Sikyu Insecurity (2009)

 

ON September 11, 2001, Osama bin Laden and the Al-Qaeda made terrorism a living, breathing, turban-headed entity bent on the destruction of all that is good, noble, and pure. For the past seven years, the international community has been scrambling for answers to combat new threats, from Richard Reid to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. In the periphery, we’ve been flooded with Saudi oil conspiracies, and the U.S. government scaring us with grainy webcasts predicting the fall of the Wes.

Yet despite the impending apocalypse, everything is still bright and sunny in the happiest country on Earth, the Philippines. You see, these things don’t really affect us (or so we’d like to think). Filipinos would rather gripe about the lack of government dole-outs than about inadequate disaster response systems. While forums around the world debate on whether or not to pull out troops from Iraq, local airtime would rather debate on whether or not Piolo and Sam are getting it n.

We only care about issues that are close to our hearts and minds. (Notably, stomachs and wallets are acceptable substitutes in the event of a lack of the said organs.) It is because of this that ideals such as democracy, justice, and environmentalism will never captivate the Filipino people in the same encompassing and uplifting manner as Willie Revillame, who has enough worshippers to be counted as a major religion

day 15 of the after-life

I heard Mom say something but couldn’t quite understand it. My brain produces a psychosomatic effect such that without my glasses, my hearing is impaired along with my sight. “She’s going to the other side,” Justin told me. I took this to mean she would follow Jason to the other side of the pool, so I replied with an “okay” and a thumbs-up. Jacob, Justin and I then took turns holding our breaths and diving to the pool bottom by the deep end of The Village Sports Club’s pool, the side opposite Jason’s. We would later find out that Mom meant to go join our sisters at the badminton court.

We didn’t know how long it was—five, ten minutes?—until we felt like we’ve had enough and missed our little brother. Justin clambered out of the pool to find him, while Jacob and I start to paddle. “Where is he?” I called out to Justin. I was searching for a little boy with a snorkeling mask splashing around in the shallows. But now there more guests than when we arrived and to my -4.00 myopic vision, each bobbing head was indistinguishable from the other.

I heard Jacob say he spotted a floating boy in green board shorts. “Is that Jason?” he called out. Floating perfectly still is a neat trick, I thought when I saw what Jacob was looking at, but don’t be silly. Jason can’t a) be here where it’s four feet deep, and b) floating; he can’t swim. I approached the said floating boy and I was right, the boy looked nothing like Jason. His belly was engorged with fluid. The skin around his half-open eyes were blue. His tongue was blue too, swollen and protruding from his lips. I cradled my brother and screamed for a lifeguard. [Addendum 19 March 2012, 10:36 PM: What made it all the more terrifying was he seemed to have been there for some time; nobody else had noticed him, not even the lifeguard or club staff, besides the three of us.]

Collision Course 2012 Recap

Recap and Evaluation of Sanggunian candidates at The GUIDON’s Collision Course debates by Job de Leon and Steffi Sales

Steffi and I took the initiative to bring the debates to those who could not attend due to other commitments and the bad weather this afternoon. Hopefully this contributes to Ateneans’ understanding of where their Sanggu candidates are coming from and informs the student vote in this week’s elections. Also please do check out the #CollisionCourse hashtag on Twitter for the live updates by @rosselle [link fixed] whose reports we used in the latter part of this entry.

DISCLAIMER: We have a couple. Firstly, there may be a discrepancy between what was said and what we understood. We condensed these speeches to the best of our ability. However, we place quite a bit of trust in ourselves that we got this right, so chances of error are minimal. Secondly, this is no way meant to be a completely objective evaluation. Our evaluation reflects our own sentiments of the issues discussed at the debates, so please feel free to disagree.

Kasi hindi pa ako sawa sa CSI: Manila

This is our group’s History class output. We were tasked to dramatize Rizal’s life in 15 minutes and the geek friends that my groupmates are (and I mean this in the most admirable way possible) came up with the idea of a crime procedural.

Set in the present day, two detectives are tasked with solving the murder of this mestizo de sangley. There may be some inaccuracies here and there, but enjoy it for what it is.

Keep calm

Word.