I think I am deliberately killing myself.
I slept at 3am last night because I was reading
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, the much-awaited sixth-installment of the series. Though my head was pounding and my eyes felt as if they were ripping from their sockets I had insisted on reading
one more.....just one more! chapter, so in effect when I woke up on 7am later, I felt so
wasted.
The fact that I had a killer two-hour Taekwondo yesterday did not help at all. Granted, I know Foundation Forms 1 and 2 even more than the back of my hand and I can perform them even with my eyes closed, but the killer part was actually the warm-ups which were even more hard than the forms themselves. I think our coaches won't be satisfied until all of us became accomplished gymnasts/street-fighters in their classes; I mean, not all of us could do a split, and they were pushing all of us to the ground for an agonizing five minutes until I thought my ligaments and muscles were torn and permanently disabled for further use. Dammit.
The icing on the cake was that my sister and I just knew that we could have been promoted to the yellow belt
months earlier - meaning we wouldn't have wasted this much tuition and we would have advanced more quickly and we would have got to doing much more exciting stuff like sparring.
By the way, I'm writing all of this in the CTC computer lab in the school, because I have a whopping four-hour break to consume until 1:30 and it's only 10:30. I am fast running out of things to do and I hope I don't go MAD in the process!
I can't wait to get home and finish that damn Harry Potter book! It's a lot more fascinating now that Ron and Hermione seems to be getting in a really complicated and totally adolescent love-hate-fight-make-up relationship. Meanwhile Harry has been developing attractions for (guess who!) Ginny, whom he actually jilted during his second year. Yikes.
In the meantime, he and Dumbledore has been piecing together memories of various people of their experiences with Voldemort (a.k.a. Tom Riddle) in order to discover more about his past and thus find out about any possible weaknesses he might have. It's a very old war strategy, actually, reminiscent of Sun Tzu's
The Art of War (I actually read the first few chapters; it was a very fascinating book), wherein the old Chinese war advisor wrote that to defeat your enemy, you have to know him first, or something to that effect (in translated Chinese, of course).
I am soooo damn bored. I wish I hadn't stayed up until 3am, because if I hadn't I would have been feeling more alive today. Actually I was only reading until 2am, and I couldn't sleep because of my sister's noise in cutting up what seemed like extremely thick and crisp paper for her scrapbook.
I never thought Filipino class could be so...ENLIGHTENING.
We were discussing literary theory through a text by Jonathan Culler entitled
"Language, Meaning, and Interpretation" which is actually the fourth chapter in his book
"Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction"...but I believe I mentioned all this in a previous post where I was complaining that the self-proclaimed short introduction was not really short at all, but long, tedious, tortuous, and hard to understand.
Excuse me? Did I really say that?
I take it all back now.Although the text explained some pretty boring stuff about the poetical and hermeneutical way of interpreting texts and the fine distinctions between meaning, interpretation, and context (for the satisfaction of critical theorists and linguists), it also put forward some really interesting concepts on
the nature of conventions and institutions - why most people mindlessly follow systems without questioning their limitations and weaknesses.
It's the mind-boggling question that have apparently been bothering linguists and theorists for a lot of time as they attempt to concretize and articulate that which can't really be explained through words but can only be felt and experienced. According to Culler, the system of language is an arbitrary convention; in other words its the system used and agreed upon by everyone in the society. Thus language concretely manifests and expresses the ideologies, the principles, and the beliefs of the culture or the society that uses it.
However, language, and thus ideologies, are not without their pitfalls. People can only think , understand and communicate with each other through language, but there are feelings that people can't express through words or phrases. Similarly the ideology that runs a society has weaknesses; that's why Karl Marx proposed communism because the capitalist ideology unjustly upholds the status quo (in other words, it holds the rich capitalists in power and supresses the laborers and the poor). Though some people see these weaknesses, they are called "radicals" or "leftists" because they go against THE SYSTEM FOLLOWED BY THE MAJORITY and propose an "ideological change", or a change in the system that defines and limits the structures of society.
This is actually why the movie "The Matrix" was so sensational and thought-provoking; its plot showed that
people are enveloped in a world whose comfortable realities are only CONSTRUCTED and RUN for them by a system, a culture, an ideology, a convention, a machine. However, people would continue to be dumb robots enslaved and controlled by the system unless they get out of it and see it entirely and objectively - thus Neo couldn't grasp the nature of the Matrix until he got disconnected from it and saw those endless human-harvesting fields. More ironically, people who do see the weaknesses of the system have to destroy it by attacking it from within (thus the repeated soujourns into the Matrix by Neo and the other rebels, whom I can't help likening to local communist NPAs).
Thus throughout history there have been what are considered radical groups who have been pushing for change. However, they have never been more heard and more prominent than they are now, what with the emergence of terrorists who crumble the American pride, security, self-esteem along with the Twin Towers with a single bomb. However, much closer to home is the increasing volume of the energetic and perpetually discontented voice of the youth (that means us) who scream out their defiance in the form of
rock music through artists like my beloved Incubus who croon and whine out lyrics such as:
Make Yourself
If I hadn't made me, I would've been made somehow.
If I hadn't assembled myself, I'dve fallen apart by now.
If I hadn't made me, I'd be more inclined to bow.
Powers that be would have swallowed me up, but that's more than I can allow.
If you let them make you, they'll make you papier-mache.
At a distance you're strong, until the wind comes then you crumble and blow away.
If you let them fuck you, there will be no foreplay.
But rest assured, they'll screw you complete 'til your ass is blue and grey.
You should make amends with you.
If only for better health.
But if you really want to live, why not try and Make Yourself?
If I hadn't made me, I'dve fallen apart by now.
I won't let 'em make me, it's more than I can allow.
So when I make me, I won't be papier-mache.
And if I fuck me... I'll fuck me in my own way.
You should make amends with you.
If only for better health.
But if you really want to live, why not try and Make Yourself?
Make yourself.
Although we are considered callow, immature, and inexperienced, we do want to be the ones responsible for our own lives, find or make our own opportunities, fight our way through the world. Though we know that we will eventually face obstacles that would seem insurmountable, it is the thrill of facing challenges and breaking senseless rules - breaking the barriers of systems and conventions - that add to our notion of uniqueness, power and self-worth.
Hmmmm...the Terror of the Filipino Department WAS right. Reading unusual and even obscure literature widens your "horizon of expectation" through the fusion and addition of various and sundry standards and principles.
Ha. Don't you wish you know what I've been talking about? Consider it an inside joke of Fil 11 Sec X, and you'll be fine.
Inexorably, time passes by in great dollops and rushes by my consciousness, while the dreaded, stressful HELL WEEK is approaching.
Next week is definitely going to be A Journey to Hell and Back. Yup, I have two lab exams (one for Botany Lecture and one for Botany Lab), an analysis paper, and a lab report. Sigh. Those stressful, sleepless nights in my almost-forgotten High School life do serve their purpose after all.
I am feeling really thankful right now of the training I got from St. Paul. Sure, back then I complained that those unbearably strict and particular teachers were too fastidious and paranoid, but now I see their point. Because of their harsh training and settling-for-nothing-less-than-excellence attitudes, I am now able to cope with college life easily. I mean, at least I'm able to make good reports (I got a perfect score on one of my lab reports! coolness!). More importantly, I know how to work under pressure, a skill VITAL for survival in college. And of course, for coming out on top of the HELL WEEK.
In other words: I can fight the urge to procrastinate. I shall not cram.
I'm listening now to
Drive by Incubus (I went on an mp3-downloading rampage last night while I was doing my analysis paper), and its message seems strangely apt for my current situation and resolve:
"Whatever tomorrow brings, I'll be there, with open arms and open eyes, yeah..."Thanks to my St. Paul training, I'm not groping in the dark, not knowing what to do or how to accomplish these requirements of college life (unlike some people).
"Lately I'm beginning to find that when I drive myself my light is found..."Yup. Whatever would come, would come, and I'll just have to meet it when it does.
And I'll do a pretty good job of it, too.
Ok. The suspense is (figuratively) killing me! We still haven't received our checked quiz papers in Filipino. If Coroza's gonna give me an F (if he hasn't done so already), he should at the very least spare me this
anticipation.
On the whole, Ateneo is NOT doing a good job of making itself likable to yours truly. It preferred to wring our Saturdays from us (again) as if summer classes were not enough, and decided to give us a nice extended orientation by way of...INTACT Guidance Center Orientation.
INTACT means Introduction to Ateneo Culture and Tradition (yup, Ateneo really
does love its acronyms). All freshmen are required the subject (which has ZERO credit, and therefore USELESS) once a week during their first sem. Its basically like one extended semester-long OrSem, wherein unwilling, grumbling, and begrudging students are stuffed down the throats with the Goodly Ateneo Spirituality fluff - being people for others, being the self-proclaimed
"light of the Lord" - all those stuff that have been similarly crammed into my brain ever since I set foot in a Catholic school (which was ever since Grade 1).
Give us a break - I'm suffocating already! I intend to have a freakkin'
life.
And Ateneo seems to be DEAD SET on taking it away from me by stripping me off the last vestiges of free time I've got left.
Don't get me wrong though. It's not as if I haven't learned something even remotely useful in that four-hour Saturday session. Since the Guidance Center administered the session, they gave us the results of personality and aptitude tests we had taken previously (yes, in a past Saturday). I received YET ANOTHER confirmation that I was
an introvert who basically makes judgments based on her head and not on her heart - does that mean that I am an antisocial geekaloid? I am usually fascinated with personality analysis; we did that a lot during my Psychology elective in my fourth year. But then, I know that personality can encompass qualities more varied, complex, and even contradicting that its nature shouldn't be limited to such dichotomous categories - in other words, personality isn't simply defined in black and white. Like other things, it too has its varieites gray areas.
For example, I know that I'm mostly an introvert, but I think that I can speak and defend my ideas in public better than most of my blockmates. This isn't a vain conjecture; it really happened in my Botany class. I was explaining my essay in the usual bulleted yet connected flow in the way our High School Argumentation and Debate teacher Atty. de Leon taught us, and my blockmates were positively
amazed. After that I was usually the one called by my groupmates to speak or report for them.
So I guess that in the middle of all this reflecting and philosophizing, I'm realizing one thing - that a lot of things can be so varied and contradicting. Ateneo doles out considerably less homework than St. Paul, but takes away our Saturdays and summer holidays in retaliation. My blockmates came from different backgrounds and schools, which was why they were drooling at the mouth when I explained something in the usual no-big-deal St. Paul way.
And at the end of the day, it really doesn't matter whether or not I receive my Filipino quiz paper (hopefully devoid of the big red F), or whether Ateneo makes or breaks my precious free time, or whether St. Paul-acquired habits would stay or disappear. Because I wouldn't care either. I'd always find a way to make it work in spite of the
varied circumstances that fling themselves in my life.
The Lord giveth, and the Lord taketh away. And Stephanie carest not one bit.
