BA in IDSC WTFLOL
I reckon I ought to be filled with all sorts of pithy sayings summing up my past four years, but I doubt I'd experience any satisfaction summing it up as such, if even I could. It would feel too final, too much like I'm ignorant of how much I have left to learn. Things I can give advice on with any sort of confidence are truisms I felt I should have learned at a younger age.
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This is a picture of the New Year's fireworks near Ayala Avenue, Manila. My brother and I had been fully expecting a solitary New Year's on the internet when my parents busted into both our bedrooms and insisted on watching the fireworks. Panji and I were unenthusiastic but compliant, and we headed out into the throng of humanity in one of Manila's largest commercial districts.
We abandoned the car on the main road and, after making sure it was secure, ventured into smaller side streets. It was quieter there. The noise was blocked out in these gorges formed by twenty-story hotels, and we wandered through them rubbernecking at the sky -- has it started yet? has it started?
When it did, we were right beneath, directly under. The fireworks launchpad was barely 50 meters away from where we stood, and at a couple of seconds past midnight the sky was like the death of dragons and the birth of stars and red and green and gold and violet. The kitchen crew from the four-star hotel next-door streamed out into the streets, holding their phone cameras aloft, cooing at the spectacle. The ash and debris rained down on us like snow that stung our eyes, and in the car on the way back home half an hour later we would still smell like sulfur.
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Starting mid-August '08, I'm going to be in New York studying sociology at Columbia. This summer, I plan to eat a lot and fall in and out of love and the sunshine.