things to look forward to

there are so many things to look forward to this year:
two weddings
a trip to palawan
constantine, sin city, (ok fine) fantastic 4
neil gaiman's new book-- anansi boys
and...


Neil Gaiman!!!!

yup. i was reading the blog when i saw this :

Incidentally, I'm trying to organise (well, I'm not actually doing the
organising) the promised signings in the Phillipines and Singapore before or
after the Melbourne convention and Australian book signings this summer. The
signing in the Philippines looks like it's happening, but I'm not sure about the
Singapore one, as originally I was going be brought in with Dave McKean by the
British Council, a plan that was scuppered by MirrorMask, and now I'm not really
sure who to talk to. (If anyone in Singapore has any bright ideas, feel free to
let me know.)

i don't even know when or where. well quite possibly after the anasi boys and in makati. well honestly i don't care coz i'm going to take the day off when he does come. :)
heck i did it for eve ensler and i love his work more.
not that meeting eve ensler was not great, she really did have good ideas and i liked her and she introduced me to monique wilson and they invited me to see the valentines day vagina monologues show with them.... ok im babbling. that was great.
neal by the way was silent beside me all the time probably asking himself how i can just chat these people up just like that.

anyway, had two dreams about meeting him here in the Philippines, both times I failed to get him to sign something. The one time I dreamt I saw him in some great beach resort I even though it was a dream and the people said no.

I thought it meant that borroms will be able to get his autograph during the Sundance Festival (I just found out this week that he was in a 5 mile radius of Neil Gaiman) but I was wrong. He really is coming here.

I can't wait to tell my friends. Cos and I used to do the "I'm the biggest fan" fight. I think. Well, they'll be thrilled. We can make a fieldtrip out of this. I just hope it doesnt conflict with the two weddings mentioned above because the rest of the dates can be moved around.

I think its fairly safe to say that Book Fairs are out of the question because we just don't do that here. It might be a toss between Powerbooks and Fully Booked. I hope it's Powerbooks, for personal reasons of course and the fact that I'll probably know the organizers wouldn't hurt too.

Oh well, i'll post the news when I get some.

the world's largest

:) just a quick post.(longer ones will follow hehe)i just found out that the Philippine Eagle ( Pithecophaga jefferyi ) is the largest eagle in the world.
Now that's fun.
please visit the haribon website for more info.

birthdays, parties, beer and rootbeer

leelee's 1st bday invitation
yup. lots of beer. what a promise and a definite sign that lots of quill people will attend.
my really cute godchild got to celebrate her 1st bday by drinking beer ( yes beer ) courtesy of her father, cos.
i have a feeling every year it's going to be : "Leelee, now you're really [insert age here] coz you drank beer!"
She wasn't feeling happy until around late afternoon and I only got her to like me because of rootbeer and a straw :) now we know the way to that child's heart.
i miss my friends. i only see gamer people at johann's and not even that often.
the people are still the same though either more glamorous ( like denise ) or more popular (like aldus and the purple chickens ) btw, it's kind of fun to know people before they were famous or to hear them writing their songs or their stories.
i hope that we will have big contributions to each of our respective fields. (drama!)
haraya was also there. i'll post a picture when i get a decent one coz he's shy. haraya is dong's and jewel's son.
the last time we saw him was his christening and now he's 4.
i feel weird when i see my friends being parents.
some people see them and think "i want a kid too".
i see them and my long term relationship barrier comes up.
i must have been a horrible kid.
rotfl.
seriously. being attached to anything more than 7 years kinda scares me.
i even got out of my elementary school because i just wanted to go. i couldn't take being there any more.
i wish i can go visit luna and cos and cel more often though. it's fun playing with her and i can get more comics from cos.
and he was after all the one i used to talk to about my relationships before i started talking to dawn and arf on a more regular basis. regular to me being once a month though im trying to change that.
my friends keep giving their kids filipino names that can be the source of future taunts though we think they're cute now. my mom told me i shouldn't follow suit. yeah she's one to talk, after she and my dad gave me my name.
i hope they give more parties. im planning on having a quill bday bash but i dont know where i can put all of them for a nice long night of drinking. anyway, cos and i will probably think of something up.
all i have to look forward to now is randall and maui's house warming and johann's and tin's upcoming wedding.

stimulated to appreciate IT

I’m writing all this down tonight because tomorrow I have to finish this document. My friend clair told me about this beauty contest for IT professionals. Yes, they actually thought of such a thing. Apparently they have 2 categories, one for professionals aged 25-35 and one for the undergraduates. More details on the Digital Pinay can be found here.
Clair and some of her friends were really outraged at the idea. I just told her that I noticed that the newest tech magazines in the Philippines ( I saw two of them:T3 and something else I don’t remember ), always had sexy scantily clad women on the cover holding these tiny gadgets which you can barely see.
I’m not against sexy women posing on the cover. I like reading FHM too and a lot of women’s magazines do that as well. I just didn’t want to see those kinds of pictures on a technology magazine.
I told neal about it and he said something like “it’s ok because that’s their marketing strategy to make the magazines sell”. It was probably then that I realized exactly why it bothered me.
It bothered me that they use women to sell gadgets and technology because that meant only men were interested in purchasing magazines about technology and gadgets.
Suddenly it seemed to me that they aren’t even bothering to attract women who are also interested in using high tech gadgets.
That may be because either one, they think the number of women who are interested in technology is too small or two, women who love gadgets are lesbians.
The story does not end there. My friend emailed some people and their point of view was published in an internet article. She told me about it the next day and as I read it, I laughed because my friend quoted me.
She told the reporter about my magazine insight hehehe.

"I am offended by this competition because it seems
to me that the organizers are looking for a trophy to show around. This contest
seems to feed the culture of machismo that we seem to have in our country. If
this kind of thing goes on, we would just perpetuate the idea that women are
objects of beauty to behold. I was talking on YM [Yahoo Messenger] with one of
my friends and she said this: ‘It’s weird. In America they sell the tech mags
without girl pics but here? There’s always this half-naked girl in front with
the techie stuff that is so small it covers barely 10 percent of the cover.’ So
you see, there is this already a current problem with the perception of women in
the country as it is. We don’t need another beauty pageant to make things
worse," Ching told INQ7.net.

moral of the story: be careful what you say in YM :)
Anyway I do hope they realize that there are women could also be interested in their magazine articles. I know that though engineering is still considered a "man's course" female individuals are proving their capabilities in the field and even doing better than their male counterparts.

3 years shy of thirty

i think one of the best moments we ever had happened yesterday. we were in the movie theater waiting for blade trinity ( i like the second blade better ) to start and he suddenly leaned over to my side and whispered in my ear
"you're my best friend"
(like a child who was admitting he liked me).
then he said "when (yes when not if!) we break up. i hope we still remain in good terms with each other".
i pointed out that he said "when" instead of "if" and he corercted his statement :) though it was a little too late.

when i told him his bday was coming up i told him: "do you even realize that in three years you'll be thirty?"
"oh my god"
was his reply.
"i have to get married before i become thirty..." he took my hand and asked: "do you think ill be able to find the right person before then?"

happy birthday!!!!

i hope you do find the right one.
:p hopefully someone better than the one clinging to your neck.

peppermint and chocolate

i just want to say i love peppermint and chocolate!
and...
why did they pull out all the cadbury peppermint chocolate?

thank goodness for starbucks.
yes, i actually said that.
starbucks now has peppermint in hot coffee, peppermint in iced coffee, peppermint in frappucino and my favorite, peppermint in hot chocolate.

i love life.

by the way i said peppermint in coffee or chocolate not tea.
never in tea.
now that was like brushing your teeth while drinking.

the integrity of the internet

i was reading neil gaiman's blog... yes as always.
i haven't read it in three days since i was absent doing nothing unless you consider fighting bugbears, guards, giant spiders and outwitting an ogre something.
being sick at home isn't as nice as it used to be.
anyway, he asked Teresa Nielsen Hayden a question and in her reply she mentioned that : "any idiot can put up a website".
suddenly all my days of researching stuff on the internet came back to haunt me.
i even thought of a good thesis idea for it: create websites of different genres: science, leisure, sports, gaming, movies, computers and even blog sites and check which sites are most likely to be believed by the public.
the internet can be a very helpful place but it can also be very deceitful.
as an example, when the movie Blair Witch Project was being promoted, a website containing "evidence" about the movie's truthfulness came out as well.
a lot of people really believed that it was true though old recordings of murder or tapes of weird happenings found after the people involved mysteriously disappeared is an old writing trick.
a friend of mine even got into an argument with me because he truly believed it was real.
i never actually got to the website so we don't know for sure if i could also have been influenced. i did believe the movie wasn't true way before i watched it and when i did watch it i realized i was correct.
well mostly coz in my opinion i wouldnt run in the forest with a camera if someone was after me.
i was also mildly disappointed that i didn't get scared at all. i have an overactive imagination but nope, nothing bad came out. i didnt even get scared afterwards. not like the Ring series which made me rue the day i got the big tv(big enough for Sadako to go through).
of course my friend had to admit defeat when the actress showed up at the Golden Globe Awards.
dead people dont show up at the Golden Globe Awards.
what about blogs...
isn't it amazing that people could be living entirely different lives in these pages. i'm sure a lot of people who have blogs write about their experiences truthfully (some even got fired for complaining about their jobs) but there must be people out there who use this to create new lives.
who knows if what im writing is true?
i dont even know which of my friends read this or if they did how will thy tell people im spreading lives?
sometimes we get touched by things that aren't even true.
like in my email, i got message with the letter Gabriel Garcia Marquez wrote as a farewell to the public called "A Genius Bids Farewell". Which turned out to be a hoax.
Blogs are people's novels about their lives or the lives they lead and in my opinion, the only kind of web page allowed to lie.
My only advice is to double check everything you research. Even websites that want to be truthful can get bad information from other websites and just because they say they are an expert doesn't mean that they are.
hehe happy surfing.

snakes and a brief look at dr brady barr

ok, i didnt really see a snake. i have seen one and i've even held one once but my entry is about this dream i had last night. my family had just moved in a new apartment. it was beautiful, a condominium type apartment where our place was at the end of the building's hallway where our own hallway led to the left and right sides of the building. The place was fully furnished with light furniture, not my style but i liked it.
for some strange reason, my father bought two snakes as pets. yup, the big poisonous ones. I think one of them was silver and colorful and the other was a black snake. in my dream they were a cobra and a rattlesnake though they clearly weren't. we were tying them up because they were dangerous and we were also making sure their mouths were shut. the black snake was completely tied but we were just starting on the silver one. we even had help from the people who caught the snakes.
we then left and my dad left to pick up my uncle and we left the snakes behind. when my mom, sister and i got back home, the silver snake had gotten loose and was in the process of eating the other black snake. i took my mom and sister out of there and locked the door.
it was a good thing my dad was already on is way back.
i checked the snake again inside the house and it became huge like a giant cobra from the movies. a big green giant cobra.
i then decided i hated snakes and left before it ate me.
my dad finally got home with my uncle, who i met outside. i asked him what we should do. my dad suggested we catch it and i said it was too big to be caught, i asked hime if i could kill it but i didnt have a gun and for something that big, i needed major firepower. my dad argued that we should spare its life and put it back in the wildlife. that is usually my stand though he hadnt seen how big the snake had become at this point.
ok this is the funny part, there was a small national geographic office right beside our home. so we contacted dr brady barr. who got there in 5 minutes. yup coolness.
of course i shook his hand :) im never shy around celebrities (including writers, scientists and sports personalities) and i love meeting people like that. i went back in and the snake had become an isis. half woman, half snake with 4 small feet. yes i know isis dont have feet its my dream. she was walking in our hallway before turning into a guy i think i know.
then i woke up.

i googled snakes and drams and got this where the author wrote:

In writing about Snake Symbolism, Gillian Holloway, Ph.D. wrote, "People who are dying or who have lost a loved one often dream of snakes, at or near the time of death. For whatever reason, these dreams seem involved with the psychic awareness of the transition from this life to the next...."
Carl Jung talks about a similar connection between earth and heaven in his discussion on the snake as a symbol for medicine. In Man and His Symbols, he writes, "perhaps the commonest dream symbol of transcendence is the snake, as represented by the therapeutic symbol of the Roman god of medicine Aeseulapius, which has survived to modern times as a sign of the medical profession. This was originally a nonpoisonous tree snake; as we see it, coiled around the staff of the healing god, it seems to embody a kind of mediation between earth and heaven."

which is nice...

the snakes were in the beginning the victims. we tied them up, drugged them. even when they escaped, well the silver one did anyway, it wasnt threatening us. it was just claiming our home. it didnt want to go out either even when the door was opened and it didnt kill anyone who was stupid enough to go in our house.

other web sites say that the snake can mean treachery, or something phallic. as if everything else isnt interpreted as a phallic symbol anyway. it is a fear that needs to be faced.

oh well. i like the first one. it is related to me because it is true. though something else is hidden in the dream. i just have to figure it out.