Stronghold and Sanctuary

Ho-Hum

Fri, 19 Dec 2008 08:56:50 GMT

It's the holidays. And the lack of work pushed me to the brink of absolute lethargy. And it's just the first day. It's probably a signal that I'm a workaholic. I miss the running deadlines, the burdens and my own whining (odd that I want them back). Do I? Or does this simply mean I have no social life?

Yeah, I guess it does.

Normally, I never mind. I was psychologically scarred in my childhood years.

-Nursery: Two girl bullies that pushed me nearly to a point of absolute seclusion from the class. Nearly. And the useless teachers didn't do anything. Even if I was a little smart. All I could remember was no one was ever there for me. Ho-hum.

-Kindergarten: It was the point of our lives that girls thought boys were idiots and boys thought girls were sissy. A punishment was to be placed in a table of the other gender for you to shut up. I was listening to the teacher and a delinquent nagged to play with me. I shushed her. After HER making a lot of noise, I was placed in the company of men. There I learned how to appreciate men: naive but happy. That was also the year I despised sissy girls who worshiped their dolls.

-Preparatory: This was the year my bitchiness grew. I had a best friend (ew) and she caught me playing with other classmates. She got pissed and tried (note: TRIED) to make my life hell. She snobbed me, I snobbed back. I was starting to be sarcastic even with my teachers (A sarcastic prep student? Can you imagine?).

So here I am, a sarcastic, anti-social bitch who covers her inferiority-complex with obnoxiousness.

Back to lethargy. Our ~~seminarian~~ teacher in Literature and Speech left us over some work: A Survival Kit in Hell (I might need that) and our general speech on the topic and side we got. And planning for our Investigatory Science Project in Chemistry. Might I mention a tableau for our novel El Filibusterismo.

Ah...ignorance is ~~bliss~~ lethargy

Too Sexy for Me

Mon, 10 Nov 2008 12:12:26 GMT

Prom Night (mare)

Tue, 04 Nov 2008 11:27:38 GMT

I have never seen the point of a prom night ever since I was born. This came up because the idiots who plan this useless activity decided to make it a requirement for year-end clearance.

What. The. ~~Fuck~~. Hell.

Apparently, they simply assumed that everyone is simply thrilled to participate. Yeah, right. Ignorant to the existence of anti-socials within the school, they decided to force us to this. As if it wasn't bad enough to pay the heavy fee for something I don't believe has any importance in my life.

Prom is merely an excuse to waste money to try and look gorgeous (and 75% percent of them often fails). Then they bring their Prince Charming and parade him around. It's a fulfillment of their dormant Disney Princess Dream! Or a nightmare more like.

To almost everyone, burning money for a single night of materialistic impressions upon everyone for once-in-a-lifetime is wonderful. And people with reason and sense of practicality, and personal reasons for not participating (in short me) are shunned because of their individuality, nonconformity, and lack of financial backup. Shit.

Other go simply because it's fun. Stupid reasons surely make an impenetrable defense.

I've always been shunned and unaccepted because I'm a sociopath. (severely anti-social for those who prefer taking things literally). I don't give a damn. But at least don't force me to burn my money for something worse than listening to Lil Jon's Get Low.

Taboo

Wed, 24 Sep 2008 13:56:14 GMT

Being a feminist, I'm firm with my beliefs, even if no one else agrees with me. Especially when I often think I'm right. So I pondered on this while riding the jeepney.

Many women find this word disgusting, dirty, and taboo. When I say it out loud, others stare, glare, giggle, or cough. They think it's improper for me to say it just because I'm young and I'm a girl. They think it is improper. But I think not.

I think it not wrong to say "penis" out loud. And to think this is even a scientific term already.

I remember our teacher in Afro-Asian Literature was surprised why we couldn't say it without giggling, or haphazard written boldly on our faces. I remember she wanted to describe circumcision to us (we're an exclusive girls' school) and offered to draw it on the board. The whole class squealed and begged her not to. Then she asked one in the class to say it out loud. I did and the rest of the class laughed. I found it amusing too, but irritating as well.

It is the phallus that symbolizes the oppression of women for centuries. In the Philippine culture, before the Spanish colonization, women were looked up to. They were greatly respected. Chivalry was at its height. But after three centuries of Western influence, women were silent household ghosts.

The fact that men have penises already give them societal power in our patriarchal society. Presence of a penis dangling (or erect) between your legs already refers to your power over women. Not only figuratively, but also literally. Imagine, a woman raping a man. It is a traditional definition of women to be these phantoms in the homes; to appear only when needed or wanted. They exist because men exist. History is filled with women trampled upon. Female empowerment hardly popped up; liberty only popped up mostly during the Roman civilization and early Egyptian civilization.

It is ironic that contemporary women stand up for societal equality with men, but they can't even speak the object that oppressed us in the first place.

Quoting Rowling "fear of the name increases fear of the object itself".

If you're still not convinced, imagine men fearing to say "vagina". Now you'd know how I'd feel.

Blinded by the Sparkles

Fri, 05 Sep 2008 11:26:48 GMT

This was written with my friends Maxine Ledesma and Anna Maria Santos.

We are very sure that you have heard of Twilight. If you haven’t, you must live in a parallel dimension where Stephenie Meyer has not spread her stupidity (oh we’d die to be there). Yes, stupidity. By now, you are probably fuming at us for saying these harsh criticisms. We’re sorry, but the painful, ignored truth must be told.

For those oblivious students who still don’t know the story, we will reiterate this cliché story. Twilight revolves around the oh-so-plain, average Bella Swan who just moved to Forks to be with her father. There she meets her fan base: the men who apparently pushed aside all the possible libidinal satisfaction by falling in love with such a bland teenager. Soon, she meets and falls in love with Edward, the utterly impossibly perfect vampire boyfriend-and he even comes with free sparkles. Thus starts their journey of forbidden love.

We’d like to emphasize here how used up the plot is, and we wouldn’t want to sacrifice more trees for the benefit of Twilight (Stephenie Meyer already did that for us). The plot is 4/5 of crammed romance where they focus on unrealistic, cute, but incredibly unnecessary romantic scenes. She makes it sound sophisticated by using unusual synonyms. Even if we are lovers of the English language, we believe that certain words are not meant to be used for books that are aimed at the general public. This shows the immaturity of her writing style. She was not confident in her own words.

To be honest, she writes like a naïve twelve-year old. She overused already cliché metaphors and did not bother creating imagery. She instead decided to leave no room for creative thinking or interpretation. Her writing is shallow and superficial. It does not require thinking, which is probably why people like it so much.

All the characters are hideously flat. They aren’t even developed at all in the book unlike normal human beings (For dense readers, we mean a personality, not literally “human beings”). Her characters do not progress in terms of attitude and behavior throughout the pages. Bella’s life is focused on her boyfriend and nothing more. Meyer makes Bella some girl without a personality and attitude, unless it is needed by her love life. Edward could have been good, if only he wasn’t the same as Bella: impossibly perfect and love-centric. His perfection makes him dull. Flaws are what make a character interesting: the exploration of small imperfections, odd weaknesses, and silly blunders. A summation of a beautifully imperfect human. The internal conflict is the only thing worth noting for him. Charlie exists just to create a reason to be in Forks and the vampire family is to simply widen her variety of characters. The rest are just to fill in, except Jacob who apparently in later books will join the love boat.

Have you heard of Anne Rice? We presume you read her name off the back of Twilight and never bothered to find out who she was. To give you a good background, she is a celebrated writer of novels about vampires (The Vampire Lestat, Interview with the Vampire, The Vampire Armand, Queen of the Damned, The Body Thief et. al). As we’ve mentioned, someone commended that she is writing in the legacy of Anne Rice. For us, this is the filthiest insult they can throw to a legendary writer such as Rice. Her novels have been passed down the generations. The beauty of her writing is insurmountable for Meyer. Since it so much that we cannot describe, we shall merely quote:

"The contempt, the malice, came out of [Nicolas] in this low metallic sound. It was the very opposite of the sounds made by the vampires. You could hear the human blood in it, the human thickness of it, echoing against the walls. Ruddy and hot and strangely unfinished he seemed suddenly. the only mortal among us, like a child thrown among porcelain dolls."

-Lestat, The Vampire Lestat”

Yes, Meyer is nothing compared to Rice just as Edward is nothing to Lestat.

The Twilight series is merely a terrible excuse for wishy-washy schoolgirl fantasies (and a couple of housewives’ too). Fans wish for someone like Cullen to love them. They want to read something so simple that you don’t even have to think. Meyer degrades the standards of good literature. She merely writes for her audience and profit and not to paint words together to create something worthy to be titled a true masterpiece of literature. Rarely do we find good literature nowadays, but at least they do exist. Paulo Coelho, Umberto Eco, Audrey Niffenegger, Yann Martel, and Irvin Welsch. It is high time masses learned of this.

Readers, by now you may be tearing your hair out of frustration, or maybe furiously denouncing us in front of your friends. We don’t care. We know our aesthetics. We know the difference from what is beautiful to what is ugly. It is about time you did.