Hot Melbourne Cup turned freaky halloween...

The day started out well. Yesterday, November 1, is the first Tuesday of the November which means it's Melbourne Cup holiday! The Victorian State had a day off yesterday and get to enjoy the day of "the race that stops a nation." The Melbourne Cup has been a tradition for 145 years and it was only the year after the Queen visited the event that it turned into a holiday. Hey, in this case... Long live the Queen!

Anyway, we had a barbeque at my place. Friends and relatives came over to enjoy the freakishly warm weather. For the past three Melbourne Cups, this is the hottest it has been. It went up to a hellish 31 degrees!

It got hot and uncomfortable. A lot of alcohol and sodas were consumed... as well as food.

My mother, her husband, and her cousin all left. The house was left to myself, Arnie, his brother Rey, and friend Caloi. We decided to park ourselves on the sofa inside the house where it's so much cooler and comfortable.

We had the Filipino Channel (TFC) installed in the family room. We all decided to watch movies. Surprise, surprise, all the movies they were showing yesterday were of the horror/suspense genre. I thought I was just going to laugh aloud with my friends since I felt it wasn't going to be believable and made up of actors with bad acting. We watched three films back to back - Pa-siyam (Ninth), Sanib (Possession), and Patayin Sa Sindak si Barbara (Kill Barbara with Fear). I enjoyed watching all three films.

As Arnie and the others left and I was all alone (with Meeko) in the house, I felt a bit iffy. The movies may have gotten to me after all. The movie "Pa-siyam" got to me most of all. The movie title "Pa-siyam" refers to an old Filipino custom of praying the novena for nine days after a person's death. It is also believed that on the ninth day of a person's death, one has the ability to communicate with that person's spirit. In the movie, a mother died a horrible death and her children believed she was murdered because she was found hanging by a ceiling fan. The whole movie showed the siblings trapped in the mother's home, haunted by their own mother, unable to leave until they solve the mystery of her death.

This movie got to me because of the way the mother was mistreated by the hired helps. She was forced fed, made to bathe in boiling water, chained to her bed lying in her own filth until she was driven to madness. On the "pa-siyam," the children were able to communicate with their dead mother's spirit. With so much hatred and spite, she claimed that it was her own children that killed her. It was them letting a couple of strangers mistreat her. As punishment, she told them that she'll be taking one of them with her. And she did. One sibling ended up hanging herself by the same ceiling fan. That's how it ended. No frills, no grand hollywood endings, no resolution. The movie started with a death and ended with another death.

Needless to say, and curse my overactive mind which goes to hyperdrive especially at night, I wasn't able to sleep. It took "Shopaholic Ties A Knot", which I have finished, to lull me to sleep... at 3:30 in the morning! As a result, I woke up at 8:30 and was 30 minutes late for work.

I am here at work at the moment unable to concentrate. I have never been affected by a film so much... well, aside from The Ring.

Now, I have to stop thinking about that too...

I may have to go over Arnie's place tonight.