Post-MA blues

It's finally over. The thing I'm here for has come to a conclusion. It's been a year of studying, of my attempts at being a masters student. Last week, I submitted what feels like the ultimate stamp that I achieved something, the much vaunted dissertation. Writing it took me about three and a half months. It sounds like a long time to write some kind of opus but all that effort amounted to only 10,000 words, which is not much actually. The printed copy felt puny in my hands, seemingly betraying all the hard work I put into it. There are days when I felt like my dissertation was a masterpiece and then most days I feel like it was crap.

Anyway, I'm glad I'm finished with the dissertation and the whole masters business. It's a great experience of course - and I don't know where to start - but it also helped me realized I'm not exactly the academic I wish I am. I find academia too tedious for me. Basically, I'm too lazy to still continue studying after this.

Having finished my education, I'm nothing but an unemployed bastard. Mind you, I don't have grand delusions of having a wonderful career after this. I don't feel a sense of entitlement the way I used to when I finished my BA. It's really up to me to make the most of my qualification.

For now though I'm maximizing my student visa, which means I'd have to brave another winter.  I'm just looking for odd jobs here and there. It's unbearable being so unproductive after such a hectic one year. The day after I submitted my dissertation I woke up with no plans in my head for the first time in months. It was (still is) indeed a weird feeling of aimlessness. Since then I've just been staying home, avoiding making unnecessary spending because god knows how pricey London is. And oh, I've moved in with my aunts (as I can't afford rent AT ALL) and had been sleeping on the floor (god bless me in winter).

I've been desperately looking for a job; just about anything would do from waitering to being a shopping attendant. In an ideal world I should be a money boy to a Russian gazillionaire who has a flat in Mayfair or Chelsea, but I'm too old for that. LOL.

I'm still here...

Hi girls! I just decided to drop a few words in this long-neglected blog. I don't need to give you stupid excuses on my lack of updates, if ever you cared to begin with. But hey, here I am, finally having the time and energy to write something. I'm using 'write' very loosely here as I don't have a proper plan on what to write about. So, this is mainly a free-flowing post, and you may stop reading right now if the prospect of my rambling bores the shit out of you.

Okay, so what has been going on with my life in London over the past few months? My last post was December and in the past six months I've been mainly focused on school. What else, aber? I don't want to make it appear that I suddenly became a dedicated academic, which is not likely to happen anytime soon. It's just that I really don't have anything else to do but study and write papers and more study. That's what I'm meant to do here anyway.

April and May were particularly very tensed because I was writing the last of my school essays and then soon after it was one month of exams. I dreaded the exam season most of all and I'm glad my daily trip to the library to study is finally over. It felt like I was a prisoner of the library, eating peanut butter sandwich for lunch everyday. All the tedious studying somehow paid off though. Not that I excelled in all of my exams. But suffice to say I passed all of them, which is just exactly my goal. I used to be ambitious, you know?

So what else?

Well, I'm still enjoying London, even if the sheer expense of living in this city still drives me insane. With that out of the way, it truly is a great city. I feel like I'm in the center of the action when it comes to culture, fashion, and art. I've been enjoying some of the more affordable theater shows, for instance. I've managed to watch 'War Horse', 'Once', and 'Book of Mormon', the latter being the hottest ticket in town at the moment. But somehow my favorite show so far has been 'A Chorus Line' revival. The music and dancing are both top-notch, but it excels best in its heartfelt story about a group of aspiring professional dancers.

And then of course there are the museums and galleries. I've visited the main ones (National Gallery and the Tate Modern) several times and I know I'd go back there to relish the experience of being surrounded by the greatest art works of our time.

When spring came, which was rather late, I learned to enjoy London's parks and gardens. Oh god, the fully bloomed flowers were a sight to behold, a sharp contrast to the usual greyness of the London skies. I have to point out though that there had been sunny spells the past many weeks and the city denizens always use it as a good excuse to lie on the park. Oh, I also welcome the long days of the summer months!

In terms of travel, it's something I obviously could not do at will because I'm focused on school and I couldn't afford it. But I've done a bit of travelling nonetheless. Last December was of course Heidiland. And then also in December I had a road trip with Tyty and Fatima throughout some cities of the UK. Last March I visited family in Belgium and from there I had a day trip in Paris (an absolute dream come true!). I'm afraid that's all the travelling I've been able to afford, unfortunately.

So now it's the summer term, meaning it's dissertation writing time. It's a completely daunting task for me. It's always tempting to take it easy because we have loads of time in our hands, or an illusion of it. At least that's what I tell my self, so, I'm trying to build on the momentum of my discipline of studying for my exams into my dissertation writing. Only God knows where this is heading. As it is, I'm tempted to just be lazy, lazy, lazy... it's a surprise I've even managed to write a blog post today.

Winter Update

I'm still alive. Cold, but definitely still alive. We're now transitioning to winter, a season people have warned me about. The last few days we've seen temperatures drop to single digits and then finally we were hovering just a little bit above zero. I'm freezing most of the time but there's really nothing much one can do but OWN winter. 

Perfect, now that we've talked about the weather - what else could be more important, aber? - we can move on to trivial stuff.

Oh, let's talk about school. I've actually managed to survive the first term, which ends in a week (and then it's the winter break!). There was a period during half-term when I asked my self what I was doing in masters school. I felt I didn't belong here… with all these brilliant kids in class! Really, they're pretty much kids but who know a great deal more than I do. 

And then came the first essay of the year (and I'm doing another one at the moment). It was all big drama doing it because for more than a decade now I haven't done any academic writing. Most of the time I was running around the library grabbing whatever stuff I could possibly use for my essay. I was tensed like crazy, I finished a first draft two weeks before it was due. I'm not saying I suddenly became brilliant, but really it was more because I panicked and rushed to write like my life depended on it (which might have been the case, actually). For a paper entirely built on panicking I managed to get a decent grade, although it could have been better (because I'm NEVER satisfied). 

Well, school is not always that dramatic. Mostly, I spend my time being alone, like most students I guess, poring through loads of assigned readings. That's school for you!

There are just days though when I feel like I need to extricate my self from my desk and take a long walk, especially when the sun's out, a precious moment during winter in London, it seems. Often I go to a museum to diffuse my mind or just walk down Oxford street and gawk at clothes I can't afford. 

On Friday nights I go out with Tyty and Fatima for some wine and Chinese food (the cheap kind, if that ever exists in London). That's all the "fun" I could do because I really can't afford going out more often, chai mai?

Speaking of finances, it's no secret that London is shockingly expensive. So I'm mainly subsisting on microwave food, bland soups in particular… something like 2 pounds per cup, which is still atrociously overpriced compared to a yummy bowl of noodles in Thewet for only less than a pound. 

At first I had to constantly remind my self that I'm not in Bangkok anymore. And then eventually I get used to the prices and I just basically have to live with it… meaning having a peanut butter sandwich for lunch. Oh, I applied for a temporary sales job in a department store but I didn't get it. On the one hand, I really need the money, but on the other I don't know where I'd get the time to do school work had I got the job. But I still need money, so I'd figure out how to whore my self somehow.

The Bayot Goes to School

So it's back to school. Last week was "welcome week" during which we had several orientation sessions in our faculty and department. I met several Thais who are also doing my course, which is of course great. And then I spent the rest of welcome week attending talks on such things as eating healthy (I know, I need to learn a great deal on keeping a 30-inch waist), managing money (oh, this too), and finding a part-job (which should happen now).

This week I started my courses. As we are required to take three courses, I picked politics, anthropology, and history. I hope somehow I'd be able to tie the three together, especially in writing my dissertation.

In one of my courses, I met a couple of farangs who used to live in Bangkok, too. It's amazing to find all these Thailand connections all the way here in London. Of course we instantly dived into sharing our experiences from living in Bangkok.

It's still a bit early to get a good grip on what my professors and classmates would be like.

However, I feel pretty old in class. Most of my classmates have just graduated from their BAs. So being fresh from school, they really are good on "academic speak", a skill I've lost a long, long time ago. And they seem to know what exactly they want to focus on in their study, say, migration, the politics of such and such, etc., whereas, I still don't know exactly what I'm interested in. Oh, kids these days!

The past few days I've just been trying to read as many of the required readings as I could. This brings me memories of my BA. I'm a slow reader so I need a lot of time to go through the text and then I quickly make notes... all these boring bits. I just really need to pace my self so that I don't cram the day before the lectures.

Which means I've got to discipline my self in sitting down to read at least a reading a day over the course of the week... instead of watching America's Next Top Model, no?

Iskul Bukol

Exactly a month from now I'd be back to school. The thought of it scares the shit out of me. I haven't been to school in over ten years now and I'm not exactly sure if I still got what it takes to be a student, a masters student at that. I wonder if I still have the same discipline and drive of my undergraduate years.

After graduating from university I had planned to take my masters in a couple of years. Schools in Las Islas Filipinas usually require masters students to have some work experience. That's what I did; packed my stuff and left for Davao City where I worked in an NGO.

The plan then was to get a scholarship to study abroad, and I applied to a school in the Netherlands, got accepted, but never received a scholarship. I applied to the same school the next year, and the same thing happened. I also applied to a few other universities but, after about five years of trying, the scholarships were always elusive.

Just when I was about to give up, someone harassed me into applying for yet another masters program. He graduated from the same school and thought my personality fits with the school's culture. Just to shut him up, I applied: wrote a study proposal and a personal statement, took the IELTS, and the whole deal.

It's pretty much a dream school for me, but I never tried applying before because I thought it is way out of my league. Besides, after the disappointments over the years, I thought I would never get a scholarship, thus, it would take a miracle for me to be able to afford an education abroad (I can't even afford the international programs in Thailand!).

Well, the first miracle happened. I learned in November 2011 that I got accepted to the program. BUT, the tuition fee is almost a million pesos, which would take me years and years of selling my body if I were desperate. Well, I was desperate, I seriously asked for a loan from some of my friends.

Also, I scrambled to apply for a couple of scholarships, which are always VERY competitive and you'd never know what the scholarship committees are looking for that year. I got a rejection from one of  the scholarship programs I applied for, and I thought that was it, I'd just go home and plant kamote. Until in June, I received news that I was granted a tuition scholarship by another committee.

(My story's not complete yet because I have to tell you about how I'm going to afford living in an extremely expensive city. I can't afford it to be honest, but through the amazing kindness of friends I could manage to survive somehow. I'd write about that in another post.)

So anyway, the whole process of applying to the school and then going through the whole scholarship drama took about a year or so. There were times when I thought it's never going to happen but somehow it's going to happen.

I have so many people to thank for making it possible, and I haven't held back in thanking them like crazy (I wouldn't be surprised if they're already annoyed with me). The challenge now is to prove to them that I'm worth betting on.

And then, I have to prove to my self that I somehow deserve all these. Bitch is going to work her ass off at school.

(Obviously, the photos don't have anything to do with this post.)

Batch 2001

Ten years ago today I graduated from college. I was batch 2001. I was not exactly super thrilled to earn a degree my dad chose for me (as mentioned in a previous blog entry). I was just happy – make that relieved – to finally finish university and start a new life and career.

Academically, I was absolutely mediocre, just passing every subject I took, except from Accounting, which I dropped once. I had a bunch of 3.0s (the lowest passing grade) in Natural Science, Math, Economics, and Statistics. My highest grades, somewhere around the 1.0 range, were in Literature, Art, Psychology, Philosophy, and Sociology. My grades in the major subjects were on the 2.0 range because I do not really care so much for Public Accounting and Budgeting, Techniques in Personnel Management, or Administrative Law (the horror!!!).

My social life as a student was not that bright either. I was a complete recluse in the dorm; instead I spent most of my time in the library or watching movies in the university's cinema. Except for one student organization, I wasn't a member of any other group because I was just too shy to even apply. I could not afford going out with my friends either.

Yes, I had friends; quite a good number of them actually, but I kept close to the people in my first year block. I did not make any effort to make new friends. I was super shy, awkward, and bereft of social skills, which I find normal anyway for people of my age then.

I don't want to make it appear that I had a miserable time in the university. Well, maybe for the first two years I was trying to make sense of a new life. After all, my university was worlds away form the small town I came from.

The university in fact developed my self confidence, or at least it eventually did. It takes loads and loads of work to survive in that university. Only in my junior year did I realize I earned a place among my peers. Living from home was also a test of my discipline and independence, and God knows how meager my allowance was.

So ten years ago today I wore the university sash (the traditional graduation garb of the university in lieu of togas), received my diploma, and took heaps of photos with my classmates. It was a time of uncertainty for many of us but we had grand dreams as well, say conquering the world, for instance. Well, we were young and idealistic...

Back to School

Nearly 20 million students trooped to school last monday. Hay, to be a student. I'm not sure if I miss being one but certainly I have a mix of good and bad memories about going to school.

So let's backtrack a bit to the good old days of being a student, yes?

I have a very vague memory of kindergarten, or I simply choose to forget about it. I only remember my fear of the boy's washroom. It was as small as a closet and there's always a pool of water on the floor. Since we were occupying a very old building, the ceiling was pretty high (especially when I was like only two feet then). The glow of the solitary light bulb was not sufficient for such a high ceiling so it was always dark. With an imagination that just seemed haywire, I always thought that a monster was going to pounce on me. Perhaps I was not the only student who was dead scared of the toilet because I remember a number of my classmates peeing in their pants inside the classroom.

The six years of grade school were confusing. I never figured out where I was going to fit. I especially hated the Technology and Home Economics (THE) subject coz that's the period when the boys would transfer to another room for the drafting classes. As I said in a previous post, boys scare the hell out of me. So during THE I chose to keep to myself and try to draw straight lines with a ruler when all I really wanted was to practice the running stitch that my girl classmates were learning in the next room.

Ironically, I was actually in the team of Cub Scouts always sent to inter-school contests. And these were athletic-type of competitions ha, like sack races and stuff. That was the only butch part of my grade school years though coz the rest of the time I was in some freaking declamation or dancing contest. I also reached the zenith of my spirituality in elementary that for a time I seriously contemplated to become a priest. Que horror!

High school was fun, I don't even know where to begin. Simply, I was all over the place. However, I was marked for being the biggest cheater in the batch (or so I believe). Every year in high school I was caught cheating in the exams. But it was not only me who was doing it; I was the only fool to have been caught over and over again. Cheating was an odious culture during high school. A lot of times instead of studying the night before the exams we would be preparing creative "references" that we'd pull out the next day. Or my classmates and I would assign a chapter of the book amongst each other and we would sit together the next day so we can "share" our expertise. Of course I'm never proud of all the cheating I did during high school.

College was one hell of a ride. I was in a new city, new campus, meeting new people, and I was one of those financially poor students. Talk about adjustment galore. Luckily two of my best friends were in the same campus so part of home was still with me. On our second year both of them were sent back to Surigao (as in deported). What followed was a year of "depression" and solitude. The university's library and cinema became my refuge of sorts.

As a student in the university I did not bother much with grades. It was enough for me to pass one subject after another. I excelled in the humanities and social sciences though, but the total opposite could be said about accounting, natural sciences, and math. I also took a course that I did not choose so I had a sense of detachment from my college. I was filled with a strong desire to shift to the film program. When my father finally allowed me to do so on my second year it was already too late. Stuck to a course that I was ambivalent to, I trudged on. I would have to acknowledge though that my father chose a very practical course for me. So I made the most of my degree, as my career would reflect.

The last time I was in school was more than six years ago. I do not necessarily miss it but I'm sure I need some upgrading soon.