Gifts as Character Reference

I just did my Christmas shopping earlier today, which is actually pretty early for me. Last year, I was still scrambling to buy Christmas gifts on the 24th.

Anyway, one of the things I found were these cellphone-holder-while-you-charge things:













The idea is you plug in your cellphone charger through the angel/devil's mouth, wrap the charger cord around its neck, and leave the cellphone sitting comfortably on its lap. I found them charming (and convenient) enough (which are also qualities one should look for in a one-night stand, btw), so I bought about a dozen of them, divided equally between the Angel and Devil design. I figured I'd give my nice friends the Angel ones, and my asshole friends the Devil ones. See, this way, not only will I be giving them a gift, I'll also be giving them an idea of how pleasant or nasty I think they are.*

-------------------

Another thing that I recently bought is this 17-in desktop monitor that I'm staring at right now. My old monitor was making its best efforts in giving me a migraine and turning me colorblind by filling the screen alternately with blinking, saturated greens, blues and reds, so I was only too happy to get rid of it. Good thing Mich and James, the eBay conglomerate that they are, were selling this item at the time I was looking for one. At least now, I can put being colorblind at the bottom of my "things to worry about" list.




*For the record, I'm just kidding, and I'm keeping a devil design for myself.
----------------
Now playing: Modest Mouse - Spitting Venom
via FoxyTunes

Good Times Come

Had an extremely fun night yesterday with my friends/officemates/former teammates. We all got together to celebrate Mats', Karon's, Camille's, and my birthday. Woohoo!

The four of us treated our F/OM/FTM to dinner at La Maison. The food was great (especially the barkada-sized ribs) and since there were more than a dozen of us, they gave us a table at a separate section of the restaurant (I guess so that we won't disturb the other guests.) After that we headed to Masas for some after-dinner drinks (a few pitchers of Mango Mandarin, (which I kept calling Mango Madness, which kept confusing the waiter), a few pitchers of Frozen Dalandan Margaritas, and some bottles of Red Horse, San Mig Strong Ice and Lights.) After that, we headed off for Red Box to do some hardcore videoke singing. And by hardcore, I mean heart-felt ballads, American Idol-style performances, Britney Spears pop fluff, and the requisite Aegis dregs disguised as "songs".

Thanks for the great night guys! (Hey, I did say it was gonna be legendary, right? Hahaha)

[ ]
^
This is where our group picture would have been posted,
had I not forgotten to bring my cam.

----------------
Now playing: Phoenix - If I Ever Feel Better
via FoxyTunes

The best gifts are the gifts you get

The best gifts are the gits you get even when you're not celebrating anything.

Thursday Last Week:

I met up with some high school friends two Thursday's ago for a long overdue and much-delayed dinner out. We ate at A Venetto in Glorietta 3 and ordered more food than we could eat, which is usually the case whenever I eat at A Venetto (I always underestimate their huge serving/I always overestimate my appetite for pasta.) (I highly recommend their Oil and Garlic with Ham and Bacon in White Sauce, btw.) I haven't been seeing much of my high school friends as much as I want, so seeing them again after some time was really nice. High school friends are the best people to share a good laugh really (between the Walking Human Mirror Ball and the Salted Duck Egg-and-Potato jokes, what could be better?)

After dinner, we rode a cab home to Las Pinas (where we all live) and winded our night down at the kapihang bayan ng Las Pinas (take a guess), where we were able to extort money for a cup of coffee from SMART-employed Mel. We were more than happy to accept Mel's offer(?) to treat us since we know how generous Smart is with their Christmas bonuses (hint hint).

Friday Last Week:

The next night, I met up with my PEx tennis friends (Ron and his friend Trish, PJ and Anuck) in NSG to have dinner and to watch the Roger Federer-Nicolas Kiefer Aussie open semis match (we ate dinner, but we basically ignored the match coz we were too busy eating/talking. The Fed was gonna win in four sets anyways). The highlight of my night though was when PJ gave me his brand new copy of Jeff Buckley's first and only studio album Grace.

The back story: PJ is a big Jason Mraz fan, and so is Ron I guess, and they were talking about the Mraz concert that they both watched some days before (Mraz did two shows in Manila and PJ actually watched both, presumably so that he could write a compreshensive thesis of how Mraz's singing and performances in Manila changes from one night to another. Hehe.) Anywayz, they asked me if I liked Mraz too, and I said I think he's okay but I don't like him enough to watch his shows. And then I said If it was Damien Rice then I would definitely go watch, and if it was Jeff Buckley, then I would kill anyone who stops me from watching. So PJ asks me if I had a copy of Jeff Buckely's Grace, and I said no because it's so hard to find Jeff Buckley cd's anywhere here in Manila. Then suddenly he takes out the Grace CD he has in his bag that he got for a very looow price when he was in Singapore and said that I could have it since he already had the Grace Legacy Edition. Ofcourse there was a few seconds of me pretending like I was too shy to accept such a generous gift, but that only lasted a few seconds because there was no way in hell I was letting PJ change his mind.

I then proceeded to declare PJ "My favorite person in the world for the next five days."

This weekend:

I planned to talk about my weekend but the weekend is not yet over and this post already has too many words in it, so I'll just blog it next time... (I think I'll call my next entry Aaaaaaaaahhhhhh!)

Week One in the Rat Race

This was a pretty good week.

Hell yes it was...

Last Monday marked my first day on my first job. I arrived at the office (at the tenth floor of our building) a few minutes before 9, but I didn't get to meet my officemates until about an hour later (thanks to Mhia for getting me out of that frikkin cold conference room hehe. No, I didn't get trapped or anything like that...)

After that I was sent to the 34th floor so I could join my fellow trainees for some SQL training. The training lasted for four days, for about 8 hours a day and was basically a crash course of what we were taught in the DBAPDEV days of college plus some new tricks too. We had free snacks in the mornings and the afternoons so that really kept me well-fed and happy, which is never not good in my book.

Anywayz, since the training didn't finish until Thursday, it was only on Friday that I spent significant time at the 10th floor, which basically explains why most of my conversations with my officemates turned out like this:

Officemate: Ikaw yung new hire? Kelan ka nagstart?
Me: Yep, first day ko nung Monday
Officemate: Talaga? Eh bakit ngayon lang kita nakita?
Me: Nagtraining kasi ako from Monday to Thursday eh, kaya ngayon lang talaga ako napunta dito hehe...

So it was only on my fifth day of work that I actually met my officemates (and I don't think I've actually met all my teammates yet) and from what I was told, I'm gonna have the duty manager role (the same role Mhia has, or used to have as she said on her blog) and training for that won't be until October so I'll have the whole of next week doing, uhm... nothing in particular really. Hmmm... Maybe I should practice my "suck up to the boss" routine next week then. When I tell people that I probably won't be doing anything next week, they basically tell me (and I paraphrase): "Enjoy it while it lasts..."

In that case, I'm gonna stretch every damn second.

We ate lunch at PBComm Tower's food court, and I think they have better food outlets there than our own building's food court.

Highlight of the day however was definitely the dinner/s15 reunion with my college friends (s15 was our original block) at Teriyaki Boy and although not everybody was there since the dinner was just short notice, it was still hell fun ("Less sense, more fun" is one of our guiding principles. Haha)

Next Wednesday should be equally interesting since most of us will meet up again for grad practice, college recognition, and the baccalaureate mass, and on Saturday night some of us will meet up again in Dandan's house in Katipunan for some after-grad celebration (Our grad will be in Saturday afternoon.) So if your a friend of ours and you are reading this, consider this an invitation to come, just contact Dandan for detaile hehe (You wouldn't want to miss Dandan and Eliza's karaoke showdown would you?)


PS: Someone told me a very amusing story last Thursday. One of the most amusing ones I've heard all year, actually. It might be disturbing to some, but I gotta admit, there's humor in it you won't find in everyday-average jokes.