Happy Easter

Last friday was the highlight of the lent season, it is the ever-changing day on the gregorian calendar where christians grieve for the death of the son of god who died some millenia ago to save humanity for all their acts or omissions done against the laws of christianity. Ironically known as good friday, and along with the thursday before it, have become a traditional two day holiday in our country where christians take this chance to go out on a break from work, go see some relative or go to the beach straight til the end of the weekend.

I didn’t have work on both thursday and friday, I was very hoping I could go to the beach too, but I didn’t find anybody to tag along with. So just like every lent weekend before this, I ended holed up at home.

Thursday wasn’t as deserted as friday, I walked around some of the malls which were thankfully open that day. I bought a cup of this fruit dessert from ice monster, I was sort of hungry and I was narrowed down with my food choices because of lent diet restrictions for Christians, and besides I wanted to try it anyway. I had strawberries top of my crushed ice, since I saw that strawberries were the only fruit that looked a little fresh in their rack. But it was good, and in fact I liked it. Ice monster is just a small stall under the stairs inside the mall and it didn’t have a good ambience to eat while standing and eating something that was really good. I had to ask the ice lady to wrap it up for me since I felt it was better eating it at the leisure of our house while watching cable tv, which Im pretty sure is showing a lot of good movies for all those couch potatoes stuck inside their houses for the lent weekend. I took my snack home, but ice melts faster than the rate I was walking back home, and when I did get home I opened my cup to see a couple of strawberries floating on water. Beats yoghurt.

Ice Monster is expensive though, I cant afford spending 50 bucks often to eat that kind of stuff. And I don’t get it why they named it ice monster, what comes to my mind is the abominable snowman, or some prehistoric ice age animal or the wampa from hoth.

Good Friday is the mother of all holidays in our country. No other holiday can shut down the most number of offices and business in a day like good Friday. And for the faithful who are not on vacation, come dusk on good friday is their annual march across the empty streets along with moving platforms decorated with a lot of flowers depicting the significant events and key characters during the execution of Christ. It’s a religious affair worth watching, since there’s no place to go anyway.

By the way… Happy Easter

Bitter Lack Nix Time

Ive had a runny nose for like a week already. I didn’t skip work though but it made me stack a lot of trash tissues in the office with damp compliments from my clogged nose.

Max called me up around 8pm a while ago. I thought he called to bug me since I was still working at the office at that time. A little later he called me again on my mobile phone and I knew he was up to something, he asked me to join him and his girl for dinner. They were at this new restaurant whose name is synonymous with a solar explosion. I had been there once and their food isn’t that great, the place looked too stylish with all the formalities the waiter had to make but their grub tasted pretty much like cafeteria food, less the hassle of lining up with a tray anyway and besides, max said he’d take care of the bill.

Came 9pm max already started to yawn. I think max is some sort of a solar powered human being, he always sleeps a only little later right after sunset. He finished grade school in the united states but that was long enough for him to adjust the jet lag he made after settling here. I took max and his girl to the coffee shop across the restaurant to get them to have some coffee while holding max’s drowsiness at bay and getting them to kill some more time. Starbucks the place it was not, but it is the closest thing to being one in our city, making it the central watering hole for social caffeine drinkers. Max didn’t drink anything though, he still kept yawning while nagging me every minute to finish my coffee off.

One of the more interesting topic that came up when we were at the coffee shop was about this boxing match yesterday, featuring this boxer pacquiao who lost the match with a well deserved embarrassment after his month long arrogance. He was up against a mexican boxer who was the underdog of that match, but the mexican boxer proved his worth after defeating pacquiao, tearing pac’s upper eyelid and swelling his right cheek leaving the over confident boxer with a bloody.

After the match, the mexican boxer was interviewed, he cant speak English and some translator had to help him talk, but when I heard his spanish accent, it sounded very regal and so full of history. When it was pac’s turn to talk, he knew a handful of english but it was flawed by his accent, like “bitter lack nix time (better luck next time)” and by his grammar, like “I do my bist (I did my best)” and he kept saying “yu no, yu no (you know)” in between his lines, giving the audience the freedom to augment with sympathy for whatever particular vague thought he is trying to say. He shouldn’t have attempted talking.

I went out for a drink with jason and some friends last saturday night. It was the night before sunday’s boxing match, and I could hear everybody getting excited about it. Some were already placing bets for the match, and they were not staking their cash on either boxers, they were actually placing bets on which round the mexican boxer will fall. They should be thanking pacquiao by now for losing the match and keeping everybody happy with their betting money intact.

The bars were crowded that night, most of the crowds were fresh graduates, either celebrating their accomplishment of earning a college degree or going out to celebrate their contribution to the unemployment rate. And most of them were from the university of san agustin, which had their graduation rites earlier that day. I had a reason to attend that graduation too since my uncle was the commencement speaker for that event, but I didnt since this was one of the major schools in our place, and I had a hunch that their campus is going to be jampacked like hell.

A little past twelve, me and jason gatecrashed into this bar and we met this very cute girl on the dance floor. She had quite an attitude and I was almost ten years her senior, making me realize this impending reality about aging. She was really cute though.

Pilot of the Empire

I didnt feel like writing the past few days. I ended up painting this portrait of me posing as an imperial pilot of a TIE interceptor, from a long time ago... in that galaxy far far away.

Series of Unfortunate Events

My younger brother asked if I wanted to watch this movie a series of unfortunate events by some guy almost named after a citrus fruit, it is the next closest thing to being harry potter, less the hocus pocus crap but more of being jinxed for life. It was a boring Monday night, there was a slight rain outside but the breeze was rather cool and I guess it was a great night to go out, so I went watching this movie with two of my brothers and two of my cousins. My parents were not home too, they had to visit this baby cousin of ours at the hospital who got sick earlier today, she was throwing up and shitting water and had been dehydrating herself too much.

One of my cousins brought his best buddy while my other cousin brought her friends from work to watch the movie. The movie looked great if you were a ten year old kid watching it with your family on a happy weekend. Unfortunately Im a miserable 25 year old going out on a rainy monday night with beer on my mind but ended up watching this movie instead. It wasn’t that bad though, I liked the movie's gloomy atmosphere, jim carey’s antics and the baby character in the unfortunate trio . The baby took the role of being the wisecrack comic relief in the plot, he had his speech limited to mere one syllable expressions but his sarcasms were translated through subtitles in the screen which were quite hilarious. I kinda liked the baby's attitude, he had the liberty of cracking up jokes for just anybody on the movie, and without thinking about the expense of these people ever hearing about it, and having us off screen moviegoers for an audience to laugh at his humor. He would have had a great blog going with this situation.

Halfway through the movie my banker cousin left, she said something came up and she really had to leave. I didn’t mind it though, I was thinking it had something to do with her work. After the movie she later smsed us that she had to leave because her officemate who was supposed to join us got into some car accident, it alarmed my other cousin and he replied to her message asking how much damage the car got from the accident, she replied that the car is pretty much in shape, except for the big crack in the windshield where her officemate smashed his head unto during the collision. They’re in the hospital right now and her officemate is just fine and dandy. If there was one word that I found amusing in her message, it was dandy: it is that feeling you get after smashing your head into your car’s windshield and getting yourself rushed to the hospital, that’s dandy.

There was a fantastic breeze blowing outside so we made our way home on foot. My cousin started to recount: one of our baby cousin is sick in the hospital while our cousin's officemate who was to join us watch the movie ended up in a dandy car accident. My brother replied “series of unfortunate events ineed.”

Dog Karma

Ive been driving with an expired driver’s license for almost two months already. Today I finally got to the land transportation office to have it renewed.

First I had to go through a drug test, a procedure which the LTO had hopes of stopping stoned people from getting a license and killing themselves on the road, which oddly enough still happens quite often. They were going to take some of my urine to check if I doped, which was rather vain since I don’t do that kind of stuff anyway. They handed me some papers to sign but suddenly hell, it asked if I took alcohol over the past 24 hours, I didn’t know alcohol was going to screw everything up: I had 3 bottles of beer last night, another 3 the night before and 9 last saturday night. I glanced to the other two persons behind me, but they happily admitted that they were drunk within a day’s length from now, What the heck, it wasn’t such a big deal anyway. The pathologist led me to the lavatory and passed me a little canister to fill with samples of my urine. I had a hard time getting myself to take a leak, I was bothered about that alcohol intake question that I began to worry whether to take samples from my initial burst or the closing drizzle, which ever part of that jet stream had less alcohol contents in it. Then for crying out loud, the pathologist bastard barged into the lavatory and told me to keep the door open, he wasn’t the pervert type, but he probably made sure I wasn’t switching urine samples. Thanks a lot anyway, I had to hold my breath all over again just to squeeze my bladder. The moment it came bursting, I took the sample right away, just to get over this.

By noon I was halfway done with my license but the LTO was about to have their lunch break, so I went back to the office to be worthwhile productive, and I had to make some calls abroad.

“Oh hello, how are you?”

People from other country can be so polite over the phone, I was quite in a hurry and I didn’t tell him what a morning I had. He wouldn’t want to know about it anyway.

I went back to the LTO and I was finally done with the whole thing around 2 in the afternoon. On my ride back home, there were a lot of Christian priests and nuns on the road screwing up traffic carrying picket signs which read: No to Coal Plant and that kind of crap for whatever problems they had. I’ve heard that coal plants aren’t so environment friendly, but neither is a nuclear plant, and these people on the road seemed like they were not concerned about life without electricity. They should have been better off born during the dark ages.

We were supposed to play badminton with my friends tonight, but none of the guys showed up at the court except me. I was a little frustrated so on my way back I decided to walk til the next road intersection where I would catch a ride home. The road I took on foot is a highway and most of the roadside view there were open fields and grassy plains, and it can get a lot depressing to be walking alone in that place. then I began to notice that the highway was empty, not a single car passed and I noticed that the sidewalk was lined up with marines standing about 10 meters apart from the other, and I was the only civilian walking on the sidewalk. It gave me the creeps but I continued to walk anyway as if nothing was happening and the whole roadside landscape was still getting me depressed. Then some big entourage passed by the road, some cops on motorbike, then a truck carrying more marines, then some really expensive cars, which now dawned to me was the president. I was already expecting some marines to yell at me to get off the sidewalk or something but nobody minded me anyway, even if the badminton racquet I held by my shoulder on a sling looked pretty much like a rifle in the dark.

I reached the next intersection on the road but then I felt like walking another block or so. Then after couple of meters down this block I saw some neighborhood dogs across the street beating the crap out some stray dog passing by their turf. They had quite a fight and they were barking and yelping like mad, the stray dog ran towards my side of the street and the rather dominant neighborhood dog ran after him and pounced on him where they both rolled with claw and fang and with a lot of dust flying into the air. the stray dog shook off the mugging dog while yelping like hell. The boss dog triumphantly trotted back to his side of the street with this aura of arrogance that I thought only humans had, he had his head up high in a egotistical manner mindless that he was crossing the road, then all in a flash, a motorbike in top speed crashed into the canine bastard knocking him out of his miseries. The other neighborhood dogs scampered to nowhere and the motorbike that took the collision slammed to its brakes, which sent the other rider rolling into the road and their crates of eggs flying all over the pavement. The fallen rider wasnt hurt though, he stood up from the road with yolk all over his body. I suppose they just felt like speeding up since the road was temptingly empty after the presidential entourage on the road before this. Learn not to put all your eggs in one basket though.

I took a ride home after the second road intersection, I didnt want to see what's gonna happen in the next block.