I'm Like A Lawyer...

The lyrics below implicitly capture that which I had to let go last year..

I'm Like A Lawyer With The Way I'm Always Trying To Get You Off (Me & You)

Last year's wishes
Are this year's apologies
Every last time I come home
I take my last chance
To burn a bridge or two
I only keep myself this sick in the head
'Cause I know how the words get you {off}

We're the new face of failure
Prettier and younger but not any better off
Bulletproof loneliness
At best, at best

Me and you
Setting in a honeymoon
If I woke up next to you
If I woke up next to you
Me and you
Setting in a honeymoon
If I woke up next to you
If I woke up next to you

Collect the bad habits
That you couldn't bear to keep
Out of the woods but I love
A tree I used to lay beneath
Kissed teeth stained red
From a sour bottle baby girl
With eyes the size of baby worlds

We're the new face of failure
Prettier and younger but not any better off
Bulletproof loneliness
At best, at best

Me and you
Setting in a honeymoon
If I woke up next to you
If I woke up next to you
Me and you
Setting in a honeymoon
If I woke up next to you
If I woke up next to you
Me and you
Setting in a honeymoon
If I woke up next to you
If I woke up next to you
Me and you
Setting in a honeymoon
If I woke up next to you
If I woke up next to you

The best way
To make it through
With hearts and wrists intact
Is to realize
Two out of three ain't bad
Ain't bad

Me and you
Setting in a honeymoon
If I woke up next to you
If I woke up next to you
Me and you
(Honeymoon)
Setting in a honeymoon
Me and you
Setting in a honeymoon
If I wake up next to you
If I woke up next to you
Me and you
Setting in a honeymoon
If I wake up next to you
(Honeymoon)

***

So now I'm a Fall Out Boy fan. And it's this song that did it for me. (Great vid, too.)

Sometimes their player's pretty useless, but you can DL away here.

Marion Cotillard Wins Best Acceptance Speech and Best Backstage Interview in the Oscars.. oh, and Best Actress too..

Marion Cotillard is damn beautiful. Mind you, she may not be the type of beauty that knocks eyes out of their sockets. Her sultry good looks may not inspire a madness that could drive one to slit their wrist in puppy love despair. Rather, the extent of her appeal, albeit not quite ethereal, is beyond worldliness. She doesn't look like Christmas morning, she looks like French spring. She's magnifique. She's divine.

It's cliché, but the star who plays the award-winning role of iconic French songstress Edith Piaf in 'La Vie En Rose' (not to mention the female lead in my fave French movie, 'Jeux D'enfants', as described by moi here) is the picture of all things je ne sais quoi. I mean, will you just look at her.


Plus, she's effortlessly funny too. How can you not love her?

[Backstage at the 80th Academy Awards Press Con] When asked how it felt to win first the César, the French equivalent of the Oscar, then the Oscar itself, she said:

"I'm totally overwhelmed with joy and sparkles and fireworks... Everything which goes like bam, bam, bam... all these things are happening right now. It's just a joy and so unexpected that it's surreal, but I love it. It's huge. I'm so proud of the movie. We had so much more than fun during the shooting and all the adventure."

Cotillard credited her presenter Forest Whitaker--last year's Leading Actor Oscar winner for 'King of Scotland'--with helping her to come back into her body. "I was totally... my brain collapsed," said Cotillard when asked what was going through her head after hearing her name called. "He helped me to find the plug back to my brain."

She said the process of being nominated for the César in France and the Oscar in America is very different. "The confusion is that I spent more than a month talking about myself, which is not what I prefer to do in life," she said, "so it's very long, longer than in France. You don't do this, you don't campaign, so that was kind of weird to answer the same questions about myself because the movie was released everywhere. I mean... the life of the movie is going on... the movie doesn't need us anymore."

(writeup in block-quote by Stacy Jenel Smith and Stephanie DuBois)

Like I said, how can you not love her?

Eureka Moment: Iron Is Actually Good For You

Aha! Now I know why I was so not bringin' it during training last Saturday. I needed some iron-pumping action, and how! And that's not just because I'm sort of anemic. Although now that I think about it, how in the world am I getting by without any ferrous reinforcement?

Needless to say, I totally bombed. Halfway through the second round doing pad work with one of the krus (that's Thai for "teacher"), I found, to my utter mortification, that I was operating at 25% capacity. In cellphone terms, I was low-bat. I immediately saw it even before the new trainer was saying, "Kaya pa ba? (Can you still do it?)" In my mind, I was missile-launching expletives at myself. WTF--I used to be able to do 6-8 rounds, straight up. The least number of rounds a student can do is three, with a two-minute break in between. So this one I totally didn't see coming. Just earlier, I had relatively breezed through a straight five-lap run of the tracks for warm-up. Okay, I know, that's not even half a 5K, but considering that I haven't been running in a couple of months, that's hunky-dory for me. Anyway, doing a 5K right before Muay Thai training is just not the smartest thing in my book. Add to that the realization that it is so not worth going through training when you cannot perform to full capacity. I swear, you'd just feel crappy.

An added caveat: This weekend was the first time I set foot in the gym since New Year's Day. Yep, I was that fanatical. During the countdown to 2008 party that Lejan and I went to (see here post), I was texting with the lone kru who was left to care for the training gym while all the other instructors were enjoying the holidays with their respective families far and away from the city. I was on a roll during the holidays, training for days at a time, and I was so gung-ho on making the most of the slackening preoccupation at work that I went ahead and scheduled a one-on-one for the next day.

So I came, I saw, I kicked butt. Although it wasn't the easiest sesh I've had or anything, I was pretty pleased with myself. Nothing says "I'm getting game" more resonantly than doing it in the first day of the new year. Obviously, I thought it was a sign of things to come. Good things, of course, a year of all things fabulous for the Muay Thai nerd that is me, myself, and I.

But then work came flooding back into the mainstream consciousness like a superlolo blowing up on NY Eve--in the living room. While you're in it. Plus, the fam's painting the town red, and I need to keep them in check lest they be accosted by the cops for possession/abuse of acrylics.

And my own pending homeward bound in the coming days doesn't exactly leave me with boundless energy for other stuff that the cosmos might throw my way.

And so, when I spotted a window in my weekend schedule to finally put in some time again in the gym, I was so intent on going that I didn't bother stopping to ask myself the usual questions before heading off to training:

"Did I get enough sleep (and not just rest) in time for training?"
(Answer: I was thinking 6 hours of sleep should be good enough, just coz I have had way less.)

"Did I eat anything the day before that might contribute to an unnecessarily challenging and uncomfortable performance?"
(Answer: Nothing memorable. Meaning, nothing weird enough to derail me from performing as needed.)

"Did I have a relatively stress-free Friday to buffer the craziness of the week and allow for a smooth transition to training day?"
(Answer: Not exactly. From Sunday to Friday last week, average amount of sleep must have fallen below 5 hours.)

"Did I have my daily banana?"
(Answer: Unfortunately, I was fresh out.)

Maybe I should add in a couple of bullets in this here list, saying:

"Did I take the recommended daily 14.8mg of iron today? What about yesterday? What about the rest of the week?"

"Did I ingest less than 2 units of coffee before Wednesday?"

The number right there is an arbitrary figure; I'm trying to cut down on the once-daily cup of joe, on top of attempting the impossible--doing away with caffeine altogether on the uber-toxic days of Thursday and Friday.

And another good thing to consider, too--getting enough calcium for all that bone-crunching, hard hitting/kicking/kneeing/elbowing action. I know I avoid dairy products like the plague now (unless if it's cheesecake) but this serves as a serious mental note to head on out into a pharmacy on the way home and get a box of Anlene or Calci-Aid or something.

Brrrrrr. I shudder to think of all the crimes of negligence I've committed in the name of whatever. If I were my own mother, I'd be giving myself a spanking right now.

So I have had it--enough with the excuses! Who knew the Muay Thai diet could be so common-sense? Read on, for the equally dispossessed.

Life's A Beach

Hunger hurts but starving works
When it costs too much to love...

- lyrics from "Paper Bag" by Fiona Apple

During a trip to Palawan with a few friends last year, I asked Greg as we were sitting out on the porch of the rustic beach house we were renting about something that my mind just wouldn't lay to rest. Earlier that day, we had toured the myriad of islands in El Nido and by golly, the view that stretched out in front of me was so sublime that my eyes hurt. I was so struck by the blinding beauty of the place that the question I posed only made sense: "What is it that makes places like this a thing of universal beauty?" That is, if there is even such a thing.

Much like moral relativism, I believe in the plurality of aesthetic values, in how something to which one ascribes beauty as a natural truth can be viewed quite differently by another. But certainly, at the key moment of recognition, there was no question in my mind as to whether El Nido was beautiful. No ifs, no buts, no maybes. I'm saying this now because prior to our arrival in Palawan, I had expected the rave reviews of El Nido to be overrated, that maybe the budding tourist trap was not all that it's cracked up to be. Now I know that to cradle thoughts to the negative was a sacrilege. To even acknowledge such a question could exist in the realm of the natural world was unimaginable. And that was what got me wondering, exactly what was it that made imagining so difficult.


To this day, I still have no idea.

And really, all I wanted to do was just post pics of some of the things that got me asking that question again today. But of course, I had to have an opening. =P

Anguilla

Nevis

Tangiers, Morocco

Capri

Amalfi, Italy

St. Barts

This is why people like me work like dogs. Because you never know when it's gonna be the day that the cosmos might decide to go nuts and give you your lucky break. C'est si bon!


Photos courtesy of Wimco Villas. The Conde Nast-winning villa and boutique hotel reservations company has an ongoing essay contest wherein you stand a chance to win a US$1000 credit on your villa vacation. Check out their official site and MySpace profile for more information.

¡Qué Jessica!

I really don't wanna sound like a fangirl but I can't help it--I LOVE YOU, Jessica! And you love Marat Safin!

Before tongues start wagging, let me set the record straight. I love Ms. Zafra, but I'm in love with Marat. Me and him, it just totally makes sense. Like peanut butter and jelly, like yin and yang, like Dolce and Gabbana. Or something to that effect, hehe. Basta, it's Marat all the way and doncha forget it!

courtesy of www.maratsafin.com


But really, who knew the queen of varbarian pursuits would have anything in common with the queen of twisted irony? (Hey, was that a pleonasm? I can't say.)

She, whose books in school I would devour, which offered tremendous hope for the perennially oddball, unpopular types that people thought were never going to get with the fab.

She, whose biting candor and acerbic wit made chronicling of the seemingly mundane into an effortless art worthy of a subject slot in the curriculum for mass communications in peyups. (Deconstructing Pop Culture 101, anyone?)

She, the dominatrix from planet Twisted who looked at me with a withering eye across the room in Powerbooks Megamall one time when I was sheepishly asking the bookstore attendant, "Miss, I can't seem to find the sale section...?"

She, whose language and voice inspired and helped shape my own.

And we like the same things? Granted, maybe only a couple of things. But mind you, that's a hefty couple of somethings.

The other Jessica, of Dogeaters fame.

Epicureans, we are.

Two things already.

Tennis players. And tennis, of course.

"I love Marat, but he’s the great squandered genius of his time."

You said it, JZ.


You can check out more of Jessica Zafra's photos here.