holy crap on a cracker

Steve Martin and Alec Baldwin I think is getting to George Clooney. Clooney is not smiling. Oh oh oh and they sprayed off the Avatar sprites.

Up won for Best Animated Feature! Yay!

Oh God. Miley Cyrus. Why does she sound like an 80 year old lady? I mean woman? And she's wearing a corset with a skirt.

Robert Downey Jr. wears a blue bowtie! Presenting with Tina Fey.

Why is Sarah Jessica Parker chewing a gum?

John Hughes's wards Ferris Bueller and Pretty in Pink! She was never cute.

Oh, they al turn up at the stage for the John Hughes tribute. They are old. And Macaulay Culkin is too.

K-Stew is still a sourface. Blech.

That Logorama short animated film feature winner is inneresting.

Who hijacked the mic from the best documentary winner?

Ben Stiller as Avatar presenting Best Make Up! Fuck he's a hoot.

Haha Star Trek won for Best Makeup then focuses on a real live Star Trek eyebrows lady. Wonder who that is.

Wow Mo'nique Hairy Legs wins Best Supporting Actress!

Keanu Reeves is alive!

SJP presents Best Costume Design. I do not get hers.

The winner of the award, Sandy Powell, looks amazing in her dress.

Bella and Jacob presents. Where is Edward? And why is Bella so... bored?

I snoozed. When I looked next, J. Lo is on the stage, with some bearded guy.

I wish I could dance like those dancers.

Well hey, it's Aniston's men Brad Cooper and Gerard Butler.

Sandra Bullock wins. I love her.

Barbra Streisand speaks! In a tattered blouse/negligee with a tux jacket.

Hah! Kathryn Bigelow beats his ex-husband for Best Director! Suck it, James Cameron!

Tom Hanks!

Hurt Locker wins for Best Picture! I should watch it I guess.

Here's my deal with kids: I don't like every kid I meet. Yuh huh. As a general rule, I only like my siblings' kids, my godchildren, children of my close friends, some of my relatives' spawn, and incredibly cute ones. And orphans, because they don't have parents who are obligated to love them. I have this theory that if I liked their parents the children must have inherited some of those likable genes. Yes, I will say now that I don't necessarily like kids just because they're related to me. And you're a hypocrite if you say you do.

Over the years I have developed certain tolerance for little people 10 years old and below. When I was younger I made them cry when the parents are not looking, taunting them to a screaming fit complete with snot and fake tears. I didn't care if that incident with me would make them serial killers.

When my hormones had settled down and normal body parts have all arrived completely in order I made peace with the little people. Whenever I find that a particular child does not delight or provide entertainment in any way, I just completely ignore them. I wouldn't even look at them or God forbid, answer any stupid question that all begin with "Why?" I just usually stare them down (I always win) or stick my tongue out. Yeah, real mature.

If you think all children are angels, well, they're not. They can be scheming little demons, can lie through their teeth when they do something wrong and is being grilled about it, and they rat you out. They can also be very manipulative with their adoring public, and they carry a host of germs and all sorts of cooties on them. I once contracted head lice from a nasty four-year old. They also destroy things (more often than not it's the expensive ones), but you're not allowed to retaliate because that would make you very evil in the eyes of those who love kids.

If that's mean, then I'm mean. As far as I know I'm not violating any of their rights by ignoring them. Hell, it's not like I deny them basic necessities like food, clothing, and shelter or I don't know, trafficking them for child slavery (those who do deserve to be burned alive at the stake, skinless). I'd like to think that I'm giving them a life lesson, that you can't please everybody, and they shouldn't even try. That leads to more screw-ups in life. If people like them, then good. Milk it. If not, it's perfectly ok to ignore them back. That's what parents are for, to provide you all the love and delusion in the world.

I know it's evil, really evil, and still there are things way more evil than this, such as actually offing people or kicking kittens, but whenever I'm sad I just go to this website and GLOAT. Like gloat so much I'm considering breaking this self-imposed vow of being incommunicado and the silence after a very long time just to point and laugh.

Yes, I want to point and laugh and just do this annoying dance that Rumpelstiltskin might have performed around the fire while the housewife tried to guess what his name was. Schadenfreude is just too delicious to resist, and right now I'm swimming in a vast pool of it.

I never offered much argument back then, partly because I had no energy left, and partly because I know it was a good thing happening. It really was the best thing. I don't think I could have survived the subsequent and and consequent dots on the timeline that would inevitably follow had I stubbornly persisted. I still had pride and self-respect, and I have a strong suspicion that those two would be the last to go if I die; probably even after my sense of hearing goes too.

Although sometimes I manage to find situations where I compromise my well-being, I get miraculously extricated from those and after a while, find myself whole again. I guess gloating isn't a very nice thing to do, and the next thing you'll tell me that whenever I gloat a puppy dies or something, but goddammit I deserve to gloat. And point and laugh.

No apologies. I wanted to cut the crap out of my life for the longest time, and hey, it happened! Never underestimate the power of wishful thinking. I haven't blogged because I don't have anything new to say, except I had dinner here and there, watched some movie and it was amazing/great/meh/vomit-inducing or something or the other, went places, partied, got drunk, met people from my past/present/future, bought things, and details which I felt you won't care about.

But hey look, it's another year. The year 2009 was a hard year, as if all the flagellation of the past 8 years wasn't enough, it went out with a bang. The 9/11, the dot com bust, the wars, the recession, the natural disasters -- it was a mighty ten-year long buffet of kicking our asses.

And we survived it. The last decade was when I really became an adult, graduating from petty love problems to having real responsibilities and worrying about the future. I was forged during hard times. I don't relish making life-changing decisions but it had to be done, and I had to be brave about it.

I'm expecting a big, huge, humongous change this year and I will be very disappointed if it doesn't happen. Hello 2010, I hope you're better than the last.

Glee, the new series from Fox. This is the first time in years I am forced to watch something in installments. All the series I am addicted to were bought en bulke but after watching the pilot of Glee I am now one of the idiots waiting for Thursday afternoons when a rip of the episode would appear on Torrent. For the record my favorite is Kurt, and I would like to sleep with Puck.


Glee, the music. Glee would be just another high school cliche series were it not for the amazing amazing music. All the cast can sing, I mean really sing. I have a feeling glee clubs around the world will see a spike in popularity this year because of the show. Glee has become so popular that artists are actually discounting their music so it can be used in the show. In January there will be a Madonna episode -- she gave them their catalog for use. It's on crazy repeat (that's repeat multiplied a thousand times) in my iTunes and iPod Touch.


Cafe World. This is a Facebook game where you run a cafe by whipping up dishes and hiring staff, and decorating it. Yeah, yeah, I used to look down my nose on people who would rush home just to harvest their bananas in Farmville. I have turned into one of them, except that I still won't do farming. I'd rather buy a 75,000 fountain fixture and cook some king crab bisque for my customers. Oh yeah, I have an actor and a rockstar as waiters. You can hire your Facebook friends to be your waiters, but with their clothes on, unfortunately.



Hatchlings. This is another game that I tried but got immediately hooked on. I'm a packrat, therefore the act of collecting things will appeal to me. Throw in the words "special" and "rare" and I'm now zombified in front of the laptop trying to find the damned eggs. I'm so hooked I wrote an article about it. I love their creations.

It's been what, 17 years since I marched up the stage on that centric Con Hall (was it Con Hall? I'm confused) we all know. For three years that rectangular space inside the main compound, flanked by old classrooms and a sorry excuse for a canteen, served mainly as a shortcut for me to get from one side to another. Sometimes we congregated in huddles, talking about things most important to high schoolers. On special occassions Con Hall was a dance practice space, or some other special number practice space. I don't remember exactly all the things we used to do there, my classmates and I.

I remember a non-gay beauty pageant they held, the first time in the history of the school, I believe. Straight guys in drag, ramping it up in a makeshift catwalk. It was made more exciting by the fact that the relative "studs" (or those that passed as ones anyway) looked better with make up on. I forget who won, but seeing these boys in sportswear and evening gowns almost made up for the fact that I was actually in the school marching band holding the annoying lyre. I don't know why I joined, in hindsight I must have been taking some mind-altering substance, like kamote. I hate kamote.

School romances, urban legends, first loves borne and instantly killed - these were the fun things that compensated for the lack of a proper school library. I was afraid to enter that room; like a haunted house in a passing peryahan just in time for the town fiesta. I know there are no real ghosts, but just the same I wouldn't take my chances. Well, actually I did enter it that first and only time, to pull out a rotting and dated Encyclopedia Britannica volume to research about Japan. Which was a monumental fail, as I have always hated Social Studies.

We got the grades, moved to some form of higher education, some saw it their fate to get hitched immediately. We left the confines of secondary school's feigned innocence and went out to find our places under the sun. Years pass by, and through some quirks of nature or some bug in the universe's system, from time to time I manage to see some of my classmates and have the occasional drink. It wasn't so often as in my head it was every leap year, save for some really close friends with whom I make it a point to see with semi-regularity.

The other night I saw two of them again, where I was forcibly coerced into confirming attendance to the next reunion. I say forcibly because they asked like fifty million times and I said something like "No", "I'll have to check my schedule," "Maybe", and it's hundred and one variations for the first hundredth time they asked. Then something clicked inside my teeny tiny brain and I said "Possibly", then turned to a full-blown YES (I guess I shouted a little) because it was getting late and they weren't stopping and I still have deadlines to meet.

Don't get me wrong, I would love to attend. Three things keep me: 1) you always hold the reunions in December when the gods of cheap airline fares are on leave and therefore the published rates online are a bitch; 2) if I go in December I would only have to go specially for the reunion, and if I pay that damned bitch amount I would like to have something else to do to maximize my stay but all my family's here and I don't want to spend Christmas and New Year at my grandmother's house where it's always dark; and 3) my Decembers are always hectic.

BUT, and that is a large but, let's see. Maybe I'll consider crossing out "Attended high school reunion" off my To Do list. However, I will not participate in a group singing rendition of "Hotel California". Over my dead toenails.

Dear Person Who Gets Annoying When Drunk,

Let me get this out of the way: I am not against drunkenness per se. At it's best it eases along boring nights, or gives you a boost of confidence, or at least just gives people a reason to laugh at corny jokes. Alcohol, like many other legal mind-altering and addictive substances, is best taken in moderation.

But, if you're at the point where you ask me a question sixty five thousand times and you get mad when I don't reply at I don't know, the four hundredth and twenty second time, then I'm outta here. And I don't appreciate being whispered to, or pawed, or my hair stroked. NO. NO. NO.

Yes, we're friends and I really do like you when you're sober, but next time we go out and there's drinking, I'm leaving after your fourth bottle. Seriously. Earlier you dragged me into that hole in the wall place where some middle-aged balding guy who hasn't lost his aspiring rockstar delusions belt Air Supply hits and fuckity fuck, Hotel California. I wanted to spear a fork through my chest, or at least through your chest, because you sang along with feelings.

I was in hell.

I'll see you in two years. Or here's a good idea, let's see each other every leap year only. Until then, I'll communicate with you from another zip code.

The other day we were struggling to write our assignments, but of course who cares about our struggling, we have deadlines to meet. The hardest part about any task is to get started, and to get started on an article you must know the angle you're writing from.

Usually on easier days the angle presents itself in your head almost immediately -- the flow is there, all we have to do is put fingers to keyboard. It's amazing, the way the article writes itself, when I'm just almost an audience to its creation. Letters appear on white space to make up words, and those words make up sentences. Sentences that sometimes take up too much space the problem now is cutting, because duh I don't own the paper.

There is no conscious effort to self-edit, because the hand barely catches up with the mind. That's why I hardly write by hand anymore; aside from my deteriorating penmanship, I can't write as fast as I can type. Which is sad, because handwriting is now considered a dying art.

I have always been envious of people who have great handwriting, regular and seamless strokes of pen on paper. While mine will not be mistaken for a doctor issuing a prescription, it still gives the impression that I'm always in a hurry. And I know handwriting experts would tell me my scribbles tell a lot about my personality, I am not always in a hurry. Seriously. Hurrying stresses me out, and somehow it doubles up the mistakes. That's why I usually sleep on important decisions, because everything looks different in the morning. I will not do the proverbial walk of shame on life-changing judgments.

And this, this is the awesome thing. Fingers to keyboard, no thinking.

Thing is, you should never talk with friends about some things that could have been, because that talking will lead you into believing that things can be different, even if in reality they couldn't be salvaged for a million dollars.

Remember when we used to be friends? Like friends friends. I would tell you things and you would tell me things and I would cry sometimes and you'd tell me everything will be fine. Or the dinners and beers and tocilogs and pita breads. The YM conversations, text messages, and in general just being there.

I miss that.

We don't see each other that much, but when we do, I want to pull you over and ask you what happened. Now every conversation is strained, and we need other people to be there with us because if we're left alone for some reason or another one will eventually leave with a lame excuse.

Which is, yes, lame.

I won't say anything more because anything more would be too much already and as it is I'm trying to keep this as vague as possible. So I won't get shot down.

And this post is lame. Kill me now. Or in a month if I still feel like writing the same shit, I give you license to shoot me. I'll let you know.