All My Children

If you have kids, you probably know what I mean. You try to not play favorites among your children, but the fact is, you do, even if you don't tell them. And you know what? They probably know too, but it's ok to keep the fiction that there is no favorite.

But now and then, you may 'switch favorites' for awhile and it's not for any reason, but truly because you love them all. But maybe one week, one of them comes up and has a hold on your heart, or needs your attention, or has a knife at your throat and you spend more time with that one.

This past month, DJ Evil Twin has been my favorite child. I should be spending time writing my novel, or writing stuff for No Milk Please, but Tracey Thorn's CD Out of The Woods has really inspired me to remix some really great songs in the album to dance greatness. Tracey is the vocalist of the group Everything But The Girl and as usual, she sings with emotion and depth. But underneath the subdued production, I hear the notes that are the bones of a soaring dance anthem.

The album already has a few singles out that have been remixed like "Grand Canyon" (amazing mixes!), "It's All True," and "King's Cross" so I am concentrating on the other album tracks. Of course, I also enjoy designing the graphics that go along with the mixes. I imagine that I am designing the CD covers of these songs if they were released as singles.

Along with the ones I already mixed below, I am planning to do a couple more mixes from the album, probably "Nowhere Near" and "Piccadilly Station." The keys in those songs are itching to be sampled and looped. Stay tuned.

Each mix can take up to a month to do. So if there is no new post here, check out DJ Evil Twin and see what's happenin' there.





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Tracey's CD:

Oscar Hangover

I lost 5 pounds over the past two weeks and I still wasn't able to wrangle an invite to those damn f*cking gay A-list Oscar parties, so I spent last night gaining all the weight back by ordering a couple of large pizzas (sans cheese) and guzzled it down with some box wine from Franzia.

Is it just me or did Javier Bardem get hot?

Oh Squiggly Line

oh, squiggly line 
    in my eye fluid
i see you there 
             lurking
on the periphery of my vision

but when i try to look at you
                 you scurry away

are you shy, squiggly line?

why, only when i ignore you
                 do you return 
to the center of my eye?

oh, squiggly line
                 it's alright,
you are forgiven.

- Stewie Griffin, Family Guy

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Poetry - Schmoetry. Stuff that rhyme and shit. Some of my favorites.

Tribes

Waking up is an ache, eyelids ebb to darkness. The sheets tangle my legs like tall weeds, the blanket a weight. This is the first battle of the day, 6 am, mid-winter morning. If I can get out of bed soon enough, I have time to go to the gym. Thirty minutes of cardio, a quick shower and then, I am off to work. I am hoping that this will shave off a few pounds.


It's only been a couple of weeks since I started going to the gym in the morning. More than anything, starting a new routine is the most difficult. Mentally, you fight it, you just want to just sink deeper into the couch and reach into a bag of potato chips for comfort. But today, the imaginary sound of jeering at my lumpy abs pushed me out of bed.

The gym in the morning is not a pretty sight. The people here stumbled out of bed in their rumpled shirts, ponytails, stubble and beards. I call these folks The Determined. They include people who are generally optimistic: people who are determined to stick with their New Year's resolutions; 40 year-old guys determined to lose weight faster than losing their hair; brides who are determined to fit into their wedding gowns by June.

There is hardly any talking; people are either in the zone or they have morning breath. I'm of the latter.

The only people chatting are the ones lifting weights. Weirdos. Who lifts weights in the morning? Besides, it's hard to be chatty first thing in the morning, especially after you just woke and realized that your body has gone to shit and unless you can come up with $5,000 for lipo, you have to be on that damn treadmill.

After my run, I don't dawdle in the locker room. For gay guys, the locker room has sort of a languid effect: we take like 30 minutes to put on a sock when it normally takes seconds. I shrug it off, I can cruise the showers when I come back later after work.

Come back later? Yes, you heard me right. After work, I head back to the gym to do some weight lifting. My biceps cry when I neglect them.

The gym in the evening is a totally different scene. The regulars--the ones who have managed to stick around after their trial membership was over--are a very peculiar bunch. I call them The Deranged: homos in our standard lung-crushing outfits; women in full make-up and hair; businessmen in pit-stained undershirts. Some are multi-taskers, combining their work-out with reading a book, catching up on the news or twirling an imaginary baton.

There are also the American Idol hopefuls, who sing along with their iPods, melisma included; the ones who do little dance moves as they go from machine to machine; and my personal favorites, the rapper wannabe's who rap under their breaths, throwing arms and hands as if they were on BET.

Then, there is Lance. Lance is a tall black guy who does the most insane dance moves on the elliptical machine. He puts on his tunes, then does full-on dance routines as if he was auditioning for Bruno and Carrie Ann. I serious. He crank dat and superman dat ho the whole 30 minutes on the machine. I don't know whether to laugh or give him my phone number.

(And listen folks, just because we have our tunes on, and we can't hear you fart, doesn't mean we can't smell you. So please, at least move to a corner or stand next to somebody really annoyingly skinny before releasing your fumes.)

But I try to avoid going to the gym at lunch time. The people who work out at noon are whom I call The Desperate: brides one week from their wedding day; bridesmaids who don’t want to be the 'fat one' in the party; Adnan Ghalib. These are the people who have the motto "Starvation = Hope," sort of ironic, I think in these post-Katrina times.

I understand completely of course, if I don’t lose 5 pounds before the Oscars, the superbowl of the gays, I'll just die. You know there will be a bunch of A-list parties that won't let me in because I will flunk the body fat detector machine they put by the door.

But I am of The Determined; this is my tribe--for now. It's already working: I pulled out a pair of jeans that I used to wear 5 years ago and I can almost snap the button around my thigh. Pretty soon, I will be able to put both legs in. I still have just a leeetle bit of time to lose some more weight before I have to start working out at lunch...

First Love

I was blind to you when you loved me long ago.
I switched you for another, like Isaac,
for a smell, and a taste, and an appetite for meat,
for a fragrance of the field, and a house, and a little heat.
I have forgotten the words
of the only letter I wrote to you.
All that I remember is the taste of the glue of the stamp
on my tongue.
The fate that determined us was not really
destiny,
but it was as strong and sure as the finger of the violinist
that determines the fate of a note,
though it, too, is as final and as decisive
as death.

- Yehuda Amichai
(translated, from the Hebrew, by Leon Wieseltier.)

For all lost loves.

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Related posts:

Where My Feet Once Walked - Also by Yehuda Amichai

Poetry - Schmoetry. Stuff that rhyme and shit. Some of my favorites.

Logo Madness

If you haven't noticed yet, the blog has a new temporary logo which will be up until Valentine's Day.

In a fit of creativity, I had created a bunch of new logos for No Milk Please which I intend to put up during the holidays and maybe when I'm feeling bored with the standard logo. But I'm impatient and I don't think I can wait a whole year to unfold these, so I decided to post them now as a little preview.

Seasonal







Non-seasonal





Some of them will be up for only a day, others I may keep for the duration of the holiday. I haven't decided what to do about the non-seasonal ones. I thought they were cute, but I can't really have a different logo every week. I thought they were fun to make though.

If you have any concepts you can think of, put them in the comments. Maybe I'll be inspired by them. I think I've exhausted all the evil cow/poisoned dairy themes. You can also send me pics that could be interesting to make into a logo.

If you want to try your hand at a No Milk Please logo, please feel free to send them to me, maybe we could get a contest going. Winner gets to do my laundry.

Also, if you haven't visited the Sidebar lately, this past weekend, I have re-designed the template so that it was more cohesive with the main site. :)

Thinking the Unthinkable

He said, She said. Annie and Paul went to Lynda Barry's writing workshop Writing The Unthinkable. Paul thinks it's changed the way he views writing; Annie is a happy puppy. Read on!

I know there’s a level of trepidation one must feel when signing up for a writing workshop called "Writing The Unthinkable," but if you’re seriously considering it, let me allay your fears: it is not scary, it’s not stressful and it’s not going to be like going to the principal’s office. In fact, instructor Lynda Barry, would probably be sitting next to you getting reamed by the principal. Yes, it is writing intensive: you will be writing at a level and speed of which you’ve probably never experienced. It’s going to be emotional, because the workshop will be accessing your memories, your deepest feelings and imagination in a very connected manner. There were a couple of times that I felt choked up during one of the writing exercises. I was writing and trying to hold myself together at the same time because I didn’t want anybody to think what a wuss I was, especially after I took the time to wear a football jersey to convey my masculinity. Kelly Hogan, our class monitor, thoughtfully pointed out at the start of the class the various locations she placed boxes of Kleenex, probably because she knew from experience how some Asian in a football jersey may need it. I think that starting out with what the class isn’t may be easier for you to understand what it is. It is not going to teach you grammar, or how to find an agent, or how to write dialogue or plot. It’s not going to teach you how to become a famous author. read what He said.

The nearer this class got, the more my excitement became nervousness, which then became scared shitlessness. Now that it’s over I want to live there, leaving only for lemon and brown sugar crepe breaks. Even though "Writing the Unthinkable" was "marketed for 'non-writers' like bartenders, janitors, office workers, hairdressers--anyone who has given up on 'being a writer' but still wonders what it might be like to write," it wasn't until reading Anne Elliott’s blog describing the not just encouraged but mandatory anonymity that I said, "Sign me up!" And I don't just mean no-last-names anonymity. We're talking Deep Throat anonymity, the kind that allowed you to read your work out loud and be nothing more than a disembodied voice to your classmates. Not that this was enough to get me to participate; some of us require an anonymity of even greater depths. I call this nirvana state annienymity. Regardless, I still managed to freak myself into a panic attack: What if the rules changed? What if reading out loud is now mandatory? What if it always was but my subconscious desire read the word "voluntary" simply as a coping mechanism? What if my high school nemesis is there, or worse, my WBF (work boyfriend, people--don’t pretend you don't have one)? What if someone writes about their childhood abuse and it gets all group huggy except the girl with the dead heart looking for a way to escape this freakshow? What if everyone writes about their childhood abuse and I write about my cat? read what She said.

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More Unthinkable:


Recommended books by Lynda Barry:

Patience

When I was four, I witnessed something quite horrible, though at that time it seemed curious as well.

I know that in these YouTube days, horror mingled with curiosity are quite pedestrian, there's someone posting a horrifying video that you can't take your eyes off right this minute. But in those days, the mixture of horror and curiosity was something you can only experience first-hand.

Let me step back a bit and paint you a picture of that beautiful early summer, in my hometown in the Philippines. The temperature was mild and sunny almost every day. In a month, the sun will turn treacherous and burn your skin in a minute, but right then, it was just perfect. You could run around for days and not break out in a sweat.

Our dog, Patience--Pasensiya in Tagalog, was pregnant. Patience was a mutt, with creamy short hair. Her face and legs were often caked in mud, as if she just came from nosing around somewhere in the garden.

You know how all your pets in your childhood seemed larger than any animals later in your life? Patience was like that for me when I was four. When I hugged her, she filled my arms. Her head was the size of my head. When she licked me with her warm, wet tongue, it felt like the little washcloth they give you in Japanese restaurants to wipe your hands (although I like to wipe my face in it too because it is so refreshing).

When I sit back and think about it now, rationally, she must've been just an average dog, maybe even on the small side. Even in the few seconds of this rational thinking, my memories have been altered, split into two parallel universes; Patience's bigness/smallness now co-exist in my mind. It's a bit jarring, like fun house mirrors.

Patience was lean, as most dogs were in the Philippines, as she was fed only rice and scraps, whatever she can manage from under the table. My two cats these days are spoiled gluttons compared all the pets I had in my youth. Patience's leanness only emphasized the size of her pregnancy. When I touched the skin on her gravid stomach, it felt tight, hot.

It must be said that I didn't really understand that Patience was pregnant. I'm sure somebody explained it to me, but even then, so what? Even though my vocabulary was expanding by the minute, comprehension was limited to things my child's mind was occupied with. Some words only strike a hollow fear: 'Death,' 'Divorce,' 'Donnie Osmond,' they didn't hold any true meaning.

I remember up until the day Patience was to give birth, she was playful and exuberant. I don't know if this was the case with most pregnant dogs; Patience was the only pregnant animal that I had ever been in close contact with. That made her disappearance so odd.

I looked for her all around the house, looking under couches and behind shrubs. I found my brother's chewed up plastic truck--but no dog.

I went to my mother then, who was sewing something, maybe another pair of pajamas pants. My siblings and I wore them all day in those days. She helped me look.

Eventually we found Patience in the garage. She was hiding in a corner behind a old spare tire, lying on her side, panting. She looked at us disinterestedly, saving her energy.

My mother said, "Patience is about to have babies, it looks like."

I was excited, even though I didn't know what to expect. We stood looking on for a few minutes. But then suddenly, it started.

Swoosh! Out came a little fleshy thing, then another, and another. And swoosh! Two more! But the little things didn't look like a dog, or a puppy or anything like Patience. The little things looked like fleshy Vietnamese spring rolls. They were were small, pink and translucent; they didn't move.

After the last one came out, Patience stood up and smelled the little spring rolls and then, to my horror, ate them all up. She wolfed them down, each with a single bite.

I was stunned, but also totally mesmerized and confused. I asked my Mom if Patience took a shit and ate them, she's done that before. I backed away just in case Patience wanted to lick me.

Mom explained that Patience must've sensed something wrong with her pups.

I was skeptical, I thought maybe she was just hungry and just not very discerning. Shit, food, little fleshy spring rolls--it's all the same to her. It made me kinda grossed out.

Thinking back, if I hadn't been standing there, I would've missed it. I wouldn't have known that Patience given birth to stillborn pups. I probably would've thought that she just lost weight or something. I probably wouldn't have noticed even that.

But god, when I think about it now, I really, really wish that I could've YouTube'd that.


When I was about seven, Patience died. Then we ate her. Part of her will always be with me. But there was a part of her that was gone forever, the next day, after I took a dump.



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Other pet posts:

Morning Routine - A surprise greets me at lunch for my haste getting ready for work. Confessions of a Broken Cat - A feline emergency in 3 parts. Drama guaranteed.

Meeting The Family - It was an inauspicious beginning: Rusty knocks me down when I first meet my BF's family. Bite Your Tongue - Mythbusting. Do dogs bite their tongues? Find out.

What Your Remix Says About You

When our new neighbor downstairs moved in, Brian and I were very excited. This was because the guy was HOT. When he was looking over the place, we ran into him in the hallway and we prayed--prayed--that his credit check was good so he would get the place.

He is a tall, trim black dude with nice broad shoulders, very Tyson Beckford in those old Ralph Lauren ads. I looked forward to fantasizing about him when I'm having sex with my boyfriend. What? It's true.

We speculated whether or not he was gay, which for you two straight guys that read this blog, is a compliment, because we would never speculate if someone was gay if he looks like he could have skidmarks in his underwear. If we fags like you, you should have no trouble picking up girls, and if you do, then what the fuck's the matter with you? Get it together, or get a gay guy to give you a makeover. Every dude should have a good gay friend.

Anyway, Satan answered our prayers and a few weeks later he moved in. However, we couldn't determine our man's sexuality because he didn't really have a lot of furniture. Apparently, he just moved into the city from Denver or DC or something, I don't know, I was distracted by his gorgeous brown eyes when he was telling me this.

The following weeks, there were noises indicating industry beneath our floors. We would peep into his back window to see if we could get a glimpse of his decorating style, thinking we could figure out his sexuality pretty easily that way. Thank God he hadn't bought any window treatments yet although that would've answered this question right then and there. Window treatments inevitably speak louder about you than anything. If I were a shrink, no treatment would start without visiting my patients' homes and checking out the window treatments.

However, all questions were settled last Saturday afternoon when loud music filtered through our floor. It had a nice thumping groove and immediately made me want to shimmy. We tried to place the song because it was so familiar, but it took us a few long minutes because the melody was muffled. Then suddenly, it came to us--Deborah Cox! Nobody's Supposed To Be Here, the Hex Hector remix! He's gay! He's gay! Hurrah!

If it had been Whitney Houston or even Mariah Carey it wouldn't have been as definitive, but it was Deborah Cox and the dance mix! He's sooo definitely gay. Mystery solved. We congratulated ourselves on our excellent CSI skillz.


In the next episode, we try to find out what that funky smell coming out of the place inhabited by the couple two floors below us. Is it kimchi or boiled cauliflower? Stay tuned.

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Related posts:

Tug of War - What our decorating says about us.

DJ Evil Twin - My alter-ego. Totally eeevil and remixed for your pleasure.