I remember being honestly scared to death of this movie on VHS. There’s something about stop-motion that’s freaky beyond all belief. But now it rocks so much I listen to this song over and over and over again.

And I swear Halloweentown citizens are lifted from some of my worst nightmares.

I caught this movie “The Fever” on HBO a while ago, thinking from the title sequence that it was some sort of grisly dystopian horror movie of some sort. Five minutes into the movie led me to realize that I wasn’t going to be seeing any zombies, but by then I was hooked with the movie’s strange method of presentation – a monologuing main character. She was this rich, slightly aged urban socialite whose life had nosedived into existential angst after becoming aware of politics, economic exploitation, and the emptiness of consumerism, and how it related to her. She starts thinking, seeing things differently; she questions the morality and righteousness of her privileged life; her little bubble of comfort and contentment is popped. She travels to some unknown country in Eastern Europe, where she confronts herself about everything – economic divisions, the rich-poor gap, the brutality of the economic system, the stupidity of her own perceived tribulations, and the truth about her own life.

It was interesting, to say the least, because the character was far from boring – she was not only monologuing, she was talking to herself; it was a discussion with herself about her life, questioning herself if she deserved what she had. I *did* feel like I was watching something close to communist propaganda, yet I couldn’t ignore the fact that a lot of the things she had argued with herself made sense.

For example, those with money dictate the way things are. In the movie:

Where do all these objects come from?… How does it happen that these things are made and not others? Of course, there are only a limited number of workers in the world. And each day they do a limited number of things: some things and not other things. Who tells them what they ought to do? The holders of money. They bid their money for the things they want and each bit of money determines some fraction of the day’s activities. So the people who have a little determine a little and the people who have a *lot* determine a *lot*, and the people who have nothing determine… nothing.

What bugs me is that if the holders of money determine and maintain status quo, and if the current status quo entails the suffering of a great deal of people, does that mean that rich people are inherently selfish, ignorant, and oppressive? The ones below the line, at the bottom of the triangle, are the ones moving for change (revolution, in some contexts) while the ones higher up on the slope try to keep things the way they are, but if money dictates power, then those at the top are more well-equipped to change things – which is NOT what most of them want. I’m just pointing out the irony here. Are we people at the top and middle content with the way things are just because we’re not the ones at the bottom?

The movie made me think because I haven’t seen anything significant on TV in a long time (and because I was stalling doing my homework in Economics), so there. TBH, I’m thinking my richer schoolmates in Pisay should see it. Now for that Econ HW.

I was either in exam mode or way-too-early-sembreak mode this past week or two, so I’ve been away from my blog and attending to more urgent matters, like exams, other people, and my social life. Oh, and Command and Conquer 3, which kicks so much ass I replay the campaign cinematics in my head. It’s quite amusing to see House’s Dr. Cameron (Jennifer Morrison) play GDI’s instruction-girl.

Anyway, school schedule’s been screwy since the fire, so they held the postponed exams and canceled classes for a week, to let them sort out stuff. And I have so far bummed my way through the past ten or so days, almost always remembering to bathe before the day’s end, lol. A quick recap until before this Thursday’s events:

Thursday, Oct 9: School bumming. No classes, just finishing of quarterly requirements. Hastily videoed and edited our Health video on 3rd-degree concussions with subdural hematoma – yes, our Physics books really CAN induce severe head trauma.

Friday, Oct 10: More school bumming. Submitted the Health video, wrapped up my missed exams and quizzes. Went to Trinoma with friends, ate at Fish & Co. – Fish & Chips taste so much better when shared – and had fun at Timezone. I actually almost busted the Tekken machine button-mashing, but I was able to pop the button back in and luck my way through my friends until I got my ass kicked by Bea, resident gamer queen.

Saturday, Oct. 11: This day is fuzzy. I’m assuming I did nothing but bum at home, surf and play Flash games on Newgrounds (the C&C3 computer would be unavailable on Saturdays). This is probably one of the days I forgot to bathe.

Sunday, Oct. 12: Went to the province, visited my remaining grandparent, lola on the father’s side. I mostly slept the whole day, being stuck in a car and all.

Monday, Oct. 13: Applied for another 6-month British visa for the November awarding. Then I finally got a new phone – an extremely cheap one, this time – and a new number.

Tuesday, Oct. 14: Oh yeah, before this one, I was recently accepted into Pisay’s exchange program with the Singaporean Hwa Chong Institute, along with another senior and four juniors. The Singaporean students will be swinging by first, around mid-November, and we get to go over to their school in January. Anyway, went to school for the SixSing (that’s what our moderator/teacher-chaperone calls us delegates) pre-field trip to a few museums. Watched Neon play Phoenix Wright on emulator until we had to leave for the Bantayog ng mga Bayani along Quezon Ave. We were to follow it up with the Vargas museum in U.P. and with the Q.C. Memorial museum, but after Vargas we were way too tired, so we just had a trans-fatty McDo lunch and went home.

Wednesday, October 15: Went to the Division Secondary Schools Press Conference (DSSPC) at the QCSHS with a handful of other people. Saling-kitkit lang, TBH. Was entered into Feature Writing English and Editorial Writing English, and because I didn’t know anything about the second one I got to listen to a talk in Editorial by Manuel Quezon III, passing up a talk in Feature by Danton Remoto. Oh, and Kara David gave the keynote speech. I’m not much of a journ type, so I felt sort of out of place there. Ironically I screwed up Feature and did pretty well in Editorial; at least I think that’s how I did. Went to SM after, escaping the people my teammates called “my fans” at the PressCon; there I discovered the joys of The Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf cheesecake with Icia. Mom and sibs and me Hypermarket-ed afterwards for the outing the next day.

So yeah, busy busy me. I’ll tell the long and complicated story of Thursday and Friday in a separate post, coz I’m currently catching up on my short-story reading: First Love by Faye Ilogon and Fragile Things by Neil Gaiman. More on those later, too.

The carnage of the recent Pisay fire:

Photos thanks to Ate Lara ‘08.

The ironic thing is that a flame is the central icon of the PSHS logo. It’s really sad; I loved the second floor. :c Now they’re not going to let anyone onto the second floor after all of this. Sucks.

Please do help the PSHS community get back on its feet – donations in any form are gladly accepted, and there will be a lot of fund-raising activities coming up soon – including of course, this year’s Fair! :D Stay tuned to various Pisay Interblags for details.

Kasi hindi naman series connection. Woot. Today has been… eventful, so I can’t help but tell everything in “what happened to me today” style.

Anyway, last night nakatulog ako while attempting to study Filipino, and when I woke up the next morning I was thinking, “Damn I’m screwed.” So I closed the random IM windows on my laptop that had popped up sometime between 11 pm and 4 am – one of them, funnily enough, read “guys nasusunog shb!!! :O” I took it as a joke and had breakfast with my laptop, then biglang tumawag si Icia. Nasunog daw ang Main Building ng Pisay Main. I went “wtf” in my head, so I finished breakfast and waited with my laptop to see if I had to put on my uniform after taking a shower. Then people started IM-ing that the 2nd floor had been screwed over with a fire, so there were no classes that day. :|

So in my head I was thinking how screwed the SHB was – if student records and applications in the Registrar’s and Guidance Center had been turned to dust; if the Library now had an organized catalogue of ashes; if people’s lockers were now scrap aluminum. And then I remembered that I was supposed to meet people up after exams to submit the La Salle application forms, so I headed to school for my remaining recommendation form. They weren’t letting people into the SHB (thankfully my letter was in the separate Administration offices, pero paano naman yung mga may recommendation dapat sa Faculty Center?) but you could see the broken, blackened Faculty Room from the field, and the horribly stressed out teachers pacing and glancing up at the devastation. I can imagine how horrible they must have felt, especially for those who left money, valuables, sentimental pictures of students, student projects, unchecked test papers, etc. Tapos pinaalala nina Inna yung English Cheat Sheet for the Perio – and I worked so hard on mine, too. x____x

So anyway, nagpunta kami ni Verge sa McDo Q Ave to meet with sina Icia, Bea, and Angel; we were commuting together to La Salle to submit our applications (save for Verge, tinamad daw siya) on the last day of submission, which we’d guessed everybody would do. I myself was submitting for four different people – my best friend, me, Ricky, and Mara.

Oh, here’s the nasty part of today. :| My phone got snatched – yes, fucking snatched - while we were going down at the Station near La Salle. I’m not gonna tell how it happened, coz the people who were with me know enough (diba.), but I wasn’t as worried about the phone as I was about the contacts, and I wasn’t as worried about the contacts as I was about me and how screwed I was with my parents. Although it gives me slight comfort to know that my snatcher stole a phone with broken keys and a faulty battery, I still don’t know how my parents are going to take it. :|

I couldn’t really do anything but go on to La Salle, so we went there and saw the great big line of people submitting their forms at the eleventh hour. So we took a number and entered, then we saw Ate Lara, who dragged us around for a bit (kinilig si Icia nung nakita niya si David Webb :p) then left us to ourselves. I started worrying about the effing P600 application fee which I appeared to have to pay for two of the four applications I was submitting. Then the number order for the Admissions line got screwed around, which would keep us there for another hour or so. Then somehow we were told that bulk applications could be submitted at a separate window – with an extremely short line! – so we shoved in our papers together. My testing fee worries were for nothing, and what’s more, all six of the applications we submitted in bulk ended up in the same room, in consecutive seating order (si Angel napunta sa katabing room mag-isa :p). That’s the first time I actually get people I know in my testing room. :o Then nag-Shang kami afterwards, where we had a late late lunch at Fish & Co. – masarap mag-share ng Fish and Chips :D. We played a bit at Powerstation, then I went home after ihatid si Verge sa Pisay.

I soooooooooo don’t want to have to do the things I have to do right now. :|

Kahit exams, I can’t very well pass up a good opportunity to bitch against this now-infamous post here, can I?

I apparently have to “realize my responsibility to society” by listening to discontent activists blather about God-knows-what – these are the people, she says, who “actually really care about what is happening.” But that’s not what gets everybody’s goat; listen to her repeatedly blame the institution she was brought up in:

Pisay did not give enough emphasis on the notion of serving the people. Pisay did not show the students that money is not everything. Pisay basically did not introduce us to the notion that we have the responsibility of enacting change in the flawed system in our country. Pisay was like a prison for me. Inside, I lived in a place that wanted to meet perfection. I was shielded from public issues that should have been introduced to us.

For me this is such an anal-retentive post because it imposes a “responsibility of enacting change” and demands an “active awareness of public issues.” I’m wondering why this person assumes that students like me have to care. If I were to take an active stand in politics or social issues, it would be my prerogative. If I were to do something for the greater good of the nation, it would be my call. Yes, I am apathetic, and yes, I’d rather go to a mall than to a rally. AND I’M PROUD OF THAT FACT. I’m proud that I am living my life as a 16 year-old and that I don’t waste the last days of my youth trying to find the panacea to the “public issues” she loves talking about so much. The moment I turn 18, I’ll start voting and reaching out to people, but activism and activists can just take their banner and streamer-wrapped heads and shove it somewhere for all I care. I can love my country without fucking up the system, and I’ll keep things that way.

And as for blaming our dear old school/system, it wouldn’t really matter if I had ended up in Pisay, or stayed in Claret, or (god forbid) gone to Ateneo HS; my say on the matter would be the same. (Only I’d probably not have said anything at all if I wasn’t Pisay, but meh.)

I just got P11,000 in “tokens of appreciation” for being a speaker at two separate events.

For a 16 year-old with shallow pleasures in life, P11,000 in two days is a LOT.

…but I don’t think they even know that I blog, so I’ll take my chances.

There’s this odd feeling I get nowadays when I lie to my parents. It’s like I know I’m going to disappoint them and eventually ruin the fairly good relationship I’ve been keeping with them, but right now my life isn’t going the way I want it to, so I’ve been pretty distant. When I do need to come into contact, however, I’ve been so far lying and hiding and being stand-offish about school and people and college and other matters. I don’t like it at all, but if I started telling them the truth about stuff they’d be screaming at me again like they used to. And I never liked it when they screamed at me; I never liked it when they turned unreasonable.

And I’m blogging about this now because just this morning I told them I’d be at choir practice when I in fact had lunch with friends at Trinoma (something they say I shouldn’t be doing yet, which is stupid, really). And then I told them I’d be working overnight at a classmate’s house for a project, when in fact I attended a friend’s debut party.

I just got home from there, and it’s really really late. I told my mom I decided not to overnight and instead went home with a friend; the trust in her voice was slightly perturbing.

I don’t tell my parents about my life because I’ve never liked the way they treated me. They, in all honesty and objectivity, are close-minded, prejudiced, conservative people who do nothing in life but to tell me what I should and shouldn’t do. I’ve had to put up with 16 years of them and their double standards; I’ve tried speaking out and all it’s ever earned me were slaps across the face and three-day scream lectures. So I shut up. I avoid them, I lie and do the things I think are right behind their back.

And believe me, I do a LOT of things behind a LOT of people’s backs.

I am proud of this essay for English 4, so it shall appear here. It was part of our discussion on Dante’s Inferno. We were to choose one of 5 topics…

• Hell is a state of mind.
• Hell is other people.
• Heaven and Hell are two sides of the same coin.
• Hell is exothermic.
• Hell is endothermic.

…and write a 200 word (+/- 10%) essay on it. I chose the first simply because it was easier to cram than the others.

—

Prozac for Satan

Ladies and gentlemen of the psychiatric community, I present a new condition for consideration. It is not particularly new, but the condition causes such great distress that it must be looked into.
The affected show a kind of hypochondria, for they believe that they constantly endure extreme emotional or physical anguish (when in fact they do not). Patients are also apparently schizophrenic, showing signs of being delusional, paranoid, and heavily distorted. But even with evident symptoms, the condition is mostly undetectable and extremely difficult to gauge. I name this condition “Hell.”
The illness involves the exaggeration of one’s life as the worst example of suffering. The patient bears enough emotional baggage to exceed airline regulations, and heaps great amounts of self-pity on his or herself. It has been determined that Hell is a negative means of coping with the crap that life inevitably brings, and it manifests in people under extreme or prolonged stress. It is then no surprise that research has found Hell to be more prevalent in angst-ridden teenagers.
Hell is often used a means of gaining attention – a good example would be the much-laughed at “emo kid” – or as self-justification. Currently the only cure – optimism – is infeasible for the target demographic, so we must find a cure for this distorted state of mind.

Bored at school, so I might as well update.

Past few days have been okay on me, surprisingly even the ACET I took last Saturday. ACET was fairly okay, but I’m pretty sure I’m not getting the Merit Scholar thing – which most likely means I’m not turning blue anytime in the future without financial sponsorship.

English and Math were better than I’d expected, but I still resent the Abstract Reasoning and Logic parts. Honestly, how is something supposed to be “More Likely True” given only a certain case? And how do you determine the truth of a completely unrelated statement?

I also didn’t know when Hong Kong was freed, what the speed of a falling object is (I’d know it’s acceleration, but nooooo, they ask for speed without giving mass), and various other things. The exam turned out to be more of a guessing game than anything else.

I also participated in this competition thing yesterday by the Association of Biology Majors at UPD – BioLogic 2008. First time Pisay tried (and failed) its hand at the competition. We lacked training *ahem*, so the written elimination exam ended up with only my team (out of 3) getting into the semifinal quiz round. My team = me and Lance Co Ting Keh, who knows waaay more about everything than I do. We honestly could have done it, but we ended up 6th in ranking – and they only get the Top 5 for the final round. Dammit. But really now – am I supposed to have the name of the bacteria in women’s vaginas stuck in my head?