Pre-shopping: a discourse
"i think i'll do some pre-shopping."
i bet marlon was struggling not to raise an eyebrow when i told him how i was going to spend my afternoon. over lunch with him today, i realized i've come to take my annual singapore shopping jaunt (it can hardly be called a spree) very seriously. i'm a victim of the impulse buy and queen of the bargain find most of the year, except for this one time that i get to go shopping with no expense to marlon or myself.
Sayona-lah! Year 3
it’s the boyf’s birthday once again, and i am off to lah-lah land!
wow. my march singapore visit has now become an annual event. parang pilgrimage, haha.
apart from the much-deserved time off from work, i’m looking forward to my singapore trip not so much for the thrill of discovery as for the routine we’ve built up over the past three years. there are always new little variations here and there, but for the most part our mini-life in singapore revolves around the following:
the happy reunion at the airport. black pepper crab dinner at jumbo on the first night. the takashimaya shopping spree with vouchers from marlon’s office. sleeping in on saturday morning. lazy brown-rice-and-tuna brunch in bed. marlon cooking for me. swimming and tanning (my favorite solitary desperate housewife activity). invading our one-dollar bookstore. drinks and indian food at boat quay.
just thinking about these inane rituals both warms and soothes me. they are ours, and they are a product of the three years we’ve spent together. and they make for a happy, tingly farewell.
see you all in a couple of days!
Mommy’s day out
my mom turned 57 this week, and my sister and i decided to "book" her for a sunday junket to tagaytay. it was a weekend long overdue — the last family trip we took together must have been in my sophomore year of high school, when we still had a car. my mom didn't even know that the tagaytay-sta. rosa route now exists! (she thinks the old way was faster.) but now that my sister has max, hopefully we'll get to take more girl-bonding trips together. thanks ate!
i felt very grown-up and efficient making reservations for lunch and spa treatments — both of which we were late to, naturally. 🙂 (more…)
Sugar frenzy!
ack! i have so much to blog about! it's amazing that so many pictures and anecdotes have piled up, considering that i only really have a life on weekends. :-Pnow let me see… where do i start? ah, yes. dessert comes first, of course!
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seventy-five eager sugar hounds…
dessert vultures ready to swoop
one sweltering, steamy sunday afternoon…
fabian's and my loot, awash in the late afternoon glow. (yup, it's summer!)
two fab, famous pinoy bloggers (lori baltazar of dessert comes first and carlos celdran of walk this way)…
the witty and articulate lori, whetting our appetites (as if kailangan)
one look at carlos: yep, this is definitely going to be interesting
and a parade of thirteen of manila's most divine homemade desserts…
the first serving of sin! my faves are on the left side of the plate
… make one deliriously happy currystrumpet!
cabbing home in a happy sugar daze
Jun-jun for the win!
will he get over one million pesos in cash, a two-million peso exclusive contract, a business franchise and a house and lot?
will he become not just hot, but super hot, overworked and rich?
more importantly, will i get to see him on tv (and around the office) for years to come? it all happens tomorrow at 9:30 p.m.!
gad, am i actually going to traipse all the way to marikina to see my pet account go out with a bang? i think i’ll let the tea party make my decisions for me — if i win something in the raffle, i’ll go home and watch the delayed telecast. i certainly can’t lug a cake or a framed 8X10 photo of one to a stadium full of 13,000 screaming fans.
return primetime tv to the jun-juns! jun-jun for the win!
p.s. i just have one last shoot with him on monday, and then the worst of this obsession will die down. promise. 🙂
Glory be
i have seen the light. after years of dodging high school p.e. (and slinking through most of college p.e.), i have now come to the epiphany that physical exercise actually feels… wonderful. who would have known that my body could turn traitor to my slothy ways and actually secretly crave for exercise? not me. but the craving was fulfilled yesterday, and it felt great.
my only experience with capoeira so far had been the virtual kind — mindless, button-mashing sessions with christie monteiro in tekken 5. but yesterday, thanks to escola brasileira de capoeira philippines and their newly opened saturday sessions at the ateneo, got to try it out for real.
and it was fun! unathletic as i am, i didn’t feel as stupid as i normally would have trying out a new physical activity — a martial art/dance at that. and daunting as all the acrobatics/buff bodies/fluid movements are, i am definitely coming back for more. why?
one: the people are great. the advanced capoeristas are mixed in with the beginners, and you switch partners a couple of times during the class, so you learn a little bit from each new person that you meet.
there is a visible respect for each person’s pace. none of that deadmahan you get when you’re a beginner at something (such as, say, fitness first’s body jam, tee hee) and everyone else is leagues ahead of you.
there is a very strong group dynamic — warm, effusive, and simply envelops you, drawing you in.
two: anything fuelled by music is a go for me. especially when it’s live and has a distinct shout-your-heart-out feel-good factor. such are the songs sung in roda, which are accompanied by instruments like the drums and berimbau (which kind of looks like a big bow with a gourd tied to one end).
the musicmaking takes place during the part of the class called roda, or the circle in which everyone “plays” or “performs”, two by two. it’s more like what we pinoys like to call an “exhibition” rather than actual sparring, since nobody actually tries to hit each other. which to me is great — walang patalbugan. plus, the beginners can actually “dance” with the more advanced capoeristas, or even the instructor.
three: that it’s so beautiful to watch is quite inspiring. in other group exercise classes a.k.a aerobics (well, the ones i’ve tried), motivation to get better and practice more doesn’t seem quite so strong. i mean, you don’t really try to achieve the perfect grapevine, do you?
one of the biggest surprises for me was this huge kid who was totally red in the face all throughout the class (like me). but in the roda, whoa! ang galing niya, cartwheels and all! i thought to myself, syet kung kaya niya, kaya ko rin! i want to do cartwheels too!
i am even more inspired to lose weight just so that there’s simply less of me to lift when i attempt the acrobatics. hell, not even the acrobatics. i can’t even hop from my left to my right foot while squatting.
i wish i could attend the weekday sessions at the polo club. the more you train, the faster you improve. but… augh. work work work.
four: everyone’s buff bodies are really inspiring, too.
demmit. someday, i too will do headstands in white pants and a bikini top. but in the meantime, i will go on huffing and puffing, ginga-ing and kicking away.
oh yeah, and i gotta nurse my poor legs back into shape. they’re absolutely killing me.
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another glory be: the hordes are gone. i can put my jun-jun posts back up now.
Sometimes…
… being in a long distance relationship can be a real… yeah. that.
… drastic spikes in your site traffic can be really unnerving.
… i get praning and wonder whether it’s actually ok for me have personal preferences about my work.
… you just gotta do what you gotta do.
… you have to let someone drag you off your sorry butt to exercise (capoeira with my sister on saturday. good luck to us.)
… you just wonder.
Yawn, stretch
it’s another rip-roaring weekend over here in my little sphere of existence. half the day lolling around in bed, then out to the grocery and book store, back home to munch on popcorn while re-reading bridget jones’ diary and covering a couple of new books in plastic (which, in all seriousness, is something i’ve been dying to do for months).
the highlight of my day was probably finding the perfect afternoon tea party dress at a new ukay-ukay. it’s a soft, drapey wrap dress with a deep v neck. it’s not only light and summery, but it fits my most important tea party criteria: it must hide all signs of dessert bingeing. the drapey quality of the dress is perfect for that purpose. i love ukays.
oh, and my visit to national bookstore. i felt a sudden rush of nostalgia when i stepped into the bookstore we all grew up with/in and realized i haven’t been in a national bookstore since college, when i had to buy school stuff.
i also ended up buying myself a new book (malcolm gladwell‘s the tipping point) within ten minutes, something i’ve found difficult to do lately at big bookstores like fully booked — the selection is so overwhelmingly large (with so much bad mixed with the good) that all the back cover blurbs start to sound the same. (i say “overwhelmingly large” because i grew up with a bookstore where half the space was devoted to office and school supplies, and not books.)
really exciting stuff, huh? the perfect complement to all the hullabaloo that was going on in the city yesterday. yes, the city. not the nation. far as i’m concerned the “coup” was strictly a makati thing. inquirer columnist manuel l. quezon III calls the state of emergency “a state of panic.” i’m inclined to agree.
Crap as it happens
it's time for our nation's annual exploitable holiday. we just never learn, do we?
How sweet it is
… to be invited to a tea party!
two of my favorite bloggers (dessert lover lori baltazar and ‘streetwalker’ carlos celdran) have cooked up the confection convention of the century… and i’m going to be part of it! all because i’m kapalmuks enough to email a total stranger for invites! haha! (well, not a total stranger — my sister knows lori from college carpool.)
what tea party, you may ask? check it out here.
a parade of manila’s best desserts, 59 new people to befriend, and an opportunity to meet the people behind two of my daily must-reads. all that and a raffle too! i simply can’t believe my good fortune.
incidentally, it seems i’m on some kind of online winning streak. like a true jun-jun fanatic, i won a jun-jun shirt up for grabs on a US fan’s blog. i would die before actually wearing the shirt to the office or an event though. i’ll just be super kilig knowing that jun-jun and i have the same shirt!
but anyway.
a tea party! a tea party! whatever will i wear? and however will i keep from bursting out of it?
… to know that i can visit marlon on his birthday!
seismic shifts in the world of primetime television have suddenly, miraculously, created a vacuum in my summer workload. all the nail-biting and schedule-juggling i’ve been doing to get time off for my annual lah-lah land junket has now been rendered irrelevant.
i’m genuinely happy about this development because it’s not just fabulous for my downtime, but also because i truly believe it’s in the best interest of the show concerned — as well as of the network as a whole.
but i’m especially happy because this also means i’m going to get to have a holy week vacay! which shall it be: desperate housewiving in singapore or tagging along on marlon’s business trip to bombay?
lalalalalala!
the strumpet speaks 