As soon as I got home, I
seriously felt like weeping.
Due to the absence of that damn driver who chose, of all the days in the week, a weekday, to get married, I had to commute to school for the first time in my college life(I wasn't alone though; Dad insisted on having the maid accompany me, as if I wasn't in college). I have to admit, though, that because of this I now have a great appreciation for our (private!) car, even though the driver seems to love applying the Law of Inertia (read: sudden braking). I never had a greater appreciation for the MRT and LRT lines than I have now; if it wasn't for their existence (though the MRT looks like a dingy sewer next to the LRT lines), I'd be stuck with slow buses and jeepney OR expensive taxis. I totally admire hard-core commuters now, because I never thought that it'd be THIS hard to walk under the hot sun, in the stiflingly humid air.... not to mention the annoying trike ban along Katipunan just when I needed the tricycles most (the driver will be coming back tomorrow).
Also, I now have a greater picture of my grades in Filipino and Botany Lab...which all seem to spell GLOOM and DOOM. Though my grades (thankfully) aren't a depressing row of Ds and Fs, they average on a mediocre, banal, boring, average
B. My english and lit grades could be pretty fair, but I haven't received my advisory marks on them yet. Botany Lab is depressing (I mean, I got a 55.5/70 in one set of lab exercises), and Filipino just HELLISH (although I got a rare B+ on one quiz, the others range from C+ to D).
Dammit, am I this dumb or what????!?!.
It is only now that I realize how easy my life was in St. Paul. Though we were constantly barraged with the usual multiple-quizzes-and-long-tests-and-projects-a-day, the standards and expectations are not that high. And besides, low grades were always redeemable through The Miracle of Standard Deviation. In college, however, that blessed "adjusting of grades" is non-existent; in other words, we reap what we sow. Argh, I must have been sowing really BAD plants lately, else I haven't used fertilizer that much (hydroponics, anyone?).
I swear, I AM going to raise my grades. I am going to aim for an A (yeah....riiighhht). And that would mean studying for the Botany Lab exam tomorrow, the Math long test on Friday, the Math midterms (omigosh!) on Wednesday next week, the PE midterms, the Lit long exam, the Botany Lec long exam, the list just goes on and on and on and on....
I swear, when I arrive home tomorrow, I will NOT be compelled to weep anymore.
Let's just hope that I won't faint from sheer stress, shall we?
I went to this blog to admire my handiwork on the layout when I realized that I haven't posted a review for
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince.
Though I can definitely say that this sixth installment of the phenomenally popular series is darker than its predecessors owing to the maturity of the protagonist/title character, it's too mature and PG-13 for comfort.
I agree that the plot has to get darker and more complex (yes, once again an important character is murdered by someone whose loyalties seem to be ambiguous). I agree that Harry Potter has to have some kind of a love life even though he's marked as a future murderer/victim; I mean, I would have been surprised not to find anything on the typical adolescent fling in a book about sixteen-year-olds. In fact, I actually liked the interesting little emotional skirmishes (case in point: Ron and Hermione). The numerous kissing - or
snogging - scenes were overdone and hilarious, at least, in my point of view.
But would the parents of the young Harry Potter groupies be as amused when their kids start asking them what
slut means? Or maybe, what exactly Ron and Lavender were doing as they were thrashing around like a pair of eels all over the place? I'll admit, it's never too early to make kids aware of the birds and the bees, but
eels??? Come on, people: I know that things can get wild when adolescent hormones surge, but Rowling writes as if her characters had an overdose of
steroids. I wouldn't be surprised if (as I found on one website whose URL I can't remember), Harry Potter would eventually bed one of his hero-worshipping groupies in Book Seven.
One thing is for sure: what with its increasingly darker, wilder, gloomier, and death-filled content, Harry Potter is fast evolving from the long-ago time when it was confined to the Children's Section at the back of the bookstore, and some of its most notable content were quirky long-bearded Headmasters and weird Every Flavor Beans. No longer is its audience confined to eager kiddies obsessed (as we all once were) with magic and fanciful unicorns; in fact, the series seems to age and mature with the children with whom the series was first introduced once upon a time. It could even become an adult-worthy classic if Book Seven was dealt with in an intimate yet grand and epic scale worthy of Tolkien's Lord of the Rings.
Actually, I can't help feeling resentful at Rowling, because in spite of the questionable merits of Book Six (I still think that Books Three and Five were so much better), I immediately hankered after Book Seven upon reading the last line of the damn book.
I sure do hope that Book Seven has no more snogging than is absolutely necessary.
Isn't it about time I updated this blog?
In a fit of creative obsession I painstakingly crafted the new graphics in Adobe Photoshop over a whopping four days (and counting). I posted more info about the layout in the
about page. I hope you like it. :-D.
Anyway, college life is fast becoming a "fiasco" (for want of a better word). I mean, for the first time in my whole life as a grudging yet responsible and almost law-abiding student, I have
cut classes. Granted, it was only Taekwondo class; PE grades aren't included in the QPI. And besides, I already know all the white-belter forms the subject teaches. I felt that I deserved a break, especially since I stayed up until 3am the night before to edit and mutilate (and wholly redo) the lab report made by one of my groupmates (fortunately the one-group-lab-report-per-week scheme was scrapped in favor of individual answers). I am NOT feeling guilty...nope...nuh-uh (denial, anyone?).
I really should be moving on now; that gripe's over and done with. The more pressing issue right now is
"How am I going to redeem myself in Botany???". We were just given our project details, specs, and dates of submission last week, as if we weren't busy enough trying to catch up and process the voluminous information force-fed into our brains every session. Yes, I am trying to catch up; I already bought the Bio book by Starr (unfortunately, I couldn't find the pretty colored International Edition version of the book, so I settled with the grimy yet cheap black-and-white Philippine version instead). I hope that next time I will at least have SOME idea what the prof's talking about.
I just read
Holes by Louis Sachar for my Lit class. Though it is a children's/young adult's book, it actually has none of the corniness/preachiness/inane nonsense of most in its genre (think C.S. Lewis's
Chronicles of Narnia and
Sweet Valley Twins); I mean, come on, it's about time a children's book dealt with the harsh, not-so-pretty and magical, but REAL facts of life. It actually touches on the reality of social issues such as child labor, poverty, miscarriages of justice, social stigmas, crime and punishment, etc. etc. The plot has many back stories in it, which in the first part of the story confused me as to their significance to the main storyline, but actually provided some cool bits of plot twists along the way. Actually,
Holes strikes me as a
Da Vinci Code for kids, except for the fact that the former actually has better character development.
It reminds me of another thing. I have to do my Lit and English worksheets!
But before that, I think I'll edit some of the grammatical errors and typos in previous posts.
Procrastinating.....again!
