Captain... Captain Jack Sparrow!

Johnny Depp named People's "sexiest man alive"
Reuters - Thursday, November 19

NEW YORK - "Pirates of the Caribbean" star Johnny Depp was named People magazine's "Sexiest Man Alive" on Wednesday, reclaiming a title he first won in 2003.

Depp, whom People described as "the king of cool with the killer cheekbones," succeeded 2008 winner Hugh Jackman. Other stars who have received the honor twice include George Clooney and Brad Pitt.

"Whether it's onscreen in roles like Captain Jack Sparrow in the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise or at home with his family on their private Bahamian island, the 46-year-old father of two with 25 years in show business still reigns as Hollywood's most irresistible iconoclast," People said in a statement.

Past winners include Matt Damon in 2007, George Clooney in 2006, Matthew McConaughey in 2005, Jude Law in 2004, Ben Affleck in 2002, Pierce Brosnan in 2001 and Brad Pitt in 2000.

two birthdays and Gabriel Garcia Marquez

it's my mother's birthday tomorrow, but i will be out of town until saturday for some freakin' training i wish i had experienced before when i was still showing some vigor at work. it looms in me a feeling of guilt, especially now because it is only her and me in our house, and obviously there's no one left with her on that special day. and i am more saddened by the fact that i could not even dare to back out, and she sure as hell won't let me do so, save some considerations to our department that has a battalion of officers: the boss and the weary researcher.

birthdays, for me, are more than mere calendar marks calling forth fancy celebrations of some sort. i don't know if this is peculiar to me, but i feel a sense of sympathy and/or sorrow for someone on the day of his birthday. it's as if i tend to assume that that particular person is so sad, everybody needs to partake in a joyous diversion for the celebrator to have something to compensate for those youthful years disappearing right before his eyes. and that compels me to do even the smallest thing i could or give, be it serious or just to make that person laugh, or even smile upon knowing that there is someone who did not fail to remember (well, in some cases i do. you know me; i'm the personified Dory). that's why for those dates i will never forget, being unable to give or even do the simplest thing, and worse, being not there for them as they hit that milestone in their lives becomes a grave emotional distress. it depresses the hell out of me.

today is one of those special dates. it's someone's birthday, and i don't even know where that someone is... to you, wherever you are and whoever the devil you are with, i wish you a happy birthday.

***

anyway, to make amends for the "might have beens" haunting me every single minute, i'm treating myself with excessive indulgence of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's genius. he triggered in me an emotional impact of overwhelming admiration and respect for his poetic diction, that i could not seem to agree more on whatever there is that his thoughts inflict upon me. he is my Pablo Neruda when it comes to novels. my first intimate encounter with the pleasures of his words was when i read Memories of My Melancholy Whores. on that first romance, i learned to love Marquez as another author of my emotions. what more in my maddened soul can Love in the Time of Cholera enkindle? i am just on some thirty pages from the cover, and i couldn't help falling in his poetic spell, from the lucidity of his realities beyond human comprehension to his eloquence in human love...


"With her Florentino Ariza learned what he had already experienced many times without realizing it: that one can be in love with several people at the same time, feel the same sorrow with each, and not betray any of them. Alone in the midst of the crowd on the pier, he said to himself in a flash of anger: 'My heart has more rooms than a whorehouse.'"
— Love in the Time of Cholera


"Neither could have said if their mutual dependence was based on love or convenience, but they had never asked the question with their hands on their hearts because both had always preferred not to know the answer."
— Love in the Time of Cholera


"He was aware that he did not love her. He had married her because he liked her haughtiness, her seriousness, her strength, and also because of some vanity on his part, but as she kissed him for the first time he was sure there would be no obstacle to their inventing true love. They did not speak of it that first night, when they spoke of everything until dawn, not would they ever speak of it. But in the long run, neither of them had made a mistake.
— Love in the Time of Cholera"


"Sex is the consolation you have when you can't have love"
— Memories of My Melancholy Whores


"We men are the miserable slaves of prejudice, but when a woman decides to sleep with a man, there is no wall she will not scale, no fortress she will not destroy, no moral consideration she will not ignore at its very root: there is no God worth worrying about."
— Love in the Time of Cholera


"I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where. I love you simply, without problems or pride: I love you in this way because I do not know any other way of loving but this, in which there is no I or you, so intimate that your hand upon my chest is my hand, so intimate that when I fall asleep your eyes close."
— One Hundred Years of Solitude


"To him she seemed so beautiful, so seductive, so different from ordinary people, that he could not understand why no one was as disturbed as he by the clicking of her heels on the paving stones, why no one else's heart was wild with the breeze stirred by the sighs of her veils, why everyone did not go mad with the movements of her braid, the flight of her hands, the gold of her laughter. He had not missed a single one of her gestures, not one of the indications of her character, but he did not dare approach her for fear of destroying the spell."
— Love in the Time of Cholera


"He is ugly and sad... but he is all love."
— Love in the Time of Cholera


"...and both of them remained floating in an empty universe where the only everyday & eternal reality was love..."
— One Hundred Years of Solitude


"It was a meditation on life, love, old age, death: ideas that had often fluttered around her head like nocturnal birds but dissolved into a trickle of feathers when she tried to catch hold of them."
— Love in the Time of Cholera


"It was inevitable: the scent of bitter almonds always reminded him of the fate of unrequited love."
— Love in the Time of Cholera


"Perhaps this is what the stories meant when they called somebody heartsick. Your heart and your stomach and your whole insides felt empty and hollow and aching."
— Collected Stories



...and so on, as every page gives me another quote to keep and live by.

now i know

The German educator Friedrich Wilhelm Froebel (1782-1852) is the father of the Kleinkinderbeschaftig-ungsanstalt (institution where small children are occupied). The name, too long even for the Germans, quickly shrank to Kindergarten (garden for children).

Froebel wanted his school to be a garden where children unfolded as naturally as flowers.


---------------------------------------------------------
Excerpted from Compton's Interactive Encyclopedia





so that's why.... hehe. ok, etymology. :p

one thing that made me happy amid all these

it was not my birthday yesterday, but i received a gift anyway. it was a box from heaven with a familiar handwriting on one side. i told myself, “that must be the books.” and i was definitely right! courtesy of my cousin, TJ, i now have new additions to my book collection, particularly, Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera, Laura Esquivel’s Like Water for Chocolate, and Alan Lightman’s Einstein’s Dreams, plus another two, which i forgot. it was the first time a big heartfelt smile broke across my face since a mixture of everything bad shattered my faith in life.

typhoons are in no way uncommon in any land, save for those dry countries in which storms are loose grains of sharp sand, though what we are used to are not as rampaging as this last one. a month’s amount of rain in a day’s downpour. hours of wailing and pleading for help. hundreds of bodies buried in the mud, houses broken down, homes shattered. days of bleak darkness and mortal fear. weeks of search and recovery. months of misery and famine. years of mourning and haled recuperation… and a scar in the face of this country to last a lifetime.

if there is one good thing this calamity has brought up, that would be the universal feeling of outpouring concern, which compelled us all to move and lend our hands to people who we know are practically within our reach. but, would we care this much if it happened somewhere else far from our roots? as what my friend, Jaycee, and i were discussing the other night, everything becomes a matter of proximity. people don't really care unless it's happening right in their own backyard. i just hope this disaster would serve its purpose of reminding us, dear dwellers of the earth, to stop complaining about the world deteriorating right before our eyes and start doing something about it. is this exactly what we really dreamed of when we gripped on a frantic swirl of transforming this place into a bricked society, under the mantle of our desires to live conveniently? i don’t see any convenience in this. we might be able to move faster today, only to spend our spare time on things that matter less in our lives. and i’m guilty of drinking all night and slacking off in front of the television or this darn computer!

each of us has a typhoon of his own, be it financial instability, emotional turmoil, or even life crisis. what we often do not realize is that, just like the victims, anyone is a potential sufferer, and unless we initiate changes, tragedies will continue to hound us.

from a 'taxi ride' story

"Life may not be the party we hoped for, but while we are here we might as well dance."

poem of the week

If You Forget Me
Pablo Neruda


I want you to know
one thing.

You know how this is:
if I look
at the crystal moon, at the red branch
of the slow autumn at my window,
if I touch
near the fire
the impalpable ash
or the wrinkled body of the log,
everything carries me to you,
as if everything that exists,
aromas, light, metals,
were little boats
that sail
toward those isles of yours that wait for me.

Well, now,
if little by little you stop loving me
I shall stop loving you little by little.

If suddenly
you forget me
do not look for me,
for I shall already have forgotten you.

If you think it long and mad,
the wind of banners
that passes through my life,
and you decide
to leave me at the shore
of the heart where I have roots,
remember
that on that day,
at that hour,
I shall lift my arms
and my roots will set off
to seek another land.

But
if each day,
each hour,
you feel that you are destined for me
with implacable sweetness,
if each day a flower
climbs up to your lips to seek me,
ah my love, ah my own,
in me all that fire is repeated,
in me nothing is extinguished or forgotten,
my love feeds on your love, beloved,
and as long as you live it will be in your arms
without leaving mine

anak ng ungas naman oh!

napaka-indolent/useless/unproductive ko these days... ok, may masabi lang.

a poetic description of poetry itself by the greatest romantic poet of all time

(Neruda's somehow personal yet universal account of poetry)


Poetry
Pablo Neruda

And it was at that age ... Poetry arrived
in search of me. I don't know, I don't know where
it came from, from winter or a river.
I don't know how or when,
no they were not voices, they were not
words, nor silence,
but from a street I was summoned,
from the branches of night,
abruptly from the others,
among violent fires
or returning alone,
there I was without a face
and it touched me.

I did not know what to say, my mouth
had no way
with names,
my eyes were blind,
and something started in my soul,
fever or forgotten wings,
and I made my own way,
deciphering
that fire,
and I wrote the first faint line,
faint, without substance, pure
nonsense,
pure wisdom
of someone who knows nothing,
and suddenly I saw
the heavens
unfastened
and open,
planets,
palpitating plantations,
shadow perforated,
riddled
with arrows, fire and flowers,
the winding night, the universe.

And I, infinitesimal being,
drunk with the great starry
void,
likeness, image of
mystery,
felt myself a pure part
of the abyss,
I wheeled with the stars,
my heart broke loose on the wind.