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Where Love Meets.

Santa Cruz, California Summer of 2011

Outside the ideas of right doing and wrong doing there is a field.

I'll meet you there.

- Rumi. 

Johnny with Depth.

Arrested for trashing a New York hotel room. Depp claimed that an armadillo was responsible, saying that he had found the animal hidden in a closet and it had gone crazy, wrecking the hotel room before leaping out the window.

On August 20, 2005, in a private ceremony, Thompson's ashes were fired from a cannon to the tune of Norman Greenbaum's "Spirit in the Sky" and Bob Dylan's "Mr. Tambourine Man." The cannon was placed atop a 153-foot (47 m) tower of his own design, in the shape of a double-thumbed fist clutching a peyote button originally used in Hunter S. Thompson's 1970 campaign for sheriff of Aspen, Colorado. Red, white, blue, and green fireworks were launched along with his ashes. According to his widow Anita, Thompson's funeral was financed by actor Johnny Depp, a close friend of Thompson. Depp told the Associated Press, "All I'm doing is trying to make sure his last wish comes true. I just want to send my pal out the way he wants to go out."

We had been shooting [Charlie and the Chocolate Factory ] for about a month, and I was beginning to get nervous because there weren't any phone calls. I called my agent and asked, "Has no one called from the studio to complain or say, 'Hey, what's he doing?' or 'Hey, he's freaking us out?' " And when she said, "No", I thought, "Christ, I'm not doing enough! Something's wrong!" Then some of the studio brass came over to the set, and they were sitting in my trailer and I was all decked out as Wonka with the little bangs. And I just had to know. So I said, "Okay, who was the first one, when you started seeing the dailies, that got a little worried?" And there was this beautiful 30-second silence. And [Warner Bros. president] Alan F. Horn finally said, "Yeah, that was me". I felt better instantly. 

My sister Christi had a baby when I was 17, and I had just heard about crib death. The horrible thing was that it wasn't understood. For some unknown reason the baby would stop breathing. So I would sneak into where the baby was sleeping and put my hand in her crib, hold her little finger, and I'd sleep on the floor like that. It was stupid, I'm sure. But I thought the warmth of my hand might help, that maybe if she felt my pulse it would remind her to breathe. 

Johnny the loyal and the quirky.  He once said in an interview - "I maintain a hunger but not an ambition." I think he has found the meaning of life.  Here's to the actor I like both for what he delivers on screen and what the stories people tell about him offscreen.

Words with Friends.

The lake at the crater of Mt. Pinatubo, on a trek with friends.

This post is a toast to my good friends for almost 20 years, those whose ancestry stems from the words of Pumbaa and Timon.  I wrote this post as my childhood barkada celebrate the wedding of one us, Dette-dette, the true bohemian who once swore against the formality of marriage.  And also, I'm writing this post because it's my friend Gigi's birthday today. 

Memories are rushing in quickly and I cannot keep up as I type this with fresh lemonade at my reach in a high humidity location. Everytime I pause to drink the liquid,  a unit of memory fleets away from my mind and I could no longer claim it. It's like remembering a tune but never the song name. Painful. 

I remember my friends picking me up at my house and we would pick up our other friends living in my neighborhood,  and then we would play pranks and ring doorbells of our batchmates' houses nearby -- wala lang for the fun of it and I realize now the first common thing that binded us was our same sense of humor, and then at school, we would stalk people for no reason at all, calling out their last names and when they see us, we would whisper to each other and run away - with some streak of dementia right there, I'm surprised we were not institutionalized in our adulthood, and then I remember us discretely passing notes during class hours, notes containing profound lyrics of Bon Jovi, Tears for Fears and Claire Marlow, and our thoughts about our crushes -- yep, no texts, pure paper, oh was it so renaissance and so poetic  back then, and then we would exchange shoes among each other and we would go home with our shoes mismatched because we forget to return it back, and then we would huddle around to cover any of us whose skirt has some stains due to those womanly monthly visits and I remember my friends would ride the taxi with me going home during school hours so I could change my clothes, and then I remember how proud we were when one of us got an "x" for disciplinary behaviour, first woman in a star class to "achieve" it, and I remember how we shared the love for books and us talking about Sidney Sheldon, Mario Puzo, C.S. Lewis, and my god yes, how we cried over Danielle Steele, and then how we talked for hours on analog telephones (my friends even have 5 digit numbers back then) and I remember how we were touched so easily with each other's recollection letters.... 

Oh we do make sunggod, we fight like sisters albeit zero physical, and as we grew older, we found our own voices, carved who we are to the person we were meant to be, and all of us became stronger, more independent and our disagreements became more colorful, our physical distances much farther.  But we still look for each other - for friendship and comfort or whatever thing that binds sisterhood, as if we have no choice but to find each other.    With my friends, I found out that love, in its purest form, overcomes differences. No joke.  

As we were preparing for the wedding, it made me realize to trust more in the goodness of each other, to communicate better, to communicate often (thanks WhatsApp!) - no matter how trivial, because in the end we cannot judge what is significant.  Thanks to Fe's leadership, my god, how this woman can manage -- she coordinates with people of differing sets of opinion just to come up with one gift and one message :).  

To make up for me not much of help, here's the collated pictures of us hiking through Mt. Pinatubo crater during those days when the trail was still unmarked, when endurance was not in our vocabulary, and when we fought hard, clearing our schedules so we could  always meet (I hope we still do).  We were missing Jenjen and Gigi.  This was circa 2009.  

I chanced upon Patty Laurel's blog and what she wrote struck me, and I literally nodded my head in agreement while reading it, dumped my laptop and jumped off my couch, raised my fist in the air and shouted, hell yes, woman, I hear ya! 

 I grew up in the 80s-90s, in the era of patintero sa kalye, biking around the village, and wholesome sleepovers. We didn't have Xboxes and Ipads, we had empty streets and chalk and we played piko until sunset. We didn't have Facebook, we had slambooks and answered "What is Love?" with "God is Love." We didn't send each other one liners via text, we actually sat in the park and talked for hours. Back in the day, uso ang totoong kaibigan. And by friendship, I don't mean random people you bump into in Republiq and tag on your photo. Those aren't your friends, those are just people you happen to know by name. If you have people around you who you can share honest conversations with, people who will love you unconditionally with no judgments, people who encourage you to do better in life, who lift your spirits and make you feel safe---then invest in these FRIENDS. It's not about the number of friends you have, it's about the quality of friendships you're able to keep.

Dakota Fanning As Lily? Too Young.

Circa Spring 2001, taken at a park in Tokyo, Japan with friends. If there's one defining signature for spring, it's the sakura.

From the book, The Secret Life of Bees:

She laughed again. "You know, some things don't matter that much, Lily.  Like the color of a house. How big is that in the overall scheme of life? But lifting a person's heart -- now, that matters.  The whole problem with people is ---"

"They don't know what matters and what doesn't," I said, filling in her sentence and feeling proud of myself for doing so.

"I was gonna say, The problem is they know what matters but they don't choose it. You know how hard that is, Lily? I love May, but it was still so hard to choose Carribean Pink.  The hardest thing on earth is choosing what matters."

I remember this book recommended to me by Blesh, one of my officemates and roommates back then, years ago, when I read books like a breathe air. It's different now where I don't read as often as I used to, not bad, just different. I've been outside nowadays out of my hammock and wanted to do and be lots of things and still trying to strike  a balance doing all the things I love doing, like reading. I put this book in my heart-warming shelf,  where The Girls Guide for Hunting and Fishing and Birds of America sit. 

This is part of my intention to read 1 book per month for the rest of 2012.  So far, I'm on track. A tinge of me feels like it's a wishlist bound to fail, but a huge part of me hates failing so still hopeful I get to meet lots of characters, both fictional and not, of different worlds this year. 

I need to buy that Kindle. 

THE Pasta Experience.

I'm scared of lasagna - the making of it. Of all the pasta dishes, it is what intimidates me the most.  Maybe it's the work involve or the baking involve - I mean why can it not be like a spaghetti - boil then toss the sauce?

After researching about lasagna and different variations of its recipe, I decided to try this one because it predominantly uses mozzarella - my favorite cheese.  Forgive my humble assessment but I really feel the turnout was a success. Why do I think so? Because I ate the meat sauce separately and could not stop eating it for days.  I'm not a cook, so I'm not going to detail what I did and recipe linked above should do the trick . I'll show you though the experience of cooking/baking a lasagna for the first time. 

Photo#1: I'm  standing here boiling the meat with the sauce, in near panic as I'm trying to think if I need to transfer it to a bigger caldero as it is almost overflowing and beside it, I'm boiling the lasagna pasta - what the crap is this stuff, so huge and wide -- and I'm juggling texting back to my teammate Venkat (who believes I'm trying to burn down the house) and my friend Tin (who will soon be a professional baker) warning them of where I am with my cooking. By the way, fresh parsleys are heaven and are good for presentation too!

Photo#2: I'm a little bit relaxed at this time, spreading the ricotta cheese mixture with my layers.  I go all out with parsley. I put them EVERYWHERE, I don't care.  I actually cannot decide now if I undercooked my pasta or overcooked it.  True mark of a happy-go luck cook (read: idiot) in the kitchen.

Photo#3: My sauce is ready and I'm ecstatic! Ecstatic because I just layered my mozzarella slices! My perfectionist me wished that for next time, I'll try those raw mozzarella cheese, not the sliced one. I think those kind is a wee bit expensive, I think around 500 pesos. 

Photo#4: The recipe never mentioned cheese bubbles. Take a  look at that picture. I was worn out with 2 hours of cooking at this stage, I think I was in dementia when I remembered my mom telling me that the secret to a good leche flan is that when you whip the egg mixture, it has to be so fine as to not cause any bubbles. So I started swatting the bubbles while this was in the oven. Yeah, I know, totally non sequitur. I apply pieces of advice on wrong scenarios.

Photo#5 :). I know :). It was good. And note the garnish: ever ubiquitous parsley  ;-).

Euro-Backpacking: Making Sense of Athens.

I'm going through my album of pictures and I remember this one in Athens, Greece - Nikki and I wearing our version of a grecian dress. 

This is my white lady dress, I figured it would be good to wear with the Parthenon in the background.  

We pranced around the city both of us in this attire, thinking this to be an interpretation of their national costume.  There were some stares but given that this was the last leg of our adventure, we were pretty  much anesthetized by any form of embarassment or self-consciousness. We were in Greece after all, we have hundreds of century-old ruins behind us, the least we could do is wear the part!

The above picture is one of my favorites.  It's the Porch of Caryatids (part of the Erechtheion temple at Acropolis) - these are women statues carrying the roof with their heads. Those are fake ones actually - the government decided to preserve the real ones and placed them at the Athens museum to protect it from falling apart.  It's so  magnificent and grand. I was more impressed with this temple than the Parthenon, it merited a Princess Diana pose reminscent of the hilariously same pose I almost did with the Taj Mahal behind me.  

I remember how hot the weather was, and how we hiked to the top of Acropolis at a very scorching heat and came back down, passing by different ruins - quite amazed actually with the Temple of Hephaestus --, amazed to be so close and immersed in one of the oldest cities in the world, here with these ruins that gave birth to democracy, philosophy and some of the greatest literature of our time.  I remember us getting dis-oriented on the way down and almost getting lost, getting shouted in Greek for sitting at marble stones (we really didn't know the stones were part of the preserved ruins), and getting a shade darker after the hike. 

I remember our friend Marios (our customer in IT, love my job) who called his dad early in the morning for an emergency fix at his house and having to explain why he has two girls sleeping at his bachelor pad.  I remember us teaching these new found friends some Tagalog and forcing them to speak it and have some mini-movie about it.  

 

I remember our conversations in the car, how we teased Marios to marry Elena, his girlfriend, him telling us we're invited at his wedding and at that moment we believed we will still see each other again.  One of my favorite pictures below - it was sunset, we're waiting for one of Marios' friend and also our customer, Francisco to meet us, we're at the Athens Olympic Complex (birthplace of the Olympics!), dancing around the sexiest arches I've ever seen.  It was like walking under the curved shell of a turtle. 

Good times. I probably will post the Santorini pictures by...year 2014. 

I'm Claire.

There was no comedy show that could replace Friends I thought.  But then again, here comes  Modern Family.  My favorite character from that TV show is Claire - she goes postal at anything as long as she stays in control. After watching an interview clip of Julie Bowen, the actress who played Claire, I realized - I can so relate to the persona and the actor! 

When asked, what turns her off, she said in one word, "Entitlement."  

When she was telling Ellen De Generes how she stayed up late to watch a TV show, she quipped, "Sleep is for the weak."   

Julie reads my mind.