Music Questions, and other stories

Jolens14 Comments

Do you have any fan merchandise that is unusual?

I don’t think so, no. I was a broke-ass kid so I was never the type to spend money on fan merch.

I used to be surrounded by artists though, and they used to give me the coolest hand-made gifts. A teacher once gave me a wooden kunai (the ninja weapon from Naruto) which he carved out of mahogany. A schoolmate also gifted me a guitar pick with the Natin99 pattern that he painted himself. The paint (acrylic?) easily chipped off when I started using the pick, and so this guy reminded me that the gift wasn’t made for actual use: “pang-collector’s item kasi ‘yan!” Shet sorry naman! Haha.

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June

Jolens1 Comment

Today marks Day 4 of my attempt to solve an Excel VBA problem at work. My sheets look the same as they did last Friday, and the fact that I haven’t moved forward on this task makes me feel like my brain is nothing but a slightly cognitive swirl of cow manure graced with a dead langaw on top. Hayayay.

But anyway, let’s talk about June.

June was the month when I just wasn’t in the mood to do anything. Normally I would force myself to write a post every Sunday but I didn’t feel like doing that last month. I also got sick, I barely ate, and I struggled with both waking up in the morning and sleeping at night.

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Searching 3.0: OPM and Figures of Speech

Jolens15 Comments

An interesting query I found in last week’s Search Terms:

My post has a few examples, but it doesn’t explicitly state which lines count as personification. Hopefully the kids who were searching still found it helpful; I bet you they were actual kids cramming for an English or Filipino assignment. 🙂

Anyhow, I decided to do some further digging and write about the different ways figurative language has featured in OPM lyrics. I initially wanted to explore at least 10 figures of speech, but because I tend to get way too chatty about these things, I eventually narrowed them down to three: simile, metaphor, and personification.

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Mundane Monday

Jolens8 Comments

I didn’t do anything productive at work today. No urgent tasks, no nothing. I just spent the first half of the day teaching myself SQL queries but I never got my code to work. Whatever.

For lunch our team went to an Asian restaurant, the kind where the chefs cook the food right in front you. I had salmon and veggies. I also wanted to try their unagi but maybe some other time, hopefully this weekend when my parents come over to visit.

After lunch I started working on a mini research project. I asked a colleague for ideas on how to narrow down the topic, and she recommended that I focus on the math, M&V and stuff. “I have resources I could send you,” she said. She never sent shit.

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Sunday Night Sadness

Jolens6 Comments

It is one of those nights again.

Two words come to mind: lethargic, as DJ would say, and languorous, which according to Google means “oppressive stillness.” Now isn’t that accurate?

It must be the loneliness, I don’t know, but I don’t even have the energy to write anything tonight. I’ve been collecting sadness though, and I’ve been disposing them onto my sketchpad. Go and have a look. And if you don’t mind, dear stranger, please send hugs if you could. 😦

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On Sid & Aya (Not a Love Story)

Jolens2 Comments

It is precisely the parenthetical reminder in the title that compels me to pay closer attention to Irene Villamor’s Sid & Aya (Not A Love Story). The textual framing calls attention to itself. It is gimmicky, sure, but it is also an unveiling of directorial intent and an invitation for the viewers to examine what exactly makes this movie not a love story.

From this examination stems what I deem to be the film’s ambition. Sid & Aya centers on the familiar Rich Boy Poor Girl coupling, but it swerves around the typical trajectory from Meet-cute to Happily Ever After. The film instead parses a familiar premise and plays around the tried-and-tested formula of the cross-class romance genre [1].

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