another hammer to the head

i have bitten the bullet.

i have joined the other side. this other side, it is more popularly known as facebook.

and the net effect? it is already 6:34 and i am still at the office. never has this blog, nor shelfari, nor 43things, nor flickr done this to me.

does that mean i love facebook more than my other web presences?

hardly.

i don't like it. maybe not yet. but it certainly feels like maybe not ever.

what i hate: the interface, the appearance (so cluttered!!!), and the fact that i don't know how to do what. most of these things are supposed to be intuitive. so maybe i am not wired for the facebook intuition. i don't know.

what i like: maybe that i now realize i have a lot of .... friends? at least 61 of them. isn't that amazing?

self, welcome to facebook.

How to go about having a glamour portrait of myself done in Zamboanga

a third post about cory's death? sigh. this is backsliding.

but then, it's better than the months-long lull between posts, di ba?

i was just thinking, seeing all those huge photos of cory at the cathedral, maybe i should get portraits of myself done too?

how horrible if i died and my family would display enlarged copies of my passport picture atop my casket.

so my latest project has been identified. have a portrait done.

to do:
1. decide on a look
2. find dress (or blouse -- my portrait will be a bust shot only. no whole body stewardess application photos please)
3. find good local make-up artist
4. find good local hair person
5. find a good local photographer
6. find a good local kunsintidora friend to hold my hand during the shoot
7. go have that portrait taken
8. somewhere between numbers 1 and 7, find money to fund this endeavor

the look of the photo
i would like for it to be a "glamour shot". so shoot me for wanting something very different from my daily life. with the advent of digital cameras, i have too many, far, far too many shoots of me looking the way i do everyday. it will be obviously done in the studio. no location shoots for my glamour shot. right now i am thinking black and white. timeless. something that will look good when it turns sepia with age. something that will look good inside either a golden baroque frame or a plain shaker-style wooden one. yes. i am full of shit. i have heard that said of me before. get over it. i have.

the look of me
i want to look like catherine zeta jones or penelope cruz (my cousin on my mother's side, haha. along with tom cruise). you know, smouldering. big hair, smoky eyes. very aloof but very come hither also. that should give my friends and family something to talk about during my wake.


the great thing about Cathy's photo above is that it came from a site that contained an article called "How To: Look Gorgeous in Pictuers". Don't ask me about the appropriateness of the colon in the title. For my part, I am just happy to have found, all in one site, a great picture of Mrs. Douglas and a helpful article. P.S. My hair won't be as messy as hers here. and i don't know if i can pull off that look-into-the distance thing during the shoot. but i will really, really try.


i have serious misgivings about the material of her gown. nothing wrong with it, per se, but it's so un-me. but doesn't she look gorgeous? her hair isn't big but i like it, like it, like it. Hmm. mother dear gave me a bottle of hair dye. maybe it's time i go to the parlor and have highlights put in....

and why is it that everytime i line my eyes with black pencil like penelope did here, it just looks so.....wrong?

honestly, i am not really into make-up, or into hair for that matter. my last haircut was something i gave myself a month ago in front of the mirror with the scissors i use to cut my beading cords. i call it a "very blunt cut". but since college i have been told this jalandoni guy is great. he used to have a shop on nunez street but i am not sure. when i got married, someone from david's salon on mindpro did my face. he was so happy with his handiwork but i hated it. it didn't help that after the wedding, i managed to pry from my husband his opinion of the makeup. and this is what he said: "kamukha mo kanina si queen amidala." he said this during reception, after i had gone to the bathroom to wipe off some of the brown gunk and my original brows had resurfaced. here's an illustration of my husband's memory of me during our wedding:


the photographer
i know of two good local photographers, rikki lim and keith lorenzo. they'd be rolling on the floor laughing if i tell them all of these things but that's a small price to pay for a good photo for people to remember me by.


this is derrick lim, rikki's son. of course papa took the picture. gwapo 'no? blame his mom's genes, hehe.

now if i were really, really flush with cash, i'd have my glamour shot done by the team over at mimi and karl. i have been making tulo laway over at their site for almost a month now. sigh. i probably have to facilitate 25 writing workshops or sell seven million beads or take my son off his meds or do all three to afford these guys. but i just think they are the greatest.

if you can ignore the obvious fact that she is wearing a wedding gown and we all know how star wars like my wedding look was, this is how i want my portrait to look like. no come hither here, its all just haughty, but you know what i mean. i hope. here are other mimi and karl masterpieces

the friend
my sister maita would only roll her eyes at my kaartehan, so not her. my friend marsha would want to be in the shot, so definitely not her. my friends vina and sheila would be really, really great, and i can imagine sheila taking on the styling tasks, but they are both in the states earning dollars, so it cannot be them. i have a feeling jane and ivy would be tolerant and their taste levels are high. so maybe either of them....
all my other sisters aren't here either. but i can imagine the eldest making kunsinti....since she already had glamour shots of herself taken!

....time lapse....

thirty minutes ago i started to add images i have gleefully ripped off photographers' websites but until now, the orange thing that goes round and round, indicating that blogspot is still working on my command, is still going round and round. and i am losing my patience. so i am going to end this entry, come back to it tomorrow or this afternoon. and add those photos that will illustrate what i am raving about regarding my glamour portrait.

hindi ako nagiisa

apparently, like cory, hindi ako nag-iisa.

at least in my deep feelings of gratitude to the four blokes i wrote about in an earlier entry.

the senate is going to commend the four honor guards of cory's remains. this news broke just two hours ago.

imagine that. getting a senate commendation for being able to stand for a damned long time.

if i stand for eight hours and 15 minutes on a flatbed truck going to pagadian from ipil, i will demand a commendation from senator pia cayetano too. make that two commendations. if you have been on the ipil-pagadian road, you will understand.

four poor but enduring blokes

i could talk about kris and her speech that included yet another self-proclamation of her favored child status in the aquino family.

i could talk about the wonder and awe i felt looking at thousands upon thousands all over the country who gave in to the obviously strong urges they were feeling inside to do something, anything, to show their gratitude to a former president.

i could talk about the nausea i felt when i saw jamby madrigal at the cemetery, yellow flower in hand.

i could talk about how vindicated she must feel, IF cory were a vindictive person, which i doubt, about the humongous outpouring of grief and gratitude from millions, having suffered through those coup attempts and frequent mudslingings.

but i want to talk about the four men instead. the four men who escorted cory's remains from the church to the cemetery. this seemingly inconsequential thing kept nudging itself into my busy brain yesterday as i, along with seven hundred million Filipinos all over the world, virtually walked beside the truck through rain and a sea of people. but at least we walked. and to my mind, at least we could scratch if something itched. and we could carefully sip on the water we imaginably remembered to bring along.

those four could not only not do those things, they could not even move at all! for eight hours! there they faced the casket, standing at stiff attention, on a platform that surged forward, stopped. surged forward, stopped. again and again everlastingly.

i wondered if confetti landed on their lips. but it probably wouldn't stick, their lips were probably too dry from dehydration. i wondered if they felt the urge to take a leak. that must have hurt, holding it in. for eight hours. and on top of the confetti, people hurled flowers, not at them, admittedly, but at the casket, but surely a few must have missed the intended target and hit them instead? and its not as if there was not enough flowers already. they were standing on a virtual flower garden. What if they were asthmatic? and there was that part of the journey where the local fire department felt the need to send cory off with a literal shower of water from at least six hoses. so flowers, confetti, a moving truck, people shouting, strongs winds, and a drenching to boot.
























the military is so happy with those poor dudes, they're thinking of giving them medals or something. to my mind, the military and the police (because one of the four was contributed by the pnp) should be happy and proud of everything they did for cory yesterday. the best. as for me, i am saluting the four blokes now. a lousy salute, but a heartfelt one. thanks.

MJ

if you asked me on june 25 if i would cry if michael jackson died, i would have given you an unqualified "no". at the time of his death, most news story about him focused on how circus-y his life had become. if i thought of him at all, it was to think how self-indulgent he was.

but i wasn't really paying much attention to michael jackson anymore. he had become irrelevant to my life. just last month, as i was tweaking with my playlists, i deleted three of the five songs i had of him. i only kept "ben" and "man in the mirror". i removed beat it and thriller and billie jean because they left me cold. so the sadness that i felt at the news of his death took me by surprise. i still have not read in full any article about his death. when stories on him come up on tv, i tune them out too. i am sorrowed that it took his death to remind me of his genius.

i am waiting for the time magazine special edition on him. i guess that would be my way of paying michael jackson my last respects. reading on him in peace and quiet. for he did seem to have had a noisy life. and he seemed to me a quiet man.

i first met ram of buddha banana a couple years ago, when he was still a fourth year college student. he was in my class. his projects were always the neatest and best-looking.

he was a cousin of my high school buddy vina. he now works in a pr firm in makati and was nice enough to sponsor three of my current students - karen, josh, liza - to do their internship there. expectedly, they had a blast (while learning a lot, i know they would insist).

yesterday, ram was nice enough to "polarize" three pictures of my son gabriel. ram saw them in yesterday's post, thought they can be improved on and voila, here they are:




that's a photo of my thumbsucking two-year-old, Gabriel. He is standing in the middle of a squash field in a mango farm in boalan wearing swim trunks.

the pictures look like they were taken circa 1970.

thanks, ram!

our hayden....NOT!!!!!

so i was reading this father's day article on a national broadsheet about what the author would do if his daughter took it upon herself to star in a homemade sex video, or worse (his sentiments, not necessarily mine), hayden kho, the wannabee blue movie producer, was his son.

the author's words were expected but it was effective in the sense that he did make me think....about how my husband insists out son looks like hayden kho here



well, gabriel DOES look like a gigolo in this photo....

will it help dispel that notion from your mind if i told you two nights ago he tried to turn off the computer by pointing the tv remote control at it?

and that when it's time for his minder to go home, he says "namaste" coupled with the hand gesture and mini genuflect?

that he is a terrible thumb sucker?

or that while he sucks on his thumb (right, never left), he worries with his fingers either a knotted shorts drawstring or an earlobe (mine or ariel's, never anyone else's)?