Toughest Place to Be Documentary 8:21 AM

I'm posting this entry via email so I can't attach links properly or embed
videos.

Anyway, head over Chuvaness' blog to watch this documentary that made me
tear up a bit.


http://chuvaness.livejournal.com/1054792.html


As I was watching the videos I kind of see some similarity physically with
Mang Rogelio and my Dad.

My Dad was once an FX driver. An honorable and decent job. But not a lot of
people know that.

So I can't help but tear up on some parts because some of the things Mang
Rogelio feels, I've seen and experienced it as well at a certain point of
our lives.

I have to warn you though that some of the translations are done loosely for
those who can understand Filipino.

Sharing Time: Fresh Barcode! 8:30 AM

Source: http://www.yankodesign.com/2010/03/17/dare-they-sell-you-stale-veggies-now/

Wonderful idea! A barcode that indicates freshness! The barcode fades as the produce gets "older". When the indicator reaches "0", time to chuck it out or not buy it!

I wonder though if the barcode will prevent less than good intentions like placing a fresh code on stale items. 

Trial with Val Villarin 1:59 PM

I had my trial hair and make up with Val Villarin yesterday.

We did airbrush makeup for our session since it gives a nice coverage.

He's right, it doesn't feel heavy at all but the coverage is nice. Whisper light!

Forgive me for the quality of the pix. I forgot to bring my digital camera and had to resort to my camera phone.

Me and my MOH

A few hours after....

Hanging out at Starbucks

past 11pm. My face turned a bit ashy.

I figured, my skin changed it's pH level when I changed my diet. Before, make up used to really darken after a few hours. Now, I turn ashy. Hmmm. How to deal with this?

What's up ketchup? 7:27 PM

Short run down of the last few days:


1. Got my plaque! Now all they need to do is engrave my name on it.

 

2. Enjoyed our soccer-themed event. The jacket is so cute! Gotten a lot of compliments from my friends over Facebook. I wonder who the guy behind me is though?

3. Finished 6 novels. That's 6% of my target for 2010. I'm on track.

4. Went to our invitation supplier. I have never seen so many paper types to choose from! I was buried under various paper colors, gsm, paper styles, and ink varieties. I didn't think choosing your invitation was that complicated! Picked Conqueror White Wove in 220 GSM for our inserts. Prestige Zanzibar Bronze for the envelopes (of which I am changing after talking to the calligrapher, see #5).

5.  Talked to 5 calligraphers who all recommended that dark envelopes will not make the calligraphy ink register correctly. The use of gel pen for me is a no-no.

6. Hotel ocular is a horror! How come Quezon City doesn't have a decent hotel? Seriously, why would I pay good money for hotels whose carpets are smelly and the tiles are dirty? I expected them to put their best foot forward during the ocular, but they didn't. Some hotels even have the audacity to charge for pictorials during the wedding preps! My Mom and I were disappointed. We scratched out Quezon City hotels for wedding prep venues. Our recommendation: RENOVATE! MAINTAIN YOUR FACILITIES! We went to Ortigas. It was awesome! Big rooms, very clean, and we were even treated to a free lunch care of the hotel's account executive. I even got a very good rate. About 36% discount from the room rates!

7. Talked to a flower supplier. It seems the bouquet  (see below) I want costs an arm and a leg because they're all imported and must be ordered outside the country. Figures. Got my flower inspiration from an English  autumn wedding. Will settle then on local flowers but with the same scheme but at a friendlier cost. Will do an ocular inspection of the flower supplier's assembly office before we make the final decision. I have to make sure they don't use a lot of fillers!

 

8. Felt like a million bucks when I went to Una Rosa to check out their End of Season sale. The salesladies were fawning all over me. Ended up buying 2 blouses that will be great for office wear and even in jeans and a dress. I guess that makes me a sucker for compliments no? But I did resist buying the boyfriend blazers. It was nice though.


9. Wanted these shoes badly as my "something blue" for the wedding. I did a double take when I saw it at Stella Luna. I knew it was THE shoes because I wanted something blue and something that I use over and over again after the wedding. But the price was rather prohibitive at 6k a pop. I have to manage our budget wisely since not only am I paying for my share of the wedding but I'm also paying for the house my sister and I are building for my Mom and Dad. And so I turned my back around. Sob. Settled for something much more affordable. If circumstances were different, I'd buy it the moment I tried it on my feet.

Gee...What am I in this list? 4:25 PM

Readers by Author by Lauren Leto

Stereotyping People by Their Favorite Author

(by the way – I respect every author on here, kind of)

J.D. Salinger

Kids who don’t fit in (duh).

Stephenie Meyer

People who type like this: OMG. Mah fAvvv <3 <3.

J.K. Rowling

Smart geeks.

Jack Kerouac

Umphrey’s McGee fans.

Jeffrey Eugenides

Girls who didn’t get enough drama when they were younger.

Lauren Weisberger

Girls who can’t read. Or think.

Jonathan Safran Foer

30somethings who were cool when they were 20something.

Jodi Picoult

Your mom when she’s at her time of the month.

Chuck Klosterman

Boys who don’t read.

Chuck Palahniuk

Boys who can’t read.

Christopher Hitchens

People I would love to hang out with.

Leo Tolstoy

Guys I want to date.

Fyodor Dostoevsky

Guys I want to sleep with. (The difference between the two Russian authors lies in the fact that I think the Underground Man is sexier than Pierre Buzukhov).

Christopher Buckley (or William F. Buckley)

People who love excess verbiage.

Ayn Rand

Workaholics seeking validation.

David Foster Wallace

Confirmed 90’s literati.

Jane Austen (or Bronte Sisters)

Girls who made out with other girls in college when they were going through a “phase”.

Haruki Murakami

People who like good music.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

People who can start a fire.

Nathaniel Hawthorne

People who used to sleep so heavy that they would pee their pants.

Charles Dickens

Ninth graders who think they’re going to be authors someday but end up in marketing.

William Shakespeare

People who like bondage.

Mark Twain

Liars.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

People who drink scotch.

Joseph Conrad

People who drink old fashioneds.

Dominick Dunne

People who get their class from Vanity Fair.

Anne Rice

People who don’t use conditioner in their hair.

Edgar Allan Poe

Men who live in their mother’s basements. Or goth seventh graders.

Michael Crichton

Doctors who went to third-tier medical schools.

John Grisham

Doctors who went to medical schools in the Dominican Republic.

Dan Brown

People who used to get lost in supermarkets when they were kids.

Dave Eggers

Guys who are in the third coolest frat of a private college.

Emily Giffin

Women who give their boyfriend marriage ultimatums.

Richard Russo

People whose favorite day in elementary school was “Grandparent’s Day”.

Anais Nin

Librarians.

Margaret Atwood

Women whose favorite color is hunter green.

William Faulkner

People who are good at crosswords.

Jackie Collins

Your drunk stepmother.

Nicholas Sparks

Women who are usually constipated.

James Patterson

Men who score a 153 on their LSAT exam.

Sylvia Plath

Girls who keep journals (too easy).

George Orwell

Conspiracy theorists (too easy).

Aldous Huxley

People who are bigger conspiracy theorists than Orwell fans.

Harper Lee

People who have read only one book in their life and it was To Kill A Mockingbird (and it was their assigned reading in the ninth grade).

Nick Hornby

Guys who wear skinny jeans and the girls that love them.

Ernest Hemingway

Men who own cottages.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

People who get adjustable-rate mortgages.

Vladimir Nabokov

Men who use words like ‘dubious’ and ‘tenacity’.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Sommeliers.

Bret Easton Ellis

Foo Fighters’ fans.

Hunter S Thompson

That kid in your philosophy class with the stupid tattoo.

Cormac McCarthy

Men who don’t eat cream cheese.

Thomas Aquinas

Premature ejaculators.

Pearl S. Buck

Women whose favorite president was Harry S. Truman.

Toni Morrison

Female high-school English professors who only have an undergraduate degree.

Thomas Pynchon

People who used to be fans of J.D. Salinger.

Elizabeth Gilbert

Women who liked the movie “Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood” but didn’t read the book.

Rebecca Wells

Women on the East coast who wish they were from the South.

Tama Janowitz

Cougars who went to an urban college in the 80s.

Alice Sebold

People who liked Gilmore Girls – even in the first season.

Michael Swanwick

Men who argue Neil Gaiman is overrated.

Terry Goodkind

People who have never been dungeons master but still play D&D.

Stephen King

11th graders who peed their pants while watching the movie It.

H.P. Lovecraft

People who can quote the Comic Book Guy from Simpsons.

Brothers Grimm

Only children with Oedipal complexes.

Lewis Carroll

People who move to Thailand after high school for the drug scene.

C.S. Lewis

Youth group leaders who picked their nose in the 4th grade.

Elmore Leonard

People who know how to perform a “Michigan left”.

Shel Silverstein

Girls who can’t spell “leheim”.

Douglas Adams

People who bought the first generation Amazon Kindle.

Tucker Max

Guys who haven’t convinced their girlfriends to try anal yet.

Alexis de Tocqueville

Political theory and constitutional democracy majors.

Tom Clancy

People who skipped school by hiding out in the gym.

Herman Hesse

People who own one straw chair in their house.

Phillippa Gregory

Women who have repressed their desire to go to Renaissance Festivals

Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Men who can’t lie but will instead be silent if they know you don’t want to hear the truth.

Susan Wiggs

Older women who are surprisingly loud during sex.

Nicole Krauss

Girls who intern at Nylon but end up moving back to the Midwest for their real job.

Mitch Albom

People who didn’t go to college but do well on crossword puzzles.

Stieg Larsson

Girls who are too frightened to go skydiving.

Sue Grafton

Women who have an @aol.com email address.

Seth Grahame-Smith

People who own a smart phone which requires a stylus to use it.

David Baldacci

No one. Even the police say Clancy before they’ll say Baldacci.

Michael Pollan

The girl who just turned vegan to cover up her eating disorder.

Andrew Ross Sorkin

People who refer to themselves as “playing devil’s advocate”.

O. Henry

Men who have names like Earl or Cliff and were really close with their paternal grandfather.

Virginia Woolf

Female high-school French teachers who have their master’s degree.

Michael Chabon

People who  hate Ayelet Waldman.

Ray Bradbury

People who own golf head covers.

Joseph Heller

People who love buying drinks for their friends. See also, people who cringe when they see their bar tab.

David Mitchell

Women who live in any area of Brooklyn other than Park Slope, but may end up there someday and if that day comes, they will switch to Barbara Kingsolver fans.

Max Barry

People who don’t mind the color orange.

Dean Koontz

People who would never dream of owning any type of “toy” breed dog.

John Irving

People whose parents are divorced.

Richard Dawkins

People who have their significant other grab them under the table in order to shut them up whenever someone else at a dinner says something absolutely ridiculous and wrong.

Salman Rushdie

People who google image search Padma Lakshmi late at night.

Albert Camus

People who went to art school after “trying it out” at a public university.

Kurt Vonnegut

People who played Creep by Radiohead while having sex or smoking pot.

James Joyce

People who do not like John Cusack movies.

Charlaine Harris

Elementary school teacher’s aids.

Jorge Luis Borges

People who took care of their dying grandparents.

Terry Pratchett

People who really like monkeys.

Oscar Wilde

People who can’t resist anything. See also, people who claim they’re going to change but never do.

Truman Capote

People who would never dream of owning anything that could be classified as a “knick-knack”.

Tour Pilipinas Part 1: Dumaguete, Bacolod, and Cebu 11:28 PM

Whew. That sums up my last two weeks. It was a lovely but tiring two weeks of adventure!

First off, I flew to Dumaguete for another opening with my boss in tow. It was a rainy morning when we arrived but the sun shined immediately a few minutes later.

View from our Van Pick Up

The opening was a success. My boss and our other companions decided to partake of the local seafood offerings like oysters and scallops. YUM! They were so fresh. The oysters have a natural sweetness in them and the scallops, tender and rich.

The night was lovely and we thought nothing about what would happen the following day.

It was declared signal # 1 due to typhoon Urduja. Unfortunately, our fastcraft trip from Dumaguete going to Cebu got cancelled as well as other sea trips. We attempted to take the bus who will ride a barge, hoping that the bigger sea craft would be allowed. No such luck. All flights were fully booked as well. No luck getting to Cebu.

So off we went and took a land rip via Sir Vic’s car going to Bacolod hoping that we could get a Bacolod-Cebu trip. Again, nada.

So while travelling, we entertained ourselves with the wonderful sights of Negros Occidental.

Being in Bacolod, I cannot miss partaking of the famous Calea cakes which was just across the street from our hotel. It got two thumbs up from my boss for being dense but not cloyingly sweet. It was a sweet ending to a tiring and long day.

We flew back to Manila the following day, in the afternoon, since we had no other options left but to go to Cebu via Manila because all flights were full in Bacolod as well.

The following morning I took an early flight going to Cebu for another opening (my third branch in Cebu). It was a fly in fly out thing because I have a lot of catching up to do with work. Of course, since I was already in Cebu, what else to do but go to Tabo-an to buy danggit!!!

Choy, my Cebu counterpart, and I decided to buy CnT Lechon. Too bad we arrived late and lucked out on the lechon. Choy, who owes me a HUGE favor, took me to Merto’s for lunch. He bought me not one, not two, but THREE huge containers of Dentelles Au Chocolat Belgian Chocolate Lace cookies in three flavors: Mint, Semi-Sweet, and Dark. I was shocked at the price but what the heck… Choy owes me. Hahaha. He happily bought me a thousand bucks worth of cookies! Oh they were super yummy. I love those cookies and always ask Choy to bring me some whenever he goes to Manila for meetings. I hope he owes me more favors soon. Harharhar.

Anyway, off to fly back to Manila come 3pm. I kept wondering why this Indian guy kept sitting beside me and staring at me. He never attempted to make conversation though. I was surprised we were seated beside each other on the plane. He still kept staring. And then it hit me. I freakin’ smelled like danggit! Gah! It clung to my silk blouse! He must be attracted to the scent. Gawd.

When I arrived at Centennial 2, I almost had a heart attack. I saw that the passenger side window behind the driver’s side of my car, Genesis, was covered and taped up with carton boxes! I went white. I thought somebody smashed my windows taking advantage of the few hours I was at Cebu.

I called security to get an explanation or incident report. Turns out I was super sleepy when I flew to Cebu that I left my window open. The guards were kind enough to cover up my window just in case it rained. My God! I cannot believe how lucky I am that NAIA Centennial 2 Security Guards are so wonderful! Too bad I can’t remember their names now since this happened two weeks ago. But thank you! I now feel safer leaving my car at the airport overnight knowing how outstanding the guards in Centennial 2 are at their jobs.

Sharing time: From Seth's Blog- What you buy when you buy a lottery ticket 8:36 AM

Source: Seth Godin's Blog

What you buy when you buy a lottery ticket

Hint: you don't buy a future of money.

People who win the lottery are almost always unhappy in the long run, and most of them continue to buy lottery tickets.

It's not the destination, it's the journey. Same thing with first dates, blog posts, opening presents and answering a phone call from a stranger.

The thrill of possibility, the chance for recognition, the chemical high of anticipation. That's what people pay for.

Who's the Sales Lady's Comments: 

I couldn't agree more!

Sharing time: Seth's Blog on Trolls 8:23 AM

Source: Seth Godin's Blog

Trolls

Lots of things about work are hard. Dealing with trolls is one of them. Trolls are critics who gain perverse pleasure in relentlessly tearing you and your ideas down. Here's the thing(s):

1. trolls will always be trolling
2. critics rarely create
3. they live in a tiny echo chamber, ignored by everyone except the trolled and the other trolls
4. professionals (that's you) get paid to ignore them. It's part of your job.

"Can't please everyone," isn't just an aphorism, it's the secret of being remarkable.

Sharing time: 20 Career Lessons from Celebrities 5:41 PM

Celebrities. We love to hate them. We also love to watch their every move, laugh at their mistakes and scrutinize their decisions. 

Like them or not, their celebrity status means not only have they achieved career success, they’ve also got a hell of a lot to lose. And sometimes, whatever actions have helped catapult them to fame or rendered them B-list can provide valuable lessons for the careers of regular people like you and me.

Monster Evolutions presents 20 career lessons from celebrities. Some are good. Some are bad. Some are just plain ridiculous.


Click after the jump!

Sharing time: How NOT to Write a Cover Letter 7:31 AM

The resume was impressive. The formatting was impeccable, the content was excellent, and she did a great job of focusing on accomplishments instead of job duties. If I were an employer, I would have been impressed.

Then I looked at her cover letter and imagined the employer tossing that perfect resume into the trash bin.

Many people looking for jobs destroy their resumes by accompanying them with half-hearted or downright terrible cover letters. While some employers don’t bother reading cover letters, most do. And they will quickly eliminate you if you make any, all or a combination of these mistakes.

READ MORE HERE