Menthol-Guy

Unexpected shit on line 94

This website got some major overhauling a while ago with regard to my sudden layout-changing - which I presumed would run smoothly before I get error messages regarding line 94, line 57, and all the CSS and PHP shits. I know the works; I just don’t have the right programs that would highlight the exact line 94, and editing codes directly on Wordpress is just ridiculous. So I changed my mind and switched back to this theme, as sudden as how it even dawned on me in the first place.

Though my layout-changing occurred on the spur of the moment, I still have my reasons on why I want to change:

1) Finding a good shot out of my picture folders is getting slimmer by the moment that sometimes I ask the help of dear Deviantart for pictures (and of course, crediting the photographers for their work).

2) Resizing/cropping the pictures and making two versions of it (one large, one small) is tiring and effortful, and the fact that my laptop didn’t have any digital cropping program gave Jhed ten-minute headaches for all the cropping favors I ask him to do while he was playing some MMORPG game and planning their pathetic Perfect World clan meet-ups.

3) It looks more of a photoblog than a personal blog, though I don’t really care about what impact it gives to the reader of some sort. For chrissake, I’m the boss!

During the rehabilitation period where my blog wore three other layouts, all I did was grunt while tweaking the codes - and it really was a hair-raising ordeal for an amateur to even play with the codes and do the trial and error thing. I think I’m stuck with this theme - whether you like it or not - except if other ready-to-download user-friendly themes are lurking out there. :)

Was reaped by surprise

I overlooked the date of HBO’s movie schedule that I typed yesterday on my notepad a must-watch nine PM HBO movie with hopes of finding something better than “The Hills Have Eyes” or even “Fear” on the horror-thriller movie category. I abandoned my computer station for good, practically walking slowly between the gaps left by the huddled crowds of customers waiting for a vacant slot, and told them I have to go to . When it did, I told them I have to work on something worth dying for - an effective alibi for watching some bloody movie like “The Reaping“.

It was scheduled not Saturday, but Sunday. Since it’s vacation and there would be no valid reason for me to know the date, I thought that the fifteenth is a Saturday (what really slipped on my mind was that the day I checked the schedule was Friday the 13th). I almost puked and killed myself when HBO flashed the “next” movie’s title, Take the Lead, which I have seen a couple of times with that sleek-looking tuxedo Antonio Banderas was wearing. I wasn’t really infuriated of some sort, just plain irritated knowing that the slimmest chance that I may have been wrong with the schedule had materialized.

It was scheduled tomorrow, not today, and I half-wished that I was still on the computer shop playing DoTA or smoking cigarettes till I feel dizzy. Oh well, I’d rather not rant about my carelessness - it’s a waste of time.

The wallflower

I reinvented my composure to cater my Dad’s birthday needs: I became his sacrificial chef for his birthday, his personal butler. I cooked his favorite Caldereta with tons of thick coconut milk, liver spread, and shredded cheese. It was boiled to perfection - my Dad was the type of guy who would prefer not to eat than chewing a gummy, rubbery chunk of beef, and I can’t risk my job as his part-time chef. Since what he really wanted is to melt the beef in his tongue by the time the spoon left it in his mouth, I boiled the beef chunks for seven hours. He loves my Caldereta and its piercing aroma, and its flavor - he really does - but it all boils down as to whether or not the beef is soft and chewable enough to dissolve inside his mouth for two seconds.

He turned 57 today. (Happy birthday, DAD!)

I was wearing checkered shorts made of patches of different cloths and textures and a loose-collared T-shirt when the saleslady greeted me a Happy Father’s Day. The panty-hosed schmuck must have been kidding, but no - she even wore a smile after the greeting. It may be her mechanical task for today - to greet fathers and father-looking seventeen year-olds like me a Happy Father’s Day, but I was defeated. I may be betrayed by my five-inch-ten frame and perhaps the two-day stubble that formed along the jawline and the chin, but do I really look like a father when I’m wearing a wardrobe meant for teenagers and earphones plugged?

11:30 AM. I parked myself on the express lane of some grocery store holding an orange plastic basket containing all that is written on my Dad’s gastronomic wishlist: two kilos of jumbo hotdogs, five canned Chili con Carne, a block of pasteurized cheese and two packs of ready-to-cook sisig. What’s the hardest part of this shopping ordeal is not the food-spotting, not even the brand-picking. I had to hold my cellphone in one hand and the basket on another while I make my calculations; it may sound paranoid but I don’t want to be embarrassed when everything’s on plastic and I’m ready to go and the cashier would ask for another two hundred pesos, which I don’t really have except if I entrust my underwear to them and run for the nearest ATM booth. I just don’t want to look funny or ridiculous in front of people. I really don’t.

While I was waiting in line, I was literally absorbed with the pumping music. I was in a moment of abstraction - the way people look to a certain angle or thing as if they had been knocked dead or wide-eyed unconscious, and I was staring at the Doublemint chewing gums piled side by side with Mentos and Juicy Fruit and toothbrushes and the oral cleansers and stuff. After two steps and two more customers have left the line dragging their groceries, I saw this pony-tailed girl who looked familiar. She really looked familiar. I started to enumerate every girl on High School in hopes of hooking the right name.

She happened to be my last dance at prom night when I was a Junior. I was wearing a tuxedo like everyone else, and the dance floor was literally teeming with all the romantic dancers you could ever see - some Seniors, taking advantage of the darkness, were even kissing as if they were in Laguna Beach or The O.C having this solemn mouth-to-mouth thing going, and I swear they looked really phony. Anyway, I’ve had my first dance and she was okay - two of my guy friends forced me to dance with her - and every other girl I danced look fabulous, except a Senior who happened to have lipstick dabs all around her lips and I bet one of her kissers smothered and swallowed her mouth whole.

The pony-tailed girl was my last dance when I was in Junior High. I never really thought I’d dance with her - not to say that she wasn’t gorgeous that night - I just had this premonition that something would go nasty when I dance with her. And it did. When I did this phony prince-charming type of hand gesture as if I was waiting for her hand to touch hers as a sign of approval to dance, she cried. She really cried. I suddenly panicked when she cried and sobbed - my hands are halfway towards her mouth in a wicked attempt of muffling her breath-catching sounds (I’m afraid that people might think I kissed her and she cried since she was scared to hell that her mother would beat her to death).

Why she cried, as I looked at her pony-tailed hair at the grocery store, was because I was her first dance - and to think that she was my last dance, I started picturing her as this wallflower waiting for some guy to dance her when all her fellow wallflowers got her partners. I wasn’t really her first dance, but the first guy who has this will and conviction to dance her - I kind of thought the my other classmates either danced her inattentively, like swayed her to the music without even looking at her face - or they were forced by some girl to dance with her.

I felt sorry for her, and I made this sorry face while we were dancing and I told her to shut the fuck up and just enjoy the night without even cursing the unwilling guys who danced her. I almost asked her how she felt some guy’s reluctance to dance, but I just felt sorry for her so I stopped thinking about it. She didn’t really look awful; she just have this irritating trait to irritate someone or make someone’s day one of the worsts of his life.

I called her name all of a sudden, and it was just a two-minute chat of how’s things and all that college stuff happening around lately.