the perils of

To call this week a living hell would be an understatement. It might actually be an incorrect statement - it indeed felt like hell, but it certainly didn't feel like I was living. This week was so excruciatingly saturated with long tests and thesis work and oral exams and and sleep deprivation and Father Dacanay and Global Health, that it is a wonder I am still alive (and blogging) right now to tell the tale. I really should be sleeping, conserving my energy for when life decides that it is time once again to torture me. But I have something that I want to say, and it is quite important, and you must understand that in trying to say it coherently, I will be squeezing out whatever juices are left in my last remaining brain cells. I shall not waste time then. Yesterday, I slept for four hours only, woke up at 6 AM, and spent the entire morning studying for my oral exam with Father Dacanay. Worse still, I was so busy studying that I had eaten only a pack of Sweet Corn. By 12 noon...

       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"...

My blog's readership has grown a lot since my first post. I used to think of my blog as a diary that the world could read but would probably never bother to, and I liked that. That's why when you go scan my archives, sometime around April 2010, you'll find a lot of short, meaningless posts that were the product of an idle, summer-soaked mind. (Like this post, for example, which is nothing but a poorly constructed whine .) But the more I realized that people did actually come and visit this site, people I don't even know, the more I felt pressured to churn out better posts, to write more coherently, to not be such a goofball online. Plenty of my previous posts were written with an audience in mind. Perhaps that audience has enjoyed reading those entires. But now that I want to return to posting randomness on my blog, I just feel like I can't. Perhaps this is why I've been updating less and less. It's been more than a month since my last post, and I real...

lindly following advice I found from a stranger online, I went to National Book Store this afternoon to look for "cheap, twenty-peso review pamphlets" that were supposed to help me with the NMAT. I didn't find any. Come to think of it, I don't recall ever seeing such a thing at National. You lied to me, stranger!        But my quest to find these mythical magic pamphlets was not for naught, for it took me to the less-explored nooks and crannies of NBS. And, in a stroke of serendipity, I discovered the Sale section! It's an inconspicuous-looking strip of short bookshelves on the second floor. If not for this one, medium-sized sign that said "SALE!" in bold red text, you would not have known that amazing deals were to be had here.          And what amazing deals did I find!           Squee! Books! Jessica Zafra is one of my favorite authors. Imagine my surprise when I saw that her book "T...

any people come into Health Sciences dead set on being a doctor. But in the past few months of my junior year alone, so many Health Sci majors have shifted gears and decided otherwise. What's surprising is not that people are actually rethinking their choice to go to med school, but that so many of them are doing it in about the same period of time, as if it were a contagious disease.       My apologies for the horrible metaphor. I'm not saying that questioning yourself is a bad thing. In fact, it's a terrific thing. The huge, scary decision of what to do with your life after you graduate is a choice that you will inevitably be forced to make. There's just no getting around it, unless perhaps you plan to flunk your subjects and stay in school forever (a decision I actually mulled over for a while, because I really do love being in college). Otherwise, it's best to be prepared when that time comes. You wouldn't want to be stuck in med school knowing deep do...

omething I often joke about is my ridiculously low standard for food, or my inability to distinguish a gourmet meal from five-peso siomai sa kilid kilid. I remember when Rap and I ate some microwaveable pizza (that we had used as a prop in this video).  Even after we had heated it up, it still had a stiff crust, tough meat-like particles, and bland cheese. Simply put, it tasted really cheap. But I still liked it, even though Rap said it tasted like Freon . I didn't understand what he was talking about, because I'd never tasted Freon in my life. The pizza tasted pretty good, like a less delicious version of the pizza I used to buy from across school when I was a kid.          I will never forget the look of horror on Rap's face as I reached for another slice.          But as messed up as you may now believe my taste buds to be, they're actually not that far gone. Believe it or not, I actually do have som...

Oh my gosh. I'm alone in my condo, presumably because all of my roommates are out celebrating the weekend (and for two of them, the start of their sembreak). I still have an Epidemiology finals tomorrow, but holy heck I DO NOT CARE ANYMORE. I can't bring myself to stare at another ugly Powerpoint slide. I have just consuMed a huge order of milk tea and am now jittery with excitement for the end of the semester. I cannot possibly concentrate on studying for this horrible Epi exam. Ughhhh. And I just tweeted Marie Jamora about my indoor plant. WHAT IS WRONG WITH ME!? Update: Thank God she replied, or I would've looked like a damn fool.