Home for the holidays

my flight home is tomorrow morning at 9:45 a.m. i've just finished packing, and have never packed so light for a week-long trip. well, light in terms of clothing that is -- i have two large plastic bags full of presents for family and friends, and that was my biggest motivation to keep my outfits down to a minimum. the presents also serve as placeholders in my suitcase -- for all the things i plan to shop for and bring back to singapore!

i've been in holiday mode since yesterday, a condition allowed by the surprising lack of activity at the office. this year's batch of clients, miraculously enough, celebrate christmas and are thus all on leave. apparently last year, the company was deluged by hindu and muslim clients, forcing everyone to work through the holidays. luckily, this year has allowed me to pretty much bum off. anticipation for my trip home has been building steadily throughout the day -- an anticipation that i've never ever felt before. after all, this is my first year away from home. the rush of excitement is a new and welcome feeling. 

marlon and i exchanged presents this evening after a very lazy dinner care of mcdonald's. i know, we should have some kind of elaborate christmas dinner, us being such foodies and this being our first christmas together, but i guess "holiday mode" has taken over at home as well. nobody wants to cook and clean -- not when there's a flight to catch tomorrow!

anyway, we agreed to do our gift swap (i hate it how they say "swop" here, hahaha) tonight because we were both giving each other something heavy and bulky. i want to do a show-and-tell with pictures, but suffice it to say we both loved each others' gifts! and marlon is playing with my gift to him right this very minute and has been doing so for the past hour. :-)

right now i'm a teeny bit apprehensive about the weight of my check-in luggage, and an itty bit sad about leaving rogue by herself for the next seven days, but all in all i am happy, content, at peace, and sort of full and buoyed up inside. just the way i want to be the day before christmas.

and so before i disappear into my internet void (i'm leaving the laptop here since all we have at mom's is a crappy dial-up connection), i just want to say: merry christmas everyone! i hope we all have a joyful, loving and peaceful christmas!

The tree tour!

it's time to take a mental break from work... which means it's time to take a tour of the paul-plazo christmas tree!

this is one of the first ornaments i made when i was still pretty clueless and just getting warmed up with the christmas spirit. i cut out little chinese children from a vintage - placemat that i shook-ed spirited away from the mint museum of toys cafe many months ago. i glued the cutouts on green paper, drew curlicues around it in gold ink, and stuck it on fuzzy red felt. i'm not too happy with how this turned out, so it's at the back of the tree.


next i wanted to make felt ornaments like the ones i saw on design*sponge, but i couldn't find felt that was thick or stiff enough. (moment of silence for all the "thick and stiff" jokes that are going through my head right now.) i tried, anyway -- they were cute, but i still wasn't too happy.


then i found an english-chinese dictionary in my paper collection -- and made word nerd ornaments! i used silver ribbon, glue and the words joy, reindeer, happy, celebrate, and Christmas.





as i was flipping through magazines for pictures to collage, i noticed that there seemed to be a surfeit of red shoes. so, with a bit of red felt and green paper, i made his and hers shoe ornaments! i was obviously not taking myself very seriously at this point.


so you think everything i made was along these nutty, kweng-kweng lines... think again! ito, career na!

following a how-to from the domino website, i made my absolute favorite and most labor-intensive set of ornaments. i started by printing and cutting out the handy template from the domino website, then gluing each piece on to thicker card stock for more durability. then i cut those pieces out and covered both sides with yellow and red-and-gold handmade paper that i bought on insa-dong street in seoul -- gorgeous, gorgeous printed paper that i've been saving for months. i only made eight of these, but with all the double-siding and reinforcing, i must have cut each individual piece eight times!

and here they are... the reindeer and the dove! i'm already thinking of how to unassemble and pack them so that they survive till next christmas...






we rounded off the tree with store-bought baubles and wide swathes of wired ribbon, as you can see from the photos. the store-bought ornaments are nothing to write home about... except for this super adorable ditzy angel. when i saw the completely clueless expression on its face, i knew our tree wouldn't be complete without it...


and that concludes the tree tour! which one was your favorite?

now let me see if i can get a good enough photo of marlon's masterpiece tree-topper...

Kamustahan

i liked toni's cup-of-tea questions. napaisip talaga ako. i thought it would be a nice quick update for one on things that i don't normally blog about -- or even really think about too often.

now let's sit down for a cup of tea, for what paolo would call kamustahan...

1. Now, would you like chamomile, jasmine, Earl Grey or English Breakfast?

i'll stick to my mug of milo powder. when it comes to milo, i am the papak queen.

2. How’s your health?

i may actually be in better shape than i have all year, thanks to muay thai. i can do at least ten pushups now before stopping to rest, and i survived robert's hour-long grueling circuit training last friday as the only girl among guys, with only four one-minute rest stops. but right now i feel a tickle in my throat which i hope will not turn into a cold or fever.

3. Have you done your Christmas shopping yet?

happily, yes! marlon and i did our christmas shopping in one blitz at plaza singapura and the cathay yesterday. i just have to get a gift for my sister, sir jojo, marlon's dad, bitchik, dada and binky.

4. How are you dealing with the economic crunch this Christmas?

honestly, i don't feel it. as i said to marlon and a few friends recently, we're lucky to be high enough in the corporate ladder to afford some of the things we really want, and low enough to not to really be affected by any retrenchment plans or salary cuts. if anything, we seem to be recessionistas in reverse -- we finally cleaned off the credit card debt, have the enough to help out family members in sudden emergencies, and even had a brief shining moment this weekend when we felt like millionaires. we spent sunday evening planning a budget for 2009 and it was a fun exercise. the challenge now, i guess, is keeping to that budget and saving smart.

5. What Christmas tradition are you carrying through this year?

in a year where marlon and i begin to find our own christmas traditions, one thing i am keeping from my family's traditions is having lots of little gifts to unwrap... and giving basic necessities like soap and shampoo!

i think that's a tradition we picked up from my mom's ex-fiance uncle david, who would literally put mountains of gifts under the tree on christmas day... even if they were just little things like toothpaste and soap! i only realized that this could be seen as a little bizarre when marlon gave me this funny look when i said i had to go to carrefour to buy soap for my tita.

my own spin on this tradition is that the maid's gifts can't look better than my tita's gifts... and that all the toiletries have to be terno!

must not forget: elaborate giftwrapping... something that i have enjoyed every christmas since i was nine. that year, we spent christmas in brussels and i fell in love with how salesladies at the department stores wrapped packages with scads of gorgeous curling ribbon, feathers, the works!

it's not part of the question, but i have to say it anyway: my most-missed christmas tradition is singing with acs! i've been so desperate to sing, i sang along with the video of the nordic chamber choir singing lauridsen's o magnum mysterium that gp posted on facebook... more than once! i also miss acs's fantastic and totally out-there themed christmas parties where everyone is so game.

answer these questions! it'll be fun!

p.s. yes, that's our finished and fully trimmed christmas tree!

Our first Christmas tree

the first weekend of december was reserved for bringing all things christmas into our home -- which in the case of marlon and myself was basically buying a tree and a couple of wreaths. we had decided to get a plastic tree despite the surprising availability of fresh trees here (wait, why am i surprised -- this is expatland!), and i had decided to make my own trimmings this year.

first, the tree...

the search for the perfect tree took several days of shopping. we saw sad, sparse $29.90 trees at carrefour, a momentarily stunning glossy black pine tree at paragon (which very quickly went from cool to TEE-AYCH), lush but exorbitantly priced trees at tang's ($259 for four feet of plastic!), and finally settled on a moderately priced ($95), decently shaped five-foot tree at novena square, where marlon works.

the most irksome thing about buying a tree here: salespersons attempt to convince you that every tree is a foot taller than it actually is. marlon is taller than our supposedly six-foot tree. the good thing is that salespersons actually seem knowledgeable about trees. when marlon and i were contemplating an all-white tree, the salesman at actually advised us against buying it, even if it was more expensive than a green tree. apparently customers who had bought white trees in the past found that it looked dirty yellow under certain lights, and that it was hard to keep clean. who knew?

next, the trimmings!

as we scouted around for trees, i looked at store-bought trimmings as well -- and quickly confirmed that i was making the right choice in choosing to make my own ornaments. you have two choices, basically: expensive or generic. i don't know what was a worse prospect: pay $8.90 PER PIECE for a faux venetian tasseled bauble, or having a tree that was identical to the rest of the population. 

my resolve strengthened, i trooped to art friend in takashimaya for some DIY supplies. while i was there, i picked up a dozen red and gold balls since i figured i wouldn't be able to make enough ornaments to actually fill up an entire tree. we also picked up some ribbon for the tree, wreaths for the front door and holly garlands for the window at tangs.

to work, to work

setting up the tree took two weekends. on the first weekend, marlon got to do manly stuff like unpack the tree and assemble it...

i got to do girly stuff like cut out shapes from felt, figure out how to use bits and pieces of paper from my collage collection (placemats and dictionaries, anyone?), think of cute color combinations and tie ribbons...

... and rogue got to do cat stuff like sniff around the new tree and wonder how to destroy it with the maximum amount of fun.

we also did couple-y stuff like take pictures with the self-timer documenting this historic first in our newly joint household.

and this is how the tree looked at the end of the first weekend.

our biggest achievement was just having the tree up! the second weekend though was when the real transformation took place with all the lights, ornaments, and a special something that marlon cooked up to top off the whole shebang.

but that's something for my next post! it's cold and rainy, it's a non-working holiday, and a book and a cup of coffee with cinnamon and nutmeg await my attention...

In shock

my favorite starstruck kid died this morning in his sleep. i am in shock.

he won the year i first started handling starstruck promos. he was a huge crush of mine that season, from the first pictorial where i kept telling him not to squint while smiling, through that whole shirtless-in-the-rain video (where he totally brought it!) that got everyone to sit up and notice, up until he won. 

when he started working, he soon gained a reputation of being one of the nicest young men in the network's stable of stars. i haven't met anyone who has worked with him who didn't instantly like (if not love) him. he was always so sweet to me whenever he's see me around the network. 

he was just getting started. he had some good turns, but was pretty much untested and really had to still get his big break. a plum indie role a couple of years down the line, or maybe just as part of the natural turnover process for leads in the network. i figured time would take care of that, since it didn't look like he was going anywhere anytime soon. who knew?

it's a cliche, i know, but it's at times like these that you really think, the good ones go first. why couldn't it have been some other inflated a-hole or talentless hack?

i'm so shocked and sad.

Promaxination

after staying home the whole day with a fever, i have finally run out of things to read and watch online, and am thus blogging this long overdue promax post.

a competition and conference combined, promax is the annual event for those of us in this rarely understood, oft-ignored, completely accidental (as in, you only get into it by accident, not aspire to be part of it) and surprisingly big but surprisingly small (as in, i never knew there were so many career options in this line, at the same time everyone seems to know each other) industry of on-air promotions. 

promax was one of those mythical events i only used to hear about, because only the bosses got to go. back in gma, we would religiously scan winners' reels from promaxes past for inspiration -- in fact, george made me watch a promax reel when i showed up on my first day at work and nobody quite knew what to do with me yet. every year, creative services would embark on this mad rush for spots to enter into the competition, a process that always ignited this tiny flicker of mad hope in me that we -- and maybe even i -- would win something. (of course we never did. hahaha.)

so this year, in my nerdy wide-eyed way, i was thrilled to finally be attending promax. headcount at the office was so low this year that even if we were just sharing passes, everyone got to go to at least one full day of the two-day conference (even our admin, terry!). it was a combination of anticipation and stupidity that made me turn up at the arts house at 8:30 a.m. on the dot monday morning -- whereupon i discovered that the sessions were going to start at 9:45 a.m. i should have known that no event geared for creative types will ever start before 9:30 a.m.

the arts house is a former court and parliament house converted into an arts venue, which made the whole thing look very cool. as usual, i was the only eager beaver on my team who wanted to sit up front and risk a stiff neck.

the rest of the boys wanted to stay in the back, where the seats at least faced front and there was less chance of being spotted in case they fell asleep.

nerdy confession: i secretly expected promax to do for me professionally what marktoberdorf did for me as a chorister. competing in marktoberdorf  was totally fun and inspirational. i was relatively new to the world of choral music, and discovering this huge gathering of people who were so passionate about, and in many cases, so good at, this odd thing that i liked to do was nothing short of amazing for me, and completely solidified my love of choral singing. (of course, winning that year didn't hurt my love of choral singing either!)

and in some ways, i was right. in marktoberdorf, you had your spectacular, amazing performances (like, ahem, the ateneo college glee club c. 2001) and then you had your duds (russian male choirs, or lachrymose italian female librarian choirs). i guess i was expecting all the speakers to be glee club caliber. 

the first session featuring mike reiss, a writer from the simpsons, was totally glee club. he was every bit as hilarious as you'd expect a simpsons writer to be. however the awesome start he provided went over to russian male choir territory way too fast, and i found myself wondering how logo designs from the early eighties were supposed to help me produce winning promos, and how exactly 243 clips of a storm trooper wiggling his hips in the middle of shibuya was supposed to be relevant to my job.

the venue for the smaller afternoon sessions. very game k n b?

one of the writing sessions was great, but it was more like nordic chamber choir than ateneo glee club. still, it was good enough for me to take notes the lazy way -- by snapping pictures of the slides with my camera. by this time i had identified the suite de lorca of on-air promotions -- you know, the piece that everyone seems to have included in their repertoire: discovery's "the world is just awesome" spot. and while it was really just awesome, i couldn't have helped wishing i could see something else.

finally, i felt a swell of pride to belong to bda when jens, the creative director of the sydney office came up to give his session. he was, for me, the portland state university chamber choir of promax. impressive pero hindi yung pinakamagaling, may halong kayabangan, pero tumatak. (seven years after the competition, listening to portland's ave maria by biebl still gives me goosebumps.) 

especially the way he ended his session on how to work better: stay calm and smile. (and here i paraphrase him.) because really, we work in an industry with some of the most creative, fun and passionate people in the world. we do work that barely feels like work. and there is no shortage of great colleagues and great work to inspire us. what's there not to smile about?

Making a list (and checking it twice)

twenty days to go till i fly home from christmas! and i am just raring to go! being on probation (well technically) at work, i have a limited number of leaves... which means i have only december 24th to january 1 to cram in all of the things on my holiday to-do list!

• spend time with mommy (hmm paano kaya 'to with all the stuff i wanna do)
• omygod... UKAY UKAY!!!!!
  
• stock up on fresca homemade scents at the legaspi market... come to think of it, a visit to the salcedo market might be fun too
  
• eat at bellini's and schlep around cubao x
  
• chocolate buffet with the kiddies at manila pen
• see my beloved acs again! but i am so bummed that i'm not going to hear them sing or get to sing with them at all this year!!!
• meet mimi's fiance, the famous pete
  
• visit friends at gma and eat chicken inasal at jt's manukan on sgt esguerra after
  
• eat bibingka at via mare
• eat corned beef sinigang at sentro
• eat at cyma (or manos greek taverna)
  
• celebrate our first year wedding anniversary (one year already! time does fly when you're having fun!) in tagaytay -- i hope t house or the boutique still has an available room for us though
  
• buy cinnamon rolls and stock up on kapeng barako at bag of beans
  
• get a cheap manicure, pedicure and color job at azta on katipunan
  
• buy tees and funky christmas gifts for my officemates (i know, very late, but hey -- bulk christmas shopping at home will be so much cheaper) at team manila
• check out the shoes at janylin and landmark
• stock up on rogue, preview and cheap books at national bookstore (i read somewhere that the domino book of decorating sells for only Php950!)

i know, it's all shopping and eating -- and i'm supposed to be in a country where the shopping and eating is among the best in the world. but hell. nothing like manila.

now, the only thing i'm wondering is: this list really it? i could have sworn it was so much longer in my head....

Pakiusap

i have soooo many things that i want to blog about, but i have just received my umpteenth creative hipster email (you'll know what that is in a second). i've had it up to here and just want to say:

please, please please -- stab me and cut out my heart with a dessert spoon if i ever sign any correspondence with the first letter of my name.

Hi.
This is what I mean.
Later,
D

yun lang.