updates

i know i haven't posted in a long time. and that partly explains why i uploaded a whole bunch of photos!! my birthday went really really well. you know how i like to celebrate it.

started out saturday before my birthday. with my girls, ate at gaudi (GB3 next to that veggie popcorn/movie snack place), redbox (my god. ang saya.) then oktoberfest at my cousins. ended up being the boring "sober" ones there. it was easy, some of the other guests were practically licking the floor.

my brother learned how to dive. i assisted in those classes. do you remember when you learned with homer? and i retrained? now i know what that looked like!!! horrible ;)

but am proud of him. he did really well. only shot up about twice! making me v nervous. but it was fine. after that, he kept pretty good bouyancy. i'll tell you more about it later. needless to say, this 3-star course is giving me a whole new perspective into diving. i love it. ;)

finished celebrating at this big clan party reunion at my house just this sunday.
happy.

lab work has been going well. hope to defend by this coming sem!! yay! so i can FINALLY go back to work with Dr. Gomez.

seagrass lab hasn't been going well. i'll tell you more about it sometime too. remind me!

yesterday, my labmates and i were talking about october. and how it passes very very quickly. november is knocking, and december is circling the block looking for parking!! and the radio was on. and seasons of love played. for me, that's the ultimate christmas/year end song. maybe because i saw it christmas time here? anyway, i'll end with this. since i haven't posted a song in a loooong time.

something we have ALWAYS shared. we both measure in love.

Seasons of Love (RENT)

five hundred twenty five thousand six hundred minutes
five hundred twenty five thousand moments so dear
five hundred twenty five thousand six hundred minutes
how do you measure? measure a year

in daylights,
in sunsets,
in midnights,
in cups of coffee,

in inches, in miles, in laughter, in strife
in five hundred twenty five thousand six hundred minutes
how do you measure a year in a life?
how about love?
how about love?
how about love?
measure in love...

seasons of love...

seasons of love...

five hundred twenty five thousand six hundred minutes
five hundred twenty five thousand journeys to plan
five hundred twenty five thousand six hundred minutes
how do you measure a life of a woman or a man

in truths that she learned
or in times that he cried
in bridges he burned
or the way that she died

its time now to sing out though
the story never ends
let's celebrate remember a year in a life
of friends

remember the love...
(oh you gotta remember the love)
remember the love...
(oh yeah, its a gift from up above)
remember the love...
(sing out, give out, measure your life in love...)
measure in love.

seasons of love...

seasons of love...

my official birthday "cake" and second favorite thing to eat for desert... sugar high second to none.

unbeatable combination: minggoys dinner with family. will always ALWAYS be an amazing time.

my girls. minus one. we missed you gayle!!!

redboxhappy : )

my dive buddies. keeping them safe was my job. keeping me bouncing up and down all over the reef was theirs! ; )

my first time to assist an OW checkout. 8 students, all trying their best to dive happy and well. succeeded!

my brother and i (i got him to dive!!!)

traffic!!!

what a day! (in detail)

this day reinforces another "lesson" i've learned, that you just never know what the day might bring. no matter how bad you think it is, it always has the potential to turn around. especially when you have good friends about who love you. :)

i mean really. after a very sleepless tense night, waiting for the sun to come up then wishing it hadn't, i would hardly expect that to be the makings of a beautiful day. but life always surprises doesn't it?

talks with BOTH advisers went well, she actually smiled at me. PROGRESS. and after an email to her, she concedes that things are cleared up a bit. and can see things moving forward. setting a meeting for all three of us to come together. whoa.

lunch was with the whole lab and our student. complete with gonuts. (sugar high)

afternoon meeting with someone i later find out is also atenean went really well also. interesting challenge for the future.

and then i rush over to makati to hear a spanish guitar concert by an absolute God of spanish guitar. just to hear such quality music like that must do your soul a world of good. lex and i were in awe. everyone left smiling. they were forced to do 2 "encores". was it even right to keep clapping and ask? i guess it was. we left there saying "john mayer WHO???!"

during the concert lex kept turning to me and saying the guitar player reminded him so much of d. he did. similar intense expression, the half frown squinty eyes look. same accent (catalan too). even made the same grammatical errors. maybe d was telling the truth, there are a lot of people like him out there? i shall take it as a challenge to find out for myself... :)

genius

yugo nakamura designed this 2004 cannes cyber lion award winning website that i find really brilliant. it's also environmental minded without being preachy.

another one.

genius.

high low weekend

ok, well it wasn't an entirely bad weekend. i just had painful splitting headaches everytime i moved and stayed put. solution? move extreeemely slowly. :) fevers at night did not help either. but hey, why not throw the fever in there? just to make it all a bit more fun.

positives: pepper slept with me in the room that weekend. she's hilarious. i knew she was gonna be unhappy sleeping alone without ate susan around, so when it came time for me to go to bed (extremely early on account of the headache) i walked up to her and tried to get her to follow me into my room. pero no. eh di wag. sus. rejected by my dog. haha! i was in bed a few minutes later, the whole house was sleeping na, and i hear this scratching sound outside my door. pepper. sus. drama. alam ko! mana sa may-ari ;)

movie marathon with cousins while eating lansones and paella. good mix no? wait til you hear what we saw. resident evil and... (drumroll)... ella enchanted. WHAT!!? yea. we're weird.

hope you enjoy eternal sunshine of the spotless mind!! watch house of flying daggers when it comes out ok? :)

sixteen minutes to seven ramblings

head's a bit woozy, waiting for seven so i can go home. great. 1.5 hours of traffic. last blog before this weekend. was supposed to have a check out dive, but have to stay home for pepper. do you notice there's not much point to this blog? as if the others did. maybe some did? hmm. oh, i cooked today. ok, i know you cook everyday. and you know i don't, so for me, that was slightly new. i surprised my brother! have a great weekend ok? moo.

helping teach a group from SIKAT (NGO). happy. i led them through exercises. they did it naman. don't know if that was just because dick was behind me though... (hehe)

happy skipping

remember how deej always teased me about this? how i'm always happy skipping either that or i am the holiday cheermeister. he's in quezon with mark (remember him? clam lab?) for work, learning how to surf at the same time, inviting me up there to learn too. NO. no no no.
my point, here it is, i came across this poem by ee cummings, and i think you'll like it as much as i do. i think it's beyond happy skipping. very close to one of your favorite words.

i thank You God for most this amazing
day:for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky;
and for everything
which is natural which is infinite
which is yes
(i who have died am alive again today,
and this is the sun's birthday;
this is the birth
day of life and of love and wings:
and of the gay
great happening illimitably earth)
how should tasting touching hearing seeing
breathing any-lifted from the no
of all nothing-human merely being
doubt unimaginable You?
(now the ears of my ears awake and
now the eyes of my eyes are opened)

i will read it again on the 18th. it just seems appropriate no?

keeping updated

since pinagalitan mo ako moo, i will make a special effort to always write in my blog. AT LEAST ONCE A DAY. just for you. ganyan ka kalakas sa akin. daya. dapat ikaw din. may blog. di na ako updated sa iyo. ;)

ANYWAY, saw p last night. was really nice seeing him again. and reaffirming that people can and are able to stay connected despite distance and lack of constant communication. he was telling me about a new aspect of his work, and how he decided to remain in cebu and make it his home base. which came as a mild shock to me. mainly because i had never considered that people would rather live in cebu than in manila. i mean, given a choice. you see so much migration into metromanila, hear about it on the news. and people think decentralization should happen soon. encourage growth in other parts... am getting off track...

maybe i'd had understood it more if he were cebuano or something? it made me really think about the prejudices i have about living in the provinces. (ok, cebu isn't exactly provincial, but you know what i mean). it also made me really think about what i like about living in this huge concrete madhouse of metro manila. even bbb couldn't stand it, and he's city-bred. but then again, he also cannot stand malls... hmm. bit of a weirdo that one.

ANYWAY (again), and i really can't say i can defend it very well. i think i mumbled something about the schools being better here. (hehe) and even now, i can't say i could really sell metromanila life. i love it obviously. i love that you have the whole range of options, and i mean THE WHOLE RANGE. culture, art, film, music, food, poverty (gotta do something about that one). and that things are always in motion. and that things always involve a slight struggle. i like that it's a bit frenetic. but these things, i realize are true of any big 3rd world city no? not exactly specific to metromanila. so i'm back to square one. maybe i'll sleep on it some more.

how's las vegas treating you? can you FEDEX me some krispy kremes? :))

molgen lab. PRE-exorcist.

exorcism

saw it last night. was pretty good fun. mainly because i was with my coworkers. not because the film was any good. the CGI was really bad. i mean, you can tell straight away, just by the first opening shots of "cairo" in 1949. i guess we've been so used to brilliant CGI, that we ignore the fact that they are CGI as long as they're believable? the hyenas. pangit. i remembered how much you hated the last matrix!! so i guess i know what that feels like na. napikon ako sa CGI ;)

since i'm already talking about movies and films, let's try and exorcise the memory of a really icky film with talk about the other ones showing or "coming soon". next movie i want to see, "The House of Flying Daggers" another Zhang ZiYi. from the people who made Hero and Crouching... has it been shown there?

ALSO, Spanish film fest starting in Greenhills! the Cineuropa is also in UP. muito legal!! :)

oh. saw Feng Shui with my mom. pretty good. you almost forgive Kris Aquino's acting.

science and religion

reconcile science and religion in thirty seconds. was he insane?? IMPOSSIBLE! 6 years ago, my philo teacher asked me something along these lines. and it's always been an ongoing debate in my mind between the scientist and the believer in me. so how does one reconcile the two? answer: i, personally have NO CLUE. but i must have mumbled something particularly brilliant during those final thirty seconds, because a walked out of that philo oral exam room with an A!

((moo, i know you're sniffly. get better soon! you don't need to read the link. it's a long thing))