The Bear Bitch’s Project

Bitchy

Exasperated

Angry

Resentful

Bitter

Envious

Acrimonious

Rancorous

Irritated

Narked

Annoyed

Some people are just so unhygienic it gives me the heebie-jeebies! I mean, yes, I’m more OC (Obsessive Compulsive) than the average person, but there are some things that just shouldn’t be done.

1. Licking your fingers when sorting through other people’s paper – Just like most offices, the one work at has just 1 printer for everyone to use. It’s not uncommon to find a huge stack of paper sitting at the printer which you have to go through to find what’s actually yours. Sometimes, I get to the printer and there are already 2 or 3 people standing there waiting for their turn to sort through the stack. The first one will lick his/her fingers and start flipping through it. When he/she is done, the stack will be handed over to the next person who will repeat the licking & flipping process so by the time the stack gets to me, its corners are swarming with the germs of a quarter of a dozen people’s saliva! And that’s just what I witness. Who knows what goes on before I get to the printer. <shudder> That’s why Sortkwik was invented, people! Use it.

2. Not washing your hands after using the bathroom – Some people just walk out after using the toilet and that’s just gross, others go through the motion of running their hand/s under water for (literally) 2 seconds and then wiping them dry. Sure, this is slightly better than not running your hands under the water at all, but come on. Who are you trying to kid? Will all the germs be miraculously killed after a nanosecond under water? And its not like there’s no soap. There’s a perfectly good soap dispenser above very sink as well as a huge bottle of Vaseline lotion so you can’t use dry skin as an excuse.

Some people are just so unsanitary, its disgusting!

Okay, so I may not be the most attractive of the lot, but I sure as hell ain’t the bottom of the heap!

I may be a bitch but at least I’m not facially unfortunate like . . .

It’s been 85 degrees Fahrenheit / 30 degrees Celsius for the past 2 days. Just like Manila but without the humidity. I LOVE IT!

Seeing those pictures I’ve uploaded into my Smart Photo Albums got me depressed: a) because I miss my Smart friends and b) because I was so skinny then!!! I’m a right butterball now. Sure, Its nearly impossible not to gain weight in this country but that doesn’t change the fact that I’m SO much tubbier than I was a year ago.

Woe is me…

It’s been so long since I’ve been able to walk to work. Normally, I’d have my Yoga-Pilates classes on Monday, Wednesday, & Friday, and on Tuesdays and Thursdays, I’d walk from the train station to the office, and again during lunch time. I stopped walking in April because it was constantly raining and spending the day in the office with damp toes isn’t exactly the most comfortable thing. Around the last week of April, the rains stopped and the sun came out. The weather has been absolutely perfect ever since but I still haven’t been able to walk. Why? Because its higad season! Stanford is positively crawling with higads. There are hundreds hanging from every tree and you can’t walk 5 feet without having one (or three) swing at your face or drop on your shoulder. And they’re not just hanging off trees. They’re crawling on the streets, sidewalks, lamp posts, trash bins… The bus-stop bench has had those orange road cones & yellow ‘caution’ tape around it for weeks because it’s infested with creepy crawlies! You name it, there’s a higad there. Even inside the building. Yesterday I saw 2 of them slowly making their way up the stairs, and Arsenio (my boss) saw one on the Caltrain! Can you believe that? Boy, not only do they travel far, they take public transportation too!

Photo courtesy of Arsenio Roldan

The story of Tristan & Yseult (my preferred spelling) has been my favorite of the Arthurian legends since high school so I was positively thrilled when I found out that a movie of it (Tristan + Isolde) was to be released in January of 2006. It was just a month away but the wait seemed like forever. Sadly, the movie was a bit of a flop so the theaters only screened it for what seemed like a week and it was gone before I was able to see it. My disappointment, to say the least, was acute.

The wait for the release of the DVD was torturous, but when I finally had it in my hands, I was suddenly hesitant. The movie was, after all, a box-office flop, and the reviews on Amazon aren’t that great (though I easily dismissed the contributors as ignorant fools who don’t know their classical literature). What if, after all that waiting, I didn’t like it?

With trepidation I slid the disc into the player and sat back.

So what did I think of it?

I must admit that I wasn’t too happy about the artistic liberties they took by changing the ending. < SPOILER ALERT >

In all the versions that I’ve read, both Tristan & Yseult die of a broken heart at the end. Well, Tristan is first wounded in battle, but then loses the will to live when he thinks that Yseult has not come to him (even though she has) and when she sees Tristan dead, Yseult too dies. In the movie, Tristan dies, simply, of the battle wound with Isolde by his side and she just disappears after burying him. That’s it. End of story.

Where’s the romance in that???

Just like Romeo & Juliet, perhaps even more so, losing the will to live because of the death of the lover is the essence of the story: it’s the whole point of it! Removing that turned the legend of Tristan & Isolde into your regular, run of the mill love story wherein it should be about an all consuming passion, a love so intertwined with the very lives of the couple that they’re indistinguishable. That love alone sustains them; gives them the strength to survive anything & everything. And because that love is so entwined with their life, the loss of it kills them. That, to me at least, is the soul of the legend of Tristan & Yseult. As Marianne says in Sense & Sensibility: “What could be more glorious than to die for love?”

But other than that, I quite enjoyed the movie. There was no miscasting, the scenery was breathtaking, the costumes looked authentic, and there weren’t too many cliché lines about love as there’s wont to be in any romantic movie. And of course there’s the fact that Tristan was played by cutie James Franco (the quarter, or so, of the movie with him shirtless is already well worth the $20 I shelled out for the DVD. Hee hee!). I’m certain that my opinion of the movie would be drastically different if an un-facially-blessed actor played that role and same thing goes for the role of Isolde. I mean, she is, after all, named “Yseult the Fair” to distinguish her from “Yseult of the White Hands”. It would be horrid if she wasn’t pretty.

So, my overall rating of the movie? I’d say 4 stars out of 5. Not the greatest movie the world has ever seen, but definitely in my personal top 10.