Just a question…

Last sunday I was just hanging around on Central Station (Rotterdam). Just waiting, leaning against a wall and staring around a bit. Nothing special as far as I know. Untill I turned around (just a change of view) and a girl walked up to me. From here it becomes really weird! This is what happend:

Unknown girl walks up to me, smiles a bit. I stand and look away. The unknown girl stands still next to me, and ask me the following: “Hey, what do you ask for one night of sex with me?”
At this point I was kinda like “wtf?!”, did I heard it wrong or was she serious (she didn’t laugh strange or whatever, she was staring bloody serious at me). So I reacted like most of you would have done: “Sorry, what?”
And guess what… she repeated the question exactly the same without hesitating. “What do you ask for one night of sex with me?”
Now I was really confused… Was she really that desperate for sex? Was it a prank? Do I look like a male whore? Why me? Was she drunk or influenced by drugs? So I responded: “No sorry, not interested”
Now she even asked me: “Are you sure?!” Ofcourse I was sure! So I replied: “Yes, sorry, I’m sure.”

She walks away back to some friends of her, and I’m still confused by the shameless question. Okay it was kinda flattering for my ego, but on the other hand, what did she expect from me? Do I look like someone who would do this? Because I wouldn’t… not in a billion light years (she wasn’t ugly or whatever.. looked like a normal girl… although she sounded belgium).

What would you do? Did it ever happend to you?

Ohw YEAH! I’m black! No really, I am…

After more than 8 years of training, over hundreds of blisters and painfull moments I finally got my black belt. It was a freakin hot saturday in Utrecht. Normaly I don’t give crap about exams, but a blackbelt is a huge milestone. Onlya few (8) people in holland have a blackbelt in Eskirma and now I’m one of them. The exam took about 2 hours and every part of it was back to back without a single pause. Normaly this is really tough, but with this kind of weather it was a hell! Beside doing all my moves right I had to control my breath too (sounds easy, but is really hard when under high pressure). My mom who isn’t a brilliant with a camera filmed some of the exam. I’ll try too edit a little piece and put in this post. But the problem is… There is now f*ckin driver for a JVC GR-DX55 Digital video camera.. Anybody who can help me out???

Portfolio progress

While I’m still stressing to complete our animation movie for our NS/KPN assignment i’m also still busy on my new portfolio. Sometimes I just sit around and don’t do anything. But for the last 3 weeks my motviation has grown te really make something of my portfolio. Altough it’s far from finished and not even near the words: “That’s great!” or “Ooh.. freakin cool!”. But when I’m done it will be (what do you mean lots of self confidence?). I’m constantly rewriting (gonna do a choice course called copywriting, finally!) my intro text, and still adjusting animations and picking out cool projects to show on my portfolio. You can check out a test version:

PortfolioV3

If you have any comments, suggestions or just wanna spit at me, post a comment!

Doce Pares Eskrima

When ever I tell people I’m doing Eskrima people have no clue what the hell I’m talking about. Usually I tell them it’s a Philippino stick fighting art. But actually it’s alot more. Eskrima is a sport wich isn’t just using dumb force. It’s all about pricples and interacting to react on your opponents movements and power. The difference between this martial art and alot of others is that this came from the streets/beach. The Philippino’s used it to fight the Spanish invasion on the Philippines. There are alot of different styles of Eskrima but this is one of the most populair.

I’ve been doing this for about 8 years now and it never bores me. I started training together with my dad, after a year started with competition fights and have been addictd to it ever since. People who see it don’t understand a single bit of it because it’s going way to quick to see the essence of this sports.When people just start out they all have a hard time to handle a stick. Motorically it’s just really hard to make the right strikes and not losing your defense. This is because all people think they can strike with a stick in their hands, but they can’t. They are using the dumb force again.

I ‘ve been trying to get this into school by suggesting it as an “choiche course”. But it’s really hard to convince the school that it could be really usefull for students. Not because of the cliché “You’ll feel much moreconfident on the street at night” kind of bullshit. But because of the system behind the movements. Just like all sports I think the basics are really easy to learn. To master it you will have to commit to it. But I think I would have been able to learn students the basics good enough to have some fun and teach them what it’s all about. Too bad school isn’t really cooperatingwith me…

For those who are still interested, check these video’s:

The Grandmasters Dionisio Cañete and Percival Pableo in this video are great. I’ve trained with them a couple of times in the Philippines and still love to watch them. The video is okay, but still doesn’t cover the real beauty of the sport.

This is a video from Dutch masters Frans Stroeven (teaches in Utrecht) and Marcel van Dongen (teaches in Waalwijk). (damn now I wanna make a video too!)

Love them!

This week is gonna be a hard one. Too much sun and too little time for myself or my friends. But last Saturday I dropped all school assignments and reserved the whole day for me and one of my best friends ever (merel). I haven’t seen her for about a year, but everytime we get together we always have a great time. It just feels like family (okay a bit different, but I do love them in every way). So who are those friends, and how many are there? To be honest, I don’t have alot of real friends. I just have a few in my class who are really friends (you know who you are), and for the rest I just know a lot of people who are nice. But there are 3 special persons:

As mentiont above, Merel, she is just a wonderfull girl, who makes me laugh and giggle all the time. Although she can be really shy, we always make some kind of connection wich make me feel really good. A typical example of someone you always wanna have around, but unfortunately she also has her own life.

The other is Joost (Merel’s older brother). This guy just loves about everything I love. We share our intrest in sports, in games, in school. There was always some kind of competition when we where both doing Eskrima, but it was in a really cool way. I always admired his way of fighting and training. Awsome guy to train and super fun to spend the evening with.

And last but certainly not the least, Lennart! This great guy is a complete wacko! We know eachother for about 10 years now and I never get enough of him. He’s a true inspiration and I admire him for all his knowledge and skills (multimedia design). Besides this genious side he also has a dark side. Especially when we are together we can produce the most perverse humor ever.

That’s what I love about them in a nutshell. But these kind of friends are so precious to me, but the tragic side of it, is that I hardly see them. I’m soo busy, and they have their lives too, so it’s hard to really get together and make lots of fun. But when we do… *sigh*

Study pressure taking over

It’s the 3rd quarter of this year at CMD. We started a new project about the NS/KPN and finally came to a good concept after 2 months!!! No we only have 2 weeks left till the deadline. I still believe in our concept but I hate the fact we have had so little time to really make something of it. This isn’t the first time this happened to me… Even worse, this happens all the time at school. The way I see it is that they made one mistake at school. The want to motivate us in a way so we would really work hard and get used to high expectations and deadlines. The problem is that just gave us a shit load of work from all classes. This way they achieved two things: We learn to work under pressure and we are getting used to deadlines. The bad thing about this is that the quality is really really poor. In fact, I don’t even know what to put on my showcase/portfolio because I just don’t have the time to make some projects really worth looking at (even my portfolio itself is a horrible disaster!). They are fine, but not good.  So now we have the experience but nothing that shows the real quality we have to offer. This is my view of what CMD is doing now:

Quantity over Quality.
 And that freakin sucks!

Sure our teachers will disagree with me(us?) and they will tell us to make a better planning.  But that’s just denying what’s really going on. I won’t say I’m an angel in making my homework but I’m convinced if they would focus more on quality and gave us good feedback they could give us the same working pressure without all those weird “little” assignments wich take to much time and are just a little part of the “real” assignments. Push us on our quality not our our quantity! Just look around yourself! Are you really that proud about what some students create? Do you guys even know, we can do way better? Why are we pushed to make lots of “okay” assignments instead of a few really great projects?