la lluvia

tengo gusto de él cuando llueve. i like it when it rains. tengo gusto de despertar a él. i like waking up to it. i like the cool that invades my room, making the airconditioning unnecessary and next to useless. inutil. i like the fog sticking to the windows, the coldness of which seep through your skin, stealing your warmth in the natural laws of heat transfer, as soon as you dare to touch the once clear glass, now beaded with drops of rain. some, succumbing to gravity and falling, bumping those on its way down to form a bigger clear sphere. more certain of going down. abajo. siempre abajo.

mis sentidos quiero siempre la lluvia. my senses always romanced the rain. and i am forever eager for its return the moment it withdraws. always greedy for it to stay. eternally lustful of it when it is away.constantly and decidedly selfish to those who do not share my sentiments. it is, after all, the closest piece of heaven i can attain as a prisoner of gravity. heaven in so small a package. tan pequeño un paquete.

it is to my ignominy that i admit that there had been a time that i wished for the rain not to come. i wished for it not to find me, caught so unaware as to be drenched and helpless and eventually shivering from cold. my feet, that of which i am so conscious and careful about are reduced to nails whose underneath pale a violent violet. the arch no longer white and creamy, but a lump of veins threatening to bulge themselves out of my skin. una qué vergüenza. shame, that i have to admit all those, even to myself. i had come to doubt that perhaps the reason that i love the rain is probably because i never saw both its sides. when i was in highschool, i was driven to and from school. and i never had the inconvenience or the adventure of commuting. in college, my dormitory was but a pedestrian cross away from school and i had discovered to my convenience, routes that shielded me from the rain. i had loved. but i doubted that love because for a moment, i thought i only did love the rain because i saw only, as i rarely do, the good side of it. i thought that perhaps, i had nursed that thought until it grew into a full affair.

out of the two years since i left college, i had to commute via the mrt then the lrt just to get to school. where i would spend two hours on my lecture classes and stay for just a while to catch up on the latest developments of the BIR project i was assigned to. and ever since the tropical depression, my rides became an adventure. a game of hide and seek between me and the rain. that which i loved. i became wary at the signs of rain at the sky. i became irritable when i got caught in its wake. and i finally admitted that perhaps, i had loved blindly.

and i finally admitted to cy that perhaps he was right. that perhaps, i only loved the rain because of my one-sided perspective of it. most people would gloat over a victory. spread it thin until it becomes inappropriate to the point of irritating and rub it in. pero no el. no el. not him. not my cy. he, well we, bought a car. his family's car more specifically since bob was planning on buying a new one when he gets home come august. a 2000 Civic model of Honda make, manual transmission just as we both like it to be. it's second hand but it's well maintained and i have no complaints about its engine. a few scratches and scrapes here and there but it's of no real consequence. no es importante. what matters is that cy and i can go where we need to be, safe and comfortable. driving each other around. it's our biggest conjugal property as of date.

pero esto no está sobre ése. it's not about the car at all. it's about romance. and the infinite chances that exist despite the smallest of possibilities. to cy i am thankful. because he gave me back the rain. and i nothing if humbled.

kudos to you my cy. te quiero para siempre.

Son of ..

Mac. That's exactly what it means. In the realm of names, Mac is used in family names to indicate that you are the son of . You know those posts where people try to enrich your education by giving you a vast history of something? Like the history of names for example? Well this is not one of those posts.

Far from the depths of general knowledge, this is actually nothing but a shallow status report. Brief at its best and if not, descriptive at the least.

So I'm still trying to get myself used to Mac OS. Being a Windows user ever since I got my hands on a PC, I'm telling you this is no trivial task. Learning is hard. But I guarantee you that unlearning things that you are so used to that they have already become second nature is harder. This is so reminiscent of my fumbling Dvorak days where I traded in my Qwerty keys back last year's summer. Now, the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog is equivalent to yd. 'gcjt xpr,b urq hgmlo rk.p yd. na;f eri Completely keyboard gibberish wouldn't you say?

Anyway, taking a stand requires sacrifices - a lot if you are swimming against the current. And the current is Qwerty and Windows. Here's a typical scenario whenever Cy and I go to a lan shop to kill people. Not actually kill them per se' but pawn their heads for gold in a game called Defense of the Ancients, more popularly known to the masses as DOTA. So anyway, the moment we get to time in, the first thing we do (almost like automatons) is to go to regional settings and add Dvorak as a keyboard input scheme. Why not use Dvorak for our hotkeys, changing every hotkey would require some hacks on several files and besides, the convenient remnant of our Qwerty is surprisingly enough to press the right hotkeys. Translation: we're too lazy to edit the right files and change them back before we leave as courtesy to the next user.

So away from my digression and back to my point (it seems that lately I've been having a lot of 'points' and I'm beginning to wonder if it's a good thing or a bad thing). Trying to ditch my Windows habits and trying to crawl my way in to getting what I want done is sluggish. But there are improvements. I'm trying to get a lot of materials, podcasts, videos etc that would help me jumpstart my Mac prowess (note to self: riiiiiiighhhhhhhht). Oh well, pain is pain if anything at all, I still have my desktop pc booted with Windows. Anyhoo, I did say that I adapt, easily.

it must be christmas

Christmas came a bit too early this year. What started out as a half hearted joke materialized into one of the items in my wishlister list. Actually not just one item. But the item. Nieve blanco pura. White snow. Pure, white snow.

I have learned at the age of 12 that Santa Claus was a myth. Demystified, I struggled between telling my parents just how disillusioned I was about their deception and trying to manage a look of surprise and glee whenever I opened the presents Santa Claus supposedly sent me for being a darling angel all year round.

Ten years after learning that, I learned something else. Oh yes, Santa Claus was and still remains a myth. And I don't know if I should spoil some child's notion of christmas every year by whispering that there is no Santa Claus or just leave it to time. Surely, they'll find out like I did that the big fat guy with rosy cheeks dressed in red is nothing but a figment of someone's drugged imagination. The guy who popularized santa claus was probably himself delusional bordering on the psychopathic who thought of this stupid idea of creating a overly cheerful person that took a fancy wearing red in ink. And the world of literature, fickle, fickle world, gobbled the whole idea hook line and sinker. *Burp*

But there's this thing with fiction and the characters that proliferate in it. Whether or not they are true or not in real life is beside the point. Because it is in the nature of literature, of whatever form it takes, to embed the characters of real people in heroes and heroines, villains and supporting characters and the strangers that litter the figurative world. Our traits become their own. And we learn to relate to them like real people. Because there are real people behind the characters of ink.

So what's my point? My point is, there is still no Santa Claus. He is but a popularized fat geezer that wears red and is forgotten the days before we even take down our christmas trees and it's stupid to believe that he exists. But there are real people. And there are real people blessed with kind hearts and generosity that share what they have with others no matter the season. There is cy's family that welcome me with smiles and warm meals every time I come and visit. There is my family who never grow tired of sharing a laugh with me or two no matter how silly. There is Cousteau who despite of making a mess of the apartment ( I swear I don't know where he gets all the news and tissue papers from), is glad to see me every time I come home and is not afraid to show it. There too are strangers who show me the beauty and divinity of being human with an unexpected kindness. And of course there is cy who perhaps is the epitome of a stupid man that never tires of giving ^^.

Today, my santa claus is without a doubt, my Tita Aida and Tito Mario. Why? They, with no questions asked, bought me item number 1 in my wishlister, a MacBook. In fact, I'm writing this entry now using the MacBook and I'm telling you, I still don't know whether I'm to laugh or cry or both or alternate through paroxysms.

What started out as an all too verbal self-talk overheard by my dad became this. This entry because of a MacBook that my aunt and uncle bought for me.

Summer has gone and it's raining cats and dogs because of the tropical depression and the hurricane that it brought here in the Philippines. But it might as well be Christmas all over again.

I never knew that it snows here in the Philippines. Did you? Anyway, now I let the pictures do the talking.

look at my screen! yes, i'm blogging away

now will you look at that?

Ditto.

don't mind the messy bookshelf at the back. general cleaning is scheduled in the pm

isn't cousteau adorable?

Thanks to Cy for playing the paparazzi. More pictures will be uploaded on my flicker account soon!

the world is a blur. and most of the time, i come and go like one through the ticking of the clock. not that i'm complaining. there is time. but most of the time, not enough of it to suit my taste. so i compromise. i cut short my sleeping hours. and i also multitask as best as i could: i recall my lesson or listen to a podcast as i commute to school, i try to get some shut eye in the not too comfortable fx ride from school to work, and i try to fix schedules while i work. my weekends are flooded with schedules and if i happen to be free, i cannot forget the class' pile of papers that do nothing but just that: pile up.

there are those that are there whether you come and go. there are others who you only chance upon once you come and go. and there are those that never seem to chance upon you because you come and go. to the first i'm more than grateful, to the second delighted and to the third, saddened.
pura tonteria, pura sabiduria