Arctic Beetle

A day after my sister left for Japan, the PC passed away. Whilst sarcasm should be sensed and should be figured out by the reader or the one you are talking to naturally, I’ll state it myself — with my sister around, it could have been fixed as fast as how a high-speed internet in Japan can download a whole season of an anime. Imagine, if that was the case,  my mom didn’t have to proceed to a PC repair shop and discover that in order to get XP installed back, she needs to pay 8000 php for something you can download from The Pirate Bay. Well, sure, it’s the manpower we are after but still. Had I not been called to take a bath, I would have seen how my sister downgraded the laptop’s OS to XP and would have been able to fix this trouble myself. And holy smokes, this whole inconvenience happened just days after I’ve expressed my aim to blog again. In the end, we rejected their offer. Who wouldn’t?

Coincidentally, that same day, I left the audio CD I was supposed to pass and it, being a very crucial component of my group’s grade in our elective, I was obliged to bucket along to the internet shop one of my groupmates was in, to download the songs, burn them to a CD and to find out that she hasn’t figured out how to print the CD leaflet I designed, with only fifteen minutes left before the next class. With a download speed of  3 kbps,  6 songs with sizes of approximately 5 MB in queue and about six people to compete against for the printer, I think Virgil would have to rise from his grave to write a sequel for Atlas’ narrative and note that Zeus condemned another person from the modern times to carry the Earth with him. And yes, I cut that class and did it for good.

Ere these blotches of misfortune, I saw my standings for two of my major subjects and of course, I wouldn’t be affixing this to the previous paragraphs and wouldn’t be writing about them like this if they were exceptional. Once again, reality proved that it can prick better than a spindle and that there is no such thing as a fairy tale.

And also, there was the concept paper I had to pass two days after (even with that PC-less situation at hand). Being the grade-conscious that I am, I went to a study center the next day and typed the concept paper which was supposedly a group chore; but since our breaks seemed to have a null set as their intersection, I wrote one anyway, just in case. When the direful day came, all that was left to do was print it; however, as soon as I saw the mail I sent to myse– damn, I forgot to attach it! I went back to the study center in hope of seeing the file still there. As luck would have it, it was and as faint makings of what you’d call group work, my other groupmates made a concept paper as well. To not break the rare streak of luck, our professor allowed every group to send the edited version on Saturday (yesterday).

Never was I branded as a freeloader and certainly, I couldn’t afford to have last week as an exception. I was a beggar and as they say, I can’t be a chooser; hence, I took every opportunity there was to get the PC back, even if it meant Vista would have to clog my system again. Honestly, the Vista I knew from my laptop and I expected to be installed on the PC was fine, but Vista Home Starter definitely isn’t with its three-program limit aboard. After getting rid of that concept paper in my To-Do list, recovering XP became imperative. Today was mostly spent trying to retrieve a CD containing all the drivers and utilities for the motherboard — only to learn that it is a CD I brushed off everytime I searched through the heaps of CD spindles.

After last week, I have grown certain that life, reality and death have two things in common, and that is, they have a weird sense of humor and they certainly grasp the concept of sarcasm. Glad I survived.

“Science is a social issue.” (Pablo, 2009)

Hear him, hear him. It couldn’t have been said any better.

Due to the mercurial twists of our neurons, that afternoon, which could have been spent at the comfort of our homes, was rather ceded to an ACLE (Alternative Classroom Experience) my friend and I never planned to take part in. Contrary to its appearance as a seemingly bad option which requires a back-up save file, it led us to another alternate ending our indecisive (not to mention, unimaginative) neurons never thought of. Apart from the fact that the time I spent there allowed me to catch my sister in the mall and snag a shawarma, it proved to be a genuinely enlightening talk about stem cells.

Unbeknownst to me until that day, the most promising type of stem cell is the embryonic one obtained from a certain stage of a human’s development in his mother’s womb. Sad to say, the process involves obliteration of the life it never even had a firsthand experience of. Though, of course, you couldn’t make out any human face or body of a blastocyst, it’s still a reality that it was bound to be an animate thing. Who knows what those humans which have been subjected to experiments could have been? The next Einstein? The next scientist who could have discovered the cure to cancer? And you bet, “Life is unfair” wouldn’t be enough to justify this. It’s not a wonder why it’s a scalding topic.

For now, let me abstain. If I am to side against stem cells and don a mindset that every person will conk out anyway and that there is no need to postpone death, then storyline I chose for myself is serving no useful purpose. However, picking otherwise would make me a remorseless entity —which I am slowly becoming but I have no plan of becoming fully.

Recently, there were researches that boast of being able to produce stem cells which do not involve the noted process. Yet it is a big leap, it also suggests the possibility of cloning. And that, needless to say, is a bigger and a more searing problem. Not only does it alarm the Catholic community, but also question the subconscious side of entities. Indeed, science is a social issue. Science was never just for the scientists nor the researchers. It has always been a matter for the masses; the scientists were just translating it to us all along.

At the end of the day, that ACLE was a good treat for my indecisive, unimaginative and naive neurons.

It’s a conspiracy, I say! The cosmos is machinating a plot to impede my intent to ramble and jog every now and then. (In point of fact, the hues and cries should be steered towards me. No matter which view you will look at it from, the blame should be laid on me for perpetrating a vacuous act of deleting the core files that maintain this URL’s existence. However, I’m no different from a n00b so permit me to focus the spotlight on the vast cosmos — which I think has more excuses to offer, like the adage “Sometimes you’re up, sometimes you’re down.” — instead.) Alas, I am not going to budge, not even a nanometer.

Since this comes right after a post (that I just barred from Muggles’ eyeshot) which says I’m on hiatus, I’m afraid this signals the third dawn of Arctic Beetle. I want none of the EP1C PH41L stamp again and of the pokes I frequently get from my tightwad self, complete with a mini-monologue about how I am wasting my sister’s dough with this whole enactment of flaunting my own domain with modicum content.

Before this post, before that Twitter widget, before that amputated beetle lodged on the upper right corner of your screen, before this white layout that probably caused your pupils to dilate abruptly, there were Arctic Beetle numero uno and numero dos. Let’s have a moment of silence in memory of them. And after that deafening silence, ladies and gentlemen, let me ramble again until I cross the demarcation line of your patience. Well, maybe not.

Out of curiosity and an intent to be conceited at least for a minute or so, my official blog came out to be the source I wanted to extort –yes, extort– my self-vanity from.  An extortion would only be given thought in the real world if it was successful enough, or at the very least, created a brouhaha which is quite a mundane scenario in the political affairs of the Philippines. In my case, I could only be granted a lawsuit if, for one, I can still admire my former works with their impact on me unchanged or two, if I can still find any trivial literary effectiveness in them. Unfortunately, I found none and the sad thing about it was, there was no fraying at the edges done before they completely lost their glimmer (if they had any, to begin with).

For the first time among my passed summer vacation days which were entirely spent for the pursuit of hedonism, I felt that I had to accomplish something, in addition to reading a book or attaining the ideal statures I am dreaming for my in-game characters. It felt really urgent, to the point that when light reached my eyes at the speed of 300 million meters per second, I knew that I had a calling of wiping from the face of the Earth or at least from the biggest entanglement in the world weaved by I-dunno-who the words I once butchered English with, exaggeration aside. Truth be told, it wasn’t just urgent — I felt excitement on my part too!

Reading my previous posts can be synonymous to pitying myself and wondering how I could have written such works– with no visible coherency but has visible teensy-weensy grammatical errors and magnified literary failure– and in the end, be still proud of them.. until yesterday. Reading other blogs whose writers are way superior than I am (for calling them better is an understatement, a shame on their part and a piece of flattery for me) doesn’t make things any better. However, a ‘Touche!’ for them for imparting a hit more than adequate to wake me up from my delusion of being an exceptional writer and for making me recognize that the moral of my story, at the end of the day, is to be not conceited no matter what.

What you are reading right now, lucky fellow, is the beginning coming from my same blog’s end (reference to a song is slightly intended). This time, I am hoping and calling upon in supplication to God and to the minor god of writing that they (and He, for God) may help me create a better and less-serious blog, wishing as well that what I said moments ago will not be classified as a violation of the first commandment since it only mentioned not having a god before him and not otherwise. Oh please, may the 27-page copy in Tahoma 8 of my previous works be not a repeated mistake in the time yet to come.

A word after a word after a word is power as stated by a local radio station in one of their self-made commercials. Nonetheless, it’s still better if that power can still be radiated with words arranged tactfully; hence, start of this blog aimed to achieve that. Welcome to the Arctic Beetle’s world!