About a week or so ago, I tagged along Stick’s shoot. It featured a few of the Azkals representing a sports brand, and I was told it was for school. I know very little beyond that. I went along because I thought I would be able to get in a few shots of these people in a nice studio setting. But a bunch of things happened and I got there pretty late, along with Sarie and Bia.

(These photos have no captions because I have no idea who’s who. Lessons would be most welcome!)

The shoot was wrapping up by the time we got there, and I couldn’t really get much on my camera, as I brought the 35mm. In any case, I got in a few good pictures (in my humble opinion) anyway. Not of the Azkals, but of the people who were behind-the-scenes.

It turns out that the owner of ACME Studios, Sir Ocs Alvarez, has been into photography for quite a while. We were admiring his collection of vintage cameras, when he slowly started bringing out his babies.

And then we were introduced to one with a Polaroid back attachment and all hell broke loose.

(This was the first one taken.)

(This was the last shot.)

It’s kind of funny to take photos with people you don’t really know. The polas I did manage to smuggle out of there (to scan, not to steal!) are of me and people I do actually know, though, so it’s OK!

The following photos are of me, Sarie, Bia, Stick, Chiara, and her boyfriend, Jack.

Worst at synchronized jumping.

Worst at conga-lining-up.

It was a fun afternoon. We had dinner at Pancake House after and I tried their fried chicken for the first time! This is one instance where I actually enjoyed meeting new people (including a Karina with a “K”!) and getting to know some of those I already knew a little bit better. I also had fun taking photos and looking at the cameras people used to use for photography.

Did it make me feel small? Maybe a little bit. But more than anything, it just made me want to be better at taking pictures. To really learn what it means to understand light and how to react to it. I am no photographer—I get by with loads of guesswork and intuition. I think it’s about time I learned how to be better at it, though. Not for any reason other than me wanting to be.

Anyway, what I am saying is that: it was fun. It was fun & I’d like to do something like that again.

Click for more fun photos!

Reasons Why I Have Been MIA:

• ONDOY: Ondoy, or Typhoon Ketsana to the rest of the world, has been keeping me busy. When I’m online, I’m usually posting on Tumblr or Twitter or Facebook about Ondoy and news on relief operations.
• That’s mostly it.

It just seems like whatever I do choose to update about, it would seem callous to post, when all this ridiculous crap is going on in the world. The Ondoy posters that I made, I posted on Tumblr and social networking sites because my ‘readership,’ so to speak, is bigger there. I mean, the only people who read this are people I know in real life, people who get here from links by people I know in real life and the occasional random stranger who clicked something and ended up here. (By the way, I appreciate you all.)

Anyway, I’ll be making a lessons-I-learned-from-Ondoy-type post in a while. I just wanted to get everything else out of the way, so things are more organized. Or something like that. (!) So, in the time I was away, here are a few of the things that happened:

1. I turned 21. I was born on 29 September 1988 & this year I turned 21.
I feel like a little part of me has died, because I do not feel like 21 at all.
But I am hoping for the best. Maybe I will catch a break this year, y/y?

2. Been makin’ some art. (!) I started this website with the intention of
posting works in progress, current projects, et cetera. Obviously, did not happen.
But let’s change that! This is for Redefine. (a close up!)

3. CCF Relief Operations. I’m the smallest person in this photo. c/o Isa!

4. Watched Game 1 of the UAAP Finals. This is a photo of Father Dacanay,
who is pretty much my favorite. (If you don’t know him, you are probably not Atenean.)
He brought this jersey and wore it over his barong towards the end of the game.

S’more photos from the game:


Me & my dad, and me & my sister.

5. Panic-buying. We went to SnR yesterday to buy stuff since a new typhoon is a-brewin’.
Here is a photo of my favorite coffee brew of all time. (Of all time!) No lie, DD is the best.
It costs twice as much as what we buy (Folgers, ugh!) but we got 3 bags.
BECAUSE IT IS THE BEST. Was tempted to get more since it’s hard to come by.

O HAI. I’ll be making some changes to this website, so I guess watch out for that. I hope? Yes? See you guys later & stay safe, wherever you are.

So, in case you did not notice, Nothing Spaces was down for a week. Pretty timely, too, since I was looking forward to updating about my Phenomenal! Week! But yeah, so it goes. My brother talked to the host, though, so things are well for now.

Since I’d been itching to update but couldn’t, I made a vlog (lest things turn irrelevant, as they are wont to do). Yes, I went there. Here it is!

HAHA. Say hello to my stupid face for five and a half minutes. Wow, aren’t I wordy?

(P.S. I’d been ‘vlogging’ for a while in 2007, I think, then stopped because some people I knew in real life found it and it was way awkward. And also, I’m not really very funny, so I ran out of material right away. Ho hum.)

Double P.S.: I got an account over at DailyBooth. Here is my last picture:

Let me know in the comments if you have one! :)

photo by the wonderful regina belmonte

I’m the one person in the world who is probably the least likely to be interested in sports of any kind. Mostly because I am not good at any of them. (My favorite P.E. class in college was PE 101, which was basically a lecture class on health and the human body.) And it’s not just sports. I basically suck at everything that concerns any sort of physicality and/or coordination.¹

And so, I find my great (and I do mean great) investment in Ateneo basketball games (and only Ateneo basketball games) curious.

I know it’s not because of the personal opinion that Ateneo! Is! The! Best! for two reasons: a) I’d been supporting the Ateneo Blue Eagles since I was a high school freshman at an all-girls private school so the “school spirit” really came from nowhere; Ateneo wasn’t even my first choice, and b) I hated being Atenean, until about the second semester of second year when I experienced a complete turn-around, out of nowhere, and suddenly realized that I did love — yes, love! — bleeding blue.

It’s definitely not about the sport because I don’t know the rules completely, I don’t know all the terms. Sometimes, I cheer by mistake because I misread the ref’s calls. I have no idea what a turnover is, what the difference between all those fouls are, how many minutes each quarter starts with, and I could go on about the things I don’t know about basketball, but I will spare you.

It’s not about the grace of the game, or winning them — school spirit or no school spirit.

I think the reason why I am so deeply invested in the Ateneo games is because I deeply believe in the Ateneo way. In Magis, in being a man for others, in doing things for the greater glory of God. Watching Ateneo games, regardless of the outcome, makes me witness such an admirable display of perseverance, where there is always something more to want and to aspire to.

They almost always feel like that last scene from The Two Towers, where Frodo is about to quit, but Sam won’t let him. “There’s some good in the world, and it’s worth fighting for.” In other words, it’s not over, until it’s over. Personally, it has rarely ever been about winning so I could gloat about my school’s victory, or about using basketball stats to prove which school is better.

I love the games because every time Ateneo wins, it always feels to me as though the good guys win, and it always feels stellar to be a part of that. It’s like being in a family. Watching Ateneo win is exhilirating. Watching Ateneo lose is disappointing, but in a strange way, comforting, because there is always that knowledge that what we did was try, try, try, and no one can fault anyone for losing after all that trying.

This sounds like sentimental claptrap, because it is sentimental. It’s sentimental because I am not really, in the strictest sense, a basketball fan. A main reason why I enjoy watching games because I enjoy seeing the players do better. Even if we’ve never spoken to each other, or if some of them seem like douches (haha) in real life, during an Ateneo game, they feel like family, and it feels great seeing them just really try to be better.

Regina wrote that there is nothing in the world like an Ateneo-La Salle game, and I really and willfully concede to this observation. There’s nothing like an Ateneo-La Salle game because there is probably no other tandem in the world that fights as fervently in what they believe in. Eric Salamat in a Guidon article: “Actually every La Salle-Ateneo game, yung fire ng mga players talagang gusto nilang durugin yung isa’t isa para ipakita talaga yung school pride.” I’m not really in an I-want-to-crush-people-from-the-other-school mood and never really have been, but Eric is right, because what I basically really want to say, and what I’ve been trying to say for the past few hundred words can be summed up in four:

And that is precisely why, to borrow from the NBA, “I love this game!²”

———
¹ New Family Joke: They said that the only exercise I get in is via my flailing about whenever Ateneo scores or misses a shot.
² But only if Ateneo is playing.