Bottled Sky

My friend Chrissa and I were having one of our phone marathons recently, and we got to talking about our kindergarten days. (We both attended CSA Makati from kindergarten to high school.) I asked her if she could recall the time we were required to view a morbidly detailed presentation about the life and death of Lorenzo Ruiz, the first Filipino saint. For her it was only a vague memory; I could still remember it like it was yesterday.

It was the anniversary of Lorenzo Ruiz’ canonization, and for some crazy reason the school administration thought it was a good idea to present a diorama depicting the events that made him a martyr to a bunch of impressionable five- and six-year-olds. The guy was tortured for refusing to denounce his faith. His captors hung him upside down with his head buried in muck, drove metal spikes under his fingernails, and jumped on his stomach after forcing him to drink copious amounts of water. Now picture all that in lifelike miniature. I had nightmares after seeing that diorama!

They say early childhood trauma greatly affects how a person turns out later in life. Could that gruesome display be partly to blame for Chrissa’s and my slight strangeness? Could that premature awareness of water torture be the reason that I have to pee every other minute and that Chrissa drinks much less than the recommended eight glasses a day? Could that morbid diorama be why we were the only two people out of a packed movie house who laughed out loud when a guy—strapped to a wheelchair in his underwear and engulfed in flames—rolled down the street in Red Dragon? (We were honestly surprised that nobody else thought that scene was funny.)

Have we been scarred for life?

My LiveJournal has been “smoochified.” I normally don’t do mushy, but I came across this old drawing of mine and felt the urge to use it in a layout:

I added the style sheet to the LJ themes page in case anyone else wants it. I had a few drops of creative juice left over after finishing the layout, so I made a bunch of icons as well.

In other news, my mom is now a blogger. I guess everyone and his mother really does have a blog these days She chose Mrs. B for her screen name and refers to my dad as Mr. B and me as Miss B in her entries. I love it, haha!

To my knowledge, my dad has yet to join the blog-wagon. He does visit this site regularly, though. (Hi, Dad!) Sometimes we’d be eating dinner and he’d say, “By the way, in your links page you missed an ‘I’ in ‘visiting.’” Who needs Spell Check when you have a perfectionist father going over your website?

My college friends and I hung out at Eugene’s condo this weekend. It had been months since I last saw some of them — Tin! Nas! Albert! — so I was really excited. We went swimming, had dinner at Pancake House, played PS2 (they played; I just randomly pressed buttons), (re)watched Golden Boy, drank, slept a little, then woke up and had leftover alcohol with our breakfast. Good times. Check out the photos from Chrissa’s camera.

Of course there was gift giving, too. Like I mentioned in a previous post, I didn’t have much money to spend on gifts this year, so I did a lot of DIYing. This time I drew cartoon alter egos of the girls, had them printed, and found matching desktop frames for each drawing:

Check out my illustration portfolio for the bigger versions.

They loved it! Seeing their reactions to the cartoons got me feeling all warm and fuzzy inside. The guys pretend-pouted and asked why I didn’t do the same for them, so I mock-complained about how hard they were to draw because they all looked alike, hehe. I did try, but unfortunately I can’t draw boys as well as I can girls. I got them uber-geeky squeeze flashlights instead. Maybe next year.

Happy holidays, everyone! And thanks to Rose for being extra cool