AT THE STOA

I arrived in Baguio yesterday. The air is certainly cooler than it is in Manila, although daytime can make you sweat now. Went to have a brief dinner with two friends, with whom I also spent today, while sporadically working at scribie. I talked to them about my plans to leave, and I cannot help but feel that the more I talk about it, meaning the less I keep it inside me, the more real it is becoming, gaining shape in a real world that I no longer have a care for. I feel that I will confront the implications and reasoning behind that soon enough. After dinner last night, I went home, and watched Zetsuen no Tempest until 6:30 AM. It was an interesting enough anime, apparently, interweaving alien  powers (that weren't so obvious in that no aliens appeared), magic (that was very obvious, since there were mages of different powers - some speculated, some very actual), mythology (Nordic, Catholic, Eastern), literature (with very explicit references to The Tempest ,  Hamlet ,...

I am 12 episodes into Bakemonogatari , and I am still wondering why I made it this far. What I would remember this anime most for was the continuous, various, and ostensive illustrations of how Araragi Koyomi, the protagonist, is a pervert. Seriously, apart from the creators (Shaft) giving him hair antenna that serves as a metaphor for how his penis reacts half of the time, the cinematography focuses on what he focuses on when confronted with the females' bodies in a scene. And there are a lot of female characters in this anime, two girls his year, one girl his junior, another his sister's friend, and two other little girls. He has hair antenna reactions to all of them, what the hell, and there's only two other male characters in the entire thing. And to think this anime is about supernatural shit. So apart from the supernatural shenanigans he meddles around with (because he is constitutionally unable to not help people - who all turn out to be females - with their probl...