on enemy territory
i know it's been 9 years since i left the hallowed halls of malcolm, so the assumption is that i should have matured a little. but that's just an assumption, which will be proven wrong by this post. you see, not too long ago i was added to a closed facebook group called You Know You Went to UP Law if... and for a week after that my notifications were flooded by nostalgic posts of people reminiscing about life in law school. the amazing thing was that people who've never met each other, and who were separated by decades, shared similar stories.
what wasn't amazing though was that, like me, people who had left UP law earlier than i did, showed a much higher level of immaturity. and by that i mean they still go back and talk about the imagined rivalry between UP law and the best law school (in makati). the potshots against the ateneo law are kind of low, actually, and it's a good thing our group is closed, which means only UP law graduates are able to see the comments. whereas ateneo's own version isn't, so we had ammunition against them. we really couldn't help it, but people picked on things like grammar, and their ideas of a good time (highlighting codals at starbucks).
my boss lives in this turquoise building
anyway, i say this now because lately i was at the ateneo professional schools in rockwell. ever since i started living in makati, i would pass this building every time i am at the powerplant, for a movie or something (i don't exactly shop). but i've never gone inside. the closest i've come to seeing what's inside the building is when i went up to my boss's unit at the manansala, whose terrace overlooks the building. it was nighttime so i didn't get to see much.
on the right are the ateneo's rules on plagiarism
the meeting i had at the ateneo lasted only an hour, but i spent a few more minutes walking its halls. of course i didn't wax nostalgic, but i couldn't help but draw some comparisons between malcolm and what surrounded me at the time. let me just say that in UP, we weren't 2 minutes away from a starbucks. we had to take a jeepney to get us to the nearest mall. and it wasn't posh like powerplant. we had a variety of eating places to choose from, but had to travel to katipunan if we wanted something a bit more upscale than persian house or beach house (of course, with the ayala technohub, the choices have now significantly broadened).
i prefer the business of a law school bit -- this is a bit too him/his-centric
i've never considered studying law elsewhere. in fact, i only studied law because i wanted to prolong my stay in UP. walking around ateneo's building made me realize how lucky we were to have something a little more historical to hold on to. in those same corridors, presidents, justices, legislators, great women and men once dreamed of a life in the pursuit of justice and the service of the filipino people. of course it also helped that there were more greens in diliman than in any other philippine law school i could think of (unless palawan state university has a law school of its own).
anyway, i began by saying that this post would expose my immaturity because i sat down at the meeting and everyone asked why i had a camera, and i replied: oh this is my first time to set foot on enemy territory. one of the lawyers there -- who finished her law degree at the ateneo -- said: but we don't consider you our enemy. but of course. UP is sui generis, not even primus inter pares. we have no rivals because we only pick on law schools our own size.