8 minutes 10 seconds

I'll be under 8 minutes in no time.

8 minutes 29 seconds

I'm on my way....

I miss the gym

I never thought I'd ever say that, but here I am saying just that.

It's been a week since I've hit the gym. Work has been tsunami like.

I cannot wait to cut out and get on the treadmill.

I think I may have gone mad.

Recovering Alcoholic

As most of you know, I am a person who knows how to enjoy a drink. I did though, for some time (4 and half months) stop drinking altogether. Mostly to prove a point to myself -- that I can stop and start drinking whenever I please.

Point made. And to bring home the point further, I've started up again. (And the crowd goes wild!)

I have a couple of personal rules though - I can only imbibe during weekends and only if I've been to the gym three times that week. Otherwise, it's soda water. The lousy thing with alcohol is that it makes you fat. There's no going around (pun intended) this fact. And if want to keep the 20+lbs I've lost (shameless self-promotion) off, well, I can't drink like I used to.

I came to discover a lot of things when I was "on the wagon". And one of the more obvious points is that a night out without alcohol is just about as interesting as watching a box of hair. And while I remember everything that happens during an evening of cold sobriety, there really isn't much to write home about. We had dinner. Discussed office politics and weather. Went home.

But throw in a bottle of wine and well... (my father reads this blog).

What I found unbelievably hilarious (but sweet) was the "reverse intervention" that my friends tried to pull a couple of weeks into the whole "not drinking" phase. Two of my best friends literally sat me down, took my hand, looked into my eyes and asked me what was wrong. The people who knew me were not happy for me, they were worried about me.

Insightful bunch.

Don't worry guys, am on my way back.

I am 87% of the woman I used to be

I've lost about 13% of my body weight since September, and while I'm still shrinking, am not losing any more weight.

Except for a handful of people at the office who are also battling the fight against the bulge, no one has noticed at The Firm. There are over a hundred people here and about 4 have commented on my weight loss.

This led me to think -- people *really* don't notice. I think most people take a mental picture of you at your first meeting, and the picture is soldered in the brain, regardless of whatever you do to change your appearance. At that first meeting, you can be anything -- fat or thin; bald or with hair like Rupunzel's. The mental picture is taken, and everything else (preconceptions, judgments, attributed stereotype behavior) follows.

Everyone thinks I'm overweight (and admittedly, I still am) and regardless of how much weight I lose, people will always think I'm overweight. That's just how the brain works.

Thank goodness I don't care what people think about my appearance.

Then or now.

9 minutes 45 seconds

That's how long it took me to run 1k the other day.

The world record is 2 minutes 11 seconds.

I want to get my time down to 5 minutes (although I think under 7 would be f*ing phenomenal).

Will keep you posted.

More Cebu Pacific Promo Thoughts

I think that the Cebu Pacific P1 flight promo is ridiculous.

I don't mean that they should discontinue it, since a lot of people get to travel and enjoy their service. What I mean is that calling it a P1 promo is ridiculous.

We all know the ticket will set you back around three grand (which is still cheap and again, thank you Mr. Gokongwei) so why call it a P1 ticket? Why just not say they are free?

We all know Cebu Pac will tack on all the "fees and taxes" and make you pay three grand. We know that, they know that. We all know that. So why call it a P1 ticket?

In fact, let's push the envelope. Cebu Pacific shouldn't just stop at free, Cebu Pac should say that they'll PAY YOU to fly. Yep, Cebu Pacific will PAY YOU P500 to go to Cebu or Zamboanga or just about anywhere you want to go.

Great, isn't it? Utterly brilliant promo. People will be lining up.

Then of course they'll tell you that you need to pay for "fees and expenses" and that as a receipient of the "reward" or "rebate" you'll need to apply that P500 towards those "fees and expenses". Which unfortunately just went up by about P500.

And so you need to pay about three grand.

Cebu Pacific's P1 To Butuan Promo

I wouldn't fly to Butuan even if it was free.

Not even if you paid me.

Okay, maybe if you paid me.

Death by exercise ball

So as most of you know, I've turned into some sort of gym rat.

I know, I know, bizarre. But weirder things have happened. (I can't think of any one specific thing right now, but I will get back to you on this.)

Last night my trainer had me do squats with an exercise ball. Sort of something like the squats pictured here:

But wait, am not done describing the squat. I said "sort of" because my feet were not firmly on the floor, as the woman's feet are in the picture above. While doing the squats with the ball on my back, I was standing on this:
So not only was I squatting on an uneven surface, I was trying to keep my back straight while doing the squats. I'm not sure I am getting the thought across (if only I had a picture of the entire squat (i.e. full ball behind my back while standing on the half ball) it would have been simpler, but I couldn't find one (Google Images, you've failed me!).

Anyway...

Backtrack. Maybe I should have started with the half ball...

If you squat with the half ball the natural position the body takes is sort of like this:



Note that the back leans forward for balance. Add the ball on your back and things get funky.

I realize that thus far this post doesn't quite capture the imbalance I felt while doing this exercise. But maybe this will help. Try to imagine that feeling the moment you slip or fall, that millisecond when you try to balance yourself, try to find your center of gravity. You try really hard to recover for that one millisecond, all your muscles working at once to prop you up, but then you fall anyway.

Now imagine being constantly in that state of trying to regain balance.

Funky.

Btw...

.....making that table for my birthday post was a killer. Apparently some glitch in the Blogger software that interprets "enter" strokes literally as line breaks. So the first time I published the post, there was this huge space between the table and the introductory text. Bad trip.

Anyway... I don't know how HTML works, I just know how it looks and now my J.C. vs. J.B. table looks fine, but not after an hour of work and fooling with the HTML codes. I didn't know about this "glitch" so I kept on tweaking with the code, thinking I could make the empty space go away. But of course it wouldn't and I just kept messing up the table code itself. And when I finally found out about the glitch, my table code was so messed up I practically had to do it over again.

Lesson learned -- go look for Blogger-specific fixes first, before you venture out into the unknown world of HTML codes.

The Age of Jesus (a.k.a. the Obligatory Birthday Post, also do not read if Jesus jokes offend you)

So today I turned 33.

At this age, Christ saved the world (or so the Bible says). And so naturally, today I've taken some time to think about my own background and accomplishments and take stock. The verdict? Not too bad, as the table below will illustrate.

Plus I haven't started any wars.

J.C.	J.B.
Lived with his parents	Lives in serviced apartment
No job	Gainfully employed
Turned water into wine	Does not need miracles; can buy her own wine.
Born in Bethlehem, lived in Jerusalem, kin in Nazareth	Born in Manila, lived in NY/HK, kin in Iloilo
Thought his father was God	My father IS God*
Mother can do no wrong	Mother can do no wrong
Single till the day he died	Praise the Lord!

Table revised per "reminder" email sent to me by my father. And the man has a point. I was created from his seed. He technically created me. J.C. can't say the same for his dad.

The Hang Kang Movie Experience

Recently I saw two movies in the cinema (or as we Pinoy's call it, the "movie house") out here in Hang Kang (this is how Americans pronounce it). And I gotta say, the whole movie experience over here is pretty good. I can't complain.

You need to go on-line to buy your tickets. Unfortunately, movie watching in Hang Kang is not an impulse activity (unless you plan to see the last show on a Tuesday night of the third week of a movie's run -- now say that 5 times really fast). You pick a theater, a show time, seats. Unfortunately, some nights, there are not a lot of movies to go see, as was the case this week, when my friend A. and I caught My Blueberry Nights.

A. had already seen it (God bless her for coming out on a Monday night to go see it again, because really, there is so much to do on Monday nights), but it was the only decent movie on. And so Monday night was blueberry night.


Classic WKW. Since I love Wong Kar Wai (In the Mood for Love is my favorite movie of all time) I loved this movie. But I can totally understand why some people (who have no appreciation for cinema) didn't get it. The editing and the camera work are "non-traditional", almost disjointed in some places, the colors "wrong". You don't really see what's going on and the script doesn't tell you everything that's going on. People who like action movies who need to see the bomb's timer get to zero, then cut to a wide shot of the car exploding will not appreciate My Blueberry Nights.

I thought the soundtrack was too obvious (sounded much like his other movies), but the camera work... Oh the camera work.... It was like seeing Van Gogh's "Sunflowers" for the first time after you'd seen all his other paintings. Different, but classic WKW. Mahusay ang mama. (A., this loosely translates to "the guy is good").


Unapologetic chick flick. We also went to see "27 Dresses" with Grey's Anatomy star Katherine Heigel (the statuesque blond). Pretty good -- classic chick flick (cue montage, cue good soundtrack) with actress who looks like a movie star from the 50's. Nice shots of N.Y. It was very polished, too polished sometimes, but hey, we all love a happy ending.

Snacks. I gotta say, the Hang Kang movie house snacks are the *best*. You can get these 16 inch sausages (no buns -- pun is *so* intended). Super yummy (and no carbs!) but I imagine I must look slightly indecent chomping down on that piece of meat in the dark.