paralytic

© Joselito Briones

numb started friday before last. i was standing in front of the ATM machine and for the life of me i could't remember my PIN. it's not like it's new, i've been using it at least once a week for the past year. i tried to clear my mind and get the first 4 digits that i could think of. i came up with the PIN of my atm cash card in berlin. the people in the line behind me were already making their impatience known so i cancelled the transaction and walked away. i made up another 4 digits in my mind and thought about it over and over until i was convinced that it was the right combination. the next atm machine, 3 blocks from the one i was just in, said it was nothing more than made-up memory. as it was a friday night, there was no way to get a new PIN until the following monday. a whole weekend without cash.

or maybe the symptoms really started three months ago, when istockphoto decided to impose the royalty cut on the contributors' share. i was uploading photos at the exact moment of the announcement and i just stared at it in disbelief. motherfuckers! helplessness came after anger then the one question that never got answered no matter how many times i asked. "what now?"

on whichever date it started, the effect is simple enough. general feeling of helplessness, lying on my bed just thinking about the same things over and over. obsessing over injustices i have to put up with (mostly imaginary, of course) recurring inability to move my ass to do something productive - something else other than lying down thinking - anything else.

worst attack (thankfully also the shortest) was thursday night. a good friend whom i'm visiting overseas in the near future, sent me an email saying a mutual friend might also be there at the same time. someone i had (an ancient) personal history with. i was paralyzed with i don't know what. i was up all night  thinking about it. when morning came i read the email again before calling in sick at work.  turns out i misread the message and we weren't gonna be there at the same time after all.  i went to work without sleep.

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some guys

© Joselito Briones

you know how sometimes you feel bad for not keeping in touch with people you used to hang out a lot with? john (photo, above) is one such person so when i learned that he's in hong kong visiting i invited him for dinner to catch up.  last time i saw him was twenty or so years ago, in mapua.  so he does mostly turnkey projects now and lots of golfing and diving and underwater photography and traveling and shopping.

so anyway we just walked around lan kwai fung and soho and non stop talk and had big ass yummy steak dinner in staunton street, then drinks in a bar in hollywood road.  don't you just love it when you see someone you haven't seen for a long time and it doesn't feel weird? fun night.

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p.s.
i remember we had a small group back in the days and we had a song! lol i've forgotten how it goes exactly but supposedly each of us represented a "type" in the song : "some guys have all the luck, some guys have all the brain, some guys have all the pain, etc. etc." silly song.

coming to an airport near you

© Joselito Briones
spent the past week planning trips.  carmona for christmas (booked).  sydney (booked) and wellington (booked) during the chinese new year holiday.  san francisco in spring (was gonna be the baltics, but the schedule with the euro divas proved not too ideal), somewhere else in summer, then autumn in new york. and no, i don't have that much time off from work, i usually end up getting no-pay leave.

as for the maya thingy, it proved to be not too different from other 3d apps. it's more advanced, of course, and there's a lot more buttons to learn, buttons that spawn windows with lots more option buttons.  i still have half a month left of software trial but i'm sick of buttons already.  so no more maya for me, at least for the next few months, or until i get a new computer and i can download the software trial again.

hmn. what to do now?

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banana pancakes

i don't usually listen to the words of a song when listening to music so i was surprised that this one, from one that i've had for a while now,  registered:

"just so easy

when the whole world fits inside of your arms

do we really need to pay attention to the alarm

wake up slow, mmm mmm

wake up slow"

it struck me as something so simple and yet so endearing (not that i like romantic things. ok, maybe a little).  granted it doesn't say anything about "the whole world" NOT feeling like your arms was all it took to make him happy - what with all the events he wanted to go to because he read that that's what everybody else was doing - or the holidays his colleagues have gone to and that he has to do himself - or that you were not supposed to have any "lesser career" than in architecture, among other things.  but of course that's another song altogether - and one that frankly i wouldn't want to hear.

so yeah, thanks jack johnson for "banana pancakes".  i would've loved to have known the song under different circumstances, but it made me smile nonetheless.

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pagsanjan falls

i took this photo off of one of my nieces' fb album. it's from a recent trip to pagsanjan falls where i went with norie, dave, ludy, toto, jane and jon.  find it strange that none of us had a paddle? that's because the boatmen did all the rowing, and they literally carried us (well, the boat - with us on it) on the rocky upstream parts of the river. if that isn't service i don't know what is.

and yes i'm posting this because i'm still busy learning them difficult (but awesome!) 3d apps.  

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what was i thinking?

 © Joselito Briones
i opened maya and got scared by the buttons.  how can anything have so many buttons?  i decided today is not maya day, hopefully i can recover from the shock.  i was already in geeky mode tho so i decided to walk to wanchai instead.  298 and wanchai computer center. tech/geek/nerd paradise.  used to be that if anyone needed pirated copy of any software, or any movie, these are the places to go to.  they've cleaned up of course. no more pirated software and cd's and they're are not as seedy (nor as smelly, tho they still are, kinda, and very stuffy.) as they used to be.  but still full of interesting things - computers of course, electronics, gadgets, comics, action figures, robots, and every imaginable kind of iphone case or any other phone case - from the simplest to the most ridiculously pimped up (blings!). i placed an order for an LED signage display and walked back to central.

when i got back to my flat, i felt dirty and overdosed of wanchai computer center - so i decided to do the complete opposite to balance things out.  i went to palace ifc and watched a gay movie.  alfred molina (spiderman 2's doc ock) and gary oldman (batman begins' comissioner gordon) as lovers.  they were so good!. and vanessa redgrave. but then she's (almost) always good. it's an old movie. "prick up your ears".  the british council brought it in as part of this year's hklgff.

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the autodesk maya 3d learning challenge

i'm kinda all over the place nowadays, so many things i want to do and i don't know what to do first.  so naturally, i decided not to do any of them.

i'm gonna try to learn a new app (new to me) instead - autodesk's maya.  it's basically a 3d modeling and rendering program and supposedly the best among all the ones geared towards cgi animation (avatar, anyone?).  the best thing about it, of course, is that it has a version for mac. i can play with it at home.  so i downloaded the trial app and i have a month to learn it. the objective is to have a working knowledge of the system and processes, enough to do simple photorealistic 3d renderings, before the trial expires.  the problem is that it's notoriously difficult to learn - which is exactly what i'm gonna say if i don't have anything to show after a month's time.  that, or that i got sidetracked by all the other things i wanted to do in the first place.  we'll see.

***above is a screen capture of the maya website.  i am not in any way affiliated with them.  unless of course they want me to be.  in which case they can always send me a full copy of the app.  hello? anybody there?

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