Just because it’s December, I’m sure we’re going to see a lot of trade show exhibits at the malls. The holiday season is the perfect time for entrepreneurs to show off their products because, for one, people are a lot more generous and shopping-happy. I’m sure we’re going to see more and more hallways get lined up with exhibit booths and tables and tables of goods. Even at our office, I expect to see bazaars and booths to show up anytime this month.

If you’re someone planning to put up a trade show exhibit, you can find table covers and table top displays online. Personally, I like to visit booths with a strong aesthetic pull, so it’s probably pertinent that exhibitors be concerned about the overall presentation and quality of the products they are offering. You can have banners, drapes, cabinets even.

Speaking of which, I haven’t been to any major fair of late. I might have to come out of hibernation and check out the malls one of these days.

I’ve been reading shooting scripts of some of my favorite TV shows and it’s increasingly being clear to me what I’d really like to do. For a living, hopefully, but more so for myself. No big surprise here, I would like to write. I’d like to be someone working behind the scenes of a good TV show or a movie or a musical. I don’t know where I’m going to start with that but just thinking about it makes me happy already.  

Reading episode shooting scripts, I was amazed how much input the writers have on the nuances of a particular scene. It’s not just about writing dialogues but even expressions and actions, which is not to say that actors don’t really have any creative input. The coming together of it all, the merging of talents and ideas, culminating in a single work of art for all the world to see, is something I’d like to be a part of.

Take my recent fascination with Buffy the Vampire Slayer, for example. [I know, it's an old show, that's why it's prominently featured at datedthings.com.] Here’s what Stephanie Zacharek of Salon.com said about the show:

It’s pointless to spend much time wrestling with the question of whether TV can be art (of course it can be and often isn’t). But there have been many days when, after a particularly potent “Buffy” episode, I’ve found myself feeling vaguely off my game, my mind clouded with a gauzy, muted sense of dread. When a show jostles your equilibrium to the point of haunting your days or robbing you of sleep, when it finds a place in your imagination that also rubs, hard, at the core of who you think you really are, it starts to look like something more than what we simply call TV.

 

To be as effective a writer as those who are rained down by such compliments must be something so fulfilling. Another writer for Salon, Joyce Millman, described the show as

Buffy is an ode to misfits, a healing vision of the weird, the different and the marginalized finding their place in the world and, ultimately, saving it. … the show’s central themes [are] female empowerment, destiny vs. free will, the search for identity and the many varieties of families.

I agree to everything that has been said, but what I most appreciated about Buffy are the hidden and not-so-hidden emotional riches. You can look at it and go, “Wow! Tiny girls saving the world, cool!” and see nothing but that, and that would have been one objective – to have people enjoy watching the action unfold. But for those who look deeper into the many layers of meaning, the allegories, and the metaphors, the series has provided an entire universe of thought, so much so that scholars wrote tons of papers about it.  That’s what I love about the use of subtext; you can have one character go rummaging for an acne treatment, for example, but what’s really happening there in the scene is something bigger (like the demonstration of self-loathing perhaps?). Of course, there are times when subtext needs to be translated to text so as not to alienate the audience, and there’s a certain amount of satisfaction a viewer gets from being proven right when such things come into order.

There’s something about the play with words that fascinates me. Joss Whedon, the creator of Buffy, was described as someone who “writes people who are self-deprecating, pop-culture savvy, madly in love with wordplay, quick-witted, terrified of sounding pompous and with wells of emotion lurking beneath a shiny, protective layer of self-aware sarcasm” (Kristi Turnquist, The Oregonian). Which is why despite being so late in the game, I enjoyed his show immensely. I’m twisted like that. But at least it gave me my lightbulb moment, so I couldn’t ask for a better reward for spending hours and hours in front of the TV than that.

So what makes a show a cult hit? What is it about some TV shows that garner a cult following – devoted fans, sometimes overly so, that convene on message boards, chat rooms, and even on conventions to share mutual interest and devotion about a particular media – as opposed to others that have a more mainstream appeal? I won’t really go into the psychology of that, although I must say that I find that fans of The X-Files and Buffy the Vampire Slayer are among the smartest ones around and they’re demographically diverse, too (though you may think I’m only saying that because I’m a fan of both). Anyway, if anything, that is what make these shows good franchises. They may have been off the air for years now but they live on through DVDs, online fan discussions, comics, and even in movies. We haven’t even considered how any franchise can spawn related products – toys, action figures, costumes, books, etc. It spells big money for the entertainment big wigs who are deft enough to play the obsession of the most ardent fans to jump on any franchise opportunity. That’s why we know Twilight is now a huge movie franchise, as much as the Harry Potter movies are never forgotten.

Now if Fox will only give a nod to XF3 and Joss Whedon will seriously consider writing a fantastic script to a BtVS movie soon.

I so need a tall cup of coffee right now. I woke up rather late, when I promised a friend that we’ll go play badminton early this morning, so I’m a bit cranky. More so when I realized I don’t have my stock of instant coffee at home. I can’t last a day without coffee now. They say when you start getting headaches because you haven’t had coffee, that means you’re addicted to caffeine. Oh, well. I just wish I have that Rancilio Silvia espresso machine at home. Better go to work now to get my fix.

I skipped my supposed overtime work, yet again, last Saturday. I didn’t regret it, though, because it turned out to be one of the best Saturdays ever. Well, at least in my badminton universe. 

See, in our home court – what we call our regular badminton place –  people there have formed a really tight group. In reality, in a sort of fragmented kind of way because it’s like a big family with several small cliques. But when there are special occassions, like birthdays and others, a lot of them are generous enough to share their joys with the entire court. Things like that usually happen on Saturday nights. Last Saturday was a blast! I arrived there around 6 pm and 1 hour into playing, dinner was announced. Lots of food for everyone, drinks, cake. and even alcohol (tequila and beer). Heck there was even a guy passing slices of apples around. The best part? There was a videoke machine for everyone to use. The court fee? Php80, play all you can. I’m sure those girls using badminton as a replacement for dietpills are not at all bothered that we had so much to eat.

My apartment has this small window that is directly across where my TV set is located. Don’t you just hate it when it gets so bright during the day that you can’t see what you’re watching? I need to look for bamboo shades at ACE soon. You know those things that look like wooded blinds? Last time I checked, they don’t really cost that much.

I’ve been doing the same thing for almost a decade now. My job, I mean. Lately, I’ve demonstrated quite an increasingly embarassing show of delinquency, for someone less thick skinned than I am; I don’t mean to say I’m proud. Just, I’m bored. Which is probably something I shouldn’t really be writing here because, one, someone from work might get wind of it and fire me, and second, I’m ruining myself for future job prospects.   

I’ve been interviewing friends, asking them about their plans in the future. Misery really loves company. Most of them are waiting for a Small Business Opportunity – of course, almost always something related to what they are passionate about. One would like to make handbags, another wants a Hotel Business or a Fast Food Business, and still another wants to be an events coordinator. Nifty ideas, all. But what about me? I don’t think I have the heart and the mind for business. Besides, what kind of business would I be interested in? A coffee shop? A bookstore? A badminton and tennis center? That’s kind of a stretch.

Now if I have the money, that would be an entirely different story. I am all for investing just as long as somebody will take care of everything else. But that’s not so smart either, eh?! See, I’m not a business person. Darn.

Rubber Stamp Champ is a Web site that offers a wide variety of, you guessed it, rubber stamps! They’ve just launched a new site design which makes for easier navigation. I remember when I was in grade school, my friends and I used to collect notebooks without grids so we can “stamp” them with different fun and cute designs we can find from the stores. Different ink colors help, too. I used to keep a rubber stamp or two in my school bag then. I didn’t realize there’s still some use of such things now, especially at work, until one day while idly skimming through a project update memo, I noticed the custom logo at the bottom of the page. So the site offers custom rubber stamps, clothing stamps, electronic rubber stamps, embossers, inks, stamp pads, and basically everything you need for such purposes. The site is easy to navigate, with the links to all products at the left side of the page. Contact information and relevant details, like free shipping, for example, can also easily be accounted for. My favorite product is the Home Stamp Kit , which comes with a program CD with demonstration video. It’s perfect for those who love to make cards, scrap books, and for hobbyist of all kinds.

I was watching an episode of How I Met Your Mother yesterday and they have this story about how one day you find yourself not as fit nor in shape as you want yourself to be. I had to laugh at the gags, like Ted (the leading man) feeling stress and tired after brisk walking a few feet, because most of the time I feel the same way, too. So the gang decided that they will join the gym (one thing that I’ve been planning to do again for a long time now) only to be disheartened or diverted away from actually working out by an acutely strict female trainer, a muscular trainer who is not really a trainer, a former flame, or Ted being simply to lazy to stretch his muscles.

There are times when I fear that I may have hormonal imbalance, especially at certain times of the month. But mostly I suppose my feeling lethargic is caused by not enough exercise and an unhealthy diet. It’s hard sometimes to assess yourself if you’re just being paranoid and hypochondriac or if you’re putting off seeing the doctor when you actually have to. Speaking of hormone therapy, I remember hearing from a friend that such treatments sometimes cause dramatic weight increases, so I can only hope I won’t need to have that anytime in the future (we’re not going to talk about menopause here; that’s still too far). There are alternatives like natural hormones, but I’ve read that drugs are not necessarily safe just because they’re “natural.” Oh, well.

I registered in the Fully Booked Web site and now I’m receiving updates from their email newsletter tool. It’s actually nice, not much “spammy,” and the updates are really interesting. I almost got to convince a few friends to attend a book signing with me once but that didn’t pan out.

Anyway, earlier this week, I received their latest e-mail newsletter and it has some good stuff about the upcoming movie Twilight. It comes with an online survey tool – for Twilight fans, there’s a contest for you. It runs until December 21. Up for grabs are Twilight: Complete Illustrated Movie Companion and Twilight Collector’s Edition. The whole package looks great so check out the official site and look for the link to “twilightraffle.”