dominattyrix tredux

I'm making the move to this site.

It's still under construction, the links aren't all up yet but I've made a few entries since I couldn't log into blogger again for the past few days.

My lay out sucks but atleast now the text is a lot easier on the eyes, no more all-black background, border nalang, hehe.

migrating

I decided to sign up for Typepad's service and will be migrating soon.

I'm still setting up the templates, I never had the time to finish doing the lay-out. Not that I am great at it. :-(

Watch out for the new URL soon.

goodbye, grams :-(

Grams passed away last week.

That explains my long absence from blogging. I haven't turned on this computer for 10 days. Been real busy with the lamay, funeral arrangements, preparing the eulogy--a first for me! It's not exactly uso in my family. As a lapsed Catholic I have no idea if writing a eulogy for the dearly departed is uso with other Catholic families. The tip came from Gab, who's an "expert" when it comes to OC-stuff, and since her lolas have gone before mine, she and her family had gone through a lot of the preparations and I truly appreciate the tips that she shared with me.

More updates later. I'm still recovering from the sleepless nights--bagyo and all.

________________________________

After "googling" the search words "Catholic eulogy" I came upon a site dated in 2000 that says it's allowed.

However, a more recent aritcle that came out in 2003 reports that eulogies are banned during mass in Newark, New Jersey. Their point is that "liturgy is an act of worship" and while the life of the deceased ought to be remembered, the gospel and the homily ought to be the focus of the mass. Here's an interesting quote from the same site:

"For some non-Catholic churches," he said, "the funeral is primarily a time for remembrance and celebration of a person's life. For Catholics, however, the intercession for the dead is the central focus of the funeral liturgy." As their experience with the revised funeral rites grew, he said, many bishops have found a need to address "problems with the length and content of eulogies and the tendency for some people to take advantage of the occasion ... to address extraneous family matters or even political topics."

I haven't found anything about local bans from the CBCP or maybe I just haven't looked hard enough. But now that I think about it, maybe that's the reason why the officiating priest (who was obviously in a hurry) informed us that the eulogy should be read after the final blessing. Hmmm...

I'm agnostic in theory but I also happen to be very big on rituals. I have come up with a hodgepodge of meaningful "rites" for various occassions culled from pagan influences. i suggested the eulogy because I thought that many of my relatives had already forgotten about grams' many fine qualities. In her old age and subsequent illness, they had forgotten to visit her, check on how she's doing. When she died, ironically (though not surprisingly) that's when they all decided to turn up. The eulogy was a a good reminder.

grams' death also brought some clan members back into the fold. Former enemies declared their truce. Atleast temporarily. I guess the priest didn't want to hear about lola's famous cooking, or her famous one-liners. That's okay. We all did. We remember. We'll never forget.

___________________________

Still on eulogies. This site says custom-made eulogies can be ordered onlone for US$250, while ready-made speeches are available at $25 a pop. But to ask a stranger to write the eulogy for your loved one is so inappropriate, don't you think? :-(

hot guy alert?

Meet Welsh hottie Ioan Gruffudd (pronounced YO-an GRIFF-ith), another strong contender to the much coveted James Bond role.

He played bearded Lancelot in King Arthur (with Keira Knightley and Clive Owen). He's yummy too, though Jude Law is yummiest, of course!

bitten

I really think Anne Rice is over-rated, no offense to her fans out there. So after reading Interview (of the Lestat series), down to Memnoch, I was bored to tears so I naturally gave up on the super-natural. The undead men in Rice's novels were shallow, hey, PTerry also writes about vampires, werewolves, zombies and the rest of the undead but PTerry is FUNNY hence, enjoyable.

I was never into Buffy, never mind that there are lesbian characters like Tara and Willow. Sarah Geller just doesn't appeal to me. Somehow I never found her anorexic figure to be a convincing heroine (or "shero"?), but maybe that's just me. To Buffy's creators' credit, they did contribute to redefining what it means to kick butt, blonde chick style.

I've also been hearing a lot about Laurell K. Hamilton's Anita Blake series but never gotten around to getting any of her books, instead I picked up Kelley Armstrong's Bitten, the first of her Women of the Otherworld series. I had no expectations, I just wanted a light read after all the Foucault books I've been staying up late for. But I was pleasantly surprised to find it to be highly enjoyable. The main character, Elena Michaels is the one and only female werewolf. According to Armstrong's lore, werewolfism is passed via the Y-chromosome, i.e., from fathers to sons and the only way to have female werewolves is to BITE 'EM (hence the title). Elena is one among the very few who survived being bitten plus the agonizing process of "transforming" and adapting to her state of having a dual-citizenship (er should I say, speciesenship?).

Told from Elena's point of view, the book says a lot about what it means to be human (sometimes vicious, kiling for the sheer fun of it, twisted) and what it meas to be animalistic (for wolves who live in hierarchical packs, they protect each other, but are also very territorial).

Will have to go back to Powerbooks soon to get the sequel which is called Stolen. If caught red handed, all the shop-lifter has to do is say, "look at the book's title! Who could blame me?" ;-)

I'm Baaaaack!

For a while there I thought I was a victim of "blog-jacking" (na-high-jack na blog?) AGAIN, after that incident with mblog (viz, "blognapping") I was resigned to the tragic fate of my dominattyrix blogs.

Glad to note that I could now log onto the blogger dashboard and see MY blog for a change! For the past week I had a bit of an identity-crisis where logging on to blogger meant getting to the edit menu of blogs of different people, WEIRD! I also couldn't get to the comments page, so had to use anonymous. Now things are working okay again so, thanks Blogger! :-D

I signed up for a typepad account (30-day trial period) using a different alias and I'm loving it. :-) Typepad is such a friendly software, even better than MT, I created "Type Lists" where I listed all the books, music and links I am currently into and it automatically seeks the thumbnails of book covers, album covers, and URLs. Nifty! I'm such a kuripot though, me wonders if $4.95 a month is worth it. Blogger is still free after all, despite the occasional glitches.

Stolen Chain

Let's lighten it up:

(A) First, recommend to me:
1. a movie
2. a book
3. a musical artist, song, or album

(B) I want everyone who reads this to ask me three questions, no more, no less. Ask me anything you want.

(C) Then I want you to go to your journal, copy and paste this allowing your friends to ask you anything; say that you stole it from me.

I stole this from Lady C (who stole it from Pinay Hekmi)!

Happy Philosophy Day, everyone!

Yep, you read that right.

For all it’s worth, today is “Philosophy Day” according to UNESCO. We had a small celebration at the uni, with the twin book launch and philo debates serving as high lights, glad that catering and festivity frills were sponsored by (the RP reps of? Cesar Montano, is that you? He's a UNESCO rep of RP isn't he?) UNESCO, Philosophy Division. I had been studying philosophy for 15 years now and when I first heard about it a month go the concept of celebrating it was totally new to me. Geez. All this time, UNESCO has had a philo division? They even sponsored lectures by JP Sartre many decades ago, this I learned from a printout of an old events brochure. Wow! We never had such celebrations in the past and if my boss is correct, this is also the first time that Philo Day is marked as an “event” in this country, and only the third time all around the globe.

I am making a huge deal of it because let’s face it, I honestly don’t know a lot of people outside of the campus walls who would admit to loving the discipline, much less claiming to “know” what it is that preoccupies “philosophers” – the Filipino understanding of “pilosopo” or “pilosopa” (to be absolutely PC) just doesn’t cut it. Neither does the more intellectual sounding “pantas mahal.” Philosophers get a lot of flak for being a contumacious bunch of nitpicky parsers, obscurantists all—making not-so fine ontological distinctions between “Being” and “being” (note the big B and the small b), i.e., the Dasein and the Das Man. So much for Heideggerian metaphysics. Hedeggerrrr talaga!

I’d like to think however that today’s line up of activities made quite an impact on the students. Our philo undergrad majors held a Philo contest [three rounds: quiz format, (objective type and content based), essay writing, and for the finals round, an on the spot orals on philosophical issues] they initially dubbed the Philosopher-King’s Cup (after Plato’s ideal ruler, of course). They had to drop the “King” because the rabid feminist faculty-PC police (ahem) objected to the royal title. ‘Twas a great thing too because the champion was not a King but a “Queen” – a Philosophress won 3K in cash, and her name (as the very first champ) will be engraved in a shiny new silver cup that closely resembles the Wimbledon trophy.

To raise funds the students had the caricature of Nietzsche printed on nifty white shirts and they sold like hotcakes. I was disappointed that they picked Nietzsche. I mean yeah, he had a remarkable moustache, and a distinct profile but why him? I was telling Gab that Socrates could’ve made a more interesting figure, stubby nose, high forehead, long white beard, the baldy geezer had more character. Or what about Ayn Rand (ok, technically “not” a philosopher but very interesting face), and Dame Simone de Beauvoir? Or Jean Paul Sartre the cross-eyed existentialist Frenchie? Hmmm… now profiteering from these very people whose works constantly give us headaches is beginning to sound promising. After all we in the philosophy department do not expect to get rich via our usual “trade” being so high up in the ivory tower so might as well milk them for all they’re worth eh? Ha!

Then there was also an exhibit, The Dead White Male Philosophers Gallery where portraits of philosophers were showcased. The title of the exhibit was a joke, I submitted it to make a point, but hey I never expected them to keep the tilte. They actually thought it was cool, argh! However now I am more ambivalent. I hate it when I’m the only one who’s laughing! :-(

What rhymes with TURD?

I have deliberately stayed away from the blogosphere this past week because of school-related toil and trouble. The thankless chore of facing a never-ending cycle of papers to grade and write reminds me of poor condemned Sisyphus. At the home front, it is even more chaotic, I’d rather not launch into a sob-story lest I begin to sound like Flor de Luna, or Ana Liza or… (insert your Pinoy soap opera “vida” of choice here).

I stumbled upon this quote from an essay by Meaghan Morris in a book Gab recently purchased for me, it's a tome called Feminism and Foucault: Reflections on Resistance.

“Lacking faith in their ability to change anything, resigned to the status quo, they have to see beauty in turds because, so far as they can see, turds are all they’ll ever have.”

I couldn't agree more. Mine's a crappy life. I feel like I’m swimming in a bowl full of turds. Where is the beauty in that? And is that all I’ll ever have? Swimming with the turds may not be fine and dandy but that’s my reality, and I truly can’t let that get me down.

All I need right now is a wee bit of humor, so excuse me while I drown myself silly in some Pterry Brit humor. Pterry coined a rhyme word called “knurd” but I dunno what that means? Nothing “absurd” I hope.

Hey, rhyming rocks! Would love to come up with a rap thing one of these days, or slam poetry maybe? Ambisyosa! :-)

pissing styles

In my Genders class some days ago, a discussion on gender roles and gender traits was diverted to a discussion on "pissing styles". A smart-ass male student wanted to "prove" to everyone that there is one thing that men can do that women can't because of simple biological make-up, i.e., piss in a communal bowl at the same time. The boys in my class were gleaming with pride for this so-called feat.

Had to burst their bubble when I started telling them that some women are already doing that as they had been raised by their mothers to pee standing up. I didn't want to tell them that I occasionally practice certain techniques found on this site, especially how to avoid dribbles and sprays. Not an easy thing to do, and since I am often rushing anyway, I always forget to "practice."

I truly believe that this technique if or when perfected by women could be very useful, especially when traveling. Public toilets could be filthy and very nasty in Manila, and I can't imagine how those with weaker knees actually manage to "squat" as they piss, sans tissue or water to wipe the toilet seat.

This isn't really about a pissing contest. Men pee standing up, fine. But women can do the same thing with a bit of practice. It's a bit trickier but the key is to learn how to "aim" well and not end up wetting your pants, or have the liquid dribble along your thighs.

From the practical side of things, the construction of female urinals (perhaps this is what Bayani Fernando really had in mind with the Hot Pink Urinals all over the metro?) seem more cost efficient compared to the toilet which consumes a lot of water, plus queuing to unload your bladder in the ladies room always takes ages!