What I want for my xx birthday

It’s almost the end of the month, the time of the year when there’s the urge to deny my failures, my blunders, my inconsistencies, and my real age (hehe);when hope springs eternal and I once again make resolutions (because after all, it costs nothing to make one) and I believe against belief, hope against hope, in the crap friends tell me that like wine, I am getting better (not bitter) with age. Yes, it also costs me nothing to believe in this crap, as well as the time-worn cliche that age is a state of mind.

Because age is a state of mind, I will believe that I will not really feel old until I reach 55 and have grandchildren (ugh!) Even so, I will be a groovy grandma sporting golf shorts and a cap; still going to the gym like this female septuagenarian I know who has muscles in the right places even at that age. I dread to imagine, but everyone of us hopes to mature gracefully because if we don’t, there’s no use talking about birthdays, right?
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I got short hair…how liberating

MeMeMe

Hexcuse me, this is a rather narcissistic post and I hate talking about myself. But for a lack of an appropriate blog topic and the fact that nobody seems to have noticed (heheh), allow me to embark on a supercalifragilistic post on why I decided to cut my hair short one day and out of the blue.

Needless to say, this decision has liberated me. I figured that most women I know grew their hair long to please their partners or attract the opposite sex. Some friends I know would never – for the life of ‘em – chop their mane without consulting The Husband or Boyfriend or Parent. Since time immemorial, long hair has stood for the difference in the sexual hierarchy; it has always been viewed as a symbol of femininity and beauty. We never see short hair waving in a shampoo commercial, do we?
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‘Authentic’ Indian food in Manila at Queens Crystal Garden Restaurant

I’ve always wanted to try good Indian food in Manila. Though I’ve done so in one of those hole-in-th-wall eateries along U.N. Avenue (beside those rows of Indian groceries), I’ve been on the look-out for a fine dining establishment representative of the continent. Admittedly, there are gazillions of Chinese, Japanese and (ulk!) Korean restos in the city and only a few Indian. So imagine my relief when I got invited “on coverage” to a cocktail party at Queens in Jupiter St. Makati City.

The complete name is Queens Crystal Garden Restaurant, and the super-amiable owner Ram Hathiramani told moi they just put the phrase “Crystal Garden” to attract the Chinese, haha. But really, my impression is that Queens is one great place to go to if you have guests from Indian, Pakistan or anywhere else craving for some savory curry or tandoori. I browsed through the Queens menu and it’s quite extensive – some 250 dishes of which 80 are vegetarian. An even better news for anti-carnivores is that this place serves no pork or beef – beef because cows are sacred to Indians and pork because the foreign chefs in the resto are Moslems and they don’t eat baboy.
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Call for volunteers: the Exchange Arena project

Thanks to a sender from the Philippine Business for Social Progress for believing that this blog can help spread the word about their noteworthy project called Exchange Arena. In this endeavor, the country’s top companies are invited to invest 1% of their annual employee time for nation-building.

The idea is to form an army of employee volunteers to work for some development projects in progress. Attention HR managers: this could be a noble alternative to the out-of-town excursions, basketball tournaments, bowling tourneys and badminton sessions you always cook up huh. For all of us: time to set our sights outside our sphere of influence and make a difference. After all, we can’t always complain and complain about the state of affairs in the country without doing anything about it. And I agree with the observation that volunteerism in the Philippines truly s-u-c-k-s. What we have is a country obsessed with the Big Brother, Philippine Idol and run-of-the-mill kimchinovelas. No one truly cares for the plight of our neighbor Juan de la Cruz even if his ignorance, poverty & pathetic state stares at us in the face.
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Nokia’s 5500 Sport & the advent of the talking cellphones

Talking cellphones are here! And so… you will not just read SMS messages but also hear the same messages being read to you through the phone’s Message Reader.

I first heard about mobile phones’ Text-to-Speech recognition from the Ben-Q distributor early this year (since Ben-Q phones carry them too) and now I get to test it first-hand with the new Nokia 5500 Sport which my editor has sent me to review.

What can I say? It’s really C-O-O-L!
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LG’s 5 megapixel cellphone

One of these days I’ll have to write something about the Manila Bulletin’s Technews lab which houses all the latest gizmos and gadgets, sometimes even before they are distributed in the Philippines or written about in the other newspapers. Every time I visit this publication I write for (which is as frequent as once a month, to get my check, lol) I am amazed at the variety and diversity of the technology on display, which just lie around scattered in the whole workplace, such as my editor’s table. These include the newest state-of-the-art laptops, printers. MP3 players, gaming consoles and cellphones, among others.

Having said so, I couldn’t resist borrowing from my fellow writer and reviewer,Paul, LG’s much-vaunted 5 megapixel cameraphone. The KG920 is quite the same in bulk as Nokia’s 6680 or N70 and I guess the best thing about this is its high-resolution cam. Guess we”ll just have to wait for the MB review before I blabber about what this phone is all about.
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Get fit tips from my gym

Gyms are really not the favorite destination of Filipinos, malls are. Somehow we have this crazy idea that walking the whole length of Mall of Asia (with stop-overs of window-shopping in between) already equates to time spent in the treadmill. Women wearing skimpy skirts and midribs are also a common sight in Manila but rarely will you find a mini-skirted woman who is toned and muscular at the same time. A muscled and toned woman seems odd, by our standards. We prefer to wallow in our slimness and we can only thank God that we are Asian, and in some cases suffering from poverty (huh!) In my case, I have a two year gym membership which I am taking for granted because it is for two years anyway and somebody paid for it. I always make the excuse that I have no time and because of this, have cheated on the exercise routines that my trainer has listed down for me. I am just content with 30 minutes spent in the cardio machines three times a week, sometimes only once heaven help moi. Welll, that’s better than doing nothing. I just thought I’d like to share these tips I read in our gym’s bulletin board to inspire me, you and everyone else:

1. Watch portion sizes. Your midsection is the first you’ll notice overeating.

2. Balance your diet. Even a low-calorie diet won’t work if you’re not eating the right foods.

3. Spot reduction only tones. You need cardio to blast away the fat.
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Balut, kwek-kwek & other Philippine street food

I should have blogged about this more than a month ago during our first culinary trip to Pampanga but somehow the pictures got lost in my archives. At the Nepo Mart in Angeles City, I saw several carts of street food which is perhaps one of the biggest to be gathered in one place I’d seen. What’s good about these stalls is that people flock to them like flies because they’re cheap, they can ease your hunger pangs for a few pesos and some people seem to believe that the dirtier, the better (these places just have pails of water to wash the dishes, spoons and such. Ewww.)

Above is the picture of one of the most famous Philippine street food, balut. I could never call myself a true-blue Filipino or foodie because I’ve never tasted balut. I just couldn’t imagine myself eating day-old chick..yet. Balut is the premature embryo of a chick that is boiled then eaten in its shell. You are supposed to sip the broth first, then peel the egg to eat the yolk and the day-old chick. According to Wikipedia, balut is a delicacy that’s not unique to the Philippines. It’s also found in China, Cambodia and Vietnam.
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Thank God It’s Friday!

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To break up is to make up … your life!

Is it life or is it just the weather but I don’t understand why, three months into Christmas, this seems to be a season of break-ups among my circle of friends. And as you can very well imagine, nothing can be more heart-rending.

Take for example Friend A who’s given it all in a relationship which appears to be one-way. She was the one who broke it off but now she wants to take it back, reasoning out that she can never live without him. We try to tell her that “God will send you someone better in his own time” even though we know it’s an exercise in futility putting some sense into the head of someone who is in love, blinded and absolutely hurting. She will heal for certain but now our challenge is to dissuade her from further calling/chasing her ex-boyfriend in a language (or even sign language) she can understand.
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