Tweedledum and Tweedledee 11:31 PM

Heehee. Cute but freaky concept art by Tim Burton. Kind of like the way Quentin Blake illustrates for Roald Dahl.

spring shopping 5:31 PM

I researched online and discovered that when it comes to weather, the month of March can be unpredictable in Countries X, Y & Z where I'm going. So I've decided to bring a variety of coats and jackets with me: my new gray wool coat from Zara, plus some old favorites like my light cotton plaid trench coat, a warm hooded sweatshirt, a white cardigan, a brown suede jacket--and my new black cotton jacket, again from Zara!

I just want to be prepared. I know it's going to be cold over there; it just really depends on the degree of coldness. Will just layer and layer to death until I'm sweating inside my thermal undergarments!

I've put a picture of my new jacket here because I'm so in love with the jacket sleeves. I'm not really a coat kind of girl (as I like to wear small tops and skirts in the office) so I didn't realize how fun it was to shop for thick coats and the like.

AND THE PRICES IN ZARA ARE REALLY AIN'T THAT BAD.

I'm still not saying where I'm going! Until like a few days before I fly out. Heehee.

bursting 9:32 PM

Yes, I am bursting with amazing news. But it'll have to wait. Like until March, when I'm sure it's proper to tell. Don't want to jinx anything.

(After reading the paragraph above, I realize people might read too much into it and think I'm pregnant. Nope, not that kind of news. Although I'm hoping a friend of mine will have that kind of news in the near future! Right, L?)

Anyway, my news has something to do with this huge work-related and personal event I've been preparing for, for the last couple of weeks, and although it's been tiring "work", I've been brimming with excitement all this time.

Haven't been writing lately, nor boxing. Running--just a little bit, but not enough for me to join races. I feel sad that I missed the Condura Run this year because of work and other pressing matters. Last year's Condura Run was such a joy for me.

Okay. Shit. Useless for me to talk about other things because I can hardly think of anything else except for this "amazing news" of mine.

Well, here's a hint. Bought a nice gray wool coat from Zara a few weeks back. It was on sale, and it's a pretty good deal, if I say so myself. (Besides, I never buy Zara clothes at regular price, anyway.) So...I canNOT wait to use it! =)

Okay, I will stop now. Must wait for March.

last quarter storm of book buying 10:52 PM

This is a long overdue post on the books I obtained in the last few months of 2009, with the first six books bought in Kinokuniya Bookstore in Bangkok back in September. Getting eight books in a span of 3 months isn't a lot by some people's standards, but then books don't come cheap these days, and I really am trying to curb my book-buying impulses.

And yes, the red book on the second row is indeed a book on sex.

So here goes, based on the order of books shown above:

1. Roverandom by J.R.R. Tolkien. When his second son, Michael, lost his toy dog during a family outing at the beach, J.R.R. Tolkien tried to console his son by writing a story about a dog who was transformed by a grumpy wizard into a toy dog as a form of punishment. Roverandom is a whimsical little story about the amazing adventures of Rover, the toy dog, who travels as far up as the Moon and down to the depths of the ocean in his attempt to find the one wizard who can change him back into his old self.

This is a book really meant for children, although adult fans of Tolkien would enjoy it simply because it was written by the great man himself. And the book is quintessential Tolkien--with dragons and wizards! Obviously a book worth buying even if one can finish it in a sitting. Interestingly enough, Roverandom never reached its final form before Tolkien's death. I don't think he ever meant to publish it--or if he did, he was too preoccupied with other matters for Roverandom to be on his priority list.


2. The Children's Book by A.S. Byatt. I'm a big fan of Byatt, so anything she writes, I automatically buy, because I'm sure to like it anyway.

Shortlisted for the 2009 Man Booker Prize, The Children's Book is a complex story that centers on a group of children belonging to three privileged families (the Wellwoods, the Fludds and the Cains) as they grow up during the post-Victorian era leading up to the Great War. It's a dense and slow-meandering read, but if you're used to Byatt, you'll actually enjoy her long and pretty much obscure references to Fabian socialism, pottery, poetry, children's fiction, and German puppetry. The best part of this book however is Byatt's life-long fascination with fairytales (I'm obsessed with this subgenre myself); the novel is chock-full of fairytale motifs like magical underground creatures, locked rooms, a boy looking for his shadow, fairies (of course!), children refusing to grow up, and magical advice from 'wise old man' Jungian archetypes. There are many references to Hans Christian Andersen and the Brothers Grimm--and what particularly excited me was a scene from The Children's Book where in a German master puppeteer stages the story of 'Aschenputtel', the Grimms' bloody and disturbing version of 'Cinderella'.

When I was young, my first forays into children's literature were the Tales by the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen, J.M. Barrie's Peter Pan, Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, and stories from Arabian Nights. As a child, I was at first puzzled by the Disney movie versions of say, Cinderella and The Little Mermaid, because the movies didn't show Cinderella's stepsisters cutting off their toes and heels so that they could squeeze their bloody feet into the glass slippers--or the Little Mermaid wielding a knife, only to throw herself into the sea and turn into foam because she couldn't bear to kill the prince who married someone else.

Those were the fairytale stories I grew up with--heavy with morals and consequences, and meant to scare the living daylights out of you in a freakish yet enjoyable way. I never lost my fascination for strange magical creatures, fantasy adventures and whatnot--hence my enduring love for Tolkien and even Harry Potter (J.K. Rowling herself was into fairytales and came up with The Tales from Beedle the Bard). When I read Joseph Campbell's The Hero With a Thousand Faces years later as an adult, I then fully understood why I was so in love with this genre. All the hero myths in this world, regardless of culture or religion, share the same story pattern: namely the call to adventure, the hero's departure into the unknown, the quest and all the entities that he encounters, and the return back home with added knowledge and powers. All the fairytales and sci-fi and adventure stories I've been reading all these years is essentially the same story--one big grand 'monomyth'--but with different hero-faces.

I've totally strayed away from talking about The Children's Book per se, but reading it was like a heady re-immersion into fairytales. Byatt's novel, though, also explores the disturbing side of writing children's literature. In an interview, Byatt said, "I started with the idea that writing children's books isn't good for the writers' own children. There are some dreadful stories. Christopher Robin at least lived. Kenneth Grahame's son put himself across a railway line and waited for the train. Then there's JM Barrie. One of the boys that Barrie adopted almost certainly drowned himself. This struck me as something that needed investigating. And the second thing was, I was interested in the structure of E Nesbit's family - how they all seemed to be Fabians and fairy-story writers."

Needless to say, I finished The Children's Book in less than a week even though it's one of the thickest books in my book collection.


3. Alias Grace by Margaret Atwood. I'm a Margaret Atwood late bloomer. I should have read her as early as 2002 or something but then again, I was reading other stuff back then. When I read her Booker Prize-winning The Blind Assassin a year ago, I was seriously miffed at myself for not reading her earlier. Saw a copy of Alias Grace in Bangkok's Kinokuniya and promptly bought it, because--well, I don't know if it's bad timing or what--but I could never see a copy in the local stores.

The premise is interesting, and here's the blurb from Amazon:

In 1843, a 16-year-old Canadian housemaid named Grace Marks was tried for the murder of her employer and his mistress. The sensationalistic trial made headlines throughout the world, and the jury delivered a guilty verdict. Yet opinion remained fiercely divided about Marks--was she a spurned woman who had taken out her rage on two innocent victims, or was she an unwilling victim herself, caught up in a crime she was too young to understand? Such doubts persuaded the judges to commute her sentence to life imprisonment, and Marks spent the next 30 years in an assortment of jails and asylums, where she was often exhibited as a star attraction. In Alias Grace, Margaret Atwood reconstructs Marks's story in fictional form. Her portraits of 19th-century prison and asylum life are chilling in their detail. The author also introduces Dr. Simon Jordan, who listens to the prisoner's tale with a mixture of sympathy and disbelief. In his effort to uncover the truth, Jordan uses the tools of the then rudimentary science of psychology. But the last word belongs to the book's narrator--Grace herself.

Alias Grace is the next book I'm going to read once I'm done with my current one.


4. Metamorphosis and Other Stories by Franz Kafka. Who's afraid of Kafka? I am!!

Afraid of his imagination, that is. It runs pretty wild.

I read Kafka back in college, mostly with the intent of just being able to say I read the damn story of the man turned cockroach. Of course, as I got older and more mature (hehe), I re-read 'Metamorphosis' and 'The Trial', and learned to appreciate Kafka's signature nightmare style. Critics brand him as defeatist; I simply think he's terrifying. But because I like a little terror in stories, Kafka is the man for such things.

I'm so happy with the Penguin Classics deluxe edition that I bought--definitely worth all that Thai baht. The front and back covers are such eye candy:



5. The Mythic Dimension: Selected Essays 1959-1987 by Joseph Campbell. I'm one to stick to perennial favorites. One can never go wrong with reading Joseph Campbell. THE expert on comparative mythology, Campbell has written what I consider mind-blowing ideas on universal truths manifested in different ways through myths and in different settings. The Power of Myth and The Hero With a Thousand Faces are his most popular and accessible works, but as I was scanning The Mythic Dimension's table of contents, I noticed that the book can also serve as another introductory overview into Campbell and his ideas on comparative mythology and religion.

I have a feeling that this book will not tell me anything mind-bogglingly new, because based on the chapter headings, The Mythic Dimension seems to be a summarized version of Campbell's massive 4-volume work The Masks of God (on Primitive Mythology, Oriental Mythology, Occidental Mythology, and Creative Mythology), which I've already read--laboriously, I might add, within a 3-year period.

The Masks of God isn't really for everyone--and I'm not being lit snobbish here. There were so many occasions I felt like crying over it because Campbell can get so stuffy and arcane sometimes. But there was no choice except to plough through it and when I was done, I felt like keeling over, exhausted and triumphant.

So I pretty much think it's safe for me to assume here that The Mythic Dimension may be a more appealing introduction into world mythology. Joseph Campbell is such a nerdy choice for reading, but I truly think everyone should at least read him once.


6. Position of the Day: Sex Every Day in Every Way by Nerve.com. Obviously, I bought this for the novelty of it. It's hilarious! 366 positions: one for each day of the year plus an extra in case it's a leap year! A lot of the positions seem pretty unrealistic, so I think the book's just meant to be a laugh trip the whole year round. I mean there was one position involving what looked like monkey bars, and having sex in a playground just seems so...well, wrong.


7. The Ancestor's Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Evolution. When Andy, who recommended it to me, started describing The Ancestor's Tale as "something like Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales with different characters having their own tales to tell, only it's a reverse journey back to the origin of life and the ones telling the tales are animals which share a common ancestry with us."

Oh my God.

I told Andy I wanted to get it. I think he had me at 'Canterbury Tales'.

I'm a big fan of layered narrative (or stories within a story within a story) such as The Canterbury Tales, Arabian Nights, Giovanni Boccaccio's The Decameron, and my favorite, A.S. Byatt's Possession.

Well, The Ancestor's Tale, being a nonfiction science book, isn't layered narrative fiction, that's for sure, but it cleverly uses that stylistic form to a certain extent. Evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins explains the whole grand story of evolution by taking the reader on a reverse journey of sorts from present-day humans back to the very microbial beginnings of life billions of years ago. Along the way, Dawkins lets the reader 'meet' various species--the other characters in this story who, at specific geological moments in time (or rendezvous points, as Dawkins calls these), have been proven to share a common ancestry with us humans. So for example, when we retrace our steps from present to past to discover our human ancestors, the first species we meet back in time at Rendezvous 1 are the chimpanzees--the closest and most recent species who share a common ancestor with us humans. And what Dawkins means by 'most recent' is that this first rendezvous takes place millions of years ago. It is but a blip in the evolutionary process which spans 4 billions years.

The next meeting point, or Rendezvous 2, shows us the most recent common ancestor of gorillas on one hand and that of 'humans + chimpanzees' on the other. And in the next rendezvous, we meet the common ancestor of both the orangutan and 'gorillas + humans + chimpanzees.' This journey back in time goes on and on until we hit Rendezvous 40, or as Dawkins explains it, the point where we reach the origin of life itself, the grand ancestor which humans and other species have descended from.

It sounds wild, I know.

I started reading The Ancestor's Tale on New Year's Eve and currently am at Rendezvous 1. It's slow reading because I'm still getting used to all the scientific terms, but I did appreciate Dawkins' lengthy introduction in which he explains his reverse narrative method. I'm actually dreading reaching a particular rendezvous that may force me to reckon with the idea that I, Human, share a common ancestry with The Frog. Urk.

I'm not going into an entire religion vs. science debate over this. I believe in God and I believe in the evolution of life. I believe that humans and all the other species in this world were fearfully and beautifully made, that we all continue to evolve, and that this whole grand masterplan of putting everything into place within billions and billions of years could not have been done by any other being except God Himself. To me, religion and science co-exist, and that's that. I'm sure other people maintain their own views on matters such as these, and they are free to do so.


8. Boy: Tales of Childhood by Roald Dahl. I read this in the school library when I was kid, and I realized some twenty years after that I never got to buy my own copy. I was so happy when Ryan bought it in Kinokuniya Singapore and gave it to me as a gift last Christmas 2009.

I don't feel like I've aged at all every time I read a Roald Dahl book. And the writers that you encounter in childhood are the ones that you're likely to grow old with.

a new mug for the year 11:15 PM

Okay, I may not have gotten the Sanuk shoes I wanted yet (operative word being 'yet'), but I got a nice unexpected gift this Christmas--a Starbucks Seattle city mug!

I don't go mug-shopping for myself regularly because I don't really see the point of collecting a bunch of them. Two mugs have served me well in the workplace over the past 9 years, and I never needed a new one. But now that I have a city mug from the birthplace of my favorite coffee brand.....!!!! (Enough said.)

A Pike Place mug would have been cool, since this it would have originated from the first ever Starbucks branch, but a Seattle city mug in general is still something that I'm incredibly delighted about. It now resides in my desk where I can look at it everyday to remind me (needlessly, actually) that it's time to get my after-lunch coffee.

P.S. I promise myself a less frivolous post the next time I blog. And because nothing really exciting happens in my life, it will be about books! So there.

reading one book a week for one year 10:28 PM

I don't know if I can accomplish this (given my busy work schedule), but here's someone who has.

In his blog, Michael Surtees interviews Inaki Escudero about the latter's recent accomplishment in finishing 52 books in one year. It's not exactly a ground-breaking achievement, but then again, how many people do you know can complete one book per week for a year--especially if these books are of the hefty kind?

Spent the first day of 2010 happily wandering around Fully Booked High Street. I wasn't planning to buy anything at the moment, since I still had a huge backlog. But it was nice to make mental notes of what to buy in the future.

Here's to a fresh year of reading! Happy Wonderful New Year, everyone!

Dear e-Santa 4:06 PM

Can you please give this to me for Christmas? Wandered into Bratpack in Greenbelt 5 yesterday and tried these tan Sanuk Women's Starlet slip-ons. These Sanuks generally look ugly when they're hanging on the shelf, but lo and behold, they look great on my feet!

I'm a size 5 by the way.

***

This is not the first time I've forgotten to publish a post. This should have been released last December 20.

No wonder I didn't get this for Christmas, harhar.

buttermilk 11:04 AM

My current favorite lotion. It must be the baby scent of buttermilk and coconut that makes me fall asleep at night.

I used to like floral-scented stuff but as I get older, I'm leaning towards skincare products that include vanilla, buttermilk, almond, basmati rice, and coconut scents. Ah, the smell of childhood.

Midnight's Children 8:03 PM

I'm having one of those lazy Saturdays in which the only decision-making that takes place is which fastfood to order for home delivery. McDonald's usually wins, because of its hot fudge sundaes.

Anyway, a free Saturday with no plans gives me enough opportunity to catch up on reading. While I still have a ton of new books to read, I still indulge in re-reading some of my favorites.

Am currently re-reading Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie, which I truly believe deserved winning the Best of the Booker Prize twice--the second win being in 2008, which cemented its status as one of the best English novels of all time. I'm eternally fascinated with the premise of this book. It can even translate well into film, if some fan-slash-director really cared enough to make a movie out of it. (And I believe there ARE plans to make a film adaptation.)

People who are woefully ignorant of Rushdie's works (some assume The Satanic Verses, is, well, satanic) or never bothered to read him, thinking he's a difficult read, may be surprised to know his books are actually reader-friendly.

Not as reader-friendly of course as the drivel that writers come up with these days (Paulo Coelho and Twilight and chick lit whatnot). What I mean is that Rushdie's pretty accessible without dumbing you down. He's not as easy to read as Garcia Marquez or de Bernieres (who both tackle magical realism like Rushdie) but he's definitely more fast-paced than say, A.S. Byatt or Thomas Mann. He may not be my first option when I enter a bookstore with an intent to buy a novel, but he's usually a solid choice.

I love trying new authors now and then, but it's great to go back to old favorites. Reading Midnight's Children just brings me back to the time when I did first read it, the excitement of discovering how beautiful the plot was, how I raced through the pages, reading it wherever I went (in the MRT, at Starbucks, at the office during lunch breaks), how I stayed up late to finish particular chapters until my eyes hurt, etc. A few years back, I had more time to read, and Midnight's Children was one of those books I devoured and finished in less than a week. Even Rushdie's Haroun and the Sea of Stories is associated with particularly happy memories; I was reading it in October 2006, when I found out that I won the fundraising post in UNICEF Philippines.

The Midnight's Children edition I am reading now is the 25th anniversary release, which contains an introduction written by Rushdie himself. It's a damn good introduction, and I'm glad I bought this edition. Here are excerpts:

.... I had two titles and couldn’t choose between them: Midnight’s Children and Children of Midnight. I typed them out one after the other, over and over, and then all at once I understood that there was no contest, that Children of Midnight was a banal title and Midnight’s Children a good one. To know the title was also to understand the book better, and after that it became easier, a little easier, to write. I have written and spoken elsewhere about my debt to the oral narrative traditions of India; also to those great Indian novelists Jane Austen and Charles Dickens — Austen for her portraits of brilliant women caged by the social convention of their time, women whose Indian counterparts I knew well; Dickens for his great, rotting, Bombay-like city, and his ability to root his larger-than-life characters and surrealist imagery in a sharply observed, almost hyper-realistic background, out of which the comic and fantastic elements of his work seemed to grow organically, becoming intensifications of, and not escapes from, the real world....

.... In the West, people tended to read Midnight’s Children as a fantasy, while in India people thought of it as pretty realistic, almost a history book. (“I could have written your book,” one reader told me when I was lecturing in India in 1982. “I know all that stuff.”) But it was wonderfully well liked almost everywhere, and changed its author’s life. One reader who didn’t care for it, however, was Mrs Indira Gandhi, and in 1984, three years after its publication — she was Prime Minister again by this time — she brought an action against it, claiming to have been defamed by one single sentence. It appeared in the penultimate paragraph of Chapter 28, A wedding, a paragraph in which Saleem provides a brief account of Mrs Gandhi’s life. This was it: “It has often been said that Mrs Gandhi’s younger son Sanjay accused his mother of being responsible, through her neglect, for his father’s death; and that this gave him an unbreakable hold over her, so that she became incapable of denying him anything.”

Tame stuff, you might think, not really the kind of thing a thick-skinned politician would usually sue a novelist for mentioning, and an odd choice of casus belli in a book that excoriated Indira for the many crimes of the Emergency. After all, it was a thing much said in India in those days, had often been in print, and was indeed reprinted prominently in the Indian press (“The sentence Mrs Gandhi is afraid of” read one front-page headline) after she brought her action for defamation. Yet she sued nobody else. Before the book’s publication, Cape’s lawyers had been worried about my criticisms of Mrs Gandhi and had asked me to write them a letter in support of the claims I was making. In this letter I justified the text to their satisfaction, except with regard to one sentence which, as I said, was hard to substantiate, as it was about three people, two of whom were dead, while the third would be the one suing us. However, I argued, as I was clearly characterising the information as gossip, and as it had been printed before, we should be all right. The lawyers agreed; and then, three years later, this one sentence, the novel’s Achilles’ heel, was the very sentence Mrs Gandhi tried to spear. This was not, in my view, a coincidence.

The case never came to court. The law of defamation is highly technical, and to repeat a defamatory rumour is to commit the defamation oneself, so technically we were in the wrong. Mrs Gandhi was not asking for damages, only for the sentence to be removed from future editions of the book. The only defence we had was a high-risk route: we would have had to argue that her actions during the Emergency were so heinous that she could no longer be considered a person of good character, and could therefore not be defamed. In other words, we would have had, in effect, to put her on trial for her misdeeds. But if, in the end, a British court refused to accept that the Prime Minister of India was not a woman of good character, then we would be, not to put too fine a point upon it, royally screwed.

Unsurprisingly, this was not the strategy that Cape wished to follow — and when it became clear that she was also willing to accept that this was her sole complaint against the book, I agreed to settle the matter. It was after all an amazing admission she was making, considering what the Emergency chapters of Midnight’s Children were about. Her willingness to make such an admission felt to me like an extraordinary validation of the novel’s portrait of those Emer-gency years. The reaction to the settlement in India was not favourable to the Prime Minister. A few short weeks later, stunningly, she was dead, assassinated on October 31, 1984, by her Sikh bodyguards. “All of us who love India,” I wrote in a newspaper article, “are in mourning today.” Despite our disagreements, I meant every word.

The Fists That Rule The World 9:26 PM

Oh yeah, that's our Manny.

It was unspeakably wonderful to watch him live (not in freakin' Las Vegas, which I can never afford) on pay-per-view inside an air-conditioned tent-slash-theater with hundreds of other Filipinos to witness his brutal victory over Miguel Cotto.

And be recognized as the first boxer in boxing history worldwide to win in 7 different weight divisions.

I've watched all the HBO 24/7 episodes focusing on the training camps of Pacquiao and Cotto prior to fight night and it was just so obvious that Manny had way more arsenal than Cotto. People just tend to underestimate the little guy, that's all.

2010 seems so far away. Pacquiao-Mayweather . . . can't wait!

I heart Moleskine Helvetica 9:05 PM

My latest love.

I've used Moleskine for years. I use it to list all the books I buy and read on a monthly basis, to write down the books I want to read (and every time I finish one, I tick it off the list), and to make personal daily notes. Even in the age of Blackberrys and digital planners, I still find great comfort in jotting down stuff on my Moleskine notebook's acid-free paper using an ordinary tech pen.

When I saw the Moleskine Helvetica special edition (in celebration of the font's 50th anniversary) in Fully Booked, I nearly had a seizure. I love both Moleskine and the Helvetica typeface, so it just made perfect sense to buy it. I got it though for a pretty hefty price (Php 1,300 for a frickin' notebook?? some would say), but it's worth it.

If you love typography and if you've watched the feature-length documentary film Helvetica, then you'll find yourself wanting this notebook as well.

our guest from UNICEF UK 7:50 PM

Hey, looky! I'm included in a story posted on the UNICEF UK website, along with some colleagues!

Our office has a web consultant, Andy, from UNICEF UK, who will be with us until December to help us improve UNICEF Philippines' online presence. Because we're so swamped with emergency work and the upcoming holidays (which is peak season for UNICEF fundraisers), Marge, Pam and I are just so grateful for the extra help and web expertise that Andy brings to the table.

AND, he's promised to run 10k with us in the Timex Run this November 15. Welcome to the Philippines, Andy!

Old Man Running 7:36 PM

This 70-plus year-old runner and his blog inspires me so much. He literally keeps a running log of his weekly training, which I avidly follow.

I'm younger, and I don't even get to run as much as he does. Guess who's the fitter one between the two of us?

When I reach the age of 70, I'd still want to be able to go the distance like Old Man Running here.

I have a plan. 12:24 AM

And the plan is this:

Week 1: Oct 26 - Nov 1
5km run
boxing + 300 crunches
5km run
7km run
boxing + 300 crunches

Week 2: Nov 2 - Nov 8
7km run
boxing + 300 crunches
8km run
boxing + 500 crunches
10km run
*with an option to do a 12km run (if I haven't keeled over yet with all this exercise)

Week 3: Nov 9 - Nov 15
6km run
boxing + 200 crunches
8km run
boxing + 200 crunches
10km run on RACE DAY


Knowing how my body responds under certain workout conditions, I'm fully aware I shouldn't over-exercise on race week (the week of November 9 to 15). So that's why I've decided to pace myself and come up with a realistic workout plan.

The only thing left to do is to stick to it.

Oh, and yes, I forgot to mention: this whole thing is in preparation for the 2009 Timex Run happening this November 15, 2009.

I am so scared I won't be ready for 10km, because I haven't been running regularly in the last 3 months. In fact, I haven't been running much at all, so I think I'm not in great shape. But if I stick to plan, I should survive the 10k.

This Monday evening, I started working on The Plan and walked over to Legazpi Park, the scene of both my running highs and lows, to do a 5km run. Anyway. Ironically, my Timex Ironman Fitness Tracker watch decided to conk out on me (does it need batteries or did I calibrate it incorrectly once again?), and so I couldn't accurately track my performance.

I should have been upset about the whole thing, but when I hit the twenty-minute something mark, I thought, what the hell, I'll do an open run instead. I ran for a total of 35 minutes. Don't know if I ran 5km exactly--it could have been less, could have been more. I average 30-35 minutes anyway on a 5k. Well, suprisingly, it didn't matter if I wasn't aware of the exact distance of my run earlier tonight; I was just happy to be running again.

I felt free, running without measuring my distance, and funnily enough, I could feel myself picking up the pace on the last few minutes. Pretty encouraging for a girl who hasn't run in weeks and weeks.

On Wednesday, if my watch is still acting weird, I'll run again for 35 minutes.

left hook blues 3:36 AM

I hate how the physical exhaustion one feels right after boxing becomes amplified in the next few days after the workout.

My right wrist was smarting like hell during Saturday's session because of the uppercuts Ryan had me do. My right uppercut got weaker and weaker, and my frustrated self felt that the best thing to do was to compensate by doing better on my other punching moves.

So there I was, delivering harder straights with my right, and putting a little more violence in the ever reliable left hook. More than 24 hours later, I am sporting sore right knuckles, which is typical. But what irks me is that I now have an extremely sore left arm, which, when I try to lift it, starts shaking, like I have Parkinson's or something. Not to mention a white-hot flash of pain that starts from above my left elbow up to the shoulder every time I raise my arm.

So it's now 3:30 am, and I still can't sleep because of the pain. If by Tuesday's session my right wrist and left arm are still sore, I guess this means the only punches left for me to do are the bread-and-butter jabs and straights. How sad.

(500) Days of Summer 12:29 AM

I love this film and everything that it stands for.

It's one of the best movie [un]love stories I've seen. Now I'm no longer puzzled why I like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and High Fidelity so much.

Most days I'm a Summer with a great discomfort in labeling relationships, but there are days when I'm a giddily happy and hopeful Tom.

And when it comes to break-ups, well, we've all been a Tom at some point in our lives.

Song of the Moment? "There is a Light That Never Goes Out" by The Smiths.

normalizing 1:23 PM

v. become normal or return to its normal state

Oh, I sure hope so! The past few weeks (and weekends!) have been uber busy for me, as I've been juggling direct mail work with emergency fundraising for Ondoy & Pepeng victims. And then there's RedDot, which I totally blame for all that web work cramming until 2:00 am and at-my-office-desk stress eating.

But things are starting to be normal again, and I can breathe easier, now that I'll be getting more help on the UNICEF Philippines website. We just rolled out a local version of the Bangkok regional training, and our office has just gotten a web consultant, Andy, who's on board with us until December.

My previous crazy work schedule has left me hardly any room for exercise, and I feel so unfit these days. When I boxed again last Saturday after a 2-week hiatus, I was gasping a lot--and my trainer was frowning at me a lot. Struggled painfully to finish 45 minutes of boxing and 300 crunches, and I felt like such a loser walking back to the office at 10:00 pm to do--wait for it--more RedDot work. On a Saturday night.

So later this afternoon, I hope to redeem myself in boxing and get an approving nod from Ryan. And if the weather cooperates tomorrow, I will RUN, after what seems like eons of not running. My last race was in July, for cryin' out loud. I really need to shape up if I'm going 10k again this November at the Timex run (but more on that in succeeding posts).

Catching (500) Days of Summer with Bun this evening and squeezing in some reading as well. God, that sounds like a normal weekend plan--and I'm loving it.

The Informant! 11:31 AM

I love this film! Awesome performance from Matt Damon.

Haven't watched a movie in a long, long time (and a good one at that), so it was such pure joy to run over to Greenbelt 3 and meet up with friends last Wednesday to catch the screening. I found myself laughing at intervals, because the script was so clever.

The official site is here, and I get a kick out of hearing again some snippets of Damon's voice-over monologue from the film.

Joel McHale also stars in The Informant! as FBI Agent Bob Herndon assigned to the lysine price-fixing case, and he just cracks me up. Now there's no excuse for me not to start downloading Community.

more on Middle-earth 11:45 PM

I recently finished reading Tom Shippey's The Road to Middle-earth. Here are just some of my favorite parts in his book.

Feel free to skip this post if you're not a fan, but I think Shippey had many interesting things to reveal about Tolkien's writing that aren't common knowledge to most people.

Gnomes vs. the Noldor, Trotter vs. Aragorn

[Tolkien] was stubborn to the point of pig-headedness about sticking to names, apparently in total incomprehension of their likely effect on contemporary readers. He kept using the term 'Gnomes' for the Noldor till at least 1937, in confidence that 'to some "Gnome" will still suggest knowledge', through its connection with Greek gnome, 'intelligence' (see Book of Lost Tales 1, pp.43-44). To some, possibly. However, to all but a vanishingly small proportion of English speakers, 'gnome' has lost all connection with its Greek root, and means instead a small, vulgar garden ornament, very hard to take seriously. Similarly, as remarked above, p.95, Tolkien stuck to the name 'Trotter' while the character who bore it changed from a wandering hobbit to a hobbit-Ranger to a human Ranger to the last descendant of the kings of old. Very late in the construction of The Lord of the Rings, Aragorn, or 'Strider' as he eventually became, is still declaring (War of the Jewels, p.390), 'But Trotter shall be the name of my house, if ever that be established; yet perhaps in the same high tongue it shall not sound so ill...' Wrong! For 'trot', as the Oxford English Dictionary rightly says, implies 'short, quick motion in a limited area,' and is quite inconsonant with dignity when applied to a tall Man.

- Shippey, The Road to Middle-earth, p. 293.

On Macbeth and The Lord of the Rings

It is thus quite clear that whatever he said about Shakespeare's plays, Tolkien read some of them with keen attention: most of all, Macbeth. Motifs from this play are repeated prominently in The Lord of the Rings. The march of the Ents to Isengard makes true the report of the frightened messenger to the incredulous Macbeth in Act V Scene 5: 'As I did stand my watch upon the hill / I looked toward Birnam and anon methought / The wood began to move.'

.... When Denethor says that stewards do not come to be kings by the lapse of a few centuries in Gondor, but only 'in other places of less royalty', the remark is true of Scotland, and of Britain--though not of Anglo-Saxon England, ruled from the legendary past of King Cerdic to 1065 by kings descended in paternal line from one ancestor. The Return of the King is in a way a parallel, in another a reproach to Macbeth.

Tolkien, however, used the play for both more and less than motifs. There is a flash of minute observation in chapter 6 of The Two Towers. What shall we do about Saruman, asks Theoden. 'Do the deed at hand,' replies Gandalf, send every man against him at once. 'If we fail, we fall. If we succeed--then we will face the next task.' The jingle of 'fail-fall' echoes a famous crux in Macbeth, where the hero falters in front of his wife. 'If we should fail?' he asks. 'We fail?' replies she--in the Folio punctuation. Actresses have tried the line different ways: as a sarcastic question, a flat dismissal, a verbal slap. They were all wrong, implies Tolkien; it was a misprint, the word was 'fall,' meaning 'die', and it is a straight answer to a straight question.

....However, the final and strongest influence of Macbeth on The Lord of the Rings is quite obviously in theme. If there is one moral in the interlacements of the latter, it is that you must do your duty regardless of what you think is going to happen. This is exactly what Macbeth does not realise. He believes the Witches' prophecy about his own kingship, and tries to fulfil it; he believes their warning about Macduff and tries to cancel it. If he had not tried to cancel it (and so murdered Macduff's family), Macduff might not have killed him; if he had not killed Duncan, he might conceivably have become king some other way. Macbeth is a classic case of a man who does not understand about the cooperation between free will and luck. Galadriel's warning about the events in her mirror, 'Some never come to be, unless those that behold the visions turn aside from their path to prevent them,' would have been well said to him. But he had no Galadriel. The only mirror he sees is controlled (Act IV Scene 1) by the Witches.

- Shippey, The Road to Middle-earth, p. 182-184.

On the Fate of the Elves

The future fate of the elves is often mentioned in The Lord of the Rings but never becomes quite clear. Some will leave Middle-earth, some will stay. Those who stay, says Galadriel, will 'dwindle to a rustic folk of dell and cave, slowly to forget and to be forgotten.' 'Dwindle' could have a demographic meaning; there could be fewer of them. It could be physical too, looking forward to the 'tiny elves' of Shakespeare, and even moral, making one think of the detached, cruel, soulless elves of Scottish and Danish tradition. The best fate for the elves who stay, perhaps, would be to turn into landscape.

....It's hard to say, declares Sam Gamgee of the elves of Lothlorien, 'whether they've made the land, or the land's made them' (p.351). And his perceptions are often deep, even if his education has been neglected. His further explanations may be taken to refer to The Lord of the Rings as well as to Lothlorien: 'Nothing seems to be going on,' he says, 'and nobody seems to want it to. If there's any magic about, it's right down deep, where I can't lay my hands on it, in a manner of speaking.' Yes, agrees Frodo, complementing Sam's style as often with his own. Still, 'You can see and hear it everywhere.'

- Shippey, The Road to Middle-earth, p. 133-134.

child marriages 12:09 AM

I've been working in UNICEF for three years now and have heard and read a lot of distressing stories about the plight of children.

But I still can't get over the fact that child marriages continue to be practiced in this day and age.

From the UNICEF Press Centre:

Statement by UNICEF Executive Director Ann M. Veneman on the death of 12-year-old child bride from Yemen

NEW YORK, 14 September 2009 - "It was with great sadness that we learned of the untimely death of 12-year-old Fawziya Youssef from Yemen. Fawziya was forced into a child marriage with a man at least twice her age. She became pregnant and she and her baby both died after struggling for three days in protracted labor, according to media reports.

“Child marriages violate the rights of children in the most deplorable way. The younger the girl is when she becomes pregnant, the greater the health risks for her and her baby. Girls who give birth before the age of 15 are five times more likely to die in childbirth than women in their 20s.

“Child marriage denies girls of their childhood, deprives them of an education and robs them of their innocence.

“Tragedies like these underscore the urgent need to better protect the rights of women and children, particularly girls. Child marriages are often a result of poverty and ignorance. More must be done to address the underlying causes in order to prevent tragic deaths like those of 12-year-old Fawziya and her baby.”