Last night, Kuya Tim found an old chess set, and wanted to play, so I obliged him, though I haven’t played anyone in years—fifteen or so. Thirteen? About that.

Anyway, I played. My strategy, if you could call it that, was to frustrate his immediate tactical goals, which is a way to prolong a game, but not a strategy to win. Luckily, it seemed that most of his tactical goals were fairly transparent, and I kept up with him piece for piece up until the end game. By that time, though, I had put my rook in an inaccessible position, only freeing it towards the end, and had rated bishops as slightly higher than knights in the midgame, trading them as somewhat equal, and forgetting how devastating knights are in the endgame. Then I blundered my king’s shoring up of the pawns on the right side. I resigned a few moves into the hopelessness territory, when I was two pawns down.
12:28:00 PM  #  comment []

May’s wedding

The Castro cousins and ourselves were in the front seats, but late. How embarrassing. I liked the flautist, but she arrived at the reception with someone. The impromptu sung vow was nice.

Reception: dancing, and wine. The food: vegan. Sigh. I think that was why she got a faceful of cake and he got to eat his.

After the reception, and failing to convince anyone else with a car to go to May’s afterparty party elsewhere, I tried to hint to a few people about a certain girl who had attended who had piqued my interest. Now sometimes I can be so subtle as to be nonexistent, so I made an effort to be slightly more broad about the hinting. No luck. Either no one knew who I was talking about, which boded somewhat well as it probably meant I was not related to her, or my acute embarrassment was making me subtler than I thought I was being.

At last, Maureen, secure in her own relationship, mentioned her in passing as that coconut who came in with the pute (white) boyfriend. I tried to draw others out on it to get to the name by lengthening the conversation, but it turned to other fruits, such as bananas. I figured out no one knew. Sigh.

Later on, back in Jersey, with Kuya Tim and Tito Willie and the girls in the house, I tried to draw Vivienne out on the subject. “I’ve been thinking about what Maureen said. That girl she was talking about? The coconut?” “Yes.” “Now, did she know that she was a coconut,” ie, did she meet her at all beforehand, “or was it the white boyfriend, or was she being catty?” Subtle, huh? “I think she was just being catty about the white boyfriend.” Durn.

Which turned me to another subject: “I’m kind of reluctant to call anyone a coconut myself. I mean, I don’t have many Filipino friends.” Yen assured me that I was, indeed, a coconut. May she have coconut children someday.

Thinking about it later, I realized that I don’t have many friends, period, so I guess it’s okay. :./
12:19:49 PM  #  comment []

I met Wow’s beau this weekend. Thank heavens he’s not an idiot, nor ignorant, nor Protestant. A Filipino, to boot, phew. We discussed his startup, which develops a front end or a concentrator for web services. I grilled him on several aspects of his work and where he thought the industry was going, “geek talk,” as one of the cousins mentioned. They have in-house Java performance tools already, but I gave him an RTTS card. Contacts! The consultant’s lifeblood. However, they have their own in-house performance tool. Ah well.
11:33:49 AM  #  comment []