with everyone giving us christmas goodies in the form of sweets, the gym closed until the 4th of january and not enough stress to make me lose my appetite, i have no choice but to devour everything in sight and bum around the house the whole day, surfing from one channel to another. law school worries are buried somewhere underneath the mental christmas lists and the schedule of [ rare ] get togethers with friends/family that only occur during the holidays. [ although i dreamed the other day that i was making a reviewer for civpro. well i intend on doing that in the days to come, i just need a few more days to rest.

last saturday, i ate at gayuma with the harkadah [ minus jenny and penny ]. pat's home! one good thing about having a friend based in a far away place is that whenever he/she comes home and he/she arranges a lunch/dinner, everyone comes. at least, everyone tries to come. under ordinary circumstances, no one has the initiative to go out kasi wala lang. there always has to be a compelling reason. anyway, i was glad to see everyone else and to hear about each one's update on her life. we watched tanghalang ateneo's lam-ang starring jonel as lam-ang himself. [ which i watched for the third time already. at least i watched it for free on all occasions. and it still cracked me up everytime ]. we got the front row seats so we could distract jonel as he made the [ supposedly ] sexy dances. hehe!

we ate at world topps afterwards with wex, jonel and cesar, then wex and i ran to the podium to watch maksim in concert. we actually thought it was going to end at 10 pm, which was a pretty good deal, considering it was for free [ well, you can sit up front if you buy a cd, which weki and i did ], but it turned out the concert lasted for less than 30 minutes. we liked the concert anyway; the pieces were powerfully played. the recorded orchestra/techno music also helped a lot. the whole cd is reminiscent of robert miles, actually. afterwards, we ate at nypd [ pizza ] at podium with nico and his friend [ they also watched the concert ].

i had nothing better to do while waiting for the concert to start, so i just took pics of the christmas decor and the eager audience at the podium





hooray for my 10x zoom camera. we weren't seated as close as this picture shows us to be



maksim in action



this wasn't taken with the zoom feature. we really were this close to him. i was taking a picture of him while he was signing my cd. i didn't have one with him facing the camera because we weren't actually allowed to call his attention to have his picture taken or have our picture taken with him because it would take up too much time.





wala lang. vanity. hehe.

christmas blues

lately, i've been getting surges of random memories of christmas past. and they usually get triggered by the most unlikely stimuli. like one time, slipknot's song, "wait and bleed" was played on the radio [ which became popular around december of 1999 ], and i suddenly remembered giving out gifts for my freshman blockmates 5 [ wow was it that long? ] christmases ago. another time, i was thinking about what to get my parents for christmas, and i suddenly thought of those times my family, especially my sister who's now in the states, and i would go to glorietta/some mall in makati on the 24th and buy gifts for each other at the last minute. and i realized how much i miss those times when we were still complete as a family here in the philippines. given the proximity, we had reunions every week. of course back then i didn't appreciate those times as much as i do now, and i probably took them for granted, thinking that they would go on and one for years. but, things change and that's that.

i'm almost done with my christmas shopping, and i swear, trying to buy all the gifts on my list was NOT easy. yesterday, after i had lunch with my parents somewhere in manila, i headed to glorietta to buy gifts, although i'm not very familiar with the place [ i'm more of a shangri-la, galleria and sm fairview person ]. bayo has a new line of clothing/accessories for children, so i went there to buy gifts for bianca. after that, i tried to look for a bookstore to find patti scrapbooking materials [ which she wrote on her wishlist ], but i kept on finding myself on the same area [ where the "kids of bayo" store was located ]. it was twilight zone. i was afraid that i might end up dead due to exhaustion, sprawled all over the floor while oblivious last minute shoppers irritatingly try their best not to step on me. after circling the same areas several times, i suddenly saw a familiar store, "in style", the only distributor of old navy/gap products in the country [ excluding the export overruns at greenhills and surplus shop of course ], so i just proceeded there and bought myself a shirt. i was finally able to get to a powerbooks store where i got patti her gift. good thing it was right next to the exit.

greenhills wasn't any better. i went there earlier today with my mom. there were a lot of good stuff, but it was so crowded and inconvenient. everyone was trying to push everyone else, and stopping to smell the flowers is a crime, unless you want people to cuss at you or worse, forcefully push you aside. i was able to buy two pairs of nice white shoes for 400 bucks each. i had to try on different sizes and decide which one to buy in less than 5 minutes because i was blocking the way. mama was able to buy something also, but we had to leave early because she didn't feel so good anymore.

anyway, so far, that's what's happening in my life. in less than an hour, i have to dress up since we're going to attend a relative's hawaiian themed debut and i still have to find something to wear.

Labels: christmas, gig, harkadah