I have a bone to pick with the UP Administration.

Closing off half of the academic oval and making everyone go round and round to get around and forcing the jeeps to reroute their routes (Yes, it’s redundant. Get over it.) and making a bottleneck of the traffic situation early in the morning when I am already late for my Geography class (*whew) is totally unnecessary, especially if they’re doing this for the whole month of December. The other day, I asked out loud, wondering why they had to do this, and a reply came out as swiftly as it was absurd.

“Tents. They’re setting up tents.”

...........

Tents?

Tents??

Ridiculous.

(Just to paint a clearer picture, the tents aren’t exactly placed on the road. In fact, they’re not even placed on the sidewalk. Why this had to be done is beyond me.)

Just a few more days. Just a few more days….

In other somewhat related UP News, the World-Famous (or about the only thing any of my uncles seems to know about UP) Oblation Run is coming up! Come Friday, I can finally be able to tick off #287 – “Experience a brood of fraternity men in the buff gratuitously run around my eventual college of choice” of my John Goddard Life List.

Hooray!

I am using a pretty crappy cellular phone, and I don’t mind it at all.

You may ask: “Now really, why don’t you mind using a crappy cell phone? And really, how crappy can this cell phone of yours be?”

I will illustrate:

Today I inadvertently left my phone on my table after class. Two floors down and about to exit the Math Building, I realized my phone was missing and quickly ran back up to the room in the hopes of maybe catching anyone who might’ve seen it being swiped away. As soon as I get back in the classroom, I find the phone, on the table, untouched. In the University of the Philippines, no even cared enough to take it. In UP. (I have to stress the fact that this happened in UP)

Hah! Let’s see your Razr give you that sort of security!

 
      I know this guy probably has nothing to worry about.

Post It Note: I use a Nokia 1100. Yup, that’s the one with the flashlight on top. Flashlights on cellular phones, in my opinion, are totally unnecessary. They’re almost as superfluous as cameras. But nevertheless, people seem to go crazy over how you turn those things on, so I like my flashlight right where it is.

Every once a month or so, I walk over to my friendly neighborhood barber and get my hair cut. I’ve done this for the past 18 or so years and if you take out your handy dandy notebooks and did the math, it would look something like this:

 1   (monthly trip to the barber)

x  12 (months in a year)                 

x  18 (or so years of my life)

____________________________

= approximately 200+ trips to the barber in my relatively short lifespan.

That’s a lot of haircuts.

Yet out of all of those 200 plus haircuts I’ve been through, only around five (5) times have I left the barber shop satisfied with a job well done. That’s 2 and a half haircuts for every hundred I got.

Over 97% of the time, I’ve always felt that either the barber was incompetent or drunk, or they just felt like screwing with me by cutting my hair a bit too short. Somehow my hair always managed to grow into it, and I’d look fine until it grew a little too long that I started looking funny. It was then that I started getting really anxious, because I knew that a haircut was on the horizon.

Some highlights from a particularly sordid lifetime of hair mutilation:

-          As a toddler, my yaya, Ate Pidik used to cut my hair for me at home. For the most part, I didn’t really care what I looked like so I guess it never really mattered how she cut it. Looking back though, I now find it a little terrifying that her shaving the excess bits of hair behind my neck using a dull old razor tickled me so much.

-          From the “dangerously irresponsible to even have working” dept. comes this one barber who gave me half a dozen cuts in one session, all around my head. I should have had the right mind to dangle his tip in his face, only to cut it up half a dozen times right before he grabbed it.

-          Once in high school, the barber cut my hair so neat and flat, it could only have been called, “The Emilio”. Boy did those guys get a good laugh out of it.

-          Also in high school, mandatory CAT training guaranteed we’d all be sporting what was then known as the “1 x 2” haircuts, which meant an inch shaven off the side and two at the back. I tried to console myself with the fact that I was doing it for my country.

-          One time, I took three repeated trips to the barber in one day, all because no one seemed to like the haircuts I kept getting. Note to self:

Mullets in the 21^st century: not as cool as you'd think.

Every summer, as an act of defiance to my old high school’s strict hair protocol, I would grow my hair exceptionally long (defined as “as long as my ears are covered”), only to have to cut it all off right after the first day of school. In college though, the strange compulsion to grow my hair seems to have deteriorated, and I now get haircuts far more regularly then I did when I had to. Go figure.

(You can always tell a Xaverian apart in college by the hair he tries to grow out at least once. Well, that and the stereotypical Chinese thing, of course.)

Anyway, I’m due for a haircut sometime next week. Light a candle for the hair, and wish me luck!

Hey everybody,

For those of you who’ve been here before, welcome back. If you’re new, come as you are. As seen in my previous attempt at this little social experiment, I never actually got the hang of blogging. But my therapist tells me I need a release, and somehow, the emasculating process of going through stacks and stacks of FHM just didn’t cut it. (I’m kidding!)

Now it’s been quite a while since I’ve done this, and somehow, my intense zeal for observation hasn’t been the same since I got new specs (read: glasses), but I’ll try my best. Just check back whenever you can (whoever you are), and maybe you’ll find something that’ll pique your interest. I’m gonna try to post stuff more often, so watch out for that.

 
As a side note, I’ve been a little hesitant to try doing this again. Why?  It seems that lately, thanks to the internet phenomenon and the vastness of the blogosphere, every conceivable perspective taken off every imaginable idea has already been written down by someone else. In fact, most of the time I don’t even feel the need to jot down anything that pops into my mind, a few key words are all I need to find someone who already did. Nonetheless, the power of tedium compels me so, and resistance is futile!

Soooo, what’s up?