Viewing: rant

Pamosong tsansa

While reading Cristy Fermin’s not-so-blind item about Manny Pacquiao and Atenean homewrecker Krista Ranillo, I ran into one of my ultimate pet peeves.

I can’t claim to be a grammar nazi when it comes to the Filipino language the way I am when it comes to English, but I hate, hate, hate it when native writers or speakers use Filipinized English words for which proper Filipino words actually exist.

Prime example: using pamoso for famous. Showbiz talk show hosts and columnists who broadcast and write entirely in the native language always pull this ugly rabbit out of the proverbial buri hat. Does pamoso actually exist in the Filipino grammar? If it does, aren’t there less awkward-sounding words to convey fame? How about kilala? Tanyag? Sikat?

Another one which crops up a lot on daytime TV is tsansa (chansa), or chance. Cue the PCSO announcements and low-budget giveaway TVCs: “May tsansa kang manalo ng limpak-limpak na salapi!” I even recall this specific phrase from a TVC (but forget the brand): “Mas maraming tiket, mas maraming tsansa!” Meron ba talagang salitang tsansa? Wouldn’t it be better to say pagkakataon, or even the Hispanic oportunidad?

Can you think of any others? Does this bother you too or ako lang ba ang affected masyado?

2 Comments
Posted on November 19, 2009
Category: Manila Girl at Heart · Labels:

Surreal

it’s surreal to think that tomorrow, i’ll be en route to new york. cue ate guy: “di ako makapaniwala…”

my mind is already flying off ahead of me. i want to go home and prepare for the trip: read my time out guidebook, choose a restaurant and make reservations for the one special (read: expensive) dinner that we promised to treat ourselves to, and omg WAX AND EPILATE! and generally rest up before we begin tomorrow’s mad amazing race-ish dash to tor’s wedding in manhattan on saturday morning.

but there are still presentations to do, meetings to go to and interns to brief. and if you knew how detailed their briefings have to be, just so they don’t mess up casting while i’m gone, maloloka kayo.

as in, yung isa sa kanila nagreklamo na kaya daw siya nahihirapan mag-facilitate ng auditions ay dahil simula nang mag-kolehiyo siya, hindi na raw siya masyadong nag-iingles. ANO BA! e yung alipores ko ngang koreana hindi nagdadahilan ng ganyan! kaya ginawan ko siya ng powerpoint na babasahin na lang ng mga mow-thel bago sila um-emote para hindi na siya kailangang magsalita.

tapos dahil hindi siya makaisip ng anong papagawin niya sa mga mow-thel (kahit na nandun naman sa harap niya yung storyboard), ginawan ko siya ng iskrip na babasahin na lang niya sa mga mudel para mapa-emote sila. mabait naman ang batang ito, pero JOSKODUDAY KAILANGAN DE KUTSARA LAHAT!

and to top it all off, marlon is “working from home” today and isn’t going to work tomorrow. one of my last glimpses of him before i left this morning was surrounded by pillows, bundled up in a comforter, reading eragon. kakainez! i wanted to throttle him.

ok i shall now reel in my altapresyon. eyes on the prize! i’m leaving tomorrow and that’s what matters!

2 Comments
Posted on August 27, 2009
Category: The Singapore Years · Labels: ,

Pakiusap

i have soooo many things that i want to blog about, but i have just received my umpteenth creative hipster email (you’ll know what that is in a second). i’ve had it up to here and just want to say:

please, please please — stab me and cut out my heart with a dessert spoon if i ever sign any correspondence with the first letter of my name.

Hi.
This is what I mean.
Later,
D

yun lang.

3 Comments
Posted on December 3, 2008
Category: Uncategorized · Labels:

Lulu the lachrymosely laggard laptop

lulu and i started off so fabulously three years ago, but lately things between us have not been going well at all.

our relationship began to deteriorate last year when she started showing little quirks and slowing down big time. the quirks were just quirks then, slowdowns still survivable by running a bit of anti-spyware, and i could still feel sentimental about considering a replacement for her. “what? but… but… it’s lulu…” i would say, lip quivering, whenever marlon would bring up laptop shopping after i reported my newest computer complaint.

then when 2008 hit, her battery life dropped to a record low of fifteen or twenty minutes, and she started to refuse to hook up to wifi unless she was plugged into a socket. ang arte diba. this was also the year where i began having to force-quit on an almost weekly basis. it would take me anywhere from three to ten minutes to start microsoft word, up to fifteen for photoshop.

i struggled with lulu laying out and printing my cv and portfolio for interviews, which would take me entire afternoons or even the whole day. i timed myself once — sending out one application by email, a process that consisted of opening word and recasting a cover letter, tweaking a cv and a couple of pages of sample writing, then opening firefox and sending my little e-packet out via gmail, would take me thirty to forty-five minutes. now imagine this done at least fifty times for each application i’ve sent out.

for the first time, i considered replacing her when an acer trade-in promo came up last month. i decided to live with lulu a little while longer and wait for the IT trade fairs that usually roll around at year-end to get myself a macbook. i just consoled myself by coming up with a lulu-inspired name for the incumbent (i considered lolita, i.e. a little lulu, but eventually settled on something else).

just last thursday, i suddenly lost all my firefox bookmarks. like magic. they just disappeared — along with them over dozen job postings filed into “to apply” and “follow up”, not to mention all my various resources and hobby-related bookmarks. what was the point of a bookmark function, i thought, if i had to write everything down next time “just to be sure”? oh and did i mention that this was the second time in the span of one month that this happened to me?

and today i waited an hour and a half for lulu to restart.

so now i am browsing refurbished macbooks on the apple online store and feeling downright miserable because i feel like marlon and i can’t afford this right now. we have a credit card to zero out in june and shared goals and all that crap.

sooooo… that ends my rant. any feedback on refurbished macs?

Comment?
Posted on May 12, 2008
Category: The Singapore Years · Labels: ,

All botched up

so after weeks of looking at/re-editing/sending/following up/choosing pantone chips for/double-checking invites that looked like this, in (reddish-purple) plum and (teal-ish) turquoise…

my printer sends me these horrid chocolate brown and grass-green invites. one hundred fricking twenty of them.

at first i am stunned. then i flashback to the meticulous process (see above) i went through just to idiot-proof the design. then i whine about it to all the art directors at work, who, while deploring the color job, say it’s a kick-ass piece of work. this is why i love working in an office full of kick-ass creatives — my seatmate cecil did the layout for me for free. “maganda naman siya eh,” volunteers jl. “itapon mo na lang yung original file.”

then i get online and, with almost eerie calm, proceed to inform the owner of the print shop of the matter. after checking the damn things, he promptly offers me a free reprint, which is just as well. dahil kung hindi, aba pucha, one email to the phalanx of bridezillas in my egroup can potentially derail his business for at least a few months. you have no idea how seriously brides take supplier reviews. really.

since he vows to personally take responsibility for the outcome of the reprints, i am placated. really, if not for the service given me by the owner, i would be bashing this place to kingdom come. which is a shame, actually, because i was pretty happy with them until all this happened.

the reprints are done in a week, which is still too long a delay for me but what can you do. the print shop’s peace offering arrives — the colors are still not true to the original file. at this point, i am still not happy, but not willing to put off delivering the invites for another week. so i simply choose not to feel bad about anything i’m going to give my nearest and dearest, and accept the prints. i tell the owner as much. he feels bad about the whole thing and offers me free thank-you cards — a very gracious offer, which i am gracious (and penny-pinched) enough to consider.

now most of the invites are out, the guests are informed — and on the whole, pleased and wowed by them (except for one major drama). and that is that.

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Posted on December 14, 2007
Category: Uncategorized · Labels: ,

Waaah take me back

i’m not depressed.

i’m not depressed.

i’m not depressed.

i just really miss greeting people with a cheery “hola!” i’ve started emailing photos to friends i made in spain (two puerto rican choristers, gabi and rafy, and one spaniard, maria angeles). in the past hour i’ve gotten three responses all starting off with hola. it’s precisely those three holas that have triggered this rant.
gabi of coralia, and maria angeles from borja (no solo pics of rafy)

i miss the language and how it changed around when we moved to different parts of spain, from fast and clipped to lazy and sibilant (a.k.a. ma-laway). i miss the mental quiet that came from not understanding the language buzzing around you — you could just tune people out and have your mind blessedly all to yourself.
i miss the challenge of choosing to focus on that language and decipher it. i miss the succession of mini-triumphs in succeeding, word by word, whether it was during a trashy afternoon talk show (“oliver quiere WHAT con dana?”), dubbed episodes of lost (“perdidos”) or an opera with subtitles flashing in catalan (guess-translating catalan into spanish and then into english — or sometimes even tagalog = major migraine).

at the liceu in barcelona, where i saw my first opera (deserves a separate post)

i just really miss the physical activity. croaking to an unexpected sedentary death in this office cubicle is a reformed sloth. we were walking all the freaking time in europe. when i wanted to save money (which was often), i would walk. even when i wanted to take any form of transportation, i had to walk a considerable distance to find it. just going for dinner in tolosa would entail five flights of stairs.
all this physical activity reached a turbocharged peak during my six-day adventure with pia and jeline (las otras chicas), when we were changing cities, rushing to buses and flights, and hauling close to 30 kilos of luggage apiece up various stairs and cobblestoned slopes on an almost-daily basis.

we nearly cried when we saw the stairs at our hostel in sevilla

in barcelona, fate threw miikka, a certified walking junkie, at me, and at his behest (unspoken, of course) i walked for nearly five hours straight on my last saturday in europe. reviewing my map that evening, i was shocked to see how much of the city we had covered on foot, and even more shocked that my feet and legs felt perfectly fine. in hindsight, i’m happy i had done things his way and not zipped around from tourist spot to tourist spot, like i would have on my own. five years ago, i never would’ve thought we’d be pounding barcelona pavement together

i only took public transportation twice that weekend, up to parc guell and back, and only because parc guell was on top of a mountain.
at parc guell, overlooking barcelona, montjuic and the mediterranean

and now here i am, chained to my desk, spending at least eight unhealthy hours a day sitting on my fat ass. i do intend to start boxing again next week, but there’s something different about physical activity just naturally being part of your day. the unfortunate reality that manila is a pedestrian nightmare has never hit me so hard.
gosh. i miss walking so much i almost want to weep. i’m actually excited about going to singapore this weekend with acs just so i can walk. where has the old deepa gone?

i just really miss having hermetically sealed pores and great hair days, every day. marlon told me in paris that he had never seen my complexion so good before. and never before did tweezing my eyebrows cause so much pain, or the hair on my legs take so long to grow back after shaving(overshare?!). i could slather on my extra-heavy olay moisturizer plus mix it with my foundation without going all minola a few hours later.

behold my poreless beauty

and my hair! it mysteriously turned a deep red while i was in france, and it was frizz-free and had just the right amount of wave… it was just perfect, absolutely perfect!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! *wails*

i just really miss all the wine. every single meal we had in spain (with the exception of breakfast) was washed down by copious amounts of free-flowing tinto, or red wine. okay, red table wine, but at 11-14% per volume and for absolutely free, you couldn’t complain. especially if you know at least two people per meal are going to get plastered — soooo much fun. besides, we did have a couple of meals with real red wine, after which all the table wine began to taste like vinegar. but hell, we drank it anyway.

“i want to be drunk forever!” shouted mark, our first-time drunk, in urretxu

i was quite surprised at myself; i did not even get so much as tipsy throughout the entire trip. i resolved to drink after our very last concert, in borja, and what happened after was, to say the least, not my idea of fun. (sir jojo mentions it here.) but it was just good to know that the wine was there if you wanted it. and now i find myself missing all the wine i didn’t drink. i miss describing drunk friends as borracho or borracha.

let’s drink to that

i miss a lot of things about europe (mostly about spain), and about being on tour. reality is wrenching things away from me at an alarming rate, and i find myself putting up a fight to keep them a little while longer.
but i’m not depressed. i’m not.
really.
just let me wallow a bit. and i’ll be fine before you know it.

2 Comments
Posted on November 28, 2006
Category: Uncategorized · Labels: ,