CHECK! CHECK! CHECK!

It's eleven thirty-six in the evening and I've just yelled out "CHECK!" three times with my arms outstretched. No, I'm not playing chess with my imaginary friend. I'm still being nostalgic and reading through old journal entries and came across this:

name three things you want to do before you do before you die:
1. see the pyramids
2. travel across the country
3. touch the trunk of a huge redwood tree out thar in cali

so far, I've completed one out three. I AM GETTING SOMEWHERE WITH MY LIFE!!!

le sigh.

the more things change, the more they stay the same

Tumblr is over capacity yet AGAIN. Refer to your prayer books, everybody. I am reminded of a similar scenario. Picture it: Xanga, July 25, 2006. I wrote a blurb entitled "What is the world doing while MySpace is down?" and compare the child of Friendster to heroin. MySpace was a social media gateway drug for sure.

Highlights from that entry: went to a gay bar for trivia night and one of the team names was "Can't Drink You Pretty". I hereby resurrect that term and I am determined to use it as much as I can.

downton abbey

For quite a long time, I've been hearing good things about Downton Abbey, and it sounded like it would be right up my alley (bum DUM bum). It's your typical English period soap opera with an Upstairs Downstairs Remains of the Day Gosford Park sort of thing going on. Let me tell you, LOTS of bitches running around that house, both upstairs and downstairs. Villains, villains, villains, simpletons, and the rest caught in the middle. I love it. I was planning to check out two or three episodes at the most, but ended up watching the entire first season for seven straight hours.

It reminded me of all the snow days that I have spent bundled up in blankets and watching a Pride and Prejudice marathon. After Christmas, these are the only comforting memories I have of winter.

And the above picture? Yes.

shenanigans

The above photo taken by a coworker. It started with a simple stack of cups on a desk while a coworker was away. I suggested hiding their monchichi doll in one of the cups, causing the culprit to be caught. I felt a little guilty and suggested we build a cup fort around their desk as payback. It. Was. Beautiful.

nature boy

It goes without saying, nat king cole's version of this song is my #1 favorite, but let this be my obsession for the rest of the week, month, season.

FACT

watching english period movies and television shows helps in writing very painful annual reviews about yourself. thank you to the king's speech and downton abbey.

yacht rock

this song has been stuck in my head for the past week. i heard it on jimmy fallon's yacht rock playlist and it was game over. funny enough, i found the 45 of this in the stack of records from my youth.

p.s. i promise this is not becoming a video blog. it's just...the blog wants what the blog wants.

uh oh spaghettios

i'm a joan ranger all the way.

one day, you will be mine

i am aware that i have expressed my distaste for the cupcake perversion, BUT one day i will eat this croquembouche cupcake from the yellow leaf cupcake co. in seattle. i think this cupcake might deserve a standing ovation.

yuppies...yuppies in line

I was reminded of the yuppies anecdote tonight while I was perusing through twitter feeds. I'm not sure why some of my friends find the yuppies-in-line anecdote amusing, but I have to admit, it was fun times. It was almost as funny as the time someone's friend woke up in a ditch with their wallet in their mouth, when someone got the shets on the metro, when a pair of innocents were locked out all night in NYC, or when someone got so sick after a food party, they threw up racing stripes on the side of their car on their drive home. I digress.

Amie and I went to a happy hour...or something. It might have been the time that Mary wanted to go to a random house party where a number of bands were playing, one of which was a Smashing Pumpkins tribute band with a lead singer who looked JUST like Billy Corgan (Amie later told me that Billy Corgan was Mary's Andrew Bird). No, wait...it must have been a happy hour since I had gotten a little a lot tipsy. On the way home, we passed the Clarendon Ballroom where I spotted a long line of people. For some reason this annoyed me, and I rolled down the window and yelled to them,

"YUPPIES!!! YUPPIES IN LIIIIIIIIIIIINE!"

Drunk drive-by and then we went to IHOP.

So the next time you see a bunch of people in line for something preposterous, feel free to yell this, i.e., Georgetown Cupcakes. But I won't get started on that perversion of a dessert fad.

hello?

Hello from ant1mat3rie on Vimeo.

movie clips molded into lionel richie's song "hello".

oh grandma, you so fly

josh anecdote

A Josh story popped into my head an hour ago. Sometimes I think about him and really miss that guy. A couple years back during school, I met up with Amie and Josh at an IHOP and as I sat down, they seemed very, very excited.

"Josh assigned you a new ringtone!"
"What is it?" I was very intrigued to see what he had found. But before the reveal, Josh had to set it up.
"WELL...I was going through the ringtone selections ANNNNND I heard this, and I thought it was TOTALLY YOU!!"

He held up his phone so I could hear. It was "Hava Nagila".

Throughout the rest of the night of our gallivanting, they would sporadically starting singing to me "YA-DAAAA da dee da DA-DAAAA!" Best ringtone ever.

Below, please enjoy Dick Dale's surfer version of "Hava Nagila".

so she did

nostalgia saturday part two: record party for one

Nostalgia Saturday turned out to be an all day event. After seeing "Beauty and the Beast", I met up with my parents at a used book/dvd/records, etc. store and poked around to see if I could find anything interesting. I found a few jazz albums, a vintage Israeli record with a shockingly pink cover, and a one dollar kitschy vintage Hawaiian record with an instruction booklet on how to dance the hula.

Two more resolutions: learn to hula and collect as many record albums with pink covers.



I also collected a stack of old 45 records from my parents' garage that they had been safekeeping for me. I played the entire stack when I got home and it brought back one particular memory: back in elementary school, I had been sick with strep throat. I was depressed and bored from staying home for so long, all I could do was play these records on my little Cabbage Patch Kids record player. Someone please tell me why I have a copy of "Nadia's Theme" aka the theme song to "The Young and the Restless"?

sh!t filipino moms say. sunday interlude

nostalgia saturday part one: stockholm syndrome

You may have missed the millions of commercials out about this, but Disney re-released "Beauty and the Beast" in theatres AND in 3D. Be still my...no. I am not a huge fan of this 3-D fad, especially since I experience 3D all day every day, but since it was "Beauty and the Beast", I was willing to take one for the team. Like any typical young girl, I was enchanted with "Beauty and the Beast" when it first came out more than two decades ago. My cousin took me and my sisters to see it in the theatre, and a week later, I convinced my other cousin to take me to see it again.

The scene that had THE biggestt visual impact on me was probably during the "Be Our Guest" number:



I was mesmerized as the rows of moving dishes replicated into step-and-repeat-extravaganza. Apparently, I was a fan of "things organized neatly" at an early age. This was also the very first time, as I was experiencing this scene, "Oh my God, I better savor this moment because I know I will never feel this way ever again." I realize now that this thought came before I realized that this movie would come to video, television, dvd, blu-ray, and the theatre again. Still, I was curious to see how I would feel about this scene when I saw it as an adult. The result? I loved it. Thoughts? This bit which played for days long in my mind only lasted about two to three seconds. It was a slight "Don't forget to drink your Ovaltine" moment.

But overall, it was a lovely time catching the film with Vina and Ginnie, and a million other kids. I laughed a lot more than I remembered...and I wanted to see if I would cry during the parts of the film that I remember my older cousins crying through, now that I know more about life (/sarcasm). Annnnd...I didn't cry. It was very nice, though.

And to even further the image of being a complete dork,, I was reminded of how I received the piano book for this movie, learned every single song and played and sang to it, doing all the characters with my sister. And when THAT was done, I traced and redrew each picture from that book.

Oh right, stockholm syndrome. Even though I enjoyed the story very much, I always wondered why she fell in love with a beast who had taken her father as prisoner and later took her as one. As I remember, Belle was quite pissed when Gaston had her father locked up and ready to go to an asylum. I suppose Gaston should have bought her affections with the world's biggest personal library...?

i'll just leave this here

I just saw this via a coworker's fb. An egg baked in an avocado half. Positively sinful to look at for some reason.

moonrise kingdom

Hey, let's go see this.

good for you, good for me, good for all of we

Good For You by BIGkids

Whenever my pal jph from Yew Nork sends me something to watch or listen to, I know it's going to be good. I woke up to this gem on my Facebook this morning and was not disappointed. This is definitely a lovely way to start the day~!

you got that?

I love thorough breakdowns like this. Whenever I hear dancehall, I think of food shopping at Global Foods.

all day long

ay-ohh river!

IFC just announced that additional dates for this tour. How excited am I that DC was added?? Oh, I can't wait to see all the hipsters.

my eyes are starving for beauty

Lest we forget.

It is a line that I find both very shallow and quite profound. I love me some André Leon Talley.

imitate a cat puking

A scene from my favorite Parker Posey movie, "Party Girl". This dance scene alone is responsible for my almost more than decade long obsession with wearing black, wide legged pants (which were, for a short time in Rome, creased as was de rigeur at that period). Whenever I reorganize anything in my house, my sister is quick to point out the scene in which Mary rearranges Leo's thousand album collection according to the Dewey Decimal System.

This movie is also why I call out the following phrases:

"DADDAYYYY!"
• used when the DJ plays a bad song or drops the needle

"Yo, what's up with this guy, all he plays is House?"
• I like House, so I usually substitute this for "Yo, what's up with this guy, all he plays is ___(insert bad music)___?"

"Imitate a Cat Puking"
• I, or someone in my party, have committed an embarrassing faux pas.

"Oranges and Peaches / Origin of Species"
• Totes did not hear what you just said.

"Yo, Betty Crocker you ain't."
• Something is amuck with this food we are eating.

"What's up Buttercup?"
• This is self explanatory.

"Can I have a falafel with hot sauce, a side order of baba ghanoush, and a seltzer please?"
• What's up Buttercup?

Another fond memory I have of this movie was JPH becoming obsessed with the one song playing in this clip after I had lent the movie to him. He ended up finding it on someone's profile on MySpace (yes, it was during the mispacio days) and aggressively emailing them asking for the music file. That made for a great mixtape later on.

The movie is pretty cheesy by today's standards (i.e., my age) BUT I still love it to death. It captures the proverbial hopeful, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed period during my youth. To my now daily "adult life", it makes me stop and say "Yo, Betty Crocker you ain't."

it's the little things

Not to sound like a very girly girl, but one of my favorite parts of my day is sitting on my bed, running one of my favorite movies on television, setting up my lap desk, opening its little drawer full of makeup, and putting on my face. it's probably one of the most relaxing times of the day...second to putting on moisturizer before sleepytime.

This drawer contains the few items I could not leave the house without on my face: champagne eyeshadow, my two shades of blush, pencil eyeliner (for the lower lid), and the most important of them all, my liquid eyeliner. My liquid eyeliner has been my bff since high school, and I should be sad if we were to ever part.



And this box of goodies was a real treat...a Christmas present from my aunt. I remember wanting one of these very badly when I was a little girl; my older cousin had boxes and boxes of these and she would spend hours taking out the little compartments and rearranging them to her liking. They seem to have come back in fashion and I can't help loving them because, as everyone knows, nostalgia has a way with getting the best of me. LOVE!

sometimes i feel like...

this.

sick day

Apparently there is a stomach bug going around the office and I was fortunate to participate in this event. It was a blur of a night filled with weird dreams (But pleasant because for some reason, James McEvoy was my boyfriend; except while he was James McEvoy, he was also the lead singer of Beirut...I don't know what happened to Zach Condon though. This is fine, since I think I prefer JM over ZC.)

I woke up early this morning feeling a little better but still a little weak. I was hesitant to call in sick, since I detest wasting personal days spent in bed. At least it gives me time to catch up on my new interest in knitting scarves.

And...sometimes nothing hits the spot like veggie broth with quinoa and kale when you are feeling unwell. So goes my boring post about a boring sick day filled with knitting and soup.

i'll be your mirror

I'll Be Your Mirror / The Velvet Underground and Nico

This song has been stuck in my head for the past few weeks. Such a lovely tune.

new year, new blog

Happy New Year! It's about a week or so later, I know, but better late than never. I'm beginning to notice that almost every new year, I start a new blog or tumblr, etc., and I said to myself, why break that tradition? We'll see how it turns out ;-)