Mikey Munsayac: i have 3 cases of red horse in my house
Franco: haha
Franco: kung free ako friday night ubusin natin
Mikey Munsayac: left over form the party
Mikey Munsayac: so many people backoput i was annoyed..
Mikey Munsayac: thats the plan actually
Franco: siguro they had their own graduation plans and all
Mikey Munsayac: not the graduates
Mikey Munsayac: other people who were my frieds..
Franco: malay mo, they had graduating bros or something
Mikey Munsayac: nope
Mikey Munsayac: i contacted all of them,
Mikey Munsayac: they forgot or were getting laid..
Mikey Munsayac: the gettign laid i understand
Franco: probably the former
Franco: the heat does things to your brain, you know
Mikey Munsayac: yes yes well at elast we have a lot of beer
Franco: beer also does things to your brain
Mikey Munsayac: well we only need our brain for a 40-50 more years
Franco: point taken man
Mikey Munsayac: if were lucky 20..
Franco: nah, I wanna live old
Franco: yung tipong makikita mong professor emeritus yung pangalan mo
Mikey Munsayac: im a preshool tecaher that will never happen
Franco: and having enough cash to not worry about anything when you spend
Mikey Munsayac: that i want badly
Franco: see? oldness is fun
Franco: aside from the diabetes and high blood my family has a history of
Franco: the baldness i don't mind, it'll make me look like lex luthor
Mikey Munsayac: true true
Wednesday, April 28, 2010
Sunday, April 25, 2010
Congrats-ing and Condolence-ing
It's weird, really, how life seesaws from high to low and back again, all within the few milliseconds it takes for the vibrations in the air caused by your snapping fingers to reach your ears and be comprehended by your brain as such, how life is, like they say, like a piece of debris stuck to the wheel of a vehicle in motion: ascending half the revolution one moment, descending the other half the next, rinse and repeat, until everybody is all lost in the shuffle, blurry image after blurry image passing by with such speed that one appears to bleed into another.
It goes like this: while I am at my phone, sifting through messages that congratulate the step into the next major phase of life (my favorite one coming from my ninang, saying she owes me a toy as a grad gift; how many ninangs are willing to do that for 20-ish year-old inaanaks nowadays?), I receive a text from a fellow Transformers collector, saying that one of our older collector friends (46 is a pretty ripe age for a collector, considering the hobby is populated mostly by twenty- and thirtysomethings) passed away at 11AM this morning due to a sudden heart attack. All of a sudden reality strikes back, and I am right smack in the middle of the irony that is tagging about a hundred smiles worth of photos of last night's pomp and circumstance as the reality that a fellow toy collector and good friend has just left this world sinks in. The multimedia does not help either, as while I text our friend's son to ask how he's coping, looking through the faces as I tag people can't hep but make me smile and be happy that my five-year academic ordeal is now over.
RIP Alvin Asuncion aka Bigdaddy of Cybertron Philippines. You will be missed. Condolences to AJ Asuncion and family.
Happy graduation BACA 05 (fellow leftovers, at least) and especially UPLB batch 2006. Congratulations to us.
It goes like this: while I am at my phone, sifting through messages that congratulate the step into the next major phase of life (my favorite one coming from my ninang, saying she owes me a toy as a grad gift; how many ninangs are willing to do that for 20-ish year-old inaanaks nowadays?), I receive a text from a fellow Transformers collector, saying that one of our older collector friends (46 is a pretty ripe age for a collector, considering the hobby is populated mostly by twenty- and thirtysomethings) passed away at 11AM this morning due to a sudden heart attack. All of a sudden reality strikes back, and I am right smack in the middle of the irony that is tagging about a hundred smiles worth of photos of last night's pomp and circumstance as the reality that a fellow toy collector and good friend has just left this world sinks in. The multimedia does not help either, as while I text our friend's son to ask how he's coping, looking through the faces as I tag people can't hep but make me smile and be happy that my five-year academic ordeal is now over.
RIP Alvin Asuncion aka Bigdaddy of Cybertron Philippines. You will be missed. Condolences to AJ Asuncion and family.
Happy graduation BACA 05 (fellow leftovers, at least) and especially UPLB batch 2006. Congratulations to us.
Friday, April 16, 2010
Back to reading, and Y (no, not the piece by Douglas Adams, and not the Last Man either)
It is nothing short of a comfort, the first time one is able to do some pleasure reading. By this, I mean that time when you go to your bookshelf, pile of bargain hauls from the nearby Booksale or other hole-in-the-wall, or stuff scattered around your floor, picking a book whose title, cover or blurb appears interesting enough (let us all whisper a little word of thanks to Sir Dennis to showing us how important these parts are), and sitting or lying down and taking the world of the word in, with no framework to keep at the back of your mind, no theory-ascribed patterns to watch for when a particular narrative device appears pregnant with meaning.
Reading up on nationalism, magic realism, postmodernism, criticism of Filipino novels in English and magic realist novels themselves can get stale after a while, especially when that while almost stretched to its second year.
Anyway, the whole rhetoric about reading for pleasure was to make way for my latest piece of pleasure reading: Elizabeth Costello by J.M. Coetzee. Not bad, if not overy laden with speeches about history and the human condition at times (I say this only loosely, as this is the first Coetzee I've read).
It presents several interesting things, though I only have space and brainpower to present to the few people who still read these far and very few in between blog entries one of them, in my opinion the most important piece of intellectual masturbation in the book. It goes like this: according to the book (and possibly some historians out there), the original root of the Humanities and of textual analysis was in order to understand the Bible, God's Divine Word. Because it was presumed that in order to gain true understanding of its messages, one would have to know the language/s the original/s was/were written in (Greek, Hebrew, etc.). Also, one would have to be able to understand the way the Word was written (literary study), the culture (anthropology) as well as the historical conditions (history) under which it was produced, in addition to the above note about language (linguistics).
And it didn't stop there. As it would be theorized that the Bible was written to elevate people, to guide them away from some wretched state of things, people then felt the need to understand the conditions that the Bible was supposed to address. Hence, the turn to whatever literature we could scavenge from the ancient Greeks, which in time, became an end unto itself as well, as the study of the Classics.
Thus we are castaways, adrift in a pedantic sea, with nothing more to cling to, as the true motivation behind our efforts has vanished into the horizon long ago. We cling to the pieces of literary driftwood that pass by us, creating little causes to justify our existence.
Why, then, do we continue?
Reading up on nationalism, magic realism, postmodernism, criticism of Filipino novels in English and magic realist novels themselves can get stale after a while, especially when that while almost stretched to its second year.
Anyway, the whole rhetoric about reading for pleasure was to make way for my latest piece of pleasure reading: Elizabeth Costello by J.M. Coetzee. Not bad, if not overy laden with speeches about history and the human condition at times (I say this only loosely, as this is the first Coetzee I've read).
It presents several interesting things, though I only have space and brainpower to present to the few people who still read these far and very few in between blog entries one of them, in my opinion the most important piece of intellectual masturbation in the book. It goes like this: according to the book (and possibly some historians out there), the original root of the Humanities and of textual analysis was in order to understand the Bible, God's Divine Word. Because it was presumed that in order to gain true understanding of its messages, one would have to know the language/s the original/s was/were written in (Greek, Hebrew, etc.). Also, one would have to be able to understand the way the Word was written (literary study), the culture (anthropology) as well as the historical conditions (history) under which it was produced, in addition to the above note about language (linguistics).
And it didn't stop there. As it would be theorized that the Bible was written to elevate people, to guide them away from some wretched state of things, people then felt the need to understand the conditions that the Bible was supposed to address. Hence, the turn to whatever literature we could scavenge from the ancient Greeks, which in time, became an end unto itself as well, as the study of the Classics.
Thus we are castaways, adrift in a pedantic sea, with nothing more to cling to, as the true motivation behind our efforts has vanished into the horizon long ago. We cling to the pieces of literary driftwood that pass by us, creating little causes to justify our existence.
Why, then, do we continue?
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