I only link online friends and blogs I read/like.
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Feb 21, 2012
The thing about this woman is that even though we all want to stick a sword right through her and dump her body in the creek, we have to stay calm and think about the kids. My dead uncle's kids. Her kids. My cousins, eight of them.
Does she enjoy being talked about or want to have all her limbs ripped off to understand that this land, the plantation, the hectares of sugarcane, belongs to nobody else but her mother-in-law? That although my mom and my uncles manage the farm, the land is still legally owned by my grandmother? What does it have to take for her to understand that no, my mom and dad don't own a single inch of that land, you don't own any part of it, because the owner still hasn't given it away to her own children?
Oh you shameless, adulterous woman. How much longer are you going to give us headaches every night?
Feb 19, 2012
1. Time is a luxury. Even more so when you're a journalist. Or aspiring to be one.
2. I know I'm not assertive enough. That doesn't give you any right to take advantage of it.
3. I can't even...
On a lighter note, Mum and I visited Manong Charles' pad/office/warehouse at BREDCO the other week. We went to check the lambs the government had imported and headed off to his place packed with cranes and big equipment and machines. Interestingly, his office has style...although it's not yet finished.
Just one of the conference tables. All his refrigerators are PACKED with juice, soft drinks, and water, and there're noodles and crackers and snacks in the pantries. Really, they're full of food.
What's cool about the Yaps is that they're spontaneous, and they head off to practically anywhere they like, anytime they like. After lunch the next day, someone suggested we visit a zoo in La Castellana. I didn't think they were serious or it would push through but two hours later, we were there, greeted by a very friendly guide and walking down the gravel path amid lots and lots of plants.
I got three peacock feathers too, for free. *Dance.
Cassowaries are like mini, more vibrant-colored ostriches that have dinosaur-ish feet and extremely beautiful raven hair. They're said to be shy, but they can cause serious injury when disturbed.
I look horribly fat and haggard here, excuse me.
Some weird Pokemon-y orange.
There were lots of fishes as well, but we've seen them countless times anyway.
I like zoos. I like how I get to see animals that I've only seen on TV, animals that I never knew existed, animals with such wonderful colors and designs. But visiting zoos also makes me feel, well, miserable. It's like an animal prison. I'm taking pictures and gawking at animals that sometimes don't have any company in their cages. I've seen big, pointy turtles with barely enough room to paddle around. Snakes that only twirl themselves for hours and hours until it's feeding or bathing time. Just one ostrich in one big, concrete room, with nowhere to run around. Several spotted deer in a wider cage, with big blades of grass tossed in during meal time. Whenever I visit the zoo, I always imagine all the animals having the same thoughts as the boa constrictor that Harry Potter set free in the very first book and movie: bored, hopeless, tiring.
Maybe I'm just thinking too much, but that's the truth about zoos and me lol. It's like a guilty pleasure.
Feb 18, 2012
When my parents went to Manila for a month last year, I was "adopted" by my mom's colleague at the bank. With a stable eatery, an orchard, and a poultry farm, his family was what you'd call well-off (especially his 28-year-old son), but for a well-off family, they're VERY friendly and kind and humble. They don't boast about it, as other people do, they're not shallow, not superficial, they're just...normal. Except that they're able to buy SEVEN freaking ponies.
The weekend before the effin Valentines, we went with them to the poultry farm, at around ten in the evening, at more than freaking 100 km/hr! I've never gone that fast and I felt like we were flying and my feet were shaking. Hahahaha. When I heard that it was just normal speed for them, I trembled.
Lol.
Anyway, their poultry farm is just around thirty minutes from our house. I say poultry, because it also includes a piggery, lots of plantations (papayas and herbs and sugarcane), a vast land for the future sandbox (for horse riding), another wide space for golf, several warehouses, and a house for the soon-to-be-many seven ponies. Manong Charles has plans of buying REAL horses from Australia. That, and a helicopter. Helicop... Helic..
I don't have decent photos for the other ponies but their names are Glow and Scarlet (native horses, quite tall and lanky), Dutchess and Arrow (who look like cows), Shadow (a mysterious-looking dark brown horse), Princess (a white pony who belonged to former President Erap and who I mentally call Miss England, for some weird reason), and Milo (an easily-stimulated brown horse).
Here's my soulmate: Arrow. Heeee. :">
I think his purple straps drew me to him lol.
Just Arrow and Milo having a little morning bromance. Milo, who's beside Princess, had a BIG erection last night that I almost thought he had five legs. What a sight, and what a way to greet me.
Princess, y u no follow me?
Oh yeah. Arrow and some others were from Australia...so they only understand English.
Prrrrr. Prrrr. Papaya!
Pigs have really cuuuuute eyes.
IT'S AN ALIEN! Lfmao
Le me, trying to play golf. The ponies are over there! There.
Le me again, with the first basketball shot I ever made in my entire life. XD
Our weekend doesn't end here. Right after lunch the next day, we went to a zoo in La Castellana, which is almost an hour and a half away from the place, if you go more than 100 km/hr. More pictures coming up soon!
P.S. Square pictures are square, just because. :D
Feb 5, 2012
The latest Reader's Digest issue has an article about a multiple myeloma patient, age 54, who sort of reminded me of my own dad. The difference was that he had a remission a few months after treatment. My inner childlike self sulked at the idea that he survived, and my dad didn't. Life can seem so prejudiced sometimes. What's worse, or maybe hilarious because it was just so random yet in tune with my emotion, was that a van passed the house just in time with blaring music -- Gary Valenciano's The Warrior is A Child, of all songs. Haha.
But then again, who am I to say that life is unfair? Once in a while, fate holds a big raffle draw, and whoever gets picked is, well, either lucky or otherwise. It just so happened that my dad's name popped up, and his prize wasn't really pretty. Anyway, past is past, I reminded myself. Again and again. I've moved on, I've accepted that we can't all have what we want. My mother and I had no regrets, I can drive well now, just like he wanted me to, and my dad will always be loved. So what if he didn't survive like this Reader's Digest writer. I know some people who live on to a ripe age and yet are mistreated in their own homes or are unhappy. There're so many things in life that are far worse than death, Dumbledore made that point clear.
Feb 3, 2012
I'm obsessed with typography now. It's beautiful how you can create something visually appealing and fun by mismatching different fonts, serifs and sanserifs alike. I'm leaning more towards the Daily Prophet-like, messy and "medieval" newspaper type of typography. Using type to create vector-like images is a lot of work.
But I've learned something about myself to feel a little uneasy about this new love for typography, because I have this attitude to keep my obsessions short-lived. I dunno. First, it was the sharp, geometric vector images that Dan Matutina had influenced upon me. Next, digital painting. I have lots of .psd and .sai files that aren't even halfway done; most of the time I get a new brilliant idea right in the middle of painting a character's eye and then eventually I ditch the painting altogether. And then, it was Polymer clay (although it's reason enough that I'm too busy with school to mold clay).
Now, hello typefaces.
This flurry of obsessions bothers me. If this keeps up, I'd be unlikely to create my own graphic style, and with that it's unlikely that I'd finish the 13 Things to Draw Before 2013 project I assigned to myself. A lot of the graphic artists and illustrators I follow on Tumblr and DeviantArt have already done commissions before graduating college. I only have a year left and nobody knows I'm here (Lol I'm channeling Emma Morley). :|
Meh.. This all sounds like a big deal.
Well, to me, IT IS!
Jan 31, 2012
I found myself lost in thoughts for a while today, and recalled what led me to enroll for a communication course, considering that I have zero talent in public speaking or socializing with strangers. All I knew was that I loved anything audiovisual. I liked film making, production, photography. But every now and then, I still wonder if I'm in the right path. But then again, don't we all?
And then I remembered the sole reason that solidified my decision. I loved writing. I still do, and I think I've been taking that passion for granted too much these years. The last time I ever wrote a story (although I always never end up finishing it) was in summer 2010, about these two girls who go to a public visual and performing arts school and meet a local music group of four boys. Not really sure where the storyline was headed, I was struggling not to make them Americanized (because that's just so boring), but I ended up creating a list of character profiles and back histories, and inventing a whole new European setting, complete with street names and standard places like banks, day care centers, tea houses, bridges, and showrooms. I was fond of making back histories for characters that I end up just simply outlining them and forgetting to write a story about them. I didn't think it was weird, but now I do. Meh.
I also made up a story (under the horribly embarrassing pen name Deathwished) about this centuries-old warrior woman named Anvanya (I tried to find a Russian/Swedish-y name) who doesn't know that her powers attracted a lot of evil forces, including this tall, dark, and handsome centuries-old-too warlock. However, he realizes that the woman is the 21st-century reincarnation of the girl he once fell in love with, and now he's torn between his duty and his own choices. Sounds like big stuff but on paper they're pretty shitty to me now. Lol.
I have never let anyone read my freaking shallow, silly stories because (1) they're never finished or even halfway done, (2) my dialogues are super simple and witless, and (3) I'm shyyyyy. I read a lot of fanfics online that were so good that make my stories seem like dog food. O_o I was like, how can they write paragraph after paragraph about just one little scene and not get the reader tired of it? Why don't I have that kind of talent?! Haha. I had a lot of plots stocked up on my OneNote, waiting to be unfolded into short stories or 90-page Word documents, but every time I pick one plot and try to write it, I feel like I wouldn't live up to my own expectations. It's like I'd just be wasting my time trying to write a story that I know I won't, or can't, finish.
Now that I'm in college, I know my biggest drawback in creative writing is: creating conflicts is just ABC. But creating clever ways to solve them and get my characters out of certain situations was ZWODMFJEIQ.
So...for several years, my stories just lay in dust. Or in long-forgotten folders, wasting up memory space.
...And then, somehow, in the past three months, I managed to bag two awards (last places, but I'm happy) in editorial and feature writing. One's a regional contest, the other national. I shrugged off the first one as mere luck, until came the second award. I would spend a long time staring at those medals, wondering what the hell happened, why were these awarded to me and not the more experienced writers of the team?
Not that I'm boasting, or implying that oh, I'm a frikkin better writer zan any of zem so promote me and make me literary editor nao! Lol no. That's absurd. But I do feel proud of it, yes, and more importantly I feel extremely grateful, because it stirred up the passion to write again. Somehow it gave that little much-needed push to motivate me to start writing again. I know my writing drawbacks are still unchanged, but I doubt I'll improve much if I simply stopped, right?
P.S. Oh goodie! I'm writing long entries again!
