Summer

So it's summer huh? Yes, in a few weeks. Lots of things to do in for the month of april. At least these must-do's won't be too cerebral. Hahaha.

Harry Potter is coming!

Gah! the change of release date from november 2008 to july 2009 only heighten the excitement among HP fans! yeah, and now that it's the harry potter year, there is definitely a reason to celebrate! cheers!

Translated version

from english to tagalog?

it's kinda weird, it's machine translation by google. if you feel like browsing the translated version of my blog, here's the link.

Of Snakes, Moral Lessons and Darwin's Theory of Evolution

The usual misconception about Mr. Darwin’s theory is that it meant that humans are great great descendants of apes. And I’m guilty of believing that, of course, I thought I have known it by heart all through out high school, my teachers discussed about it, they settled debates in which sometimes I am shunted to the affirmative side and forced to defend Mr. Darwin. It was only in college that I realized the whole truth that the theory was really about the idea that apes and humans have the same common and one ancestor. The idea came really as shocking to me, as we have been taught that we really were descendants of monkeys. But even worse was this idea of mine that Mr. Darwin formulated this theory because of his self-realization that he looked like an ape. ***

Whenever we talked about stories in high school, we never really discussed the story as it is, not in the same way that we discussed it in our major class. We don’t talk about the historical and cultural contexts, the underlying motives or the author’s background. The main focus for the story itself is not even the plot construction, how the events unfold, but it had always been about the moral lesson. Yep, I knew how to derive moral lessons out of those stories. But I remember one time when we were tasked to review a story and surprisingly, I couldn’t derive a single stinking moral lesson out of it. Why though?

I forgot the title of the story and the whole idea, but all I could remember was it was just a reflection of something, a realization of an event perhaps, but I couldn’t categorize it as a moral lesson really. That disturbed me a lot. Are all short stories required to have a moral lesson? I think not, but it should have an insight to ponder on at least. And for me, an insight is equally different from a moral lesson.

Maybe that time the moral lesson of the story couldn’t penetrate in my head. Or maybe I was turning bad. Sigh. Either of the two will do. ***

There was a time when I forgot the readings for the next major class. As I can’t concentrate without my own personal readings (with marginal notes and own private scribbles, haha…) I went back to the boarding house which was just a walking distance from school. The creepy part was that, as I was about to reach the main library, I encountered a snake just a step away from me. It was a green snake, all through out, and totally gross. You might puke yourself if you’d see that. I ran back to school, I could almost climb the oblation statue for help. Jeez, that snake, when I think about it in my head, it gives me the creeps. I ran back to school and cried. Uh huh, the fear of death because of one grossly animal. Because of that incident, I couldn’t visit the main library anymore (which was actually loaded with more interesting books) and I couldn’t go home without someone to share death in case the green snake will strike again.

If-Only-You-Took-This-Or-That Crap

Taking up a creative writing course, upon knowing, people will either scratch their heads off or keep their face blank in ignorance. What will you do in the future? Are you going to be an author? You should have taken an education course, after all you are going to be a teacher. Creative writing? What’s that about? News writing? There’s no such thing. Writers are born, not made.

I’ve encountered a lot of people telling me that. Sometimes, it sort of stirred me a bit, some pissed me off entirely, others, I seemed to have ignored to defend myself. Then at some point in my life, I still felt broken in a way. To cap it all, although it is not reminded everyday in our lives, (those who took the same course as mine) I still feel like we are the underdogs in our school. I can’t blame them if they think our course program is just as easy as they thought it is. I don’t want to argue nor defend myself, go on with extreme rationalizations why our course is good or excellent or the best among others. That doesn’t work that way.

Yep, I used to dream of taking a more technical course, for practicality’s sake, but I found out that being in the liberal arts, literally liberated me from those ideas, that thinking about work in the future, and raking sums of money, isn’t really as important as taking a course that suits your academic preferences and interests. Well, the worst case scenario here guys, is that after you graduated from a course you deem practical, you just realized that somehow, the course that you really should have taken had just recurred, like a persistent rat that gnaws your senses. Nobody would like that.

There is still more to know about writing. Writing creatively, to be specific. Even up to this point, I envy those people who can write without ‘being touched by something divine and holy’. I envy those people who are consciously writing things, those who are not waiting for a spark of inspiration to be possessed. Writing for them is something controllable yet I still can’t discern how in the world did they do it. It is the sudden inspiration, or else, the tip of the pen, that controls me. I am not controlling it. Talk about spur without the curb.

I know that creative writing will teach me how to write, anytime of the day, and maybe that is the reason, why I like it. It’s exciting in a way, contrary to the traditional notions that it will bore you to death, Practice will help.

And raking millions of money is not satisfying when you don’t enjoy it. You have to really rake it hard, and rake it good. Scrape it with much gusto, that’s even better.

So now, I need not to think about the ‘practically sake’ reason why I should not take creative writing. Because I believe that when you finally realized that it is what you want to do, everything else will follow. It will definitely foster an excellent workplace for you to work on, and surely you wouldn’t want to starve yourself to death, so naturally, you’ll work hard in your chosen field, but with much enjoyment and satisfaction.

So whenever I encounter if-only-you-took-this-or-that rattles, I tried to be cool and then I’d smile. Or I’ll take it out to them. Maybe in a way, we can come up with a compromise.

And anyway, if you don’t have money, I just found out that sheets of paper are actually palatable. I have lots of them.

Have you noticed? It’s like a defense.

But I’m serious, I really like my course. I think I’m in love with it.

Movie Marathon

I was delighted that all the PG peeps managed to watch the movie Slumdog Millionaire in the boarding house.

It’s been raining for weeks, and need I say that it’s a perfect time to watch a movie, while drinking coffee/milk and hugging your own pillow? Yes, last week we watch Slumdog Millionaire and we all agreed that Dev Patel was gorgeous. Two weeks before that we watched The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, and we said the same thing. Next week, we are scheduled to watch the movie Revolutionary Road, and I’m wondering whether we’ll say the same thing to Leonardo diCaprio. Laughs. Hopefully, by the first week of March, we’ll watch The Reader – oh, I’m keeping my fingers crossed!

I find Slumdog Millionaire excellent and for me, the movie was deserving to win the most-coveted Best Picture award in the 2009 Academy Awards, but I can’t deny that the Brad Pitt movie was more “emotionally searing” for me. Oh well, both have their own ways of entertaining people, and I love both Dev and Brad!

---XXX---

I’ve been busy this semester so I haven’t watched as much movies as any moviegoer would peek. So, if I have time, I want to watch these movies:

1. Burn After Reading
2. The Departed
3. The International
4. The Revolutionary Road
5. The Reader
6. Valkyrie
7. Wanted
8. Dark Knight
9. Changeling
10. The Wrestler

Heck? Why Creative Writing?

There seems to be lots of things that I want to do in the future, I say, and sometimes I can’t contain myself being excited about it. When I was in grade school, I wanted to be a space pilot; the notion of flying in the sky fascinated me. But when I reached high school, I realized I have a motion sickness, and an intense fear of height, and so I resolved that I wanted to be a lawyer. A friend of mine warned me that being a lawyer is a dangerous thing; you might die young and penniless. That sort of freaked me out. So by the time that I was in my fourth year, I was at lost what to say to my mom what course I’d be going to take in college. Or at least, there seems to be really lots of courses I want to take – and I wanted to take them all at once.
These were some of the courses that I considered back then:
1. Electrical engineering – as I am fond of wires and splicing them. I also dreamed of owning a hardware store in the future.
2. Computer programming – I wanted to know how to make softwares, as much as I enjoyed some of them, like games for example. (in fact, I wrote that I wanted to be a computer programmer in our yearbook, and that’s the reason why I hate browsing through it).
3. Nutrition and Dietetics – I wanted to be slim and sexy (a very weird it’s-so-teenager-idea). But I realized now that I was so stupid to reason this way.
4. Teacher – an English major I supposed.
5. International Studies – I forgot why.
6. Electronic and Communications Engineering – because it was a hip among us, so I thought I might try as well.
I might as well say that ‘creative writing’ was never an option to me, although the closest thing to it was being an English major teacher. When the UP admission test was announced, I wanted to study there, badly. I never dreamed of being in UP Diliman, or Los Baños, as I didn’t want to study too far away from my family. So I concentrated on the courses in UPMin. The closest thing to Computer Programming is Computer Science, for Nutrition and Dietetics it’s Food Technology, and for an English major teacher, it’s English Creative Writing. My sister researched the course outlines of these three course programs. I was taken aback at how many math subjects I’m going to take if ever I’m going to take the first two, when I used to nearly flunk my high school math subjects. So I just chose Creative Writing instead, as I found out that there is no trace of a math subject to be taken. And that’s how I chose Creative Writing.
You might say if I’m good at writing. Well, it’s creative writing so I expected that it’s not too much grammar and it’s more on writing poems, and short stories. Yep, I have a short background in writing, being in a school publication staff but I’m not too proud of it. It was at those times when I really wanted to have that feature and literary post in our school paper, but I am always shunted in the news part and the sports post. I tried for three consecutive years just to have that feature and literary post but I ended up writing the headlines in the news section. During workshops, I would be classified as a news writer. Maybe I was too objective and too stiff. Making news is really boring, I concluded.
And at this point in time, taking a Creative Writing course, I realized that it is somehow fit and right for me. I am the only person in our high school class who took up an English related course – heck, all my classmates were mostly taking either Engineering or Nursing.
I have no intention to shift to any other course. I am going to stick with this course ‘til the end. I think this is more fun than solving math problems. There seems to be lots of things to know about this program, which is really exciting, like knowing literary icons and their motivations, epic tales and adventure novels – or simply, if drinking is really a prerequisite for an excellent literary work. J