The UP Red Cross Youth (UPRCY) is a duly recognized university-wide, service-oriented, student-based organization in the University of the Philippines–Diliman and a member council of the Philippine National Red Cross, Quezon City Chapter. Since 1992, it has been the only org in UP Diliman which offers first aid and basic life support services. <br> We conduct various humanitarian and socio-civic services and programs, as well as other activities, such as:

First aid and basic life support training

Medical, dental, circumcision missions

Blood programs (blood donation drives, awareness and networking for donors, assistance for those in need of blood)

Community and volunteer work

Personal development (basic leadership training, team building seminars, weekly jogging, ultimate frisbee, skating, rappelling, wall-climbing, etc.)

Marketing and fund-raising (marketing seminars, food sale, rummage sale)

Org bonding activities (videoke, outings, parties and porma days, road-trips, inuman, etc)

Contact Glase 09152314055

For so many years you have been coddling this fear,

That while at school being the model student

Bad news would come inevitably:

Your father was shot in a rally by an unknown gunman/It was a clean shot/He was DOA.

You fear this news would someday come

When you are busy

When you have to be resolute and leave grief for later.

You fear the news most when you are too happy.

In midlaughter you worry: When will the blow come?

For so many years you have been coddling this fear,

Waiting for the world to knock you senseless,

To irrevocably shatter you.

For so many years you have been coddling this fear,

Someone saying: Two suspicious men came by

To see your mother in the apartment where she lives alone.

They roughed her up a little,

Left a few threats, a broken bone

(what is a broken bone?).

Higher, greater powers sending their minions,

Their hired hands skilled

In the art of hurt and taking lives

Against your mother, your very strong

Mother, but still, only a woman alone.

For so many years you have been coddling this fear,

For so many years, and many years more.

I knew it. Even you paired up.

Why do I foresee such things, this vision too cutting? too keen sometimes for my own happiness? too stark, too clear people mistake it for distrust?

Sometimes it disappoints to have the right assessments, especially about people. You wish things were otherwise. You wish you could at least be let down, indignant even, instead of accepting, understanding.

Even as you said with enthusiasm what could have been a pact midway as we were into our adolescence, I restrained myself, perhaps knowing you better than you knew yourself, perhaps seeing through the lie you wanted to believe for the sake of pride. I knew somehow that you were not the sort of person to take on solace. Perhaps it’s our tragic irony; that you in many ways are coming away from it, while I move towards it.

When you offered that pact I had feared my aloneness, feared going into Rilke’s universe on my own. I wanted, yearned, for someone to emerge and take up that path into the universe of solitude by my side. Naively, you offered company. I would have gladly taken up the offer, would have gladly walked hand in hand. But I knew intuitively that if I had enlisted your company, you would only have to resort to betraying the pact, to abandoning me. Between the two of us, you’re the one rooted to people while I am forever a drifter, a loose woman if I may inject a pun.

So here we are, you all paired up.  I, here, not at all surprised. Perhaps a fraction wistful, but still wishing you the best of happiness possible. I have to go my way now, this road I choose (or is it an inevitability brought upon by my tendencies?). In any case, we have to go our ways. Already, the shared world we’ve been living in together throughout our childhood has come to pieces. It has shattered. We now leave the tangential point in our universes. Will we ever meet on similar footing again? Perhaps not. Here our biographies truly diverge, and we are no longer two sides of the same coin. You are you. I am me. I have to get going. May your sweetheart keep you. Always be well, sister.

I am never enough for you. Something’s always wrong with me. I am never enough and you set out to reform me. I am never enough and you always accost me for having the wrong outlook, see.

You never stop long enough to listen

or wonder why I am the way I am

long enough to see how beautiful I am, as I see myself.

You never stop to look and I am never enough,

which makes me glad not to be enough snagged by your voice, your self (because perhaps I have not looked long enough at you, nor listened enough to what you say; we are not enough for each other. We will never be enough because we do not speak straight. Or I do, and you don’t. Or you do, when I don’t.).

Rebel enough to resist your mold

rebel enough to stomp my inner foot, I drag myself away

from utter destruction,

from forgetting myself.

I’ve been stumbling onto quite a bunch of creative sites in this virtual digital world in the handful of years I’ve become a netizen. I thought I’d pay a little gesture of thanks to these sites for making my day.

Today’s creative blog: yellowpulp

I came across it while searching images on Greenpeace. If you’re looking for creative visual humor this blog’s the way to go.

I couldn’t help but mess around with this.

Ampersand Cartoonized

In childhood I had always wanted to become one sort of writer or other, sometimes a playwright, other days a novelist, and then much later, a poet, but in any case, I was going to become a writer whatever kind of writer I was. I wrote my silly four line verses and my equally childish treasure hunting stories, invented tales about alien worlds and used them as themes in the games that I played with my twin sister, wrote poems that used to come to me then through lyric and melody in the form of the song, imagined other bizarre and fantastical beings and conversed with the spirit of trees and tree-dwellers knowing somehow that these were the prerequisites to a writing life. I was definitely going to become a writer. I wrote and it was easy, and above all things writing was an enjoyable experience, like playing in the sandbox or eating iced candy.

I do not know what I was looking forward to as a child. Did I expect that someday I would receive a plaque where it said Congratulations we have identified based on your childhood scurrying here and there that you are indeed a writer. Now write!? But somewhere along the years I was growing up something must have happened, I cannot tell exactly what. I ended up in a different endeavor altogether, in a cause that commits me to the transformative education of humanity. Where did the dream of becoming a writer go? In the last few months of my senior year in high school taking up a creative writing degree had not even crossed my mind. I only knew I had violently discarded the thought of journalism from my future. I was disgruntled in those last years of high school disillusioned by writing and how rhetoric could so easily be constructed without sincerity. As it turns out I was disillusioned by one sort of writing, and this was writing with its pretentions of objectivity and non-bias. Perhaps it was this that made it clear to me I was never going to earn my bread and butter from writing. I was going to hate myself if I became a speech writer. I would feel trapped if I assumed the strict rigor of journalistic writing. I did not foresee nor even had an inkling that I would pick up the desire to become a writer again midway into college.

All that time, of course, I had never stopped writing. The short fiction and the poems, especially the poems, had always been a persistent writing endeavor in that long stretch from childhood and on to adolescence. But becoming a writer had slipped from my mind. Writing “stuff” did not make me a writer. I was just playing around as usual. I was just thinking out loud on paper. I wrote as part of my personal reflection, not because I was a writer. I had looked to other causes to define myself in the world. I was going to become a teacher. There were a lot of things in the world (I mean this in the sense of society and reality) that I wanted to change and I took it up as my personal cause out of frustration and angst from the many disappointments of a teenager. Yet as I emerged from that long depression, the writing had accumulated into two volumes of poetry and short stories. Many of them were juvenile, of course. Only a handful, to my mind, hints at potential, and however faintly, the ambition of brilliance. But what was important to me was that the writing I had ignored had never been silent. It had always been there with me during those difficult awkward years (which have not stopped being awkward and difficult, by the way). Perhaps somewhere along the way the sensibility had been formed. Or I had been born with it. The answer as to whether writing is nature or nurture is of little import. In whatever fashion it came, the sensibility was there, and I recognized it finally after such a long and convoluted search for an explanation of my difference, my inability to be satisfied, my restlessness, the strange way I saw the world for which many people have marked me odd (or silly). I have my childhood to thank and whatever else. I am a writer. First before anything else, I am a writer.

Now that I am older, writing while it may still be a pleasant experience, is not enjoyable in that childlike way, is not easy, is no longer just a game of uniting sound and sense, or a simple play with words. Some writers may still experience writing in this way even way into adulthood, but this innocence has escaped me. Writing is now a focused and deliberate effort, and most importantly, a gesture towards some sort of meaning-making, at grasping hold of something whatever it is, being human perhaps, or at least something as close to that like dignity. As a child I was determined to become a writer. Now a decade later, it is something that cannot be helped. Being a writer is now a constant becoming furiously reinvented and recreated in the different writing endeavors that I am always, and at times simultaneously, undertaking. The sensibility that makes one a writer makes all the aspects of life, all that may be witnessed, all that is thought and mulled over, a material for the writing life. It is a certain kind of lens, a filter, and it is all there is to it. There are no plaques.

Dual Purple Writer

Blue Man from behind

I just like backs. They are quite evocative. In an extended sense this is me gesturing to Caspar David Friedrich. To looking from behind!

I have decided to undertake a period of revision for all entries posted here that fall under the category of poems and/or verses. I will be taking them down gradually, and they shall not be posted until further notice. I calculate the revisions will probably take me the next six months to finish.

I’m taking a comparative literature class on poetry this semester, and I’m prompted by the things I’m learning to pay attention to craft.

Blog posts about other matters written in prose or fiction shall still be posted here.

WhiteOut

Photoshopped sketch, ca. 2008

These are the sort of things I come up with in between periods of attempting to “study”.

BlackOut

These sketches are based on a poor attempt at reproducing Koyama Keiichiro’s face. This is my version of fangirling.