the perils of

           Hello. I have to come clean: I don't have a lot to write about now. I know people come to my blog to read stories about med school life or college survival tips or the like, but I've been idle-ish for the past couple of weeks (because of sem break).            Speaking of sem break, I have a couple of med school friends who said that they went crazy over the break because they had nothing to do. It does feel weird, after months and months of shedding our blood, sweat, and tears, we have a couple of weeks to spare to catch up on all the lost time. And catch up I did. I love being idle. All break long I spent lying on the bed, watching Flipping Vegas reruns on FYI, pigging out on whatever unhealthy salty food was in the pantry, and generally just vegetating. Yes, I am quite disgusting. But I'm okay with that.            Or at least I thought I was, up until school opened with a couple...

Yesterday, my family set out to a local fish vendor in Cogon to replenish our supply of aquarium fish. We did this because all of the aquarium's previous inhabitants have slowly died out, reducing the dynamic hotbed of aquatic life that was our aquarium to a depressing glass enclosure of wet decorative stones. So yeah, our fish all died. But this is not to suggest that we are bad fish owners, for they all seem to have passed of natural causes... Except maybe for the last guy. The last of the goldfish had inexplicably lost its will to live. It spent its final days stagnant at the bottom of the aquarium, somberly awaiting death instead of happily floating around in the water as goldfish are wont to do. It's pretty sad. And what's sadder is that after it died, the water in the aquarium was emptied, leaving just a pile of small stones, which mosquitoes apparently enjoyed laying their eggs in. Gross. Anyway! Proceeding with the story. The fish vendor lady in Cogon kept he...

Last night I went to the launching of Manila Noir , an anthology of stories told against the backdrop of (yup you guessed it) a dark and sinister Metro Manila. The book is the result of a collaboration between various Filipino writers, the most easily recognized one probably being the likes of Lourd de Veyra. And it was edited by  the  Jessica Hagedorn. Jessica Hagedorn isn't one of my favorite authors of all time, but when I received word that she would be coming to Ateneo, I just had to be there to have my three-year-old copy of Gangster of Love signed. I had read the book to fulfill a requirement for Lit class under Max Pulan, and I loved it. It was all sorts of twisted and funny, and after reading it I was certain of one thing: Jessica Hagedorn is one weird chick. Anyway, at the end of the talk I was lucky enough to go home with a freshly-autographed old copy of  Gangster as well as a pre-autographed and newly bought Manila Noir. National Bookstore was selling c...

I don't really have anything to write about, but I just feel like I should say something because I don't want my most recent post to be about something that happened more than a month ago. So what's been happening in my life? Well, for starters... Leyte happened. I went on a five-day immersion with a bunch of other Health Sci batchmates. I don't really want to talk about what happened there. And I probably never will post online about it. So, yeah. Sorry. On a lighter note, Rap and I are now two years old. Well, two years and a month, to be exact. We celebrated at A Veneto Pizzeria, an Italian restaurant along Visayas Ave. It's a really fancy name for such a normal-looking store. The food was A+ though. We got some pizza and a sinfully cheesy lasagna, pictured above.  Delizioso! The pictures above were taken on a day where 140 farmers from Casiguran came to Ateneo for a forum or something. The night before, the organizers noticed that a few of...

       One day during my Christmas break, my mom, while digging through a bookshelf, came upon my high school Retreat Journal. Some explanation: a Retreat Journal is the final, most cumbersome requirement that a senior Kong Huanian must submit in order to graduate. Any regular senior, on the delightful fringes of a final semester in Kong Hua, would ignore the whole thing and choose instead to focus his attention on more important matters (like wooing second-year Chinese girls). But I was nerdy, and I was "passionate," and I just had to take my journals seriously.        It's amazing, how much I have changed since then. Reading my journal felt like reading a fanfiction about my life; the characters were the same, the setting was the same, but the author was a different person entirely.        And 2010 Me sounds like a total douchebaguette . She wrote about how she was "a fighter", about how she fought for "environmentalism"...

      I think I should start this post by backtracking to about a month ago, to the exact moment when Rap revealed that he was joining a certain dance contest called Rhythm in Blue. He said it rather nonchalantly. "I joined RIB." I reacted exclamatorily. "YOU DID WHAT!?!?!?! "       To explain my reaction, I must step back and tell you a little about RIB. It's a pretty huge hip hop dance contest organized by the Company of Ateneo Dancers, or CADS. About twenty Ateneo orgs compete in it every year. They spend weeks practicing their routine, and they hire professional choreographers and all. Only ten teams make it to the finals. The place where they hold the finals (Irwin Theater, usually)  is jam-packed with people. It's not just an Ateneo event, people from other schools come to watch too. And celebrities usually stop by. It is THE dance competition of the cench ("cench" = short for "century." I just had to). This year, the theme...

A lot of my close friends are boys. Boys who like comic books. I hang around them a lot, and usually we talk about random things like physics and foreigners and lobsters having no pain receptors. We went to watch The Amazing Spiderman on a whim just recently. It was fun. Sometimes it's not so fun. I used to get a lot of sandwich jokes until those stopped being funny. Now I get "d'oh you're a girl so of course you hate comic books" jokes. I don't hate comic books. I love Neil Gaiman's Sandman . And Walking Dead, too. And Scott Pilgrim!!! But I don't read superhero comics. It's hard to be interested in them when most, if not all, of the superhero women 1.) have gigantic breasts, 2.) wear sexy clothing, and 3.) are always in stereotypically feminine poses. What if the male characters posed like the female ones? (c) Kevin Bolk And look at that. Why can't the men wear clothes as revealing as the women, or women wear clothes as concealing...