tribute

I'd like to think I'm a pretty fabulous gay guy ;-)

A few years ago, though, I was not this fabulous. In fact, I was pretty much ensconced in my shell -- not exactly 'in the closet', so to speak, but not living my fullest life possible.

The person I owe this huge transformation to is Alvin, my (Singaporean) Inchik who hung out with me, and mentored me, and taught me that, yes, it's quite ok to be fabulous, haha.

Happy birthday, Inchik. Love you!

updates

Omigod, it's been ages since I last posted pala. Kakahiya naman with my three regular readers.

Last week didn't turn out as horrible as I thought it would be, with the office completing a successful transfer to our new location, my flatmate and I getting along famously (though of course we're currently running into each other once a week lang), and my wisely ditching the Paris Hilton album launch for dinner with my team after our lipat.

This week, on the other hand... wow. This week was the week I had to reap all the bad karma I've accumulated for my past several weeks of dissolute living. On top of having to do an immense amount of work for a workshop my team ran this Thursday and Friday, I had to spend ALL my after hours on an extracurricular writing project -- na hindi ko pa tapos, by the way, so what the fuck am I doing blogging?

Anyways, above are pictures of the last time I made yosi in my old office balcony, which, in hindsight, is one of my favorite places in the world. Nothing like a meditative five minutes with a yosi stick and a few smoking buddies to put everything in the proper perspective.

Here's to Tanya and Cynthia, my smoking posse ;-)

Self-Esteem Boost

Argh. Hectic, hectic week:

My new flatmate is moving in today, and though she is gorgeous and cool and funny and the sweetest girl imaginable (luv u, Au!) , she is still virtually a stranger, and it's going to take a few weeks for us to find each other's groove. So, yeah, I worry about this.

Then there's the Foundation moving to Salcedo Village this weekend, and though our new office is hip and swanky and fabulous and is a five-minute walk from my apartment building (yipee!), moving is enormous physical stress! So, yeah, I worry about this.

To top it all off, I have to attend the Paris Hilton album launch on Saturday, and I have nothing to wear. And hell yeah, I worry about this.

TWO major life-changes this week, plus ONE important PARTY. Pakshet.

(Sigh.)

(Sigh ulit.)

(And one last sigh, for good measure.)

One surefire method I use when my confidence is ebbing and I need a self-esteem boost: I look at my 'before' and 'after' weight-loss pictures ;-) Haha.

This is my 'before' picture, circa 2001:

And this is my 'after' picture, taken last year; I'm 80 pounds lighter and packed with more muscle (choz!):

To quote from the Credo: "I believe that I can do absolutely anything I set my mind to."

Go go go, Awi! ;-) Kaya yan, ikaw pa.

Belated!

Sundays always find me in a senti mood, so I wish to devote this post to greeting three mega-special girls in my life a belated 'Happy Birthday':



Tanya, my partner-in-crime at the office and my "pinaka-baklang ate sa lahat";











Walter, my almost-boyfriend (yihee);














and Orange, my mother, and the-girlfriend-I-never-had (CHOZ!).












(Awi's punctuation mark of the day: the dash (-). Which is distinct in function from the double-dash (--), take note. For your reading pleasure, I will be sure to devote a post to this charming little grammar topic one day, hehe.)

Mga ate, I love you to bits! Here's to love, happiness... and, for two of you, some sex naman in your life, mwahaha (wag na natin sabihin kung sino sa inyo, let's let everyone guess na lang) ;-)

I Dreamed a Dream

Was drinking with the Subic boys last night, and they were mighty pleased when I revealed to them that near the very top of my list of things to do for 2006 is... to finally experience (hot) sex with a (hot) girl.

Woohoo! LOL.

"Awi, sa stag party ni Mel sa December!" exclaims Mon. "Di ba December rin birthday mo? Tamang-tama!" There is much hooting and raucous laughter, and we drink to that.

The gay boys I hang out with wince and make gagging sounds when I mention this to them, so it was a good feeling to be so encouraged and affirmed by my straight, virile friends, haha.

So wish me luck, everyone! Anyone know anybody I can hook up with? ;-)

Hottie of the Week

(Sigh.)

This vision of loveliness is named Craig Wing, rugby player for some Australian Football League team. Huge celebrity in Australia. And he's half-Pinoy pala!

Ang hot, no? My gosh.





(Sigh.)

And so, after eight posts, I am led to believe that this blog -- like my life, haha -- will mostly be about food and boys.

In the Mood

Pucha, nakaka-adik pala mag-surf ng iba't ibang blogs. Mwahaha. (Awi's adik tendencies rising to the fore yet again...)

While surfing just now, I stumbled upon the blog of, er, some guy who calls himself Dude.

http://areyouinthemoodforsomedude.blogspot.com/

(Obviously, I have yet to master the HTML command that turns a word into a link. But I will, in due time, so bear with me. Rome wasn't built in a day.)

Dude's blog is peppered with references to how boring his life is and how he'll bore your sorry ass to death, but he has absolutely no idea what he's talking about because his blog entries are completely and utterly hilarious, I kid you not. So click on that link NOW if you know what's good for you.

What's more, mga ate, cute siya! LOL. Too bad he's straight, hehe. Here are pictures of him that I grabbed from his Flickr account (teehee):

To quote my friend Red, "meron siyang 'bababuyin-kita' factor."

Two Men, a Baby and a Yaya

From my PC journal, dated 31 July 2006:

I caught ‘Jerry Maguire’ on HBO last night, and as is my wont whenever I watch it, I cried me a river during the “You. Complete. Me.” scene. (Why Tom Cruise didn’t win the Academy Award that year I can never figure out, he was friggin brilliant.)

That line has gotten a lot of flak from people – you shouldn’t let somebody ‘complete’ you daw, you should be complete and happy all by yourself, you don’t need anyone to make you a whole person, yada yada yada. I must admit I was on that dissing bandwagon for a time, and then last night I got to listen all over again to Jerry’s entire speech from the beginning, and I realized how much meaning is lost when one takes lines completely out of context.

Anyway, all he’s saying is: being happy by yourself is fantastic, but being happy with someone else is, well, bliss.

‘Jerry’ was the perfect, serendipitous ending to a day that saw me spending an entire morning and part of the afternoon at the baptism festivities for Gino, the firstborn of my best girl friend’s former ardent suitor. The baptism story is a good one, because a big part of it will be about how my friend C. and T. used to date, and how they’ve kept in touch since, and why I think T. might still have a thing for C. – but it’s not the point of this blog entry, so I will save that for another time. Suffice it to say that I spent most of the day thinking about how it would be great to have a kid someday, preferably with a partner who looks like Gino’s dad, who is cute and lanky and who reminds me of Russell Wong.

But moving on.

After our usual Sunday mass and dinner thing, Reg and I were going down the Music One-Max Brenner escalator in Greenbelt when we saw two good-looking guys, probably in their late twenties or early thirties, going up on the opposite escalator… with a toddler and a yaya. I forget what we were talking about, but we both stopped in mid-sentence and just stared.

My exact train of thought: “Well there’s a strange group, probably the kid belongs to one of the guys… Hmm, ang cute nila pareho, in fairness… This other guy must be his brother, or maybe… Holy crap, baka that’s his boyfriend!... Omigod, that can’t be… Oh wow, that must be their kid!...”

Reg must have been thinking the same thing, because we both looked at each other simultaneously and grinned.

“Omigod, that’s supposed to be my life!” Reg exclaims, and we both burst out laughing. We were kilig out of our minds. For a while we couldn’t get over the picture of domesticity that we had been witness to: two guys in a serious, committed relationship, both taking care of one guy’s child, all of them spending a pleasant, albeit rainy, evening in Greenbelt. And they had a yaya in tow pa! Good Lord, that was the killer.

Ordinarily, seeing a scene like that would have made me green with envy, but instead I felt euphoric. Hey, we could have been wrong, diba? Baka naman pala magkapatid yung dalawa, tapos yung baby anak nung isa. But at that moment, it seemed like the Universe was giving us a glimpse of the future, a vision of the life that we both aspired for, and damn, the vision was really, really good.

Of course I’m happy now. I have a job I love, I have my health, I have a family that nurtures me and good friends who watch my back. Yeah, it’s hard making ends meet sometimes, but all in all, it’s a charmed life. But who am I kidding? Meeting The One, taking care of my firstborn with him, spending a rainy Sunday evening together in Greenbelt with our baby boy – and, lest we forget, finding a good yaya – that would make it complete.

Personality Test

Someone once told me that the contents of a person’s refrigerator revealed a lot about the owner’s personality. Of course, I just had to laugh my head off at that one, kasi siempre naman no, paka-obvious naman nun! Practically anything you own says something about your personality, for crying out loud, haha.

Anyhow, in the interest of revealing a bit more of myself to my nearest and dearest (as if some of you haven’t had enough of me to last you a lifetime), here’s a list of items I make sure to replenish my ref with each week:

1. apple cinnamon bread and walnut wheat bread – my default weekday breakfast.

2. Coke – for making rum coke with, of course ;-)

3. Tanduay rum – ditto ;-)

4. bananas – wonder food, great for a post-workout meal.

5. tomatoes – for mixing with canned tuna, my default weekday dinner.

6. eggs – for my weekend three-egg scrambled eggs, breakfast of champions!

7. green mangoes – pakshet, I love my manggang hilaw and bagoong! Haha.

And siempre, most important of all:

8. chocolate – God, the happiness that one small square of dark chocolate brings…

True North

The past few weeks I've been feeling a bit... dare I say it?... ok, fine, here we go... lost.

It's the feeling that I'm adrift in a vast ocean, and the stars are just NOT THERE so I can't get my bearings. (Disclaimer: don't worry, this is just a fluke, I'm not going to turn this blog into a weekly sobfest. I'm just feeling a bit low today.)

To those of you I run to regularly to vent my frustrations and seek solace from: super super thank you, I really don't know what I'd do without you. (And you all know who you are.)

I wrote this two years ago to mark my thirtieth birthday. I trust that reading this regularly in the next few days will help me make sense of things.


CREDO

This is what I believe.

I believe in working hard, in pushing myself to the limit, in being efficient, and in doing my best possible work under any given circumstance.

I believe in the spirit of community, in striving for the collective good, in giving back, and in dedicating my life and my energies to changing the world.

I believe that I can do absolutely anything that I set my mind to.

I believe in seizing the day, living with passion, dancing like no one is watching, and every other cliché about life being short, doing what you want to do, and dying with no regrets.

I believe that the only life worth living is one of high honor and uncompromising integrity.

I believe in family, and in friendship, in looking out for each other, in laughing and crying together, in journeying together.

I believe in magic, and soul, and romance, and the inner life, and the poetry of the day-to-day.

I believe that there is someone out there for whom I will be a home, and in whom I will find my home. I believe that each of us has his One True Love.

I believe that there are no accidents. I believe that everything that happens in our lives happens for a reason. I believe in God.

Life is unfair. Things very seldom go one’s way. One will, on more occasions than is probably necessary, have one’s heart broken into a thousand pieces. But things will always work out in the end. To be cynical is to be cowardly; to hope is to be heroic. I believe in happy endings.

current food cravings

A nice big bowl of noodles from David's or North Park. (Ok, ok, masyadong sosyalin ang picture, but you get the drift.)

A big Heaven N Eggs-ish breakfast platter.

And a big fat juicy burger. (Awi's adjective of the day: 'big'.)

All photos taken from www.chubbyhubby.net, one of my favorite blogs ever.

This Day in History

Of course I will remember September 6th forever as the day I started my (friggin) blog, but since i was curious, I visited na rin Wikipedia to check what else happened today. Items that caught my eye:

1970 - Jimi Hendrix plays what turns out to be his last ever performance, at the badly controlled and rained out Love and Peace Festival, on the Isle Of Fehmarn, Germany.

1997 - The funeral of Diana, Princess of Wales, at Westminster Abbey draws large crowds.

2000 - In New York City, the United Nations Millennium Summit begins with more than 180 world leaders present.

2005 - The California Legislature becomes the first legislative body in the United States to legalize same-sex marriage without a pre-emptive judicial order to do so. (Awryt!)

In the beginning was the word...

... and the word was, "FINALLY."

Some of you have heard me go on and on about this for, like, forever, so I have finally decided to take the proverbial deep breath, close my eyes, and make the great leap of starting a friggin' blog. (Haha. At galit pa!)

I had been hesitant to start blogging for the longest time not because I didn't think I could hack it or that I had nothing to blog about, but because I knew that if I started I would quickly become addicted to it. (Many of you are now familiar with my 'adik' tendencies.) (Notice how I use the phrase "many of you" so casually, as if sa simula pa lang anlaki na ng audience ko, mwahaha. I aspire to world domination.)

So anyway-- here we go then.