the geek chronicles

the faces of victory!!! Organization of Area Studies Majors with Sir Atoy Navarro (in front with the glasses)

we won first place!!! oh yes, we did! :) finally! our two weeks of waking up in the wee hours of the morning, 7am practices, pressure, and tiredness paid off! my 50 bucks was worth it too after paying the amount for being 30 minutes late one practice morning. thank you, Lord. the third year block 9 became more united. fun times! good thing Bea and I have pictures (tons!) to remember this by. i'm not the official photographer anymore because Bea has a camera too! whee! haha! :) now we have a back-up camera if i run out of battery. now we'll have to start working on the class scrapbook which is also a class project for SOCSCI120 class. the Department of Social Science Variety Show was a success! all of the other orgs and course representatives did really well especially block 4 of the POLSCI people. their presentation was hilarious!

after the show the seniors treated us juniors for pancit at the tambayan which is why i came home late. argh. my whole body hurts! i woke up at 4:30 this morning to get to school on time. we started practicing at 7:30am until noon. i'm so happy we won! but it's not just about winning... it's all about the good times we spent laughing, cramming, and being pressured to do our best to bring honor to the org (naksss). besides, it was a whole lot of fun working with my blockmates. they're the best ever! we may have had petty disagreements while we prepared for the presentation but in the end we all realized how much each person's participation mattered and how much it contributed to the success of the whole presentation.

the theme for DSS week was Baklas (deconstruction). when you relate it to society, it means breaking away or deconstructing from societal norms. especially some Filipinos who still live in the "Dark Ages". homosexuality is still not accepted openly by society, ethnic groups are still stripped away of their lands, laborers's rights are still violated and in short, we still haven't broken away from our being conservative.

i couldn't think of a better theme for the whole department week. i firmly believe that the theme was a brilliant idea because we need to open our minds and welcome new changes in society. we should no longer live in the dark. our society will forever be undergoing changes whether we like it or not and instead of judging people, violating their rights, and making it hard for everyone... we should compromise and give change a chance. after all, in every change... improvements for the better arise.

we depicted our class's belief by depicting the various people who are oppressed and by showing that from the dark, we can rise by cutting the strings that our dominating oppressors have attached to us. we showed the different forms of activism: cyberactivism, volunteerism, radical activism, and keeping track of current events (and actually caring!). these were just among others. there were the interpretative dancers, the jazzers, and the street dancers. for street dance, the music was hip-hop but the lyrics was urging Filipinos to do whatever they want and not let the fact of being Filipino hinder them from making a difference.

we ended the presentation by chanting:

Bayan, Bayan, Bayan ko! Di pa tapos ang laban mo!

i remember Ave's report on the US Naval Bases Agreement. i'm relating this to Baklas because we need to learn to stand on our own without depending on foreigners for our country to survive. unfortunately, it is a difficult thing to do. Ave ended with a conclusion that the battle the Katipuneros fought for us is still not over. we're still striving for freedom from foreigners so we could finally stand our own. according to her, "Filipinos should never stop fighting until we are truely free."

Amen to that!

and now some pictures! i'll upload the others tomorrow.