12:44 AM Time Machine
How much of the minutiae of our lives is lost to us everyday? Memory isn't perfect, even though some people can remember what they had for a midnight snack two years ago today. Our thoughts and actions are transient and fleeting; physical evidence of them ever having existed lies only in the effects they cause, or the artifacts we create because of them.

Who would think ordinary graffiti on tables could carry so much history? At one time or another, these words and doodles meant something to someone.

I remember my first contact with school graffiti. At my high school we wrote on our desks at the risk of getting demerits (accumulate enough demerits and you get detention). My first day of class in college, we were waiting for Philosophy I to begin and I noticed the numerous scrawlings on my armchair. One in particular tickled my funny bone: "Push button to eject teacher." Beside it was a crude drawing of what was supposed to be a button. I was to encounter variations of this throughout my undergrad stay at the university, and I even made my own versions. Needless to say they were very amusing diversions whenever my attention span began to wander.

Then there's the bathroom wall graffiti, bearing questions like "How do I tell my crush I like him?" People actually added answers to these everyday, ranging from the frank "Just tell him" to the raunchy--I think I'll stop myself right there. I think I found their advice somewhat useful whenever someone would ask me a similar question, sheltered being that I am.

But graffiti could (and still can) also put me in a thoughtful mood. I am particularly susceptible to "I love you [insert name here]!" They make me wonder what happened to those people who felt such strong attraction to another person that they just had to write it on something more durable than paper. And if the etching is almost faded I find myself asking if the feeling had stood the test of time.

Things like these--graffiti on walls and tables, journal entries--they can only take you backwards through time. They can't tell you what eventually happened, unless someone managed to write a postmortem. But they reveal to us a kind of freeze-framed blurry single shot of what was going on when they were created. They are, in a sense, time machines.

08:42 PM Missing Mandy in Manila
Over the past few years, the crop of international musicians coming to the Philippines has steadily risen. That, or I just never noticed whenever Jim Brickman or other jazz people were in Manila. I'm more of the pop temperament. But anyway, there have been some tickets I would have killed for: the Corrs, Mariah Carey (who gave a one-night concert here last week), and of course, Mandy Moore. Needless to say the whole nation is still hung over from A Walk to Remember.

Well, I didn't have to end someone's life for tickets to the mania of Mandy in Manila, since the day before her scheduled MTV Music Summit appearance last Friday, some tickets practically fell from the sky. My aunt has friends in, uh, places. Ü

So, my sister, a friend, and I hied off to Fort Bonifacio, but we couldn't enter the concert grounds because the tickets were still with our aunt. Unfortunately at about the same time, heavy traffic was slowly strangling the rest of Metro Manila. Perhaps it was because the rest of Luzon was cramming into Metro Manila trying to see Ms. Moore herself. Whole busloads arrived at the Fort Open Field, and the queue to get in was something out of Matrix Reloaded's Zion rave scene--complete with moist body heat and salty sweat, except no one was dancing.

Mandy was on her 5th song when we finally busted free and got in. We felt like cheering, but mostly we were weak-kneed and exhausted. And then all of a sudden she was saying "Thank you so much, Manila!"

What?!? It was over? Other singers began performing, but we just stood around in shock, not really listening to them. We'd spent 45 minutes rubbing sweaty shoulders and other body parts with people we did not know, only to miss the performance we'd come to see.

It turns out our difficulty getting in was caused by severe security measures. President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo had arrived to make a very, very brief appearance onstage only to brag that Malacañang had helped sponsor the Music Summit. And that was it.

Disappointed, we left very quickly and then had cocktails at Greenbelt 3's SoulFood, courtesy of my dad. It wasn't so bad; at least we had fun. But "baby I'm craving for you/ I'm missing you like candy, yeah yeah."

12:25 PM Am I Starting to Look Like Sydney?
Talk about Providence... With no provocation from me whatsover, my mom ordered the whole first and second seasons of Alias! She doesn't watch the show and doesn't know I follow it (religiously) every week, but she ordered it anyway. Ü I am so very happy. Now I'll just have to wait until after the Muslim holiday of Eid al-Fitr: the guy who brings DVDs to her office will be able to drop by then.

In the meantime, I've joined several fanlistings, which I've linked to from Rebel Heart; it doesn't hurt to show your love for media products, tee-hee-hee. Not to mention it brings added clickage to your site...

02:41 PM Email My Heart
I didn't know my email form wasn't working. Thankfully, I've fixed it, so you can now contact me via email. Just click on the "email form" link in my About section.

01:27 PM The World Pulled Over Our Eyes
People tell me I'm a tad overloaded for a fulltime master's student, and I think I'm beginning to agree with them. All four subjects I'm taking this semester seem to have a lot of requirements, and a massive reading list! Last semester's brutality seems to pale in comparison to this.

So let's speak of other things! Like, for instance, Matrix Revolutions, which my family and I watched last night. Now, I don't really mind spoilers, so prior to watching it I read other people's reviews of the film and began to think it wasn't worth watching on the big screen. Matrix Reloaded hadn't lived up to my expectations either (the fight scenes were just too long, and Neo+Trinity were just too much!), so I definitely would have argued against spending the P100+ ticket fee to watch Revolutions at Glorietta 4. Then, God blessed us with three free tickets to watch any movie at any SM branch, so we just had to cough up the additional 61 pesos to buy another ticket. Ü

I must say I was pleasantly surprised by the film. It surpassed Reloaded in terms of effects, storyline, and fight scenes. Of course the Filipino in me rebelled to see characters (whom I'd grown to love in the duration of the film) die, but that's that. But somehow I regret watching the latter two films of this trilogy they've turned The Matrix into. The first film was the best.

11:00 PM Absentee Brain
This post will just be a short one... Today, my teacher did not show up. For the first day of classes, this is usual. Hoo boy, what a waste of time. And so is this post.

10:52 AM No More Drama
I've determined that instead of doing the "woe-is-me" type of entries, from now on I'm going to try to be more upbeat. It might be harder for me, but at least it'll provide you folks with some light reading. After all, what is blog-reading than an exercise in wasting time trying to get to know a teeny part of what people project of themselves online? Ü

I should probably say that I'm something of a Friendster addict--but these days, who isn't? Roughly 1 out of 10 people I know doesn't have a Friendster account. Everyone else is in my Friends list. Ü Friendster's part of the reason why I wasn't updating my site in October, and Friendster's the reason why I'm having difficulty finding subjects on which to journal about. Simply put, I'm more interested now in what other people have to say than what I have to say.

I'd say that's an improvement in my relationships, but I'm also finding that in real life, I'm more tongue-tied than usual. It's because I realized that when I do talk, it's about me, Me, ME! And I sometimes monopolize the conversation. What a bore I must be to talk to! So, nowadays I'd rather just listen during a conversation. It's a good thing when the person you're talking to has a lot of things to say, but it's a bad thing when you're both not very outgoing and outspoken people. Ü

08:58 PM Semester, shmester
Once again I'm on the cusp of a new semester. Argh.

The sad fact is, this will be my last semester as a student proper. Next semester I have to enroll in my thesis subject and will become some sort of researcher. More on this tomorrow because I now will collapse due to extreme fatigue. Ü

06:08 PM Alms for Noelle
Check out my Amazon WishList if you have the time (and money). Ü

Update: I just realized I have two Amazon WishLists. Here's the other one.

09:41 PM Honey, I'm Home!
Okay, so I wasn't back in October. It was one of those semesters that seem to drag on endlessly, and then all of a sudden the deadlines jam up against one another and... there you go. Ü It was a sleepless first half of October, to say the least. And then the second half of October was spent recuperating. You could say I was on an unofficial hiatus, and I'm sorry you had to keep coming back to the same entries that whole month, with nary a new letter to grace the page.

Well, I'm back now. Here's to hoping next semester won't be as stressful.