Dreaming of Dancing Burritos

Overheard convo between my brother and his officemate:

Officemate: Your sister’s roleplay costume is cool.
Brother: Cosplay, man. Cosplay.
Me: O____Ox

What are friends?

My cousin asked me that question a few days ago, and I’ve yet to answer that. See, it’s a pretty hard thing to answer, and even more so if the one who’s asking the question happens to be trashed around by the people he considered "friends".

To make things easier for me to answer (since I care enough), I asked some people–whose heads I’m sure are filled with substantial meat–what the word ‘friend’ means to them. Here are their answers:

• Anne: friend - a person whom you consider knows you enough, and accepts you regardless of your shortcomings and imperfection
• Carlo: A friend is somebody you can give your knife and can expect that he’ll kill your enemies and you can trust him not to use the knife on your throat.
• redkinoko: a friend is a sibling who just happened to have little or no genetic similarity to you.
• DT: I got these from somewhere (Francis Kong? Dr. Harold Sala? I don’t remember): A friend is someone who knows who you are and like you, anyway. A true friend speaks well of you behind your back and stabs you in the front.
• renzeiken: when you think you know the person well enough to trust him/her with your wallet.
• Chase: friend - people I can connect and relate to.

Noticeably enough, the one of the common denominator for all answers is trust. Of course, who would befriend a dude who’ll take off and run as soon as you loan him money? Who would befriend people who’d do a Judas on you (sorry, I’m not taking into account the Gospel of Judas in this post, please save the flames for later) as soon as you take him into your life?

Who would befriend people who’d believe ill of someone, when they don’t even know him beyond skin deep, and instantly believe what they hear from others before even knowing that person?

And I’m sure anyone who is reading this post is wondering, what’s the point? Yeah, we all know these shite. I’m just stating the universally obvious because my cousin here is so enraged, so bitter, so blinded by disappointment.

Don’t give up on the world, L. Drop the junk, and move on. You’ve got about approximately 70 years of life left (assuming you don’t start smoking) to enjoy life and move on. Friends will not wish ill upon you. Friends will not break your trust and betray you. Most importantly, friends will not encourage your girlfriend to sleep with one of them just because of a stupid bet. They obviously don’t care about you. If you take a look at the list above again, you’ll see that ‘betrayal’ is not included in any of the definitions.

Come on, L. They’re not worth losing your sanity or ideals. I know you love her, she may have love/d you, but not enough. You go and off yourself, nothing will ever change. Your girlfriend will still be that stupid girl who threw away something so important because of one stupid reason, your so-called friends will remain as trash, the world turns, and will not cry for you. But you will lose. I know. I’ve been there, as do many other people.

The next time you fall in love, make sure that you save some of yourself for yourself. My best friend told me that. Save some dignity. Act like the 30-year-old yuppie that you are, despite the fact that I hate the image of stereotypical yuppies. *KICK*

Take my goddamn Hello Kitty hanky and blow, dammit.

***

Carlo told me that my fic blogs Broken Hearts Guild and Soul Breaker do not let people without tabulas accounts put in comments. >.> I’ve neglected to notice that, I’m sorry. I know that I haven’t updated again lately, but if there is some glaring error that you want to point out, or maybe you just want to comment, please do so. My blogs now allow anonymous comments.

***

This is an idyllic scene: My cousin devouring my Haruki Murakami books, with The Smiths playing in the background. For some weird reason this brings me back to last Christmas season, when Richard gave me my first The Smiths mp3s and I bought Haruki Murakami books with my Christmas savings. I always read the books under the candy-pink light of my lampshade, and they always gave me weird dreams.

Now, my cousin is doing the same thing right now, and I hope I’m passing on that legacy, of sorts. We were in the same situation when we read Murakamis along with listening to The Smiths…and it just feels right.

I was sorting things to throw out and things to keep in my room when I happened upon my old Creative Writing journal from way back in college. Whoa. I feel so old. Reading the snippets and exercises scribbled in chicken shit writing made me wonder why I wrote these in the first place. Avantgarde, my ass.

SILENCE

• Silence lives in a place that looks like the sea robbed of its phosporescent glow. Silence lurks in the deep, dreamless waters where it holds down, with its own slithering tentacles, Imagination.
• Silence is like fine sand sifted with fingers spread out. Silence is like the silhouette of a figure long gone.

THE UNKNOWN

• The Unknown lives in every person’s shadow, where every object in the universe takes up space with their own fears and secrets–the eclipse of their being. The Unknown knows, of course. It knows everything everyone does not want to know, for the favorable knowledge the universe holds are already specified, tagged, and identified. The Unknown eats the collective refuse of mankind, and loves it. The refuse would then be defecated from the Unknown’s bowels and turn into the monsters that lurk in men’s hearts.
• The Unknown is the greatest fear I have encountered, and will encounter in my existence, and at the same time I feel at peace in it’s embrace.
• The Unknown is like the mugger who sneaks up behind you and hits you on the head. You know something hit you but you’ll never know what it is.
• The Unknown is appealing because of the mere fact that it is unknown, making one guess for too long and may unintentionally strike up the answer to Life’s ultimate question, and the prospect leaves some hopefuls thinking, thinking, thinking, and thinking…Not me, though.

SHAME

• Shame lives in a place that looks like my old moth-eaten dress of more than ten years past. It is colored as black as sewer muck and smelled of ten year’s worth of stagnation. It knows the Unknown, and both of them guards my innermost secrets. It tears apart the shelter I built for myself, brick by brick.
• The weird thing about Shame is that everytime I face her, she plays dead.
• Shame is like a dead cockroach. Feared while still alive, even more so when it is rotting and dead.

FEAR

• Fear lives in a place that looks like my room. It’s safe, warm, and cozy. The only thing that troubles me (and trouble it is) is the world outside the door. He is a nurturing father, sheltering me from real and imaginary harm. Stunting my growth as a person, but not as human meat.
• Fear is the meter-thick wall that bars me from true happiness.
• Fear is like what I feel when I look into the mirror–no, refusing to look at the mirror–because I know I will not like what I see.

COURAGE

• Courage lives in a place that looks like the castle spire of my fantasies: set up high in the sky, against the backdrop of a beautiful, shimmering purple sunset, overseeing all that should be seen, looking out for things that can and should be conquered. He is the king over all. He wears black, and a magnificent red velvet cloak befitting a king. He knows what should be done and what should not be done. The only hindrance to his goal is his only subject, who may or may not carry out his wishes.
• Courage is like a very potent alcoholic drink that you refuse to drink, because of its taste. But you drink it anyway.

TRUST

• Trust lives in a place that looks just like my own body, where Trust sleeps. I try hard to wake her, but no matter how hard I nudge the child named Trust, she remains asleep.  She curls in a fetal position inside the body’s heart, not doing what she’s supposed to.
• Trust is like a woefully naive child.

PASSION

• Passion lives in the heart of my own being. She is the one who makes me alive, pulls my strings, gives me a reason to live. She is the queen in tattered robes and wielding a brilliant platinum sword in her hand. She cannot be stopped, hers is the driving force within.
• Passion is the driving force.
• Passion is like a lighted match. Burns easily, burns out easily.

I had such a nice day. It was actually spent doing something nice that I shouldn’t mention here or else it may be used against me in the near future. I would say that I had sex with two hot bisexual guys, but that’s not the case. Nor is it my idea of a happy wappy day.

*gets shot by lightning* omfgwtfhax0rzzzz!!!

In any case the happy wappy mood got marred when I played errand girl again and bought chicken for dinner, just outside the subdivision. One of the things that got to my nerves–even after I managed to buy the chicken without incident–was that I was about to miss Gundam Seed Destiny, and the tricycle cue was a tad long.

So as consolation I took the change from the chicken money for myself and bought Diet Coke from the local Mini-Stop (hello pow, Ate Annie o.o/). I stood in line for the poor man’s private limo service cue, glancing at my watch from time to time. 8.20 pm. Omfg.

Halfway through the line, I got so antsy that I decided to just listen to music. I wore my headset, turned on my MP3 and tried to calm down, my jaw set.

I was mentally bopping to the tune The Moon and the Prince when I heard some irritating pubescent voice say “Tang’na mu!” behind my back. I just shrugged it off, since beggar boys were littering the streets just outside our subdivision. Needless to say, the outburst went into one ear and went out through the other one.

“Bingi ang puta oh, haha! Putang ina mo!”

I was startled, “bingi” being the word that acted as the IRQ switch that forced me to pay attention. You see, there’s a reason why I bought a headset earlier this afternoon. The SE Walkman earplugs were to be literally plugged into the ears, thus eliminating 90% (an estimate, of course) of external noise while the audiophile drowns himself in music. Which is good, of course, except when walking outside. It sure feels good whenever you reach the final belt of the chorus of a certain song, but it will be for naught if said audiophile ends up being a puddle of mashed meat on the street.

The headset does nothing of the sort. I can turn up the volume at full blast and still hear the cacophony around me, since it does not totally block my ears from external sound, and thus I digress a bit too far from my topic.

“Bingi ang puta oh, haha! Putang ina mo!”

“Hoy! Gaga! Alis! Buti na lang di to nakakarinig!”

I’d love to blame the parents, however I thought this was the sort of kid for whom any form of scolding or corporal punishment would not work. This was the sort of miscreant for whom his mother would just shake her head in utter defeat, and leave her child’s fate to the law of the streets. No fault of anybody’s, I’m sure, but that’s Life.

And so I discreetly shake my still unopened Diet Coke can. Shake, shake.

“Bingi!”

Sighing, I turned around and faced the widdle kid. About ten years old. Scruffy yellow shirt with a print of what could be the Red Ranger, after he was raped by an entire baseball team, along with the coach and the wiener-shaped mascot.

And I promptly opened the can of righteous cola into his face.

*FIIIIIIIIIIIZZZZ*

Rightful retribution? Not. Such a waste of good cola, because that kid’s almost hopeless, and most probably has a low chance for survival in a world where staring boredly at the man sitting opposite you in a jeepney would slap you with a death warrant.

Uhm, yeah. I know I’ve been slacking off too much when it comes to my fiction; work nor lack of time shouldn’t be used as excuses, but I still go ahead and do just that.

To compensate, though, I’ve been fiddling about with tabulas and just managed to make slight modifications of one of the common templates, and made separate blog pages to both of my current fics (the following paragraphs are ripped out from the About the Story pages of each of the blogs, so please excuse the blurb-ish descriptions:

Soul Breaker: A young acolyte inept whose expertise lies in another profession totally unrelated to the Holy Arts, a former Lord Knight who is mistress to an ancient demon, and just about everybody else who are called to do some major ghost–or soul–hunting.

Join Aerandir and his allies as they embark on a quest (which will eventually lead them to Lighthalzen) to free Rune Midgard from its seemingly inevitable fate of getting swallowed up by the underworld. A sequel (sort-of) to Beyond Black Doors.

Broken Hearts Guild: [WARNING: EXPLICIT CONTENT] Betrayal with no just cause. A man whose life, ideals, and beliefs were torn apart for no reason at all.

Tough luck. Shit happens.

Based on the Ragnarok Online universe, this is a story of a chivalrous knight, and a guild comprising of the dredges of society, who took upon them the demented and twisted "responsibility" of delivering severe justice on matters of the heart.

People have been asking me about my original fiction. Let’s just say I’ve been harboring some hopes for them, and I refuse to let them be published in the web in the meantime.

So I spent my whole day in the Las Pinas LTO office to get my first Driver’s License. After the whole grueling ordeal (wherein I spent about eight hours tenderizing my butt, and witnessed a 17-year-old literally howl and bang his head against the backrest of the chair in front of him), I asked this question to my dad:

Me: Did you ever dream of dancing burritos while you waited for your first driver’s license? I did.
Dad: No. I was the Coast Guard Station Commander in Tacloban, and the head of LTO office there had a fishing boat. The license was given to me on a (relishes next phrase) siiiiiilverrr plaaaatterrr.
Me: *sob*

I asked my mom whether it took an entire day to get her first license. She told me that it didn’t even take an hour.

Poor fools! Being deprived of dancing burritos!

Okay, I die.

By the way, the burrito sauce says "Hello".

Whoa. Sure took me a long while before I wrote a post about what could be one of the weirdest things I did this year, besides trampling and stomping on other people just to watch some flimsy fireworks. Besides me punching some random punk in the middle of EDSA.

The Katamari Damacy Ichigo cosplay! ^o^/!!

I had fun. It’s apparent with how I thought I internalized the Weirdness that was Katamari Damacy.

It turned out I was just acting out what I really wanted to do for a long time. Yes folks, what I really wanted in life was prancing about in public like I snorted a week’s worth of shabu. Kidding.

Being glomped on is fun. I can’t blame them. Ichigo is just about the cutest replacement for Barney. Yes, mothers. Stop entrusting your kids to a freakin’ dinosaur, and a goddamn purple one at that. Cutesy Ichigo is way, waaaay better.

Edible, too. XD

Enough about me. Many other cosplayers really rocked in my book, but since I was not able to bring my camera phone while I cosplayed (my self-made gloves made holding things really hard), I was not able to take pictures of them (so I resorted to filching pics from Cosplay.ph…gomen -_-x) I especially liked the Kurama and Hiei duo (cosplayed by two females). You gotta love their costumes. Despite the simplicity, you’d know that they put much effort into their cosplay, and you’d see most of it in the details such as their hair, and I swear Kurama’s wearing green contacts (o.O!). The weapons are finely done too.

And the Castlevania trio (cue fangirl scream)! Before anything else, please let me say that I almost died the day I saw yaoi action between Alucard and Richter. I think I really did. *SPLAG* uhm…no offense, but even if I like yaoi to some extent, I really don’t think it suits the epitome of utter manliness, which are the Castlevania peeps.

But my brother thinks they’re gay (the characters, not the cosplayers). Lol.

Not because I’m biased towards them since I’m a rabid Castlevania Symphony of the Night fan (I played the darned game for two years—Japanese and English versions—just to collect all items), but they rocked, period. Not to mention they almost looked their parts, especially Richter.

Ahhh, Richter. The moment I examined the pics my friend took of the event, I went spastic…In all of my pics of Richter, his hair covered his face! And Richter was the one I really favored among other cosplayers. Aaaaaarrrgh.

And thus I present to you, the Sablay Pictures featuring Richter:

ToTx

If anybody has decent pics of Richter, please gimme >.</))

Those aside, I would like to thank the following people who really made the cosplay possible (as if world-class production. Haha):

• Brother - You stayed up with me in the wee hours of the morning to help me assemble my Katamari tubehead. I really thank you. But since you broke (sat on) my favorite pair of pink-tinted shades, I don’t owe you anything. -_-x
• Parents - Even if you didn’t provide any financial assistance for the cosplay (and why should you?) I’m still very grateful for letting me hitch rides to Divisoria and Cavite to have my dress done. Thanks.
• Chase - Thanks for being there with me and keeping me company. As in. ThankyouThankyouThankyou.
• Yvie and Mond - You guys made the pictures hilarious.
• People who recognized my costume and took pics of me - Ichigo feels so wubbed. ^w^

===

Another weirdness. An officemate asked me if ever I noticed another girl who’s always staring at me. Of course, I answered no because I’m mostly oblivious to other people at work (mostly because I have my earphones plugged into my ears until my ears bleed). She told me that apparently, this girl thought that I’m the one whom her ex dumped her for. Confused? I sure am.

Of course its not me. Nobody will dump anybody for me. And I won’t take that, if ever, haha. Di ano nanunulot, kailan man. XD

I remember someone telling me that I’m a Weirdness magnet. I’m glad that I haven’t lost my touch XD

Phone line died. After the deluge of rains (heck, it’s not even a typhoon or storm, but with the damage it did, it could be very well be the same rain Noah’s Ark encountered), phone line died. Can’t connect to the internet with my lappy at home. Just when I’m about to start a project that would fetch me half my monthly pay, for just a handful of written pages.

*cue scream*

On a lighter note, I picked up my Katamari Ichigo costume from the family seamstress. Wuvwuvwuvwuv. Here I go, Toycon V!

T__^ <– this is a cry of joy.

I am now a very messed up person to talk to.

kthxbai.

Currently playing Kingdom Hearts II. Was planning to chuck the plan to bring my PS2 to Leyte out the window, but KHII made me reserve a place for the damned thing in my luggage. Hahaha. I better get a copy of Ace Combat Zero while I’m at it, then. -_-x

I’m not going to post here my raves about KH II. All you need to do is type in "KH II" on any search engine such as ye olde Google or Yahoo, then there ya go. It’s a pity that many people quit the game as soon as the names of Donald and Goofy are mentioned by Roxas. Yeah, there are the Disney characters occasionally spouting off sickly sweet lessons (or breaking out into song-and-dance numbers as in the case of the Little Mermaid bit), but there’s no denying that the Game. Kicks. Ass. Storywise and gamewise.

Wub Jack Sparrow.

Okay. Am out. Hours of wurk ahead, and will fly out to Leyte early tomorrow morning.

I kept putting off writing a blog entry before I receive "The" guild pic from Yvie and Edmund’s wedding, but I guess the photographers mucked up so here I am, typing away anyway. Yep, Mirielle and Rep got married ^_______^ I can tell she’s happy. Oh, you can tell by the way she made a new email addy with her married last name. XD~!

I managed to get materials for my Katamari Ichigo cosplay! Plowed through the backstreets of Pronte–er, Divisoria just to find red polka-dotted fabric. I got an emerald green fabric too for the trimmings. My brother and I are still figuring out how to do the headpiece, so he made a 3-D rendition of the head for our seamstress. I may drop by several toy shops later for materials on making a decent-sized katamari ball.

Yesh. Here. I. come.

XD

Managed to scrape enough money to buy another PSP. Of course, I had to buy it in good ole Divisoria to get a reasonable discount (2k less than department store price). This time, I got the white one. It worries me because I found out that the software for the white PSP has been updated, and there are chances that the update may block emulators from working T.T oh man. 3k UMDs are too much for my pocket, and there are so many games I want to buy for my PSP (Tekken Dark Resurrection! Ace Combat Zero! Etc! Nyuuu!) Sorry, Metal Shit Acid. I don’t appreciate your gameplay. You suck. PSP and Me and My Katamari proved to be useful in standing-in as my music player when my Walkman phone conked out (unavoidable software issues). All I had to do was go to the Sound Test and play the Katamari tunes, plug in the headphones, turn off the screen. Sweetness.

I will be leaving for Leyte on Wednesday next week for an eight-day vacation leave. W00t. I have so many things to do there, now that I am not obligated to lug along my laptop. I can get enough sleep to wake up early the next day, and go to the beach and stuff, like driving or riding a bike. Whatever. Going to Leyte sure seems fun now.

Every fucking day keeps getting better, and better.