The long and short of it
June 30, 2009I just noticed that my posts tend to be as long.
I don’t know why. Maybe that’s my “literary style”; I find it easier to be superfluous than concise.
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By the way, I have new cat. He’s a gray tabby, the kind with lighter-hued stripes. He’s very small but is quite terrible – he’s so inquisitive (kittens are supposed to be like that) that he keeps on finding ways to raid the kitchen top. We found our adopted kitten in a wet market nearby. Apparently this kitten was the best of his class – the market people have a policy of exterminating or deporting stray cats in the area.
Currently we have a 3-year old dog named Hershey and a 2-year old cat named Ming. All of them live in the house and the cat never roams outside the house. I’m the official pet name-giver at home (one of the few responsibilities I have taken wholeheartedly). My job is getting ever harder as I run out of names. We have a habit of giving our pets monosyllabic names so they wouldn’t have a hard time memorizing their names (we still cling on to the irrational myth that animals recognize their names). Particularly cats, we just give them generic and local-sounding names like Muning, Miong, Meow, Maliit and Puti. Hershey is the only exception – we decided to name her after our old dog. Our Old Hershey was really old when she died (she was older than me by a year and died two days after my 14th birthday – go figure). We want the Young Hershey to live as long.
I christened our new kitten Mao. Long live our new Chaircat!
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By playing with my mother’s cellphone camera, I have developed a way to keep my pets still so I can take more photogenic (or should I say “controlled”) shots of them. The problem I often encounter with animals is that they, like 7-year olds in a birthday party, keep still when you want them to move and they move when you want them to keep still. I wonder if I can use this to a more ambitious degree – like taking a formal-looking family picture with all of them (dog and cats) sitting still and looking at the camera.
Impatience
June 29, 2009I’m too impatient to wait until my suking DVD vendor is flooded with this:
If I only had cable television I should be able to watch this on KBS World.
Health / education
It is not good that non-medicine or health science graduates of the UP Manila should finish with little knowledge or appreciation of medicine or even the human body. There’s too much of environmental science but, for those taking degree programs in the social sciences and humanities, there’s little of even basic human anatomy. It is neglect – the school is assuming that everyone is going to take anatomy in their curriculum, and the rest who are not taking it are relatively unimportant in the allocation of the University’s (poorly-paid) human resources.
The UP Manila, in line with its claim of being the health sciences center of the country, should open a GE course that will address the seeming ignorance of non-medicine related graduates on matters that concern the human body. History 4 is a step towards that goal, but what I mean is a subject under the MST cluster. One of the goals of the GE course should be to produce students that are conscious of their health and of health issues that affect the nation.
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It is demoralizing to find a professor who doesn’t know what his pancreas should do.
But then, I don’t know either.
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Why is the library closed during lunch breaks? Is this temporary, or is it a new policy?
For a person in my condition, reading in the library is infinitely better than eating at our awful canteen. Paper cellulose may be indigestible, but neither is the chemical and pathogenic cocktail they serve there.
I’m dispossessed of a place I can call “my own”. There’s none left.
Which brings us to the question “Why didn’t I graduate last April?”
Notification
I’m lending myself vulnerable to surveillance, but then, we have to inject some predictability into our lives to give it order and amenable to synchronization.
Sunday or Monday: Five to nine
Thursday: Three to nine
Friday: Three to nine
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Savoir pour prévoir, prévoir pour pouvoir. (Know in order to predict, predict in order to be able to do something.)
Attributed to Condorcet (France, eighteenth century)
Tubed experience (June 2009)
June 26, 2009
Here is the complete list of films and TV series I watched this month.
1 Liter of Tears (Japan) – Very good
Boys Over Flowers (Korea) - Just good
Chi bi / Red Cliff 2 (China) - The best!
Mei Lanfang / Forever Enthralled (China) - Just good
Heartbreak Library (Korea) - Excuse: actor-driven choice (but the story is somewhat good too)
Art of Seduction (Korea) - Good
Kekexili / Mountain Patrol (Tibet) –Very good
The Perfect Couple - Excuse: actor-driven choice (naman! kasi yung sis ko e, ito peborit)
This July, I’m increasing the number of Japanese and Chinese films to watch.
I hope I don’t get to be actor-driven this month.
