Infinitude noted.

Last night,

Encounters With A Yeti with Dave Eggar was like slicing open Alloys Bring The Future Closer and letting a mad doctor shove his hands inside it.

At one point, I had to close my eyes and just listen. This is the kind of music that didn’t need to be watched. I just needed to listen. Dave Eggar was sawing his cello and creating crazy minor scales that stood out against the Encounters’ careful control like a goth bride in Pleasantville. And then I just stopped analysing scales and let the music take over: It wanted to be in an East European countryside, rumors of green fields and dark woods, some high cliffs with crashing waves for more dramatic effect. Behind my eyelids, lightning flashed and thunder rolled.

Stories started and ended inside those few minutes that Encounters and Dave played against each other.

My friend asked why I never went back inside after Encounters’ set. I didn’t know how to tell her that I didn’t need to hear anything else after that amped-up version of Alloys on shrooms.

Dear Blackberry, how dissatisfied am I? Let me count the ways.

Got a Blackberry Curve 8520 from Globe last week.

Now I know why this thing came with a relatively cheap plan.

  1. OUTDATED phone software when I got the unit. Which zapped the phone right after the first desktop-to-phone sync, translated as the White Screen Of Death. <— Not truly explained in support pages either. Had to Google for blogs that talked about this. All of them talked about battery-pulling <— which doesn’t really work now that I think about it. And only one of them bothered to ask “did you update your phone’s software?”
  2. Took me an hour and a half (plus one shut-down-the-phone-and-turn-it-on-again and a battery pull) to get the Browser to connect via Wi-Fi.
  3. Finally managed to update cumbersome Desktop Software Update thing. Took around an hour. Numerous status bars. Made my computer hang twice. Had to reboot TWICE as well. Managed to clean out and do an inventory of our department’s marketing collateral during that time.
  4. Memos, Tasks, and Documents-to-Go DISAPPEARED after the update.
  5. Still trying to figure out where I can get the Memos, Tasks and Documents To Go packet. Clue: It’s NOT in the Blackberry Support pages, or in Blackberry’s native web-pages. Not in the CD which came with the phone, either. Besides, that one’s outdated.
  6. The sensory trackpad whatever thingy is annoying if you’re scrolling down a PDF file. Not at all ergonomic.
  7. Contacts list is presented in such a plain fashion, you wonder if they were scrimping on design fees. Even my nephew’s flowchart project in his Computer class looked better.
  8. The Calendar reminded me of my old Palm Pilot. And I had that Palm Pilot in 2003.
  9. Over-all, the graphics are too sharp and edgy. When I clicked on “text smoothing,” I wondered if I really did click it because nothing really happened. Or maybe I’m just saying this because I’d gotten used to Windows 7. Wow. And that’s saying a lot.
  10. Why is it so damn hard to tweak you, Blackberry Curve?
  11. It comes with ONE theme. ONE. Even Nokia phones let you have four themes that you can actually live with.
  12. Have yet to verify this, but apparently, there aren’t a lot of GTD programs for Blackberries. Oh freaking yey. Meanwhile, until I get the Tasks & Memos back, I wouldn’t know how to do a GTD workaround.
  13. Even my old Nokia E51 is more user-friendly and intuitive.

CONCLUSION: Blackberry’s OS5.0 or whatever is the smartphone equivalent of SAP. Useful, if you can get it to work. But the software’s so cumbersome, it’d be cheaper and more efficient if you just ditch it altogether and come up with a new one.

I guess I’m just totally unsatisfied with it. Unfortunately, I might be stuck with it for another year. Just might be a version of smartphone hell.

On untapped desires.

This is my favorite time of the week.

It’s two hours to midnight, house is empty and dark. A cool night, with light rain falling softly, softly on the thirsty plants outside.

And if you stand outside the house, this is what you’ll hear.

(What you can’t hear is me singing along. Which might be fortunate.)

Numbering our days.

So many things happen in the span of one day.

Minds change, hearts fall, hands reach, hugs are traded for kisses, decisions flicker and falter or shine steady on to meet a brand new day. We sleep, drink coffee, eat processed meat (with zero trans-fat), check our Facebooks, Tumblrs, Twitters, and then keep our thumbs on our shiny plastic toys that send SMS’ across the air. We run, jog, stretch our bodies, we fill our lives with all these little trinkets that we think define us.

We glance through the advertisements, the pithy little PR articles in our newspapers, absorb the facts, pretend we care what the score is in today’s games, and it is all futile. We are all, each one of us, a mere statistic, a slash in the blackboard of worldwide economy that determines the daily average consumption of ___________.

We read books, play our songs, think our thoughts, change our stands, switch allegiances, make enemies, make friends, play inane relationship games where we dance around one another, treading the fine line between lust and love and friendship and seduction and fucking. Documents (thoughts, plans, strategies, stories, conversations) saved in rectangular steel boxes that hum and blink its little lights.

With each little action, each strand of thought, we shape the fabric of lives around us, and in the process: shape our own lives.

Our hearts spill out its feelings and emotions through our mouths, until they become words, and the words take flight, never to come back. And still our hearts churn out its deceitful, beautiful thoughts. Traitor to our own world values and the beliefs we would like to say we stand for.

Sling shot staccato sounds of popcorn popping in microwaves, hissing sounds of the water boiling, steam rising, and the city moving in a steady roar (do you hear it?) around us. Trains, construction sites, radios, buses, cabs, cars, SUVs… we make a tremendous ruckus as we change the landscape with every mile we consume.

A birth, a death, an anniversary, a memory made, a song written, a song sung, a poem written, a story started, a story ended, a business started, a business ending, a sale made, a sale not made. Tears, laughter, giggles, moans, whistles, sighs. Far away, thunder rumbles, a hurricane leaves a town, rain falls; my city fries in a pool of its own sweat.

So many things happen in twenty four little hours, in one day.

And we are all none for the wiser.

So little of us bother to make the most of what time we do have right now. We keep half of ourselves in the past, and the other half in the murky soup of our own thoughts (the pot that holds the what-ifs, maybe-I-should-haves, and-yets, et cetera ad nauseaum).

As that song went, “My only goal is just to be. There’s only now. There’s only here. Give in to love or live in fear. No other path, no other way, no day but today…”

Who knows if there will be a tomorrow? But as sure as I am writing this, there definitely is a now. What are we doing with our now’s?

Notes re: Sublime Sunday Destinations

Glorietta Cinema 1: Guest-worship-lead at Lifechurch Makati. Went there with absolutely no voice. Not exaggerating. I totally had no voice when I woke up, and I wanted to cry because how the heck was I gonna lead worship if I didn’t have a voice. But when I stepped to the mic, and opened my mouth, there it was. Buzzer-beater miracle. I love it. I actually sounded more than decent. Lifechurch has a really great tech team. The message was super timely. Habakkuk stands for “to embrace,” or “to wrestle.” Then it was like a buffet of the Word. Awesome.

Park Square: Lunch with the Lifechurch spiritual family. Good conversations.

Manila Pen: To hug my favorite Imus family in the entire world. And get reacquainted with my cute goddaughter.

Rockwell: Mint tea and NOT shopping and catch-up time with the best friend.

VCF Fort: Been a while since I was here. They use more light effects now than when I first started attending, and the worship team’s younger. But God’s Word is still served fresh and straight up. And I felt all warm and fuzzy inside when I saw my friend’s name flash on the screen as the song writer of the EN2010 song.

Zong: Dinner with an Indian girl who speaks Ilonggo, a white girl from Virginia, two Cebuanas, and Christian Bautista. First time I ever actually had to pull out the “Is Christian Bautista here?” card. I hate to say it, but he paid for dinner. As usual. (Ian, I <3 you to bits.)

Rockwell: A hunt for Dr. Pepper. It wasn’t successful, but hurray for perfect parking spots, shopping consciences, and getting to know the people you’re with better.

How Encounters With A Yeti’s Feathers Of Knives totally fried my brain.

AILENE Ponch. Oh. Wow. Feathers Of Knives. Sigh. Who wrote this delicate song? It’s my niece and mine’s official afternoon song. We are agreed on this.
PONCH (Must have said something. And Ailene totally did not get it because, well, she wasn’t really paying attention. And he said a lot of things…)
AILENE Roz? That’s your hot bassist, right? Still single hopefully? He made this song? Hmm. *grin*
PONCH No, I wrote the song. Roz wrote Ride and (something else. Ailene wasn’t paying attention again…)
AILENE Oh. You wrote it. Oh. Glad to know Roz’s still single. Haha. Are you still single? (Since I already embarrassed myself by showing interest in the wrong song-um-maker?? I might as well embarrass myself some more. Gosh, Ai.)
PONCH I’ve always been single. Even when I had a girlfriend, I was still single. But pretty good demo, right?
AILENE I think I’m taking this demo of yours a song a day. Like I can’t get past certain parts of Feathers Of Knives. I can’t explain it. It’s such a mysterious, delicate, fragile thing. So I need to listen to it over and over and over again. Oh, Ponch. Thanks for this. Really.

Passed up on that chance, Ailene.

Last night, while listening to my friend Owie tell the story of how she and bassist extraordinaire Rommel got together, a loud voice in my head was going:

YOU IDIOT! THAT WAS IT!

THAT. WAS. IT.

YOU ARE SUCH AN IDIOT.

HE WAS DOING THE SAME THING.

THIS IS THE THIRD TIME WE HEARD ABOUT STUFF HE WAS DOING THAT…

OOOOHHH!!!

And then the voice got faint, probably stomped its way out of my head.

________

You have no idea what I’m talking about. That’s alright. This is MY blog. I can be as obscure as I wanna be.

Cat Kingdom

Before 6AM, my neighborhood is ruled by cats.

I was intruding on a monarch’s kingdom and the familiar streets take on strange shadows and corners.

I saw cats everywhere.

There was an orange one sharpening her claws on the tree stump while another looked on with head tilted to the side. A cat looked at me through slitted eyes as I ran by. A cat with strange grey markings never moved from its place, and I ran past it several times. A cat munching on grass stalks. A cat sitting on our neighbor’s wall. A cat licking its side. There was a cat crouched low behind the santan bushes. Slow perambulations from a sleek dirty cat. No kittens, though. Maybe they were in day care. All of them gave me that heavy-lidded stare when I ran or walked past by them.

Then I turned a corner. I saw the sun directly above the street I turned into, and the world filled with a glorious white light. Everything, even the dirt on the wall, seemed new.

I blinked and noticed the humans.

There was a purple-track-suited woman being coached by her grandfather. Men in weirdly cut shorts were swatting tennis balls back and forth. The maids started watering the plants. I saw a man lovingly trim the leaves of a beautiful bonsai. Carpenters working on the new mod-ish apartments in the corner. The smell of meat being fried in oil. Children sitting, blinking, on the stoop, hair still mussed from sleep. A man with a tie and a big bag full of white paper folders opening the car door. A woman running in a rather weird, jerky manner. (Her shoulders are going to hurt tonight.)

The cats?

My guess is that they’re dreaming, slumbering, waiting until we relinquish control of the waking world back to them.

After midnight ponderings.

It’s 45 minutes past midnight on this sweltering Friday night.

I’m listening to a woman sing, “Though folks with good intentions tell me to save my tears, well, I’m so mad about him. I can’t live without him…” and I feel like standing up and swaying in time to the music with my eyes closed.

It’s been a good five months, love. Been a good five days, too. Later on I’ll blog about my walking tour of Hong Kong. But just tonight, preen with me, won’t you?

I am blessed beyond all rational thought. I mess up, and instead of consequences I get blessing and favor. Instead of losing, I gain. It’s inexplicable, this grace that is extended to me out of love.

You don’t understand a thing I’m saying. But believe me when I say, it’s been a truly awe-inspiring five months. My heart skips a beat just thinking back on everything that has happened.

Heck, my heart’s skipping. Period.

Hong Kong Days: Tea time

Typing this short missive from the lobby of our hotel here in downtown Kowloon. There’s a rather elegant-looking silver teapot that’s waiting for me to empty it of its contents, hence the “short missive.”

Hong Kong still looks the same – pristine, clean, and humming with a high-charged energy only real cities generate. I can’t help but love this city. It’s such a, well, city.

I’m tripping on the street signs (what is that font they use? Helvetica? Oh come on…) and the boutiques so near to our hotel. I intentionally did not make an itinerary for myelf. Oh the joy of empty days.

If we are friends and you’ve been trying to get hold of me, the bad news is that you can’t reach me unless you leave me random notes and messages on our social networking sites. (The roaming function doesn’t work , which I find unusual, as my service provider usually finds every possible way to add charges to my phone bill.)

The good news is: you can’t reach me, and we are free to enjoy the novelty of corresponding in paragraphs and straight sentences. No more handy “like” buttons or 150-character limits in our Twitter. Write me an email. I miss reading about your days.