IT'S BEEN A LONG, LONG TIME RUNNING

This blog is 5 years old. Half a decade old! I was thinking of erasing it but then I reread all the good memories spliced together in 300 random entries. I couldn't bring myself to take away its existence. 3 years ago, I actually posted regularly and relished all your comments. 3 years ago, you posted regularly. I don't know where you all are now. Maybe you've jumped ship and moved to a safer place. We've all evolved but I still like to remember the days when we used to be friends... lj friends.
I'll see you all on/offline. Where do I find you?

Here's an ancient post of mine. 13 days shy from its anniversary...

Gran Turismo
Kung ang mga lalaking pumasok sa buhay ko ay parang race car driver at ang relasyon ay maihahambal sa isang kotse sa isang karera, nakaranas na ko ng mga sumusunod:

[1] The fast and the furious, ang bilis bilis magpatakbo, tamang nangareer, kiss kaagad, laplapan kaagad, araw-arawin ka ba naman at biglang mabubungo na lang sa pader...

[2] Slow and steady wins the race nga daw eh pano kung ayaw niya pala manalo? Holding hands biglang bitaw, tumawag at magtext araw araw biglang tinamad. Biglang nagu-turn ang gago?!? umatras ng d oras?! Wrong way! Wrong way! Wrong way! Prends na nga law daw tayo...

[3] At may mga ibang steady lang ang takbo, walang mga sharp turns, mukha naman hindi uu-turn, biglang sinabi daan na muna sa pit stop, umexceed na sa mga 10 seconds sa pagpalit ng katawan ng kotse, sa kakahintay, d mo alam, ayaw na pala ituloy ang karera, huminto na talaga... Hindi na naging kayo, friends with benefits na lang daw, wala ka nang bubutasan na gulong kase d na sya tumatakbo.

[4] At may isang crowd favorite, siya na ang gusto ng lahat, akala mo na rin naka-sakay ka na sa winner! biglang malalaman mo naka-angkas ka lang pala, hininto ang kotse, pinababa ka, at nagsakay na iba at dumiretso na sa finsih line, ikaw nakatayo na lang sa kalsada.

[5] At may isa naman underdog, akala mo siya na talaga, sa kanya mo na nilagay ang lahat ng pusta mo, ilang beses na flat-an, pero tuloy tuloy lang, bumibilis, nakakahabol at nangunguna, hindi mo napansin, hindi yung driber yung okay, yung kotse lang pala, naflat-an nanaman, at gumive up na ang driver. Iniwanan ka nakasakay sa isang okay na kotse, ikaw na lang mag-isa para magpalit ng gulong.

ayus ba? kaya nga naman ang tanong ko sayo:

Voted "Most Likely to be Cast in a Budweiser Commercial."

You have to admit this guy looks like a LOT of fun. Gabe would probably be the guy who loves making fun of his closest friends and subsequently makes an ass out of himself to show that you shouldn't take anything he says personally.

Gabe Perez, I don't know you but I think... nay, I know I want to introduce you to my friends and you would fit right in. We would hang out in grocery parking lots, take one of the carts out for a ride and leave it in the middle of the freeway. Oh, the places we will go, the havoc we shall wreak.

You gotta love a man with this much dedication and foresight.

Westpark 8 is one of the places I worked for for 2 months during my brief stint in the U.S. It was a 15 minute bike ride from my aunt's house in Irvine. I remember the first time I passed by the theater. They were showing Michael Clayton, Atonement, Persepolis and Into the Wild, movies that were in my must-see list. It was only natural that I took my chances and applied for a job since I haven't been paying for movie tickets for the past 2 years.

When I told my cousin, Kevin that I got the job, he was less than enthusiastic. "That theater sucks so much ass. They show some really sad unheard movies." I didn't understand why he was talking smack about my new employer until my very first day.

"You do know that this is an art house theater, right?" Andrea, one of the many white part-time college kids who I got to work with asked me. It was at that moment when I finally figured out what Kevin was talking about. The line between "art films" and "mainstream movies" has long been blurred after film classes with Fr. Nick and hanging out with Isaw. All I could say at that  moment of dawning realization was... "Sweet."

Because Westpark "sucked so much ass," its clientele is mostly senior citizens, mid-life married couples and foreigners who trekked all the way to suburban Irvine to watch a film from their native country. There were the occasional art school students and guys bringing in their dates hoping to impress them with their worldliness but we were never plagued with loud obnoxious teenagers and attention-deficit kids. I don't think I ever sold a single child's ticket.

One of the responsibilities of a Westpark employee is to read the synopsis of the movies being shown and to be prepared with short blurbs because customers will routinely ask you what a movie is about and whether you've seen it and whether you personally think it is worth watching.

You will never have enough time to watch a film in its entirety. Another one of the people I got to work with, David (who also happens to be my Michael Cera/ Robert Sean Leonard crush),  told me "I've been working here part-time for the past 3 years and I can't even remember the last time I watched a movie here." Between the endless mind-numbing hours of making popcorn, sweeping floors and selling movie tickets, you'd much rather spend your free time goofing off with your co-workers and making fun of the occassional customer. It was only when I wasn't working with anybody "retarded" that I went inside a theater.

So to cap off this unnecessarily long post, I have watched several films in those 2 months, never ever knowing how some films began and how they ended. Since coming home, I have been downloading then on BitTorrent and I finally know what exactly they were that I've been recommending and why those customers found them so good that they had to go back  to thank me afterwards.

Here are some of the films that showed while I was working at Westpark. If you ever see them at your nearby DVD pirate's stall or are looking for something new to download, I recommed them. Not because I heard they were good, but because now, I have discovered them for myself.


P.S. The one and only movie that I did get to watch from start to finish is George A. Romero's Diary of the Dead. Only because it is the film that surprisingly made Kevin actually want to go to Westpark. This says alot about his taste level (haha). And yes, it sucked but we enjoyed it immensely.

Hello LJ Peeps! How you doin?!?

 

Leave it to the Sartorialist to relay to us the most chic of French blogs.
Yummy illustrations AND yummy photographs. That is more than enough eye candy to salivate over for the rest of the afternoon.

I am not the kind of person who is interested in Britain's royal family. I've visited computer chat rooms full of this type of person and they are people with small worlds, they don't consider the long term, they aren't concerned about the home front; they are too busy thinking about the royal family of another country. The royal clothes, the royal gossip, the royal sad times, especially the sad times, of this one family. I was only interested in the boy. The older one. At one time I didn't even know his name. If someone had shown me a picture I might have guessed who he was, but not his name, not his weight or his hobbies or the names of the girls who attend that coed university of his. If there were a map of the solar system, but instead of stars it showed people and their degrees of separation, my star would be the one you had to travel the most light-years from to get to his. You would die getting to him. You could only hope that your grandchildren's children would get to him. But they wouldn't know what to do; they wouldn't know how to hold him. And he would be dead; he would be replaced by his great-grandson's beautiful strapping son. His sons will all be beautiful and strapping royalty and my daughters will all be middle-aged women working for nonprofit earthquake-preparedness organizations. We come from long lines of people destined never to meet.