MussoLOLen is Always Right! |

It occurred to Kristel and I one afternoon that our meager sweatshop writer earnings are barely enough to fund our rock star dreams. A few rejected alternate career ideas later, we did some mad brainstorming and decided to co-author a smashing lifestyle blog together. So today, we proudly present to you…

NO GIRLY DRAMA

No Girly Drama is more than just a blog where women “spill all” and “speak out”. We are not the blogosphere’s self-proclaimed version of Cosmopolitan and Sex and the City. You won’t find any hormonal girly ramblings here, nor are we going to talk about our periods and how we hate it when the blood forms gooey clots and clumps on our sanitary pads. We discuss dating, relationships, friendships, work, and everything female-related in its raw, non-sugarcoated form.

Our goal is to provide some sort of girls comprehensive guide to making it in the Real World. Because unlike Reality Bites, you don’t get your happy ending when your hot yet emotionally immature guitarist friend suddenly announces that he’s been madly in love with you all this time. Sometimes your well-meaning girlfriends don’t have the heart to tell you that the guy you’re seeing is a total prick and that you are a prize idiot for being a megabitch to the only decent guy who’s fallen in love with you in ten years. Well, that’s what we’re here for. We believe in being cruel to be kind. Sometimes all you need is for the truth to be placed in the worst possible form in order to get up, get your ass moving, and get on with your life.

The inspiration behind No Girly Drama is the way my girl friends and I treat each other when we come a-cryin’ and a-wailin’ with romantic issues. Most women have this annoying tendency to be too nice to their girlfriends when it comes to matters like these for fear of hurting their feelings. Well, we discovered that putting the truth in the worst possible way can drastically change someone’s perspective and bring them crashing back down to earth.

Case in point: I damn near fell in love with this pretty Pearl Boy last summer. When I showed my friend his Friendster profile, all I needed to come back to my senses was an innocent, offhand remark: “Ahh, so this is Mr. Likes-To-Be-Sandwiched-in-Between-Girls.” Then I started noticing all these annoying things that decreased his market value in my eyes, like the popped collar, the hip-hop artists in his iPod, and the fact that he is sandwiched between two girls in practically every photo in his Friendster. He’s not a bad guy, really. But put it this way: if the College Me saw the Summer Me traipsing around with a guy who pops his collar, I would have disowned myself if I could.

No Girly Drama also works like an advice column on gender-relation issues for girls as well as boys. Kristel and I may be young, but we’ve never had a shortage of WTF experiences, particularly when it comes to dating. And while we run around like headless chickens when it comes to our romantic dilemmas, we’re actually pretty damn clever at helping fix other peoples’ messes. So send us your questions! Eventually we’re going to run out of topics to blog about. :P

Oh, and link exchange, anyone? :D

Before you scroll down to read the rest of this entry, let me give you a backgrounder of myself so that you can understand why my sentiments about Timbuk2’s Blogger Bag are such. I am the kind of person who makes drafts of her blog entries in a notebook. Not a notebook like a portable computer (aka laptop) but the one that you write on with a pen. (Does anyone else still know what a pen is these days?) Any gadget with more than two buttons sends me to fits of panic, not unlike the way natives of aboriginal tribes freaked out when they were first confronted with a camera. The most hip electronic thing I own is a 2-year old iPod nano that’s well on its way to the grave. The only time I will ever get a laptop is when my mom buys a new Macbook and tosses her old one at me, as though she were getting rid of table scraps by feeding them to a starving mutt.

In short, my technologically-impaired nature makes me fail to understand why people would want to blow ridiculous amounts of money on gadgets, and then spend more money swaddling their electronics in the gadget world’s equivalent of designer baby clothes.

Mamá and myself at the Blogger bag launch

Despite these thoughts, I tried to attend the Timbuk2’s launch of the Blogger bag at Outback Restaurant with an open mind. I remember someone telling me about the existence of a Blogger bag sometime April and I think I might have responded with an impolite WTF? It’s not like bloggers have needs that are entirely different from that of a non-blogger. Seriously – all we do is sit on our asses and work those fingers. What the hell would we need a specialized bag for?

It was later explained that the Blogger bag was designed by a blogger for bloggers. The exterior of the thing is made out of ballistic nylon – you know, the self-regenerative material used on flak jackets in World War 2 – and its interior is lined with corduroy. Yes, we are a generation so enslaved to our gadgets that we need to coat them in corduroy despite the fact that they (the gadgets) are not programmed to give you a kiss for placing them in new, scratch-proof environments. Okay, maybe the corduroy lining I can understand – nothing makes electronics look so 1999 than scratch marks. But ballistic nylon? I was so torn between thinking, “That’s so awesome!” and “What the hell for?”

Let’s admit it. We bloggers are a bunch of spoiled wussies. I mean, my companions and I couldn’t even finish the Kiko Caravan trip last summer – and even that involved us sitting on our asses while we got driven from province to province. We don’t need shrapnel-proof, cut-proof containers because a blogger would never find himself or herself in a war zone, giving minute-to-minute updates whilst his surroundings explode in a clouds of smoke and dust. Even with shrapnel-proof, tear-resistant bags, I bet bloggers wouldn’t so much as think about approaching a war-torn country with electronics in tow. Hell, if I had a 80k-peso Macbook, I’d be more concerned about making sure it doesn’t get so much as nicked than saving my life.

Free food, yayz!

The point is, giving talks and attending PR events are the only other blog-related things that bloggers do aside from blogging. And unless there is a knife-wielding maniac invited to these events for the purpose of giving expensive laptop bags a purpose, I don’t see why any blogger would need to carry their laptops in atomic-bomb-proof bags.

I’m not saying that the Blogger Bag is a sucky product. I know I’d have bought one right then and there if I were a gadgets person, but I’m not. I don’t even own a friggin’ laptop. However, if it came in pink-and-purple girly designs and with that incredibly cute guy from Timbuk2 in “just add water” form somewhere in its pockets, hell yes I’d shell out the cash for it – laptop or no. Plus, I bet I’d get ten thousand cool points if I had a bag with an exterior that regenerates itself when slashed open. I’d bring it with me to parties and pester all the guests with, “HAHA! My bag is more awesomer than yours. Look what it can do!” *slash* *regenerate* *applause* Hmmm, come to think of it, I could actually use this thing to sucker guys into dating me. “Oh yeah? You don’t believe that my bag can repair itself when I rip it open? I’ll bet you a night out with me that it can!”

Blogger bag: potential guy magnet? *alerts Cosmopolitan magazine*

Like a lot of things being pimped out to the Gadget Generation (e.g. Colorware customized iPhones) I think the Blogger Bag is utterly expensive (five thousand pesos, Jesus!) and completely unnecessary. Not to mention incorrectly named, seeing as journalists might be able to benefit more from its durability and gadget-safety features than bloggers. Unless it does something really unusual, like cure cancer or churn out ideas for blog entries, I wouldn’t buy a Blogger bag. Nope, definitely not for me.

*long pause*

I’m still invited to the Mrs. Fields event, right? Right???

This was me yesterday, complete with the song playing on repeat in my iPod:

Lately I’ve been well on my way to burning out. I’m working my ass off like never before, driven by the need to earn money and spend it wantonly on travel and “useless” things. When friends invite me out I rarely ever say no (unless I really can’t stand you and I don’t even bother replying cos you’re not worth that one peso *HINT HINT*) because I worry that we’ll end up drifting apart if I don’t make time for them. During the rare instances when I get off work on time, I need to muster up the energy to row an invisible boat at the gym because all those hours sitting on my ass is making the fat accumulate in my midsection. If I’m not at the gym I’m rehearsing with the band, trying to think up ways to make our songs more striking and musically whole. My day’s far from over by the time I get home because I still have blogwork to do and friends I’d like to talk to and can only talk to on YM. If I’m lucky, I fall asleep 11 pm. The next day begins with my mom banging at my door at 5:30 am because I always sleep through my alarm.

Gold teeth and a curse for this town were all in my mouth

At work yesterday morning I could feel myself slowly becoming unstitched. Despite 7 hours of uninterrupted sleep, I felt like I spent the night tossing and turning on a bed of sharp pebbles. I barely had the strength to get up from my seat to join my friends for our early morning procrastination rituals. I was so close to breaking down that if anyone came up to me and said the right combination of words (”Thank you, Thom Yorke for putting music into our depression.”), I would have exploded into a mess of tears and existential psychobabble.

I’m looking in on the good life I might be doomed never to find.

I’ve never been so exhausted before. Which is entirely different from being tired, mind you. Tired is the urge to just drop everything for good with a “Fuck it, I give up.” It implies a very strong sense of hopelessness. When one is exhausted, however, one simply needs a break from the Bundy clock of everyday life, a few hours to recharge one’s batteries if you may. At least that’s how I see it. There was just no way I could wait til the weekend for my break; I needed one now.

My opportunity came when a friend from the night shift said he and some friends were watching The Simpsons movie at noon and did I want to come along? At first I wasn’t sure because work means money, and money is always good to have. Then again, what good is money when you’re not in the right state of mind to enjoy it?

Without a trust or flaming fields, am I too dumb to refine?

So I clocked out at 11 am and walked over to Shang for an hour and a half’s worth of irreverent humor. I was a little relieved when everyone decided to head home and get sleep after the movie. The exhaustion was weighing me down, putting me in the worst shape to make the moves on my new crush (who was in zombie mode himself). Besides, I couldn’t get rid of this urge to withdraw from the rest of the world like a cranky old hermit.

And if you took to me like a gull takes to the wind

There was still an hour and a half left before my 3 o’clock appointment so I did something I haven’t done in months. I had one of those long meandering walks by myself, with my feet on autopilot and my iPod cutting me off from the rest of the world. For once I have never been so happy to be alone. I love spending time with my friends and meeting new people, but I’m still a social claustrophobic to some extent. Going on hermit mode was so refreshing that I kept it up all throughout the evening. I went on invisible on YM and spoke to no one (but Kristel just to let her know that I’m still alive, and the editor just so I don’t come off like an irresponsible douche), did my work, got a full body massage, read The Great Gatsby (which I bought during the long walk), fell asleep at 9 pm.

Well, I’d have danced like the queen of the eyesores

Sometime in the evening, the exhaustion metamorphosed into the flu and I woke up at 5 am with a high temperature and arthritic bones. It’s good to know that I’m just suffering from a virus of sorts and not a mental breakdown that’s starting to have physical manifestations. For once, I’m glad to be sick because it gives me a legitimate reason to spend the rest of the day and tomorrow in my room, drifting in and out of sleep with the curtains drawn. I think I need more alone time, and who knows when this opportunity will come again? Never mind that my absences are going to eat up a huge chunk out of my paycheck. By hook or by crook, I shall be back to my “normal”, sociable self and ready to rejoin the rest of the world by Friday evening.

And the rest of our lives would have fared well