Machiavellian...or not

Troll’s Eye View, An anthology of tales on villain’s point of view. I love, love, love it. It has the darkness of a Grimm fairy tale, the magic of Hans Christian Andersen and it is all about the villains! The tales are beautifully crafted and the much-maligned villains get their own tales. I love tales like these, unconventional fairy tales like those written by Gregory Maguire and now by these writers who wrote such brilliant retellings of the old fairy tales in a villain’s point of view. I love that they give these villains a background story and how they understood that they become villains for a reason, and that maybe those annoying heroes or heroines in fairy tales are annoying little gits who nose in on stuff which are none of their business. They are given a voice by the best fantasy writers of my generation. 

Rawr means I love you in dinosaur

I have a strange relationship with my ex-boyfriend. Whenever I feel down, I turn to him to cheer me up and he does a brilliant job of it. Whenever I feel elated at a recent success, he is the first one I want to talk to about it. We have been together for a year and when we broke up, it was terrible as some break ups go. Even then, we were still communicating and eventually we became close friends, even closer than we had been before. After 4 years, he has become my best pal. We may not have been a success as a couple but as friends, we are certainly rocking it. I am at a stage in my life where I feel like a failure because jobs are hard to come by for fresh grads, through it all he has been my one-man cheering squad. I never hesitate to tell him anything, and he has been very patient with me. I do not know any other guy pal who can bear to listen to my woes, nor any of my girl friends who I can speak to with the same honesty as I talk to him. He is not perfect; he is actually a very forgetful person and it is one of the most annoying things that I hated about him when we were together. He also tends to tease me and mock me, which in a boyfriend is a very annoying attitude but a very endearing one in a friend, no awkwardness involved.  My ex-boyfriend is my rock in the sea of chaos. This is getting dramatic but it is true. Its how I feel. And there’s no one else in my life who has done as much as he did and is currently doing. I love him, of course. But I am safe in the thought that we will never be together again, I do not think I can handle a relationship right now, I am like the infamous Tumblr meme: doomed to be forever alone. 

Time and then again

Getting older means getting new perspectives on past books I have read. I read the Belgariad series by David Eddings when I was about 8 years old and I loved it. I read it again this year, 13 years later, and I disliked it. Timelessness is a true test of a book's greatness and David Eddings books have never done it for me. It was a disappointment. I read the Potter series, Tolkien's books, Narnia series, Enid Blyton, Charles Dickens, Arthur Conan Doyle at around that time period and when I read it again a decade or so later, it still holds the same magic, maybe even better. I was irritated with the pace of the Belgariad series, the characters were one dimensional, I find it dull. I think I'll try re-reading them again, maybe I'll find that old spark which made me read them when I was 8. Or maybe I was just a bad judge of books then, I remembered being enamored with Sidney Sheldon books, reading all his books in one summer, and years later, I find them too shallow.

A book that changed your life

Once, during a Christmas away from home, I asked for only one thing: a Harry Potter book. I did not get my wish. The one who ran the the errand of buying the book bought me something else instead. I was furious, how dare that person presume to buy another book instead of the Harry Potter series which is the best fantasy series in the entire world?! The Potter books were sold out and that person bought the book which looked as interesting as Harry Potter. I received The Hobbit, a book by JRR Tolkien. I did not know who he was back then, I was in grade school and was not aware there were other books written aside from Harry Potter (HP was the center of my bookworm existence). I can vividly recall sitting on the edge of the bed, staring at The Hobbit while shedding tears of bitterness at not being able to know what happens next in the Harry Potter series. I refused to read the book, until one day when we went to the beach and as I was and still am a very unsociable creature and having exhausted the meager supply of books in my aunt's cabinet and have deemed to read a Danielle Steel novel (who I really don't like even then) because of lack of other books, I bought The Hobbit. I read it and I fell in love. It started my romance with epic fantasies, the genre of books which for me is the greatest of them all. It takes great imagination to envision a world, a country, a land with such intricate stories that even when read a thousand times over by different people, will still hold magic among the pages.

For the love of the beautiful game

What I miss the most about Football is cheering for it. I miss staying up in the early hours, my hands sweating with anticipation, that tingly feeling in the stomach, the alertness in my brain readying myself for anything and everything that could happen in 90+ minutes. I miss cheering, crying, laughing, hating—all the addictions of a football fan. I tell you, being a football fan is more than the cumulative effect of the upper and downer drugs in the world. The feeling of community from football fans from around the globe is beautiful. It is on times like these when I believe in the power of humanity. You see, even if we are so far apart, we have a common love; Football is a beautiful game. 

Not a movie review.

A Bout de Souffle (Breathless)

Jean-Luc Godard (1960)

I have a fascination for black and white movies. I find them romantic. I love unconventional stories. This film is a wonderful movie to watch. Jean Seberg looks ethereal, the American in France who falls for a Michel (sometimes his name), a crook. I love their conversations, reminds me of another favorite film of mine; Before Sunrise/Sunset.
Next film is La Vita e Bella (because my favorite F1 driver loves it and I heard it's really good) and M, a German film.

Books and Chocolates go hand in hand

Books I bought for less than 200 php. Amazing finds. And then some chocolates. ;)

p.s. I do not know what the fuck is going on with Blogspot but my photos have disappeared and are replaced by a black box with an exclamation point. What the bloody fuck

forever a nerd

Got my first paycheck (from my part time online job) and the first thing I could think of is, "What book should i buy?". It's not quite a large amount so I'll have to budget it but then again, it's my first paycheck from doing something I love=writing. :)

It is quite all right to judge a book by its cover, nowadays. People did work hard to make them attractive.

the story of my first story

I wrote my first story when I was 12 years old. It was for a school writing assignment. I wanted to impress my English teacher because she was kind of like Miss Jenny in Matilda. I had a lot of favourite teachers when I was in grade school but this English teacher (who I could not remember the name today, but I remember her as an indistinct, plump figure with curly hair and a kind smile—she was just a substitute then) was my most favourite of them all. So we were told to write a short story as our final assignment for that school year and I wanted to write the best story ever but I ended up consuming an entire notebook plus a few pages of writing paper attached haphazardly to the notebook, it was not a short story. I thought everyone was impressed by my efforts; they kept borrowing to read it and said it was real good. Of course, we were sixth graders back then so it’s not really as impressive as it sounds. I found out my teacher never checked the notebooks. She placed them in a cupboard and allowed dust to gather until I unearthed them and saved the notebooks from oblivion. I was bitterly disappointed and vowed never to put that kind of effort in school projects thus the procrastination started. It was not my first story, I’ve been constructing stories in my mind since I learned how to think aka since I started reading books. Sometimes they are stories from books I’m reading, when I’m not fully satisfied with the stories and wanted to add a bit of a personal touch to them, hence the editing started. My mind is like the universe where I travel in my own personal TARDIS to different times, dimensions and worlds (since I can't deal with reality that well). COOL.COOL.COOL