Tuesday marks the day I can officially call myself a college student. Today I bade goodbye to my hometown and hopped on a plane to NAIA, thence on a car to UP Diliman. I spent roughly an hour and a half in Kalayaan, filling out forms and stuff (red tape for the win), pausing every once in a while only to walk to the nearby Shopping Center to buy index cards, papers, envelopes, and whatnot. I will make the necessary payments and have my forms notarized on Monday, but for today I threw all my stuff in my dorm room (basement, baby!) and headed to SM North Edsa to buy things I needed for the dorm.
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“NSPC 2009: Notes From Naga City”, published here on February 25, 2009; “NSPC 2010: The Tagum Invasion”, published here on February 28, 2010.
I have been a campus journalist since the fifth grade in elementary. Ever since I started I have been a feature writer, and thankfully I’ve won several awards in that category, including two at the national level.
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Perhaps the most iconic and enduring symbol of the University of the Philippines is the Oblation—a naked man with arms outstretched, offering himself in service to his country. No less than this attitude of self-sacrifice is expected of all UP students.
The Oblation made me think about when I decided to take on the Moryo-Moryo project. The prospect of winning a cash prize enticed me, of course, but much more than that I welcomed the opportunity to help a worthy cause. Every time we visited the school, we got to see the children whose eyes sparkled with hope despite their dire situation. That really hit me in two ways: it reminded me of how lucky I was to have food to eat, clothes to wear, and a house to come home to everyday, and inspired me to do everything I could to help.
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In less than a week I will leave my hometown to pursue a degree in Journalism at the University of the Philippines in Diliman. As a kind of countdown, I thought I’d take a look back at the past few years of my life throughout the week and connect them to what lies ahead for me. Specifically, I’ll be linking to blog posts or websites that I think are worth pondering on and discussing them briefly.
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“Regretting Section One [RANTING/BITCHING]“, published here on July 4, 2008.
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Did you guys see Game 5 of the Suns – Lakers series this morning (yesterday evening in LA)? I woke up just in time for the final five minutes of the fourth quarter. The Suns were able to slim down the Lakers’ sizable lead and tie the game with three seconds left on the clock. Needless to say the Lakers called timeout and basically told everyone to give Kobe the ball then get out of his goddamn way. But Los Angeles’ demigod wasn’t able to get close to the basket and had to shoot from pretty way out. The shot was no good.
Apparently no one noticed stupid Ron Artest manning the paint. He made the rebound and the game-winning, buzzer-beating shot.
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When I got Jamby, one of the first problems I encountered in my switch from Windows to Mac OS X was how to transfer my iTunes library. Before I purchased my Mac I actually did a bit of googling and saved links to some tutorials, but when I got the chance to try to initiate the transfer I discovered that because my Windows install is f—ed up beyond all repair, none of the how-to’s would work for me.
Thankfully I found an easy way to transfer my iTunes library from Windows to Mac OS X over WiFi. All this method needed was an iTunes account, for iTunes to be installed on the transmitting and the receiving computers, and for the computers to be in the same WiFi network. This is all thanks to an iTunes feature called Home Sharing, introduced in iTunes 9.
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Last week I went swimming with a few of my high school batchmates. (I’m still trying to get used to saying “batchmates” instead of “schoolmates”.) My summer has generally been warm and languid, so I definitely welcomed the opportunity to take a dip in the pool and catch up on things with my friends.
We spent much of our time talking about college—the subjects, the schedules, and the ways of life that we will have to get used to once classes begin. Some of us are going to Xavier University in Cagayan de Oro; others, to MSU in Marawi and Iligan; at least one will attend Silliman University in Dumaguete; I and three of my classmates will go to UP Diliman; two of my classmates, to UP Manila. It’s a full-blown diaspora.
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In a matter of weeks I will pack my things, clear my room, and hop on a plane bound for Manila, bringing with me the weight of my parents’ dreams for me. I feel like the modern, middle-class equivalent of that guy in the Filipino movies of decades past—the clueless promdi who receives kisses and well wishes from his teary-eyed friends and family then hops on a ship bound for the big city, and who, upon arriving, takes off his straw hat and raises his head up to marvel at the skyscrapers and the airplanes that dominate the alien landscape, before setting off, knapsack slung over his back, to look for a job.
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I’m an avid, if mediocre, user of flight simulation programs, being a bit of an aviation fanatic. So when I got Jamby, one of the first things I did was scout for a good flight simulator for Mac OS X. The problem is, one can say that flight simulators fall at least partly under the “Gaming” category of software, and if there’s one thing Macs do badly, it’s run games.
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I know my masculinity will have to suffer when I say this, but I’m an avid fan of “Sex and the City”. I know, I know—it’s a girl’s show, and I’m straight (jussayin). But the ideas of frantic life in New York, nights out, apartment walls lined with bookshelves, complicated relationships, and a barely working newspaper columnist just appeal to me.
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