Tribu 25

two years ago today exactly, I wore barong too big for me, and awkwardly marched on stage with mama and papa.

graduation day.

batch 2005! wherever you guys are, congratulations to all your successes.

nutinians

he's born in scotland but has italian descent. he's father owned a fish and chip shop, but his music-loving grandpa encouraged him to sing. he's 20 years old but he growls his accent like an old man.

with all these contradictions, it's good to know Paolo Nutini knows exactly who he is. his music is soft and poignant (read cafe friendly) and his poetry is surprisingly honest.

easy favorites are These Streets, Last Request (there's a hidden acoustic track which is nothing short of suicidal), Million Faces, and Rewind. but for sheer honesty and LSS-inducing musicality, Jenny Don't Be Hasty takes the cake.

this is a refreshing album because it tells exactly what it wants to say, and we walk away from it somehow feeling a connection with the artist. sure Fergie, Justin and Gwen are cool and all, but can you honestly say you can listen to all the tracks in their albums without thinking they are having identity crises?

(Fergie (The Dutchess) tries so hard to convince us that she can sing by imitating your next-door birit queens (Finally). Justin (FutureSex / LoveSounds) suddenly turns into a peace-advocate halfway in his album (Until The End Of Time). And then Gwen (The Sweet Escape). Gwen! Gwen! Do you really have to go Beyonce on us (Orange County Girl)?)

listen to Paolo Nutini, guys. it's been a while since i had a nice long conversation with an song-writer.

Google Ads, yeah!

so there. i finally decided to join after reading some stupid article from jayjay about quitting your job and just starting a blog to earn money. haha. well, i figured i could keep my job, and earn from my blog.

yeah, right.

unless you cheapskates start clicking on the not-so obscure stuff on top of this page, i'm not getting any Google dineros. well, could you just please come back to visit? i get paid too for traffic -- they call it impressions.

i read somewhere someone was sent a $90,000 check from Google just from ads. oh well. but just in case, mamangka ko.

cm'on. click on ads already!

spiderman

i used to live in a village once in the Cainta area. we were drawn to it because of the cheap apartments. it was all about "living alone" back then, and we felt too cool to live with relatives we knew nothing about.

first, we had to house-hunt. it involves buying a lot of Buy and Sell classifieds, browsing obscure internet forums with threads like "quiet 1-B Aprtment w/ T&B", and walking. well, it mostly involves a lot of walking.

Buy and Sell rolled in one hand and a bottle of C2 Green tea in the other, i braved the noisy streets of makati's suburbia district, the maze of the Ortigas residential areas, and the darkness of a Taguig baranggay (there were no lampposts in the streets and i was there at night). of course, i could always find well-meaning friends to come along. once i was with suri -- who perfectly understood the point of living hip and young. another time i was with ogdoc -- who i completely convinced i had to leave my old apartment, lest i go mad.

most of the time, i was alone, dramatically pretending i had to look for a place to lay my head to rest for the night. but no, there was no baby Jesus in that drama.

ultimately, word of mouth about a nice new place in cainta caught me and a bunch of other officemates. one by one, we grabbed our mattresses and headed to St. Joseph Subdivision. home was going to be a 4-storey building with 1-bedroom units. of course each unit had it's own T&B. i stayed in the 2nd unit of the ground floor. oski, alain, lil jessica, and mama rene all had the four units on the fourth floor. we were like those spiders elementary brats keep in match boxes. just stick us in our little boxes and we were good for the night.

(more soon)

Book 2

it's been a while kids. mustamos?

i'd assume everyone's all grown up already. so i can't write about crappy stuff anymore. maybe i'll go in the line of campus politics and finally give my long overdue answer to kitrotsky. or maybe raise the bar higher and write about -- hmm -- global warming.

right, and bore you to death.

truth is, it hasn't been so busy at work lately. finally got our project's schedule relaxed. so now, devoid of any UTPs to review, prototypes to make, and Use Cases to draft, i am left to wonder what my previous life was like. the life before BIR gave me a tax identification number.

i vaguely remember the smell of Cuz in JY Square, where we used to munch on humba, breaded porkchop and the occasional frankfurters during lunchtime. and the smell of the AS classrooms before the airconditioning is turned on. and the smell of newly photocopied materials on data struct concepts. (the smell, always the smell.)

then i remembered i used to blog. when banne and i reread some entries i wrote before, i had to cringe at how horrible i wrote. very few things are more embarrassing than reading yourself trying so hard to make an impression.

i think i'll tell you about the method of Global City and the madness of Cubao. the bizarre manangs of Quiapo and the bizarre manangs who work in my office. the landlords straight from hell and an angel i met in North Av. or an eagle i saw in Shek-O Beach.

hopefully i can keep this up. until the next project milestone comes anyway.

jars of clay

(this is a very late post, but for posterity's sake, i shall post this.)

jars of clay is a good band. they are not the best, but they are most definitely not the worst. they are just good. they play music that they believe in. they compose songs with a purpose in mind, a purpose to which everything comes second. and so long as they stick to this purpose, to this belief, to this overriding theme of universal truth expressed in childlike tones, they will to me be a good band.

when the band came to Cebu last february 28 (i told you this is a late post), most of the city did not know them except for some of their popular hits. popularity, after all, is never indicative of genius. but for the rest of us who 'knew' them, it was like a homecoming. finally, a sign that the universe does indeed look after us (zafra). finally, a validation.

i first 'met' joc last Christmas of 2002. nanie decided to give each blockmate a christmas present: a cd with 12 of our favorite songs. i couldn't decide what 12 songs to include, so i just played familiar tunes in my head. one of them was a repetitive song i heard somewhere and began to like immediately - unforgetful you.

while listening to the song, i couldn't help but notice the undoubtable Christian theme. "i never minded calling you a king/ if that meant that i could count on you to give me everything". "you never minded giving us the stars/ and then showing us how blind and unaware of you we are". i told banne about it, and after a couple of google searches, jars of clay, the band, turns out to be christian. we were thrilled. we were hooked.

(it is not a surprise that some Christian bands crossover to contemporary popular genre and have people singing their songs without knowing they are praise and worship songs. this is a common practice, debated upon among the faithful. i would like to subscribe to what jon foreman of switchfoot, yet another Christian band, said: "I think the role of the prophet (not to say that I'm a prophet) is to say the eternal truths in a way that their generation can understand. That's what we're all called to do here on earth — speak truth in relevant ways.")

since then, i only owned one joc album: 1999's if i left the zoo. it was stolen from the SC office. i never recovered it. admittedly, most joc albums and tracks i have are downloaded from various peer2peer systems.

there concert in cebu was wow, amazing, great, hooah, right on, aaah! the band struck me as very expressive. i was really convinced they were quite bold in terms of their music (hey, any band who uses the sound of an old telephone ringing as a background for a track could technically be considered bold), but i wasn't expecting they would be as bold as performers. they would kneel onstage, prostrate themselves and then jump up and down in true rockstar fashion. when dan haseltine sang "You were there when the skies broke wide, wide open", he spread his arms wide and gazed up the midnight sky. he made me feel deprived: i never thought 'five candles' is best enjoyed by acting it out like a church song.

actually, we got the cheapest tickets. as we were about to bemoan our economic status and contemplate cheating by jumping over the barricades, the producers declared an open gate. in a sudden burst of excitement, we ran to the foot of the stage. we were probably 5 feet from them (hence the pictures). all these as they played 'love song for a savior'.

jars of clay is indeed a good band. and any good band knows they must always end their concerts with a love song ('tea and sympathy') and a different kind of love song ('jesus' blood never failed me yet'). listen to joc. they're good for you.

old picture = new picture + sepia

with too much time these days, i am able to browse through computer files that i have accumulated for the past three years. most of them of course were useless, a reinforcement of that new-agey adage that 90% of everything is junk. i, however, chanced upon this old picture of UP Cebu lying idly in a corner of my disk drive:

if you are from UP Cebu this picture should be of interest to you. notice the absence of the concrete "square" that so attempts to give the university symbol some degree of importance by giving it the more regal-sounding dwelling: the oblation square. notice too the existence of the two palm tree-like plants on the opposite sides of the administration building. in the name of progress, these trees have been promptly cut -- once stately, they are now reduced to irrecognizable stumps on the ground. the building is also still fresh and bright, a far cry to the almost Adams Family-like dread the building invokes today. the Oblation, however, is still the same as it was before.

now notice the picture below taken just recently during one of the block's hysterical pictorials. with a little sepia effect, we are taken almost decades from now when this photo shall have been old and, uh, antique-looking:

digital pictures continue to be as fresh and crisp as the day they were taken. we no longer have to deal with the ugly stains and discoloration caused by the acidity of paper and some good 'ol wear and tear. a sad fact as i like the look of an old picture. the browns and the scratches add an entirely new dimension: age -- the feeling that so many fruitful years have passed, been survived and lived through. that no matter how many decades passed by, the people in the photo, like the Oblation behind them, would continue to be strong, unwavering, and loyal, except that they make funny faces and strike pa-model poses once in a while.