Absolut Sobriety

Barely two weeks into my third year and I already find myself swamped with a ton of readings, some plates here and there, and a plethora of encrypted notes sitting on my lap. Not to mention the various commitments I almost unknowingly signed up for. And of course who can forget the blasted exams, scheduled to be clustered around the same days and occuring in intervals of barely two weeks. A very exciting future ahead of me indeed.

Yes, I've ranted about how our schedule puts the BS into B.S. Biology, but this time I think that something feels different. I am in fact, astonishingly, pumped up and enraptured with the stress bearing down upon me. It could be that my mantra worked (which involves repeating to myself how much I like my course and all it implies, all while every orifice in my body is gushing with blood) I'm merely living a hallucination, and when the exams rain down upon me I'd be disillusioned and all the exhaustion I've denied myself would smack me right in the face. Well I guess we'd just have to sit it out and see what happens, wouldn't we?

Okay, so this post is long overdue, I know, but I've decided 5 months ago that I'll revamp my blog first before posting another entry. Unfortunately, my old one's been buggy and uncooperative lately, and I've had some problems moving it into the new Blogger platform. The process should take just a click of a button, and after that just a quick cut n' paste operation to update the old template to XML. But this somehow leaves traces of my old template into the layout, and manual deletion from html code is impossible since none of the culprits turn up in the code. So I had to scrap the old one, and start anew, besides the dump was beginning to stink anyway. LOL. But being the busy slacker that I am, I haven't been able to find the time, energy, or will to do so. Until now. (Wait, that sounded like it came from some cheesy cliche ~~ridden~~ driven movie, oh well, I'm getting rusty at this. Pardon me.)

Fast forward to now and you see two months worh of work, the ~~fugly~~ results of my first efforts to build a template from scratch. Well, not exactly scratch since all that you see here are just bits and pieces of design and code hacked off from sites I already forgot. So, of you happen to spot something yours in here, please don't bash my head in and accept my gratitude and apologies for forgetting. The rest however are original designs born from my blood, sweat, ~~urine, vomit, pus,~~ and tears.

Actually, I started working on this thing a month ago before the start of summer classes, hoping to finish it before the end of April, just in time to commemorate the 2nd birthday the bastardious excuse for a blog I once kept. But procrastination got in the way and not long after that came summer classes.

The whole summer can be graciously summarized in this postcard I found in someecards.

Speaking of that hell, I foolishly took up Biochem this summer, not knowing that by doing so I sentenced myself to a month of sleep deprivation, endless nosebleeds, and library imprisonment. Class started at 7am and ran straight up to 1pm, 2 hours for lecture and another 4 hours for laboratory. There were 4 exams for the lecture part, meaning an exam each week, and each exam covers 4 to 5 chapters of our book, conveniently summarized into 675 slides, all of which were discussed within 10 hours spread over 4 to 5 days, bringing it down to a nerve-wracking average of over a 100 slides flicked through within just two hours everyday. But wait! There's more! The lab part consists of 12 experiments, and each experiment required a formal report, which is just a euphemism for something short of being called a thesis. The two lab exams splits the experiments into half and they can only be described by one word--- mindf*ck. They consisted of those what-if questions, where given a theoretical situation/disaster in the experiment, you'd have to guess what the heck would happen to the given parameter. All that boxed up in one month. So, maybe I should've just taken it up during a regular sem, but here's the conundrum: By taking it during summer, I'll be able to focus on it at the cost of sitting through lecture at a nose-bleeding pace, but taking it during a regular semester would mean heavier loads from different major subjects.

As if that wasn't enough, I also had to shuttle back and forth between Cavite and Manila the whole summer, since I didn't want to stay in the boarding house alone throughout the duration of summer. I had to wake up at 4am just so I can leave by 5am and arrive to class just before 7. The trip home was just as hellish, literally. I'd commute through Metro Manila under the scorching blaze of the sun at noon during summer. I barely had enough time for reviewing and finishing up lab reports, let alone catch some Z's or take a breather. I always ended up sleeping working or studying in this lonely corner of the house:

This spot also doubled as my bunker, my office, meditation pad, and dining table. This was actually taken in a relatively peaceful and uneventful day. Otherwise, this spot would be littered with with notebooks, manuals, handouts, and xerox copies of book sources.

And finally after a month of envying all the people in Multiply posting photos of their latest escapades or an entry detailing them while I was stuck at home bent over lab reports and reviewers, summer classes are over and I even managed to pass Biochem with flying (with an injured wing) colors, I've finally had my dosage of a summer escapade (even though Global Warming and Cosme ruined it for me), and had the chance to reboot myself. Actually classes have been over for over two weeks already, it just took me that long to slack around to unwind.

Aside from that I've been holding back from posting,knowing that I'd eventually have to explain, at least to myself, why I haven't posted all this while. There's just something in this allusion to a circular argument that ticks me off the same way I cringe everytime I hear the word "blogosphere", and the reason has been revealed to me in the following excerpts from the Joy of Tech webcomic.

If you think I'm overreacting think again.

When I first started out with the Deadbeat Dump, I just planned it on being an outlet for all my pent-up emotions and views on social conditions and recent events, without realizing that this was actually the archetype for the typical holier-than-thou crap normally found on the net. But then it quickly degenerated into this rant-infested dump occasionally littered with stuff from blogthings or tickle. I'm getting the goosebumps now due to blogging about blogging, so I'll just leave it at that. I just hope I'll be able to keep this one running better than the previous one.

So, now I've got a week more before the start of the next school year, with the UPD officials deciding to f*ck up our lives and make them even more miserable by taking away Free Day Wednesday and substituting it with Monday, which uncannily crosses path with a lot of holidays due to the government's holiday economics policy, meaning that holidays would simply be less meaningful to a typical student like me. My schedule is just as f*cked up, since I've got classes running straight from 8:30-5:30 with only a short 30-minute break in between, and I'm still 3 units short of my target for this sem, not counting PE. Well, hopefully I'll be able to enjoy myself some more before that starts, and maybe I'll be able to whip something out for Multiply too.