UP JMA Publicity and Communications Committee (Pic by Joseph Pascual)
“Time flies so fast,” our helper would always pronounce randomly. It’s how she usually started a conversation. I could hear her cliché on a daily basis, and I could only politely reply, “Of course. I would then thud in my consciousness and see the following word in neon light: THESIS. The word blinks, zaps and flickers more; it’s like one of those flashbacks in soap operas where the actor involuntarily halts his way and stares at the window like a total idiot. THESIS. Bold, italicized, underlined. I then teleport back to reality and swallow the bitterness of that word. ( Read more… )
The labeled Ampatuan massacre—cos the town is named Ampatuan, and possibly the mastermind is from the Ampatuan clan— hits the front page. We know everyone’s talking about it: In class, in cliquish conversations, in blog posts, in every Facebook status message, in papers and news programs. The news arrives to our doorsteps and just as the romance between a starlet and champion boxer, horrifies us. We all know the details. We are grossed out by the vivid visuals, of not being “civilized” in terms of the murder process (torn underwear, bullet spreads, shallow graves). We later figure out if there’s really a “civilized” way of killing. We’re glad that it does stir and stun a large group of people; the confined and pretentious citizens of this county now have been alarmed that indeed, barbarism happens in the highway. We finally wake them up that this isn’t a single tragedy in history; it joins the thread of casualties in the maddening battlefield of power. ( Read more… )
Sunken Garden at Night, Rona's despedida (Pic by Rona Bungay)
I can’t believe I’m blogging regularly so recently; I mean I haven’t had the focus to pull off my last semester requirements. But since this anecdote is seriously so funny it’ll raise the roof, read closely. Okay so I was in my BC 196 class yesterday and we had this awesome professor who did some sort of psychology-related activity that can project what type of persons we are. ( Read more… )
Before I squeak about how annoying Noynoy Aquino’s presidential pre-campaign television ad is, I am first going to tell you this funny story about “me” getting seen on television. Okay, so let’s skip my second year college experience where I did some accidental hosting in a RushTV mini-segment. At least five people have confronted me with this question: “Were you the one in Colgate Total?”
And so I have to see it myself. In the ad, this yuppie-looking guy lives a regular office day. He gets blocked by a dentist (we know he’s a dentist because he’s in his immaculate lab gown) with a bacteria-monitoring device, who then confirms that an ecosystem of germs is residing in his mouth. The guy then confesses that his teeth are perfect for brushing regularly as possible. But no, the dentist says, Colgate Total makes sure his entire mouth is free of microorganisms. The next day, he visits the dentist comfortably on the street and proves that his teeth are all-clean. ( Read more… )
When I was in grade school, my mother used to volunteer me to preside as godfather/ninong to her friends’ children. I had no idea why she would raise such torture (Note: I wasn’t very sociable like what I am now; I was the boy-in-the-corner type of kid then). I would resist instantaneously since first of all I was not intimate with her friends (please), and second, in that age I wasn’t really fit for godfathering responsibilities. I would get mad, and totally forget the names of the poor babies who had taken religious tracks under me; it’s like they should repeat the christening all over again. And right now I don’t see the point believing in the “original sin” spiel anymore. Come on, they’re just infants ignorant to the constructs around them which have totally ruled over the next decades of their lives. ( Read more… )
Pic by Paule Santos: UP JMA Team Media! Aha!
I officially spent the first week of school doing A LOT of things. I mean, have you ever encountered opening a semester full of both necessary and unnecessary worries? It’s like knowing that you’d die in months, and of all days in those months, you settle on feeling anxious for the rest of your damn life. ( Here’s what happened )
The good thing about television is that you know it’s not real and will never be, but eventually— to quench your state of nihilism, knowing that life in this world is nothing more than painful and insufferable, and that whenever you look for help to heal your existential dilemmas, you can never find somebody who’s willing to even show concern for you— you would want it so hard that you’re expecting everyday life’s like the small screen. That maybe the reason why the medium TV is deemed more powerful than the others; the visuals and the audio plus all the hot actors and actresses getting it on make you strive to be more than an American Idol auditionee (or in our case, Pinoy Pop Superstar, or Startstruck?). Of course, Glee wouldn’t be an exception, a new TV series for the hams and all performing jerks, who acquire no stage fright at all, in the world. ( Read more… )
