the perils of

This week has been very kind to me. *knocks on wood and hopes to not jinx it* I actually got an A on last week's long test in Math! :D I will not even elaborate on how happy it makes me because a certain blockmate of mine is probably reading this right now and scowling at his/her monitor in a display of freudenschade . So instead, I'll tell you a few other reasons why this week is awesome. On Monday, we made ice cream for Chem Lab! It tasted like real ice cream, too. Ours was strawberry flavored. :3 If there's one thing I learned in that experiment, it's that if one wants to sample all the good flavors life has to offer, one shouldn't be afraid of sharing a little saliva.  After the ice cream came Bondage! (Doesn't that just sound so wrong?) Anyway, Bondage is this yearly activity organized by the Pre-Medical Society of the Ateneo (PMSA), where people mosey on down to a grassy field in Ateneo and squirt each other silly with water guns. One person from each...

         So I came down with a fever last week. Last Wednesday, to be precise. It was the first time I'd ever gotten sick in Manila, and since I'm not exactly the healthiest person around, having gone three months in a foreign land without getting sick, and scoring a can of dalandan soda in the process, was a pretty sweet deal.         That was last week. And while I'm thankful that it was nothing like the "I can see a light at the end of the tunnel" sort of illness, I'm still bitter about it.         See, I had a ton of things to do, and a nice, long weekend to do them. My plan was to get everything done by Saturday so that I could spend the Sunday resting, watching How I Met Your Mother episodes on my laptop, and catching up on my reading and my sleep. I felt like I could've really pulled it off too, since I was in a real working mood last Wednesday.        In fact, the fever came down...

Taken from Michael Eric Dyson's "Be Like Mike?: Michael Jordan and the Pedagogy of Desire"... "Jordan's body is also the screen upon which is projected black desires to emulate his athletic excellence and replicate his entry into reaches of unimaginable wealth and fame. But there is more than vicarious substitution and the projection of fantasy on to Jordan's body that is occurring in the circulation and reproduction of black cultural desire. There is also the creative use of desire and fantasy by young blacks to counter and capitulate to, the forces of cultural dominance that attempt to reduce the black body to a commodity and text that is employed for entertainment, titillation or financial gain. Simply said, there is no easy correlation between the commodification of black youth culture and the evidences of a completely dominated consciousness." You know what that all amounts to? It's essentially the same as saying: Michael Jordan represents mor...

Let's start from oldest to latest.  1.  Would you look at that? KONG HUA BOYS!!! IN MANILA!!! PSYCH! Those are Ateneo grade school boys. They were in the college campus for some reason last last Thursday, the same time we had a fire drill. Everyone was made to move out of the buildings (AND CLASSES WERE INTERRUPTED!!! \m/ ). Also, it was raining during the fire drill. Raining. During a FIRE drill. Our teacher told us to leave our things in the classroom, but bring our umbrellas. 2. Last Thursday, some of my English blockmates and I were digging through the books in the Rizal Library, looking for answers for our research assignment. Look at this insanely old volume I found! 3. Old Rizal Library. I'll let this picture do all the talking. 4. Yesterday, my classmates from Kong Hua School and I went to Trinoma! That's Joseph (he's in UP), Karen (Enderun), me, and Jason.  I found some insanely cool stuff over there. A CENTRAL PERK SHIRT!!! From Friends! :D~~  DC Shir...

     Probably the best thing about being in Ateneo is (are?) the people you meet, because Ateneo is a hodgepodge of interesting people. Ateneans come in all shapes and sizes, and with such a huge range of interests, abilities, and personalities, the campus is a melting pot of different voices, different backgrounds, different ambitions and dreams and goals.      Now I'm not exactly an extrovert (my Myers-Briggs personality type indicator tells me I'm 10 points shy of being one), but I'm finding it easier and easier to talk to people now more than ever. I found a very very old blog post of mine  that I wrote way back in 2007, and in it, I incoherently ramble about how I don't know how to carry a conversation with some people: I don’t know how to properly introduce ideas and properly begin a paragraph, so I’ll just come right out and say it: I can’t talk. Well, I CAN talk, but I can’t carry a conversation. I mean, I can, but only with my close fr...