warning: obscenely long post ahead

i was reading the inquirer's lifestyle section last thursday when i caught a glimpse of a familiar face on the front page. double-checking with the caption revealed him to be none other than james deen, who had toured us around csb during our scholarship orientation. evidently he had written an essay on food that had garnered him a place in some food-related award. after reading the grand prize winner's essay [who works for the inquirer and so naturally got published] i wish i could've read his too. given his quirky personality, i probably would've enjoyed it more.

yot had invited me to go to manila bay with her and others among the new staff to again watch the sun set. unfortunately by the time i got off from class [around 5pm] it had rained and clouds were blocking the view. since i had to meet up with dandi anyway to borrow her copy of the sky over dimas [which i now recommend, alongside stephen king's on writing], yot asked me to meet them at starbucks. i had expected mostly new staff but half of malate was there, and by 7pm three-fourths were in attendance, with even sir allan popa dropping by for a spell. that was when i opted to hit the road. nothing noteworthy happened on the way home, with the exception of some guy in white jokeley sunglasses walking up to the jeep i was in at the bicutan interchange asking the driver "hey man could you tell me how to get to pasay?" in an obviously contrived californian accent. i don't know what tipped me off more, the scripted dialogue or the sudden emergence of the manileño accent on the word "pasay". he even had the guts to say "thanks man, peace out" when the driver answered his question. what a moron.

our christmas tree isn't up yet but i don't really care. in fact i wouldn't be that bothered if christmas was cancelled this year. i guess it just doesn't hold the same meaning for me anymore. or maybe it's just taking me a little longer to get into the 'christmas spirit' now that i'm older. anyway after the fiasco with that english-spokening jolog, i was walking past the guardhouse into our village, which was bedecked in the kind of lights that blink on and off in time to annoyingly tinny even-less-than-midi-quality christmas carols. i remember trying to guess on what day the guard would finally snap and shoot the damned contraption. hell hath no fury like christmas commercialized.

saturday morning i managed to wake up on time [for habitat take two, remember?] and in fact made it to dlsu with 20 minutes to spare, but lacking a packed lunch. tintin was kind enough to cover me though. throughout the day i never considered what i did to be 'work' although technically it was manual labor. i guess i was having too much of a good time. highlights of the day included julian's constant cologne commercial reenactments [i believe the brand he endorses is mang tomas], doppelgangers for both frytz and bj, life as a node of type structWorkerType [scroll down for more details], five-peso-at-a-time food trippings, and endless rounds of eternal soul with the policeman somehow always turning out to be loyvin. my personal favorite would be the game i affectionately refer to as "isang paa sa hukay", in which bricks go flying through the air in order to 'save time'. of course the first thing i did when i got home was to figure out the algorithm for brick-passing, which was what we did most. i finally came up with the following function:

typedef struct workerTag
{
   struct workerTag *pNext,*pPrev;
   int bBricks,bBucket;
}structWorkerType;

typedef structWorkerType *ptrWorkerType;

void habitat(ptrWorkerType pFirst,ptrWorkerType pLast, int nMaxBricks,int nMaxCement)
{
   ptrWorkerType *pRun;
   int i;
   for(i=nMaxBricks;i>0;i--)
   {
      *pRun=pFirst;
      while(*pRun!=NULL)
      {
         pRun->bBricks=1;
         if(pRun->pPrev!=NULL)pRun->pPrev->bBricks=0;
         pRun=pRun->pNext;
      }
      *pRun=pFirst;
      if(i%nMaxCement==0)for(i=0;i<4;i++)
      {
         *pRun=pLast;
         while(*pRun!=NULL)
         {
            pRun->bBucket=1;
            if(pRun->pNext!=NULL)pRun->pNext->bBucket=0;
            pRun=pRun->pPrev;
         }
      }
      else if(i%nMaxCement==nMaxCement-10)for(i=0;i<4;i++)
      {
         *pRun=pFirst;
         while(*pRun!=NULL)
         {
            pRun->bBucket=1;
            if(pRun->pPrev!=NULL)pRun->pPrev->bBucket=0;
            pRun=pRun->pNext;
         }
      }
   }
}

now you know how boring second term is. my apologies btw to non-techies - the fact that your understanding of the previous 44 lines is minimal gives me a feeling of logical superiority.

i didn't get any rest after 'volunteering' for habitat since paco was celebrating his birthday that night at the rock radio café. bunny, paco, and i had a nostalgic conversation on the way there. to paraphrase:

arun: the best bullshit technique is taught in zobel.

bunny: or by its proper name, 'the obfuscation of a lack of content with the use of rhetoric'.

paco: yep. only a zobelian would think of writing down 'no hairless mammalian biped is composed of a soil sample naturally existing surrounded by a compound composing 75% of said biped'.

arun: 'no man is an island'. nice.

i first considered it unfortunate that 11 bands were playing that night [you try holding up after eight hours of construction work] but i later found out that among the bands was the reunion set of violent playground so off i went. i had my free poster signed by musicians from every band, excepting chicosci [whose music i'm not that partial to] and sandwich [whose set i somehow managed to sleep through, to the amazement of the by-then half-deaf people with me], as well as by zach of imago and mikey of ciudad, who both just happened to pass by. beng, the lead singer of trip, asked me if i was in a band so i said that i was in an acoustic set, although after seeing how jaw-droppingly well the bands played that night, i feel like returning chami's guitar and just sticking to programming.

perhaps the best part of the evening's events was this dumb-ass kid who [a] won a cd and two tickets to this years nu107 rock awards for answering giveaway questions, [b] moshed a girl into the tables to our right then later groped her while pretending to help her up, and [c] stagedove without anybody bothering to catch him. i used to think that adults hated teenagers out of jealousy but now i realize that they're just really annoying. i finally got home around 4am and smelling like a cigarette factory but to hell with those details. they say that every trip to rock radio takes 10 years off your life. to quote rumi: "what a bargain".

sige ingat.ü 
posted by stani at 4:26 PM