Lessons Learned During Freshman Year

Tomorrow looks bright and beautiful. Rock on! Photo taken in Tagaytay City. 

It’s been quite a long and memorable school year, but I'm no freshman anymore. I'd wish to remain one a little longer, though, so I'd have an excuse as to why I don't know where certain places in the campus are or how things work in college. Being a little clueless would be forgivable then.  Still, I'm moving on, learning new things in the process, and improving into my sophomore self.

Silence

I remember the time I read "Murke's Collected Silences" by Heinrich Böll for my Literature class (my professor required us to read awesome works like it). Set in the background of post-World War II, Germany, the protagonist, Murke is a young man who works in a radio station and exhibits strange habits. First, his morning begins with riding the lift all the way up to the highest floor of the company building and down to the floor where his office is located. Second, is his fondness of collecting snippets of silence from recorded tapes, thus the title. "When I have to cut tapes, in the places where the speakers sometimes pause for a moment—or sigh, or take a breath, or there is absolute silence—I don't throw that away. I collect it." He then splices it together to form recorded silence. Third, he listens to it at night in his home as a sort of relaxing meditation.

The Uncertain Future/ The Path I Walk Now

The path I walk through inside the school on my way in and out. All photos are taken inside the Ateneo de Manila University.

It’s all been one hell of a roller coaster ride.

It seemed as though it was just yesterday when I began attending review classes, sacrificing a month of my sweet summer time to prepare for the grueling college entrance exams I would partake of that same year. The same goes for my last high school year and the summer after graduation. Now, whenever I would look back to those days, I would always be struck with amazement.

From the beginning of the college entrance examinations to almost the last of my high school days, the future was very uncertain for me. A kind of panic and terror would engulf me when that uncertainty got the best of me and I would think of the infinite ‘what ifs’ I could encounter when the results were out. Rest assured, none of the what ifs ever happened and I sometimes laugh about it now.

The Foreign Exchange

Korean-pop CD’s neatly stacked next to the stereo, Korean lifestyle magazines topmost on the bookrack, Korean Channel M constantly airing on the television screen – it was my love for all things K- that have driven my feet, along with two of my friends’, to an unofficial ‘Koreatown’ in Jupiter Street, Makati City, (Philippines) one Thursday afternoon. And gosh, did I find my sweet haven.

Authentic restaurants and groceries lined the streets, giving the impression that you were not in a ‘Koreatown’, you were in Korea. Around the corner, however, taxi cabs race past flocks of Western foreigners in bars and cafés, chatting away nonchalantly with their fellow ‘aliens’ – you were at New York.

Amidst this entire culture clash, were the locals, adding up to the already chaotic mixture of people, a mixture that gave the area an unrecognizable quality, a familiar, yet foreign atmosphere. I then stretched the rest of the day exploring these streets as a tourist in my own country, camera hanging around my neck, enjoying the company of foreigners and locals alike. And I ended up being taught a lesson in the process.