Happy New Year 12/31/2009
 
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from WikiMedia
 
Holiday feast 12/26/2009
 
Yes, I know what Christmas is supposed to be. But if you're Filipino, you know no other way to celebrate Christ's birth except by serving a feast for family and friends.

Look at it this way, then. The holiday fare is really a thanksgiving feast that family and friends can share. It's our way of saying thank you for all the blessings received all year round, and for the grace allowed us in overcoming the obstacles (seemingly insurmountable at that time) that this year brought.

And think of the intent and the preparation that went into this celebration -- the joyous prospect of gathering family members and friends from far and wide under one roof to partake of this feast with goodwill.
And because we're Filipinos, we cannot help but think of celebrations as events where we can share food with each other.

But then again, Homer wrote something about how feasting usually precedes moments of solemnity (and sometimes grimness). In the Odyssey, for example, he narrates how the shipwrecked warriors slaughtered and feasted on the cattle they espied upon reaching shore. Only when they were sated did these same warriors begin to mourn their drowned comrades.

So we, too, scratching our full bellies and sipping tea or coffee to aid our digestion, begin to ponder our fate and faith this season of Christ's birth and of the passing of the year into a new decade of this second millennium.
 
Holiday break 12/19/2009
 
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Hark the herald angels sing
Here comes the holiday break for Christmas and the New Year. It's a two-week break for those in academe, as school resumes in January 4, 2010 yet.

I plan to spend the holidays catching up on my recreational reading and watching movies while in the company of family and friends back in Leyte.

Merry Christmas and a happy New Year everyone!
 
Snafu 11/03/2009
 
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by Anynobody
Situation normal, all fucked up.

That's the best way to explain how the computerized registration system (CRS) went today as students queued up to accomplish their clearances, confirm their enlisted subjects, and have it approved by their faculty advisers so they could get their registrations forms, fill it out, pay at the cashiers, get their class cards, and hie off to the nearest hangout.

But then the computer system went kaput as students, staff, and faculty tried to connect to the database to no avail. Or if they could connect, it took the system three to four "Happy Birthday" songs before they could get to the page they wanted. And given the rather linear navigational design, they'd have to click on at the least three pages. That means at least a total of nine "Happy Birthdays."

Hope tomorrow they'll have fixed the glitches. Otherwise, I might just as well bring a guitar to strum while singing. 
 
Sundry 10/24/2009
 
While marking papers and preparing for next term's classes, I read Eudora Welty's One Writer's Beginnings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984). This passage from her book stuck:

"I stumbled into making pictures with a camera. Frame, proportion, perspective, the values of light and shade, all are determined by the distance of the observing eye."