Bullshit in seven different languages!

I am fuming mad. Staff members are being harassed by the military, or people who claim to be military intelligence anyhow. They call up a staffer's parents and tell them their son/daughter is an activist, that they have a list of subversive students, and then threaten the staffer with dire consequences if he/she does not "talk" or "confess".

My god! Since when has writing for the student publication become a subversive activity? Since when have exposing university anomalies and writing about university issues become acts of treason and sedition? Since when has the mere act of peaceful assembly, or the free exercise of the right to free speech and expression become quantifiers for labeling a person an enemy of the state?

I am a college editor. I brandish neither gun nor knife; the most lethal weapon in my arsenal is truth. How could i be a threat to the university, much more to provincial security?

No wonder the inquisition happened. No wonder the church, under the guise of protecting the Christian faith, have been torching victims to death.

This university is run by priests too and is being kept like a fortress of iniquity.

Poets and writers have taken to the the streets.

And every night I wonder until when and where the picket lines would have to stretch just so the basic democratic rights of students would be respected.

It's actually amazing how the best and the worst could co-exist in the University of San Carlos: how we have been taught to eschew materialism but are exhorted to dress as befitting the students of a prestigious university, how we have been told in REED classes to love our brothers and sisters and treat each one with compassion but are lambasted at for "dressing like a bunch of prostitutes!", how we have been trained to think critically but are actually crucified for thinking differently and questioning policies we deem unchristian.

Think you I exaggerate? Consider this. The student publication faces closure. The RCNS office has been arbitrarily and unlawfully padlocked. Activists have been slapped with charges for holding rallies without a school permit. The security guard disperses a gathering of three to four students, no matter how trivial the topics they are discussing. Long hair will soon be prohibited. Girls must all wear blouses with hemlines three inches below the belt line.

One moment, we were students of a democratic, liberal Catholic institution of higher learning. The next, we awake to find ourselves relieving the nightmares of martial law.

History does repeat itself. Under the guise of doing "what is best for the students," the university administration has been trampling upon and repressing the rights of its students, the same students and the same rights that they have long since laid claims to protecting.

That is why the poets and writers have taken to the streets. That is why I have taken to talking myself hoarse to anyone who bothers to listen. I have never been an activist but i am well on my way to becoming one. Why? Because they are drawing blood; because they are destroying what countless other students have fought and paid for with their sweat, dreams, and sometimes, even lives; because they have forced me to see that some battles could never be waged through pen and paper alone.

The administration's word is law in the university. To borrow a dead poet's words, however, though I know, "I do not approve, and I am not resigned." Somehow, the broken will learn to stand together. When this happens, the picket lines would no longer have to stretch long and far.

Or so the quizilla site said. Never mind that I have nightmares awake. Never mind that I spend my waking moments scheming and plotting of chaos, bloodshed, and mayhem. I am peace. Hehehe. I am peace and not all the dalai lamas can shriek in protest. Mwahahaha

Insomnia and an overactive imagination sure do know when to strike. They tiptoe in the wee hours of down, battering my door down when I have no one to go tipping bottles with.

I thought about what Bonn said: about kafka, and his short story Metamorphosis; about how I polkad through the story and in my rush, ended up thinking the guy morphed into a spider. Bonn said he turned into a cockroach. I'm fascinated. We read the same story but the guy ended up differently for both Bonn and myself. Bonn, however, explains it away with "kafka is experimental, same way as James Joyce."

Is he, really? I don't know. Maybe kafka is a pseudo-inkblot test. Some see butterflies, others masks, others yet dragons. Maybe another student reading Metamorphosis would think he turned into a caterpillar. Hahaha. My attempt at humor sucks. I don't really have anything intelligent to say. just some gibberish and the sound of fingers pounding, pounding away on the keyboard to fill in the deafening silence.

Silence scares me shitless. It makes me feel the whole world went somewhere else while I was sleeping and I have the whole planet to myself. Space scares me too, you see. It makes me feel very very small, like a microscopic dot, something whose passing nobody would think twice about or even miss, much less mourn.

Space and silence. Space and silence. A giant could get lost in space and silence. I'd have no trouble getting lost too. But I'd rather find myself first.

A kindred spirit i knew once told me he wants to get lost all the time. He wants to lose himself, to fade away unobtrusively in a crowd, to skulk in the shadows. He never got around to telling me why. Somehow, he just stopped talking, just stopped texting, just stopped being. I figured he wanted to reassure himself he can still lose himself and get lost whenever he wants too. Space and silence, again. We all need that, I suppose. We all need to lose ourselves, so we can go looking for the bits and pieces of selves we think we can no longer find. It's a cycle as old and eternal as time. So maybe I should not gripe and bitch about not finding myself; perhaps the cycle dictates I should get lost first.

pakatuga na ko lord, maluoy ka.

I think the moral lesson of Shrek was not that beauty is only skin deep but that sometimes, frogs do not turn into princes who would cart you off to a magical kingdom where you would live happily ever after. Sometimes, they remain green, slimy amphibians. or, in this case, green, dimwitted ogres. kind-hearted, yes, but green and ugly just the same.















at least the creators of shrek were honest. the greatest fairytale never told, they dubbed it. they might as well have called it the only fairytale ever honestly told. for really, have you ever heard of a fairytale that ended with "and the prince and princess threw pots and pans at each other until the age of ninety"? As a little child listening in rapt attention to a bedtime story, have you ever heard of a fairytale that told of "the genie who refused to do as the mortal who had rubbed the lamp wishes and went on a wage hike protest instead"? Or better yet, what about of "the princess who went home crying because her frog would not turn into a dashing prince"?

The problem with fairytales is that they make us see the world through rose-colored glasses. frogs turn into princes. and princes are charming, cultured, smart, deliriously handsome ones who are filthy rich and do not boast of farting several octaves high as an accomplishment.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know I am rambling but my point is that if I hadn't read too much fairytale while young, perhaps I might have grown up a little more normal, a little more sane, and a little less disenchanted. I might have settled for someone ordinary and not look for one who could sail the seven seas, or fly a magic carpet, or dance with the twelve princess whose shoes never wear out.

Lucky for the princess she found Shrek, a slimy, fumbling ogre but a living breathing gallant just the same.

I have every reason to gripe. All I found were toad stools. Yech!

This is how all the masthead releases of Today's CAROLINIAN look like:



Patrick has been itching to chop out all the designs and replace them with something he's had cooking inside his colorful little mind.

Do I talk greek? Forgive me. The roster is as follows:

Red&Black - the news and entertainment section of Today's CAROLINIAN in tabloid form.

Peryodikit - the wall news of Today's CAROLINIAN; in this instance, think blown up paper and heaps of scotch tape.

Kuris - the arts and lampoon section of Today's CAROLINIAN.

The kuris was born last year, largely thanks to the efforts of then Art Director Louis Kong and former editor Sonny Agustin.

Bastos is a sponge word - you can wring as many bucketfuls of meaning out of it but not one would tell you what bastos really is. For Adam and Eve became indecent in the eyes of God an apple bite and several fig leaves after. Cavorting around butt naked, they were innocent.

So what is bastos really? Nudity in film and pictures is bastos; flaunting one’s genitals in sculpture and painting is art. Andrew E. crooning humanap ka ng pangit is bastos; looking for a mate who is old, ugly, and rich is practically a way of life.

This is not a diatribe. It just crossed my mind that no matter how many years I spend prolonging my stay in school, I would never learn be able to properly delineate the line between decent and bastos. Maybe the evolution of values has not been very healthy for the ordinary college girl trying to understand all the thou-shalt-nots of her university of higher learning. For all the rules to 'maintain and observe decency' dished out in notice-loads by SAS is very convoluted.

For instance, thou shalt not laugh bousterously. I kid you not. This was how it was spelled and the spelling never changed the entire month students figured out other ways of laughing: laughing softly, laughing with their mouths half closed, laughing through their eyes, laughing in their mind.

Thou shalt not wear slippers and sandals to school. Ah yes, slippers and sandals. Jesus told those who wish to follow him to bring nothing along but their walking sticks and their sandals. Being a student must be a higher calling than serving God for certainly, only shoes and other footwear higher up the sole hierarchy are allowed.

Thou shalt not wear blouses and t-shirts that are not at least three inches below the belt line or skirts that do not touch the kneecap. A lesson in anatomy. One learns better with certain body parts covered. Religious tenet: preserving the the moral pulchritude of an inherently lascivious male species is a female yoke. Aesopian lesson: the emperor was the only exemption; clothes really do make the person.

The golden rules above are, of course, intended to make students toe the line of decency and respectability.

But what are respectability and decency, after all? The notion that someone as exalted as man could have evolved from something as revolting as a monkey was once considered indecent and ridiculous. Philippine national artist Jose Garcia Villa was considered vulgar and indecent too. So was Adonis Durado, back in the days when he was a student editor of Today’s CAROLINIAN. So was Rizal for that matter, before a volley of shots and a Republic Act lent him instant legitimacy and just as instant halo to the same church who, during his lifetime, had called him heretical and actively denounced him from pulpits raining of hellfire and damnation.

“What is decency, after all, if not arbitrary value judgements that need to be examined every now and then before they become the guillotine of artists and new ideas?” asks a student publication who has no ambitions whatsoever of becoming decent according to any established standards.

True enough, what is decency, after all, if not arbitrary fashion dictates that need to be examined every now and then before they are turned into the sadly inadequate measuring stick of a person's true value?

That Adam and Eve were booted out of heaven a bite and several fig leaves after was not the tragedy; that neither God nor the snake defined decency is.

disturbing. that's the only word i could think of to sum up kafka's metamorphosis. i didn't even pay attention to his prose; i was too involved with the guy who turned into a spider. i didn't like how it ended too. the sister blossomed while gregor morphed into a human abomination and eventually died. i found tinges of the black widow in her character. i have absolutely no idea what kafka was espousing about or railing against in that story but i sure wish i hadn't started reading him this lousy friday afternoon with the rain pounding heavily on the tiled roof.

too depressing. i feel like i've just been bludgeoned in the head with all that's bad and ugly in the world.

What if Charles Darwin lied? What if his theory of evolution was nothing more than a fairytale, concocted one night while he lay in alcoholic stupor, listening to the neighborhood frogs croaking?

For Darwin’s entire theory rested upon the premise that men evolved and that it was the fittest who survived. But what if in truth it was not the fittest who survived but the lame, the ugly, and all the rest deemed too useless to send into battle? More importantly, what if man never really evolved? What if his only claim to marsupial ancestry was just his tendency to scratch, scratch, scratch his nether regions, that there really was no transition from monkey to man, from ape to homo sapien because man already looked the way he still does now since day one of creation?

This, of course, is the gospel according to Dave Barry who, in Noel’s cuneiform edition of A Guide to Guys, preaches that words like manly and manhood should be castrated out of the human vocabulary since they make being male sound like a very important activity. And since being male is nothing more than simply possessing a set of minor and frequently unreliable organs, Barry summarizes guy activity since the beginning of time as follows:

While prehistoric woman pounded away on roots and green leafy things that grow out of the earth to make goulash for dinner, men perfected the art of loafing, sitting around under the guise of hunting down the mighty dinosaur when the mighty dinosaur had, in fact, become extinct several million years ago. And after eons of staggering home mighty dinosaur-less every night and then sitting around for hours again the morning after, some men eventually became so bored they began to develop agriculture and invented tools. The effort exhausted them so much, though, that by the time ancient Greece attained its Golden Age and all the women worked at refining ancient humanity’s glorious contributions to politics, science, and the arts, instead of doing something equally useful, men simply developed nude Olympics and tattooed the Nike swoosh directly onto their skin.

Then came the Middle Ages, a bleak and desolate period in history. Cultural values and standards stridently went down the sewer. And while Western Europe’s civilization descended rapidly into chaos and near barbarism, guys, of course, had the time of their lives spitting, and jousting, and egging their favorite knights and the arena lions on to a murderous rampage. (“You’re the man, Launcelot!” or “Hey lion, you call that mauling the Christian? My grandma could maul Christians better!”) And while women tilled the soil, thatched the roof, and looked after the kids, men invented the Crusades (a precursor to business travel) so they could leave home for months and years to loot, and plunder, and whack each other in the head far, far away in the Holy Land. All this traveling, in turn, led to the development of the expense report, which was the forerunner to modern literary fiction.

The Renaissance was not any better. Women slaved for the resurgence of theater and the rebirth of philosophy, science, humanism, and the arts. Guys, meanwhile, spent their time ogling Drury Lane actresses and the healthy mammary glands of naked female statues. But the female capacity for loyalty and endurance is truly amazing. Women never said a word in protest, not even when, during the age of exploration, guys spent years paddling around in a gondola and getting lost simply because it is a biological truth that guys will NEVER ask for directions. This is why it takes several million sperm cells, each one wriggling in its own direction totally confident that it knows where it is going, to locate the female egg.

But let’s skip a couple of hundred years in between and zoom in on modern man who had gone back to sitting around under the guise of engaging in productive work. For of course, man’s conception of dust four scores and seven years ago never really changed. For him, dust is still a noun, not a verb.

The nebulous, Lilliputian gray matter modern guys call brain is ill-suited not just towards comprehending dust as a verb but also towards grasping human relationships. Which explains their allergy to marriage and other forms of commitment except for concubinage and their amnesia concerning anniversaries. Modern women, therefore, should pepper everyday conversations with subtle reminders that go, “Louis, would you mind passing me that sugar, inasmuch as we have a relationship?” or “We’ve got to watch the new Lara Croft flick because we have a relationship.” or “I really like this cd better and yes Louis, we have a relationship.” and, yes, even among married couples, “Honey, there’s a burglar outside and we have a relationship, I mean you and I do.”

Tsk, tsk, tsk. Plato probably had the male species in mind when he wrote of the cave dwellers in his Allegory of the Cave. But the lengths that some guys would go to explain their existence is simply amazing. Noel bought the book so he could justify every molecule of himself to his wife. Barry, on the other hand, chopped and hewed and hacked his way through sentences and paragraphs to convince himself that he was not the only one who did not evolve, every guy in the planet didn’t too. Darwin’s theory was just that, a theory, and he, Barry, and every other guy in the planet today are no different from the ones who survived the great continental divide.

Still and all, Barry’s A Guide to Guys is one rollicking read. Good for guffaws, sniggers, and a few moments of epiphany in between. No, Darwin never lied. Man did evolve; never mind if you think every male in your house is still primitive. But heavens forbid that we should ever wake up one morning to find Dave Barry God.

Amen.

This is an entirely new form of writing. I do not even know what blogspots are or what blog means. Perhaps it is a new species of parasitic life form. Or just an artsy fartsy name for landing on the floor with a thud, bang, plop, and a complete loss of face as in "BloG!" Perhaps it means a good, vicious whack on the head too, as in "BloG!"

Or then, again, maybe BLoG is just another new-age sponge word, the marriage of web and log and all the elements that come in between.

The last explanation sounds the most sane, logical, and colorless.