it was to my thrill today when i drove the car and discovered "man i've still got it, even after three months of abstinence." =)

oh excuse my ego.

anyhow, spent the weekend at Wicker Park.



whoops, big picture there. sorry for anyone on dial-up.

it was a pretty sweet movie. starrs josh hartnett, diane kruger, rose bryne and matthew lillard, in case you haven't noticed that on the poster.

i shan't spoil it for anyone but the movie in brief is about a matthew simon (hartnett) putting a pause on his developing career and engagement to trail down the love of his life, lisa (kruger), whom he met, and then lost, two years ago.

throw in a sidekick in the form of luke (lillard) and accidental psycho alex/lisa (bryne) and you have a romantic and passionate tale made by hollywood.

i give it 3.5 stars.

hartnett delivers a convincing act here, not too difficult since the love of his life is played by kruger, whose fasinating visage launched a thousand ships and jumpstarted the biggest war humanity's ever had to deal with (if blur, watch Troy). i shall speak for 99 percent of earth's population and say that kruger is the embodiment of every female's ideals and fantasy of the weaker sex. haha. her performance i did not pay much attention to, but i suppose it wasn't too bad.

matthew lillard of scooby-doo fame (however dubious that sounds) plays the confidante every guy tormented by love must possess. he owns a shoe shop. he dates bryne's character, the psycho. enough said.

rose bryne is brave, that's all i'll comment. she bares all again in Wicker Park, this time to make love to hartnett's character. she's a goner, i swear. all her mainstream movies (troy and wicker park) i've seen involved her having sex. what will her parents think?

Wicker Park requires a brain to watch. not that i'm complainig but i certainly didn't expect this flick to be of such. it's a bit like Memento - confusing but not lost on the audience. so it's good, i guess. i started out frustrated because i could neither distinguish head nor tail so i decided to just go along with the hollywood assurance that everything will iron itself out in the end and i was right (yay!), the movie ended like any 90210 movie will end - happily ever after with 2.3 kids in tow.

i had decided on 3 stars, but added a last-minute .5 on the fact that they played coldplay's the scientist at the credits. i like coldplay, but not gwyneth paltrow.

we all know God's created many many miracles. one of 'em being toilets that self-flush.

(my mother told me another of them miracles would be the birth of her second daughter, ahemmeahem, but i've refused to believe her on the grounds of me having a vague memory of being stuck in some stork's beak.)

c'mon you have to agree with me on this one. how in the world can humankind invent something that cleans up after itself? we're not in that habit, neither are we that sophisticated. science and technology are advanced, yes, but we'd never come up with something as basic and commonsensical as a self-flushing loo. trust me.

now where was i.

but this particular miracle also gives testimony to the fact that He is not perfect. how so?

see, the problem with these toilets are that they never flush at the right time. a basic scenario: enter cubicle, drop pants/skirt/whatever, sit, then FLLLUUSSSSHHH... before you start your business! it - the loo - somehow thinks the modus operandi of human excretion is -- flush and shit. flush and shit. flush and shit. or flush and pee, if you really want to be specific.

well it's not flush and shit/pee we're worrying about. it's the aftermath. when you're done with your business the toilet simply refuses to react. ever. so you stare at your excretions for a bit, sit back down on the bowl and get up again, hoping to spur some activity, but it's hopeless. it's a flushed deal.

you're desperate now, the damn contraption won't flush! help comes in a little teeny weeny button and you press it, hard. out comes a trickle of water and you think, hallelujah!

not so fast, buster. two seconds into your victory dance you realize that trickle is all you're gonna coax out of that 'miracle'. oh no! what now brown cow?

now it seems like you can't do anything anyways, so you take your things and exit, you've been in the cubicle long enough, your ejecteds will never flush.

or so you think.

between the spilt second you're out of the cubicle and the next user comes in, you hear the most gratifying rush of water you'll ever hear in your entire life. nothing sounds better. aaahhhhh. almost like sex with hugh jackman.

life is good.

sometimes i go through phases where i'm "addicted" to someone's, could be anyone's, blog. it doesn't matter if said blog is boring (god forbid), grammatically-askew, reader-unfriendly, music-blaring-without-off-button, and all the unmentionable sins bloggers can commit, the list is endless.

this usually lasts for circa one week, enough for me to fill my gossip pages and get undeniably irritated at all the mistakes the writer seems oblivious to.

which brings me to... well, fact is, i've begun to dislike this person quite - for the lack of a better word - a lot based entirely on what he's wrote.

so the question is: am i being fair to him?

you see, it's not like my judgement was established on the way he looks, dresses or talks.
it's the way he writes, and on a secondary level, the way he thinks. so it is not superficial like, to quote that cliche, judging a book by its cover or anything along those lines, is it?

so there's really nothing wrong, isn't it?

i know i sound like i'm trying to placate myself, and i am. i just feel that something is amiss, like i am somehow being very peripheral about this.

what if someone came up to you, or word got to your ears, or someone tagged that he or she hates your guts because of the way you've portrayed yourself in your blog? what would your reaction be?

would it be "fair enough", or "what the fuck?!?!"?

i guess to be able to make a decent judgement i would have to have decent reasons to back myself up. but truth is, i don't.

ok, i do have one rather frivolous case: i don't like how he always thinks to explain himself to his readers, as if afraid that they'd get the wrong impression of him, like he's afraid of what people'd think.

see i don't like how he, in a way, tries to control what people think of him. he says "fuck", then covers up with "i don't really cuss that often so you should be shocked." how can you ever steer what people think? that's an impossible task... unless you're professor X.

if it's just one "fuck" out of every hundred entries you've posted, then of course i wouldn't consider you the free-cussing type. it makes me feel stupid when people explain everything like people don't know anything. sheesh.

oh, come to think about it, this isn't such a frivolous case anymore. =)

peiwen - 1
maunder man - 0
HAHAHA

p.s. "maunder man" is the unfortunate party singled out here. he shall rename nameless because i've got no money if he ever wants to sue.

after churning out copious reports throughout my two-and-one-quarter years of diploma-hood, nevermind that those reports might not be very understandable, you'd think i should already know the answer to the life-suffering question:

is it "Content Page" or "Contents Page"?

truth is, i have no idea.

i've pondered upon that many many times. when deadlines loom we all wonder about the silliest things, then go with majority decision, even if it seems wrong. well, the majority can't be wrong. right?

and while we're still in today, let me tell you something embarrassing.
i was coming home on the train an hour ago, reading ellen degeneres's my point is... and i do have one but i was really napping. the book doesn't do much to hold my attention and i was really tired, degeneres's second book, the funny thing is..., is a great improvement though, go read it!

i guess at some point my grip on my point is... loosened and well, i dropped the book. the kind lady beside me tapped my arm and picked up the book for me, i must have looked really disorientated.

but this couple across me, however, started laughing, good heavens. maybe they were humour-starved or something, i dunno, but they were giggling too much for my comfort, y'know, the kind that leads to barfing. O_o

is it really that hilarious - dropping a book while you're napping? maybe it's a you-should-have-been-there situation but nobody else on the train were laughing.

oh well. it gave me an idea anyways. i'm thinking i have this flair for physical comedy if it comes so easily to me. i hear it's more lucrative than advertising too.

i've had this weird, beyond weird, thought:

at times when my contact lenses get too dry i'd know it's time to take them off. it's likely to have been, afterall, more than 12 hours since i've had them on. i think i might go blind one day due to my cleaning habits, lack of actually, but i'll worry about that when it happens.

well a dry lens is hard to pluck out, i'm sure all you vain contacts wearers would understand, right? while it doesn't hurt at all having to pinch a few times in order to get the damn thing out of my eye; it is, however, very perturbing at the precise split second between finally removing my lens and my vision clearing (an irony in itself because one's vision cannot be clear after taking out one's lenses, can it?).
i sometimes feel like i've plucked out my conjunctiva along with it, and my eye then is truly "naked", in every literal sense of the word. what an experience.

but mother tells me my conjunctiva cannot be so easily removed, i can rest now, then.

eye woes aside, my mother (again) just reminded me this morning to "clear my handphone's inbox, it is 80 percent full". how is it possible that she's become aware that? i get no privacy around here!

an early morning pilgrimnage to the business school library revealed to me, and in subsequence to my readers, what librarians do in those god-forsaken hours,

they sort old newspapers.

well what can i say? the school pays them.