -- three to five CVs sent out daily.

yesterday afternoon while i was hanging out with phyllis (the doctor wife of one of marlon's work friends) at her flat, i realized how much i had really gotten into my games. "gotta go soon, phyllis," i told her at four p.m. "i told myself i'd send out at least three CVs today."

"wow! you're so dedicated!" she exclaimed. "that's a lot!"

"oh, it's nothing! i once sent out twenty in a week," i said dismissively.

to say that phyllis was shocked was an understatement. she actually sputtered. "twenty?!" she wondered. "my god deepa! i'm so lazy! i've sent out two in the last year!"

now here's the kicker. they both want to hire her. and there i was, pushing thirty applications made, and not a single interview lined up.

after that exchange, i began to feel tired, like all the hustling for a job had suddenly caught up with me. i got very, very frustrated and very, very upset last night, to say the least. while there was no doubt i would return to my various job-seeking games anyway, i felt resigned and very easily pissed off.

i just got my very first "result" -- i'll tell you what it is in a minute -- and now i've realized all i had to do was change my game... again. thank heavens the universe will never run out of games for us to play. sick of looking at my cv? stopped looking at it, stopped tweaking it. and stopped sending the damn buggers cvs out and sat at the phone following up past applications instead.

and in this manner, i actually lined up a "chat" (is this a euphemism for an interview?) with the first company i applied to after moving here -- and one that totally got my heart thumping when i saw the job posting! the company is bruce dunlop (BDA), an international creative agency that specializes in doing on-air television promos. how perfect is that?! check out their website to see just why i'm in lust. they're putting together a pool of freelance writer/producers, and i'm dying, dying, dying to jump in and swim with the rest of them!

and the funny thing is, this is like the fifth time i've called them -- and i applied nearly two months ago! i never would have thought i'd still get the chance to come in for a chat.

i don't know how it's going to go on monday. but it's like i've gotten a jolt that's going to power me through the rest of my job hunting. just in freaking time, i might add -- i was not a pretty sight last night.

so it's time to change the game again. and this time the game is called "what am i going to wear?"

any advice... fashion or otherwise? ;-)

Sinful sugar Sunday

i spent most of yesterday with marlon and his two closest friends from work -- shivaani and shrenik, whose wedding in kolkata we attended two years ago. i love these two friends of marlon's and i'm happy that they're among my first friends here in singapore.

shrenik apparently is a man after my own salt-and-sugar-crazy heart (must have them one after the other), and i saw the full extent of his fiendish powers yesterday. what was possibly more mind-boggling than the amount of sugary snacks he keeps in the house is that, well, they're still around -- if i had all my favorite snacks in the house, they would all be gone in one afternoon. (except a small jar of nutella, which would take me two.)

the amount of sugar we had in the span of eight hours was beyond belief. consider:

• a bowl of ferrero rocher
• a pack of pepperidge farm dark chocolate chip and pecan cookies
• filipino tablea hot chocolate with condensed milk (our contribution)
  
• a pint of ben and jerry's cherry garcia
• various starbucks drinks: caramel frap, chai latte, iced tea
  
• coke zero
• honey dijon kettle chips
• magnum ice cream bars

and that was still over and beyond the indian lunch cooked by shivaani, who, bless her heart, fell promptly asleep as soon as the opening credits rolled for paprika (totally surreal japanese animated movie). i managed to hold out for the length of the dvd, but was totally zonked out for the rest of the evening. my head felt dull and heavy, and i got cranky if i had to think for too long. at home, i couldn't even read dangerous liaisons for five minutes without my pulse pounding at my temples. who knew that this was what lay on the opposite end of the spectrum from a sugar high?

but shrenik, diyos ko, totally out-sugared us all. yes, even me! he even brought out another bag of chocolates as if we hadn't already been methodically hustling our collective blood sugar to critical levels. he exhibited no visible delay of his motor functions, while marlon practiclally had to prop me up in the mrt station. it was truly awe-inspiring. i concede defeat.

or maybe not. i thought last night's saccharine bacchanalia was enough to put me off the sweet stuff for at least a couple of days. whaddya know, barely 24 hour hours later here i am blogging while munching on a crunch bar.

so when was the last time you had a sugar orgy?

Sneaky sneaky

it's cleanup saturday at the plazos, and while ironing marlon's polos i had the following epiphany.

now that i'm in charge of ironing in this household, i hold the power to banish the polo shirts that i've always hated! since marlon makes a beeline for the ironed polos every morning, the answer is simple. i'll just never iron them! mooooahahahaha!

of course this could totally backfire. then my husband will not only wear icky polos to work, but he'll wear wrinkled icky polos to work.

still, worth a try.

incidentally, i ran out of cds to play while ironing, and turned to the stash i grabbed from chris ong when he moved to the states. i wonder how my conservative chinese neighbors are liking the creepy atonal scandinavian contemporary choral music.

A short note on the Twilight series

gutsy dear, i was actually going to post this in the comment section as a response to you. but then i realized it was getting a bit long, and that i had opinions coming out of my ears about these books! so i decided to just blog about it very quickly.

so, stephenie meyer's twilight series -- i liked it, although i didn't think i was going to at the start. started off a bit slow for me, but as i continued reading (especially through the end of the first book), i found that i couldn't put it down.

i liked a lot of things about it, like how the author kept some parts of the vampire and werewolf mythology and tossed out others (garlic, crosses, etc) to really make them out to be the ultimate predators. definitely upped the books' cool factor.

i also liked how the cullens were written -- they were quite fascinating, even endearing. the action sequences and the sudden changes of pace every now and then were great too.

it reminded me of a very goth sweet valley high -- essentially the problems are the same (dad doesn't like boyfriend, boyfriend is overprotective, girl falls into a bad crowd, etc) but in a totally different context.

i found the love 'bits' a bit much, and tended to forward through them. it was actually like wuthering heights in that way, lots of pages spent on declaring passion for each other and all that. i did find that the mushy parts were useful for a bit of a slowdown before the big, set-piece, how-cool-is-that epic action parts. parang... love love blah blah and then biglang BAM! tracker vampire! vampire-werewolf dustup! newborn vampire army! yeah! rrrrawr! bring it on!

funny, while i was back in manila and marlon was alone in the flat, he saw these books in our bookshelf late at night and freaked. paano ba naman, they were lying beside my copy of william peter blatty's the exorcist (which has such a freaky picture on its spine that i store it spine facing into the shelf) and tony perez's spirit questors series (which i bought freshman year when doreen brought up the idea of me becoming a questor).

"what is this black book with the ghosty hands and the flower dripping blood?! why do you have such scary books?!" he demanded. "why are you bringing these things into the house!?!?!"

i think i scared him even more when i said, "what? what black book? i don't own anything like that!" he really freaked out then. "how did it get here then?!" he practically bellowed, before vowing never to pick them up.

when i got home and saw the books in question, i realized that i'd actually borrowed them from my sister, and forgot that i did. oh well.

now i actually think he'll find them more girly than scary. kasi naman, all the passages rhapsodizing on edward's godlike good looks! kind of reminds me of how i would write when i was younger -- all my short stories had some unbelievably handsome, sophisticated guy falling madly in love with plain old me. haha! girl's fantasy talaga.

Couchwife and comforter

it's been cold, gloomy and raining all through yesterday and most of today -- perfect weather for curling up in my pajamas, under a fluffy comforter, with a good book. so i did just that. in this case, it was three good books -- i turbo-read my way through stephenie meyer's twilight trilogy.

it reminded me a lot of high school, which was (eeek!) over eight years ago. reading in bed was one of my favorite things to do on days when school got canceled because of the weather. i used to live near enough school to walk home the minute classes got called off, which was great -- i would practically jump into bed with a book after my ten-to-fifteen minute walk.

in contrast, some of the other girls had to wait for their parents to finish work to pick them up, or their bus services to get to school all the way from paranaque and alabang. there were horror stories of girls who spent the whole night in their schoolbuses in the rain and in the traffic, only to arrive home in paranaque the next morning. all this was were pre-ayala interchange, pre-C5 and pre-skyway, of course.

so i was enjoying myself, what with my bottomless supply of brewed kapeng barako to offset the cold, until i started feeling a little guilty, and well... baboy about spending the whole day in my pj's.

then i realized that i hadn't done this in years... not since i started working! i mean, have you ever gotten sent home from the office because of the weather? i went to work the morning that freaking milenyo struck, for goodness' sake -- and stayed there!

and i realized there was no point feeling guilty, not just about staying in my pj's, but about having this time to myself. i admit i've been antsy about being between jobs lately, but i just got that there's no point in beating myself up about it. that i can actually do things i've wanted to do for a while now. that i can actually have fun with this time in my life. and that there's nothing wrong with me for being who i am now.

which is a couchwife under a comforter, very quiet and very contented.

The boss flies budget

i've often wondered if there still exist cebu pacific marketing collaterals with the ill-fated tagline "the new filipino time" on it -- they should be burned, because the new filipino time seems a hell of a lot like the old filipino time.

have you ever read a rant about a delayed cebu pacific flight on this blog? no sirree! they've become so common that i get over the announcement of the delay in the time that it takes me to roll my eyes and sigh. oh, and i always show up late at the airport if it's a cebu pacific flight.

i've taken ten or so flights with cebu pacific over the past two years; marlon has taken about five or six. none of them ever left on time. ever.

which is why, on my cebu pacific flight back to singapore, i could hardly believe that we were all boarding the plane at precisely 8:15 p.m. the flight was scheduled to leave at 8:30 p.m.

i was incredulous. and maybe more suspicious than pleased. "wonder of wonders! i think we're actually going to leave on time!" i texted marlon.

i was at the tail end of the queue, since i was seated in the second row of the plane. i was tuned out and shuffling mindlessly into the tube when a couple of middle-aged men in front of me began to turn around and crane their necks behind me. "it's john! it's john!" the daddy types gabbered to each other furiously.

maybe john was their kabarkada who was late, and surprise, he made the flight! i thought idly.

i surreptitiously glanced behind me. at the very end of the queue, waiting for a short distance to open up between him and the rest of us, was an snowy-haired chinese man dressed in a suit and holding a walking stick.


and so, as he stepped into the tube with the rest of us budget travelers, the mini-mystery of "john" was solved, and so was the heretofore unexplainable phenomenon of a cebu pacific flight actually leaving on time.

abah. JOHN GOKONGWEI pala ang potah!

as he waited to step into the plane -- excuse me, his plane, the female flight attendants giggled nervously and joked about petitioning him (in sugary sweet stewardess tones, of course) for a salary hike.

"omigod ayan na siya, nakikita ko na siya!"

"welcome aboard, sir... increase!"

"kindly fasten your seatbelt for takeoff... increase!"

"oxygen masks will drop down from overhead... increase!"

it was hilarious. i remembered being back at gma, and the fog of heightened alertness and mild dread (more from the prospect of making a complete fool of yourself, than from the presence of the boss himself) that would crop up the minute flg would step into an elevator with you.

i sat behind him and his wife for the entire flight. i was pleasantly surprised that he would use a budget airline for his own trips (even if it was a budget airline that he owned). it was really cute to see him eat cup noodles and drink C2 like the rest of us hampaslupa. oh, and in the spirit of eco-chic, his carry-on luggage was a reusable canvas tote stamped with a goldman sachs logo. o diba, sosyal ang lolo mo.

i toyed with the idea of coming up to him, shaking his hand and telling him how glad i was to see him on my flight -- because he was the only person who could ever, ever make it leave on time.

but i didn't. he slept through the entire flight, and we all know how cranky people can be when they're bagong gising. maybe next time.