Get Well Soon, Zac!

Last night I called Rey so that we could squeal over Zac Efron's new Details cover together. I must admit that he's an even way bigger fan of Zac than I am, as he caught Hairspray an amazing six times in the cinema (This supposedly trumps the six times I've seen HSM2 on TV). We even spent the evening mulling over the weird editing of the Details.com interview with Zac, where, after being asked who his childhood crush was, a teenybopper pic of Leonardo DiCaprio appears and Zac goes on to say how all his girl friends adored him in Titanic. Editorializing? Hidden message? What was up with that?!?

A PhD classmate of mine at Cambridge is planning to do an ethnography of Conde Nast publications in June. Taking after his supervisor Georgina Born's study/expose' of the BBC newsroom, he plans to spend time in the offices of Details, GQ, Vogue, etc in New York and London. He'd better get Rey and me all the deets when he goes on fieldwork. What did Zac really mean?!?

Anyway, this morning, after my daily dose of hard news care of AC360, I logged on to Perez Hilton and was shocked to find out that Zacquisha was hospitalized! Apparently, he was rushed for emergency surgery at Cedars Sinai in LA! The culprit: appendicitis. This is so obviously slutty Vanessa's fault! It took all the willpower in the world for me to not dial my auntie nurse at Cedars Sinai so that she could get me an autograph while Zac is in recovery. But really, I realized that I am much too big a fan of Zac to disrespect him that way.

So, Mr Efron, get well soon! May the Pinay ethic of care so alive in the diaspora (essentialism alert) nurse you back to full recovery and hotness! No thanks to Vanessa though.

Comeback Kid

I can't believe it's been three weeks since my last entry. Just goes to show how thoroughly unproductive I've been since December. From the time my mom arrived in Cambridge to my groundhog days of sleeping-TV binging-meeting with friends (to the point that I've started hating reading restaurant menus) to my return to my old homes Ateneo and GMA this past week, I've done zero work for my PhD. My "potato couch" existence (L. Garcia, 2002) led to such malaise: Every night would entail four zombie hours of tossing and turning in bed before I'd fall asleep. And each of these spells would become an extended Nip/Tuck episode--the one where the Joely Fisher character imagines how her life would be different had she chosen to marry Christian instead. Of course my PhD career is part of this issue: I started imagining whether I'd be Anderson Cooper's personal assistant at AC360 by now or my Oscar predictions article would already be published in Entertainment Weekly (instead of my current limbo status of having to wait for FOUR months for a reply from my fave media journal). I started missing being harassed, playing chimay to diva clients, and cleaning up other people's mess. And I miss scandals! While I probably wouldn't appreciate being called to office on Christmas Eve, the ABS-GMA ratings brouhaha would have had me happily rolling up my sleeves.

I miss you, Angel!

Anyway, I'm just thoroughly happy today for having accomplished my first real academic task in the past five weeks: creating my lecture slides for my guest-lecture in Political Communication class. Of course, I still have to get around to doing my own research, but as a notoriously fastidious teacher once said, "it's the little things."

But if Hillary can stage a comeback, so can I.

And to kick-start my comeback, let me speak into the air one more time and plug a great new media studies discussion website MEDIAPOLIS. The brainchild of my former student Tin Aquino, Mediapolis is a critical and responsible space for dialogue that strives for a new media politics. It is a space where scholars, students, producers, consumers, you and I speak the unspeakable and engage with the challenges of a multiply mediated society. Let us engage rather than wallow with the despair of mediation. Time to get off the couch! :)