Back from Bangkok

I tried to write an entry to talk about my recently-concluded trip to Bangkok, but I wasn't happy with what I was writing. I hit the delete button, but here I am again, attempting to talk about it. 

Even now, I keep typing one word and hitting backspace, unsure of where to even begin. Do I start by talking about how we started planning this trip in January, and all of a sudden, I've gone on the trip and come home? Do I tell you all about the plans we made and which ones didn't materialize (like the trip to the library and dinner at Baiyoke Sky Deck)? Do I share the realization that Ayutthaya is not a park but an entire province, and how we kissed our dreams of biking around the area goodbye (and besides, by "rent a bike" they meant a motorbike, not a bicycle)? Do I talk about realizing that I'm not a hardcore shopper after all? 

Maybe, where words will not suffice, pictures will.

Wat Pho: Reclining Buddha

Four Pagodas

Dinner at Cabbages and Condoms, a restaurant owned by a government official popularly known as "Mr. Condom" because of his campaigns on safe sex and HIV-AIDS awareness.

One of the many, beautiful ruins in Ayutthaya, the ancient capital of Thailand

More pictures on my Facebook account (for friends only, sorry). This may be my only trip for 2009, but it was definitely a blast!

Where will the Universe take me next? I can't wait to find out.

August is love!

For the past three years (i.e. ever since I started working here), I've come to think of August as a slow month. After all, we hardly have any events this month, and I think of it as the time to recover from the crazy FHM party in July and the time to build up for the hell month that is September.

But this year, there are so many things to be excited about this August!

First, I finished reading Something Blue by Emily Giffin. A lot of time has passed since I read Something Borrowed, but I remember being incredibly annoyed with Darcy, the self-centered "beauty is everything" PR maven who is now the protagonist of this sequel. At the start of the novel, she was still as annoying as I remembered, but I decided to give her a chance to redeem herself.

What's amazing about this book is Darcy's transformation is very subtle yet real, and you find yourself having a change of heart about her as well. Emily Giffin is brilliant, and I ended up thoroughly enjoying Something Blue. Now I want to read the first book again just so that I can form my opinion on which one I like better!

Second, I'm very excited because I'll be going to Bangkok with a very good friend of mine! I first visited Bangkok with my family in 2001, but I hardly remember anything about that visit. I've always maintained that it's very different to travel with your family because you end up just going wherever you're told. So this Bangkok trip with my friend will be like seeing Bangkok for the very first time.

It's been so much fun planning our itinerary and researching on all the sights we want to see in Bangkok. While we briefly considered taking a two-hour trip out of Bangkok going to Pattaya, we instead decided to take the one-hour trip to Ayutthaya, the former capital of Thailand (in photo). The Ayutthaya Historical Park is now just a bunch of ruins, but history buffs that we are, we're excited about biking around the area for the greater part of our day. Of course, we're also excited about shopping in Bangkok, but more than that, we're looking forward to the Temple Tour, going to the night markets, trying the restos that friends and colleagues have recommended, and even hitting the library! Yes, because we love books so much, we can't resist a side trip to the Neilson Hays Library for the sake of checking it out and relaxing in the library's cafe. We'll be gone for four days, and it's gonna be so much fun! I can feel it!

Third, because I'll be gone for four days, my parents decided that it's the best time to have my room renovated. My room has stayed the same since we first moved to our house in 1997-- the only thing that changed was adding a custom-made seater and desk set when I was in college, but my wallpapers still reflected the choices of a fourteen year old. I've always looked wistfully at the "grown-up rooms" featured in Real Living, and daydreamed about renovating my own room, but never really thought that it would happen.

But now that it's finally happening, my mom and I spent Sunday measuring my room and drawing the new storage spaces. I downloaded a program that generates color combinations for websites, but of course I'm using it to come up with the best color combination for my room. Everything has been finalized (yes, even my choice of color) and I hope that I'll be around when they paint my room so that I can see if it's exactly what I had in mind.

Once they finish everything in my room, I'm excited to look for some new furnishing. My one insistence was there be space for a nice, comfy armchair where I can do all my reading (because I'm finally heeding the warning that reading in bed is bad for your eyesight), so we worked around that. I want to have a nice floor lamp by the chair so that I have ample lighting for my reading, and I want to have a new wall clock. I'm also considering selecting some of my best photographs and either coming up with a collage or having them printed so I can frame them individually in small frames. It's so much fun to plan a room makeover, and I'm so excited to have a room that finally reflects that a 26-year-old woman lives in it.

Last, even if we don't celebrate anniversaries, August was a significant month three years ago, when my love finally worked up the nerve to tell me how he felt about me. Fast forward to the present, and we're still silly as if we'd just gotten together yesterday. For the first time, I have faith that we truly will make it all the way, and we'll continue growing together in love. ♥ ♥ ♥

August 09 is one for the books, and I love it! ♥ ♥ ♥

Spotlight: "Raising the Peaceable Kingdom" and "Baby Proof"

In my quest to become a reader and not a mere book hoarder, I decided to try harder to cross some books off my list. As of last weekend, I have successfully crossed off two: one has been my constant companion to the dentist, and I was determined to finish the last few chapters to get it done and over with. The other was one that I decided to read on a whim. So the list is moving along, and I am proud to say that I have succeeded in not adding to it any further (new discovery: leaving the credit card at home really works!), and that I have avoided any serious browsing in the bookstores.

So, what two books did I cross off my list?

It took me a while to finish reading this book. As I mentioned before, the premise really intrigued me: can a puppy, kitten, two chickens, two rats, and a rabbit peacefully coexist in one home? From the very beginning, I knew it was an experiment. What I didn't count on was the book sounding like a report of the experiment.

In fairness, the author was very personal about it. He shared anecdotes on how he would discover more about the behavior of the animals-- an afternoon on the beach reveals that chickens like to stretch out in the sand, the rats like nesting in his wife's bosom and become most hyper at night, the kitten and the rabbit can become best friends over time. But these anecdotes were also interspersed with his findings and hypotheses, which didn't make for very interesting reading.

I found myself reading until the end just to see what would happen to the animals, if and when his experiment reaches its end. When I was done, I found myself just shrugging and saying, "So he did it. Good for him. On to the next book!"

Which, after much thought, I decided would be Baby Proof by Emily Giffin. I had only read Something Borrowed and am delaying reading its sequel Something Blue, mainly because I'm trying to be fair to my books by reading the ones I had acquired first. I also tried to pose a challenge to myself this weekend: to try reading this book in just one sitting.

It had been a while since I read a book from cover to cover in one sitting, and I just wanted to see how long it would take me. After all, I used to do it all the time (which, of course, led to growing up with glasses, getting laser eye surgery, and wearing glasses again with a more tolerable grade-- but that's another story entirely). So last Saturday afternoon, I decided to forego all plans of watching CSI and instead settled in to read Giffin's third novel.

I realized from the very beginning of the book that I would have trouble liking it. After all, I disagree with the protagonist's stand of not wanting to have children-- even if I do understand that there are women who are not inclined to become mothers, I would like to have children one day. And since reading requires a certain amount of putting yourself in the protagonist's shoes, I had a bit of difficulty doing just that-- most especially when she lets go of the man she loves because he wants to have a baby and she doesn't.

In the end, it was a so-so read for me, which surprisingly makes me even more excited to read the rest of her novels, as I believe that this is just a glitch in Giffin's otherwise brilliant writing. And, despite my misgivings, the book was able to captivate me enough to read it for 4 1/2 hours straight, without breaks. So I may have disagreed with the plot, but it kept me hooked enough to still want to know how it all ends. That, to me, is a sign of good writing and makes me crave for even more.

I've heard that her latest novel Love the One You're With is also really good. I took a look at the summary when I came across it once in the neighborhood bookstore, and in direct contrast to Baby Proof, I think I could relate to this plot too much! Well, just because running into my exes is always a What-If scenario that runs through my head, and my telenovela imagination tends to blow everything out of proportion. I'm scared that Love the One You're With will hit too close to home, but then again, when have I ever been afraid of a book??

Now that my reading list has hit 20 books, I think it's time for a recap:

The 2009 Reading List
1. The Other Boleyn Girl by Philippa Gregory
2. The Smart One and the Pretty One by Claire LaZebnik
3. Skinny Bitch by Rory Freedman and Kim Barnouin --I boycotted this one.
4. A Place Called Here by Cecelia Ahern
5. If You Could See Me Now by Cecelia Ahern
6. Like Water For Chocolate by Laura Esquivel
7. Ready for Anything: 52 Productivity Principles for Getting Things Done by David Allen
8. The Amber Room by Steve Berry
9. Doctors by Erich Segal
10. Something Borrowed by Emily Giffin
11. Freakonomics by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner
12. Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason by Helen Fielding
13. Prizes by Erich Segal
14. Live a Little by Kim Green
15. Eats, Shoots and Leaves by Lynne Truss
16. Raising the Peaceable Kingdom by Jeffrey Maoussaieff Mason
17. Baby Proof by Emily Giffin
18. Something Blue by Emily Giffin
19. The Pact: A Love Story by Jodi Picoult
20. Getting Rid of Matthew by Jane Fallon

13 out of 20 is not bad at all! Whee! :D

Here lies the irony

Upon reviewing my old blog (the one filled with all the post-college emo-laden entries), I realized that a spark had died. That spark that could make me get up in the middle of the night to sleepily pen a poem, or lose myself in thought as while writing another short story. It has been ages since I felt that spark, the one that made me sure that, indeed, I was meant to wield a pen and be a writer.

I don't know if that spark really just dies out once you begin to write for a living. As you find yourself creating charts to keep track of what needs to be written and by when, you wonder how you factor in being hit by inspiration. Is it something you can even schedule? Being a writer by profession has forced me to be able to just write, whether I feel like it or not.

Many say that real writers don't wait for inspiration; they just write, period. While I agree, I worry that writing for a living has caused me to come up with coping mechanisms that my idealistic fresh-out-of-college self would disagree with. Reading an article, copying the quotes I'd like to use, then stringing them together into a coherent piece was not the way I envisioned my writing to be. I always took pride in coming up with something out of nothing, in having a blank sheet as my canvas, pinning thoughts unto paper as fast as my hands would permit. I never wanted to have a template for my writing, but upon discovering that --without conscious effort-- I could write press releases that fit exactly one page, I realized that a template is exactly what I have hardwired into my system.

Maybe the existence of such a template has made it difficult for me to spontaneously come up with a blog entry that's coherent and substantial. After churning out press release after press release, there's hardly any time to stop and think about something that really matters to me enough to write about it. Trying to sit in front of my blog to write about my thoughts is an exercise in futility-- anything that comes out of me feels forced, and I am forced to just delete everything and forego writing an entry. How ironic, to be a writer who cannot even write about things that truly mean something to me, things that I actually care about.

Yet, such is life. This is the profession I chose, and this is the talent I was gifted with. Template or no template, I was meant to write. So all I can do today is hope that the spark returns someday, to remind me what it feels like to fall in love with writing all over again.

Oops, I did it again

I should really be banned from entering bookstores, especially Fully Booked in Bonifacio High Street.

A recent side trip there had me walking out of the store with not one, but two new books. That brings my current reading list up to twenty. A fellow book hoarder lover likes to justify, "Twenty is a very nice, rounded number. Just like thirty and forty!" I'll stop at twenty, thankyouverymuch.

So what were the books I just had to buy?

After reading My Sister's Keeper by Jodi Picoult, I got curious about her other books and decided to do my research. Of all the stories, I found this one the most intriguing. The Pact is the love story between two teenagers whose families have been friends since they were born. What happens when the parents find the girl dead and the boy holding the gun that killed her?

A colleague pointed out that Jodi Picoult loves to talk about moral dilemmas. It makes me think that all her stories are built on "the boat-is-sinking/house-is-burning, you can only save either your parent-or-spouse/spouse-or-child. Who would you save?" Or something like that. Anyway, add the intriguing premise to the fact that this book was so hard to find. And when I finally saw it in Fully Booked, it was in a trade paperback version with nice paper, the ones with jagged edges that look like they've been cut by hand. I wasn't about to let it go.

I came across this book on one of my previous trips to Fully Booked, when I go through the aisles from A to Z. I thought it would be an entertaining read as the premise is that Matthew has been her lover for years, but now that he's leaving his wife for her, she realizes that she doesn't want him anymore. So as the title suggests, how does she get rid of him?

Also read up on Amazon reviews and it's supposed to be a fun read. Why did I buy it? Well, first, because it was the last copy on the shelf, and I've been keeping an eye out for it for months. Second, because I realized that majority of what's left in my book list is pretty heavy stuff, so I may need something to balance that out. I know, I know, excuses excuses.

So now my reading list is up to twenty. I'm currently reading Raising the Peaceable Kingdom, but I haven't gotten far because I've been watching CSI more often, playing Restaurant City on Facebook every night, and trying to catch up on precious sleep. Here's hoping I finish all twenty books before the year ends! (Hey, I'm just being realistic here!)

Spotlight: "The Other Boleyn Girl" and "Live A Little"

I should never have put off reading this book. That it's so thick has always discouraged me from getting started, but once I jumped over that hurdle, I found myself completely engrossed in it. It is so much better, so much richer than the movie (though Natalie Portman and Scarlett Johanssen were both really hot).

This novel was so good, it made me research on Henry VIII and his wives, and just how much of the novel was factual. As it turns out, everything is based on facts-- the only points that are fiction are the thoughts, intentions, motivations of the characters. But Anne Boleyn really did have a sister named Mary who was a mistress of the King and bore him two childern. The affair with Anne really did prompt Henry to seek an annulment from his marriage to Katherine of Aragon. And so on, and so forth.

The best thing is, I researched on the rest of Philippa Gregory's novels, and it turns out that a couple more revolve around the same time period: The Constant Princess is about Katherine of Aragon and how she ended up marrying Henry VIII (so it's actually the prequel to The Other Boleyn Girl in a chronological sense); The Boleyn Inheritance takes place immediately after The Other Boleyn Girl and talks about the rest of Henry VIII's wives; The Queen's Fool seems to be the transition novel before the reign of Queen Elizabeth; and The Virgin's Lover is during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I. So even if these novels all stand alone and have separate plots, reading it in order would probably feel like reading an entire saga on English history. Now if only they weren't so long.

I was excited to start reading this novel, and in the beginning, I was amused by her humor. Then it started getting tiresome. Then I couldn't wait for it to end.

It's actually a little difficult to explain what I didn't like about it. While I liked the premise, I felt that everything was becoming too unbelievable. Becoming a breast cancer advocate overnight, thanks to guesting on her sister's talk show (apparently, the sister is like Tyra). The sudden reawakening of her artistic side because she is commissioned to make a series of sculptures using casts of actual breast cancer survivors. By this time, it kinda became more about a mid-life crisis than about her not really having cancer and not knowing how to come clean about it. Add to that too many pop culture references --the daughter wanting to be emancipated because she thinks she's Lindsay Lohan, the image of a pregnant Britney Spears as a deterent for unwanted pregnancy, a breast cancer survivor named "Imelda, like the dictator... and I could imagine her with a closet filled with Manolos"-- and the one phrase that popped into my head was, "This novel is trying too hard."

Too bad, the premise was intriguing, but the execution was nothing great. What a waste of promise.

The good thing is, I'm officially 11 out of 18 on my reading list now! Woohoo!

on books and DVDs

As I mentioned before, I love anything that tells a story. That means that as much as I hoard love books, I also love DVDs. Last year, I was hooked on F.R.I.E.N.D.S., which I appreciated so much more now that I'm in my twenties. Then I watched Sex and the City, The Apprentice season 3, Pushing Daisies season 1, Top Design season 1, and How I Met Your Mother seasons 1-4 (and this is the only series that I'm downloading!). Now, I'm hooked on this:

After much consultation with other fanatics, I finally decided on getting the boxed set of CSI Las Vegas seasons 1 to 7. I just finished watching the first season and I'm currently three episodes into the second, already I'm showing signs of being addicted. For one, I go to bed at night with the feeling that maybe someone is just outside my door, or that I will suddenly see the curtains blowing to reveal an open window big enough to fit a human-- until I remember that my windows are not that big and I don't even have curtains in my room. So I sleep a little easier after that realization. I also caught myself looking at my cellphone and, upon seeing my fingerprints, thinking, "Wow, this cellphone is loaded with prints. Let's hope one of them is our killer's." Then I realize that it's my phone and there is no killer. I just love how they solve crimes, how they connect the dots to lead them to unlikely suspects, how sometimes they discover that the killer is someone who was right under their nose. I have yet to really compare to CSI Miami and CSI New York (my brother thinks Miami is too action-loaded, while a friend thinks the crimes in New York are too similar), but I think that after this, I will buy CSI New York just for Gary Sinise, who I think rocks.

As I go on CSI marathons, I have somehow found the time to finally get started on the one book that I've really put off reading-- The Other Boleyn Girl by Philippa Gregory (how strange that Amazon doesn't have a synopsis of this book). I bought the book primarily to compare it to the movie, but I've been putting off reading it because it's too thick. I got intimidated. But after finishing my last book, I realized that to finish my reading list, I would have to get to this book sooner or later. So I decided to make it sooner. I've been reading this book steadily, which means I've been bringing it with me to the dentist and leaving it in the car so I can read while waiting for parking. But hey, at least I'm making some progress with it!

I cheated. Just when I said I wouldn't buy any books, I went out and bought this one. In my defense, I had seen copies of Something Blue by Emily Giffin, but it wasn't in this particular edition, so I didn't buy it. My thinking is that sequels should be bought in the same editions. Apparently, this particular edition was hard to find. So when I saw three copies in Fully Booked High Street, I didn't think twice about buying it. Of course, this goes on the bottom of my list, and I will have to resist the temptation of finding out what happens to Darcy now that she's pregnant and all alone. My reading list is now 9 out of 18, which means I'm exactly halfway down the list. Once I finish reading The Other Boleyn Girl, that will make it 10 out of 18, and I can't wait!

Happy Sunday, everyone!