I’m still trying to find a way to change the font size of this new template. Forgive me if I’m too lazy to experiment for now. I’m not even too happy with this template but, again, I’m too lazy to look for something else and I’m tired of the previous one. I had to keep the green because of the sidebar widgets I had already set to green. Bear with me for a bit and I’ll try to find something awesome later. My one concern about this look is that the font is too small and too crowded. It’s not as if even I have a good vision. I’m actually straining to read my own posts! Ok, enough ranting because this is my own fault anyway. What really gives me pain is the fact that I broke my reading glasses. I’m used to taking off my contacts whenever I get home from work so I can sort of rest my eyes from them, but now I have to keep them on until I’m actually going to bed. When I get brave enough, I’ll inquire about eye refractive surgery. I heard it really works, although I’m a bit doubtful about regaining 20/20 vision.

The Dark Knight has reportedly reached (and exceeded) the $400 million mark in less than 20 days. I actually thought that it is fast becoming the top-grossing film of all time until I’ve read that Titanic’s worldwide box office gross was $1.84 billion. Wow! Now that one seems unassailable.

Probably the biggest draw the Batman movie had is that it was Heath Ledger’s last completed film. His superb performance as The Joker is now being speculated to possibly get him a posthumous Oscar. Too bad he couldn’t see the fruit of his hard work nor enjoy the wealth this movie could’ve provided him. Speaking of his wealth, his daughter Matilda is reportedly entitled to his $20 million fortune even if he wasn’t able to list her on his will. I wonder how Michelle Williams will handle this. Will she claim it or even get an Advance on inheritance on her daughter’s behalf? Ledger’s former partner, Williams, is now rumored to be getting close with his bestfriend who’s now acting very much like a father figure to the little girl.

After months of postponing going to my hometown, I was finally able to make the trip last Sunday. As cliché as it may sound, there really is no place like home. Yes, Dorothy, that is correct. I dreaded the four-hour travel, so I brought my old but trusty i-Pod. The battery died on me after 1 hour so I switched to my phone, which thankfully is loaded with mp3s and is fully charged. The sound from a portable video game a co-passenger was playing, which made me think of buying playstation 3 for my brother someday, and from the TV show being shown in the bus notwithstanding, I was able to focus on my music while enjoying the familiar scenery. There’s nothing like a long trip home to give you time to reminisce and get all sentimental. Well, at least it always has such an effect on me. I may have another life now in another town, another city, but my old bed, no matter how shabby, will always be a little more comforting than anything else I can buy for myself these days. Call it roots, call it a complete sense of belongingness – that’s what will always bring me home despite the things I’d rather run away from. It’s only too bad I can’t stay longer. On my trip back to Manila, I was regarding the city streets and the familiar corners of the place I call my own now, and although I know I do not wish to be anywhere else, I still wonder sometimes if life had regarded me differently and gave me an entirely different path to follow. Would life have been better, or simpler, or maybe fuller? I may never know. I’m never one to make room for regrets anyway.

I tried ignoring the reminder in my blog dashboard. “This is version 2.5. Please upgrade to version 2.6 now,” for as long as I could. I did once and things got awry so I downgraded back to version 2.5 because of problems with permalinks; I can’t change back to the default structure because of SEO stuff. Maintaining a hosted blog can be such a headache that if I’ll make a total of it, I actually lost days of sleep over tweaking programming codes I don’t understand at all. But it’s rather satisfying to be able to make things work, albeit not fully understanding how you did it. That’s thanks to the resources available from the Internet. There’s actually a free WordPress WordCamp coming up next month; I’m not going though. I wonder if they have promotional pens for participants. I think it might be cool to collect such things.

Anyway, if you’ve upgraded to WordPress 2.6 and you’re having problems with loading the comments page and with the permalinks, go to the settings page, permalinks, and try placing any attribute (just don’t leave them blank) to the “Category” and “Tag” buttons. Hope this helps.

I’m not trying to shove this movie down everyone’s throats. Well, maybe a little bit (reminder: August 13 is the opening day of The X-Files: I Want to Believe). General reception to the new X-Files movie has been lukewarm but from everything I’ve read, it’s apparent that the movie is a gift to fans (read: X-phile “shippers”). Granted, some who might have been expecting a grander cinematic offering like the first film, Fight the Future, were disappointed to see a smaller-scale thriller with underdeveloped plot. The X file, they say, took a backseat to character study and the exploration of Mulder and Scully’s relationship. It’s The X-Files at its core – the ever-precarious balance between faith and science. It’s a love story, although in the true X-Files sense (ambiguous and repressed). I’ve spoiled myself with the actual movie clips that fans have uploaded at YouTube and I realized that although the words and the looks that these two gave each other brought out the totally squealing fangirl in me, I don’t think anybody who’s not familiar with the show will understand why those seemingly typical scenes that depict two people in a relationship are pivotal in a decade-long wait for tying up loose ends.
MSR, the Mulder-Scully relationship as fans call it, has been nothing like anything depicted on TV before The X-Files and nothing ever since, partly owing to the actors’ much-raved-about chemistry and partly owing to Chris Carter’s (the series creator) initial insistence to keep the two characters’ relationship strictly platonic and professional. I am watching a season 3 episode as I am typing this post, The War of the Coprophages. Without getting into the plot that pretty much revolved around metallic killer cockroaches, I love this episode because Mulder gets to flirt with a scientist named Bambi while Scully acts jealous and territorial. As if to emphasize the silliness of this episode, my favorite (spooky) duo ended up both covered in dung and insulting each other. It was goofy and funny and reminded me of classic exchanges such as the phone conversation below.

Mulder (sitting in a car parked in nowhere land): Did you ever look up into a night sky and feel certain that not only was something up there, but it was looking down on you at that exact same moment and was just as curious about you as you are about it?

Scully (at home, cleaning her gun) : Mulder, I think the only thing more fortuitous than the emergence of life on this planet is that through purely random laws of biological evolution, an intelligence as complex as ours ever emanated from it. The very idea of intelligent alien life is not only astronomically improbable, but, at its most basic level, downright anti-Darwinian.

Mulder: Scully, what are you wearing?

Oh, the humanity! Have you ever seen a more geeky pair than these two?

I signed up for regular newsletters from Jason Robert Brown’s official site and got an update last night. Scanning through his new blog entry on “The Perils of an Online Life,” I found this bit:

Within a couple of months, though, it seemed that everyone on Friendster was actually from the Philippines. Also, whenever I told anyone I was on Friendster, they said, “Dude, Friendster sucks, you have to get a MySpace page!” So I looked at MySpace. MySpace gave me a total friggin’ headache. I hated it then, I still hate it now. I especially hate how nobody has a real name, it’s all PattiFan and imatosser and BwAyFaCe, like we’re all living in a comic book. I made my decision and I felt comfortable with it: I didn’t want to present myself online in that particular forum. Too messy, too weird, too insidious. So no MySpace. And Friendster was increasingly expecting me to speak Tagalog. It seemed my social networking phase had ended.

…

All of which is to say: if you’re a Friend of mine on Facebook and your last name is somewhere near the beginning of the alphabet, it’s been a really fun ride and I hope we’ll figure out how to connect again soon. Or, as they say on Friendster: pasalamatan ka dahil sa ay sinusulat akin kaibigan.

Funny. But I also noticed that Friendster is Filipino haven. But, hey, JRB, some Filipinos with Friendster accounts, such as myself, are ardent admirers of your works. By the way, if you’ll need a Tagalog translator, I’ll be more than glad to help.

On a related note, I received this SMS from a friend, something that I think I can really look forward to :

Sprint Productions and 9 Works, Inc., invites you to watch SONGS FOR A NEW WORLD, an Off-Broadway musical by Jason Robert Brown featuring your favorite theater actors: Carla Guevarra-Laforteza, Caisa Borromeo, Felix Rivera, Anna Santamaria, and Harold Cruz, directed by Robbie Guevarra. August 24, Sunday, 8 pm, at the Carlos P. Romulo Auditorium, RCBC Plaza, Makati City. Please contact 0906-3315961 for details.

I’ve written about this musical revue on my other blog.

I am too alone in the world, and yet not alone enough
to make every hour holy.
I am too small in the world, and yet not tiny enough
just to stand before you like a thing,
dark and shrewd.
I want my will, and I want to be with my will
as it moves towards deed;
and in those quiet, somehow hesitating times,
when something is approaching,
I want to be with those who are wise
or else alone.
I want always to be a mirror that reflects your whole being,
and never to be too blind or too old
to hold your heavy, swaying image.
I want to unfold.
Nowhere do I want to remain folded,
because where I am bent and folded, there I am lie.
And I want my meaning
true for you. I want to describe myself
like a painting that I studied
closely for a long, long time,
like a word I finally understood,
like the pitcher of water I use every day ,
like the face of my mother,
like a ship
that carried me
through the deadliest storm of all.

Ranier Maria Rilke

From The Book of Hours

Titanic tiebreaker:

This Sports Illustrated article sums up accurately, and rather emotionally, what Rafael Nadal’s win over Roger Federer at Wimbledon, so often called “the cathedral of tennis,” meant to Roger’s fans. His reference to an old New York Times article, Federer as a Religious Experience, also brings nostalgia to all who were left in awe by his five-year run on the lawns of the All-England Club.

Some excerpts from the first article:

On July 6, as I watched Federer lose a four-hour 48-minute five-set match to the up-and-coming Spanish superstar Rafael Nadal — a match that John McEnroe and Bjorn Borg both described as the greatest ever played — I felt a creeping realization as the duo battled into twilight that I was witnessing something more profound than my hero losing a tennis match: I was witnessing the death of beauty.

For as much as even his own fans admire his play, there is nothing lithe, elegant or graceful about Rafael Nadal, oh he of bulging biceps and perennially itchy butt. A spectacular athlete, Nadal has risen to the top of men’s tennis with strength and determination. He’s a bruiser (case in point: on Sunday, he directed 25 percent of his serves to Federer’s body; Federer chose that aggressive line only four percent of the time).

Eben Harrel, Si.com

It’s a wonder how much one can do once you have your heart set into what you know you have to accomplish. I haven’t done anything major or life-changing or paradigm shifting. This Sunday, I simply was able to wake up a few hours earlier than I’m used to (around 12:00 noon) that my sister and I was already at Glorietta by lunch time just in time to meet our other sister. It’s been so long since I last had lunch at the mall. I missed the food court there that even when I was already digging into my Asian noodles/grilled chicken with mushroom sauce/potato salad, I’m still looking around hoping I had bought chicken paella or shrimp gambas instead. After the meal, we checked for the screening time of Wanted (I have an entry about the film in my other blog) and, fortunately, we were just in time. So the movie went well. We then scouted for a laptop for my sister and were able to choose one that fits just her needs. I was beaming to be back home from Makati even before the sun has set. But there are still some things to do. I had to go the SM mall near our place to pay some bills and buy some toiletries, and then to Ruins (BF Homes, Paranaque) to look for some you-know-what. Before we left SM, my sister and I were even able to play a few rounds of games at the mini-Arcade there. We’re back home by 9 pm, just in time for me to do the software installations before I retire to sleep that night.

Forgive me for blabbering about an entire day of personal errands but having done this much in one day is quite a novelty for me lately. Because I’m usually too tired by the end of Saturdays, I usually spend Sundays doing … nothing. This weekend inspired me to try to make a schedule for the coming weekends. Especially since this July and August, there are several shows that I’m intending to watch. I’m yet to find a local site that exclusively lists all upcoming events, for example music events. Like this site with the San Diego calendar of events. There are two well-known ticket sites but they don’t handle similar shows, which almost cost me the knowledge that two foreign acts I follow are coming to Manila. But that’s all forgiven. Now, I only have to save up for the pricey tickets.

My computer at work crashed almost a month ago and I’ve since been waiting for the replacement machine. Now, I’m not about to go ranting and complaining that it’s taking so long and that the CPU I snatched from somewhere don’t have much of the software installations that I need to do my job. Truth is, it gave me time to take a breather from things that I’m used to worry about everyday. Because I don’t have e-mail, I haven’t been checking on project needs and updates. I just wait for printout of pertinent items from my bosses. The people who used to send e-mails everyday for verification now approach our team, individually, whenever they have questions or when they have some items to clarify about our work. I heard from someone that I’ve been scheduled to attend a training session three weeks in running but I didn’t know that, so I’m off the hook. Heh!

I’m not missing the “hectic” and “too many things to do” feeling that it used to give me. Maybe now when I get my mail back, I’ll be more relaxed in dealing with tasks. I’ve been eyeing the new computer units they’ve been setting up for us and what makes me most excited are the LCD monitors. They almost look too good for my area that I will have to organize my things when my unit arrives. Maybe then the only thing that will be missing are project collaboration tools software to get every person on the team on the same page all the time.