the primary thing that would make me regret not accepting the position is that working there means i'll get to see this man on a regular basis.

i just want to be REAL lawyer. the kind that goes to court. the kind that dresses up. the kind with a briefcase and meets with clients and actually gets to shout "i object!"

i love the court of appeals, don't get me wrong. it's just that i'm 30 and single. now, i think, is the perfect opportunity to immerse myself in a job that will eat up every single minute of my life. if i don't do this now, when will i take the hectic law firm life plunge?

now i'm in a fix. on an impulse, i applied for a law firm, went on the scheduled interview, and i actually got accepted. the compensation's pretty much the same i'm getting now but the experience that i'm bound to get from working there is the big come on. i WANT to take the job. but they want me to start by NOVEMBER. now THAT is going to be a problem.

i need to make a decision by monday. and now, my biggest fear is making the wrong decision.

there is no way on earth i could have had a worse day than yesterday's fx driver

first, in an attempt to get through the bfrv/casimiro traffic, he counter-flowed and went into the oncoming lane. unfortunately got caught in the traffic light before being able to cross the intersection and before being able to squeeze the fx back into the proper lane. so we got caught by the las pinas police.

second, one of the passengers belatedly informed the driver that she wanted to get off at buendia. he berated the passenger for telling him only as we were about to go over the fly-over. since the passenger was no pushover, she engaged him in a verbal tussle which lasted until we got to the quirino traffic light. in the beginning, he attempted to remedy the situation by immediately moving to the right shoulder as soon as we got off the fly-over but the girl would have none of it. so, he offered to drop her off when the fx got to kalaw cor. taft avenue. he even offered her ten bucks so she can board an fx back to buendia. no can do, the girl argued. she wants enough money so she can take a cab (imagine!) back to buendia. by the time we got to quirino, the driver was ready to kick her out of the fx so he offered her what she paid him (PhP35) and demanded that she immediately disembark the fx. fine, she shouted back. unfortunately, the left side passenger door (where she was nearest) wouldn't open. it took so long (eventually the passengers in the middle row disembarked one by one in order to allow her to get off the fx and went back in one by one) that we got caught by manila traffic police.

that was the third strike.

by then, he didn't care what happened to him and his license. i think he must have left his license (or the receipt the las pinas police gave him for his license) with the manila police.

and so, from then on, i made a resolution: nothing could be worse than what happened to my fx driver. all that, in the course of an hour. he must've really gotten off the wrong side of the bed that morning.

right now i am watching kc's paris special ... clearly i am indulging in my KC Concepcion addiction. i remember being so into her a couple of years back (when she turned 18, i think) and she cut her hair short - i liked her so much that I cut my own hair, prompting people to tell me to slay whoever made me look that way.

anyway, congratulations to everyone who hurdled the four gruelling weeks of the bar examinations - pass or not (but hopefully pass), you've done something way more than others have even attempted. so chin up ... and keep in mind that taking the bar is 50% of the difficulty. waiting for the results is the next 50%.

and so today marks the day when i made actual steps towards achieving something i've always wanted to do: be a real lawyer, the kind the appears in courtrooms, dressed to kill, and saving (or so i'd like to think) the futures of people who have been wronged one way or the other.

wish me luck.

taongbayan na lang siya sa dula ng buhay ko

and so thus went the text i sent a couple of friends last friday, in effect announcing the demise of a year-and-a-half long crush i had over this guy, better known in this blog as pldt boy.

the term taongbayan actually came from an anecdote g shared with us once about her sister. apparently, one day, her sister came home from school quite excited to share with her family that finally, after all those years of not being included in school plays, she was part of one. their mom then asked, ano role mo, anak. then g's sister promptly, and quite proudly, replied, taongbayan! so, okay, role na pala yun.

anyway, recently people who've held top billing in my life have begun being mere extras for one reason or another. maybe i've matured in my taste (highly unlikely, and i'm quite sure of that, for reasons i will not share in this blog). or maybe it's just that when people's cameo roles become less frequent, you begin to get numb to the former pain that comes from not having that person around until the time comes that you realize, maybe it wasn't as important as i first thought.

i don't know. what i do know is that the feeling's akin to the scales falling off my eyes (biblical reference right there, if you didn't notice) and realizing, probably for the first time, that there's more to life than the love and hurts that alternate deep within me.

on a less dramatic and significantly happier note, the past weekend was spent in a retreat (i am now more centered, i think, which is the biggest reason for the scales-falling-off-my-eyes incident of late) and hanging out at my aunt's house. dsl, as usual, means downloading music and so buffy, my ipod mini, has 21 additional new songs, including guns & roses' november rain, a song i used to love (and realize i still love) to bits. i don't know how it looks like to those people who see me through my non-tinted windows but i must say my recently played songs playlist which, for reasons known only to me contains a weird mix of glam rock + heavy metal + yeng constantino's time in + sharon cuneta + songs you'd probably hear at 94.7 + alternative music, makes me happy, especially when i can sing along to the song.

when i make it back there, i'm going to download my secret favorite, queensryche (remember silent lucidity? *sigh*) and ruin it by adding britney to the mix (i do love the early britney. remember that cute mtv where the dancers formed a heart?) in the past, my eclectic taste in music has brought great woe to buffy who, after being loaded with toto, eraserheads, and peter cetera in one session, refused to stay charged for more than an hour and kept dying on me.

but then, buffy's seen me through two bar examinations, numerous sleepless nights, and long trips to baguio and pandan island. buffy's also been there for me, whether i be driving or commuting, and for every single moment of waiting mindlessly. save for that short while where buffy choked on me, its held up pretty good to the assault of music i've been giving it for the last couple of years. i gues it wouldn't mind the fresh assault.

lastly, i'm having lunch with someone, wait, two someones, i don't know tomorrow. well, i actually sort of know one of them (cousin of a former classmate who used to work for the court of appeals but now works for the supreme court), albeit the only thing i know about him is that he makes great turon. we bumped into each other this morning and he said, why don't we have lunch sometime, i have a friend who wants to meet you and so i said, sure, not really believing he'd follow through the invite. but then after lunch he actually texted and extended an invite for tomorrow (well, actually later, it's 1:42 am already) so me and a friend (nice of him to say i can bring a friend) are having lunch with him and his friend.

ok. i gotta go sleep. i can't fall asleep on the soup over lunch, can i?

p.s. keith, i've to tell you something. hope i catch you online soon.

with the exception of sharon cuneta, gary v, and the eraserheads, buffy, my ipod mini, is practically bereft of music by filipino artists. it's not that i've got anything against opm, in fact i used to imagine that the song "tuwing umuulan at kapiling ka" was specifically written for my and my then-crush, FC. but then since there were hardly any OPM cds at home and downloading them is more difficult than, say, downloading coldplay and guns & roses, buffy pretty much stayed 95% OPM-free.

then i saw yeng constantino's mtv of "time in" at myx and i read the lyrics. it was cute, it was perky, and, although i'm probably ten to twelve years older than her, i immediately resonated with the music.

here's the video. enjoy it as much as i did.

ideally, the movie 1408 should've worked. it had all the elements - at least from the trailer - of a great movie: john cusack, lifted from stephen king (one of my favorite authors), and enough scaries but without the "ring-like" crawling character (which, IMHO, has pervaded all horror movies since she first came out. case in point: OUIJA, which i absolutely hated.) i was so enthralled with the trailer that i actually "forced" a friend to watch it with me.

THE MOVIE WAS A HUGE DISAPPOINTMENT. the premise was simple: room 1408 (1+4+0+8=13 ergo scary) is not really haunted (so says the hotel manager) but evil. john cusack's character is not afraid of ghosts, creepy crawlies, or anything of that sort but writes about these things and (at least from what i gathered) pretends that these things exist so as to scare his readers. he then books the room, has a tiff with the manager who does not want him to check-in said room, and eventually gets the room. fifteen minutes later (real and movie time), he calls the front desk and wants to check out simply because (a) he got spooked by the turn-down service of the ghost and (b) he hurt his hand when the window slammed down on it.

ok. that alone was weird. a guy who insisted that he got rid of all his fears at the age of twelve (as narrated to the hotel manager during their tiff) gets spooked out fifteen minutes after getting inside the room?

anyway, it's still showing though, at least here at robinson's place manila it is. if, like me, you will insist on seeing the movie even after people have given it awful reviews, then go see it for yourself. after all, we humans are real suckers for pain.