Menthol-Guy

It’s probably in my genes to get rid of my blog for a while and realize that my blog’s becoming one huge empty mass of shit, but of course I still manage to come back and update it. Aaaand I miss my Tumblr blog more than this citrus-colored blog.

BORING DAILY UPDATES:

Friday - Dad got this pharyngitis thing going on in his throat (specifically and obviously, it’s the pharynx) and he’s losing his voice so I quickly cancelled dining with friends at Trinoma at that very night. Then I got home and I saw him smoking. He’s still smoking after all. WTF IS THIS PHARYNGITIS THING ANYWAY?

Saturday - went to someone’s debut at Hotel Stotsenburg somewhere in Clarkfield, Pampanga. We got wheels provided by the debutante which brought us straight from Bulacan to Pampanga. Coolness.

Also, that Saturday - bought that brand-new Monopoly board game for 800 bucks just because of my nephew’s birthday. It’s actually my first gift to him and needless to say, my bank account dwindled even lower than expected. But I quickly deposited money from my dearest Mother.

Sunday - I think the kids and I played three Monopoly games (all of them ended due to bankruptcy).

_{Wait, the phrase “kids and I” is just so fatherly.}

Monday - I went straight to Laguna since my Speech Communication professor ‘last-minutely’ announced an emergency meeting. I’d rather not vent it out here for a while: it’s really maddening. Also, we played DotA from 8 to 1 in the morning, Tuesday.

Tuesday - I woke up and realized that I’m slowly forgetting my blog. :D

And I watched Stay Alive (with Frankie Muniz in it) a while ago. Simply kickass. The movie’s plot is interconnected with a Playstation game (also using the same name) and it’s really thrilling and mind-puzzling.

WHAT KEEPS ME BUSY:

• Shifting papers
• Dad’s resume (I can’t find the french-like e)
• DotA as usual
• Debuts
• Essay writing books!

Dad’s buying me something this Halloween. He told me he’d buy me a vest (Jonas Brothers-like vests, anyone?) or suits (Armani?) for debuts. He said I should be masculine in style, but still fashionable. I can’t get it. Whaaaat does that mean, you GQ*-overloaded father?

_{*GQ means Gentlemen’s Quarterly. It’s a magazine for dirty old men and men’s fashion.}

“We are flowers in a vast garden - so vast its borders were not even fenced for it covered the whole region, stretching from coast to coast. I imagine everyone of us as flowers with our faces somewhat engraved on the center of every flower the way Teletubbies or even a playwright would artistically manifest it on a children’s play (say, Thumbelina).

We are flowers with faces and every petal signifies every friendship and every interaction we make. Our common fields of experiences somewhat connect each and every petal to the center of the flower (where, scientifically, has the stigma and the style and the anthers and filaments).

Petals overlapping each other might be due to the fact that our friends basically know each other. Sometimes they coincide, sometimes they collide.

Now we go to the part where we find the stem and the leaves with all the thorns and the defense mechanisms of the entire plant which signifies the past and every nook and cranny of our personality.

The bees, I have no idea. They intrude our cores and sip our nectars. They may signify temptations, they may be some natural or man-made contingency that sucks our lives and our passions for something. They fall on the same kind of category with the weather and all the natural dins and disturbances around us: the earthquakes shaking and sometimes even shattering our foundations, the monsoons drowning our roots, the droughts inducing our body to become flaccid and limp, devoid of any strength, and the days and nights and everything like it.”

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This is stupid. To compare our social lives and even basically our lives to a mere flower is something stupid. I wrote this mentally during my Speech Communication I class this morning, thinking about Schramm’s model of communication and how every message and every conversation sparks because of our same field of experience.

In his model - correct me if I’m wrong - two different persons are projected by separated shapes - there’s this east-to-west distance between them. In the middle of the distance lies a circle which we imply as the signal or the message. The source of the conversation encodes the message and transmits it to the receiver. The receiver, upon receiving the message, decodes the signal. Upon decoding the signal, we can now say that the two persons have had communication.

These two persons radiate this large circle which we call the “field of experience“, and we believe that these two persons, these seemingly two shapes lying a mile away from each other actually shares (even in the slightest hint) a common experience, belief, philosophy, or absolutely anything to one another.

That common field of experience somehow makes the signal possible for transmission. That overlapping makes the conversation run smooth, or to simply put it, effective and sensible.

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Let’s just put it this way. Say, Friendster. We have our “friends” and those “first, second, third degree friends.” Our own friends are connected to us with a wider overlapping due to the fact that we share somehow a large fraction of our fields of experiences. The first, second and third degree friends are “linked” to us through our friends. Therefore, in one way or another, we also share the same field of experience with them (though not really in a notable or a remarkable way).

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So there. We are flowers. I’m probably some winter flower since I’m neither emotional nor vibrant or loud. Just this faded-looking flower like a Venus Flytrap (ooops, it’s not a flower). I have no idea about flowers even if I took Crop Science I last semester. I only know their parts, not the species and their colors and all.

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Whatever.

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ARGH. Naasar ako nung binasa ko to. It’s so corny.

The morning sun dappling, dappling, dappling on my face and my alarm clock yelling and it was quarter to five in the morning. I have a speech to deliver in front of the class later at around 7, and so I have to rehearse again and again and bear it in mind. So I took a shower, dressed myself up, skipped breakfast, chewed two Orbit gums to kill boredom while working on it mentally. I somehow believe that gums have this capability of relieving tensed and nervous feelings - since your jaws work up and it lessens the worrying. I don’t know if it’s true though - there must be a scientific explanation about it - but I’ve read it on some book at Booksale about bubble gums.

So don’t forget to chew your gum before doing anything grand on-stage. Or corporate presentations. Or talks, speeches, debates, whatever that needs confidence to combat fear or diffidence.

So I prepared myself for the speech. I listed all the topics I would have to say in front of the class.

And then the professor canceled the speech deliveries today. “It would be next meeting,” he said.

THAT killed me.

Most of my classmates have released this sigh - they have successfully emitted all the nervousness and anxieties of their morning. Meanwhile, I sighed with disappointment. I prepared. I rehearsed. Why does THIS have to happen? What factor twisted my professor’s strictness on deadlines? What’s with all the leniency around?

I sometimes hate the way their (professors) minds work. When they know the students have slept below six hours, have cancelled organization-related meetings and have prioritized the speech more than their life for some point of their day, they would move the deadline. They would kill their students by prolonging the suspense and the hardships.

What could get worse is that my delinquent seatmate way back last semester (we also took Speech Communication I last sem, and we’re both delinquent, thank you very much) happened to be on the SAME CLASS as mine! I’ve felt the same feeling Tyler Durden felt at Fight Club when Marla was visiting the same night programs he was attending - he was intimidated.

Not that I hate his face or whatever, it’s just that his face reminds me that I RETOOK Speech Communication I, and his face revives my stupid reason of leaving the class unattended for three months without going back. And his face, his face! I almost thought I’m safe in this class since nobody would know I retook Speech Communication I just because my professor’s a total bore. Just because it’s scheduled at seven in the morning every Tuesdays and Thursdays and that she’s close to perfection when it comes to the word “boring” and its synonyms. She’s the complete package, really.

And then I remembered back then, I asked him (his name’s Ryan if I’m not mistaken) last semester about his delinquency and we totally had the same reasons.

But, but why - of all Speech Communication I sections - are we still on the same class? Out of 25 sections, there’s the slimmest chance that we could be on the same boat. BUT WE ARE RIGHT NOW.

What a morning. I should take my breakfast now.