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.