Shawshank Redemption Revisited

Fear can hold you prisoner. Hope can set you free.

No, this will not be a movie review... As I have always said, it is one of my most favorite film ever. And these days when everything seems grimmer than the usual, I eventually find things that will make me feel better. Watching Shawshank Redemption for the nth time simply made my day. (I would like to thank Jun Domingo for introducing this film to me in 1996)

As grim as I am, I have always identified myself with the main character played by Tim Robbins... an underdog that eventually finds redemption in the end. Unfortunately, life is a circle of incarceration and redemption. Over and over and over and over... and that's the way it is supposed to be.

After revisiting the film, I am reminded that another cycle has simply begun again and that eventual redemption will soon (I hope) will be at hand. That the world was not meant to be fair... and therefore WTF am I complaining about?

There are more things that I should be more thankful for anyway.

Today...

I start to live!

“The day soldiers stop bringing you their problems is the day you have stopped leading them. They have either lost confidence that you can help them or concluded that you do not care. Either case is a failure of leadership.”

Colin Powell

And that is why I have to survive these times of trials and tribulation. The failure of this leadership should not deter me from pursuing the higher goal of keeping this organization afloat. Too many lives are at stake and it would be selfish to abandon this sinking ship... that is despite my personal quest for sanity.

golf day @ the riviera (couples' course)

the worst game ever, i swear. here's to the game that will never love me back, hehehe

mica villarosa - thinking of you

this is my daughter's cover version of Katy Perry's Thinking of You...

A prayer for the stressed

Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I cannot accept, and the wisdom to hide the bodies of those I had to kill today because they got on my nerves.

Also help me to be careful of the toes I step on today as they may be connected to the feet I may have to kiss tomorrow.

Help me always to give 100% at work...

12% on Monday,

23%on Tuesday,

40% on Wednesday,

20% on Thursday, and

5% on Friday.

Help me to remember...

When I'm having a bad day and it seems that people are trying to wind me up, it takes 42 muscles to frown, 28 to smile and only four to extend my arm and smack someone in the mouth!

source: http://www.bullyonline.org/successunlimited/humour/jokes.htm

Yesterday, I was supposed to have dinner with the Chairman so that I may scream my inner guts out to prevent him from making a fatal business decision. A part of my job that I consider myself inadequate. He however "forgot" maybe because I have already given a preview of the things that I wanted to talk about.

So instead of the dinner, I found myself eating shawarma with my key officers at the coffee shop while sipping my all time favorite bourbon. I only had two issues to discuss... the issue of Cebu salary cuts and the details of the Manila operations after the implementation of the new remedial salary scheme.

It became a long meeting despite the seemingly simple content of the discussion and I knew why. If my opinion cannot be recognized, then why should they think that theirs would be any different?

I guess we'll know by Tuesday.

the Call

After feeling the worst after declaring percentage cuts on salaries as a remedial measure to hopefully survive this economic crunch, the Chairman is finally back. He motions me over to his office so that I could report the updates.

He told me that we will need to go beyond "remedial" if we are to survive considering that Cebu is also not doing so well. I said that I wouldn't know since the Cebu office has not reported in their figures the entire time he was away. I told him that it seems that the Independent Republic of Amazing Cebu (IRAC) has turned totally defiant of the protocols.

Last night, as i stared at a jaw-dropping 280 guests crowd themselves at the MFC lobby (something I have not seen for the longest of time), I got the used to be usual text message from the Cebu branch office reporting in their stats. Knowing how hard it must have been for the defiant manager to be forced to report in, I responded "thank you", half sincere and half sarcastic.

A minute later I received a call from my weary-sounding counterpart expressing his "usual max-to-the-exag" emotional dilemma over the issue of salary cuts. I told him that I have expressed to the Chairman my recommendation that Cebu should not suffer the same fate since it is still an earning entity. He responds with his rhetoric on "fairness" and "family" which really got me quite ticked off knowing how "unfair" things are being ran down there.

Statements such as "I might not be here anymore when you visit", "I want to quit", and a host of other gibberish that are all too familiar anyway are the things I expected to hear. When all I wanted to hear was "I'm sorry, I failed to report my stats to you". Instead, I had a face filled in with concealer make up... the usual sooo, soooo Korean style of not admitting himself wrong.

Black Pipe - Nandito Lang Ako

Black Pipe finally visits me in my office and make good on their word that they'll record a song I wrote for them a couple of years back, "nandito lang ako" and it would hopefully be the start of the long overdue album I've been wanting them to have.

I didn't mind that I had to cancel a dental appointment, it was fun engineering for them and seeing the song come together. This is still a work in progress as you can see and I am hoping that the more they play original music, the sooner the band chemistry would come out and figure out the image and genre that's for them.

So below is the actual recording session in my office last Sunday. We patched the three instruments direct to the Fostex X-18 mixer straight to my sound card. For convenience, we decided to use my Yamaha DD65 drum kit. This recording also baptized my new (my wife's birthday gift)Greg Bennett Royale.

Additional tracks were later dubbed, the ad lib part and the other rhythm guitar for a fatter sound. With the Black Pipe down to three, August sings the song and Joey's girlfriend did the backing tracks.

I repeat... it is a work in progress.