To My Dearest Jill

Dear Jill,

I am writing you to let you know that your life begins now. i think for the longest time, you have been waiting for your life to start - you've been waiting for some sign, some signal and i want you to know that this is it.

don't ever forget you have an appointment with destiny. i think for sometime you actually forgot who you are and you lost your way. and in trying to find the answers to questions you found yourself wandering in circles of your own making.

but none of these matter anymore. you are still here - and you are still alive. your inner fire never stopped burning and now you will reclaim your rightful place in this world.

there is nothing that anyone can say about you that will matter for you will always be a shining star that can never be dimmed. even during your darkest days and hours, your flame burns bright. no one has the power to dim your own star - not even yourself.

you are gifted with amazing presence. you walk into a room and people sit up and notice - and most of all they never forget. you open your mouth to speak and people listen. you have the gift of words and the power to see laughter in heartbreak. you are not afraid to feel pain and most of all you are not afraid to learn from it.

you are blessed with a fierce intellect - your knowledge and thirst to learn more and discover what makes this world work is amazing. you feel what others feel and say the words that others are too afraid to say.

you are kind. your generosity and loyalty is unparalleled. and you are loved.

you are surrounded and gifted with so much love - from friends and family wherever you may be. they are all rooting for you and they will be with you to the end of your days, as you will be for them.

you are an amazing dream maker - you make your own dreams come true.

you own your power and you wield your power with wisdom. you are courage personified because even during the times you have been afraid, you have gone on anyway.

above all, never forget that you are a special child of the universe. you have been protected and sheltered by the hand of God through all these years and kept out of harm's way most specially those times when you were walking this earth blind.

you are an amazing woman. there is no one like you.

The Parable of the 97 Frogs to 3 Princes Ratio

my friend and i have this private joke: in a pool of 100 men, there is a consistent ratio of 97 frogs to only 3 princes. statistically, this means you may have to go through 97 frogs before you hit a prince. but by the time you pass the 98th mark, you will hit 3 princes in a row so don't panic when you find the first one.

i guess we always tell ourselves this statistic whenever the prince in waiting in our lives turn out to be a frog.

well one of my recent ones turned out again to be a frog. actually he is better classified as shrimp - take the head off and you end up with a delectable body for a treat.

sometimes i question, is it that there are just too many frogs out there or do we simply insist on calling them frogs because we don't have a clue as to how a prince is supposed to look nor be like? or are some women simply blessed with a run of bad luck, stringing up one frog after the other like beads on a necklace? or do we subconsciously program ourselves to persistently find frog traits and after finding enough hereby triumphantly declare yet again another frog and thereby given reason to move on to the next one to hide the fact that we are simply unable to commit? is it futile to give the shrimp a bit more time to see if he is frog or prince? if he does turn out to be a prince in disguise what do i do with him then? should he then be called the shrimp prince?

the other one of my recent ones is definitely the prince turned out. the right school, the right job, faultless gentlemanly manners, tall and blonde, laughs at all my jokes and thinks my temper is very amusing - so perfect he irritates the hell out of me. but secretly, he doesn't get my blood boiling like the shrimp does. so does this mean this mr. prince looking is my subjective frog? if you are addicted to shrimp even if you know it is bad for you, does this make you a frog? a very, bad frog? a delusional very, bad frog?

if you come to terms with the fact that the shrimp is indeed a frog, does the shrimp-frog have certain skills you are allowed to take advantage of under the mitigating circumstances that you are simply making the best of what he can offer you right now like changing lightbulbs and installing hooks for your coats until the real prince comes along? after all if you are a frog because you are addicted to the shrimp frog, doesn't it stand to reason that you are a good match for the time being because you are both frogs anyway albeit for entirely different reasons?

now if the prince looking one is your subjective frog, and you are the shrimp-addicted frog temporarily hooked up with the shrimp-frog, are you not allowed to engage each version of frog until you snap out of it and decide which version of frog you want to go with? is there a rule against simultaneously engaging different versions of frog because this makes you a fat, picky frog who can't make up her mind?

when you finally make up your mind about which frog you want to go with, is this the affirmative action that finally moves him into the category of prince? what about the one you decide not to go with? will he be doomed into frog memory forever until you hear someone else picked him thus changing his category effectively?

alarmingly, there also doesn't seem to be a guarantee that they won't revert to frog status after being re-classified as prince. do you think it will be a good idea to poke your eyes out once he is classified as a prince so you won't have to suffer seeing his reverting back into a frog if and when?

perhaps we should classify the 3 princes out of a pool of 100 frogs then? one is the prince which will eventually revert to being a frog, the other one is the prince who stays a prince forever and the semi-frog semi-prince who said, i don't care if you think me frog or prince - i'm staying, i'm yours, you're mine and that's that.

truly, women, this is the singular issue which plagues us all. how do you pick among the frogs and the princes? who really is the frog and who really is the prince?

This Too Shall Pass

sometimes there are days when you realize you've done all you can and all that is left is to wait and listen for the universe's response. it is a test of your patience and faith - all you can do is keep reminding yourself that this too, shall pass.

you remember all those times when you were in the same state of uncertainty. you go through the sheaves of your memory, thinking of the days that were darker than the ones you are now and you remember, this too shall pass. like all the other dark days gone before as well as those bright and merry.

you sit down and take time to cry and pray.in spite of the little voice inside you saying, this too shall pass, you have your human moments when you demand an answer and you demand it now but all you hear is a silence.

your days are filled with friends who wish you well, support you and love you and for a while you are entertained. you enjoy going out with a few men and for a while they provide issues that detract you momentarily.

these are the days when you realize you have done all that you can. the rest is up to life and God, and all you can do is wait, pray, eat, love and live.

i have discovered - this is freedom. the time i have now, having taken all the action i can do and knowing there is nothing more that i can do except wait. in the meantime, i can read, i can call people, i can cook and eat. my soul is telling me, you have done what you can so now, wait for the universe to show you the way.

this too shall pass...in the meantime..i blog.

Ricochet!

GOOP: gwyneth paltrow makes such a big deal about her healthy living newsletter website called goop. its divided into sections like make, see, be - whatever. she's also recently done a series of shows about the food of spain. for someone who's known to eat nothing but seeds and grass it's a little bit of 'someone is trying to make herself over as the blonde mother earth to match brunette angelina.

all i can say is gwyneth babe - it ain't working. it's like an anorexic trumping their recipe booklet of sugar free, fat free, calorie free, vitamin free water available in serving sizes of 1, 2 and mega dose 3ml.

she states in her website - i don't eat red meat, sugar and dairy...right so you eat grass and seeds. when she trots out the line 'i have a weakness for cheese...after all you only live once' HUH? DUH?

verdict: honey you want to eat seeds and grass and believe that no red meat, dairy or sugar makes for a happier world by all means do so. i'm NOT buying that shit though. and i don't think the rest of the world is either.

Blonde seed eating mother earth Gwyneth versus Brunette child army rearing mother earth Angelina who feeds her kids frito-lays? angelina wins any time of day babe. hunger don't do happy.

HUNGER: when i am hungry i become really grumpy. not being fed makes me really grummpy. the hungrier i get the less i can focus and the grumpier i get. i think if i went on a prolonged hungry period that grumpiness will turn into full fledged rage. i think it is this hunger induced full fledged rage that gives certain models the power to turn small, ordinary objects like blackberry's into weapons of mass destruction. and lulls them into believing it is perfectly acceptable to bash the heads of their maids or personal assistants with the weapon of mass destruction called the blackberry. really, do yourself a favor. go eat when you're hungry. and i mean red meat, sugar and dairy. seeds and grass are for cows. that's why gwyneth eats them. she's famous for being a cow. a really nasty cow.

COWS: i don't want to see pictures of them. their eyes are so beautiful and i feel a wave of revulsion sweep over me when i see one and realize these beautiful eyes are where nilaga, caldereta, lengua and crispy tadyang ng baka come from. NOT to be confused with the cow called gwyneth. i only want to be vaguely aware of them. i want to see them only as neatly sliced bloody squares on styrofoam wrapped in clingwrap with price tags at the freezer section of the supermarket. for the very same reason i do not want to EVER watch a piglet movie again. i stopped eating lechon for some time because of Babe. chickens though are another thing. i can kill a chicken if i need to. they are ugly creatures.

UGLY: with so many of them floating around in showbusiness, particularly philippine showbusiness, its hard to imagine now really what is ugly. ugly is no longer ugly. it has been replaced by fugly (fucking ugly). in no time it will be replaced by bfugly (bloody fucking ugly).

FUCKING: so commonly said now it has lost its power to shock. sometimes replaced with 'effing' but really that's like eating seeds and grass in lieu of red, meat, sugar and dairy. what's the point of swearing if you bleep it out and make parenthetical remarks? seed and grass eating people i swear are out of their fucking mind.

MIND: if all you ate were seeds and grass not only will you surely go out of your mind you would also surely end up with a toilet bowl of goop. when you go out of your mind from eating seeds and grass, you will one day think it is a good idea to come out with a webnewsletter called GOOP.

GOOP: (see previous entry)

The Saga of Sago

because it was chinese new year, i went out with my friends to have a banging dimsum lunch in chinatown last saturday. if anyone of you happen to be in london and are hankering for authentic hongkong style dimsum, the BEST chinese restaurant to go is Gerrard's on the corner of Gerrard street in soho. this is the street that is directly across the corner of the theatre where les miserables is showing.

anyways, dimsum was AMAZING. and since we were there, my friend and i decided to wander around in the asian grocery shops to stock up on oriental staples like mang tomas lechon sauce and patis.

the thing is everytime i enter a food shop (and friends who have food shopped with me know this), i just go berserk buying all sorts of things because all sorts of recipes to do start flashing in my brain. jill inside a food shop/grocery store is like dropping a drug addict in the middle of a heroin pool.

as i was wandering down the aisles, i suddenly passed by shelves upon shelves of sago. all sizes, all colors. some were plain, some were flavored. all of a sudden, i was assailed by memories of food with sago. like taho, ginatan, sago at gulaman. and this was all food i had forgotten to eat while i was wheezing with asthma when i went a few weeks ago to manila.

the sadness that came over me at realizing these were things i forgot to eat in manila quickly turned into inspired fervor. i scanned the various sago products and decided I WILL MAKE MY OWN SAGO FEAST.

so i ended up buying sago in its raw form and excitedly went home. again, as certain friends know, i don't hesitate to cook when i feel like it even at 1 or 3 in the morning.

so i found myself at 1am trying to figure out how to cook the bloody sago.

i had to research on the internet and found an article glorifying the sago aka tapioca. apparently, you had to boil it for an hour then soak in water then soak in sugar syrup.

so i thought simple enough.

i did exactly as it said and ended up with a part glue, part boiled but not quite there mixture. naknampucha BAKET!!!!!

now you know failure incites me to try even harder, before i knew it, i had 4 pans of sago with varying amounts of water and heat boiling away at different times. after boiling i soaked them in varying temperature of water to find out which one would give me the best consistency. magkamatayan na tayo - hindi ako papayag na masabihang hindi marunong magluto ng sago!

before i knew it, i had the perfect cooked sago at about 543am.

the container of perfect cooked sago has now been sitting in my fridge bathed in sugar syrup. i have yet to buy any tofu, ginatan ingredients or even gulaman. joskoday baka ikamatay ko at maisipan ko pang gumawa ng sarili kong taho.

tama na muna after the saga of the sago.

Haze of 2008

as i failed to religiously plot down my adventures in the last year, i now feel compelled to write them down. partly because i want a record of my thoughts and partly to satisfy your voyeuristic tendencies on what bloody adventure i am on next.

actually i don't think my life is one adventure after another. my drama queen tendencies only serve to make them look like a series of adventures which serves the purpose of pleasing most voyeurs.

so my 2008 year highlights..and the random thoughts attached to them:

1. Keanu Reeves sighting on Portobello Market. No random thoughts - just major tingling in the womanly parts at the sight of this demi-God from Bill and Ted's Adventures hell. He was four feet away from me. My body oozed so much estrogen and progesterone at the sight I swear I could have flooded a small town in Pampanga.

2. Bob arrives in London and stayed 6 months. It was so surreal picking him up in Paddington station as if we agreed to meet somewhere in Greenbelt. Bob fixed my house, painted my living and bedroom walls red and yellow. I got used to the bathroom smelling of men's products. He almost got arrested in France (transited from Frankfurt, Germany where he visited his mom) because he had in his luggage his mom's 18 year old baby rice cooker that he asked for because we needed one in London. They thought it was a bomb. Today it sits in my cupboard place of honor - it is 18 years old and has travelled with his mom all over Europe and has met all of his various stepdads in the process. It still works fine and dandy and even if it no longer does, it will go with me wherever I go.

3. Jen arrives in London. Bob picks her up at the airport. I get redundated and being in a state of shock and tears, Jen takes a cab to pick me up at the office even if she didn't know how to in order to make sure I was alright. I model for her during one of her classes. We both apply to this mysterious print ad looking for make up stylists and account managers for a prestige cosmetics brand. More to this story in another post.

4. Jen, Jill and Bob out and about in London. We got drunk at 10am in Borough Market drinking sangria, eating paella and raclette with potatoes, gherkins and pickled onions plus champagne at one of the stalls. We kept walking around London taking pictures and posing at various landmarks. We ended in a park near the Tower of London - we lay down on the grass...and slept the alcohol off for a full hour. I snored...loudly. Bob took photos of us sleeping, me snoring. When we woke up, wala nang araw and everyone was gone. If we did this in Luneta, I'm sure we would have ended up tied, gagged, raped, mugged and thrown into Manila de Bay to die from slurping down Manila sludge for good measure. Buti na lang nasa London kami. hehehehe.....We also go to Stone Henge, Windsor Castle, a few gay bars, out to Bob's farewell dinner with the gay posse.

5. Rob arrives in London. We secretly did not tell Jen to surprise her. Jen screaming her lungs out when Rob enters the flat and appears in front of her in the living room. Jen gets a tattoo. Rob, Jill and Jen hit the museum trail and go to see the town of Oxford where we climb the tower of a 12th century church to get to the balcony overseeing the town. We also watch the changing of the guards at Buckingham Palace.

6. Rob, Jill, Jen, Will and Arnold go out and party til 3am in this gay bar. Jill and Arnold quickly get smashed. Jill gets propped up by Rob and Jen in order to get home where Jill promptly falls on the carpet crawling. Jen takes a roll of incriminating photos of me crawling drunk on the floor while Rob laughs his head off beside me. I can still hear Rob's maniacal laugh in my head. You know you're in the company of friends who love you when you fearlessly get drunk and smashed out of your head like this. Haylavet. I spent the entire time the next day in bed nursing one of the biggest hangovers of my life. Jen makes our last dinner together with Rob - super sarap beefsteak Pinoy style and kanin cooked using our 18 year old rice cooker.

7. Jill sells perfume at Selfridge's for 2 days - stationed at the D&G and Gucci counter. Long story - will feature in another post.

8. The saga of my crush on my creative director - which thankfully is over. Nyahahaha!!!

9. Met someone and had coffee with him before leaving for Manila christmas vacay.

10. Edith's wedding in Batangas. Standout moment in my mind is her walking down the aisle to Ringo Starr's 'Here comes the Sun'. Awesome. Also her rock band and the shots bar at reception. Reception on the beach. Most FUN and ORIGINAL wedding I had ever been to my entire life.

11. Jill gets her residency visa and is now on her third year of living in London.

Come to think of it - I thought 2008 was rough. It wasn't. 2008 was a blast.

Super Pinay is back and here's to more drama queen adventures.

Blog by Popular Demand

when i checked the date of my last entry, i wasn't surprised at how long ago it was. almost a full 9 months ago.

i decided to start writing in my blog again after i got back from manila a week ago. a lot of my friends who i saw or failed to see during that time were asking me if my blog was still on and was i still writing in it. i took it as a sign that my life's adventures and my musings on them must be somewhat interesting so it made me feel encouraged. or perhaps i am just friends with a bunch of desperate, lurid voyeurs. either way i feel blessed.

i first intended this blog to be a chronicle of all the interesting things i would see in this country and this continent. but it evolved into a whole lot of other things. beyond anything else, it was my companion during the first few months of my life in london when i all i mostly had was myself to talk to. as i made more friends, it started to somewhat drop out of my life because i felt during those times that my human friends were real and this cyber diary was losing its relevance.

but as i read back on the thoughts that i had, some of the entries took me by surprise. i was taken aback at what i had written - some insanely funny entries, some blah, some were so emotionally raw and one or two were written with an insightful eloquence and thoughtfulness that i didn't think i ever could possess.

and i decided to take up writing on my blog again - because i am now convinced i can actually write. i remember writing a list once (well one of the many lists) about what i thought i do really well and it was a very short list. i have decided to add 'write well' to it.

i realized that the more i wrote the better the entries were so - this is going to be part of my resolution now. to write more in 2009.

tonight, i will have dinner with someone i met 2 days before i flew to manila for the christmas break. when i told him i was going away for the holidays, he asked to have coffee with me before i left. and before our coffee hour ended he asked to have dinner when i went back.

when i got back, i waited a day before texting him and he immediately responded. so tonight i'm having dinner with him. i'll let you know how it goes.

i'm back. blog by popular demand.