california love

driving to lemoore for christmas

christmas and 2nd anniversary

golden gate bridge

cleaning out my closet

i'm moving out of my apartment of three years. how i'll manage to do that, i still don't know, but to convince myself that i was making a little progress, i started sorting my stuff last night.

needless to say, i was overwhelmed by the junk i accumulated as a struggling young urban professional. i found my old curriculum vitae that says i was a journalism graduate with no work experience. 1x1 photos of my much younger-looking self. bank statements and pay slips, which didn't seem to have much activity all throughout the years.

i found worn out plane tickets from traveling to the visayas and mindanao for sorties. maps and brochures from trips abroad. exorbitant cellphone bills. branding documents for my boss during the campaign. old love letters (yup yup yup :D )...and my dad's death certificate. i didn't even know it was with me--it was an original document. i guess my brother, who used to share the apartment with me, left the certificate when he moved out of the house. the document carries my dad's cause of death, and at the bottom of the page, my eldest brother's scrawled signature. i can imagine how hard it must have been to put his name there.

when i finished, i had a huge shopping bag filled with mementos that i can't take with me anymore. i'm starting with a clean slate, as i should. :)

where have all the boxeadores gone?

and so it happened again. another great mexican fighter forced into retirement by pacman.

i was rooting for de la hoya, not only because of the four-inch height advantage but because of my longtime fascination with mexican fighters which started even before manny pacquiao hit the bigtime.

growing up with a dad who loved boxing and two brothers, some of my fondest childhood memories were earmarked by great boxing fights. and to me, boxing equals all these tough mexican sluggers. so forgive my lack of team spirit.

as for de la hoya, i can only remember thinking one thing when i first saw him fight: what's someone this good-looking doing inside the boxing ring? from his loss against felix trinidad to his dramatic unification bout with rival fernando vargas, the golden boy really brought the game of boxing closer to so many people.
but as de la hoya himself admitted, he no longer has it. i take consolation in the fact that it's somebody carrying our flag who ended this legend's career.