the perils of

Yesterday my mom and the rest of the Co Family came to Manila as a stopover before going to China today. So naturally, I spent most of yesterday afternoon shopping with them. We went to Eastwood and checked out the bazaar. My mom noticed how "old-looking" clothes are the trend these days. Like the stuff that was fashionable before are the same things that are fashionable today. After checking out the clothes (and not buying any), we wandered into the mall and ate food. When we got back to my Twa-E's house for dinner, my mom bestowed onto me some gifts she brought from home. YAY!!! I got a jar of mangosteen preserves, which I originally bought as a souvenir for Rap and his family from my summer trip to Dapitan  a month ago. I wasn't able to bring the preserves to my plane ride coming to Manila, because for some reason, airline authorities do not allow glass jars of preserved fruit on airplanes. (And apparently, heavy wooden hitting sticks are less of a security ...

Blogging again to maximize the remaining time I have with the awesome wi-fi here at home. I'm going back to Manila tomorrow. I'm gonna wake up at four in the morning and endure an hour-twenty-minute flight, hopefully arriving just in time for my swimming class at 10. Let me seeeee, what else. I have Economics homework I haven't done, a Statistics exam on Thursday, and then German and Biology exams on Friday. Why have I not done any work this weekend? Oh, right. Because I am a lazy bum. Oh well. I'd been excited to see this exhibit called Dinosaurs Alive! ever since I heard about it in December, but I was bummed to find out that I wouldn't be around when they came to CDO. Two months later and surprise surprise, the weekend of the show happens to be a long holiday for Ateneo! Woohoo! Today, my parents said that we wouldn't be going to the show because so many people said it sucked. But I forced  coerced my family into going anyway, just for the heck of i...

       Before I start to  rant any further, please take a minute and a half to watch this awesome Fiamma Fresh Fridays trailer made by the awesome production team of Loyola Film Circle using "over 4,500 shots" (I'm assuming that they're talking about "shots" as in, pictures). Go watch. Fiamma Fresh Fridays Teaser from miguel gutierrez on Vimeo .        I love the video. I love the soundtrack. I especially love the editing. The video alone is awesome. The hardcore party lifestyle that it shows, however, I'm not too fond of.        Okay, okay, I know some of you are reading this and going AWW MAN, THIS AIMEE PERSON SUCKS. SHE BE HATIN', and that's perfectly fine with me, BECAUSE I REALLY AM HATIN'!!!! PARTYING SUCKS!!! Kidding. If you like partying then by all means, go party.        Anyway, the point of showing you the video was to illustrate what most people outside Manila (well, my frien...

Look how vain I've become. You can now Like my blog on Facebook, but it's not a fan page or anything. Ooh, technology. Anyway, I had an awesome weekend. Saturday marked my parents' sweetheart anniversary, so we went out to celebrate by eating at Butcher's Best! If the name of the place doesn't sound all that romantic, that's because it isn't. It's always full of people, and there isn't a lot of space, and the walls are covered in a mural depicting Chinese people grilling meat. But if you ever happen to be in Cagayan de Oro, that's the first place you must eat at. I dare you to find better sisig! After dinner we went to SM to watch Rio. The last time I saw a movie in a cinema was during SOSE Movie Night, and that was the latest Harry Potter! I love Rio by the way, you should go buy your self a ticket and see it right now! It's funny! It's charming! It's farming ! (Forget I said that.) The colors are amazing, and the music is jus...

      Super long weekend! Woohoo! A lot of my dormer friends actually went home. While I would've jumped on the first plane back to CDO had I the opportunity (and the great amount of strength that jumping on planes requires), the weekend in Manila wasn't too bad.       Saturday        On an impulse, I paid a visit to Cafe Xocolat, the inconspicuous little shop right across Box O' Rice, a few steps from my dorm. At the entrance, I was surprised at how un-cafe-like the store was. It looked a bit like my lola's house before it got renovated. Part of the cafe's charm, I guess, is that it used to be someone's actual home. The inside is wonderful as well, but I will not go into detail; you must visit it yourself. (Oh, and the food was delicious. A bit pricey, but worth it.) I wish I had taken more pictures, but I didn't wanna look like a cafe' n00b. Ugh. How pretentious of me :|        I finished reading...

Three days into the second semester and so far, so good! I haven't even stopped writing my novel. Yet. There's a research paper due two weeks from now :| Our English and Lit professor is still Mr. Max Pulan, only this time, we're taking English 101 and Lit 14. Level ups! Yayz! Speaking of profs, our Filipino teacher is Mr. Alywnn Javier - the author of Sa Victory Liner , the poem that Ren and I did a report on last sem! He seems like a cool guy, but I'm really scared of Filipino class now. I don't speak much Tagalog, and it was all cool in Mr. Devilles' class last sem, because even he spoke English here and then. While Mr. Javier also spoke English during our first meeting, he made it absolutely clear that he does not want us being conyo during his period. :-s Also, he said that he does not want students coming up to him "stupid" questions like what Huwebes means. When he said that, I swear that a tingle went down my spine. I was just about to ask ...

I guess that I should be updating this blog more often, now that it's sem break and all, and the Internet connection at home is a bajillion times faster than the lame SmartBro plug-in I use in Manila. But the thing is, there's nothing much going on in my life right now that anybody would really want to hear about. For example, would you really be interested in knowing that for my first week home, my siblings and I are devoting our vacation time to finishing three titles in the Nancy Drew PC game series? Or that I haven't been out with my friends at all, and that the first time I've seen any of my classmates so far was today (four days into sem break), by the sheer coincidence that they were playing basketball at school while I was picking up my brother? Naw. Didn't think so. But I guess I should elaborate more on that last part. See, if you haven't already guessed by the depressingly tremendous amount of time I spend on the Internet, I'm quite the home...

       Friday (which was yesterday) marked the beginning of sem break for me. Officially, though, my last test of the sem ended at 7:30 on Thursday night, so I guess you could say my sem break started then, but I had been too depressed from English work to do anything besides curl up in front of my laptop and eat chocolate.         Yesterday, however, I woke up feeling quite chipper. I had made plans to wake up at 5 and go walking around Ateneo, exploring those places I'd made mental notes to check out during the semester. However, I wasn't able to sleep until 3 AM - probably because of the chocolate. So instead, after waking up at 10, I decided to go settle some unfinished business. B-) (No, just kidding. I didn't do anything cool that morning.)       So first I went to settle this hold order that I just discovered I had in my AISIS. It was from the Associate Dean of Student Affairs. When I saw it, I panicked, thinking ...

         So I came down with a fever last week. Last Wednesday, to be precise. It was the first time I'd ever gotten sick in Manila, and since I'm not exactly the healthiest person around, having gone three months in a foreign land without getting sick, and scoring a can of dalandan soda in the process, was a pretty sweet deal.         That was last week. And while I'm thankful that it was nothing like the "I can see a light at the end of the tunnel" sort of illness, I'm still bitter about it.         See, I had a ton of things to do, and a nice, long weekend to do them. My plan was to get everything done by Saturday so that I could spend the Sunday resting, watching How I Met Your Mother episodes on my laptop, and catching up on my reading and my sleep. I felt like I could've really pulled it off too, since I was in a real working mood last Wednesday.        In fact, the fever came down...

      In Cagayan, I had always wanted to go to Manila during vacations. It was, for me, this beautiful place with an amazing cityscape, huge malls and insane theme parks, all that glitz and glamour. It was the City of Lights, and everything to me seemed so magical and wonderful (all this having been established as "fact" the first time I came to Manila; I was about three years old then).     But Manila is definitely NOT all that glamour and glitz. Living in Katipunan (and now, seventeen years old) has made me realize that things aren't as flashy as my three-year-old self had imagined them to be. Katipunan may come across as a fancy shmancy destination to go eat, unwind, and have fun (*ahem* Cantina *ahem*), but it can also be very UN-glamorous: the unbearable heat, the insufferable filth, the risk of getting stolen from, or the dangers, as my Kagay-anon relatives and friends are always warning me about, of indiscreetly being slipped a roofe...

        Something about living on my own and learning how to budget the P300 my mom's allowing me per day is turning me into a real cheapskate. This week, I started keeping track of my expenses for my meals. I wrote them all down in this purple notebook my sister had gotten me for my birthday, and ever since then, I've been obsessed with figuring out how to cut back.          I think that being able to actually see those figures written down on paper like that instead of mentally keeping track of them is what's suppressing my impulsive tendencies. Sudden decisions to order dessert, or last-minute detours to Rustan's Supermarket to pick up cookies or cold juice - such was my life before the Purple Notebook. There's my magic little notebook. This picture was taken in Cagayan, the night before I moved to Manila.            Today, I learned when NOT to be thrifty. It was raining buckets here, you see, and...

      If you are, or have ever been, a high school student in the Philippines, I'm assuming that you know about the Diliman campus of the University of the Philippines, more commonly known as UPD. Because if you are/have ever been in high school, and you  don't  know about this university, then you should be ashamed of yourself. Go curl up in a corner and listen to My Chemical Romance and cry. I am ashamed of you.*      Fortunately, being the good soul that I am, I will provide you a little background about the place. Be grateful that somebody actually had the decency to relieve you of your ignorance and blindness. Yeah, that's right. Just call me The Illuminator.** And, yes, you are forgiven.     UP Diliman is the Holy Grail of universities here in the Philippines. Its entrance exam, the UPCAT, is the hardest to pass (I think it's because of the right-minus-wrong system). Among all the UP campuses in the country, the Di...