Home sick

after feeling feverish and achey most of yesterday, i woke up today with little red spots all over my face, chest and back. (charlie's unsympathetic-but-well-meaning text: "magiging ganap ka nang pinya!") thank goodness it's not measles, but i've been doctor-advised to stay in bed for the next couple of days... and withhold my cilium intake. (but... but... ang traje de boda!)

guilty confession: i kind of like the thought of staying home for the next few days. my only misgiving is that i have nothing new to read.

i have an odd book craving: v.c. andrews' flowers in the attic, which i've never read or watched. charlie was working on a couple of title card studies for a new show yesterday, and they reminded me of all those creepy v.c. andrews' covers with the under-shadowed faces and inbred families. so i dug up all the v.c. andrews' book covers on the net (charlie was not impressed), and read the dollangager series' plot summaries on wikipedia.

This was NEVER gonna happen

zambales. august. midnight till about two-thirty, three in the a.m. a couple of beers, a bottle of ginebra, and two bottles of a mountain dew-alike called sparkle. one glass, shared in turns. (ika nga ng mga tao sa opisina, parang naka-lips to lips ko na siya. at guilt-free pa!) peanuts, i think, and some leftover chicken wings. porch steps. the ocean to my left. the most unexpected, amazing, fun, surreal conversation ever. ("magkaka-despedida ka ba? imbitahan mo naman ako.") a goodbye that someone in the office, when i told them about it, described as "lingering."

a new friend -- one who would pass by me the next day and stop me for no reason at all except point to both our shirts, and point out: "terno tayo!" one who would pull up a chair opposite me during a lull in the workday, and share a bar of dark chocolate with me.

my all-time work crush for two years (!!!) and me.

definitely a first, and maybe-hopefully-not an only.

i love my job!

In the background

i was writing this over at the wedding blog. but then i realized it really didn't have any place there. so i'm bringing it over here.

i wanted to post the sketch of my wedding dress today, but i didn't feel like it. and i felt bad that something could happen that would rob the joy of sharing my wedding dress -- my beautiful, beautiful dress -- with all of you.

see, marlon and i are sad about something. it's there in the background, and we can't simply wish it away.

i remember a conversation we had with gerwin late last year, right after his wedding to charlie. he said something like, expect that everything that can happen, will happen this year. all the conflicts, arguments, and everything our good friend murphy can come up with, will come up.

wala lang. i just remembered that.

this is strange and mysterious; i'm finding out just how much i love -- want to love -- someone. and it isn't marlon. i hope someday she finds out too.

it's times like these that i remind myself that our commitment isn't to being sad and wishing things were different or better. it's to a whole and joyful family, to love, to aliveness, and to our special day being a day where all these are present -- not just for marlon and i, but for everyone. and we're committed to finding love, aliveness and joy each step of the way.

even in the little things. like my wedding dress. if it's up on the other blog, then you'll know i've picked myself up and not let the sadness rule me.

so even if i don't feel like blogging about the wedding right now, i will keep blogging -- and sharing. and even if we just feel like rolling over and giving up, we just won't.

You had me at "verbal barrage"

with me in charge (more or less) of the wedding, the boyf has been tasked with planning the honeymoon. it took us the greater part of a year to decide, but we finally set our sights on a couple of days in boracay, a short visit to the family in kolkata, and a week-plus roaming the wonders of rajasthan and agra. (palace of the winds! taj mahal! amber fort! gorgeousness!)

yesterday, marlon forwarded me a lengthy missive from a mr. tapas banerjee of trinetra tours in delhi. and by lengthy, i mean three pages when cut-and-pasted into a word document! within seconds i knew this was going to be interesting.

'Namaste' & Greetings Mr. Plazo !!Good Morning !!Many thanks for your mail. We take this opportunity to confirm our best intentions and knowledge to the cause of your trip. It is a pleasure to welcome you & your traveling partner to our country.

Before I serve my verbal barrage on to you, I just wish to inform you that I would be delighted to offer you references from All Over The World including Singapore too.

kapow! you've got me mr. banerjee! something about the self-deprecating, candid and enthusiastic tone just got me. and so i read on.

more choice excerpts:

For your entire journey, we are upgrading your transport to a fine Toyota MUV (Innova). This car will substantially add to your traveling comfort, especially on some bumpy roads where the top quality suspension would not let you feel any discomfort. However, the biggest and the single most achievement of this car is its Air-conditioning, [natawa talaga ako dito! omigosh! this is so true! especially in india!] which ensures that you are cool and fresh even if you are traveling under the mid day sun in warm country.

Besides the car, your driver would be special. He would be your 'Man Friday'. You would of course have local guides conducting your city tours in each city, but, besides that, your driver would be your most invaluable friend. He would not only be knowledgeable about places of interest in between journeys as also in cities, but, he would be a very nice human being with a pleasing personality for whom nothing would be trouble.

pero dito talaga nahulog yung loob ko sa kanya:

I apologise for my unending chin wagging, Mr. Plazo. I love the business and the gossip opportunities that come with it. Actually, the home dinner that I am proposing is in my house. Both me and my wife, Krishna love meeting people and making friends. I got into the business primarily because I could travel with tour groups making friends and sharing experiences. However, with the business expanding in the last 7-8 years, I am more or less now confined to my office ensuring standards that we are so paranoid about. Hence, whenever possible, I invite clients to our home for a meal with myself and my wife, Krishna. Home dinners are my major personal interaction with clients and I look forward to this eagerly. Little do the visitors realise that they would be subjected to my verbal diarrhea!!

ang sweet diba? anyway, i checked out a couple of the hotels and sites on his itinerary. and. oh. my. gawd.

behold rohet garh, a gorgeous 17th century home-turned-heritage hotel in jodhpur. swoon.

i may have died and gone into a taschen book.

and check out the luxe desert camping digs in manvar.

and one of the client references describes their driver as "a prince among drivers."

i do believe we have a winner.

Say it like you mean it

you know how job objectives in resumes are always so hard to write?

you have to use the "right" phrases ("career" instead of "job", "contribute" instead of "work"), include "buzzwords", create a "hook", use it as more space to sell your skills but somehow try to get in a word about what you want to do (taking care to veer toward "hirable" and away from "demanding"), sound stable and levelheaded but not boring, and just go ahead and invoke "travel opportunities" because you never know.

well, screw all of that. the nebulous, post-college quivers about writing job objectives are over.

• To live my passion for writing daily in my work, as part of an inspiring and powerful creative team that confronts challenges head-on and makes creative miracles happen
• To contribute my ability to create, plan, execute and deliver effective communication solutions to a broadcast network or advertising organization as a copywriter
• To see my ideas come to life in a multicultural work environment that promotes creativity, vitality and dynamism.
  

this is what i want in a job. and i mean it.

absolutely no brain cells were harmed in the writing of this job objective. who knew it could be so easy?

and if the person reading it doesn't like it, then by all means, on to the next! who says only employers get to do the weeding out? ;-)

Spanish Saturday, subtitle Sunday

firefox shut down on me unexpectedly and i just lost a long, happy, impassioned post i wrote about starting spanish lessons yesterday and subtitling my portfolio today.

syet. feel na feel ko pa naman siya.

i'll recreate it when i'm not so bummed anymore. besides gotta get back to work. (work on extracurricular projects, not work work, so don't worry.) in the meantime i'll post something i wrote today that's not so long, but packs quite a punch.

toodles.

Barcelona bench

inspiration for a new painting i'm working on:

it's from a mosaic bench at parc guell, barcelona. haay i miss barcelona... and the rest of spain. buti na lang spanish lessons at pia's house are starting this saturday! for free! yay!

i have a 3x4 unlined notebook from paperchase that i use as a visual journal. been picking it up more often to draw recently. tried drawing on a big sketchpad but it seems like i've gotten used to hunching over and drawing things in miniature.

la lang.

Apology to a casualty

warning: dancing with reckless abandon can be hazardous... to others.

i must have laughed for a full five minutes when i found this blog entry on womad through google blogsearch.

note the dutiful, sincere apologies from me and marlon in the comments section. in furnez, nakakatawa magsulat itong afam (afas?) na natalsikan ng pawis.

Womadness

some glimpses from my first time at womad singapore, one of marlon's yearly musts.

as someone whose itunes player at work is permanently set to "stuff in a strange language", i went mad over womad. not only were the acts spectacular and well-chosen (all of them with a noticeable crossover/mainstream appeal), but it was great to just dance barefoot on the grass with such reckless abandon.

that said, i had the overwhelming impression that attendance for the caucasian expat community was being checked at the gates. kung gusto mo mamingwit ng poreyner, ay nako day, doon ka. (what am i saying? in singapore, i'm a foreigner too!)

posers not welcome

there was sort of a uniform: pretty ethnic-print dresses, chunky exotic-looking accessories and various skin-baring tops for the women, and cargo shorts and tsinelas for the men. once in a while we would spot pretentious valiant souls who defied the mold.

"look, sweetie, a poser lost in the crowd!" i pointed out to marlon, as one girl tottered around the muddy, blanket-strewn field on four-inch, pointy-toed stilettos, tugging at her painted-on miniskirt to keep from being boso-ed by everyone who was sitting at thigh level, ironed hair frizzing and sticking to her neck, clutching a teeny evening bag, and wiping at her quickly melting rampa face. a curly-haired, middle aged indian lady beside us whipped her head around to look at me, then let out a hearty laugh. "you said it, honey!" she chortled gleefully.

personal picks

we didn't get to catch all the featured musicians, but i personally loved the mahotella queens, legendary singers from south africa with full, powerful voices. like the sixty-something grannies they were, they would dispense advice between songs: "get up at five o'clock in the morning to make tea for your husband. that's love!" loved them live (i swear, these grannies can shake better booty than me!), but rather not enough to hunt down a cd.

classically-trained david d'or from israel has a gorgeous tenor that would make any filipino chorister weep -- not to mention a stunning resemblance to matthew perry. (he's got a fabulous backup band too. loved the violinist.) he asked everyone to link hands and dance in a circle, shouting "a jewish dance!" the 101 attempts and individual interpretations of "jewish dance" that ensued all over the field were hilarious. (how would you dance jewishly?)

and daara j! they made me i realize just what a huge fan of hip-hop i am, have been and will probably always be. marlon and i were eating indian dinner off paper plates when they started performing. midway into their first number, i was possesed by the urge to dance -- so i scarfed down a few bites, chucked what was left of dinner into a garbage bin and sprinted to the front of the stage, yelling "let's go! let's go!"

not only did they make me (and a couple hundred people) dance like loons for the greater part of two hours (picture an entire field going "two steps to the left! two steps to the right!"), but they made me an instant fan. and their stand is truly inspiring: that hip-hop ("born in africa, raised in the u.s.") is education, not gangsta rap. awesome. now all i have to do is make a friend or two from senegal, so i can buy their cds.

ending with a bang

the finale was brilliant -- in the succinct filipino turn of phrase, nag-jamming sila. sinong sila? one musician from just about every group that performed that weekend. another tagalog term that fits perfectly: labo-labo. at one point i counted musicians from seven different countries onstage, playing at the same time, all making it up as they went along.

some permutations: a scottish fiddler and a tuareg percussionist. a dhol drummer from the uk, a senegalese dj and an israeli pop divo. a south african granny with lungs of steel and an iranian... er, man playing some instrument i can't even name (clad in nothing but a knee-length sarong, no less). it was mind-blowing. and it sure looked like sh*tloads of fun for the musicians.

ironically, the only cd i bought was of an act that i didn't catch -- the dhol foundation. their founder, johnny kalsi, directed the finale -- when he stepped onto the stage with his giant drum, brit accent and fancy duds, i knew we were going to see a great finale. and there was one part when it was just the fiddler from shooglenifty, and johnny kalsi punched right in with his drumming -- the music suddenly became so alive, so electrified at that moment, that i knew i had to get a dhol foundation cd before the night was over. (i did. i love it by the way.)

other acts we caught: youssou n'dour (senegal), shooglenifty (scotland), clube do balanco (brazil).

Sige na nga

as someone who's chosen to work in creatives and television, looking over the singapore media directory got my heart beating. (wonder if intimidation and excitement can burn calories.)

i love that cd shop. (that's really what it's called.)

womad every year.

i see outfits on the street that actually inspire me to dress better/with more effort/more adventurously.

this kitschy little shop called blossomz (so high school) in cathay cineleisure, where i found a manufacturer of high heels that not only look great and are easy to run around in, but feel like they're molded to my feet.

walking, walking everywhere.

the delicious and actually tipid possibility of clothes shopping bangkok on weekends.

it's taken me a long time to say this, but: i'm ready to live a life i love over there.

Melissa mania

okay, a lot of fun stuff happened over the weekend in singapore, but seeing as shoes are what float your boat... guess which style melissas i got?

none of the above below!

i went to two of the three stores in singapore that carry melissas (such purposeful shoe-shopping! haven't done that in a while!), and none of them had any of the styles i posted previously. BUT they have a whole bunch of really cute styles that aren't up on the melissa philippines site. plus a whole bunch of really old styles that are on sale.

i saw a bunch of cute heels from the love robot collection, but my size was out of stock. so i got these instead: the green indie heels with detachable straps. very cute. my trusty green peep-toe heels had just died the week before, so it was perfect.

they look gorgeous (my shoe idol fellow shoe freak, christine, went gaga at the sight of them yesterday) tho' breaking them in is a royal bitch. it's like wearing person-sized barbie shoes. and since i'm kind of in-between sizes and the plastic is slippery, i keep leaving them behind as i walk.

ah well. 'tis only the beginning... literally. i am now officially on the mailing list of novo, which is the singaporean store that carries these babies -- perfect for when i move there next year! by the way, i downloaded the above pic from the melissa australia site, and my eyes nearly popped out at all the styles available! and there's a karim rashid shoe! delikado 'to.

j, the scarfun wasn't as cute in person. it was rather too chunky for my taste. medyo suma-spice girls na yung level. (and while we know the eighties are back, the early nineties just give me the heebie-jeebies.) also they had it just in peach, and i'm not really a peach kind of girl.

ate, go to the novo stores in suntec and great world city! ngeps yung mga styles in ngee ann city/takashimaya.

in related news, i think i'll start wearing heels more often. kaya ko naman pala eh.

Waiting and beginning

i have a singapore trip coming up this weekend, and i'm looking forward to it. come to think of it, i always look forward to my singapore trips. and i always, always have a great time when i'm there. (must be the company.)

so, remind me again why i was dreading moving there? ;-) i look back on the magnitude of my dread, and say to myself, gawd that was so absurd.

==

fun stuff planned for this weekend:

womad. how can you not have fun at one of the biggest world music festivals in asia? i love, love, love world music. (my itunes player in the office is permanently set to "odd stuff in another language".) after three successive years of rapturous stories from marlon, i finally get to see/hear/dance on the grass/be rapturous myself. must bring lots of pocket money for cds.

my first pair of melissas. shoes? cute? rain-proof? durable? sold in singapore for half the price that they are here? count me in! now help, which two should i get?

the gray neon?

the purple ultragirl?

the white scarfun? (also comes in beige, peach, mint and black --- ahh hell knowing me i'll get a pair in black. black shoes are my weakness) or the red lace glam? decisions decisions!

wakeboarding. marlon wants to take me wakeboarding in this man-made lake. ohhh...kayyyy. pwede rin. this activity promises much entertainment as i attempt to stay upright. may burn calories as well.

apartment-hunting. yes, i'm about to become a grown-up very soon. marlon and i hope to check out at least two likely prospects. the criteria: must be within budget, with two bedrooms (one for us and one for my shoes our art materials junk guests) and near an mrt stop.

and ...

okay the real criteria: must have a fantabulous pool (to inspire exercise) and big windows. non-tiled living room and owner willing to let us paint the walls a huge plus.

boyf time. all of the above! yay! oh plus we're doing wedding stuff too, like deciding on the wording of our invitations and the flow of the reception program.

==

this weekend promises to be fun, like all the others i've spent in singapore. but something will be different this weekend too.

because aside from my little red wheelie bag (oo, yung galing global sources), i will be carrying with me little pieces of my life: a box of scrapbooks, sketch pads, albums and books. these i will leave in a corner of marlon's apartment until january, when they -- and i -- will settle into a corner that is truly ours, in our new home.

A welcome back meme

you have no idea how many other things i should be doing instead of this.

===

THREE NAMES THAT FRIENDS CALL YOU
1. deepa
2. deeps
3. deepsydoodle (only if you're my mom or chris ong)

THREE MOST IMPORTANT DATES IN YOUR LIFE
*well not THE most important... can they just be really really important?*
1. june 11, 2003 - the date marlon and i picked to be our anniversary (we don't actually remember the date we said our i love yous)
2. october 21, 2006 - the date we got engaged!
3. december 29, 2007 - the day i marry my best friend :-)

THREE THINGS YOU'VE DONE IN THE LAST 33 MINUTES
1. rub my eyes (bad habit, i know)
2. add new albums to my facebook account (all hail the new facebook addict)
3. drop off my stock disposition forms at the finance department (zzzz)

THREE OF YOUR FAVORITE BANDS
1. hmmm
2. hmmm
3. o sige na nga the corrs!

THREE WAYS TO BE HAPPY
1. canoodle with boyf
2. curl up with dark chocolate/ritter sport praline and a good book
3. open your eyes and see that there's so much to be happy about

THREE OF YOUR FAVORITE SONGS AT PRESENT
1. tiempo de solea, ojos de brujo
2. katosimme kauneuteen, rajaton
3. gosh what's that song by timbaland? where he says he doesn't have a red american express? basta yun, i keep hearing it on the radio and it brings me back to my hip-hoppy high school self

THREE PHYSICAL THINGS YOU LIKE IN THE OPPOSITE SEX
1. smile
2. shoulders
3. hands

THREE PERSONS YOU MISS FROM YOUR PAST
1. euniche
2. the jungs from lindenholzhausen (papa alfred, mama anita, dietmar and frank)
3. one of the legions of college crushes i had hahaha

THREE GIFTS YOU WOULD LIKE TO RECEIVE
1. a honeymoon in boracay
2. books by orhan pamuk, alain de botton and/or nick bantock
3. a lomo or holga

THREE OF YOUR FAVORITE HOBBIES
1. reading
2. surfing the web
3. doing wedding stuff

THREE PLACES YOU WANT TO GO FOR HOLIDAY
1. rajasthan, india
2. greece
3. florence, italy
+visit my sister in kuala lumpur, malaysia!

THREE FAVORITE CARTOON CHARACTERS
1. she-ra
2. shampoo from ranma
3. catra (loved the black hair and green eyes combo)

THREE GIRL'S/BOY'S NAMES
1. tala
2. amaya
3. alon

THREE MALLS YOU USUALLY GO TO
1. greenbelt
2. rockwell
3. shang

THREE OF YOUR FAVORITE FASTFOODS
1. kfc (zinger + brownie)
2. mcdo (cheeseburger meal + chicken mcnuggets)
3. yellow cab pizza (four cheese or pepperoni)

THREE FAVORITE DRINKS
1. sarsi
2. calamansi juice
3. water

THREE THINGS FOUND IN YOUR BAG
1. car keys (the spare set) on a pink pig keychain maggie gave me
2. navy blue quilted patent wallet from mango (the doppelganger of the one i lost)
3. nivea careline lipgloss

THREE PERFUMES/COLOGNES
1. this citrus and cinnamon cologne i bought in bilbao, love it but forgot what it's called
2. burberry weekend
3. basil, olive and ginger scents from fresca in the sunday legaspi market

THREE FAVORITE COLORS
1. black
2. gold
3. blue

THREE EVENTS YOU'RE LOOKING FORWARD TO
1. our wedding :-)
2. moving to singapore and finally being able to have a cat (yay! yay! yay!)
3. completing and sending out my copywriting portfolio

Oh, and...

... the wedding blog's up!

Ang pagbabalik

puñeta! sa wakas! naka-unblock na ang blogger sa opisina! tatapusin ko na 'yang bwakanang mumbai cliffhanger na 'yan! tapos bubuhos ako ng sangkatutak na pictures ng boracay 'tsaka donsol! tapos iba-blog ko na nagkainuman kami ni dingdong! tapos ... tapos...

zzzzZZZZzzzz.

Hello Bolly!

i'm in bollywood! *smiling, color-coordinated dancers jazz-walk into frame*

the city formerly known as bombay has been my temporary home for three days running. while marlon is off doing various business-y things, i've found myself -- hmm, ano nga ba? alone but not lonely. each day has its highs and lows, but oddly even the lows occur to me as highlights.

day 1, tuesday

we land in mumbai after a four-hour flight from india. ever had waves heat pound at glass windows to get to you? walk from plane to immigration at the mumbai airport and you will. stepped outside and had the novel experience of having my jeans "shwup", a sensation akin to vacuum-packing, to my lower legs. verified that the "twenty-nine degrees centigrade" temperature announced by the captain upon touchdown was off by about, oh, just ten degrees.

fell in love (with a resounding ka-blag) with our hotel, the itc maratha sheraton. oh god, this hotel. i want to take everything in our room home with me. there are beautiful indian dupion silk drapes (in my wedding motif colors! let me at 'em!) and delicious aromatherapy toiletries in apple, apricot, basil, parsley and sandalwood. (naka-shook na ako ng isang buong set for my mom.) there's a pillow menu (!) and 100Mbps Internet.

and when you step out of your room, it's just beautiful. it's a light-filled white atrium, with latticed windows that remind me of the alhambra, stretching all the way to the ceiling.

our first lunch in this hotel convinced me that i will have to be rolled back to my family. i love indian food to bits (now making up for all the years that i fiercely resisted it as a child), and this hotel reportedly has some of the best restaurants in mumbai. god help me. ang traje de boda!

bits and bites

marlon and i spent the rest of the day immersed in work, albeit separately -- him at the office, me at the hotel. nawili ako masyado sa bilis ng internet at sa ganda ng kuwarto -- i did not set foot outside the room for the next six hours. pathetic, i know.

after welcoming home my sweaty, dusty, mumbai-encrusted fiance, we set off for a group dinner with the twenty or so p&g global folk who'd flown in for the week. it had all the makings of a great dinner -- first was the superb food that seemed to never stop getting plunked down on my plate.

then there was ridiculously excellent service -- one waiter dashed to my side after i took a bite of fish, murmuring "madam, you have ordered the vegetarian meal. but i just saw you take a bite of the fish. i am sorry for not informing you that it indeed was fish that i put on your plate. are you alright?" my gawd! i bit back the urge to tell him that i was just a vegetarian poseur.

there were extremely interesting people, of which my favorite was dr. colin, scientist-turned-beauty p.r. director. forget chi-chi fakeness and empty smiles -- this guy is a genius on so many levels, without that "i-know-more-than-you" aura, and so much fun to talk to! feeling ko parang tumalino ako pagkatapos ko siyang nakausap. haay idol ko na siya.

discovery channel

what i loved most about dinner was stepping into marlon's world. at one point in the evening, i just stopped and took in everything around me -- being in mumbai, the gorgeous surroundings, the intelligent conversation -- and realized, marlon's part of this. i just sat with that for a while, letting a whole new world open up: a world of him. suddenly, the man who cuddles with me at movies, loves corned beef and comics, and who i regularly "save" when he blanks out on people's names took on a whole new dimension. at that dinner table, on that night, i discovered marlon all over again. that alone was worth coming here for.

back in the room that night, talking to marlon about what i had done for the day and what i had planned for the next, i uncovered something rather prickly about myself.

why i hadn't stepped out at all was not because of the amount of work i had or the comfort of the room.

and why i wasn't at all excited about flinging myself out into mumbai was not, in fact, because of anything about mumbai.

(to be continued)

This is cute

Read my VisualDNA™ Get your own VisualDNA™

The Blogger ban

hello, my friends. the good news is, i'm alive and happy. i'm in lah-lah land with marlon celebrating our fourth, and our last, anniversary as boyfriend and girlfriend. tomorrow, the two of us will be flying to mumbai -- marlon on a business trip, and i as official palamuti.

the bad news is, blogger, and consequently all blogs, have been banned from the office.

haay.

i'm not giving up my blog just yet, but as the office is where i do 90% of my blogging, the frequency of my updates will be seriously affected (as you've gathered from my month of internet hibernation). i miss reading my friends' blogs (that's YOU! or those of you who are on blogger anyway), and especially miss the inspiration and eye candy on one of my favorites, design*sponge.

i'm not too happy about the prospect of migrating to wordpress or livejournal though -- i have a wordpress version of this blog that i gave up after a couple of days of working on it. plus there's just way too much on this blog to give up!

must admit i am stuck at the moment. stuck but still writing :-)

Welcome to Boracay

after an hour-long flight in an aircon-less, stewardess-less aircraft that i will always cherish in my memory as the "coaster na may pakpak", i barely remember my first glimpse of the fabled white sands of boracay. i think i might have been a little underwhelmed -- the sun was hiding behind thick gray clouds, dulling the colors of everything.

what i do remember vividly, is almost weeping upon seeing the room that would me mine (mine, all mine! moooahahahaha) for the next two days. ah, how the centavo-scrabbling writer of "paradise at a steal" had moved up in the world! first i wanted to twirl around and fall into bed a la julia roberts. then i started really missing marlon. *insert crude thought here*

welcome sight # 1: my room at the boracay beach resort.

home sweet home

the people from fila (i swear! grace under pressure ang mga ito!) treated me and paolo, the photog, to lunch. i believe the frozen lemonade i had at the regency set the tone for the rest of my boracay trips -- i went on this two-week long citrus frenzy which included countless calamansi/lemon/mango-lemon shakes, calamansi muffins at real coffee, and the aforementioned lemon cheesecake at lemon cafe.

then we went to work. or rather, paolo went to work.

while i pretty much watched, chatted, looked over some of the clothes, and ogled various boys pointed out to me by a woman more than twice my age and in better shape than me. i played photographer, too.

welcome sight # 2: teams practicing for the dragonboat races that weekend.

score one for the hype.

this is when boracay really started wowing me. i'd never seen the ocean that soft, pearlescent almost-white shade of turquoise before. and the sand was just absolute talc.

my first pair of havaianas. i totally get the addiction now -- which is not to say that i actually have an addiction of my own

and presenting the finest welcome of them all: the obliging male-models-for-a-day of the bugsay boracay dragonboat team.

welcome sight # 3: care ko sa girls?

work it! work it!

aside from daniel and sebastian here with their prepare-for-glowy midsections, there were also various groups of men around me at this point flexing muscles, lifting heavy weaponry (isn't the dragonboat a war vessel or something) and going "harrumph harrumph!" (or "awoo awoo!" as jeline would say). it was all very 300.

i remember marveling at all these extremely fit and tanned specimens (in fairness, pati ang mga girls) and wondering briefly whether this was what God had intended human beings to be. i felt almost sure that beer bellies and thunder thighs were not part of the divine plan.

then it was five thirty, "work" was done, and i was left to enjoy my first boracay happy hour -- and my first boracay sunset.

My life in weekends

last weekend, i watched one of my dearest high school friends marry the love of her life in a beautiful, intimate, all-white sunset wedding in one of boracay's most exclusive resorts. the night before, i'd gone night swimming in the ocean (totally piss drunk) for the very first time. i spent zero on accommodations, and even less on food. my biggest splurge was a lemon cheesecake at lemon cafe.

the weekend before that, i flew to boracay for the very first time in my life on an all-expense paid writing job for the star. my travel time to boracay -- about 2.5 hours back and forth -- was probably longer than the time i spent actually working, if you call chit-chatting, watching a photographer and ogling buff dragonboat rowers working. i stayed three days.

and this weekend, i am flying with the love of my life, and a handful of my fabulous officemates, to spend the weekend swimming with the world's biggest living species of fish -- the whale sharks of donsol, sorsogon.

i am darker than i've ever been. ever! well maybe since grade school when we went to the beach practically every weekend, and we had a pool in the backyard. this is the first summer in a long, long, looong time that i've actually had a tan.

so in short, life is good.

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there were times these past few weeks that i just stopped and said to myself -- wow. i have a life that allows wonderful things like these to happen. this is my life.

i never thought it could be this good. i have a life that allows wonderful things like these to happen. i would have said even the in-betweens -- but i just realized there are none.

and instead of waiting for the proverbial anvil to drop out of nowhere, i'm looking up and seeing nothing -- absolutely nothing -- overhead. just a brilliantly blue summer sky.

it's my life, all of it -- and i'm loving every minute.

oh. and i promise to blog about and post pictures of these weekends. they were just too good not to share in detail. :-)