To culminate our weeks-long 89th anniversary celebration, the resident and the alumni brods staged a free concert at the University of the Philippines Theater last December 11, 2007. Featured performers were the UP Jazz Ensemble, Eileen Sison & Guarana, the Family Cruz Band, Up Dharma Down, Peacepipe and Pinikpikan.

The concert, through the various performers and bands, traced popular music from the 1920′s till today. This also served as a kick-off concert for next year’s centennial celebration of the university.

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Continued from here.

On December 4, we held our “˜infamous’ Car Stuffing event. Mechanics simplified, the organization who stuffs the most number of people inside a car wins a hefty ten thousand pesos. One organization, UP ICTUS, had been winning the contest for the past four years. This year, thirteen organizations participated, and through a tie-breaker round, UP CURSOR took home the honor and the prized sum. They fit in thirty people inside the vehicle. UP ICTUS finished second.

Interestingly, a few years ago, our car stuffing event was co-sponsored by my student political party’s rival party, which from then on earned our event the traditional criticism, from my friends, of being irrelevant. Hehe. Admittedly, sans all the other events and activities with hints of social relevance, we do our car stuffing event largely and simply because it’s really just fun.

This year, we also had a Food Stuffing activity as an intermission event. The team of four who finishes a plateful of spaghetti, cakes, pansit, among other foodstuffs the fastest, wins three thousand pesos. A team from the College of Arts and Letters won.

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Let me get this off my blog checklist once and for all. Our frat’s 89th anniversary was what occupied most of my time the past months and a few weeks. Days of no-sleep, hours of prodwork like tagging three thousand stems of roses and cooking 15 kilos of pasta in under three hours. Haha. Oh boy. Despite limited funds and manpower at times, we were able to pull everything off.

After our free film screening of Tulad ng Dati, we held a bloodletting contest last November 22 and 23. In cooperation with the Philippine Red Cross, we sought to gather teams in UP Diliman to best each other by donating the most amount of blood based on the number of donors. After two days, a team of university security personnel won the contest with almost a dozen blood donors.

The Saturday right after, November 24, we held a Gawad Kalinga build with UP Gawad Kalinga at a GK site in Brgy. Central in Quezon City. It was my first time to participate in a Gawad Kalinga activity. Though I dislike how some people in the university use it to swipe at campus activism or use it as an excuse or alternative for mass mobilizations for political and social change, this Gawad Kalinga build was particularly enlightening in some ways. It felt futile and inefficient at times–the human chain and the passing around of sandbags despite the availability of wheelbarrows–but then I realized it’s the symbolic act of cooperation that’s most important. Gawad Kalinga for some, exists, after all, as a venue for an erstwhile apathetic middle class to feel like they’re doing something to change society without getting inconveniently political.

The Sunday after, we spent all night till the wee hours of Monday morning preparing three thousand stems of pink roses for our traditional Day of Roses on November 26. Despite an utter lack of sleep, we spent the entire Monday giving flowers to the girls of UP Diliman while serenading them with some songs. Hehe.

And it doesn’t stop here. I shall continue a chronicle of our events in another blog entry.