Boy meets thigh

i was my butt was my thighs were the cellulite on the back of my thighs was introduced to andrew wolff at the gym awhile ago.

it was one of the more, shall we say, undignified introductions i have ever had the misfortune to experience. to keep the mortification at bay, i shall force myself to think of it as that all-purpose palliative -- a learning experience.

so this is what i learned.

lesson # 1: shorts from the '80s should remain in the '80s.

two straight weeks of no sunshine = no laundry out to dry

no laundry = dwindling pool of clothes (gym clothes dwindle particularly quickly)

no more gym clothes = mom's pink nike pekpek shorts from the '80s

and when i say pekpek, i mean pekpek. i was actually extra fidgety wearing them around the boxing trainers, but i pek-peked pooh-poohed my discomfort away by reasoning that i'd worn them at least once before, and who cares about scruffy old ex-boxers anyway?

so i thought (almost) nothing of agreeing to a pre-workout stretching session with my trainer, jeff. i love getting stretched -- you just lie there like a log while they do all this physical therapy stuff. i was lying on my belly, face flat on the floor, shorts riding up my (thunder) thighs when one of the other trainers exclaimed, "oy! si andrew wolff!" the other trainers chorused, "pare! andrew! kamusta na?" as a very, very large shadow slowly loomed over me.

crap.

at least, i reasoned as male chitchat ensued, jeff will have the good sense not to introduce me while i'm lying here like a tub of giniling.

lesson # 2: men are dense.

i gave all the non-verbal clues i could in such a position. i kept my face turned away. i clipped my arms tightly to my sides. i clamped my thighs to prevent further riding up of said shorts. i may even have given a warning wiggle or fidget. all to no avail.

"siya nga pala, andrew, papakilala ko sa 'yo si deepa. tiga-gma din siya. deepa, si andrew."

he could have just said, "siya nga pala andrew, hita ni deepa."

i have never taken so long to turn my head in my life. i would rather he have met my toes (they're nice and slim) or my split ends (i have none).

but there was no escaping it. i turned my head. with what dignity i could muster with my face purple and pressed to the floor and my thighs staring him in the face, i smiled and said hi.

lesson # 3: when in doubt, hide.

quicker than you can say "cellulite cream", i whipped my head back and away from him, and cringed. i mean, i'm not a fan, but i didn't want a fine specimen like him to associate my face with those thighs, resplendent with niknik bites and bedimpled with cellulite. (come to think of it, i literally dimpled at him.)

god forbid i ever, ever bump into him again, and my face be replaced in a split second in his memory by quivering, white, jiggly thighs. as we took our places in the ring, i worked extra hard to make my punches as strong as humanly possible, so that he could at least have something else to associate with me. "you're the girl with the kick-ass punches" sounds way better than "you're the girl with the, uh, ass."

lesson # 4: when able, ogle.
(or, select types of men are entitled to as much silicone as they please)

as i said, i'm not a fan. after seeing him in person, i find him a bit of a calamari (as defined by j). but you don't have to be a fan of someone to ogle, right? you can just be a fan of the male species in general? because, as i also said earlier, he is quite a fine specimen. one that boxes shirtless, and wears the biggest size glove, at that.

jeff and i made chismis while said specimen was off crunching granola. "ang laki ng katawan ano? naging girlfriend n'yan si ethel, tapos si gwen," jeff said conspiratorially. "ngayon naman si keanna. dala n'ya nga dito kahapon eh."

hmm. the man does like his silicone, innit? but then, i figured as i ogled all through his ab workout, any man who can bounce a medicine ball off his abs (even the obliques!) can have as much silicone as he damn well pleases.

see? i am so much smarter now.

One

one ring to rule them all

yep, the header is new. and it's still part of my green and pink sari theme. the ring was one of the many components of the outfit that inspired the (not so) new look of this blog.

i love this ring -- more so since it's usually so hard for me to find one that's small enough for my fingers. now if only i could remember where i put it...

one hour... just one

aside from the usual idle hankerings for clothes, shoes, books (money, power, fame) and whatnot, i've found myself wishing for just one extra hour each day. i don't know how it would work (would it be a 25-hour day for everyone or just for me? could i stick the extra hour wherever i wanted? do i just want the extra hour to apply on workdays?), but it's been a nice fantasy.

if i had an extra hour a day, i would...

do yoga. uncle sujit gave me a slim volume about yoga, and i've been bumbling my way through it on and off since january. i just about gave it up since i started boxing, which i am beginning to believe was the beginning of the end of what little flexibility i'd previously achieved. i managed to call it an early worknight on monday, and it felt great to do a full forty-five minutes of yoga when i got home. wish i could do it more often.

box more often (or longer). i don't have the time to box every day (three times a week at most, and never consecutively), and i often have to dash back to work. i find myself wishing for that extra hour when i'm trying to squeeze into a pair of jeans that fit me only days ago.

be more conscientious with singing. vocalize more often, and practice more pieces for acs' imminent takeover of europe (sana). more often than i'm happy about, i have to content myself with putting on my study mp3s as background music while i work, and hope that i learn them by osmosis.

write. not for tv. tv can stuff it. that one extra hour would be for me, and me alone.

sleep more. i intentionally set my alarm earlier than necessary just so i enjoy the exquisite pleasure of hitting the snooze button and going back to sleep. my idea of bliss is getting to hit "snooze" at least five times and not have to wildly rampage through the rest of my morning rituals just to make up for it. this cold snap is making me crave that extra hour of sleep even more.

what would you do with an extra hour in your day?

More threes

from toni. because it’s a monday, it’s rainy outside, and i feel like procrastinating. (i’m editing out the ones that are giving me meme-vu.)

three people who make me laugh: my corny boyfriend. chris ong. rufa mae.

three things i love: sleeping. dark chocolate. ukay-ukay.

three things i hate: people who can’t keep their voices down in small, enclosed public spaces (like buses and elevators). bopis. food with fatty textures, like lychee and yes, fat.

three things on my desk (at work): “spunk & bite: a writer’s guide to punchier, more 'engaging language & style.” a marilyn monroe mug someone gave me in fifth grade. matrioshka dolls from prague.

three things i’m doing right now: procrastinating. typing. blinking.

three things i want to do before i die: go to a really fancy dress-up event and be gawked at and photographed. own a diamond and south sea pearls. learn to cook.

three things i can do: write. sing. pick up things with my toes.

three ways to describe my personality: game. suplada. multifaceted (haha, cop-out).

three things people might not know about me: i always pick something by madonna on videoke nights. i cut my eyelashes as a kid. i once wanted to be a fashion designer.

three things i think you should listen to: the ateneo chamber singers. (shameless plug). the amazing rina. apocalyptica.

three things i don’t think you should listen to ever: people who tell who you just how you should dress. and those who tell you that you can't do something (ala lavinia of bituing walang ningning fame -- "you'll ne-he-vehrrr make it..."). oh, and sleazebags who say things like "don't worry, i won't put it in." haha.

three of my absolute favorite foods: godiva truffles/ritter sport praline (make that chocolate, period). microwave-melted queso de bola, as introduced to me by justine in college. spam with ketchup and rice.

three things i’d like to learn: thai and indian cooking. how to get a job at discovery. photography.

three beverages i drink regularly: water. coffee. c2 apple iced tea.

three shows i watched when i was a child: perfect strangers. the charmings. silverhawks.

three people i tag to do this meme: you, you, and you. both of you!

Parents at the gym

parent no. 1: a tall man whom the trainers simply call “doc”. he brought his son to box with him last saturday. father and son did everything alongside each other – from warming up to a couple of rounds in the gym. a couple of times while i was working out, i would catch a glimpse of doc teaching his son how to do his crunches properly, or overseeing how the trainer put on the kid’s hand wraps.

they didn’t say much to each other or to other people in the gym, but i noticed both a certain radiance about the boy. i imagined that being allowed to share such a “grown-up” pursuit with his dad made him feel so special. one could see it in in how quiet and careful he was, where a little boy would normally be exuberant and noisy and all over the place.

parent no. 2: kathleen, a young, fresh-faced mom with three mestizo, super-adorable kids aged nine, seven and six. she usually brings her eldest son, tommy, to box – with his chubby, rosy cheeks and surprising stamina, he’s the default darling of the ring. kathleen and i got to chat for the first time in the locker room, and i commented on it being my first time to see her daughter, ashleigh, at the gym that day.

“ay, dinadala ko talaga ‘ yan minsan,” she replied cheerily. “para pag mag-away sila ng kuya niya, may chance naman siyang lumaban.” she chattered on about how ashleigh simply didn’t have time to box anymore – what with figure skating, tennis, ballet, piano and go-karting.

“go-karting?!” i blurted. gosh. times, they are a-changing. in my day *pats hair primly*, all little girls had to suffer through ballet and piano to fulfill the ilusyon of the perfect, well-rounded little girl held by an entire generation of middle-class moms. i did tennis, too, and painting and summer acting workshops at the all-but-dead rep. but never anything half as cool as go-karting.

parent no. 3: winnie, a producer for two of the shows that i handle. close to her forties (i’m guessing), her ease to work with and abundant dry wit has made her one of my favorite clients. she usually goes to the gym her husband, nestor, and with another client, redgynn, who was alone that day.

“o, wala ata ang gym buddy mo,” i remarked to redgynn in the locker room.

“ang gym buddy ko? preggy!” exclaimed redgynn. “diba, humabol pa? all this time na nagwo-work out kami, two months na pala siyang buntis! just goes to show,” she continued, “pag physically fit ka, mas mabilis kang makakabuo!”

“so dapat ba tayong mag-ingat?” i joked.

“immaculate conception?” she retorted. “ibang level na ng physical fitness ‘yon!”

parent no. 4: one of the daddy types i usually see at the gym. while i was dressing up, i overheard an exchange between him and the male locker room attendant.

“bye sir!” chimed the attendant amiably. “direcho uwi na po ah, wag nang kakaliwa!”

daddy fell silent for a beat, then laughed awkwardly: “ah, eh, may konting detour lang sandali.”
then it was the locker room attendant’s turn to fall silent. i guess he didn’t expect his joke to actually hit a mark.

nakakagalit, actually. i can’t help but wish that his kind of parent dies out with his generation. and so i try to think of doc, kathleen and winnie, and hope things will be better.

Grayness

this fugly grayness! when will it end?

normally i love really gloomy weather -- leo and i get to pretend that we’re in the u.k. (“reminds me of ahhhrland”, as we like to say). plus it was a convenient excuse to put off boxing for an entire week (“kasi naman, kakatamad ang panahon”, i said to myself almost helplessly). but it’s stretching on a bit too long. affected na ako!

most of last week was sluggish – i was practically falling asleep at my desk by 7pm. depriving myself of endorphins was most definitely not a good idea, as i found out yesterday when i finally slunk back to the gym. whereas seven rounds in the ring gave me nothing more than a “healthy glow” on my last session, yesterday’s four measly rounds were enough to reduce me into a purple-faced, wheezing, pudding-like creature. must get back on track.

the weekend was surprisingly gloomy as well. i usually enjoy going to the mall to window shop or run non-essential errands by myself (it gives me a sense of normalcy to counter the all-nighters and late hours). but i just found myself getting – well, lonely. i wanted to try cyma at shangri-la, but it didn’t seem like much fun to try a new (and supposedly good) restaurant all by myself. so i went for comfort food (bibingka with salted duck egg) at via mare – and, since i was the only person eating alone and there’s not much people-watching at shang, still felt lonely. haay.

then there was sunday’s conversation with marlon. lately, talking about wanting to be with each other invariably leads to difficult questions. you know those old-school questions that parents are supposed to thunder at young couples who want to get married? “saan kayo titira?” “paano kayo mabubuhay?” yeah, those.

i guess when we started out, we thought we could breeze through those matters armed with mobility and financial stability and all those things young couples are supposed to try to achieve (well, not that we have, but we seem to be on the right track). it’s rather ironic that those very questions would end up staring us in the face anyway.

i don’t know why asking those questions can be so difficult when, for all intents and purposes, we are quite blessed, and our futures should be brimming with promise. this just seems to be one of those inescapable moments when the future just looks more like a soup of decisions than a shimmer of possibilities.

it’s – well, hazy. kind of like the view from my office window.

Productive weekend

• shrink new jeans (scalding soak + very hot tumble-dry)
• watch season 2 of lost on dvd
• buy rechargeable batteries for digital camera
• mass-download new mp3s

my acs friends like to joke that marlon and i treat singapore-manila junkets like trips to quiapo or alabang. i think i believe them now. especially when my to-do list for a weekend in a foreign country begins to look like one for any old weekend at home. naturally, it's a given that at the top of the list is "spend much-needed quality time with the boyf." :-)

the number of photos we have at jumbo is insane

i won a great new pair of levi's from a "fashion lab" event at the ramp at crossings (part of an entire fabulous outfit!), and i picked out a size that was too big for me. as it was quickly wonking into a pair of butt-crack jeans, i read up on denim shrinkage methods and decided i needed marlon's ultra-hot shower and his dryer. i had great jeans all throughout my sentosa saturday (didn't have to hitch them up once!) but they went right back to butt-crack mode when i tried to shrink them a second time.

lost was great and gave us major eyestrain, as usual. iyak na naman ako ng iyak sa mga koreans. i'm finally starting to like sawyer, and i'm glad they offed michelle rodriguez's character. her involuntary sneer at the end of her every line was beginning to annoy me.

i got the rechargeable batteries, and a whole bunch of music from people i just read about and have not heard. unfortunately, i hit some weird button when i was renaming the files and now i have about thirty mp3s all named "corinne bailey rae - call me when you get this".

Rain again

i love, love, love this weather. (unfortunate incident with bedroom ceiling notwithstanding.)

some of my favorite rain memories -

1. being picked up by the driver from grade school on rainy days, and watching rain trickle down the window. sometimes i would have the whole backseat to myself, so i would lie down and watch raindrops upside down. or i would sit with my head against the window and try to predict the path a raindrop would take, and the other raindrops it would run into and take along with it. i particularly liked it when the raindrops gathered and made fat pools on the window, quivering with the effort of resisting gravity.


2. walking home after school one afternoon in the rain. i must have been in fifth or sixth grade (we were still living in bel-air, about a ten-minute walk from my school). i was walking with a friend, but i can’t remember who it was. i do remember getting scolded by my yaya and shooed immediately into a hot bath. but that was worth the fun of splashing around in squeaky black leather school shoes and the satisfaction of finally peeling off my dripping uniform.


3. the numerous brownouts induced by stormy weather. the most memorable one was when we had just moved into the mercedes street house in bel-air and we hadn’t unpacked anything yet. my sister and i tried to heat takeout from hossein’s persian kebab in a frying pan over candle.


4. the blissful, confusing, gray and rainy afternoon with frank in lindenholzhausen. i wrote about it here, and here.


5. getting up for my 7:30 a.m. classes in college and making endless calls to ateneo in the hopes of hearing that classes got called off. paunahan ‘yon with all the mothers of the grade school and high school boys who were, of course, fighting to get on the line at the exact same time. often, i would hear the female recording on the ateneo trunkline (which had this weird clackety-clack background noise) say “classes are suspended for grade school and high school levels only), which was my signal to sigh and get out of bed. but i lived for the recording that went “classes are suspended for all levels.”


6. marlon picking me up from leo’s “tea and strumpets” despedida at aui’s house. i texted him, expressing my dismay at the rain. his reply: “rain is our friend, my strumpet >:-)”


7. well, it’s not exactly a favorite memory, but it certainly was memorable: getting stranded on the mrt, and having to walk on the tracks in the rain one day before my birthday last year.
8. hiking in mcritchie reservoir with marlon and kissing in the rain among the treetops. haay. i miss marlon.
9. the heng keng junket, when ocean park was one big puddle.
10. oh and speaking of puddles, how can i forget? the glee club kiddies (me, pia, maggie, jett, leo, joshua, tor, jonel and gideon) sang for a wedding at caleruega, and it rained really hard on the way home. josh was driving his fx, with all of us crammed inside.

tor: "watch out for that poodle!"

josh, swerving to avoid the poor pup: "what poodle? where?!"

when we realized tor meant "puddle", we all collapsed into "poodles" of laughter.

The Palawan show

boat
Originally uploaded by currystrumpet.

whew! i'm finally done resizing and uploading all my palawan photos to flickr. so sit back, relax, and let this nifty little slideshow take you away from it all :-)

i'll let the photos speak for themselves, but i'll share the morbid little thought i had while boarding my first ever domestic flight.

if i ever wanted to die in a plane crash (and God forbid that i do anytime soon), i would probably have chosen that flight, with the three most important people in my life -- mom, ate, the boyf -- sitting right along with me. (told you it was a morbid thought.)

obviously, and thankfully, it was not my time. thus here i am, healthy, alive (if a little itchy) and able to share my wonderful weekend with you all.

it looks a lot better in pictures, by the way -- the camera didn't capture any of those blasted sandmites that are giving me hell right now.

Ulan

i woke up to the sound of raindrops on my bed. outside, it sounded like the skies had just burst and apparently, my bedroom ceiling was itching to follow suit.

and so i spent the last few hours before daybreak dodging drips -- intermittently getting up, shoving my bed a couple of inches left or up or down to a dry spot, and getting back into an increasingly damp cocoon. by 6 in the morning, i was clinging to the very edge of my bed, desperate to take advantage of the perfect sleeping conditions brought about by the rain and wind.

i finally gave up half an hour before my alarm rang, when, without any provocation, aegis's ulan began to play full blast in my head.

eto ako-ho-ho
basang-basa sa ula-aaan
walang masisilunga-aaan
sana may luha pa
akong mailuluha-aaa

(there. that's the only part of the song i know, and it was on endless loop.)

you know it's going to be a loooong day when you wake up in the middle of a pond, and the first thing that pops into your head in the morning is aegis.

Recouping

just got back from palawan, and wondering how....

1. ... i'm going to keep my heart from exploding tomorrow at the boxing gym, after four straight days of absolutely no exercise, too much inihaw, and one too many servings of garlic rice
2. ... to dress to show off my hard-earned tan while hiding the 48,000 sand-mite bites (in local parlance, niknik) on my arms and legs
3. ... long the aforementioned mite-bites (mbites?) will take to heal. i have to show off this tan, geddemmit!
   
4. ... penniless i'll actually be after i pay my sister back for the my share of the airfare and accommodations. everything was discounted since it was off-peak, but it was so not in my budget (ah hell. what is?)
5. ... on earth i'm going to wake up and get to the office on time, since my phone died and my charger is in the office -- and i am so exhausted
   
6. ... i'm going to feign work at the office but secretly upload all my palawan photos to flickr
7. ... that kick-ass starfish i smuggled home is going to smell tomorrow
8. ... soon i'll get to go back. next time, it'll be all about el nido, baby!
   

When the mind travels

i've had travel on the brain recently. what with daydreaming/hostel-hunting for barcelona and wrapping up the important details of the palawan trip on thursday. i thought i'd just let my mind wander a bit.

* sometimes i worry that i no longer know how to write for myself. at work, i write for a triumvirate: viewer (the fictitious "aling fely"), client, boss. sometimes i manage to throw myself in there somewhere, but that pretty much depends on how much i can become one (better if all) of the persons in the trio. don't get me wrong, i'm not unhappy at work. just -- worried.

my blog is supposed to be my own personal space, but lately i wonder if i've really been treating it that way. maybe i'm writing for a triumvirate here too -- here, at least, i should be part of it.

* right before my very first europe tour, i used to measure time in terms of the trip. the future was cut up into neat segments called "before i leave", "while i'm there" and "when i get back," each with a hope or goal pinned to it. i wrote about it in english class and sweet, wonderful doreen scribbled next to my A, "relax! just flow with it." i'm falling into that same habit again; anticipation can be so delicious. but this time there's no doreen to tell me to just let things happen.

* it's going to take a lot of guts for me to draw in the office on wednesday. it's not just that there are so many artists and creative people -- it's that there are a lot of opinionated ones as well. how many times have i been mean just to be funny?

* marlon and my family will be thrown together for four days. wonder how it'll go. can't help but think that he's being very brave about this.

* wonder if being in the philippines' most pristine corners of ocean will give me more ideas for my new baby. must take lots of pictures for charlie to use.

Travel bug decides

Cannot be made reserves with more than 90 days of advance.
Excuse the annoyances.

-- Hostal Avinyo's reservations page

i have magnanimously decided to grace barcelona with my presence this november. madrid is still reeling from the loss.

searching for accommodations online is my new form of daydreaming. and computing my budget for a four-day trip (not to mention for the whole three-week tour!) is my new way of shaving at least a couple of years off my life. bakit pa kasi nag-euro? why? why? as if we third-world tourists weren't kawawa enough already! the last time i was in europe with the glee club was in 2001 -- the euro was a faint and distant mumbling, and one could still feel like a millionaire when having currency exchanged, despite being a third-worlder (particularly in italy and slovenia).

ugh. this can only mean one thing: must. stop. cabbing. (that's my biggest guilty pleasure as of late.and it's damn expensive.) buti na lang talaga hindi na ako estudyante. those days, money-wise, were the pits.

okay. nakabusangot na ako ulit at the prospect of scrounging for money. shall now return to my hostel-hunting. lalala.

Meme

this took a while, but finally got to do nette's tag. i'm tamad so i won't tag anyone, and you can all lift this when you feel like being a little self-absorbed. ;-)

once you've been tagged, you have to write 8 facts/things/habits about yourself, saying who tagged you. in the end you need to choose the 6 people to be tagged and list their names. No tag backs.

1. my first crush was at the age of three. it was on this tisoy guy who worked for my mom. i recall he rather looked like a young eduardo capetillo, a.k.a marimar's one true love -- sergio.
   
2. the only subject i ever failed was high school trigonometry.
   
3. i've never tried drugs. (people never me offer any at parties. i wonder why.)
4. i wanted to be kimberly (pink 5) from bioman.
5. i hate my arms. (but the boyf vows bloody murder if i have them lipo-ed someday.)
   
6. i only wore shorts to college once.
   
7. my favorite alcoholic drink is bailey's. (boring.) after that, tequila. (juvenile.)
8. i love my hands and feet -- they're tapered and narrow. (thus am now freaking out because boxing is giving me skinned knuckles.)

--

slow saturday -- slept in till 12, hied off to boxing, took advantage of my temporarily supercharged metabolic rate to scarf down takeout from burger king, napped, giggled through t.s. white's "the sword in the stone", figured out how to squeeze more savings out of my paycheck, studied pieces for acs and surfed. even had time to think about my new baby while taking a long hot shower at the gym.

in the cab home, i realized i can now not feel guilty about having saturdays like this because the launch of the captain is actually a full month behind me.

love it. :-)

Decompress

artwork by our venerable tatang

if my office was a person, this post would probably be the equivalent of me looking deep into his eyes and letting out a lovesick, contented, delirious sigh. have i already mentioned that i love my workplace?

starry-eyed muni-muni aside, this looks like fun. i haven't drawn in ages -- the last time i seriously put pen to paper was doing the collage for kooky's (still unreleased) book, and that doesn't really count as drawing.

i used to draw and paint a whole lot when i was younger; then i hit puberty, lost the ability to focus, and started getting impatient. if i couldn't finish it in ten minutes, then i wasn't going to finish it, period. i took a once-a-week, three-hour-long art elective in college, where i was forced to take time with my work. the fruits of my labor were not bad at all, if i may say so myself, and i took to keeping a visual journal.

ironically, now that i work with a very visual medium, i've fallen out of touch with that part of me. although ideas are demanded of me on a daily basis, five-, fifteen-, and thirty-second bursts of words have become my way of putting those ideas across. sometimes i worry that i'm getting spoiled by having a creative juggernaut of a partner who creates visuals to match my words.

i can imagine that this coming wednesday will be extremely hectic (what with me flying off to palawan the next day!!!!), but this looks like something i should make time for. katuwaan lang naman, diba?. at may tsitsirya pa!

Meet the Captain

captain burbur

captain burbur hails from planet ocean park, in the distant galaxy of hong kong. while in his home galaxy, he was known to those who knew him (umm, bale dalawa lang kami ni marlon) by the unremarkable, if obscure, name of fu chi.

upon reaching philippine shores, he found himself possessed of powers mysterious and magnificent -- making him thoroughly deserving, he reasoned, of an equally magnificent new image and epithet.

newly clothed in a sticky, paper-thin (but virtually indestructible, of course) breastplate, a cape generously loaned to him by a neighbor named spawn f. igurine, and the vivid memory of a local matinee idol's cotton-mouthed superhero shout, he took upon the magnificent persona of captain burbur!

he stands a proud and valiant guardian over precious founts of inspiration and magic, as well as powerful magnetic fields filled with marvelous sounds and images. and his adventures have only just begun.

sundan ang pakikipagsapalaran ni captain burbur... ang pinakabigating oso ng bayan!

(so now i guess you know what account i handle. and how nutty things can get at the office by week's end.)

Franklin returns

back at the factory, one of the straws that broke this camel’s back was the introduction of a “personal productivity tool” called, innocuously enough, the myFranklin. named after the much-touted franklin planner that many factory higher-ups swore by, it was reconstituted from a thick black zip-up daybook into an excel spreadsheet with a dizzying number of cells, which we had to fill up with word counts and hours (or fractions of hours) we spent achieving those word counts.

image from www.geek.com

a number of us lower-order drones used the actual franklin planner, but the staid black, zip-up bible-like casing scared me – i felt my stubborn loyalty to my lonely planner would save me from being thoroughly assimilated by the factory. if the franklin planner in its book form gave me the heebie jeebies, its electronic incarnation had the power to draw blood from the very pores of my scalp.

here was something that literally forced our work, our skills, our very art (if you’re the type to take your profession as your art) into miniscule boxes and numbers that were forced lower and lower (well, lower for man-hours and higher for word counts), all in the in the name of the two-faced factory god, “personal productivity.” i say two-faced because way even after i left, nobody had yet come up with the brilliant plan that would transform all those cells and decimals into an actual, actionable productivity strategy. (j, meron na nga ba?)

anyway, why am i bringing up such a horrid memory? ironically enough, it’s because, in a way, the myFranklin has followed me to my new digs. my creative sanctuary, my wonderful office, with mucha and michaelangelo splashed on its walls and ceilings, has been invaded by the deadly excel sheet! aaaugh!

this time, though, the time-tallying is for a behemoth-wide efficiency audit, and the make-your-own-format spreadsheet is called, for lack of a better term, the daily diary. after the token rebellion, we creatives decided to hunker down and fill up those damned spreadsheets because, well, they aren’t really limiting or violating – they’re simply out of character for a workplace like ours. personally, i felt that unlike the myFranklin, the underlying objective and productivity strategy gave birth to the tool, and not the other way around. and i’m all for that.

plus, the daily diaries started to look even better when we realized we could use them to inform the powers-that-be of the inefficiencies that make our lives hellish. especially the ones that look like this –

2:00pm-6:30pm forced break (waiting for video material)
actual excerpt from my daily diary

so while some of us have to get our creative skills cracking (“mentoring”, “research”, “field work” and “brainstorming” now take up a *cough* significantly larger chunk of our time), it’s all good for now. i’m on the side of anyone or anything that wants to get me home earlier.

'Nlabo

… ng IE! WATDAPAK HAS HAPPENED TO MY BLOG?

firefox people, what does it look like to you? (rorschach test ito.)

Water, water everywhere

lion in the rain

first, the heng keng weather.

there were probably no two people more desperate determined to have a good time in heng keng that weekend than marlon and i. we soldiered on against the elements, despite the fact that the only protection we had thought to bring against the rain was closed flats (me) and a big red jacket (the boyf).

we made our way up victoria peak in the rain, and marveled at all the fog ("wow sweetie! so mats fag!") where we should have been thrilling to a clear, 360-degree view of hong kong. our supposed "lunch with a view" at cafe deco on the peak turned out to be "lunch with a backdrop of construction workers, bamboo scaffolding and white nothingness", but no, todo emote pa rin kami.

spot the difference

if not for a major downpour at ocean park, we probably wouldn't even have bought an umbrella. "this better have an ocean park logo on it", grumbled the boyf as he forked over hk$ 89 for a plain blue umbrella. siyempre, pag bukas namin, wala.

ocean park was probably the closest we (or maybe just i) came to giving up on the whole idea of having a good time. it was a typical bara-bara couple scenario -- the rides were closed because of the rain; we were late to the first dolphin show; and i had come to the horrific realization that i was wearing ancient mongolian torture devices disguised as flats. braving hordes that made sentosa seem like a happy memory, i sloshed forward in the rain until we collapsed in a cold, damp and almost-miserable heap in the ocean park theater.

i've seen this show once before as a kid, but the dolphins were worth it. anything that can erase oozing blisters from your mind for at least an hour are indeed God's most brilliant creations. having had our feel-good factor boosted by the dolphins, we cheerily whiled away the rest of the afternoon playing "spot-the-incoming-pirated-goods" from our perch, as well as "where-the-crap-is-that-panda" at the panda habitat.

second, the new account (a.k.a. the obsession).

shortly after nabbing the new project, i made it a point to go home early one weekday evening and curl up in bed with chocolate, pen and paper, and a tagalog-english dictionary. i was pleasantly surprised to find that we have so many tagalog words pertaining to water that all begin with the letter "A" -- perfect for my purposes.

so, yeah, it's a water thing. words fail me when i try to communicate how excited i am about it, since it will entail seeing my all-time office crush clad in something skintight, waterproof and (hopefully) skimpy.

at the moment, charlie and i have water on the brain. we're not the only ones either -- the father-daughter team being considered to do photography for this account has been doing water-y test shots. the daughter photog has invited me to do test shots with them twice now -- and the weird thing is, she doesn't seem to be kidding.

daughter: "deepa ha, next week magdala ka ng mga gown-gown, mag-test shots ulit tayo? ang pangit kasi nung model namin."

me: "sa bagay no, may baleña din naman sa dagat."

cut to me dressed as a giant pusit: "i'm ready for my closeup!"

cut to me presenting test shots to client: "and this is the visual treatment we had in mind for the account -- ay, oo nga no, ako pala 'yan, ehehehe..." (cue nervous laughter)

uh, okay.

Endorphins!

after seven rounds of boxing, i plopped, drenched in sweat and purple in the face, on the floor to roll up my hand wraps. i looked outside and said to myself -- it's such a beautiful day!

grabe pala ang nagagawa ng endorphins no? pre-boxing, i would have spent this saturday locked up in my room lolling around in bed, munching on something, and luxuriating in the feeling of being absolutely brain dead.

ah, onga pala. i box now. i didn't want to blog about it until i felt i was really committed. baka ma-capoeira kasi ako. as you probably guessed, my silence about it means i never went back after the first session. the shame, the shame! but since i've been boxing religiously, thrice a week for a month now (well, except for the week i had an injured wrist) and since i just plunked down two grand for my very own boxing gloves and jumping rope, i figured it was safe to finally write about it.

i thought i would pass out halfway through my trial round (i literally gasped "diyos ko, ang puso ko!" much to the amusement of my trainer), but in the past few weeks i've grown to really like both boxing and my boxing gym -- red corner on panay avenue, near the office. feeling ko super sulit siya, since i get one-on-one training. i always get tickled whenever one of the trainers -- all rough-and-tumble ex-boxer types-- says something like "tara na, babanatan kita sa abs ngayon!" or "hayaan mo, papapayatin ka namin!" it actually makes me feel like there's hope for my body! haha. in fairness, the locker room attendant said to me this afternoon, "ma'am, pumapayat ka na!"

my weird, never-routine workdays have actually made it easy for me to keep to my thrice-a-week commitment. i steal away from work while waiting for my daily plug material to arrive, which takes the edge off the fact that i even have to spend so much of my day just waiting. so it looks like i'm this for the long haul, or at least until makabawi ako sa gloves ko (which is about three months based on the per-session rental cost of gloves at the gym -- gawd i'm such a cheapskate.)

september will be the ultimate test of my commitment -- hello, nightly rehearsals for acs, the launch of my newest baby, plus boxing? good luck to me! kapayatan na sana ito!

Ramblings of a travel bug

update: tried getting a feel of both barcelona and madrid via flickr. seeing all the eye candy each place has to offer isn't helping me choose, but it sure is fun to look at.

so, where to, where to? check out barcelona and madrid and let me know what you guys think!

--

the obsession has barely begun, and already my workdays are getting more and more packed. thankfully, i always manage to force some spare minutes (that, admittedly, add up to hours) into my day.

and lately, aside from a smattering of the requisite online haunts, i've been spending a hefty chunk of my free time over at lonely planet (with the occasional side trips to renfe and msn travel, currently on beta). i've been on a happy mini-quest the past couple of days: after tolosa, should i madrid or barcelona?

the answer still eludes me. both are trainable from san sebastian (what seems to be the closest cosmopolitan area to tolosa). one has the prado (and can be a jump-off point to quite a number of intriguing side trips, if my poor wallet doesn't die on me first) while the other has gaudi and, well, seems to be more alive.

other areas that interest me are granada (trainable from tolosa via madrid) and valencia (which doesn't seem trainable from tolosa at all, but maybe i'm just not looking in the right place). oh and i have to check on andalucia.

--

in related news, my contribution to the upcoming family vacay in palawan is putting the itinerary together, which is pretty much done. there's not much booking to do apart from the hotel, and one can hardly be anal about anything when my family is involved.

pero parang nakakapansin na ako a. when there's a trip to be planned, i end up planning most of it. this is especially true of recent trips with the boyf. so much so that i realized he was half-expecting me to book a hotel room for him on one of his personal (non-work related) trips home recently. i'm not so in love that i couldn't tell him to stuff it, and he (dutifully, but a bit dazed) booked his own room like a good little jet-setting yuppie.

otherwise, i actually don't mind -- reading up on the destination and planning the itinerary actually psychs me up and puts me in the mood for a trip. plus, oddly enough, it makes me really look forward to the boyf proposing someday -- it'll be his turn to wrestle with logistics, moooahahahaha.