The Fat Man Today

One of the things I miss most about Manila is that the city just doesn't fall asleep. No matter where you go within the city, you're sure to find somebody awake. Never mind that the people who're up at say, three in the morning are more likely to do you harm than anything else, but the fact remains that for good or ill, you're never truly physically alone in Manila. These thoughts ran through my head as I made my way out of the village I live in here in Cagayan de Oro. It was two-thirty in the morning (my day was pretty fucked up at the time, starting with the fact that I fell asleep at five in the morning the day before), and the entire bloody village was emptier than a cemetery. We don't keep night watchmen here, so when the local istambays go to bed, the only company you have are the mountaint's animal and insect occupants. When you get to downtown Divisoria, the scenery changes from deep rural to semi-urbane. You see the requisite poor littering the sidewalk...

Ohohoholy shit I am not doing gin-bulag ever again. The subsequent bouts of wastedness is just too awesome for me to handle. As of this writing, I am laughing at the fact that I apparently tried to enter the word "DAMMit" as the username for my Gmail account. That fact alone is hilarious. However, last night was pretty fruitful. Gabby and I managed to flesh out ideas for the entire webcomic; now, I just have to write the bloody script and finish the bloody storyboard. BTW John, yes, I am also working on the scripts for "Continuum." I expect a lot from you, so brush up on your art, foo. To the people I sent randomly strange messages to last night, I apology. Really. I didn't know hell of what I was doing. :D

First off, I would just like to say that I need a haircut. And a shave. I told myself I wouldn't get any real kickass grooming done until I set foot back on Manila soil, but apparently, that's not going to do wonders for the ruggedly handsome countenance I am privy to. That, and the lack of sleep of the past few days, anyway. So I should be heading off to dreamy-dreamland in a bit. In other news: House meets reality TV. Except it isn't reality. The writer who thought up the entire survival of the nastiest bit deserves some pretty good praise. Also, it's quite a treat to see Greg House giving out peonies. It gives you some insight as to how a good character can change without becoming insufferable; write that down kids. That's all for today from the front. Don't let reality bite you on your way out.

The Eraserheads are the best cure to a heavy heart, as well as other ailments. :) Meanwhile! Advibe hasn't been anything quite like what I initially expected it to be. This leads me to wonder if mebbe I hadn't been given the shorter end of the stick. But I get to work from home, so that's always a plus.

I saw this link on Mike Ongsingko's blog, and MAN. I just had to post it here. I am currently drooling. I wish it were real.

This is the end of contentment. I finished the last few assignments I had to finish for Stickymedia Solutions' content department earlier today. It was like dropping off anchor from your hometown, waving at all your friends from the dock, wishing them all well and promising to write, except that you know you'll still be in the same place at the same time the next day. I'm not saying that its an emotional separation. I've been going on way too much about emotional this and emotional that for the past few posts that I could put up my very own soap opera clinic and actually have enough material to last me a couple of years. So no, this isn't an emotional post. But there's something to be said about having a steady something that you know working for you. I mean, I know writing. I know my writing. For the past year, I've been editing so many words, resuscitating so many dead articles, churning out so much copy that I couldn't even bear to look at the short...

Crossroads are annoying little bitches, sometimes. You don't know if you're going the right way, and the only way you can find out is if you take the damn avenue - and even then, you probably wouldn't be in your own perfect path anyway. But that's the thing. You have to take them, whether you want to or not (although you mostly often don't; you rarely get chances to choose exactly what your heart tells you to choose, either because you're an idiot or because everything looks enticing , and these two situations always happen). At the very least, I am on the last legs of my stay here in this sleepy city that remains to be one of the most beautiful I've seen, although I wouldn't want to live here. In eleven days, November rears in its ugly face, and from then, it's two days to my dad's birthday, thirteen to the near-death anniversary of the crash brothers Obi and Martin. And the day after that, I go home. Home. It sounds like a Star Wars introducti...

I am normally a very, very nice man. There are very few things that get my goat, no matter how dire the situation. One of them, sadly, happens to be bad writers. I am presently editing the work of a twenty-something excuse for an imbeccillic monkey given the God-given gift of using a keyboard. And, unfortunately, a computer with an Internet connection. And because of this, this . . . ABOMINATION, I make one solemn promise. Should the gods be kind enough to provide me with the chance to meet this writer personally, I will smile, and slowly, slowly gut him / her whilst he/she is living in order to extract only the most succulent, purest and most inimicable sort of pain. The most unadulterated scream of pain shall be like the tinkling of little piano keys in my ears. I will smile as his / her blood slowly drains from the body, the ebb of life from it's mortal shell. A nd just before he/she knocks out from sheer hemorrhagic pain, I will eschew a hole on his / her back and pull out his...

I LOVE this webcomic . Here's a sample dialogue: MAXIM: Should haff used hyu brains dot time, too. DIMO: Shot op. I gets a new vun soon. MAXIM: A new brain? Goot idea. And I am convinced that I am a Jagermonster. Gaslamp fantasy (steampunk for you sci-fi freaks) galore in Girl Genius . The comic is highly recommended.

Tremors. You feel it when you're walking down the street, or even when you're just sitting down with a good book. From out of nowhere, you feel a sudden vibration in your side pocket, or you hear a distant, disembodied chime. You instantly reach into the said pocket, like a reflex action, bringing out your mobile phone, expecting a new message or, if you're lucky, a phone call or an email. But there's nothing there. The operator logo greets you with a blink as your fingers activate the mobile phone's backlight . You have just felt a phantom vibration. Some research - not much, admittedly - has been going into this phenomenon, wherein most of the more definitive results point to a psychosomatic answer. That is to say, that it's all in our heads. Which also underscores the urban legend that man, in this day and age, has become so attached to his technology that it has partly begun to affect even his mind's involuntary actions. I'm no technophobe, and I lov...

Okay. I've made gargantuan decisions before. But this decision I'm making now could be pretty huge. And I'm feeling that pang that normally hits other people at times like these. Which is, to say, that I am starting to hate decisions.

NO. No no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no. I don't like it when I go batshit insane. So no. NO. And I mean No.

I wanted to post this earlier. I must not fear. Fear is the mind killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past, I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone, there will be nothing. Only I will remain. And then I realize that I did the exact same thing in my old blog two years ago on October 6th. Creepy shit. But I think the emotion is well worth the repetition. Because right now, I must be strong.

Now, if I were a person of some clout, and was given the chance to print the headlines for either the People's Journal, Pilipino Star, or any of the somewhat respectable tabloids circulating in Metro Manila, it'd probably go something like this: Barrera Pinakyaw ni Pacman! (for the bisaya readers, pakyaw in tagalog means to finish greedily, often used as a term of ridicule). Because really. That was what happened in the Pacquiao - Barrera fight held at Mandalay Bay. Barrera could have been a stuffed and weighted dummy that just kept coming back for more and more punishment, and we wouldn't have been able to tell the difference. Oh wait, there was that one illegal punch. Yeah, no dummy would have been able to pull off something like that. Or the cut cheek. Or that trip of his during the twelfth round. In any case, Pacquiao was just laying on the punishment like a cheeseburger grinding machine on Extra Joss. If Barrera wasn't so busy defending himself, Pacquiao would have...

Finally, after a looooooong feud with the Virtumonde dialer that somehow managed to worm itself into my computer, I found a fix. No more late nights of scouring through the registry, trying to find the offending files. No more bloody pop-ups in both IE and Firefox. And best of all, I no longer have to run Spybot on every startup. Woohoo! God bless you, ComboFix.

It's inevitable. One of these days, we'll all have to come to terms with the fact that we are truly alone, deprived of the hand that fed us, the mouth that made us who we are, the people that truly kept us from going over the edge. We'll have other loved ones around us, but nothing, nothing can replace the love of a parent for a child. I remember two years ago of the events when my paternal grandmother died. The four Cruz siblings - my ate Yeyey, who commuted in from Singapore, my kuya Migs, my ate Carina, and myself - were caught unawares (death kinda does that) by my lola's passing, especially because my dad was at the time incarcerated in Makati Medical Center, recovering from a failed attempt to put his large intestines back together (he's been living with a colostomy bag ever since). We didn't have the heart to tell him, especially since it was early in the morning, I was supposed to be at school, and his blood pressure at the time was unexpectedly high. M...

Did I say it, or did I say it? Read this to understand what I'm talking about. They won't let this die without a good bout of further grandstanding, although it's actually pretty nice to see our beloved senators commending the chief executive, for once. Abalos, in the meantime, is still in for a lot of hot water. And so is FG. Let's just see how good ol' Gloria handles that, especially since she's not doing Abalos any favors by being unable to receive the former COMELEC chairman's formal resignation - which, in turn, will be used by the senate's blue ribbon committee to tar and feather the poor bastard. In other news: I need to stop doing what I do best. Which is obsessing. It'll get me nowhere, like a quagmire in the middle of a desert. It's only making me more and more disagreeable, and since I have to liquidate a lot of the stuff in the apartment on this last month of my stay here in Cagayan De Oro, I need all my wits about me. Oh yeah, I...

In November, the streets of Manila will be filled with the blood of a million brain cells, and the avenues shall be streaked with a multitude of alcohol of various shapes and sizes, from all walks of life and the farthest reaches of the world. Forevermore.

Let's see. I. I got back to Cagayan de Oro yesterday, fresh from a heady night of wine-ing with Obi wherein I ended up in one couch, him in another, both of us with no recollection at all of how we got there. Let the speculations begin. Anyway. The night before, my boss specifically told me that one of the projects I was handling was going to have what is called a field day the next day. I forget the details, but when you hear the terms field and day used in the same context as advertising and / or marketing, it could only mean a whole lotta work for me. So against my better judgment, and the proddings of an as-yet sober Obi, I agreed to show up at work the following day after my flight. This was, as you could well imagine, a really, really bad decision. Upon arriving at the office fresh from my welcome-back-to-the-ends-of-the-earth meal at JRJ Fried Chicken, I discovered that not only did Lia not have any work for me - which leads me to suspect that the damn broad missed me and ...

I just found out that I have no self-control at all. None whatsoever. I was supposed to not say anything. Keep my mouth shut. Abhor contact. I mean, how hard can that be? Pretty hard, apparently. It's never easy to say no when it counts. Tsk.