I tagged along a fellow blogger-finalist in the PBA and a brod of mine in the Upsilon, Ivan, to one of his spontaneous trips to Intramuros and Binondo last Wednesday.

We first stopped by Bahay Tsinoy in Intramuros to meet up with Ivan’s friend in the heritage conservation circle, Ivan Man Dy. He toured us around the museum for free and gave me a brief lecture on the Chinese’ part in the shaping of the Philippines’ and the Filipinos’ identity, which I’m familiar with anyway ever since I wrote that term paper about the Mano Po “series”. We then walked off to San Agustin church where both Ivans sat down with the head priest in the head priest’s office and talked about some restoration / renovation / reconstruction of some of the church’s parts. While they talked and debated about how our heritage sites should be properly restored and conserved, I wondered off to take pictures instead.

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My mom availed of this certain logistics company’s passport renewal service the other day. True, we were saved from going all the way to the Department of Foreign Affairs to queue up and go through all the red tape. But then we ended up waiting at home all day for the company’s representative to show up with the papers we had to sign. The annoying this is that we didn’t know what time he would arrive so we had to call off all our tasks for the day.

After signing the papers, my mom decided not to proceed to her duties in Bulacan and instead treated Tisay and I to a few hours in the mall. It was Tisay’s first time in a mall. What a cute thing. She was gushing at almost everything she saw and was chasing any small kid we bumped into as if they were her friends.

I had little to do last Sunday, though I had a finals exam in Communication 141 the next day, so when Bianca asked me to help out in her group’s Film 114 shoot, I said yes. She did play as our cinematographer in our own Film 114 shoot. Let me tell you, you won’t survive in the film institute without good working and cordial relations with your batchmates or film orgmates. We all become each other’s production assistants, cinematographers, production managers, assistant directors, etc. from one production to another, which I can say is selfless in a way since we’re all good friends anyway. In reality we are also ‘paid’ with food and perhaps in the intangible assurance that your film friends will help you out in your own productions. It’s all mutual.

The shoot was in some mansion in Alabang. The shoot lasted the whole day till around 9 in the evening, but I left Alabang before the sun went out because I still had an exam to study for the next day. I took a 1.5-hour bus ride all the way back to Quezon City.

I did notice that most of our batch’s Film 114 productions this semester have bed scenes. What a binding motif. Hehe.

I spent my late afternoon till evening last Friday with some friends from Mass Comm surveying an area in Quezon City for Kabataan Party, which we will be campaigning for in the next few weeks (which I’ll try to do while trying to complete a 100-hour internship in a month).

Fortunately, military personnel and alleged ex-communist rebels out to demonize partylist groups like Kabataan Party, in behalf of the present administration obviously, aren’t present in our designated area. Yet.

Hm, nako-conscious na tuloy ako mag-blog ng bagong entry, with the surge in traffic and attention. Even people in school are congratulating me. I still find it sort of weird, being recognized for an online journal.

My group mates and I finally finished editing and re-editing our documentary for documentary class this morning. We’ve been at it for two almost-sleepless nights here at my room. It’s really no good if you start shooting a documentary without a detailed outline or even an edit log. We ended up with hours and hours and hours of footage that we (actually, I) had to sift through and sort out and trim into a ten minute documentary with a coherent story. Whew, we pulled it off nonetheless. I’ll upload the documentary in a few days.

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The list of finalists for the 2007 Philippine Blog Awards are out. I have been aware that I was included in “shortlist” (which is actually a long one) of official entries in the Personal Blog category, but I never gave it much thought until Benj Espina informed me in one of his comments that Bikoy.net was chosen as a finalist in the Personal Blogs category!

Other finalists in the Personal Blogs category are LastLeaf.org, Fight Pompe, Jessica Rules The Universe, and Misteryosa.

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It seemed quite weird, especially for the candidates like me who lost, but our college party held a small thanksgiving and victory gathering yesterday at the Film Department lobby. What’s more weird, we even invited our opponent party. All’s well, however. Like what we’ve always said, STAND-UP is and will continue to be present, election season or not.

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I still feel disoriented. For the past month or so, my routine has been irregular, what with my neophyte phase, and then the weeks-long election season. Now, everything seems weird to me. No more student council work, no more ‘initiation sessions’, no more elections. Everything’s ‘back to normal’ and yet I’m still heavily hung up from all the irregularities that have happened. I’m not even used to being online all the time anymore. I’ve been trying and I’ve been getting back into my ‘old routine’ the past days. There’s just less than two weeks of school days left however, so it’s not really getting back to a regular routine because these weeks are hell weeks. It also doesn’t help that I’ve given up and missed a lot of things, most are academic, the past month because of my extra-curricular and political preoccupations.

Last Monday, I was able to attend assemblies of my two orgs in Mass Comm. My attendance reminds me that I have to reorient myself with the busy org life I once had in my first and second year in college. Those were preoccupations I felt fulfillment and happiness in (eghck, but true). [Photos are here]

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