AA visit!!!

I'm sorry I don't have pictures; I had to wake up at quarter to six (on my free day, no less) and I simply lacked the will power to grab the camera on my way down. A little more and my sister would have had to tear me off the couch since I was going with them to Assumption. Anyway, they weren't late because of me (a crime they've been accusing me of since time immemorial), so that's good.

Gosh, I just loved the drive going up to Assumption. (I just realized: we were literally going up a mountain. O_O A MOUNTAIN. It just didn't strike me as odd before.) Except for the hideous smog obscuring the view of the city to my right, the trip was actually the most pleasant I've had in months. No jeepney fumes, no traffic, no irate passengers, no rain-- it was (and still is) a morning unspoiled. I would have melted onto the passenger's seat if I could; it was that relaxing.

I was honestly a little excited to visit. The thought of going back to one of my venerable comfort zones, where people are friendly and all students are younger than I am(!), just made me very happy. I even saw Ms Olalde getting out of her car, and I had to fight a maddening impulse to hug her because I looked like a freakish creature in rumpled bed clothes. I was in shorts and slippers; strangely enough, I was half afraid she'd admonish me for coming in forbidden attire. But then again, I'm not a student there anymore.

AA is: blue sky, green grass, golden sunshine and red skirts.

Let's get these teen hearts beating faster, FASTER

Panic! at the Disco

I can't believe I actually went to their concert even though I had an econ test early next morning. Sinamahan ko si ate, who's the bigger fan between us. Wait, scratch that, she's the only fan between us. I like PATD well enough, but not to the screaming fangirl extent-- it's more of a feeling of respect for their musicianship and the genre they're pursuing (to great success, I might add). While some people might prefer their first album's style, I'm glad their second album proves that they're not FOB rip-offs, and that they do hold well on their own. And besides, I like happy music. Everybody should listen to happy music.

I'll be posting the album eventually.

They're real! O_O

This is from their meet-and-greet in Podium. Ate and I went there after school. I didn't even bother changing-- so... I kind of carried over my haggardness. But who cares anyway?!

(L-R): Spencer, Jon (or is it the other way around?), Ryan, (and obscured by the belly of this bouncer in front of me), Brendon

At the concert: yes, I had to drag my Econ book along. I nearly popped a vessel trying to digest marginal revenue and marginal cost in the market structure of monopoly. :| And yes, I didn't change for the concert either. I was in shorts and sneaks. Top that! :))

They're great people. Speaking of people, Tracy Abad and Lia Hernandez were standing to our right. And at one point, Miggy Chavez (who looks strange when dressed as one of the ordinary folk) was standing about ten paces away to my left, in the ten o clock direction.

I just feel like posting

Another week.

Please excuse my incoherent writing, I just finished my non-existent weekend and I'm preparing to have breakfast with an exam tomorrow. What cheery prospects. Of course, provided that the new Katipunan traffic scheme works itself out and we get to strangle each other before we all die of fumes or worse, it'll just be another blasted day in another blasted week.

Two months into college and counting: I have just lost fifteen pounds, have gone down a cup size and am currently trying my best not to fail in Math 17. If anyone wants to slim down, you might as well go to UP and drag a freakishly huge bag along; technically, if you keep running around the campus with your house inside your backpack, it'll count as "working out". Thus, the slimming effect.

---

It's strange. There are times when I feel like college is not my reality, like I'm supposed to be somewhere else, or that I'm supposed to be doing something different. It's still hard to wrap my head around the concept of joining an org, or the fact that there are no "classmates" in UP: just people, people, and more people. We are all floating around like dust motes in sunlight. It's strange not to be anchored anywhere else. Back in highschool, I used to consider my section as part of my identity. In the big wide world of UP, there is simply no such thing as a "section", let alone people you can count on/leech off. It's just you looking out for yourself.

I sadly have to admit: I'm not used to that.

I saw Ms Lanzona a while ago at Cherry Foodarama. Five months ago, she was my teacher. Five months ago, I was in high school. I briefly considered saying hi, but didn't; I also considered texting one of my friends just to say that I saw her, but I didn't. I realized: it's just not relevant anymore.

What do I miss?

Everything.

What is Graphic Design?

I was casting around for poster ideas when I came across this site:

http://veerle.duoh.com/blog/comments/winners_of_the_what_is_graphic_design_poster_competition/

The winning entries were quite amazing. You can look at the site for the posters themselves, but here below is one of my particular favorites.

All posters have to answer the question posed above, btw (what is graphic design?). First to figure out what this one says wins a cookie.

What in the world am I going to do with my education?!

Sometimes it bothers me that I’m taking up Economics. Aside from the fact that, roughly eight weeks into the first semester of my first college year, I am bored with studying it, I have no idea what I’ll do with it afterwards. It’s not just Econ; there’s Nat Sci and Creative Writing and Socio. And PE, regrettably. As much as I enjoy the novelty of attending classes I picked and interacting with a greater variety of people, sometimes I feel like throwing it all out the window. I feel restless. I don’t know what to do with myself. If the world had a nuclear explosion and all life got wiped out or mutated, there is actually no sense in continuing these sorts of studies. I mean, I may well be able to tick off the great thinkers one after the other in accurate succession, but at the end of the day, when you’re dying of hunger (in a world where possibly the grass is red and you have web-like appendages growing between your fingers), it’s not the ticket to getting yourself fed. Of course that’s just my imagination. I guess I’m thinking up of reasons why not to study. I like to learn, certainly, but that is, as Oscar Wilde points out succinctly, quite different from “education”.

What am I going to do? As a child, I used to want to be an archaeologist, until that idea bored me. Then I wanted to become a chef, until relatives dissuaded me; to my great bitterness, I learned years later that my cousin enrolled herself in CCA. Dream stealers—they came in and took away what I really wanted, and all that was left of me was my “smart” head. Ah, then UP is the key!, they told me. They urged me to take up Accountancy, a surefire way to getting paid afterwards. It was during those times that I absolutely despised discussing my future; I wanted to be spared of the pressure and of the alarming feeling that I was going to end up with something I didn’t want. In the end, it didn’t matter. I chose Economics partly because it sounded good enough to pacify my critics. But as I said, it doesn’t matter anyway; blindfolding myself and shooting darts at courses randomly would have been as effective. So here I am, in Economics, where the book is so tedious that it makes me want to tear it to little pieces and feed it to the dogs, where I don’t even get the reason why its discussion is important in the first place. This, of course, begs the question: then what is important in life? I honestly don’t know yet. Family, I suppose, and friends, and finding out who you are. Is there any course to study this? Psychology I guess, but the real classroom comes in the form of Everyday Life.

Right. Well. Attempting to live in Everyday Life can be frustrating. College has stripped away all the secure familiarities I’ve had, including the ones that I thought were permanent. A small implosion has gone off inside my head, and everything I thought I stood for has just been smashed to smithereens.

I hate it; I just figured out who I was and what I wanted, then bam. I have to start from scratch. Again. Like a house of cards lovingly, painstakingly built up, a slight tremor from the ground has suddenly upset everything.

Growing pains and hormonal imbalances—and suddenly, I feel like a wreck.

You know, if I just didn’t have a conscience

I might have probably stopped school right now.