The “we’ll battle the world” philosophy.

Someone literally snatched me from the road and invited me on some unplanned boozefest: it was so unplanned that they had to drag me out of the road and convince me to share the night with them. “Okay, I said, I have an 8 am class tomorrow so I think I’d be going home early.” But that’s just crap – I can’t just leave them so sudden.

The four of us went inside some poorly-ventilated bar with all the cigarette smokes circulating around the bar from all the blackened lungs underneath those boobs and muscles. In that bar, you inhale and exhale smoke. It’s the bar here in Los Banos which has the worst case of pollution. So we went inside the bar and chose the corner farthest from all the billiards and the smoking, some lame attempt to stay away from intoxicating smoke levels of Gudang, Black Bat, Marlboro and every brand known to man.

If you’re from UPLB, you should know that I’m talking about the only resto-bar with pool tables. Also, they don’t sell Red Horse just for the hell of it. So I have to drink something awful, something I absolutely hate: San Miguel Strong Ice. I have no other options but to at least order a bottle of beer since they don’t serve brandy on shot glasses. So this bar is practically the perfect bar to hate (except for the good sound system and good choice of music). In that particular resto-bar you can shake hands with a bunch of phonies and nymphomaniacs and all the worst cases here. I hate that place.

I lost count of the weeks I’ve spent without alcohol in my system. “Hi, I’m Kevin, and I drink once in a while. I drink whenever people would just drag me out of the road and put me on a bar with phonies and rose petals and candles on their tables and round pillows like large Mentos candies to play with.“

“Hello, I’m Celes (her name’s pretty celestial so let’s call her Celes) and I work at some big-time computer shop here in LB.” She was almost beautiful except for her inexplicable vulgarity, not the uneducated type of vulgarity, but something mysteriously distracting. So she works at some big-time shop in LB and she’s been working there for four years, if my memory serves me right, ever since she eloped with some grassy-assed guy she met during her cousin’s wedding. Great.

Honestly, her story’s pretty interesting. I’ve never met anyone who had the same case with hers – I mean, of course I hear rumors and hearsays about some long-haired figures and silhouettes I don’t really know, but this one’s up-close and personal.

Why she did that, I have no idea. Her cousin got married here in Laguna, probably four or five provinces away from their native province, and there she met the guy and became head over heels for him. It sounded irrational and incomplete but I’m not really delving for more information about the story: the mere concept of eloping (and its being against the will of her parents) thrills me bizarrely.

I haven’t thought of her being a lowly angel of some sort. I respect her decisions, and maybe I just can’t understand the entire of it since – well, I haven’t experienced anything close to it. No matter how much I welcome certain situations like unwanted pregnancies or other love-related stories, this one knocked me out. “For a year,” she said, “I never attempted to beg for any help from my parents; I sort of assumed that this would be a consequence of my wrongdoings, though I can’t seem to understand why it felt so right in the first place.“

Oh, goodness. Love sometimes is too powerful to even correct what’s wrong and make delusional things rational and right.

“Pretty soon I gave up and begged for help from my parents but they were stern enough not to send me some dough for the rents, though they were kind enough to send me food and all. I wasn’t mad at them: I absolutely understand why they were doing this. They wanted me to come home and manage our fisheries and farms and my younger siblings. That’s what I hated in the first place: there’s just too much responsibility whenever I live there.“

Wicked, I told myself. My beer bottle clinked with my ice-filled glass while pouring some beer on it. All the while I kept on rubbing my eyes and closing it for some time since the smoke irritates my eyes. I suddenly wanted to go out and breathe fresh air and keep it on my chest for some time but it would look rude.

So here’s a twenty-three year-old lady who, at some point, wasted her life with some guy she met on her cousin’s wedding. Though, again, I respect her a lot – and I think that she didn’t really wasted her time entirely: I can sense there’s a part of the decision that fulfilled her since it felt right for her. I think she wanted freedom and she found it on that guy – but honestly speaking, I can’t seem to decipher what kind of freedom was she getting from that guy: pseudo-marital freedom perhaps? Or freedom from the chains of parental guidance?

That’s just really depressing. To think that a lot of people go crazy over love to the point that they leave everything, even their lives, just to take hold of it, without even realizing that it was such a dumb and stupid thing to do. Of course they were blinded by it, and it was horrifyingly depressing.

Why? What’s happening? Are there such people who’s thirst for freedom exceeds everything else that it bursts out of their bodies and controls their mind until everything’s crazy and pregnant and messy? I think I need to be enlightened.

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P.S: I haven’t mentioned the personalities behind the story. Well, there were four of us: two girls and two boys. The other girl than Celes was a close friend, a former housemate (yes, I once lived with two girls on my dorm and it was awesomely weird and fun at the same time). The other guy than me was a common friend. I virtually have no idea about her before that event, and somehow I’m glad that we’ve kind of met. She exposed me on the alarming reality I’ve been hideously aware of for a long time.

My terribly messy obsessive-compulsive list.

OCDs (read: obsessive-compulsive disorder). I have lots of them. It’s pretty normal, really. Except with Stranger than Fiction where Will Ferrell (or maybe it’s the narrator, if you guys have watched that movie) make a specific number of strokes to brush his teeth. I know it sounds crazy, but for the love of the world, let’s just talk about our OCDs.

• The television’s volume should be on a multiple of five. I’m pretty much irritated when the volume goes 24 or 26: it has to be 25 or 30. I have no idea why.
• I would always, always skin my lips whenever it’s dry. That’s downright gross but I really skin my lips when it’s toasted – but of course I wouldn’t force my lips to bleed. I just have this OCD about chapped lips. Even when I’m thinking, I even touch my lips. Sometimes I even bite my lips, though not that harsh since it would hurt. Really, there’s something wrong with my lips (not that it isn’t kissable, mind you) and my OCDs about it.
• This isn’t really an OCD, but I hate myself whenever some word escapes on my mind – to the point that it’s at the tip of my tongue, yet I can’t even manage to snatch that very word. I really hate myself after that. I really hate that feeling – I feel so stupid and so clumsy after that.
• Misspelled words. I go crazy with misspelled words. Now I terribly want to have an eye for grammatical errors – it would really be a huge, HUGE help for me.
• Before I would write on a single leaf of those notebooks I use for school, I would first fold it into two. Vertically. After having two columns (and this should be equally and proportionally divided into two, else I would do the folding again), I would write down on the left column first. I use red ink (and it has to be a G-Tech .3 – not .4 or .5) for important words and concepts and black for meanings and stuff. Cursive for quotes. Illustrations, graphs in black. Cool.
• I would always press my toothpaste on its butt whenever I would be using it. Especially when it’s that striped type of toothpaste.
• I hate the sight of misaligned lines. Whenever I draw margins or squares, they should at least be straight to near perfection. That’s why once I thought of being an architect, but I hate math.

So far, those are the OCDs I know about myself. You should have at least a single case of OCD, and if you’d be so kind to put it on the comments section – then do it. I’d love to learn that my having these OCDs doesn’t make me one huge dumbass with terribly gross – not to mention irrational – OCDs.

_{By the way, I used to have an OCD with my nails. I manually (and forcefully) trim them by my own set of nails and fingers. Good thing I ditched it after I suddenly appreciated the one-of-a-kind invention of the nail cutter.}

By the way, suggest me a good Flickr plug-in for this blog. I wanna put some color on my sidebar.

Three cheers for sweet revenge.

I don’t know why but the sight of abandoned ATMs with the blinking green light and the “insert ATM card here” sign right after the mouth of it made me lonely and blue for a while. I’ve seen two ATMs last Saturday night on my way home, and all two of them were abandoned. The green light blinks continuously like a buoy in the middle of some spacious sea at night, and it looked hopeless that way. And then there’s the bank lights – the fluorescent lights carved somewhere, and that’s it. No cars parked nearby, no one’s using that damn machine. I don’t know why but ATMs look horrible and depressing when they’re left alone in the middle of the night. The sight could have been better with a security guard standing right besides that ATM – surprisingly, when I’m imagining it, I don’t feel lonely for the security guard.

_{“Bakat brief mo!”, some fan shouted. Damn them. I’m with Ramon Bautista so STFU!}

Last Thursday night, I was invited to be one of the guest speakers at the UPLB Communication Arts Society’s symposium entitled IPod, IFilm, IBlog, which talks about the media and its reinvention through the years. I was lucky enough to be with THE Ramon Bautista, my co-guest speaker, and have a panel discussion about the said topic (and sit with him on the stage and be friends with him). His appearance simply starstrucked the avid fan in me: I was a reckless fan of his David Blaine-like video clips (search for “Dan Michael” on Youtube and you can see him) featuring him bleeding after walking on broken shards of glass, and of course his stupidity in MTV’s “The Ramon Bautista Show” where he jams with rock bands and teaches his audience the A chord and his “that’s a lot of fun” motto. He was surprisingly affable; very much approachable for (in my opinion) a much-celebrated UP Film Institute professor and a kickass comedian. I really adore him for all of those things I’ve listed, and now I have to move on.

_{I’m the guy wearing violet. The rest are members of the UPLB Communication Arts Society, and I must say their girls are definitely one of the hottest on campus. No kidding.}

The speech I delivered includes my side of story – that I discovered blogging in July 2005 at Friendster and December 2005 at Blogger, that there are food blogs and video blogs and all of those stuff. I made my speech a bit informal – though I haven’t heard someone laughing so loud with my jokes (I suck at delivering jokes in English). It was an awful fifteen to thirty-minute speech and good thing I survived.

_{I HAZ A FANZ CLUB! YAYZ!}

The entire Saturday I was in Pulilan, Bulacan since my beloved organization launched an UPCAT Review at St. Dominic’s Academy – if I’m not mistaken – and it was fun! I had fun teaching the Language part of our mock test: mentioning past perfect tenses and subject-verb agreements. During that day, I suddenly missed that feeling of taking the UPCAT, of being nervous and numb about everything around myself – thinking that it’s the only life-changing examination in my life and I have to seize it. But anyway, UPCAT was moderately easy for me (compared to ACET, dammit). I skipped a lot of numbers on the Math part and I was really sweating when I sort-of analyzed the way I answered all those questions: it’s as if I’m a hundred percent sure that I’ll flunk the test.

_{I’m the big guy wearing gray.}

After the exhausting UPCAT review, my orgmates and I went to Cafe Narciso, ten blocks away from the abovementioned school, and there we had dinner and beer (I only drank a single bottle of Red Horse since I have no plans of going home tipsy). We also watched a reggae band and a rock band.

_{One thing: GAWDDAWESUM!}

The reggae band was definitely awesome and professional with what they’re doing – they got Bob Marley and Santana songs (you wouldn’t believe on how they did the guitars – it’s almost impossible) and the vocals! Pure awesome! I was there sitting in front of them and they were just really, really awesome.

What killed my day was the rock band. Okay, I admit I’m an advocate of rock music, but this band definitely stank. Their vocals could kill your day with her Yeng Constantino songs and her “pop-ish” rendition of Colbie Caillat’s Realize. Their guitars and their drums are both great but their vocals just killed my day. I literally turned my back on them – I know it was really rude of me but I just can’t help hearing the vocals and her tap dancing as if she’s sexy. Hers is more like a beerhouse kind of vocals with all the artsy-fartsy vibrations her throat does to kill every song they play.

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I literally forgot what I did yesterday. I’m positive I haven’t done anything remarkable on that day.

Now I have to go pack for LB.