Blue screen of death

Monday last week I was doing back-ups of my pictures because I had a hunch my laptop’s about to screw up. And it did. Right while I was doing back-ups. The notorious blue screen of death (in Wikipedia it has its Tagalog translation, which is funny) at 12MN and I was hissing my cuss words, and then I was sweating while thinking of three projects I still have to do with my laptop.

Fuck, right?

Then my cellphone has been malfunctioning for a month. I initially thought it was Globe’s fault (lately they have been very much the cause of arguments and hotheadedness for a lot of people) but I switched to Smart and I don’t even have a goddamn signal. I was thinking about staying at the foot of a cell site (in my wildest attempt to text people) but it’s probably my second hand Nokia.

So I ditched my cellphone for a while and relied on word of mouth.

As I type away this post I’ll be leaving Los Banos in a few hours. I’m planning to leave at 4AM because: a) no traffic at all, plus if I’ll get on a train in Magallanes it’d be perfect; b) I have this tendency to hate bus rides while awake because it’s goddamn boring–even with a book in hand and music plugged in my ears–because at the back of my mind I’m doing it for killing time’s sake; c) just in time for a big sausage-and-egg breakfast at home.

As always I’ll be reading books at home to compensate my inadequacy in allotting time for book-reading this semester (or ever since I’ve shifted to BA CommArts). Books to read include:

• The Woman Who Had Two Navels by Nick Joaquin
• Strange Pilgrims by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
• Naked Lunch by William Burroughs

I’m currently listening to Mason Proper and toe and I have to say it’s perfect for bus rides. Especially toe (and their album For Long Tomorrow)! Japanese post-fucking-rock! No to Japanese and Korean boy groups! This is one good shit I dug out of last.fm which could somehow par the greatness of Explosions in the Sky.

I’ve also updated my Project365. I was about to give up this project when my laptop went bonkers. But it’s challenging and I love every day of it (though I’m a cheater, really; it’s not really daily pictures, but daily uploads, so fuck that).

Ask me a question! I’d love to hear from you.

I hope I could update more frequently this summer since Mom e-mailed me about Internet subscriptions for our house just so I would prefer home than the apartment. Hell yeah! :D

This entry was written by Kevin, posted on March 30, 2010 at 12:58 am, filed under 2in1, Books, books, books, Last song syndromes, Photos. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink.

Heavier boots

Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close is a book you wouldn’t want to be absorbed into. It’s a fucking washbasin. Some tips how not to be affected by the book: don’t ask these questions. (WARNING: Spoilers ahead.) By the way, I suck at making grammatically-awesome questions.

1. Why did the protagonist’s father have to die?
2. Why, of all places, did the protagonist’s father meet up with some business guy at the World Trade Center the morning of 9/11?
3. Why did the protagonist’s father have to leave five–well, six–messages to Oskar (the protagonist) before he dies?
4. Why was Dresden bombed?
5. What the fuck was Hitler’s problem, killing Jews and shit?
6. Why did Oskar’s mother seem quite unaffected with his father’s death?
7. Why couldn’t Oskar’s parents’ anniversary be celebrated before 9/11? (In the book the anniversary was to be celebrated three days after, which is… sad.)
8. Why did Oskar’s grandfather decided not to speak (throughout the book it has been a problem I ranted about)?
9. Why should the reader invest his/her feelings in reading a book about grief (though nothing could compare with the weight of Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking)?
10. Why did the story feel real?

This book is fucking awesome. It’s probably an instant turn-on because of the language, quite reminiscent of the colloquial smoothness of Catcher in the Rye, yet quirky enough to include pictures (which is really cool), but the weight of the emotions it incites would hold your mood down for some time (I’ve been feeling quite lonely since two hours ago). People might say it’s just about a nine year-old Oskar Schell and his parents and grandparents and the tragedies they have to endure for the past few decades, but for me, it’s different. It’s a book that would ring things and bring to life fragments and shards and dead images in your mind, and the ringing is retentive enough not to let you forget the uncertainties of life, or life itself–all written in this non-Biblical way (never did it sound like preaching), which is another plus.

I bought this book as a Christmas gift and I felt grateful after reading it. I’ve read it for three months (!!!) because I’ve been reading other books (Train Man and Naked Lunch). I should have read it earlier.

Please correct my grammar the way Oskar Schell does it in the book. Thanks!

This entry was written by Kevin, posted on March 22, 2010 at 3:44 am, filed under Books, books, books and tagged 9/11, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, Jonathan Safran Foer, Manhattan, World Trade Center. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink.

The endless surprises

A while ago my Dad sent me a text message:

Anak, patay na yung idol mo, si J.D. Salinger. (Son, your idol J.D. Salinger passed away.)

I’ve known about it last Monday, or Tuesday–I really forgot but I knew about it six minutes after The New York Times published the news online (sadly, after knowing about it I was really sad for the next thirty minutes and sent a message to my closest writer friends about it; they kind of comforted me, which felt good). I received the text message while hosting a popular fiction quiz contest my organization spearheaded, and it made me smile. Dad knows I really like J.D. Salinger; I’ve probably told it a million times, but I didn’t expect him to text me about it. Hell, he didn’t really like the book (or he must have read it when he was twenty-something, in between his Vietnam war novels, and must have treated it with the same disgust he had with Murakami and Kafka). I showed the text message to my friends and they were happy for me to have such a Dad who at least knows his son’s favorite author.

Before I die I really wish I could to go to his grave and tell him everything I liked about his writing and his novels, most especially Catcher in the Rye. And I’ll probably whisper that his death made me realize that my Dad knows me, because my admiration for him is something deeply private.

This entry was written by Kevin, posted on February 4, 2010 at 12:05 am, filed under Books, books, books, IRLs, Sentemotional. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink.