Sir Ediboy Calasanz's Ph103 class, this evening. Paraphrased.

Meron akong kaibigan, meron siyang pagka-OC. Pero cute naman yung pagiging OC niya. Anyway, ganito. Kapag papasok siya sa bawat bagong building, kailangan niya munang mahanap yung fire exit. Otherwise manginginig siya talaga.

Naisip ko lang, hindi ba magandang metaphor rin ito para sa pag-ibig? Pag-ibig nga ba kung provisional, yun bang "mahal kita, pero maghahanap muna ako ng fire exit, just in case"?

---

Conversation, North Parking smocket. Later that night. Paraphrased.

Jojo Farcon: So Mike, nakahanap ka na ba ng fire exit?
Mike Dizon: Hahaha, hindi pare, go lang ako eh.
Jojo Farcon: Pero siya, sa tingin mo ganun ba?
Mike Dizon: Feeling ko naghahanap siya. If not actually nakahanap na.
Jason Baltao: Eh pareng Mike, pano pag nasunog na yung building?
Mike Dizon: Ewan. Tatalon na lang ako sa bintana.
Jojo Farcon: Hahaha, nice nice. Tama! Malamang mabuhay ka nga, pero pilay ka panigurado.

---

Lessons learned:

1) Calasanz loves Jacinta.
2) We can take a metaphor to town and paint the place red with it.
3) I don't think we have actual lives.
4) Smoking helps insight, but not clogged noses.
5) I will miss these crutches.

Last night I made you a pink crane.

It was hard, you see. It was my first crane ever. I had to get my brain to comprehend craft and my hands to comprehend brain-comprehended craft, so it took me an hour. But see, I've never focused on a thing that hard since I was five, when I still had the kindergarten fascination for magnifying lenses and spot-charred paper.

I finished your crane and folded it into a book, the book I forgot to show you I'd bought because maybe, when you took your crane from me and surprisedly thanked me for it, I was so giddily happy to have finally done something right for you that my mind missed a beat or two.

Because I was afraid to give it. But the way that you gingerly put it somewhere it won't crease at least made my day.

I can't stop giving you things. Giving you me. Knowing that this is at least a hit-or-miss, that I can give you something instead of not anything, is at least par for the course.

Alright. Let me first make the very obvious observation: Craist. It's been a long time since I've been here.

The fact that I AM here, however, seems to be good for something! Namely, it's good for my thesis, which, up until today, was about Hegel. Not anymore.

I have decided to move over to the Kant camp, for myriad reasons. Chief of which would be that I HAVE read Kant already. Hegel-reading, obviously, never made it past dream-phase alpha. Corollarily, I have read Kant... and understood what he was trying to say. Basically. No-frill-ly. And definitely not comprehensively. But it's a start. Also, I already was supposed to get Kant for thesis, but my only then-known Kant expert in the department, Dr. Reyes, didn't want to support me with my particular Kant endeavour (exploring freedom and morality, evidently). But then Kant class, and then Dr. Bulaong, and then Rechtlichtermensch, and then wow. Kant, apparently, has an oft-overlooked body of thought on the relationships between ethics, right, the good, and individual freedom. Which was what I was looking for in the first place. And then lastly, as Sir Jon points out, hey, at least now you've read Kant. Read most of what you need, actually. So yeah. Kant now.

( I suspect I am much too incoherent to post anything remotely even philosophical. But for the sake of note-taking (and posterity), I shall attempt it. Cut for your sakes. )

That's it for now. I have often remarked, as have my blockmates in class, that Kant seems to have had a merry time of prancing through the difficulties that the philosophers preceding him have wrangled with for so long and so agonizingly, only to say that ohai hahaha those are not problems if you do THIS! And then he does this thing with the phenomena and the noumena and then apparently all is saved. Or is it? Why are there derivationist and separatist Kant thinkers; why the divide? I know it's not strictly my problem anymore though.

It remains: Kant is difficult. But whenever I do get him I enjoy it. It is something I have not felt with Hegel. I'll hold on to this fact for a while. And Dr. Bulaong being himself, I'm sure that once we've come to an agreement, I'll be facing killer deadlines like I've never known before. But I accept the challenge. I've never been too good with this autonomy and self-legislation thing anyway. Rechtlichtermensch indeed: coerce me.

---

Also, Microsoft OneNote 2007. I love you for the rest of my academic life and I knew you only today. May you love me as I love you and may we have a fruitful life as lovers up until your newer edition comes around and I ditch you for her, or I go clinically insane. Since I am many bad things but dishonest is not one of them (if you're not my mom or dad) I thought you should know. If you decide to take up 100% of my CPU usage now I will understand. Just know that I will uninstall you, but not without immortalizing you with a eulogy first. Once again I love you, thank you and good night.

I started out with the basic assumption that love, for it to be properly called such, necessarily has to be of a nature immutable and permanent. That it has to be stable. That it has to be universally this and not anything other, at its very core; corollarily, every person in love experiences the same, but differently, rather like a mansion of a thousand doors opening to a single floorspace. The same, but different.

I was working under the initial assumption that love is of a nature perfect. That it is the primary indivisible. That each and every one of its fallibilities are not its own, but of the human being with which it is in participation; such vessels have been, historically, proven to be quite weak and brittle. Perfect and indivisible.

The method was clear, the reasoning impeccable, the conclusions sturdy and logically verifiable. But the basic assumptions were ultimately utterly, incredibly, disappointingly wrong. All other derivations from the fail point onward are rendered unviable, as either poisoned, baseless, or insensible.
---

Love is a social construct transcendental for a reason. What was I doing trying to prove it anyway?

---

SELF-CONSCIOUS EDIT! This entry, in no way, references Hi166 Girl at all. Thank you and good night.

The situation went sort of like this. Finally, a pretext for talking to Hi166 Girl has arrived. I'd cut class Tuesday this week: perfectly good excuse for me to tap her on the elbow and go "Um, hey, did we do anything important last meeting?" Not exactly the most engaging of conversation topics, but hey, one's got to start somewhere. So I enact this brilliant plan. I got as far as the tap and the "Hey" and of course she looks back to listen properly. And then... and then my brain shut down. As in. Three seconds of awkward pause before, mentally, oh shit what the fuck was that I'm supposed to be asking her a question what was it WHAT WAS IT. And then I got to ask the question and the whole ten seconds she was talking I was more watching her face move in speech than actually listening. I managed to thank her politely afterward, which I think by that time was a gigantic achievement on my part. *sigh*

I'd start trying to explain exactly what I saw in that face when she turned to look at me that threw what felt like a tire jack into the gearworks of my head, if I didn't think that I probably would 1) not stop anytime soon if I did, and 2) I might sound like, and be rightly mistaken for, a particularly bad understudy of a Romanticist somebody. It's seriously, SERIOUSLY that bad.

And then I managed to get her talking about the resident campus wandering Jesus (her: Ice Pasco? me: nah, Darren Gustafson. her: oh, don't know him. me: I bet you do. Tall guy, Caucasian, huge-ass earrings? her: OH, siya! Oo nga kilala ko. *laughter*) and I can't help but think, Step One: Have a More-than-one-sentence-long Conversation that Ends in Smiles and not You-weirdo Looks is a resounding success.

I'm thinking something quite like, weeeeeeell. This schoolboy crush is getting a bit out of hand.

/brb grinning like an idiot.

---

Immersion tomorrow today. Half-exciting, quarter-hassle, quarter-terrifying.

Tonight I'm absolutely brilliant. I have planned my thesis defense in my head and I have finally untangled the knots in my head about the people around me and the reasons why they're still around me, or me them.

But I'm scared of what I know so I'll be keeping it to myself for now. Too many ships have been sunk by loose lips already.

---

Dear father. Don't go insane.

This is becoming a trend.

Every day that that booksale rests in front of Dela Costa is another day that I am tempted, with various degrees of success, to strain my budget to the breaking point for books. To wit: Rant by Chuck Palahniuk, Brave New World by Aldous Huxley, and Doctor Faustus by Thomas Mann. As a direct consequence I am now unable to extraneously spend any money for the remainder of the week.

But oh well, books.

Despite the dramatic heading, all that this means is that now I have Chuck Palahniuk's Lullaby, Kurt Vonnegut's Deadeye Dick, and Banana Yoshimoto's Kitchen. And that this expensive bibliotheque escapade was enabled by 1) said bibliotheque's being Zeitgeist books, and 2) the money used up this day was released by dear mama, for such a dubious reason as "books for thesis". Sorry, mom. Will pay you back threefold when jobs start arriving.

That is all for the day. Reviews might or might not be forthcoming; anyway, you guys'll see it first. Bye for now.

Right, I knew I implied continuous one-week postage, but life got in the way. So, minor notes are forthcoming.

( Serious wall of remotely interesting text up ahead, y'know, really. )

Ends. Maybe more definitely later.

This post is for everyone. OO PATI IKAW YOU KNOW WHO YOU ARE. Haha.

Seriously, though, guys. Seriously. Read on and weep.

---












For more information:
PICTURES:
here and here
NEW INFORMATION:
Here - near constant updates
Here - ONTD_political live post
ON TWITTER:
@StopAhmadi, @ProtesterHelp


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---

On campus I am known as an intellectual apathetic, about practically everything that doesn't concern me. But I sideline as armchair activist at night.

I don't much like Iran. I don't much like Islam and its radicals. Hell, I don't much like theocracies. But all of those things must be freely chosen into existence by the very people that live by it or under it. And this isn't happening in Iran.

What the fuck do we care about Iran, you say. Nothing. Absolutely nothing. But, principled human beings that I assume all of you to be, you might try caring about the people.

Picture this happening here where we are. Not unimaginable, no, since it already has? Now picture it happening again.

This didn't go under a cut. Neither should it ever. Some things are just that much more important, even if it's just a virtual value, than all the tired and jaded fingers that might be inconvenienced by a few keystrokes or wheel-rolls. I should apologize but sorry, guys and gals, I don't think I can be apologetic here; it's the least I can do for THEM.

Please repost. Barring that, spread the word.

It ticks me off somewhat that I even have to beg.

(repost code can be snagged here -> http://one-hoopy-frood.livejournal.com/10678.html)

( This didn't need a cut earlier. Now it does. )

---

Tomorrow more subjects. Tomorrow more postage.

Recent information had arrived suggesting in no uncertain manner that we should get a new househelp. And the because of this is: our last one got shotgun wedded.

That's right. She left to get frakking married. It doesn't help that where she hails from in Mindanao, shotgun weddings are just that, if not slightly inaccurate because YOU KNOW, shotgun pellets don't reach really far. "AK-47 wedding" might be the more technically, if not politically, correct term.

Which isn't really a bad thing per se, were it not for the fact that we were expecting her back, since, you know, she said she was only going back home for certain mundane things called bakasyon lang, ate.

I guess this means I permanently and irreversibly begin the process of learning how to do laundry. AND ironing. o_0

---

Violet Hour is now on its home stretch. Come on, baby, two-and-a-half scenes left!

Right-o. I did say I was gonna use this thing for writerly-writer stuff.

( Cut for story summaries, salient points, and heavy implications. It's interesting, I think, but long-winded. )

Doc Momok required me to think of a central question that ties this all together with the Heideggerian model, which I think is forthcoming after I read the Heidegger readings *insert wince here* that I had photocopied. But it's worrying nonetheless because the only question I have at the moment that might tie things up is this: "How does/would the Three Laws of Robotics as propounded in Isaac Asimov's I, Robot series respond to the call of Heidegger to reflect on the deterministic capacity of the hegemonic force that is technology on humans and humanity?" And he didn't seem to find it that specific. >_>

3000 words required. This notes-session? 1000++ words. This both amuses and worries me greatly.

[Crossposted DW>LJ for minor justice!]

So... here I am again, trying to sip through a murderously hot hypercaffeinated cup of coffee at ten in the sweltering morning. I have a paper due at five in the afternoon, with its soft copy-little brother due at midnight, and from where I sit it looks like the midnight paper's the only one that's getting submitted today. Manfully taking the resultant deductions notwithstanding, I really didn't want to be late with this one.

Seriously speaking, though, I wonder that I even reached 4th year without failing anything, with this kind of work ethic. I don't even know what I mean by it; it just sort of happened that one day, I was a lazy bum with zero motivation to get off his ass and work. And I DO know that one day this is seriously gonna bite me in the ass. Or scratch that: in a million myriad minor ways (and perhaps the occasional major, kick-you-in-the-teeth way) it probably already has.

Not a very smart man, made my fairly-larger-than-usual pile of big mistakes early on in life. I promised myself the lackadaisical (who the elven fuck even uses that word anymore?) lifestyle would stop at 20, but the countdown to it seems equally as daunting as the years, and adjustments, that need follow.

Christ on a coldcocked cracker.

---

Anyway, Y HALO THAR, PHILO THESIS!

http://www.thepetitionsite.com/1/no-to-the-philippine-book-blockade

PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE sign the petition. Yes, I know, it might not be much help. Yes, I know, it's easier to be cynical about it and say "well this kinda crap never works anyway."

But you know, if you were frustrated even by the mere thought of an effing BOOK BLOCKADE (!!!), this might actually be cathartic, people. Yes, that's right, I am aware that I have just appealed to your catharsis. *snicker*

Again, please sign. Let's go with the principle of "who knows?" :D

So Mother's Day has come and almost gone (and I bid all thy mommies a happy one of the same) and most of it was spent in Pasig, to which us Dizon people typically home onto during matters of grave importance. Read: matters pertaining to 1) get-together, 2) food, 3) booze. Several of the day's highlights include:

- A malfunctioning BB gun. One which when perfectly functional rips holes in aluminum cans and cardboard like nobody's business, but one which precisely isn't functional. Cue overgrown boys with beer groaning when the thing's air compressor puttered out.

- Cute baby Neon. Without whom the celebrations wouldn't be complete. I've actually been wondering how the hell she'd grow up self-reliant when she has all these doting ninongs and ninangs wrapped around her pinky finger. Hell, even her mommy, my cousin, couldn't resist her when she goes "mommee mommee, Neon is soreeeee!" Gah, the cuteness, it horrifies. That's what happens when you're the first of the great-grandchild generation (I'm counting from my lola).

- Dad has four siblings. Their firstborns, with the exception of the one by the eldest, make a certain... quadrifecta, for the lack of a better term. This includes me, me being the youngest (next: girl two years older, girl three years older, guy nine years older). We talk about all the stuff that the elderly generation (there're less polite terms, but I'm a good offspring today yes I am) don't expect us to know anything about. Sex, drugs, jobs, the future, planning lives without parental support. The point being that one of us is Neon's mom. And we were planning her future. Where she'd study. What kind of school. Will she date at what age. Stuff like that.

- Ugly boyfriends and being "not one to talk". I can be older than these people sometimes, I swear.

- DANCE DANCE REVOLUTION TOURNAMENTS. FTW. Actually, FTL, since I didn't win a round. Loser.

---

Taylor Swift. o_0

Songs... too... CATCHY! Must... cleanse... brain... with pr0nz!

It doesn't help that she's as cute as a button.

---

Two weeks to End-sem. Pathetically low random number, kthnxfate.

Lapis and pentel pen, behold. ZE DREAMWIDTH ACCOUNT! = pepperpotprufrock

... which isn't much, actually. I've been wondering, what with my stupidly lethargic writing habit, how exactly I'm going to keep maintaining the LJ account, not to mention an additional one.

As it is, the usual for LJ->DW crossover people probably holds true for me. LJ is first love, DW probably becoming the glorified backup -slash- repository. So...

LiveJournal = life updates, personal drama, emofaggotry.
Dreamwidth = writerly writer stuff, creative doohickies, candidates and ideas.

Looks okay. Crossposting for epic win, anyway.

When things have come to a head and somehow I'm not pensive enough to write, I scurry on over to where I can read all your old, possibly moldy, words. Among the ghosts and remembrances of past utterances I find your peculiar kind of decay, the kind that's happening in the present but not really, because it's just being channeled from the future like some sort of corrosion-in-reverse. I remember how much I thought it was sad, really, that you can both be living and dying, but more dying, at the same time. Now I just think you're normal. Isn't that a hoot? All these years of not agreeing with you and here I am, intellectually penitent at your experiential feet. As much as I want to vomit up everything you and your ilk have inevitably managed to make me accept, I can't. Because you're right.

What has this to do with writing? Well, everything, really. Fiction is fiction and there at least I find the comfort of should-be's rather than as-is's. And here at least I never have to agree with you. You may be right, but that will never mean I'm wrong.

---

Someone I can't remember once told me "congrats, at least you know what you want to do." That's not necessarily true. I have no frickin' clue. But if living on means having to be led by Fate by the nose, then I'm all for it. The only worse thing than a man who's sold his principles to live is the man who's dead before the world knew what those principles were supposed to be. Pragmatic thought. What is right is what is good; no, the negative formulation is a bit more precise. What is right is what does the least harm to as many as possible.

---

IN OTHER, LESS DRAMATIC NEWS! Still no topic for Contemporary Crisis of Reason class. Frankly, it's not so much a lack of anything interesting to write about, but the fear of said thing to be written about ending up becoming so time-consuming it eats away the time needed for Drama class.

Which is another thing. Pp. 1-5 were finished at 5.30, seminally ONE HOUR LATE for class. Turns out there were no classes that day. o_0 I dunno which is worse, actually, the fact that there were NO CLASSES after all that belated effort, or the fact that there were no classes AFTER ALL THAT BELATED EFFORT.

... no seriously, I have GOT to stop cramming. The fact that the draft came out reasonably okay (for a two-hour thing) does not in any way help me in this personal crusade.

As Sir Gus put it: "This, this WEATHER! is a crisis of reason. I mean, come on guys, it's raining in the middle of fricking April!" And there's supposed to be a storm coming in this Saturday. Of course, no such words which might resemble complaints about the "stupid, silly weather" will tumble from this mouth.

I... I have a Dreamwidth account. o_0 (again, onew, I love you for TEN YEARS this fact is still open for negotiation, happy? because of this) BUT THEN! I don't know what name to give it. The plan is for the DW account to become the repository of everything productive I crap out, while LJ becomes, precisely, a "life journal". *cue facepalm* So I think it deserves a good (by good I mean "permanent enough to not be gag-inducing ten years later") name. Got suggestions?

---

That's it for now. Pp. 6-10, HERE I COME.