i don't know if i should be happy or worried about our professors' class cancellations.
since the sem started, a week has never passed without us getting at least one free cut. just this week, we had no classes last monday because of the sona, a free cut in negotiable instruments yesterday, a free cut in intellectual property today, and i just learned from my blockmates that we won't be having classes tomorrow and saturday because our teachers said so.
now i have too much time on my hands [ which i know i should be utilizing to study and finish digests ], i don't know what to do with it.. but what i'm more bothered about is that i'm sure we would be having make-up classes for every missed class, and that means more hell weeks to come. worse, our professors might leave us to just study the lessons ourselves. good luck na lang sa'min sa bar exam..
Labels: law school, random
i just got this through e-mail from pat. pretty long, and a bit cheesy, but it's a really good, sensible article. promise. :)
THE SACRAMENT OF WAITING
The English poet John Milton wrote that those who serve only also stand and wait. I think I would go further and say that those who wait render the highest form of service. Waiting requires more discipline, more self-control and emotional maturity, more unshakable faith in our cause,more unwavering hope in the future, more sustaining love in our hearts that all the greatest deeds of deering-do go by the name of action.
Waiting is a mystery - a natural sacrament of life - there is a meaning hidden in all the times we have to wait. It must be an important mystery because there is so much waiting in our lives. Everyday is filled with those little moments of waiting (testing our patience and our nerves, schooling us in self-control.) We wait for meals to be served, for a letter to arrive, for a friend to call or show up for a date. We wait in line at cinemas and theaters, concerts and circuses. Our airline terminals, railway stations and bus depots are great temples of waiting filled with men and women who wait in joy for the arrival of a loved one - or wait in sadness to say goodbye and give the last wave of hand. We wait for springs to come - or autumn -for the rains to begin and stop. And we wait for ourselves to grow from childhood to maturity. We wait for those inner voices that tell us when we are ready for the next stop.
We wait for graduation, for our first job, our first promotion. We wait for success and recognition. We wait to grow up - to reach the stage where we make our own decisions. We cannot remove this waiting from our lives. It is a part of the tapestry of living - the fabric in which the threads are woven to tell the story of our lives.Yet current philosophies would have us forget the need to wait "grab all the gusto you can get." So reads one of America's greatest beer ads - get it now! Instant pleasure, instant transcendence. Do not wait for anything. Life is short - eat, drink and be merry because tomorrow you will die. And so they rationalize us into accepting unlicensed and irresponsible freedom- pre-marital sex and extra marital affairs - they warn against attachments and commitments - against expecting anything of anybody, or allowing them to expect anything of us - against dropping any anchors in the currents of our life that will cause us to hold and wait.
This may be the correct prescription for pleasure - but even that is fleeting and doubtful - what was it Shakespeare said about the mad pursuit of pleasure - "Past reason hunted, and once had, past reason hated."
Not if we wish to be real human beings, spirit as well as flesh, soul as well as heart, we have to learn to wait. For if we never learn to wait, we will never learn to love someone other than ourselves.
For most of all waiting means waiting for someone else. It is a mystery, brushing by our face everyday like a stray wind of leaf falling from a tree. Anyone who has loved knows how much waiting goes into it - how much waiting is important for love to grow, to flourish through a lifetime.Why is this? Why can we not have it right now what we so desperately want and need? Why must we wait - two years, three years - and seemingly waste so much time? You might as well ask why a tree should take so long to bear fruit - the seed to flower - carbon to change to diamond/There is no simple answer - no more than there is to life's other demands -having to say goodbye to someone you love because either you or they have made other commitments; or because they have to grow and find the meaning of their own lives - having yourself
to leave home and loved ones to find your own path - good-byes, like waiting, are also sacraments of our lives.
All we know is that growth - the budding, the flowering of love needs patient waiting. We have to give each other a time to grow. There is no way we can make someone else truly love us or we them, except through time. So we give each other that mysterious gift of waiting - of being present without asking demands and rewards. There is nothing harder to do than this. It truly tests the depth and sincerity of our love. But there is life in the gift we give.So lovers wait for each other - until they can see things the same way - or let each other freely see things in quite different ways.
There are times when lovers hurt each other and cannot regain the balance of intimacy of the way they were. They have to wait - in silence - but still present to each other - until the pain subsides to an ache and then only a memory and the threads of the tapestry can be woven together again in a single love story. What do we lose when we refuse to wait; when we try to find shortcuts through life - when we try to incubate love and rush blindly and foolishly into a commitment we are neither mature nor responsible enough to assume? We lose the hope of truly loving or of being loved. Think of all the great love stories of history and literature - isn't it of their very essence that they are filled with this strange but common mystery - that waiting is part of the substance -the basic fabric against which the story of that true love is written.How can we ever find either life or true love if we are too impatient to wait for it?
Waiting is a good thing only if something is worth waiting for. How will you know if it's worth it? Gut feel. What if you don't trust your gut? Pray. You will be enlightened. Trust me. Is it wrong to expect while waiting? It's not wrong, but it will increase your chances of heartbreak and disappointment if things don't work out in the end. Is it good to expect while waiting? It is better to HOPE.What's the difference between hoping and expecting? HOPING means you're open to either side of the coin landing though you're more inclined to believe that things will turn out well. EXPECTING means you're thinking single-track...which won't do you much good at all.What's the difference between waiting and expecting? EXPECTING is waiting for something TO DEFINITELY HAPPEN. WAITING is staying where you are, but not necessarily
expecting something to happen definitely.
Do you need assurance from someone you're waiting for while you're waiting?Ideally, yes. But realistically, do you really want assurance from this person? It's so easy to just point at something and make that the reason why you're waiting ("Because she said..." "Because he told me that..."). With WAITING, all you really can rely on are 3 things: your gut feel, your heart and mind. Just YOURSELF, not anyone else.So should you wait? What does your gut say? How does your heart feel? What does your mind think? If they're saying different things, keep asking yourself these 3 questions (and pray!) until you get a solid answer.
THEN you'll know if he or she is worth waiting for.
Labels: forwards
today's the SONA; and SONA = public holiday. i can't get out of the house because to get to anywhere i would inevitably pass by the sandiganbayan where all the action is [ unless i decide to go to sm fairview or robinson's novaliches ] and maybe get stoned to death or stepped on by angry rallyists in the process. point: i'm stuck here at home the whole day. and since i have nothing better to do [ i'll try to finish all my backlog this afternoon but that's wishful thinking ], i'm just going to post this senseless entry.
i recently installed a site meter on my blog, which could track how people get to my site. and these are the most unexpected referring sites i've found so far:
oh well.
i should be studying for evidence/succession now, but this is urgent. besides, we might not have succession tomorrow [ again! hopefully ].
another eventful weekend, which explains why i wasn't able to study anything. i still have loads of backlog despite the fact that we've had a lot of free cuts for the past week. [ one of the perks of being in law school is that when there's political turmoil in the country, which happens every year, the professors, being on the forefront, need to cancel their classes and do their jobs as lawyers. ]
anyway, yesterday, we trooped over to fully booked in greenhills together with more than 600 other neil gaiman fanatics for a book-signing and short book reading by the "dream king", the great NEIL GAIMAN himself. being the concededly brat that i am, i asked the driver and one of the maids to line up for us while we went to church. hehehe. neil [ eusebio, not gaiman hehe. which i will address as neil e. from this point on to avoid confusion ] and i got 156 and 157, a few numbers away from the cut off number which was 200 [ yahoo swerte pa pala ako! hehe ]. we went back after lunch, where i saw richelle, tessa, her law school blockmates katha and kristy, and pat. neil e. and i stayed with them while waiting. 'good thing pat was there; i didn't even know she was coming. 'talked about the goings on in the harkadah. hehe.
neil gaiman arrived at around 2:30 pm [?] i'm not really sure. i just remember running to the 'fully booked' entrance when i heard the crowd cheering. he gave a short reading on his unreleased book, "anansi boys", and then proceeded with the book signing.
we were actually a few rows away from him while he was reading the book. good thing neil e. was tall enough to take these pictures. and i'm also glad i brought the canon powershot with the 10x zoom.
alright, so he looks nothing like his old picture at the back of "neverwhere". in fact, he looks like barry manilow, as a friend of mine observed. hehehe. 'doesn't change the fact that he's a GREAT writer [ although, as he said, he doesn't consider himself a prolific writer. ano buh. ]
while waiting for him, neil e. and i came up with a corny list of "how to piss neil gaiman off or the hoard of supporters in the store": [ corny, but we were laughing our heads off the whole time hehe. wala talaga kaming kwenta. well we had to amuse ourselves to kill time ] 1.) call him "gay, man" 2.) accidentally break his right arm so he couldn't sign for the rest of the day 3.) tell him not to ruin your book by signing his name 4.) announce that they're lining up for an isaw stand 5.) haul in triumph the insult dog from conan o' brien. hehe.
i was so excited to meet neil gaiman that i didn't feel a hint of exhaustion while on the line. there were rare times when i felt a bit sleepy, but then again that's normal on my part being the narcoleptic person that i am. a few minutes before i came face to face with him, i honestly could feel my heart pounding. i was thinking of something witty and lasting to say to him, but when i got there, i was just completely dumbfounded. i kept myself from saying anything before i blurt out something stupid which i would regret for the rest of my life. he read my name, and then he signed my book. i wasn't even looking at him most of the time. earlier on, i planned to ask him to draw me something, but i felt it would be too much on his part, and i didn't want to rob him a few seconds of his time when he had other people to sign for.
i didn't have the guts to hug/kiss him or ask him to hug/kiss me like some of the other girls did, so i just took his hand and gave it a firm shake while saying "thank you so much" [ i'm not even sure if the "so much" was drowned out ]. i hope my hand wasn't cold and clammy. hehe. he was really really nice. he actually extended the book signing just so he could accommodate those people who weren't able to get stubs. and i heard his interview this morning on the radio, and he's just so cool and witty.
this was taken at around 6:30 pm. he decided to stand up probably to stretch his legs a bit [ he has been signing books since around 3 in the afternoon ]. i have yet to scan the dedication he wrote on my book. anyhoo, it says, "lianne, mind the gap".
looking back, i really hoped that i gave him a little something - a drawing of him no matter how sucky it is, a pen, a book, a pack of dried mangoes [ which he really likes, as he admitted in an interview in NU 107 earlier today ], anything. but it's all good. i'm just really happy to have met him :) and i'm definitely buying his other books.
excerpts lifted from neil gaiman's blog. 'good to know he had a great time. and that he completely read our minds. hehe:
July 10, 2005
The FAQ line is completely filled with messages from people in Manila saying "when I got to the front of the line I didn't say anything/burst into tears/said something stupid but what I wish I'd said was....", all of which are really nice and none of which I'm posting here.
July 11, 2005
In the Philippines, the people are enthusiastic on a level that makes the Brazilians look reserved and polite. They shout very loudly when they're happy, too. There's a noise that a few thousand of the locals make when they all shout at once to let you know they're happy to see you that made me finally understand the idea of a wall of sound...
Labels: event, neil gaiman
last friday was papa's induction ball as the governor of rotary district 3780 [ yada yada yada ]. i really didn't know anyone, but of course i was required to go because he is my father and we were going to be presented in front. we arrived just on time [ we left the house early, but the traffic was horrible, and there were anti-Gloria rallies everywhere ].
well, it was just another formal event. you've seen one, you've seen them all. the same made up faces, the big gowns, the embellished tables. and in every event, there's always this person who, after repeated announcements for everyone "to turn off his/her cellphone or put it on silent mode", still fails to do so, and his/her phone goes off during the invocation or the national anthem part. hayy..
we just sat on the table the whole night [ until 10 pm at least, when the kids, including me, started getting sleepy ]. the food's ok, if you literally pour salt and pepper on them. i would just eat my dad's food whenever he had to leave the table [ hehe ], which was every minute. the program was nice and organized though.
Labels: family
it has been almost a month since my last entry. for the past month, i've been going to the gym regularly [ still no visible results yet though :P ], i returned to art class, we went to fete de la musique last june 18, pat came home from the states for vacation. apart from those little perks, i'm still caught up in the usual humdrum state of things. i hate mediocrity.
my life is just so uninteresting right now. i know i should be contented with what i have, especially since nothing extremely bad is happening [ my being completely behind in my bills and notes and taxation subjects does not count ]. i just wish something fun and exciting would come my way, like a digital SLR or a 15-pound weight loss or something. damn quarter-life crisis.
fete de la musique was held again in el pueblo, ortigas. i didn't have the best time of my life, but at least there were NO RAINS. i actually arrived there at around 4:30 with cesar. given my eternal bad luck, i was anticipating downpour that evening, and just in case it does rain, at least i have watched a few bands already. there weren't much people when we arrived, but there were less [ sorry for the politically incorrect, demeaning term ] jologs. it was actually nice looking at all the girls and boys with their spunky rocker outfits. it was like browsing through a japanese fashion magazine. later on that evening, jologs hoarded the whole place, clad in black, waving the banners of their "rakizta" groups in the air while throwing mineral water bottles at people. ARGH. the concert at the rock stage was closed for an hour or so because of the uncontrollable crowd. at least we were able to watch ciudad, cynthia alexander, dicta license, hairy dawgs, shiela and the insects, and a good band from cebu i forgot the name of. because they closed down the rock stage, neil, wex, mike and i ate at chateau, the only restaurant in el pueblo that had available seats [ maybe because the prices were unreasonably high ]. we later on moved to the alternative stage where we were forced to watch hale. personally, i don't like hale because all their songs sound alike and i don't think i'll ever be in the mood for cheezy emo songs. [ sorry if you like hale, you can kill me later. hehe ] anyway, i stuck around since i thought juan pablo dream was playing after hale, but they changed the sked and another band i didn't like came up front. so we decided to leave. i know i should've stayed [ they reopened the rock stage ] para naman sulit, but i was getting sleepy and tired already [ at 10:30 in the evening :P ].
i'm currently enjoying our unexpected three day weekend. 'explains why i was able to blog in the first place. but then i have to study. or at least fix my unorganized desk with all the scattered readings.
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