so it goes like this: two supposedly long time friends/barkada, who have opposite personalities and who never thought of hooking up with each other, get conveniently set up by their friends in a hotel room together for three consecutive days without contact from the outside world, except that food will be delivered to their room by whoever every now and then. it has become a barkada "tradition" to set up prospect couples in the group that way [though never in my life have i heard of such a ridiculous practice]. the setting already gives away the crux of the tale - yeah, they're going to end up together. if you didn't see that coming, you haven't been watching TGIS or gimik long enough. anyway, both of them just recently got out of a relationship. they have opposite ideals/principles [i think this part is supposed to deceive the readers into thinking that they're not going to end up together because they're so different. but of course you're not stupid so you're not going to buy that.] - Boy X is a typical pretty boy, a gentleman who wants to remain a virgin until he gets married and he's just so darn nice that people actually mistake him for a gay. Girl Y is a commercial model and ex-prom queen who has very liberal ideals and who has hooked up and has done it with several guys already. when they were about to sleep on their first night together, Boy X, being the gentleman that he is, was planning to sleep on the floor so Girl Y wouldn't have to share the bed with him. however, Girl Y, being the liberal person that she is, told Boy X that he can sleep on the bed, "as if anything's going to happen between them anyway". besides, they're just going to put up a divider between them using the bedsheets [tell me, friends, how in the world are you going to set up a divider on a bed in a normal hotel room? now if they brought their own wire and clothespins, it would've been credible]. they start a small platonic talk about how weird their friends are in setting them up, and then they play a little "let's-get- to-know-each-other" game of "twenty questions" and begin talking about their love lives and their principles and whatevers while drinking wine in the process. what's with the wine? how the hell should i know. probably it's a premonition that something's going to happen between them. as if there weren't enough signs to show that they're going to end up together. so anyway, they begin to ask each other questions, starting with the neutral ones until, predictably, one of them asks, "who was your first crush in the barkada?" and then the other one drops hints that it was the former, but because of the awkardness of the situation, they still try to evade the obvious fact that they do like each other. later on, both of them were already dropping hints that they like each other. (wow. as if i didn't see that coming.) and then Girl Y discloses a deep dark secret to Boy X and she cries and of course Boy X, to comfort her, hugs her. ooh, what a senti moment. later on, Boy X asks GIrl Y if ever she's going to be victimized by the same tradition all over again, who would she want to spend it with. and of course Girl Y tells every possible adjective that obviously describes Boy X, but of course, she didn't say "you!" because it wouldn't be romantic. in the end, one of them [i forgot who] asked the other one if he/she could kiss her/him, and then the story ends. it doesn't say if the kiss pushed through. oh yes, it's an intelligent read because it has a hanging ending. blah. so maybe the normal reaction would be to say aaaaaawwwwwwwwww and feel kilig all over - if you're an avid fan of "click" and you think that the whole line of "sweet dreams" pocketbooks still has literary value, or maybe if you're in your early teen years thinking that everyone is going to have an idealistic love life with a good looking significant other and an equally titillating love story. but no, i'm a realistic [okay, sometimes cynical] twentysomething person and i guess it's also a very well known fact that there's a real world that goes way beyond the kind of "perfect" stories they falsely depict on tv or in the movies. i'm sorry, but the story, in an attempt to incite "kilig" feelings from its target audience (what target audience?) suffers from too much emotionalism. and don't give me that "it won a palanca award" crap because i find the idea that this tasteless tragedy actually won an award too puzzling to fathom. it just sickens me.

i can't believe i actually finished reading it. halfway through the story, i deleted it because i got pissed with the way things are progressing. then i later on thought that probably it wasn't as predictable/typical as i thought it was, maybe there would be a shocking clincher in the end, like the guy's actually transsexual or he had a sex change or something like that [since the girl kept on insinuating from the beginning that the guy was gay], so i restored it from the trash and read it. and i felt doubly disappointed that there was no catch, it was just that - a boring, sappy, irritating love story that lost its way to my inbox. pieces like that should be submitted to channel 2 or 7 and be the plot of upcoming daily telenovelas/weekly teeny bopper shows.

Labels: forwards, rant