Re: a pathetic and repentant note

BATTLING INNER WARS By JanMell Dugenio

It saddens me to confirm that a person's expectations of ideal relationships between his group is never enough to make it come true. We just have to accept that it is very hard, if not impossible, to impose a certain feeling to anyone, who is not willing to empathize. That is, the "Utopic" bond that is referred to in the note, will never be achieved in the truest sense of the adjective. We just have to face that. The real deal is appreciating the most of the happy moments that we all share, directly or vicariously.

True, for most, this may be the last time classmates will experience themselves as classmates, and probably the next time we see each other, we might refer to the word "classmates" as a thing of the past. However, friendship never dwells on the whims of time. It would be such a waste to sulk over things instead of growing up and realizing that SHALLOW CONFLICTS, and the even SHALLOWER REASONS behind them drag us to our immature selves which we want to get away from.

The ChE group is a brew of the different personalities available on earth. We have enough fluidity to mix with each others interests, yet we all want to stand alone. There's no problem with that. The consequence is some people, love the feeling of standing alone more than mingling with others. That's the problem. There's only one solution-- Leave them alone. Mind you, efforts like this actually contribute more to the rapport of the group than forcibly dragging them to group events which they don't wanna go.

The ChE students are intelligent, and we think a lot. That's a very good thing. However, it is IRONIC to say that in the course of thinking a lot, some people ONLY THINK OF THEMSELVES. It is perfectly fine to think a bout oneself. It's normal, it's human, it's Darwinian. But to ONLY think of one's self, that's another thing.

It seems that the whole point of your note is in UNITY. But it seems, as you might have observed, that the ChE lot gave a whole new meaning to that word. I can remember a previous ChE higher year student lauding our batch because they can see that we are tightly bound together. But that was because we are in for something to win. It was because we have a certain ambition which united our ideals. That is the point. Some may not participate in beach parties, or involve in drinking sprees but comfort your mind in the thought that everybody will participate if given an impetus that best serves everyone. It may not be "barkada-like" or it may not be what we love to think about- camping together, laughing, without any hint of hidden hurt feelings, but it is the best that we can expect from the group I describe as coming from different planets who came here to befriend each other. Everyone of us has a different view of friendship and companionship, depending on which planet they came from. One cannot simply inflict his notions on certain things based on his own planet.

We are not united, YES. Just look and examine the fibers. Cheap, Rinjers, Baguio girls, Apao boys, So fakes, and other groups that might pop without my knowledge. It is not a comforting thought, that some still bears the stigma of a previous misunderstanding and some still has certain conflicts. It is even on a sadder note, that everybody has already lived with this, and if there should be a significant turning point towards a UTOPIC bond, I'm afraid it is not on this final year.

We are UNITED, yes. Not in a conventional sense. We share laughs, we share plans, we compete together until our opponents experience hell. This is the closest we could get to the UTOPIC BOND. A conscious effort to patch things up, would only leave a bigger hole. Our goodwill towards each other is not "plastic", it is just the act of mature individuals, who believe that despite differences, everyone should act properly and help each other. A new sense of Unity is called upon, some may refer to it as "fake", but I don't think so and I contend to say it's all we have. No one should be blamed, because everybody's differences equally contributes.


[06.17.10]

Once Again the Day is Safe, and Boring

BATTLING INNER WARS By JanMell Dugenio

Driven with the zeal of a rampaging horde of rogue elephants, I prepared everything spick and span—from my packed lunch to my overly pressed hanky. Thanks to my “baon”, I had something to do for the whole day. It turned out that from 8 to 11:59 am, all I did was wait for lunchtime and from 1 to 5, all I did was digest it.

Hookay, I just love hyperboles. But my point here is that there is not much “action” that day, and by action, I meant something hands on, something that can prevent you from dozing off, or simply put, something I like to do. The supervisors (who are, by the way, all chemical engineers), were generally too busy to even turn an eye on us and I found myself reading a humungous book of PPPs, (duh, its not papalapit, papalapit, panget or what we call layogenic, magandapagmalayo) or procedures, policies, and protocols. Probably the only significant moment was the safety seminar refreshment course conducted once a week in every department. It was in the form of a small group discussion which reiterates the company’s advocacy—safety. In as much as I know, the company’s safety policies equal, if not exceed, the stringiest rules and tenets. I did not expect that the level of attention safety receives from the company is this much. As the speaker said, safety is not anymore above priority, but it is already a way of life. True enough, I learned a lot, of course with the motivation of snacks, of which I ate heartily.

Just as the Roman historian Tacitus once wrote, “the desire for safety stands against every great and noble enterprise,” which explains the apparent direct relationship of production versus risks. The more the company demands production, the more risks there are- from near misses to first-aid injuries, medical injuries and possibly being crushed by a falling crate. (di kaya ng hard hat yan, which reminds me of Final Destination). To prevent such misfortune, the management always looks for effective ways to enforce and implement safety, and believe it or not, you can actually see safety officers hovering over the whole vicinity of the plant waiting to suck the souls out of disobedient workers. (ala-dementors?)

The safety seminar reiterates one of these ways which more or less seems to be progressive reprimanding, whenever an employee, or contractor violates safety regulations. Encouragement, instead of police force apprehension. As I see it, its about establishing rapport to propagate a certain conduct. How sweet. Something’s brewing in my mind. How about replacing the plant’s slogans, and instead of “Work Safely”, or, “Safety is more than a Priority”, with,

“Take care cause I care”. Or,

“Work safely, we love you.”

In bold, intimidating letters.

I think the company needs me.

[04.19.10]

Equipment Not Glassware

BATTLING INNER WARS By JanMell Dugenio

Earlier today I was filled with excitement of the multitude of things that deserve my expectation. As the day waned, however, I was only clad with the dreadful feeling that much of what has been said is true- that I would be left hanging and my expectations would never be met.

The OJT orientation was definitely a blast- of course, from someone who finally landed a company after grueling weeks of trying to find one, everything is explosively scintillating. Despite the fact that my classmates in other companies are enjoying their daily allowances and free grub, (and not to mention air conditioned rooms and my envy!), I comforted myself with the feeling of relief that finally, I’m here, and ready to render my man-hours to this company. After all, training is more important than allowances. (Oh c’mon, I’m not fooling myself here.) But anyway, stipends (or the lack of it) are not the reason why anxiety bugs me tonight. It is actually the bleary, cold experience of being, or shall I say, doing a job that does not fit that of a chemical engineering trainee.

I just hate it when people get mistaken with my course as BS Chemistry, which is a pure science. I vehemently object this oppression. This is certainly a case of academic racism and condescension! Hookay, just kidding. But I addressed this apparent confusion by saying “ChemEng” instead of “Chemical” when I am asked what my course is, which, I think, starkly suggests that it has an engineering surname. Hello, ring a bell?

What do I mean with “doing a job that does not fit that of a Chemineering trainee?” (Note: Chemineering is another cute, I think, apocopation of my course name.) Instead of trying to picture out what that is, I think it will afford me less trouble if I outline instead what a Chemineering trainee should do or should have done in a cement plant like this. It’s a vision, instead of an expectation. And I have my favorite model in mind, myself, complete with what they term as PPE (Personal Protective Equipment) e.g., hard hat with chin strap, “hard” shoes, I mean safety shoes, highly visible clothing with reflectorized straps, and safety goggles. (The fact that it is referred to as equipment and not clothing exposes the fact that it really is cumbersome, and makes you shout, Hey man! I’m wearing the same stuff as these towering silos!)

For one, a Chemineering trainee should be thoroughly knowledgeable of the plant’s complete process flow, not unless there’s some company secret like a huge snake under one of the plant’s large equipment. I am not referring to confidential information, which I think by the way is the meaning of confidential. I am pointing to the basics, which by the way, doesn’t mean its layman. The orientation about the cement process flow barely provided for this, albeit the slideshow was detailed enough. The lecturer who had to simplify technicalities to facilitate Marketing, Psychology, Electrical Engineering, and etc., students, overdid his job. I could have suggested that technicalities be retained in its purest form, because it’s why we trainees, whether majoring in drums, placed ourselves in a cement plant. We know better than coming unprepared for a major nosebleed. I don’t care if I don’t know what C₃AlF is or whether it’ll make me rich or not, but the point is everybody in that hall deserves to be lectured a dissective, scientific knowledge so that afterwards they may know. It’s self-gratifying, trust me. (Thank God, there are hand-outs.)

Another thing, I hate to be confined in a laboratory. I feel like I’m some serious scientist or a lab rat. Hey, I’m an engineer, which is exactly why I always emphasize the “ENG” part, for the very reason that it stands for “Equipment Not Glassware”. True, test tubes are cute, but I would never risk failing equipment design just to gawk at a colorless liquid turning pink for the rest of my life. In fact, I want to be blown with compressed air in a dryer, or get inside a ball mill turning at critical velocity, or join blasted limestone in their amazing journey through a jaw crusher. Hookay, that’s hyperbole. But you get what I mean?

At school, I only see flowcharts-- boxes with a word on it. Now is my chance to see for myself that this ginormous monster with a hellish temperature of 1450 degrees Centigrade is not just a box labeled idiotically as rotary kiln.

True enough, my excitement and expectation may have afforded me arrogance, but forgive my vanity. I am planning to focus on the academe after I graduate, and this may be my only chance of working in the industry, so I better kick the hell ass out of it. Very much, I wore oil-resistant, steel-toe, safety shoes during the orientation. It was so bulky I felt like saying, “Sakayna!” to anyone who might wanna take a ride. But nevertheless, I wore it on that first day. After all, my enthusiasm was to a degree that caused me to expect that blasted quarry boulders would fall on my feet while we are sitting comfortably in a heavily air conditioned room, looking at a slideshow.

[04.10.10]

Getting your finger dirty

BATTLING INNER WARS By JanMell Dugenio

In this kind of scenario, you have two ways to profoundly affect the lives of the people around you. Simply sneeze and cough, (for best results, don’t cover your face), and their future will depend on their immune system. As a first time voter, I ushered myself to the Philippine elections the really hard way.

Whoah. The scenario couldn’t have been direr. I was pushed in every direction by ginormous people and I felt that my internal organs will be crushed any moment. It was so crowded and jam-packed that I almost passed out from inhaling the carbon dioxide that transpired from the sweaty and icky individuals (me included),and probably other releases of their excretory systems(gross), but I contained myself with the knowledge that I can’t possibly—for God’s sake- make a scene and embarrass myself for all eternity.

So I persevered—but not without toil. I queued from six in the morning and with a seeming hint of divine intervention, the PCOS machine finally congratulated me by 12:25 p.m. From nine till my momentous entrance to the precinct I was only freakin’ one foot away from the door. Take that distance, divided by the time it took for me to cover it, and I bet I had become the slowest organism on the face of the earth. It was too long and lagging that I felt If I’d been free, that span of time would have allowed me to circumnavigate the globe.

Earlier that day, people graciously lined up, and waited for voting to start. However, when the precinct opened some individuals who seem to have no I.Q., ignored the line and pushed their way into the door, which is the perfect act for their fellow low-brainers to emulate. Soon enough, no line was even discernible as people (again, me included) competed to get inside first. In the end, those of us who got there and lined up first were apparently outwitted by people who have no I.Q. Shame on us! As an effort to explain such appalling behavior, I thought they were diagnosed with some esoteric ophthalmic disorder which disables them to see apparent order in the form of a queue. Or maybe, they’re just idiots. Biased as you would have me sound, I’d invoke Occam’s razor and chose the latter. Hey, it’s too early yet in the morning to blatantly expose how a bunch of people who call themselves Filipinos expect a better Philippines when they can’t even make a decent queue or refuse to follow one. Some may have the initiative, but it’s not contagious enough, and the officers relied on it too much that they never imposed order in the outset and when they tried it was all in vain. ( They gave priority numbers only when they realized the crowd was already uncontrollable and pesky, making those “utak-gutom” share of the electorate snatch it first, and not those who supposedly got there first. Hey, I know what “diskarte” means, and I use it sometimes, but please, your “diskarte” didn’t make a wit out of you—it’s the opposite, really.) It dissolved in a cacophony of quibbles, complains and all the possible interjections you could possibly think of.

It was not long before I busied myself with trying to come up with a body count, for I sensed this must be what a revolution feels like.

Exasperating as it is amusing, though, this should not go on for long. With my ranting here as fertile ground, I appeal to lawmakers to make disrespect (yes, DISRESPECT) to a queue punishable by law. Allow me to say I’m not concerning myself with the details here, but certainly, this can be done. It’s doable, and it’s not weird. It may not wash away idiots mentioned here from the face of the earth, but we can hope it’ll spark even a vague idea to them. It’s funny how order should be imposed upon order, but we’ll continue doing that until there’s really order. After all, it’s part of what the electoral process is all about.

A friend told me that according to Reader's Digest survey, the second most hated people in the Philippines are "queue breakers", and guess what, the most irksome are POLITICIANS. It's all in our elections.

[05.28.2010]

No, I am not a fan.

I did not volunteer to be his campaigner. That's not my campaign vest. That's my high visibility clothing with reflectorized stripes, which shouts "Hey I work in a cement plant, y'know!"

I saw him on TV during Iligan City's cataclysmic flood. I saw him again at the 1st Commencement Exercises of the College of Nursing. The third time I saw him, was the only chance I had in getting this picture. He was campaigning for reelection (his last term as mayor) and one of his stop is the very populated ICC canteen, which probably accounts for half of Iligan City's voting population, amounting to 25 registered voters during lunchtime. (Hookay. I just can't see the point of going there, so, I made it up. Ha ha)

Never mind the white hairs about to expand territory. They're supposed to be benchmarks of how emaciated he got after all the blows to his city and his people. I guess it worked. Iliganon's gave him his last term.

No, I am not a fan, because he's not a celebrity. But I rooted for this picture since I happen to live in a city where he is the mayor.

A Dose of Ponderous Thought

In the course of reading Through a Glass, Darkly, a conversation between Ariel, the angel who appeared to the sick child Cecilia sent my brain surfing through its convolutions...


'Many humans believe that an angel is a ghost that flaps around between heaven and earth and without a proper body--'

'That's just how I've imagined angels myself.'

'But it's the opposite. To us you're the one ones who are light and airy. When you kick a stone, I'd simply kick straight through it. It's no more solid to me than a piece of fog..'

'Then I understand how you can glide through doors and windows without hurting yourselves. But I don't understand why the walls aren't spoiled.'

'When you walk in fog, the fog isn't spoiled either. And when you think about something, your thoughts can't do any harm to the world about you.'

'That may be. But if you can dive through a wall, it must be because you don't have a proper body.'

'Feel my foot, Cecilia.'

She put two fingers round his big toe and squeezed. It was like touching a piece of steel.

Ariel said, "We have much more solid bodies than anything in creation. An angel can never be destroyed. That's because we don't have a body of flesh and blood that our souls can be departed from.'

'You can be glad at that.'

'But nature isn't like that. Here everything is destroyed very easily. Even a mountain is slowly ground down by the forces of nature and turns to earth and sand in the end.'

'Thanks for the information, but I know all about that.'

'You are ghosts to us, Cecilia, not the other way around. You come and go. You are the ones who don't last. You suddenly appear, and each time a newborn child is laid on its mother's stomach, it's just as wonderful. But just as suddenly you've gone. It's as if God is blowing bubbles with you.'

-Jostein Gaarder
.....
That sent me thinking. I'm supposed to include a picture of an angel here. But upon second thinking, I realized angels in this novel don't grow, are neither male nor female, don't grow hairs, and have no wings. And I can't find any photo of that kind of angel. It comforts me to think, though, that they still wore white robes.

Headache: The Euthypro Argument

Capricious and whimsical?



By virtue of my claim that I am a frustrated philosopher (or better yet, an advocate of philosophy), I managed to read Topics on Introductions to Issues and Isms, not without feeling snooze-y, and found myself distressed with an entry. (Warning: Thinking too hard might cause vertigo. Hah.)

Definition: Divine Command Theory is defined by two necessary conditions:

A. The extensional equivalence thesis: An action is morally right if, and only if, God wills it and morally wrong if, and only if, God forbids it.

B. The Dependency Thesis: God's willing an action is the reason that a morally right action is morally right and God's forbidding an action is the reason that a morally wrong action is morally wrong.

The Euthypro Argument

1.Euthypro's Thesis: An act is pious if and only if, it is loved by the gods.

Socrates' Question: Are pious actions (i) loved by the gods because they are pious or are they (ii) pious actions because they are loved by the gods?

2.Socrates' Argument: a. If (i), then the piety of the action explains the fact that it is loved by the gods; being loved by the gods does not explain why an act is pious. (If it did, the pair of explanations would be circular.) On this alternative, Euthypro is not giving a view analogous to a divine command theory because he does not accept a dependency thesis.

b. If (ii), we must ask for an explanation of why the gods love certain actions (those that turn out to be pious because of gods' love of them). Either there is an explanation for the gods' love of pious actions that is not based on their being pious or there is no explanation at all for the gods' love of pious actions.

1.If there is such an explanation, then whatever explains the gods' love for these action's is the explanation of an action's being pious.

2.If there is no explanation of why the gods love certain acts, then the gods' love is capricious and whimsical.

c. Therefore, either the gods are capricious or whimsical or their love is not the explanation of why a pious action is pious.


Inhale that. I don't know why, but i just like Socrates' conclusion. No wonder he died the way he died.

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