AT THE STOA

The past seventeen months held my first three terms (or four, including summer) in postgraduate school.  Since it's school, it's full of people talking, and writing, and of talking about writing, and writing about talking, or any other permutation involving those two pedagogical things.  Since it's  postgraduate  school, the talking and the writing happen in the land marked "Here be Dragons," ruled by B minuses with the strength of ten men and the dreaded entities called deadlines. I assume that learning happens by osmosis amid these processes and entities. I didn't have time to write about starting school again, and I still don't have time to properly digest my feelings about moving to Manila.  (I know that my university is in Quezon City, okay, but for Baguio folks the entirety of QC, Marikina, Pasig, Mandaluyong, San Juan, Caloocan, Navotas, Makati, every other city within a ten-mile radius of all these places and even Metro Manila is for all intents

The semestral break finally kicked in.  Before we allow ourselves to be reminded of the amount of our work left undone, or of papers that will very nearly evolve into a sentient mountain, we made time to waste as happily as we could. We spent hours looking at stuff we can't afford, as well as stuff that we can afford but did not buy for being too fluffy, big, useless (or all of the above).   Except for two things.  Well, it was more like seven hundred and twenty-four things, but we can just call them two things.  The first one is a happy golden yellow backpack the color of fresh egg yolk. It felt like a warm hug to be able to buy it, because this is the first backpack that I bought for myself. The bag I had in primary school was a red and gray hand-me-down from a cousin, and was subsequently and continuously impregnated with seven hundred and twenty-four textbooks and notebooks.  That bag lived for five years until I went to college, with a collection of patches and d