June 7
So my sister's best friend is here.
Lucky bitch, and she doesn't even look that enthusiastic or excited. Didn't text excessively, didn't spend hours on the phone, didn't try to meet as much as possible. They wanted to watch a movie. They won't even be able to talk during the movie, what's the point of wasting the money?
I was a bit angry at that fact because she was whoring out the privelege of her best friend being here.
Or maybe they're just like that. Watching a movie is the best thing.
But I have to rant, she didn't even bring a camera. Not once.
Maybe it's a primary school thing. Cherlynn the peer leader was right, primary school friends aren't much. Unless you continue to keep in touch and grow together. You don't stay twelve years old forever, so. Communication is key! And of course having a few similar interests help.
My grandparents were strongly against my sister and her best friend seeing a movie. Because the best friend is a boy. Not the Filipino culture, she says, but again, as millions of other aged people fail to see, Times. Have. Changed.
Now that I think of it, I watch way too many movies. Let's say, a hundred. (I'm sure there's more.) That's about two hours a movie. Two hundred hours. And then let's say one out of every... five movies run longer than 2 hours. That's another fifty to sixty hours. Total 260 hours.
I've lived approximately (to my next birthday) 140,160 hours. 260 of that is all movies. Sitting in front of a television or in the cinema just watching people cry laugh get mad go mad be happy et cetera et cetera.
I'm sure everyone is a Philosopher or a Humanitarian to a certain point.
June 8
I wonder how Suet Wa is doing.
June 9
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31. "Now tell me everything about you, all over again."
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Right now I sit on my bed, next to the window that overlooks the house next door. Judging by the message in crusive printed on the pink and blue balloons, Reese was born June 9. Reese may or may not be a boy. These people are strangers to me.
You know that cassette tape full of children singing children's birthday songs, singing of happiness and friendship? Where they sound like they're from another planet where the grass is a lucid blue and the sky is pink and the trees grow lollipops?
At best - a desperate attempt at popart; at worst - a three-year-old's coloring book.
Hurray for your birthday today, hurray for the ice cream and cake!
You're a little bit bigger, you're a little bit nicer, and every year we like you even more!
Yeah,
that tape. The anthems of McDonald's (or KFC or any other restaurant, for that matter) staff that get stuck trying to carry out games with obnoxious little tykes that cannot comprehend what they're saying anyway.
Or worse, get stuck in that heavy, smelly mascot costume.
There's something about those songs that make me really, really sick. They've been around for over a decade, I assume. I remember them being played at the McDonald's party I had when I was six. I hated it and Ronald is unexplainably grotesque-looking. Everything was fast-paced. Everything in a hurry. Race to the balloon. Race back to the middle. Why is everything a race? It doesn't make much sense to want to kill time when you're also trying so desperately to be ahead of it.
It was extremely crowded. Kids and their parents I barely knew sitting here, eating food my parents paid for, eating my birthday cake, a lot of them even got me and my sister mixed up. Not because we were wearing matching outfits (my mother was a complete sucker for things like that), but because they very simply didn't know me.
One of those unexplainable bad memories. Where certain things are distorted.
Certain scenes repeated over and over. Sounds louder than they should be.
Above all, the songs were just really, really bad.
It really is pretty fucking daft to have such a reaction towards a stupid birthday song. There's just Something about the synthesizer beat, the organ sound of the piano notes, the chorus of the children, the way they shout Happy Birthday! and cheer at the end, so plastic and shallow it was like they were demanding you to be happy and cheer too.
I guess it's like.. that Arnold Schwarzenegger movie. My memory fails me except for this one scene - a mother puts headphones over his son's ears. They were yellow and black. There was falling debris everywhere. Men shooting. The boy runs through all this while his earphones sing
Somewhere, over the rainbow, way up high.
Or when you were ten and first saw hardcore pornography while one of your addictive catchy songs was playing on your computer.
You don't listen to that song anymore.
Anyway.
The party hasn't begun, but people have started arriving. For now the miniature plastic tables and miniature plastic chairs are empty and the balloons tied to chairs sway gently as if they were dancing politely to the song playing. The tables are covered in a big plastic sheet with Happy Birthday!s printed on them. A children's party standard, children are messy eaters specially when it comes to spaghetti - which is another children's party standard.
This little setting outside the house, balloons and chairs and tables and all, looks really lonely with the sunlight dancing on it.
I'm guessing Reese is a girl. The cake is covered in bright pink icing. Mounted on it is a white castle with pink flags and a blue icing lake in front of it.
This is fun, I feel like Harriet the Spy. Who is awesome and has earned me respect for Michelle Trachtenberg. Even if it is an old movie. Up to this day I love that character though I am so much older.
There's a blue balloon humping the back of an electric fan because the fan's tunred on.
Pun intended.
Great now the High School Musical Soundtrack is playing.
I want pizza too. Pepperoni and cheeeeeeeese
Once again, 9 and 10 year olds are dressing like mini prostitutes. Nannies stand around their kids like bodyguards and personal waiters.
You know times are changing when the present younger generation have parties like this:
Dress to Impress (read: My Backless Top Brings All The Boys To The Yard), eat,
watch TV.
June 10
Funny that I came across that movie survey on Friendster today, since I mentioned just the other day that I've seen so many movies. I scored a 95+ on the survey, I can't remember.
Now I'm listing down every single movie I can remember watching. Typical of someone who finds a twisted pleasure in listing things down and alphabetizing them. So far I have about 200 listed down, and I am nowhere near the end.
Starting on this made me go back to older movies I've seen, and I really want to see Keeping the Faith again. Again, sappy and stuff, but at least Edward Norton is adorable.
June 11
Concluding that it'd probably take a long, long while till I get my hands on a copy of Trainspotting, I searched an online screenplay and just read the whole movie. Which was interesting, I've never done that before. Gives a whole new meaning to using your imagination. I loved the part when Renton and Spud had to go for job interviews. Not because they wanted to get a job but because they had to be seen trying. Classic.
I have the Fight Club screenplay as well and I read a teeny bit, and spent the rest of the day resisting the urge to finish it because I wanted to wait till I saw the real movie. Thirteen days!
The Constant Gardener was good. Plot-wise it wasn't anything amazing, but I thought the cinematography was brilliant. It was novelty, specially the sex scene - it was all bright and... light-hearted, for the lack of a better word. Music was playful, but not the seductive playful. The movie on the whole was well done. Great for a political thriller. People could use a wake-up call towards the poverty in Africa.
Oh right and Rachel Weisz (physical) fans will be delighted to hear that she'll be visibly naked in the bath tub.
Why do I keep giving movie reviews?!
June 13
School was bad.
Culture shock #92351469.
It wasn't bad at
that moment, it was just incredibly boring, writing down Requirements and Course Information on every single subject. And then writing down your particulars on 1/4 pad paper (which I didn't have) like 20 times.
Bad first impression #1: Geometry teacher.
I didn't have that stupid 1/2 pad either, so I just tore a page from a notebook and cut it, it was too small, I watched him look through the handed-in papers at his desk, got to mine, he winced, rolled his eyes, read the name and flicked it onto his table like it was garbage. I stood up and said "I didn't have the required paper." He may or may not have given me grace for being a new student. I don't know, and I don't care.
For once, I have an English teacher that I actually like. So far. She talks to the class like she's doing stand-up comedy.
I ate a grand total of 6 bites off my sandwich from 7 a.m. to 4 p.m.
Recess with Don DeLillo, lunch with Don DeLillo, in between classes with Don DeLillo. Typical social loser. There are people who try to be nice and introduce themselves but I (will probably, not right now though) regret to say that my response was not the most appealing to them. Smile and retreat into my own thoughts.
Being in Filipino class was like being completely foreign. I could hardly understand Anything. The way the teacher spoke in Tagalog was so different - it was proper, I guess. He wrote down a title on the board and asked us to write. I stared blankly. Thank god for those special classes. Though we have to pay a fucking thousand per month.
I was put in the Arts and Letters course. They call it career-tracking. I don't know if they just dumped me in that class because it was the only one with open slots, or if they based it on the "Interests" in my application form. Either way, it's good because I think I would have died if I was in Medical Science. Which is a really smartass class so I wouldn't have gotten in in the first place anyway.
There was this girl Karen who was being nice and introducing me to a lot of people but I wasn't exaclty in the mood to be sociable. She said "so you have a lot of friends!" but "friends" in this context is obviously the Friendster meaning of "friends", as in I Don't Know You But I'm Adding You Because You Have A Cool Profile And So My List Will Reach Over 500 And I'll Seem Really Popular.
In other words, aquaintances.
Besides I can't really remember the names anymore. I have trouble remembering names.
The worst thing about school so far is probably the amount of notebooks, and the 500 different kinds of paper.
Well, that, among other tear-jerking things. I need to stop reading the notes my friends left in my notebook during class because the last thing I need is crying, outside the comfort of doing so in the dark at night.
Santa I'm desperate, do you do birthdays too? If you're, you know, feeling generous. I
need would like very very much to see a few people again. My mommy and daddy won't let me. I'll bake you brownies, I make killer mint chocolate ones, and besides you could use something new, cookies and milk can get a little sickening after a few hundred years, no?
June 14
The morning was shit on a stick.
See that's the problem with spending the night wallowing in self-pity. Swollen eyelids give you away the next morning. I tried hot water but it didn't work much. Fucking waterworks.
Waiting for the school bus to arrive I turned on the television to take my mind off things. Tried to concentrate on Nicole of the Pussycat Dolls. The video would have been good, if not for the computerized fire that blasts across the floor in their final "I'm tellin ya ta loosen up mah buttons."
But mother just had to go and ask me why my eyes looked heavy.
Karen introduced me to more people. I don't really fit in, not so far at least, and it doesn't help that Tagalog is a second language to me.
End of the day was all right because my bus mates, three other people around my age, are easy to talk to. Though I still don't know their names...
June 15
Quote of the day:
Let me ask you a simple, logical, rheotorical question.
Rheotorical.
Rheotorical.
Say hello to my new English teacher. Don't smile because he doesn't want you to. He is completely convinced that he is smarter than you, wiser than you, and can do anything ten thousand times better than you.
This isn't my own evaluation, by the way, he said it himself.
He will never like you, because he is only in the school to teach, it is completely professional and he will not bother about being liked, or liking students, or being nice.
Clearly he doesn't realize that,
professionalism in being a teacher requires him to build relationships, no matter how flimsy or plastic. Uh, what was the aim of the school again? To create a second home?
One more.
I made a great mistake in my whole life.
Sorry, I didn't get that, you're an
English teacher?
I was seriously laughing my ass off inside my head, seeing how incredibly ignorant not to mention contradictory this man was, I was wishing I could look at someone and share the same sentiments like Si Jing/Nicole/Bernette/Rachel and I used to do across the classroom. I looked at my "friends" (in this context - individuals who you stay around with because they're trying to be nice and you're being polite) beside me but they didn't get it. Most unfortunately.
Oh my god the computer isn't working asdklvjakmegldjgap
June 16
Dad fixed it yay.
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Updated Friday, June 16, 2006, 06:16 p.m..
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