Uhhhh. I have a headache. Top that with gory news on a primetime newscast — while eating dinner. There was this hostage drama in some bus station at Pasay City. The news got an entire shot of the event and they actually showed most of everything on TV. So anyway, according to the voice-over news guy, it was after two hours when the suspect started stabbing the child (in-synch with the footages on TV). And then gunshots rained on the suspect and he, of course dropped dead in a pool of blood. All those in TV. It was a little censored of course. And it was only a little pixelation. Uh. That was horrible. Specially the stabbing part. Egh! This is too much. It brings back my nightmares from our road trip from Cagayan.

Anyway, I went to school again with a cab. I had to submit the hopefully the most final of all final blueprints and layout. I would absolutely hate to work with another layout with Pagemaker. Not to Pagemaker’s fault, but I am just begining — rather, I have already gotten very tired and irritated at this layouting job this summer as layout editor of the school’s paper (which is a magazine actually).

I went to school today to claim my books for this school year and to claim my uniform as well. And of course, to get the additional information and write-ups that the CSO have so I could add them to the CSO Manual booklet, which I am layouting.

Actually, I should have claimed my books yesterday because that was the juniors’ book claim day or something and today was the sophomores’. So the book man made me wait for a full hour to prioritize the sophomores. Geez. And those books weighed a ton too. It was a pain in the back. And I had to commute with those!

Today I went to school to submit the final layout of the Freshman’s Guide. I got to school at 11 but the publisher’s contact person said she’d arrive by 2 so I just left the files with the office secretary. I wasn’t able to burn the files on cd so I just split the directory into 1.44 MB parts so they could fit in diskettes. 11 diskettes all in all.

It was raining today. So it was sort of difficult for me to get a cab. Well, not actually. I got home not so wet from the rain.

I finished the layout of the CSO (Council of Student Organizations) Manual this morning. My editor-in-chief told me to be in school at 10 AM to submit the blueprint and the layout. Fine, I was a little late — only by about 5 to 10 minutes. But was that enough reason for me to wait for 3 hours before I get to submit the goddamn thing? I arrived there at 10:05 AM and I only get to hand down that stupid little black diskette by 1. You see, The core group of the CSO was having a meeting and my editor-in-chief was the publications cluster head so he was at the meeting. It took several hours. And all the long while, I was just sitting there at one corner of the office trying to take a nap and trying to shrug all the wait off. Okay. I’m not feeling bad against my editor-in-chief or anybody. He looked very embarrassingly sorry to me enough. And I never felt bad against him in the first place. I just simply feel bad. I’m doing this layout deal for the CSO as a request. And I just realized that I am an unrequited worker. I’m not even part of the core group of the CSO, why should I bother? I’m not even paid to do this. It’s not even my duty or job to do this. But I’m doing it. And yet I feel so out of place.

Sigh. I really felt so bad and out of place that time. Sitting so quietly at one corner while watching those big people from the CSO having a meeting over some snacks. While my stomach grumbled for lunch. While I waited for hours just to hand over a pathetic diskette.

I was finally able to leave at about 1:30 PM.

Anyway, I have another deadline tomorrow to finish the final layout of the revised Freshman’s Guide. Hopefully, they won’t let me revise any more things. I’m sick and tired of working with layouts and seeing that Adobe Pagemaker window.

Yesterday, it was raining hard. Fine, it was great. It was great because it broke the endless monotony of scorching hot summer days in the Philippines. It was cold. The air smelled wet and cool. Nice. But here in our place, when it rains hard, power fails. We had four goddamn blackouts yesterday! And it was only here in our village. It completely annoyed me.

Anyway, it still somewhat rained today but thankfully the power didn’t fail.

I tried to finish the revised layout of the Freshman’s Guide for tomorrow’s supposed deadline. But since Jaime, our editor-in-chief, said that there are some more picture that he will send me tomorrow, he extended my deadline to Wednesday. Great. One more day. I can still laze around. I’m a lazy person.

Oh by the way, I also just finished layouting the CSO Manual booklet. It wasn’t so hard since I basically, just cut and pasted the entire content and did some modifications to the fonts and style. And of course the front cover.

Only, could you kindly tell me one thing. How do I burn all these publications in a cd so I could submit it tomorrow and on Wednesday? Hah, as if someone actually reads this and resposnds. I better go search for my answer in Google or something.

Tonight is a turning point in my online journal history. For the second time, and probably the first permanent time, I changed the title of my journal. It used to be Younglife from October 2000 to June 2001 and again from July 2001 till today. But Younglife soon became an imperfect title for my journal. Well, it kind of fits well, but I thought, “My life isn’t going to be young forever right. I need to change and mature.” And besides, Younglife is the name of some other organization, and my journal is not connected to it. And the former is the offical Younglife. Well, I present you, Vicrenzo, the rebirth of my new journal complete with a new layout! I’m quite impressed with my new layout. I never used an onMouseOver attribute before. Well look at my menu! Uhuh, cool huh.

Well, just like any other Sunday in my life, we went to church at our parish, and spent the rest of the day lazing at home. Sigh. I’m not a going-out person. Though I’d love to be one.

I almost finished layouting the Freshman’s Guide last night. I got to sleep at about 1 AM. I can’t believe I can let myself stay up that long nowadays. I’ve been sleeping really late these past weeks. I never do that. When there’s school, I usually sleep as early as 8 PM! No kidding.

I finished the whole layout early enough before I went to school to submit the blueprint to the Freshman’s Guide editor and to our Hilites Magazine editor-in-chief. I asked my mom, who was capable of bringing me to school, to bring me to school but since she was lazy she told me to hire a cab! I got a little annoyed and wished I’d get kidnapped by commuting so she’d blame herself. Thankfully, my dad brought me to school. But then, my dad did the same thing, I asked him if he could pick me up from school when I’m done and yet he told me to hire a cab. The more I wished to get kidnapped. Tsk. Anyway, my editors liked the layout actually.

We left the blueprint in school for our moderator to see. Jaime (our editor-in-chief) told me that our moderator will just fax to me her corrections and all.

Came tonight, I received the fax. All 12 pages of ‘em filled with x’s and encircled paragraphs and handwriting everywhere.

Ohh. Just when I thought I was done with the thing, I need to virtually do it all over again. It looks just great the way it is if you ask me. But no, I’m not complaining. At least my deadline is on Tuesday. I can take it slowly.

By the way, I had my haircut today. After almost two months of neglecting to go to the barbershop, finally. My thick hair was getting too hot for the summer. I feel so cool right now.

I’m going to make this journal entry quick. I want to begin layouting the 12-page magazine I’m supposed to do. Deadline’s tomorrow. Sigh. What I have to do as layout editor of the school paper. And without any staff to help me.

I went to school again this afternoon to pick up some artworks and articles that are to be included in the Freshman’s Guide issue (that is what I’m supposed to layout). The artwork is hilarious. The artwork I picked up is to be the back cover of the magazine. It’s a caricature of a typical Atenean filled with text balloons and arrows describing the features of that so typical Atenean. There’s this text balloon pointing to the hand of the caricature guy and it reads “CLEAN HANDS: Sparkly clean w/ clipped nails, extremely useful, especially in your bedroom.” Hahaha. It may be just me but that made me laugh while reading it when I was walking home.

Jaime called up about half an hour ago and dictated a couple of edited articles. He couldn’t email it to me. Good thing I have the pre-edited copies so I just checked his dictations against them.

That was a quick entry, I guess. I’m about to stay up late tonight to finish the layout of the Freshman’s Guide issue.