thar she blows!

nope. this isn't about pirates or piracy (whichever definition) nor is this about porn either. this one is about a question that has been poking at my neurons for a long time. and despite the hilarity of the premise, it is a very serious question that must be considered.

the backstory: morning rush hour. picture yourself on your way to a very important appointment. let's say that it is an interview for a job so life-changing that you need to be there and be there on time. but for some reason, you have to use public transport. for this exercise, let's use the mrt (because i ride that every day). your car's broken, license is expired, no one can drive you to your destination on such short notice, whatever. you're taking the mrt. picture yourself dressed to nines. let's use male pov. new long sleeves tucked in, shiny belt buckle, polished shoes, clean cut hair, shaved face, you don't even want to sit and wrinkle your pants. you know you have a 99% chance of nailing the job. you just have to go through this final one-on-one looking, sounding, smelling and being your best.

the sitch: standing in front of you is beautiful woman (handsome man if you're using the female pov) who looks like she's on her way home from an all-nighter party. she's holding on to the poles to stay upright. she looks like she'll pass out any minute. you realize the inevitable but you can't move in this sardine can. you hear her stomach turn over. you close your eyes as she hurls everything she ate and drank at you. her mouth is a barf geyser. you are immediately drenched by her stinky, sticky, chunky vomit. after the pukefest, the girl faints. the people who were previously standing so close around you are now miles away.

the question: what are you going to do?



p.s. nope this didn't happen to me. but i once rode in a bus and some kid puked and a small amount caught my shoe. i also almost always imagine a person on the back row of the bus vomiting on the person in front of them and then that person would then vomit on the person in front and so on and so on. vomit domino. vomino.

the write stuff, part one

int. office cubicle - night
jai, early 30s, is writing an entry for his blog instead of working. his team leader approaches and cuts off his arms with a chainsaw. his blood floods the office floor. a paper boat floats by, with two ants in the titanic pose. it is suddenly eaten by a great black shark.

seriosuly, i could really see myself writing shit like that for a living. not exactly like that but something that makes more sense. currently, i have about a dozen movie ideas and a bunch of random concepts gestating in my brain. i want to write them down, i really do, but:

1. i dont have the time. well, of course, i can make time but with a family and a job on top of my priority list, i just won't be able to make enough. all my film ideas, from beginning to end, every line of dialogue, every sequence, they're all in my head. and when i write them down, i have to finish because one of my flaws is the moment i write an idea down, it gets erased in my brain. i dont now why (maybe to make space for new ones) but i just forget them completely. ive tried it a couple of times, just writing the first act. but when i come back to it, i just cant continue where i left off because i couldnt figure out a lot of things and tend to edit too much that i cant move on. its like retracing my steps and going, wait why did go this way again? i also tried making notes but that caused even greater headaches, sitting down, staring at the overlapping lines and arrows, words and names with double underlines, and wondering, what the heck did these mean? the solution to this is if could just do that thing that stephen king's protagonists do, cut myself off from the world, take a vacation in a strange town and type away without interruption.

2. its sort of pointless. i used to write by pencil and actually finish short stories. but in relation to #1, when i read them again, there's so much i want to edit. some i even want to throw away and burn. i guess during those years, i just wrote whatever came to mind, not thinking about sense, purpose, or marketability. a few years ago i did a couple of pitches for an indie film to a friend. he said they weren't socially relevant. i never knew they had to be. since then, ive lost hope. i still dream of making films but ive accepted the fact that it just might not ever happen. no one's willing to invest in my ideas. i dont have the funds to do it on my own. i could still try and go straight to the big guys but we all know that requires connections and i have this fear that they would reject a pitch but use it anyway as if it was theirs. my last chance to penetrate this filthy industry and clean it up is to save up and go back to school.

i remember when i was filling out forms for college, i wanted to tick the checkboxes for film and literature as my first and second course choices respectively. my mom talked me out of it (she said i wont earn anything from them) and instead made me choose business administration. i dropped out after two years. now i cant really blame her. being the eldest grandchild, i was the principal candidate for taking over the family business. but i do think that my parents shouldn't have expected that i'd actually fit that role, having seen grade schooler me rip out used pages from notebooks to turn them into comic books at the end of every school year. they never stopped me but they didnt support me either, not until after college did they realize that maybe it was the path i was supposed to take. but by then it was too late. my mom said that i could have simply just switched courses instead of dropping out. but it still meant i wasted so much time away from honing my craft. that's like riding a bus to destination a, getting off at midpoint, going back all the way home and taking the bus to destination b. except that i had already missed the bus.

but like i said, i dont blame my parents. i have learned to understand that they just didnt understand me. they didnt know what to do with a boy who refused to go out and play with other kids so that he could live in his make-believe world. the most they could do with my "talent" was have me do my siblings' projects that involved writing or drawing. my mom took me to a painting class once which i didnt like because all we did was copy things. here's a photograph, clone it using a pentagraph. let's go to the park, paint that monument. no thank you, sir,  i want to create. (but also because im bad with colors)

i love my parents. i love them the way they are. if i could relive the past, i'd still pretty much want them the way they were. it would be me that would do things differently. i'd be more of a rebel as i should have been. i'd pursue my dream regardless of what they say. because it's a dream that should not be ignored, put aside, or shunned, like it's a dream of being a murderer and killing people (although it basically is, fictionally). it's a great dream that should be embraced, cherished and encouraged with fervor. had it been so, i would not be constantly tormented by ideas hankering to materialize right now. i'd probably be hunched over a laptop typing a screenplay or a novel at this very moment, instead of this blogpost.

and so, i close with a promise to fully support my daughter's ambitions as long as they have no direct negative effects to anyone, most especially to herself.

gamechange

oh yeah, i have a blog.

this part is where im supposed to explain why i havent posted anything in a long while but screw that. also, the answer to the riddle of the last entry is the letter a. also, you shouldnt really start a sentence with also but screw that as well. formal writing is raped in this joint.

so, on with the show: i keep realizing how being married and having a kid has change my life, especially being in a workplace populated mostly by single people. now, enumerating and discussing everything that's different between statuses warrant time and effort im not able to provide, so i'll aim the crosshairs on the top of the list: money.

my current job salary is almost the same as my previous job's. and yet back then, the last week before the next payday was when i suddenly would acquire budgeting skills. there were even times when i was actually flat broke on payday eve and slept off the hunger (sometimes id clean up my apartment and hunt for spare change). i used to think fate was being exclusively mean to me, torturing me for my poor finance management. but, as my work friends would attest to, zero-responsibility stable job woes are quite common.  paydays are like divine drizzle to desert dwellers despaired of decades-old drought. (yay alliteration)

anyway, after a year of putting off the purchase and prioritizing family necessities as a good husband and father ought to do, a couple of months ago, i splurged a bit and bought a pc. my first time to buy with my own, hard-earned money. the primary reason for this was pity. pity for myself, having endured the headaches of using an old, ultralow end pc that frequently required excessive force to turn on; and pity for the said pc. at first, all it needed was a gentle shake to start up. but it quickly escalated to punching and kicking it to life. when kratos, the name i chose for the new machine, came i went to the old guy to transfer some files and it miraculously turned on at first button-push. and i was like, too late to plead for your salvation, asshole.

kratos is quite fast and capable. specs are not as  high as a hardcore gamer's but it runs the latest games pretty well. my wife also uses it for photoshop and it runs smoothly. my daughter loves watching the clownfish swim around in the aquarium screensaver. i have yet to used it for video editing but judging by how fast it converts videos (to mp4 for my psp), render duration likely wouldn't be as much of an exercise in timekilling as it used to be. inevitably, it'll start showing its age and decrease in performance a bit, but i have plans to gradually do a few upgrades by then. for now, it's perfect. the workstation thin client i use in the office is its bitch.