Bismuth
Mom bought me a 13″ Macbook Pro and man, did it make my year.
The package arrived one day earlier from Shanghai, China. FedEx has this tracking system and it updates you where the package is and it’s a nice feature to track down my laptop as it travels along the Aleutian Islands to Anchorage, then a plane to Newark, then a van to Moonachie, then here in our house. (Every geography geek would love a tracking system.)
Dad got the package because I was waiting for it so bad I fell asleep.
My Dell Inspiron 6000 (creatively named as Lappy; I stabbed a friend to near-death when I learned her laptop has the same name) has been worn out by back-and-forth trips to Laguna. The frame of its screen disintegrates, a CTRL key is missing, the letter L keeps on having trips away from the keyboard, the touchpad’s plastic coating I scratched with my nails by accident (and out of too much use as well) until it wears off, and the faux aluminum body of it has changed its color–unfortunately into something which resembles like a mold or algae you see on bathroom tiles.
Performance-wise I’ve been having a lot of trouble about it: it would crash the day before I’m about to cram for a project, or the very midnight I’m making an audio-visual presentation (talk about perfect timing). I spend my own money from getting it repaired in some computer shop for PHP600 (with the back-ups and all), and at my third visit in the span of six months I told myself I have to get a new non-Windows laptop.
This Macbook Pro I named Bismuth (I initially thought of naming it Portia, like a girlfriend who washes clothes by day and brings out the leash and handcuffs at night) because a) it sounds macho like me, b) the -th in Bismuth sounds pleasing to the ear, like uncouth or… I dunno, vermouth? c) well, I don’t really know about Bismuth the Element but it sure sounds interesting and brave and sturdy, like its alter-ego owner. But I still don’t get the point of naming things!
Anyway, Bismuth is such an awesome thing because it never goes slow: I’ve tried running Adobe InDesign, Dreamweaver, Photoshop, Illustrator, Microsoft Word and iWork Pages simultaneously and it doesn’t even fret!
The graphics, too, is a huge change (maybe it’s due to my Inspiron’s being ancient)–it doesn’t look like those dots from the TV anymore. It’s absolutely clear. Plus it has a built-in webcam (!!!) for my Dell doesn’t even have a built-in microphone for chrissake!
Before Apple gives me another Macbook from all the praises I’ve been giving them (but it’s true!), I think I have to sleep. My head feels woozy (?) because I haven’t slept that much. I’ve been installing pirated programs, transferring the back-ups of 33GB of music and 20GB of photos from my external HD for the first three days. Now I feel tired.
This entry was written by , posted on May 6, 2010 at 3:58 pm, filed under Events, IRLs, Photos, Tech and tagged Apple, Bismuth, Macbook Pro. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink.
A fresh bouquet of unpretentious parentheses ((()))
(The title comes from J.D. Salinger’s Seymour, An Introduction. This can also be titled as: What I Talk About When I Talk About Boredom.)
I drank from Wednesday to Sunday Monday and my liver felt groggy after all the hullabaloo and the debts I had to make at Greenbelt last Thursday night just because of their overpriced tequila shots and the leading fact that we didn’t drink in a bar (we drank in this restaurant at Greenbelt 3, and if I’m not mistaken it’s Mr. Rockefeller). In the first place I was wondering why we had to go all the way to Greenbelt just to get our tequila shots (a friend proposed it “for a change” of environment). Plus that dinner at TGI Fridays and at Bizu! My fucking god, why do I have to go there when I lack money.
I suppose this post doesn’t make me an alcoholic. I think alcoholics have their craving times and sentiments; in my case it was pure teenage whim, and it’s summertime anyway. (I do have addiction to something I wouldn’t like to spill.)
Then last night I had to suffer a bout of impacho after eating my third dinner, though at first I took it as food poisoning, because of the accompanying wave of nausea which I felt for the first time (because I always suffer from impacho, especially in those Cuban restaurants in Hoboken). So I groped all the way to the attic and asked the maid to call Dad and ask for some tablet and shit. Though I half-wished I was poisoned since I miss the feeling of being hospitalized, at some point it could be life-threatening (thanks to that news Dad and I have heard about food poisoning in pochero because they made a mistake with the salt and a chemical I vaguely remember as something-nitrate) and the maid was telling me I’m paying for my gluttonous habits.
I say, I don’t care if I’m obese. Heck, there’s nothing wrong with being obese. But I’m not, young sir. I’m definitely not.
- The Woman Who Had Two Navels, by Nick Joaquin
- Strange Pilgrims, by Gabriel Garcia-Marquez
- Be More Chill, by Ned Vizzini
- The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, by Douglas Adams
- The World of the Short Story (Anthology), edited by Clifton Fadiman
- Fiction (Anthology), edited by R.S. Gwynn
- All Quiet on the Western Front, by Erich Maria Remarque
- The Grapes of Wrath, by John Steinbeck
- Raise The Roof Beam High, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction, by J.D. Salinger (currently)
My list of books I have read this 2010 swelled from 3 to 13 books in two weeks. Boredom talks this way. Imagine, The Grapes of Wrath in three fucking days! I mean, fine, I take pride on finishing this bitch (I tried reading it last 2008 but gave it up due to its epic [form- and language-wise] characteristics; for me, it’s like reading Biag ni Lam-Ang, though Steinbeck never disappoints me) but it is one of the many sole tickets to be named a bum, and that hurts. (I was eyeing on Norman Mailer’s Harlot’s Ghost, all 1300+ pages of it, but decided not to for the fear of dying in between those pages.)
I haven’t watched any movie this summer except for Valentine’s Day and Cloudy With A Chance Of Meatballs (which is awesome). My laptop was busted (again) and I’m still bargaining with my Mom about a new laptop (hopefully my tactics back then would work, but considering the incident when she caught me smoking on Facebook via my sister’s paparazzi powers, I’m about to consider this mission as futile as licking my elbows with my tongue).
Last Sunday I was so bored I exterminated a colony of ants creeping up on our walls. (I’ve been doing this every vacation.) Who would like those red ants when they usually cling on towels and bite my balls and shit when I’m inside an passenger FX? Much to my delight I caught their queen ant (how could I know it’s the queen ant? Simple: worker and soldier ants carry it and she’s the biggest of them all) and crushed her belly (?) until she was begging for help, and I hope I could publish the picture here. She was already dead when I woke up this morning.
So right now I overeat, exterminate colonies of ants and wolf down books. I’m also doing my creative thesis (a collection of short stories!) as early as now; my adviser is cooperative enough to initiate a “regimen of reading and writing exercises” this summer, and a bum loves deadlines.
This entry was written by , posted on April 19, 2010 at 8:43 pm, filed under 2in1, Events, Formspring Answers!, Pensive shits, Sentemotional and tagged alcohol, Bizu, Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, epic, Greenbelt, Harlot's Ghost, impacho, J.D. Salinger, John Steinbeck, Mr. Rockefeller, Norman Mailer, TGI Fridays, The Grapes of Wrath, Valentine's Day. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink.
Bibliorgasmic discounts
Bought Snuff by Chuck Palahniuk last Saturday at the Manila International Book Fair, with two of my friends plus Jmar, Cars and her young brother.
On my way home with a friend, we decided to hit Fully Booked with the gleaming posters of SALE everywhere in its perimeter. At the baggage counter was this section where they have books with prices slashed off as much as eighty percent and, lo and behold, the first book I’ve seen was Ned Vizzini’s Be More Chill! LIKE WE ARE DESTINED.
(These two books cost PhP 700+ but the discount made its price to an affordable PhP 175!!!)
Another book I bought was Martin Amis’s Night Train; I was really intrigued with him since I heard he’s a good writer (British?). Or was it this Kingsley Amis guy? Are they related, after all?
It was funny I haven’t bought that much from the fair. I thought they sell it very cheap, as in half the normal price or something, but maybe it was my fault; the misconception was too sugar-coated. But I wasn’t disappointed. I don’t blame the fair or anything about it. Plus I’m really broke, and had prioritized eating at some Italian restaurant than buying five books (I should have at least bought Jose Dalisay’s book)–which I did, together with my Japanese friend: a platter of pesto and fresh, thin-crust pizza.
Next time I should gear up for bookfairs like these. Well, I only caught wind of it three days last Wednesday (when the fair started) so I didn’t have the time to beg for my parents some money.
This entry was written by , posted on September 21, 2009 at 1:20 pm, filed under Books, books, books, Events, IRLs. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink.