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Hello, stress!

I’m sure it’s not just me who’s struggling with requirements and deadlines as the end of the school year comes nearer and nearer. From the daily 12 hours of sleep I got last Christmas break, I’m now down to four hours of sleep a day. I’ve never been so grateful to the inventor of concealer. Haha!

This week will be the craziest of them all. On top of thesis and other acads, it’s the JC Week! From Monday to Friday, we’ll be celebrating the 54 years of my org, the UP Journalism Club.

We’ve packed the week with fun and socially relevant activities that are open to everyone. Today is the launch of our exhibit at the College of Mass Communication. It showcases photos of different beats, which in journalism means specific areas that a journalist covers. We have photos of the police, investigative, Congress and fashion beat. I’m part of the fashion beat.

Also happening today is our media tour; we’ll go the office of GMAnews.tv where we’ll get to see how their newsroom operates. I’m excited about this since I’ve never been there.

Tomorrow, we’ll launch our official publication Beyond and our new website. It’ll be a relatively quiet day for us, but make no mistake that we poured blood, sweat and tears for Beyond and the website, with the most sacrifice coming from Grace, our academic committee head. She has the grueling job of reminding JCers, half of which have thesis deadlines, to submit their articles. She truly deserves a round of applause and big slice of Mango Bravo. Mmmmm!

On Wednesday, we’ll be rocking to an acoustic set on our cultural night called Strings and Verses: Attached. As in the opposite of no strings attached. Get it? It’s so cute, no? Haha okay, enough now.

We’ll have musical performances and poetry reading. All the JCers are required to read a poem or even sing a song answering the night’s question: Is there anything more romantic than music and poetry? I’m very kilig about my answer, which I’ll share next week. Hehehe. If you want to drop by, we’ll be at Coffee Way in UP Village. (:

Thursday is my hell/heaven day. Grace and I are the heads of JC Week’s flagship event, Suit of Cards: A Forum on Libel at the UP College of Mass Communication Auditorium. It’s hell because I’m in charge of making sure that everything goes smoothly. Our speakers are some of the biggest names in the industry: Mr. Isagani Yambot, publisher of the Philippine Daily Inquirer; Ms. Marites Vitug, editor-in-chief of Newsbreak; Ms. Ellen Tordesillas, columnist for Malaya and Abante; Mr. Beting Dolor, editor-in-chief of Prime Asia; Atty. Romel Bagares, executive director of the Center for International Law; and Mr. Abe Olandres, blogger (yugatech.com). Whew!

We’ve been preparing for this event for almost a month now, from contacting the speakers and sponsors to publicizing the event to classes, school papers, organizations and other schools. I’m very grateful to the speakers who will take the time from their busy schedules to share their insights and expertise.

This is where the heaven part comes in. I know all our hard work will pay off because the knowledge we can get from these speakers are priceless. Being able to help spread that knowledge makes the experience sweeter. Also, I must admit that there’s a burst of pride when I see someone’s eyes bulging at the sight of our speakers’ names or when I hear people swearing to go to the event. All this makes all those sleepless nights and haggard days worth it.

The remaining event is Members’ Night on Friday, which is just a chillax thing. We’re not planning anything; we’ll just follow our cravings on that day. I’ll be a night of laughing, unwinding, and just plain breathing.

I would like to assume that you’re now tempted to go to our events. Haha! Seriously, you’re all welcome. The more the merrier!

Posted in Red-Letter Days, Reflections | No Comments »

Last Sunday, as I was looking through the incoming week’s schedule, I felt my heart skip a beat. The week was definitely going to be a very busy one. This was how it looked like in my planner:

Monday, January 19: Botany Long Test # 2
Tuesday, January 20: Botany Lab Long Test # 2
Filipino Readings
Wednesday, January 21: English Presentation & Complete Draft of Research Paper
Candy Shoot for Food Products (3-7 pm)
Thursday, January 22: Filipino Midterms
Filipino Paper
INTACT Reflection
Required Play at 7 pm
Friday, January 23: Literature Homework
Botany Homework
Shifting Talk
Friend’s Birthday Party
Saturday, January 24: Woodrose’s Family Day
Meeting with Friends for a Debut

This kind of week is known as Hell Week in Ateneo, or in any other school for that matter. It is the week when teachers schedule all the long tests, project deadlines, homeworks, and other required things. Before the week started, I braced myself for I knew I had a lot to do. I just told myself that I had to get through the week and I would be fine—and I did. Each day, I pushed myself. By Wednesday, I was already tired but I knew I couldn’t just give up. As odd as it sounds, I also tried to have fun while getting through it all—and I did. And you know what? It feels so good to have survived the last week; to have gotten through all the tests, early mornings, late nights, and endless action-packed days. Today, I am going to reward myself by watching Greek all day and catching up on Gossip Girl (I missed the last two episodes!).

Oh, and thank God there’s nothing due this week! I can finally get some rest.

Posted in Etcetera, Red-Letter Days | No Comments »

When someone mentions fashion models, what comes to mind? Automatically, people will think of those tall ones who have über slim bodies, walking down the runway, showcasing clothes made by designers. For some reason, models are expected to be skinny because they usually wear clothes in size 0 (they’re using small sizes to lessen the cost).

Sad to say, some people see them as inspirations and as a result, some teens suffer from the “I must be super thin” perception that leads them to anorexia nervosa (an eating disorder with fear of gaining weight). Example of this is the 21-year-old Brazilian model, Ana Carolina Reston. She weighed just 40 kilograms, or 88 pounds, when she died. It’s so sad how a beautiful, young girl like her pass away with such an early age.

Skinny or scary?

Yes, it’s in the society and having a nice body is cool but overdoing it by starving yourself to death is unhealthy. I hope her death serves as example to girls out there having an eating disorder and prefers being stick thin.

I’m just wishing that someday, people would realize that being healthy and fit is far way better than being skinny brought by anorexia.

CJ

Posted in Etcetera, Reflections | 5 Comments »

If you love someone, ask them for nothing. Don’t hold them back from their destiny. Don’t keep them from going off in search of their own answers.

Don’t ask them for commitment. You will know commitment is real when it is something given willingly and not as something obligatory.

Don’t ask them for promises. If you are patient, if you have faith, you will know in your heart when the right time for promises has come.

And when that time arrives, then you will see that you have both lost nothing by setting each other free, and have instead gained a richer, fuller life, a wealth of experiences, and a stronger certainty of your desires.

But should they not return to you, then life hasn’t cheated you because no promises were broken. Your bitterness will not last long, and you will feel thankful and blessed that at the very least, this beautiful soul has colored your life, that knowing them has already made life infinitely more meaningful.

By setting a person free, you run a risk of them not returning. But always remember that you found them beautiful precisely because they were free. People are like sunlight. You can feel their warmth, and their glow, but you can’t hold them in your hand and keep them with you forever.

People CHOOSE to stay. But a choice is made more meaningful when it is made despite so many other options.

Love has no restrictions and it is through mistakes that sometimes we see the right answer.

Because if you love someone, you ask them for nothing and they will come back to you.

Aura

PS. Although I am not the author of this, I really hope this touches your hearts, the same way it touched mine.

Posted in Relationships | No Comments »

There is no perfect world—only perfectionists trying to make it so. And until a few months ago, I was one of them.

Having been born into a family where excellence seems to be a theme, I grew up telling myself that achieving the best is the only thing worth doing. I brought this conviction into everything that I did—every test I studied for, every essay I wrote, and every dance I performed. There was no room for mistakes.

Moreover, beating my determination for excellence was my determination to avoid disappointment. Disappointment entailed mediocrity. My mother has gotten used to my “achieving” habits and began to expect nothing of the lesser sort. However, it fears me to think that perhaps I had brought about this attitude in her because of my belief that nothing is worth striving for if not brilliance.

It was this misled drive that got me for days into thinking up of a topic for a final article in class. After painstakingly deliberating on one topic and meticulously writing it for a couple of days, I changed nearly, if not everything, that I wrote the night before the deadline. The topic, or topics, I kept telling myself were not good enough—too dry, too empty, too boring. These would not make the grade was the thought, I kept thinking.

Most people start anew when they enter college. With the fresh environment, there is a shift of study habits, friends, and attitudes. I did not change. I started my freshman year with the familiar perseverance to be the best. I targeted As and B+s, at worst Bs. Anything less would be unacceptable.

Thankfully, despite the pressures of university life, I managed to do quite well. Scraping well-deserved grades that reached my chosen grade limit. That is, until the second semester of my sophomore year. Journalism made it all different.

I became so concerned with what would warrant an A that I stripped myself of my style, my opinions, my sense of what is good and bad, and allowed the textbook to dictate how I write. I believed this would necessitate the excellence that I so craved for.

Mired in perfectionist thinking, I operated on autopilot that headed only towards good grades. After writing an article, a swarm of “could haves,” “would haves,” and “should haves” attacked me. After awhile, I began loathing writing. It became a drag. What used to be my means of relaxation became a cause for stress. I realized that I lost the reason I chose to study journalism in the first place. My writing became free of any expression. My obsession with flawless grades made me hate the one thing that I loved the most.

My frustration in not getting my expected grade in Journ has actually reached that point where I seriously considered dropping out and shifting tracks. Each time I tried to perfect it, I became more disappointed. But as I threw my hands up, about to surrender, I couldn’t.
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Posted in Reflections | 2 Comments »