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.