You Do, You Know

I guess there's so much more
I have to learn
But if you're here with me
I know which way to turn
You always give me somewhere,
Somewhere I can learn
You make it real for me

What's with Hankies?

I liked the performance so much I was planning to heap praises... and then he started throwing those hankies to the girls. OTOH, Nadal and Djoko throw their dripping wristbands to the crowd and they love it. It must have something to do with sweat and tears. And blood? No not that. Noooo...

Budding Badings, Junior Jocklings

Without permission from Migs, but I'm sure he'll understand... here goes...

A hyper-belated reaction to Mig's podcast on Closet Badets

Okay. I'm retarded. I'm a blog retard. I should have read this a long, long time ago. I could have made 24 blogs out of this. What catharsis that would have been. At last, kindred spirits. Fellow Jock-lings.

Thanks Migs for keeping this in your archives. This is precious. This generation talking. Our generation learning. The prejudices and biases of our generation are so... nakakahiya after listening to these guys. They're so savvy and street smart while us... (do a KimmyDora here) we're just bitter and disenfrancished pink pesos, marching on the streets, asking society to laaav us. Hay... Since when did sexuality become public sector? But I think these kids need to thank us for the bad example we set. Because of our militancy, alam na nila what they don't want to be when they grow up. (World Peace po, maraming maraming world peace). Because really, you don't have to be out to be gay. And the really smart people of our generation realized that. And we vilified them for it. Crucified them. Force-outed them. Eh? And we ask society to laaav us?

(Plugging for Danton Remoto. I will work for that guy gratis et amore if he decides to make good on running for the Senate in 2010).

Clearly, I see your struggle here to evaluate their experience in the context of your own (e.g. coming out, labels, and all that western mishmash that we inherited from Gay Pride). The Freudian fabrications that we can never wash ourselves clean of... (World Peace uli na may kasamang Faith, Hope, and Charity).

And clearly, I can feel your tension. I wouldn't want to be where you were at that moment. I would have made no effort, at all, to be objective and understand where they're coming from. But I would have made an effort to hide my hard-on. Just the physical hard-on, because you can never be objective about that while it's happening.

No Migs. They're not trying to understand themselves and make sense of what's happening to them. They already have that pretty much figured out. It's us who still need to understand ourselves in relation to our personal pasts and the present that we now gleefully inhabit. And they do not need our advice. No please. We don't want to turn them into fabcasters. LOL. Joke lang. They have a good thing going, and have more between their ears than the swarm of out-and-out metroposhies in emo outfits and/or discreetly branded mid-priced imported labels feeding Lady Gaga to their cranium, etc. etc. etc.

Sexuality is NOT about coming out! That is so fringe. Sexuality is. It just is.

For people like them there is no coming out. There is only self-acceptance.

P.S. -- but to all of us for whom coming out is "what completes me," for heaven's sake let's all hurry up and complete ourselves.


Yes there will definitely be more on this when I find the inspiration. My deepest gratitude to my muses BITC, Tristan, McVie, Gibbs, and now Migs.

Love Moments

To gay people who think spinsterhood, (spinsterity, spinsterrorism) is the worst of all punishments and who now spend their days wishing this was that and all that...

The couldves wouldves and shouldves are sometimes their own reason for being, and generate their own brand of happiness. If a tectonic shift in earthly possibilities shakes the cosmos turning perfect tense to present, wow. But that's like waiting for disaster to happen. Earthquakes, are notoriously unpredictable. Like love.

Those who are in the thick of the moment should thank their sponsors (capital G first of all). Millions of people sleepwalk through their days hardly feeling anything except hunger during lunchtime and withdrawal if they decide not to smoke during breaks.

But you, you're in love! It's a very personal thing. Much as we always associate it with an other, that other is simply an object. The rush downhill and soaring highs are all yours, and often your other has absolutely nothing to do with it except be there (or not there as the case may be). In fact, all they need to do is exist.

Treasure the moment.

I'm cynical so I'll say this. We now live in a retail-driven world, because some smart people figured out that the power of a product over the buyer is deprivation. And because we're all so faddish these days, our satiety levels are so shallow. Fash-fash Klum-klum says it all. One day you're in, next day you're out. So while waiting for the inevitable "out-of-love" moment, enjoy the pain of being in.

Review: Half-Blood Prince

In one word: Lavender.

Lavender, Lavender, Lavender... what would the movie have been without you? I was the only one roaring with laughter inside iMax at the hospital bedside confrontation scene between Lavender and Hermione. But I couldn't care less.

Oh my Anito! They're borrowing Philippine cinema leitmotifs. We should sue them.

Ron's goofy moment was a fingernail's length away from being a total embarassment. But Harry was right on with his impersonation of Professor Snafalafagus the poison teacher. Second biggest laugh of the night.

Obviously, everyone was trying to heap entertainment value on a very dark and serious chapter. Of course it backfired grandly and will, for sure, ruin the stage it should have set for the Deathly Hallows climax and dénouement. Ouch. Even the death of Aragog was not spared. I had one clasp-hand-over-mouth moment there too!

But Snape's high camp was pure artistry. Snape at his very best. His non-speaking stiff-necked non-moving tour-de-force almost stole the hospital bedside scene from Lavender.

The movie was sooo campy! No gravitas at all. Like they were second-guessing people who would come to watch how gay Dumbledore really was. So they made everyone gay, even the girls and Minerva's costume. There were pure "poguey bait" dialogues between Dumbledore and Harry that, I'm sure, were calculated to incite the excitable Catholic Right to raise hell.

"If Professor Slughorn wants to collect me, shall I let him?" Hala.

If you're my crush and I happen to be outside looking in, I will seriously contemplate making a big haaaaa ha on the plate glass and etching my feelings for you on the fresh saliva mist right there and then, just because Lavender made the whole exercise such pure joy. But I have enough self respect to prevent myself from sending you a box of hexed chocolates.

Oh, well. I'm not qualified to be objective about all this. I'm a fanboy. But if there is one part that didn't live up to the rest of the series... this would be it. I guess they're tired already and are just waiting for Deathly Hallows to be over before everyone can go on leading normal lives and Harry and Draco finally kiss and make out in real life.

Brit Wit

These are not my pics and I don't know where I got them. I was cleaning up my Documents folder and saw them in a Word document. Made my day.

FTP and Custom URLs

Oh Lord!

I never knew this could be such a pain, this simple change of URL. No worries, I'll figure this all out.

Oh well. In high school there was a poster in my classmate's bedroom that said:

"Whenever I feel like studying, I lie down until the feeling goes away."

So I will.

Harry Up!

I can't find my borrowed copy of Deathly Hallows, but I'll certainly find time on July 16 to be out from work early.

Kelangan ba talagang sa first day manood? Kelangan ba talagang sa iMax?

Sensory overload is overload. But whaddheck, I want to see the trip to the cave and how they fleshed out the Inferi in the pic. My benchmark would be those dead bodies under the water in the LOTR marshlands where Gollum first found the ring, or something. I think iMax is okay as long as you're not watching Transformers.

So it's gonna be a team outing. Me and four kiddielets almost half my age and barely three-fourths my height with their girlfriends and boyfriends. And I'm the one excited. Or maybe I'll watch it alone first, and then ruin their experience by doing a running commentary as events unfold. But they didn't do that to me in Twilight so I won't na lang.

I want to see how the Pensieve was imagined -- this magical version of the Blu-Ray player. One time I tried tracing a thin line one inch away from my forehead with a lit cigarette, imagining the smoke to be my thoughts. Don't try it if you love your eyebrows .

As always, I can't remember the last movie I watched inside a moviehouse. Underworld, Rise of the Lycans, I think. But Half-Blood Prince is something I will definitely watch and remember, and watch again and remember some more. Plus I now know that Dumbledore was written as a gay character so I'll watch Michael Gambon more closely now. I hope they do a flashback to the day when Dumbledore and Grinewald dueled with their wands (dirty thoughts flood my consciousness), or will that happen in Deathly Hallows? I'm not good at Potter lore. I sometimes get the chronology all mixed up.

The other thing I can't wait to see is Lukyanenko's Final Watch on film. I hope they remake the whole series with English dialogue this time and be truer to the book. Night Watch and Day Watch were too "divergent."

I'm rambling already, which means I'm very very excited. Ilang tulog na lang July 16 na. Tagal-tagal. Sana bukas na agad yun.

Crossover

When I change careers I usually leave everything behind. The kitchen sink, the bathtub, and sometimes even the dirty laundry. It's never really intentional or premeditated, but I always avoid happy/unhappy returns of the day(s). The one thing that makes this extremely difficult is friends, treasured battle-tested true friends that you really can't leave behind because they'd kill you if they ever thought you thought you could.

But once in a while, some vestige of a left-behind career crosses over. In this particular instance I'm not sure which past career it is (journalism, or advertising, or public relations). My company is in the thick of developing a killer application that's light years (I'm exajjing here) ahead of the competition and the proof of concept is out. But it didn't have a name. And the bosses were looking for a name and asking around and my synapses did a quick rewire and voila... I had a name. And they liked it. And I got P1,000 in Starbucks GCs for condensing a concept with a kilometric description into a four-letter acronym that actually sounded like a real word.

Which should have made me extremely happy because I like Starbucks pastries. Well, I was happy but not extremely because right away I realized that in another industry I'd actually get a mega-bonus for that.

Sigh. I like the geeky world of software already, but I was this close to whipping out my little black book and pestering my agents (may agents talaga? hahaha) to find me freelance work. 'Chos. There are only 24 hours in a day.

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A friend asked me to count all instances of "I", "me", "my" and all other instances of the first person in everything I write and for the record, in the post above, there were 18. So?