SC orders AFP to release missing UP students — Page 3 Philippine Collegian Opisyal na lingguhang pahayagan ng mga mag-aaral ng Unibersidad ng Pilipinas - Diliman 23 Hunyo 2011 Taon 89, Blg. 2
Paano pinasasarap ang mapapait na alaala?
Dibuho ni Nico Villarete
Balita Pahina 3
Terminal Cases Delfin Mercado
T
Ang timpla ng ilusyon at pangarap sa mga pelikula ng Nestlé
BOR OKs new and higher fees in UP Visayas
Killing time
Kalakal na pag-aaral
Kwento at kuro-kuro sa paghihiwalay ng mag-asawa
Editoryal Pahina 2
Lathalain Pahina 9
he books I bought on impulse last summer proved to be almost useless. They were purchased at a bargain shop, where books about diets and conspiracies are stacked in the same pile. I could just predict the future for these books: re-shelved in another bargain bookshop—my bedroom back home. One book, however, got me reading till the end of the first chapter. What is time, the book asked. Is it the hours, the minutes, the seconds that pass? More importantly, how do we perceive it? The book said that we do not perceive time in itself – we only know when time passed. We know when the bells chime, the leaves falls off the trees, when we start losing friends and begin making new ones. Important events mark the passage of time—I understood this much from the book I almost regret buying. The book got me thinking of all the things I did, or didn’t. It got me reminiscing: the night I fiercely fought with my mother, the afternoon I first held somebody’s hand, the day I climbed the four flights of stairs and took the Kulé exam. The latter thought had been a burden for some days now. Since the release of this year’s first issue, friends have been battering me for pleasure. They say the illustration for this column was too handsome to be me—the artist only got the glasses right. Others texted to confirm if it was really me they were reading on the front page. We didn’t know you had it in you, they all said, trying their best to make it sound like a compliment. What they said hurt my ego, but I knew they had valid reasons to doubt me. Luckily, the people in this office care less about who I am than they do about my ability to churn out words. They don’t mind if I am a college dropout or a prodigal son; what matters is that I can fill up spaces in this paper. There is only one thing that people in this paper care about: deadlines. In here, we mark the passage of time with an edited or revised draft; we count hours by the number of cigarette stubs that litter the floor. This is how I mark the passage of time now—a line-up for this week’s issue, another line-up for next week. The time in between, the now, is an interval spent on thinking about where I am headed, if indeed I want to get somewhere. It is marked by random thoughts on the passage of time, and why, always, I do not feel as if time has moved at all. ●