My mother is not perfect. She cries a lot, she shouts a lot, sometimes she is too lazy to cook so she asks us to do it.

I had assumed that the years will deaden me to the pain of her absence. We all know too well that is not true. There are days when I am still too shocked at the idea that she is taken too soon.

My mother is not perfect. She cries a lot, she shouts a lot, she sometimes forget to drink her medicine. But she is everything I could ever hope for.

I am sorry I am rambling. All I want to say is that I am happy that I am my mother’s daughter despite all the imperfections. Every day, I try to make her proud.

Happy Mothers Day.

(I should thank The Replacements/Paul Westerberg for understanding. I feel like I could just post the lyrics of Here Comes a Regular here and I would still be saying what I wanted to say)

I have been monumentally sad the past month. I have no one to blame but myself. Especially when I made a rash decision based on the potential sound of my pockets. I need to find someone to talk to and fast. I have been so flighty the past month, I might decide to just move to a mountain city and never come back again.

Dreams are all I have as far as epiphanies go. If I had a shrink he’d have a field day interpreting last night’s dream. In my dream, I had decided to go back to school, albeit anxiously. In it, I was a college dropout. I had decided, after much coaxing from my mother, to go back to Baguio and earn my college degree. I was scrambling because I was worried that I would be unemployed if I had decided to go back to school, seeing as I am employed in Ortigas. My mother said I should go back to college and finish my degree and just look for a job in an NGO there. I was anxious and excited at this potential.

Of course it is easy to say how much of it is a reflection of the present. In more ways than one, I feel like a college dropout. Even if I have already earned my degree and had gone through two years in graduate school.

Everybody wants to be special here
they call your name out loud and clear

I wish I can just drop everything and finish that which I haven’t finished and decide once and for all what I really want to do with my life. I need a mountain and someone to talk to. Hurry, hurry we don’t have much time.

April is a complete 180 from my March. While March has me all hopeful and happy, April is the opposite. I am sad; I need a mountain. All I have to stare out the office window these days is Tektite. (see image above)

I am feeling depressed. If you want, I can discuss this to you in a private letter.

My blog disk space usage is full, I need to sort things out. I need someone to manage my cPanel. I am very ignorant about these things. I don’t know how much those things go by these days, if people really pay for those things. I can’t seem to upload photos, too. All I get is this error: “The Uploaded File Could Not Be Moved To home/takemt/…”

Had to revert to my old theme because the pink theme won’t work because I did something to my cPanel.

I don’t know who to approach when it comes to this. A little help?

This post is password protected. To view it please enter your password below:

Password:

I have a feeling that this year is going to be a very hot year. There was no cold February to speak of, I am bracing myself for summer days when the heat would be unforgiving.

As much as I would like to wake up in Sagada or Baguio City for the rest of the summer, I can’t. The closest thing I have to shivering these days is in form of song.

So I made a mixtape to help me get through a very cruel summer, because I need something ice cold in my bones. This mix is unobtrusive, with minimal lyrics. There shall be less talk and more shivering, because we can’t always rush to an air-conditioned room.

This mix is best listened to during a hot morning commute, on the train.

1.  Avatars of Dub – Sexelevatormuzik (Thievery Mix). Downtempo might be heaven’s elevator music. Cool and easy on the ears. It doesn’t hurt that Sexelevatormuzik is exactly what it is, good music for elevator sex.
2. Todd Terje – Snooze 4 Love. There is something about Snooze 4 Love which makes my bones want to disco.
3. Youth Lagoon -Daydream.  A band that hails some influence from Cocteau Twins, awarded as Pitchfork as Best New Album, and is the number one new discovery in Last.FM in 2011. Surely there is something there.
4. Dalai Lama Renaissance – 80 BPM. Chillwave seems to be everywhere these days. It’s hard to pick out one band from the next, with every other new band riding the chillwave bandwagon. But Dalai Lama Renaissance is different, the Belgian trio’s music is simple and packs a lot of soul music. 80 BPM sounds  oddly very emotional for such a cool track.
5. Gang Colours – To Repel Ghosts. Easily one of my favorite albums from 2012. Chillout music seems to always have a space in my heart. Gang Colours’ To Repel Ghosts has piano, synths, and texture, texture, texture.
6. Summer Heart – I Wanna See the Sunset. Chillwave with hints of ska and funk. Summer music is incomplete without those. If someone is actually reading this, head on over to Summer Heart‘s Last FM page because they have free downloads!
7. Four Tet – She Just Likes to Fight. Four Tet is my fifth  favorite band. This song gives me goosebumps in all the right places.
8. Nujabes – Counting Stars. Nujabes (RIP)  is taken too soon. Cool jazz stirred into chillout and hip-hop. Listen to this anywhere and you’d feel as if you are lying on a hammock while counting the stars.

For people who live without their parents, one of the challenges is cooking at home. It’s not because we do not have the skills but because sometimes we just get too lazy to cook and want the instant gratification of food served in front of us in less than 20 minutes. Good thing, there are food like this which fulfills our need for instant gratification

For some, lent is the time to abstain from meat and other worldly pleasures. Good thing, this squash soup recipe is simple and easy to make, even your five year-old son can make it in the kitchen. Goes best with bacon.

Squash Soup Recipe

1. Saute: onion, garlic, chili and diced squash
2. When squash is to your liking (charred and dark or lightly roasted), add water (or if you are not counting calories, some cream.)
3. Once squash is soft and can be mashed by a fork, turn off heat, mash the squash to form a paste. (This is therapeutic, do this!)
4. Mix the mashed squash in the water/paste. Simmer.
5. Add salt, pepper and your preferred spices.
6. Garnish and enjoy.

This recipe is so simple, there is no excuse for not knowing how to cook.

Spices which go best with these include paprika, nutmeg and cumin. Maybe that is just me, though.

On a completely unrelated note, my camera is busted. There is something wrong with the sensor which makes everything so blurry.

To end the very good month, my family (my brother and my sister Alex) went out to have dinner at this newly opened Korean Restaurant in Manila.

As always, when I am bad at documenting things and ended up with very few photos. 

(clockwise) utensil detail, my brother, something spicy, something beefy

Many authentic Korean restaurants give free refillable side dishes. Jeonju served us 8 side dishes, 3 of which are a variation of kimchi. Some were remarkably delicious.

Prepare to spend some P250.00 per head. On hindsight,we shouldn’t have ordered that much, what with all the side dishes.

Jeonju is located in Malvar St. cor Adriatico Manila. (We were lost for a while because we read in another blog that it was in Nakpil. Korean Village was the one in Nakpil. I used to work along Malvar St. and I was surprised to find it along the same street as my previous job.)

My mind has gone on vacation. No matter what I try to do, I can’t seem to concentrate on writing what I was supposed to be writing. I can only seem to do the tasks in-between like call people up, email strangers and make mixtapes for work. Call it procrastination, if you like. (On a similar note, read about Alex’s entry on procrastination)

I made this mixtape of things I listen to while I work. Most of the songs are instrumental, except for the one by Battles.

We begin with something clean and unobtrusive, then lead on to songs with a heavier feeling. These are music to help you concentrate at work. It’s all about the crescendo, because we need a little urgency in our bodies.

Concentration Lessons
Post-Rock, Instrumental, Math Rock

1. Explosions in the Sky – A Slow Dance
2. Forgotten Children – Mouse on the Keys
3. Toe – Long Tomorrow
4. Battles – Ice Cream (ft. Matias Aguayo)
5. Mono – Burial at Sea
6. 65 Days of Static – Install a Beak in the Heart that Clucks Time in Arabic
7. Cliff Martinez – They Didn’t Touch Me (OST Contagion)
8. Chromatics – Tick of the Clock

In other news, I made an 8tracks account. It’s so easy to make mixtapes there. If you are reading this, I wonder what songs you listen to to help you concentrate with work. Tell me about it?

I love this mountain city so much I treat it as a lover who knows me too well. But enough of the melodrama.

Noel and I had lunch in Oh My Gulay! on top of La Azotea. I remember this building all too well, especially back when Session Rd. were paved with tiles, because La Azotea had the most slippery sidewalk (because of the tiles). Despite the fact that I spent 5 years in that city, I have never eaten in Oh My Gulay! until now.

Oh My Gulay! Kabute Pasta. It's like Pasta Alfredo with just the mushrooms.

Oh My Gulay! is a vegetarian’s dream as they (obviously!) only serve vegetarian food. The food was OK. It’s not exactly fantastic, and I have had better. However, I think I would come back because I have yet to try the other things on the menu. Maybe next time, we will opt for a salad.

Owned by Kidlat Tahimik, it is an artspace, too. It surprised me that this space actually exists in that building.

Pancit. I think this has sesame oil. It was a bit too salty for us.

Oh My Gulay had the loveliest details such as koi pond, a ship, fake cameras, and lots of shrubs. It's like an outdoor restaurant indoors.

Oh My Gulay! is located in the 5th floor, La Azotea Bldg, 108 Session Rd., Baguio City.

There is something about this month that makes me so thankful. It feels like I had the luck of the draw this month. I am overwhelmed with the kindness that the universe has shown me.

I went to Baguio City last weekend with my boyfriend. Even if I spent some 5 years in the city, there is a big part of me that feels like a tourist in that city, the way it felt the first time I step foot in Baguio. For some 5 years, I called the city home and fell in love, but I am still filled with so much awe every time I step on its city grounds.

We did not do much of the things tourists would do. We did not go to SM Baguio, we did not go boating in Burnham. But we did go to Mines View Park and stared at the trees. We ate a lot. We call it food tourism. We ate in the usual places I went to in college. 

Being in Baguio City opens old wounds.

It was so sweet,
even to feel
that wound again.

(Seven Years Later, Driving Home; Justine U. Camacho)

 We had Sunday breakfast in 50s Diner. It felt like a Bloc Party song. (50s Diner used to be located near Abanao Square.It has since moved.) Because a retelling is always better with photos, (I will not bore you with words).

50s Diner had a non-working jukebox. It would have been awesome had it been working. They have an awesome song line-up which features Elvis Presley and even The Mamas and the Papas. I must say that his diner looks so much better than what I remember from its old Abanao days where some seats were falling apart because of age and use.

I had what I usually have which is called “You and I”, ground beef made to look like a hotdog with some garlic mayonnaise on top, served with vegetables and rice. N had Schnitzel (featured above) which is basically porkchop. He did not like it as much. I liked my food. The Feist-song sounding name adds a plus, too.

It was a it would have been awesome had we eaten Filipino breakfast food because 50s Diner serves those.

50s Diner serves what could be dubbed as diner food: milkshakes, burgers, fries, spaghetti, meatballs, and the occasional salad.

50s Diner is located in 92 Upper General Luna Road, Corner Brent Road, Baguio City.