we're months way past that holy week revelry that marked moalboal with a special dot in my penchant for beaches, and i'm still swimming in thoughts of those 4 days. these pictures help -- a lot. i've shared with you in batches: one (from anya's camera), two (from kuyang's camera), and this last, three, from my own. which is to say, these are my illustrations of how i wanted to remember those kodak moments, taken at the very same instance as those kodak moments. cheeze be with you as well.    


us ladies awake at 5 am for the long road to moalboal. me, alyssa, iana, maica and cailyn.


(left) 1/10 of all that's tio perok, the ever never late on coolness; (right) his brood, annoyed by having to wake up at 5 but still go-go-go: manding kyra, baby ben, and the bugoys andre (hidden) and pedro
 

shades up!


go-getters for the beach: cai, the ever cool tita rina, maica, alyssa, iana, vincent, me, joben with baby ben, jiggy, kenny and tingtong


the momentary star, sarah, the pomeranian at the unchuan farm in barili where we all had breakfast


 ostriches at the unchuan farm; the barkading josh, andre, rica and lyle running to their legally childish fervor


moooed..


wherelse do you get to run away from an ostrich? here, ting carrying yassy, illustrates.


a wide-smiled josh when i said "picture," but a second after, putting on that frown of  his for kyra and maica who stole his hammock seat from him


the gang with the family heroine, mamita (seated far right); post-breakfast at barili and pre-rest of the drive to moalboal



the first thing we all did once we arrived at our moalboal residence was head to the beach front, giddy and excited as it surpassed our expectations 

the house itself in just seconds took our worries of discomfort in a strange house away. (above pics) enjoying the balcony at the second floor


tio perok's brood (including this peeing pedro) was the first to put on their trunks


and tio lito's (headed by this 5-year-old energizer josh) was the first to get their hands on the sand


yassy and her famous smile that cuts her eyes in a single line (no place like it in manila)


one of my favorite shots taken; this one of my sisters' with their hats.
i agree beach is the only place where to wear black is a poor choice of color (like what my mother always tells me)


groovy andre and sexy manding kyra of tio perok's bunch are little me's of their parents


the hyper foursome: lyle (with the goggles and a few hours later, the dehydration, the fever, the pool of vomit and the hours of sleep), josh, rica (the yellow in the sand's beige) and andre


my favorite shot this summer.

this is what we want to see mamita doing in these vacations -- seated, cool, playing, away from her self-imposed duties, enjoying what might be an alien territory to her, called rest.


shameless little zzzZzzzZzing everywhere...


home is where this gang takes it.


sundown by the marine life-rich shores; (starting above to the right) kate, iana, kenny, cai, me, alyssa, maica


so havaianaed.

forever young lovers by mind, will, feelings, claims/husband & wife/dada and mama/darls/tio perokee & tita rina


this is our happy our


the younger generation; of andre, of chloe, of josh, of enrique, of lyle, of yassy


ting and his princess...


did you follow?

ben and what he is most likely up to when he's not in tears full blast full time at night


beach!

view from the top


forever young lovers by mind, will, feelings, claims/husband & wife/dada and mama/darls/tio perokee & tita rina...
... at their illegal fervor towards childhood

the always first in line when it comes to the beach


bonding time for goggled bieni and poppy...

and the wateree bugoy and the watered tio perokee


next to us
(we elder ones agree theirs is going to be a more fun batch)


who's got D'body among them all?


mita-UNapproved before 3 pm hours


us ladies
(from the back) me, maica, iana, alyssa, mel (crouched) cai, anya


 ... with yassy girl.


loving moalboal is loving is also for what its sundown is like


gotcha!


blow fire burn


little girls blow

sunkissed, sunburned, fat-invaded, brown crayoned, gutfilled




the campfire is an expected part of our Holy Week [anywhere], regardless of the presence or absence of hotdogs, mallows and barbecue sticks. this year, josh danced. joevince breakdanced. josh asked -- no, insisted -- everybody to dance along. pedro the bugoy sang "the sun family". and well, it's the annual "talent" show, thank you.


our moalboal night out


gesture!


the view from the small window in the slanted ceiling of our room. not so terrific, but i'm glad i got this in my window.


joevince's brazilian girlfriend tabatha didn't make it so instead, he lunged around the [already] beat up olive oyle stuffed toy that he said reminded him of her


she just ate a half-ripe mango


is that a wahhhhhhhhh look or whoo hohoho!?
baby ben with joben


at the kawasan


the ones who didn't make it to the 300 set
(well joben didn't try at all)


nestle floats


hatted me with hatted chloe, sunburned rica and junked yassy


divers, toddler class


tita didang and her santicle and his beep beep


dog paddling

forever young lovers by mind, will, feelings, claims/husband & wife/dada and mama/darls/tio perokee & tita rina...
... at a legal adult-ic moment


the coming (on the side you can see a huddle walking to the shore; the huddle is us on way back from our diving, toddler class)


maica who thanks to her badtiming monthly visitor never got to go all-bikini


cheeze-caliber moments for sister chloe and yassy and rica and kate

now 1/2 of our family story is explained


beach is the one word you can never get enough of
(not even in this beached blog)


the prim and proper santi and yassy. a day after easter, they celebrated their birthdays together at jollibee, bee happy.


lesson name: ice cream
goal: beat the heat


last sunday


missing


mamita only waded the waters on our last afternoon there, on sunday, after arranging our last dinner in moalboal, after partially cleaning up for the homebound, after all. she is never the first one to walk away (in fact, she never walks away) if there are things still waiting to get done.  
no sunkisses, sunburns for her.
only hugs, kisses, thank you mitas, and the love.



the sunset understands

last shots of a parting bliss

mikachoo


anyanging.photography.mode


he's not 4. he's 7?


sunkissed. sunburned. sunloved.
ting & bieni.

dinner at club serena's beach front by club serena. their prayer must go: thankfully, we are the power-est among the resorts here, we can go slopppppppppy service. what resort actually carries around "we're tired" to their guests? them.

but to the dinner now...


madame.


bienni and kyra. mommys' girls.


sunkissed. sunburned. sunloved.


yassy and mita.


the oldies.



the youngies.

the next morning started with a goodbye moalboal sunrise. it was confusing; sunrise never meant to mean goodbye [at all] but at the end of the morning, we were already in ayala center cebu having lunch. then we get it.




the oldest and youngest in the family.


incomplete yet looking complete. the rest went home ahead.



dropping by for unlimited fresh ice cream at the unchuan farm's milk station before going all the way back to cebu.

ostriched. mooooed. sunkissed. sunburned. sundrenched. sunloved. sunrised. sundowned. suntanned. sunned.
family kissed.
milked.

all good things that end with e-d got to end with e-n-d.
this is where the start of the summer chronicles ended.

finding my way back here again is as good as one big inhalation of fresh air after being trapped in a penguin display room at the jurong bird park with our friendly neighbors up south asia. did that come off like an offense? oppps. 

over the past 2 weeks, i wasn't able to log in my home here at blogdrive. deprivation never felt so soffucatingly mean. but here i am behind my least wanted desk and i'm driving again! well, well, well, i don't know what's happening with the logging-in from my PC's end, but all is well here at the office.

after my week-long leave, i'm back. while we were away, God heard my prayers and made the travel seem long, but now, while revisiting the small but worthwhile memory clips of singapore and malaysia (and jotting them down on paper before i forget), amidst all the emails i have to get back to, i have fallen once again on a nostalgic fit. pretty much like how depression beats me after an ormoc visit. is it being in a different country that i miss? or my family.

but i guess that's how all leaves go. they always seem short, especially when you're reminiscing. maybe i did not need that week-long leave as much as i do a rest of my life-long leave. have to get serious on my applications.

this particular drama aside, i want to make this official: i'm staying here at blogdrive. it's still augustchild.blogdrive.com baby! but just in case they trap me OUT of here again, let this be a pre-notice that i'll be surfing my mistress hands over at blogspot: surfingmistress.blogspot.com

it was all about the breakfast. my sister iana (and maica, and brother ting, and poppy, mother and bienni) and i woke up not as excitingly towards the agenda of the day as to the plates and plates of food on the breakfast buffet table. all the hotels we went home to in our one long week's travel engaged us in a serious affair with breakfast food. i survived 3 days of hand blogging (straight to the notebook), and from my first post on may 29 at the dining room in queen street's oxford hotel, i quote:

the fried rice tastes as they do in the philippines. i finished two servings. they serve the siopao in bite sizes -- kinda like the small siopaos in chowking with siomai inside. they also have a yellow sweet bread with a filling that is not too sweet. just right. i finished two. (nearing the end of this meal, i asked the breakfast lady what it was, but her broken english that i couldn't grasp kept it nameless)

they had hard boiled eggs with brown shell. i didn't finish one tho. their sausages were dipped in boiled water on which iana/ting commented that it's the sausage with no fats. so i finished 5.

they had a toaster for the bread. you just had to place it on grill-like plates that moved between glass sticks of red heat and dropped the toasted bread in a ceramic plate after its turn.

they had two kinds of cereal -- as in cornflakes as we know it and some square bits that ting called dog food but actually tasted better than the cornflakes. their milk without sugar was already good but this is not to say it was fresh. but still... good.

their orange juice still had residues. arguably straight from the real thing... could be.

first time i didn't have to pry into watermelons just so i'd eat them with no seeds.

all in all, bon appetite. yum!

oxford being the most budgeted hotel we booked in to, its breakfast buffet turned out to be a chicken in a sea of meat. we all agreed it was the breakfast buffet in kuala lumpur's corus hotel that we were spoiled the most. the fruits, noodles, vegetarian, cereals, appetizers, main courses were arranged in separate tables. in the noodles table, you get to compose your own bowl, but the taste only differed by the spoonful of spicy sauce you add on it.

not only for the breakfast, the corus hotel was hands down our favorite hotel. to the right after walking 20-25 steps from the front door, you have a very good view of the Petronas towers. add around 100 steps to that (a less than 5 min walk), and you reach the Suria-KLCC shopping center, which i only enjoyed for its Vincci and Kinokuniya stores. jimmy choo and banana republic branches were about to open; burberry, louie vuitton, fcuk, and a LOT others were already there, but to our uninterest since one item (in burberry for example) price around the whole of our US$ baon from papa.

all the lady friends we know who've been to malaysia know Vincci. if any lady misses this, it's going to be a big bad one. shoes as pretty and good as those you find in ayala's CMG, or Rustan's, or any of the linea outlets, or charles and keith (which i heard is a malaysian brand) are being sold at prices that range from 400-600. VNC sounds familiar? it's a sister company. my sister maica brought home 12 pairs. me, 7. this is a feat considering i don't fancy shoes. this is a surprise considering i only bought 3 books. that's a sad number considering kinokuniya is a treasure trove of books as big as our own national bookstore. important authors were arranged alphabetically (bought one nick hornby as recommended by my colleague setty, "about a boy"); asian writers were arranged in another shelf (bought one elizabeth king, "ten thousand sorrows"); other books were arranged as they arrived (i bought a latest release from a lydia teh, "honk! if you're malaysian" -- a far cry from bob ong or other storytellers of the filipino idiosyncracies).

i'm still dreaming of kinokuniya. much like how i'm still dreaming about the rest of kuala lumpur. though singapore revealed to me that need for some rushing in my 21 years (really, i've been thinking much of working there), it was kuala lumpur that enriched my senses with humble modernity (as modern as the buildings in KL were, all still considered much the islamic roots of the country), sophisticated magnificence, and rich cultural touches. if you want a visual feast in almost every turn, head to KL.

case in point: petronas towers. the brochure reads..

the design of each tower's floor plan is based on simple islamic geometric forms of two interlocking square creating a shape of eight-pointed stars. architecturally, these forms reflect important islamic principles of "unity within unity, harmony, stability and rationality."

other worthy mentions are the buildings of the national library and the national theater. the national theater reminded me of sydney's opera house. it was so grand in the evening i told my siblings that what really perfected the viewing of sydney's opera house was the harbour that dwelled just beside it; while KL's national theater stood on its own. iana is starting to worry i'm trading in my aussie dreams for these south east asian marvels.

to make it clear, it never occured to me to live in malaysia. i fell in love with kuala lumpur and with putrajaya but i didn't even once fall in thought of turning from a visitor to a dweller.

putrajaya is a developing city some 45 minutes from KL where they plan to put ALL government buildings. the concept is pretty much like washingtong d.c.'s, but to compare this US state to this Malaysian city in terms of beauty would be comparing japan's cherry blossoms to the philippines' coconut or balete trees (what a mean thing to say... ugh!). anybody would fall in love with putrajaya at first sight. everything that is within its space is clean, flawless, and reflecting of the islamic roots of the country -- again (the department of justice, the convention center, the office of the prime minister). this perhaps is the big draw. i am a Christian. too much of what i didn't grow up with somehow gave me a feeling of being choked. i am not hinting i couldn't live with a muslim, a buddhist, a hindu or what religion have this world; i am just hinting malaysia is too small a place with too strong an islamic touch.

i guess some things i couldn't just force myself into easily or even daydream on.

this sentence ends this post, but i'm not closing my post kuala lumpur/genting without jotting down some mental notes (at least those that my memory could reach). 'til the next blog.

*** selamat datang is the one most ubiquitous word in malaysian geography, sprawled in big or small and black or colored fonts in billboards, in signposts, in stores, in posters. and if only we always remember what it means, you find no reason to feel drowned by it. "welcome," that's all.

there is something so stubborn about multiply.com that cannot draw me to its clutches, unlike how successfully it had towards millions of friendster-crazy internet freaks out in the www. well, i might just be eating this post in a few months, days, minutes, but so far, i'm just happy to be able to post. displaying my pictures have almost become irrelevant to my itchiness to thrive in what i think i love to do: write. i tried wordpress, but it's almost as stubborn. so while i whine thru figuring out my inability to log in my blogdrive (www.augustchild.blogdrive.com), i'll just have you, home to million others. but this one is mine; i guess that's so far your most distinct character -- being mine.

surfing mistress, may.27.2007 (first post in wordpress that never saw light)

you are such. while i am locked out of my home at blogdrive (visit if this sounds interesting: www.augustchild.blogdrive.com), i am allowing such to surf its way to my time and writing urges. lucky you, i am itching to post it!

this sunday is different. i do not have work tomorrow to scare off my weekend spirit before we hit midnight. in fact, i do not have work the whole week. my family and i will be off to a paradise. no, not to maldives or to the caribbean; but a paradise in terms of that it's anywhere but here. and in this crazed. lost. confused.undecided moment of my 21 year old existence, anywhere but here is paradise.

the last time i was in singapore, i was sporting the no-top top look. kinda like what you regularly run across when you're in the shores of boracay. but before you start connecting a desperate past to my pre-21st year, my no-top top look in that trip actually made such crime a decent one, what with my milk bottle in the right hand and a lollipop on the other. i was only 4 you dummy. or 3. or 5.
so 17 years post that look, we're going back. it's bienni's turn to sport that. will tell you all about it (or you can check www.augustchild.blogdrive.com).

this anywhere but here jaunt will be a cross-country tripping. from singapore, we'll be riding a bus to malaysia. i think it's amazing that these countries are not separated by water. we have the chance to materialize that memorable scene from a walk to remember. one foot in one country; the other foot in the other country. and that soundtrack blasting through our ears. cooooool.
so that's about all i have and can say on the next few days.

yesterday, saturday, my sister iana, i went to bogo with mamita, tita dang and had lunch with lola carmen, tita ditas, the other fiesta-going folks. we woke up for this small town up north at 400 am. (and calculating that we ended our cousins' friday night out at 2 am, i only had 2 hours of zZzzZzzzss..). the 4 am call time was very eager since the invite was for lunch; but starting the day that early is as natural to mamita as city hopping from boronggan in samar, to tacloban in leyte, and to cebu city in cebu in just one day. (thus she is belovingly called lipak; in visayan, thunder).

any meal at lola carmen's is always an adventure. either you have purely italian food (which is weird among my cousins and i) or only a fork and a knife to eat with, or both.

during breakfast at bogo, my sister iana and i looked at the sweet mangoes and nudged each other with the question: how possible is it to eat mango with a fork and a knife only? so we avoided the mangoes. just the other night, we had too much utensils (i counted/miscounted 8) at marco polo's buffet table and there we were at breakfast, armed with only a fork and a knife for the kill. that was the joke for the moment.

we hang out with the oldies the whole time, but it didn't go like a frank sinatra song. i couldn't have thought of a more comforting way to spend a fiesta in a strange but all too familiar place. strange as we only visit it once in two years (and only if the chance comes up) and all too familiar as we hear so much about it when the origin of our martinez clan is discussed.

on friday, mamita brought us all to marco polo, my new dessert haven. to skip the main entree tables in this post and go straight to the dessert section would be a sin since no food served could have upset my stomach (well, uncounting vegetables, of course, to the rolling of your eyes), but this is getting too long to read (and i haven't got to carlyn,iana,alyssa's rendition of total eclipse of my heart yet).

the dessert section in marco polo's eat-all-you-can is a dessert haven. imagine going to la marea or to leona's or to eastwest and getting a slice of each kind of cheesecake and crepe for free. there you go. and since under normal circumstances, i wouldn't have afforded that, i got a taste of each dessert that didn't escape my visual fancy.

mamita is my favorite spoon. she feeds well; thus, no matter how bad the food really is, it is always sweet in our tastebuds because that's her thoughtfullness working. my cousins and i have been planning to go out on friday as our farewell to kuyang (who will be attending ateneo this school opening). when she heard this, she said she'll pay for dinner. she did, and big time.

after, we went to pod 5, where carlyn belted out total eclipse of my heart with iana and alyssa and literally disarranged the unfortunate room assigned to us in that desperate place where the act of belting out hidden emotions through songs is forgiveable, because it will only make it serve its purpose. but really, with these three girls' intensity, it should have been a crime. after pod 5, i was so sleepy that place called paseo (with the good intentions but useless outcomes) didn't deliver. i literally didn't know of its existence until that night. i am a shamefully uninformed 21 year old. antisocial. undecided. unpassionate.

am i watching too many iron chef americas on saturday evening? yes.

another indulgence are beginnings of novels. since almost a year ago, i have never finished a novel. my last page of garcia marquez's one hundred years of solitude is the one that storytells the train station that aureliano jose's son built to cater to his growing ice industry. of mark kurlansky's boogaloo on second avenue, is the one that storytells the afternoon shared by the seductive karoline (a german) and the seemingly nice, married nathan seltzer (a jew). of john irving's the hotel new hampshire, the one that storytells the win berry's decision to move out of their hotel in vienna. in between, i started po brinson's what should i do with my life? (which i bought the moment it caught my eye on a very lost. confused. undecided day), t.r. pearson's a short history of a small place (which i bought in cagayan de oro) and clare morrall's natural flights of the human mind (which i bought because it sounded interesting; it quotes, "the natural flights of the human mind are not from pleasure to pleasure but from hope to hope.").

well, the natural flights of my mind take me from one beginning to another. why it doesn't land on the fitting destination (the ending) baffles me. i am accomodating a promiscuous affair with these books. i am married to my mind. and these books are my mistresses.

hope your surfing is more hopeful.

i was in the company of malaysian royalty this afternoon. i did not attend to the princess, but i did to her friend who was doting louis vuitton. how sassy.

however, the princess herself disappointed me. there was no ball gown. no diamond-rich tiara. no glass slippers. no uniformed entourage. you look at her and you see another muslim lost, with malong draped over her head, over her chest, over her bottom, all over her. leo, our office manager said she's visiting incognito, thus the plain jane look (Still, isn't she not supposed to dress less better than GMA?). that aside, she is a princess, with an aggressive approach towards her orders (in the words of my colleague setty who attended to her, "very particular") and picked out a US$ 3000 glass top for her table. Now, that's royal.

on sunday, bieni (who was visiting with mader) and i watched shrek in the afternoon. i confidently approached seats O15 and O16 in Onstage Ayala. only when the rightful owners came i realized we got the right seats but in the wrong moviehouse, which made it all wrong! not only did I have to endure the "very tiny bit" (just emphasizing for anyone might exaggg) embarrassing moment of running from the top of the premier seating to the bottom, i had to drag my "super duper" excited and already comfortable little sister out of her swinging chair, pulled her across the distance between On Stage Ayala and Cinema 2, tucked her in another seat, and made her miss some 5 minutes of the movie. it was almost a perfectly bloody sunday, then i heard bieni laugh throughout the movie. what makes that bloody? after the movie and some roaming around, we dined in at la maison and had lamb ribs for dinner. their deceivingly named and deceivingly priced caramelized banana dessert (it had a nicer name) was formed out of crepe papers, slices of yellow banana (as in yellow banana) and nangka (as in jackfruit), chocolate syrup and one generous scoop of vanilla. i was utterly disappointed. thank God and this Sunday for drew barrymore and jamie fallon, the team in the perfect catch that premiered last night in star movies. i love this movie. in the 3 times i've seen this, i never missed hoping to be lyndsey and fall in love with a ben. it doesn't have to be red sox, it could be san miguel beer team, the UP soccer team, the patintero team in the corner of the village.. 

on sunday night, i was looking up at a confident crescent moon and looking beyond the subtleless of its shape, i thought about how much light a crescent moon could give. i thought about being in a borderless field, with the next town some miles away, and no light to depend on but from those you look up to. how scary yet beautiful. i do not want to get too poetic here since i'm not a savvy; but if only i could master how to capture such moment,  thought, nightdream with just plain words. it's that.

... on saturday, my cousin alyssa and i went to carbon. spending below P1000 for 7 items, i was in peso-saving heaven. long live the street peddlers!
... i read more than 2 film reviews dissing the perfect catch. i actually enjoyed it. though i agree drew wasn't so convincing as a corporate woman as she was as a hawaiian babe, but jimmy fallon is g-r-e-a-t. hmph.

... my college classmate/college buddy/friend johnna is getting married on the 26th. last year in may, in bohol, in a few days after our graduation ceremony, in lyng's wedding reception (another classmate, buddy, friend), we lady attendees pulled strips of fortune paper out of the cake. i forgot how mine went but johnna's was "you are going to be the next bride." we all laughed at that since johnna didn't have a boyfriend then. fast forward through an abs-cbn career to a year after, she found the guy she could imagine spending the rest of her life with and now has a baby and a wedding ring to her finger on the way. though i'm sure johnna could be/could have been a lot of somebodys in media (she's this very cute, perky, talkative, talented, smart and enegertic), i know that this is her dream come true. i remember once upon our college days when i asked her what she wanted to become (we all know this talk) and she said, "a housewife and a mother."  

that may sound so simple, but it's a dream all the same. considering the hard work that is required to get married these days (starting with finding a guy to marry), dreaming to be a housewife and a mother is just as difficult as dreaming to make it on TV. considering all the work that comes with it that does not merit you always, to be a housewife and a mother is as unselfish as to be a husband could be.

congratulations john, you were next in line and you stayed on the track. now, you are way past the dream talk. you are living yours already.

i want to cry when i'm on imeem. the protocol is that you log on to www.imeem.com, sign up, scout for your favorite songs (and videos!), and rock on. last night, i saw a miniature live performance (miniature because i didn't know how to maximize the screen) of broken social scene's anthems for a 17-year-old recorded from somewhere else's lovepallooza event. there were almost 15 of them on stage. i always wonder how they do their stuff at the recording booth where everything is possible; so watching a live BSS show (even on the internet) kinda slapped "we're real!!" to my face. i am in love with them now. 

broken social scene, my kind of scene. listen to their songs at imeem.com (a FEW suggestions: swimmers, looks just like the sun, pitter patter goes my heart, anthems for a 17-year-old girl, fire eye'd boy). there's a wide range over there, so don't worry, non baroque-pop lovers. if you're lucky, you can find april boy regino.

break.

after months of successfully avoiding it, i'm back on junkfood addiction. i finished a giant bag of lays sour cream and onion the other night. i've also been snacking on piattos roadhouse barbecue at work. (oh-uh). aside from that, the past few nights, i've been sleeping over at my cousin carlyn's place. her younger sister, alyssa, just finished her cooking/baking class so we've been spending a lot of hours emptying the plates and boxes of food she brought home with her. on wednesday, we went out at 11pm for siomai and a long drive through lahug, the barracks, and mango. there was jiggy at 18, alyssa at 14 and kenny at 13. i am the oldest at 21. so the main point is that i'm getting fat and i'm already old. is that a hopeless case?

no. i'm still bent on losing SO much for the boracay trip in july. hopefully, hopefully.

seriously now, what are the chances that in my 5 years of passing over the skywalk at robinson's, the two incidents in which i saw kids smelling from rugby-full plastics happened within a month? i had the second witnessing last night, but this time around not only boys but girls as well. either it's getting bad or it's getting bad or it has gotten bad or it has gotten worst.

all of the above.

my marketing team colleague and deskmate setty eats burger for breakfast, a full meal for lunch, 2 slices of mocha or chocolate cake or a full McNuggets meal for snacks, and another full meal for dinner. yet, she comes in the office everyday like she hadn't eaten for months.

i eat at 10 am for breakfast and lunch, have skyflakes for snacks, and ideally only yogurt for dinner. but my stomach looks like a bloated PMS-er the whole year round. i am so jealous.

there i was at my cousin's bathroom, staring at my round-ing face at the mirror. i wish it was michael jackson's "man in the mirror" that played in my mind so i'd look at my face with that perspective -- that i could save the world by starting with myself (a char! back to all who thought the same). but no, blasting from my cousin's stereo was jason bluntLY's "you are beautiful..." (or however that sappy sappy lyrics went). it was not a beautifullic moment at all. to add to my globe-al face, my nose is peeling like crazy and is harboring two colors that are fighting for space.

so today you're reading me like a bitter basher. but quite not the self-deprived one: last night, i was eating bits of chicharon, slices of the banana-pineapple cake my cousin baked during her cooking class, and pieces of this biscuit/delicacy from somewhere. no wonder then. 

the song "leader of the band" played a while ago (we're not on leo's favorite jazz mode today, but on malou's). it reminded me of two things: 1) lyza -- my too adventurous college buddy who made many disappearances during our college years, only to emerge one day and say she just conquered a mountain in negros or down in mindanao -- who introduced me to this song by revealing it was hers and her father's favorite karaoke song, and that they always sang it together over beer. 2) my father.

for the sake of our fathers, i wish we hadn't grown up, but as it is a natural way of things, i wish we hadn't grown up too fast. i look at my father now with a renewed appreciation for all the things he's done, he's sacrificed, he's worked hard for and for all these things, i know i could never turn him down.

i wish this rush would last a lifetime.

playing in the fields and among the tall trees at the del monte pineapple farm in bukidnon. this is one of my favorite places in mindanao. not that watching seemingly borderless fields of pineapples is fun. the atmosphere up there is just filled with warmth, and nature is not lost but is at home. it's one of the few places left in philippine turf that put any sign of metropolis out of place.


our convoy all the way from ormoc.


a lot of playing on our first day in cagayan; here we are at the playground in camp phillips.


chloe, bienni, and kyra (in her "i am my mother's daughter" pose)


yearning for our childhoods back
the picture-taker (me!), my sister and my cousin alyssa


waiting for dinner

driving past the fields of pineapple's gold
alyssa and i at the back seat of the van. the windows were open the whole ride back to cagayan from bukidnon and dashboard confessional was blasting through our earphones. that 30 minute drive was so much better than the P99 all-meat eat-all-you-can that followed. yummmmm...


it was a drink-free trip, really.
kuyang had a sundae, alyssa and i had mango crepe, chloe had sundae as well, maica had coffee and like always, spoonfuls of our desserts, and iana, as always, nothing.


no diet for chloe marie yet.

the next day, we travelled to iligan city. we had a full access to the Maria Cristina plant, meaning not only where the falls is, but also to the dams, to the makeshift lake, to the control room, and to the underground tunnel (as in 115 meters below the ground). close to the makeshift lake is the hill that made headlines before as it once housed an MILF base. a war between the military and the militants actually occured in the lake area, and consequently, a movie-i-fic experience for the locals, who instead of cowering behind the walls of their homes, snacked on peanuts while watching the action take place. these people apparently don't know violence by movies alone.

today i got a nail polished. involuntarily; but by virtue of my right to vote, i earned it. it's a deep, dark brand of blue, and the guy obviously didn't have experience in nail polishing that he made a new ugly out my index finger. i doubt acetone was made for this.

so basically i'm saying i voted for the second time in my 3-year old attempt to be a responsible citizen (i first voted during the presidential elections when i was 18 and -- kill me now friends -- i voted for Madame Glo). i was planning to rebel against my father's list, but i got sores all over my body from my 7 attempts at water-skiing, and i just wanted to finish the "job", so i copied from my father's list. if in years it would show the names there didn't deliver, i will live with the shame of having voted to the atmosphere of my mad sores.

but should i worry too much? bautista, paredes, sison (the kapatiran trio), joker arroyo, aquino, escudero, pangilinan, recto, villar, cayetano (lino's brother, of course), roco, and zubiri. i only realized after i got the nail polish that because of my mad sores i voted for those i didn't want to: aquino, pangilinan and recto because they're famous sister and wives-users and zubiri because i look at him and i just see wealth and uselessness. let's wait and see; they might have the last laugh.

speaking of last laughs, i bet much of the buzz viewers who thought the yilmaz-guttierez wedding years ago was just a hollywood scene wannabe are getting theirs. the couple have broken up. a lot of stories. no answer to the "have you been a physically battered wife?" question. tears, tears, tears.

oh, i think they hit the mark, they're living the oh too famous hollywood story. congratulations. let's move on now.

most likely, results from the elections will show tomorrow. and like how we look at all that are happening in our country, let's wait and see, and for conscientious filipinos, let's wait and see and make a move when we have to.

all it takes for evil to succeed is for good men to do nothing.

a responsible citizenship to you.