"You didn't have to!" I'd always tell Rainy. "No, really, you don't."
She's giving me a book. $#*! My Dad Says. It wasn't the book she was supposed to give, though. For a month, so the story goes, she waited for an online delivery of a David Rakoff book - his second compilation of essays, Don't Get Too Comfortable - but when it arrived it took her a while to get her hands on the book, what with people not bringing it to where she is, or her forgetting about it, I don't know.
One day, her pet dog decided to enter her room and rummage through her things. Apparently, he got one of her books; he brought it to his cage and lied down on it and. eventually, peed on it. As it turns out, it's the book she was supposed to give to me.
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7/31/2013
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7/22/2013
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The media has this fascination with the more useless statistics whenever the State of the Nation Address is delivered. How long was it? (This year's, Noynoy Aquino's fourth, clocked in at an hour and 43 minutes.) How many instances of applause were there? (88.) How many of those were standing ovations? (I can't see a number.) How many times did the president cough? (8. Not bad for a chain smoker.) How many times did he buckle? (35.) Really, it's just trivia, packaged to vaguely describe how the president delivered his report to the nation, and how well he was accepted.
The more important statistics were, of course, in the speech itself. Since there's an insistence in recent years to use the SONA to trot out what this government has supposedly done - this tradition, which we borrowed from the Americans, was built to enable the executive branch to recommend the legislative agenda for the year ahead - we've heard number after number after big number, amounts and percentages put out of context, all arranged and assembled to paint a picture that things are going well, that tasks are being accomplished, and that everything is still under control.
Today, Noynoy's SONA was the usual mix of disembodied figures, civilian name-drops, blown whistles and, perhaps disappointingly, a very vague policy road map. But he really didn't aim to tell us all how far we've come. In his fourth address to Congress, Aquino decided to celebrate. Aided by all those context-free statistics, in his punctuation-free, emotion-free delivery, Aquino proclaimed that we are finally on the right track. Three years after he was elected president, we are on the right track, and all we need is to continue working together so that the future generations may live without any inherited problems.
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The more important statistics were, of course, in the speech itself. Since there's an insistence in recent years to use the SONA to trot out what this government has supposedly done - this tradition, which we borrowed from the Americans, was built to enable the executive branch to recommend the legislative agenda for the year ahead - we've heard number after number after big number, amounts and percentages put out of context, all arranged and assembled to paint a picture that things are going well, that tasks are being accomplished, and that everything is still under control.
Today, Noynoy's SONA was the usual mix of disembodied figures, civilian name-drops, blown whistles and, perhaps disappointingly, a very vague policy road map. But he really didn't aim to tell us all how far we've come. In his fourth address to Congress, Aquino decided to celebrate. Aided by all those context-free statistics, in his punctuation-free, emotion-free delivery, Aquino proclaimed that we are finally on the right track. Three years after he was elected president, we are on the right track, and all we need is to continue working together so that the future generations may live without any inherited problems.
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7/21/2013
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Good morning! Another beautiful day is upon us. I am so lucky to be alive! I feel so blessed to be alive!
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7/17/2013
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The first things I wrote about Cory Monteith when news of his death broke out over the weekend revolved not around his role on Glee - the way he brought a naïve charm to what should be a one-dimensional character - but around his struggles with drugs.
It's the first thing you think of, inevitably. When someone is found dead in a hotel room, it's the first thing you think of. "Is it an overdose?" It seems that's the only way celebrities could die if they're found alone and lifeless in a hotel room. It doesn't help that Cory's been pretty open about his struggles with drugs. When I still wrote about Glee, when I still watched it for a living - when the show was genuinely fresh, and thus, good - I read everything I could, to the point of buying the magazines where the cast were on the cover.
Okay, I only bought two. And I only bought them because Dianna Agron looks so freaking beautiful. But in the stories in there - the crappy one on Rolling Stone, and the better one on GQ - you had Cory talk about his difficult teenage years. He had trouble fitting in, he told the latter, and thus ended up doing things you wouldn't exactly be proud of.
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It's the first thing you think of, inevitably. When someone is found dead in a hotel room, it's the first thing you think of. "Is it an overdose?" It seems that's the only way celebrities could die if they're found alone and lifeless in a hotel room. It doesn't help that Cory's been pretty open about his struggles with drugs. When I still wrote about Glee, when I still watched it for a living - when the show was genuinely fresh, and thus, good - I read everything I could, to the point of buying the magazines where the cast were on the cover.
Okay, I only bought two. And I only bought them because Dianna Agron looks so freaking beautiful. But in the stories in there - the crappy one on Rolling Stone, and the better one on GQ - you had Cory talk about his difficult teenage years. He had trouble fitting in, he told the latter, and thus ended up doing things you wouldn't exactly be proud of.
Read more »
7/11/2013
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Rainy was the first to tell me of the huge fire that engulfed shanties behind Makati Medical Center. She lives nearby - she wasn't there at the time, though, and she isn't affected - and she was asking me if it was true. Only then did I start seeing reports of that fire - an explosion, then the flames, rolling outward and upward, ultimately affecting a thousand families, a fire that authorities struggled to kill, but thankfully was put down before it could get much worse.
"Ang laki ng apoy," I told my colleagues as I looked out of our office window in Ortigas. From there we could see a huge plume of smoke.
I was doing nothing that morning - I was just waiting to head out for some errands and a meeting at SMX - so I just monitored the events, did some typing, and monitored the events some more. Slowly the people on my timeline got angry, as somehow, in between all those citizen-submitted photos of the fire from different angles (it helps that it happened in Makati, home of tall glass buildings with similarly bored office people) there was this photo of a woman taking what everybody calls a selfie, with the fire in the background.
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"Ang laki ng apoy," I told my colleagues as I looked out of our office window in Ortigas. From there we could see a huge plume of smoke.
I was doing nothing that morning - I was just waiting to head out for some errands and a meeting at SMX - so I just monitored the events, did some typing, and monitored the events some more. Slowly the people on my timeline got angry, as somehow, in between all those citizen-submitted photos of the fire from different angles (it helps that it happened in Makati, home of tall glass buildings with similarly bored office people) there was this photo of a woman taking what everybody calls a selfie, with the fire in the background.
Read more »
7/09/2013
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Lee Min Ho, nasa Pilipinas para sa isang concert!
Lee Min Ho, nakakain ka na ba ng balut?
Lee Min Ho, anong masasabi mo sa mga Pinoy fans mo?
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Lee Min Ho, nakakain ka na ba ng balut?
Lee Min Ho, anong masasabi mo sa mga Pinoy fans mo?
Read more »
7/06/2013
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I haven't seen Despicable Me. That alone should explain why I scoff a bit when seemingly everybody talks about these yellow, pudgy, dorky, slightly dim-witted, possible genetically-modified creatures - hey, this is, uhh, Steve Carell's character we're talking about - they all call Minions.
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Niko Batallones writes The Upper Blog.
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