The Princess Chronicles

They call it the "Quarter-life Crisis." It is when you stop going along with the crowd and start realizing that there are many things about yourself that you didn’t know and may not like.

You start feeling insecure and wonder where you will be in a year or two, but then get scared because you barely know where you are now. You start realizing that people are selfish and that, maybe, those friends that you thought you were so close to aren’t exactly the greatest people you have ever met, and the people you have lost touch with are some of the most important ones.

What you don’t recognize is that they are realizing that too, and aren’t really cold, catty, mean or insincere, but that they are as confused as you are. You look at your job… and it is not even close to what you thought you would be doing, or maybe you
are looking for a job and realizing that you are going to have to start at the bottom and that scares you.

Your opinions have gotten stronger. You see what others are doing and find yourself judging more than usual because suddenly you realize that you have certain boundaries in your life and are constantly adding things to your list of what is acceptable and what isn’t. One minute, you are insecure and then the next, secure. You laugh and cry with the greatest force of your life. You feel alone and scared and
confused.

Suddenly, change is the enemy and you try and cling on to the past with dear life, but soon realize that the past is drifting further and further away, and there is nothing to do but stay where you are or move forward… but u know what i choose to

MOVE

ON

..because everybody else’s life will!

You get your heart broken and wonder how someone you loved could do such damage to you. Or you lie in bed and wonder why you can’t meet anyone decent enough that you want to get to know better. Or maybe you love someone but love someone else too and cannot figure out why you are doing this because you know that you aren’t a bad person.

One night stands and random hook ups start to look cheap. Getting wasted and acting like an idiot starts to look pathetic. You go through the same emotions and questions over and over, and talk with your friends about the same topics because you cannot
seem to make a decision.

You worry about loans, money, the future and making a life for yourself… and while winning the race would be great, right now you’d just like to be a contender!

What you may not realize is that everyone reading this relates to it. We are in our best of times and our worst of times, trying as hard as we can to figure this whole thing out…

i can’t think of a SUPERB ending so i might as well just say…
GOODLUCK TO ALL OF US!!

–article from IN VITRO, The Official Newspaper of Societas Vitae

Coffee has never smelled so good as it does at 3 o’clock in the morning while you lie awake wondering whether to finish reading your 10-pound book or just slam it down your head in frustration. Add that to the strenuous cramming, constant headache, fatal exams, perpetual worry and stress…welcome to life in Human Biology….

As human-bio students, we started out as young timid individuals ready to embrace the world of medicine. We always thought it would be great… imagine we get to finish med school for only six years compared to eight or even ten years in other universities. We were always quoted as the ‘blessed ones’… but are we??? Imagine being nose-to-nose with a half-open cat, inhaling the carcinogenic formaldehyde and finding enough sense to open it some more with your clumsy seatmate using razor-sharp scalpel and scissors. How about the endless mixing of volatile chemicals and tedious process of heating and re-heating only to end up with neutral salt? Considering that getting a 5 hour sleep is already out of the ordinary, cramming almost everyday, sitting in front of our zoology books instead of dreaming about Dawson and the Halliwel sisters, not to mention that our breaks wouldn’t be complete without a study period with our ever diligent block mates. And guess how exciting our night life is… juggling between getting your deserved rest, finishing a report, polishing a speech, memorizing tons of formulas and out of this world terms and cycles and of course the reading assignments of at least a hundred pages a day… woah!!! The list doesn’t just end here… so I openly think were not that blessed at all!

Of course I exaggerated. But for the record, it takes nothing less than serious studying to at least pass the Human Biology course, painful thing is not only do you get headaches because of the studying you have to do, but also for the expensive book you have to take hold of, total rip off huh…Funny thing is, despite of the hardships and sacrifices, we cannot deny it’s actually fun, in a challenging and exciting sort of way. In fact, when asked to evaluate the course, Melissa Robrigado from Hum-Bio91 answered an articulate: “Enjoy!” Enjoy indeed. What can I say, I love Human Biology!

But to be totally honest, I’ve also had my qualms about this course concerning the amount of time and energy it consumes. Considering that College life supposed to be the time of our lives. One advice we can give; It doesn’t hurt to sacrifice! It’s all part of being a student and having responsibilities. Basically, all of us experience the same occasional stress and trauma; the difference is the way you handle it. Frankly enough, I can say that the course taught me how I can balance my time from studying and gimmicks and most importantly facing problems promptly and efficiently. Time does not befriend us, the system being trimestral and the course compressed to 2 years and all. There’s no time to dilly-dally.

Seriously though, tedious this course may seem, in reality it’s a breeze. Maybe a few grueling tests here and there and some nasal professors, but also a lot of free time and excellent block mates. Sleepless nights aren’t so unbearable with friends to keep you awake. In the end it’s not so much the weight (or should I say overweight) of schoolwork that hits you when you enter the Human Biology course, it is the reward of learning responsibility, competence, and camaraderie. Don’t worry about the stress and tension so much, cliché as it is, PRESSURE MAKES A DIAMOND! Who knows in the future, we’ll be at the finest and unsurpassed elite list of cardiologists, surgeons and pediatricians. All it takes in this course is patience and determination. Oh, and a dozen Lipovitans for your “nightlife”.

I’ll probably never reverse the public notion that Human Biology students do nothing but study, but just for the record, we also do party at times. So if you claim not to have seen us in one of yours, hey, we’re selective. Our time is gold.

by Chella Solis & Jamie Villanueva

I believe that the most damaging aspect of contemporary living is short-term thinking, i.e., many people spend their lives trying to create a lasting legacy on earth. They want to be remembered when they’re gone. People fail to realize that all achievements are eventually surpassed, records are broken, reputations fade and tributes are forgotten. This is one of the perceptions that I’m trying to instill in my life. One has to realize that every act of our lives strikes some chord that will vibrate in eternity. In short, THERE’S FAR MORE TO LIFE THAN JUST HERE AND NOW! Today is just the visible tip of the iceberg. Eternity is the rest you don’t see underneath the surface. I live my life as if it’s the final dress rehearsal before the real production…after death comes our immortality, and it only offers two choices heaven and hell.

• You gotta SING like no one’s watching, DREAM like you’ll live forever. LIVE like you’ll die tomorrow & LOVE… like its never gonna hurt.
• Life is a one-way street no matter how many detours you take none of them leads back so enjoy its every moment as none of them will happen the same way again…
• Life is so short for drama and petty problems; so kiss slowly, laugh insanely & forgive quickly. Life is too short to be anything but happy.

• Never regret the choices you’ve made, always be satisfied with what you have now. LIFE ISN’T PERFECT. It’s a blend of joy & sorrow, it’s just a matter of dealing with.

• Sometimes we wish we we’re small, wish we we’re somewhere, wish we had something. But sometimes we wish too much that we miss to enjoy who we are, where we are, & what we have.
• To be kind is more important than to be right, sometimes all a person needs is not a brilliant mind that speaks but a patient heart that listens.
• When God leads you to the edge of a cliff, trust him fully & let go. Only one of the two things will happen; either He will catch you when you fall or He will teach you how to fly…
• The person you see in the mirror early in the morning is exactly the person who God sees & loves. No jewelry, with hair all messed up, no status, no title.. just you and your good heart.
• In life, you should love someone who will dance with you under the night sky, even without the moon & stars, even without any music playing & even if that someone can’t dance.
• It is the heart that makes a woman admirable, she is pretty according to who she is, not because of what she has.
• A failure doesn’t need to mark the end. It can can be one step closer to the success you desire. Remember that falling down is not a failure, staying down is.

     In the midst of escalating global terrorism, when man rages war against fellowmen, with our civil liberties vanishing as fast as the ozone layer, when probability states that one out of three women in the world will be beaten or raped in her lifetime, why blog about myself, my life, my thoughts, possibly anything I could imagine… I was honestly trying to work this out a couple of months before but my schedules quite tight with a little bit of dilly dallying here and there, so here goes my first quandary…I’m still on the decision making process, lemme see… politics…. Boring! Religion…too restrained! my life…later! something light perhaps..Oh.. I know my stomach… weird but read on…

     My stomach is one thing I feel I have control over, or one thing I hoped to have control over. I see that for the past 2 decades of my life my stomach has come to occupy my attention. I noticed how other women’s stomach or butts or thighs or hair or skin have come to occupy their attention, so we have very little time to think of the war in Iraq, the tsunami that killed millions-and everything else, for that matter. If I were to ask an assembly of ethnically diverse women, majority of these would possible say they would want to lose weight. Maybe I identify with these women, because at some point in my life I happened to believe that if only my stomach is leaner I would feel better about myself, I would be safe. I would be protected. Why? Because I am accepted, admired, important and loved. Maybe because for most of my life I felt wrong, guilty, bad and my stomach is the carrier, the pouch of self-hatred, the repository for my sorrow, my childhood scars, my unfulfilled ambition and my unexpressed rage. This feeling lives in every part of my being. Call it anxiety or despair. Call it guilt or shame. It occupies me everywhere. Like a toxic dump, it is where the explosive trajectories collide-the Judeo-Christian imperative to be good; the patriarchal mandate that women be quiet, be less; the consumer state imperative to be better, which is based on the assumption that you were born wrong and bad, and that being better always involves spending money, lots of money. Maybe because as the world rapidly divides into fundamentalist camps, reductive sound bites, and popularizing platitudes, an exploration of my stomach and the life therein has the potential to shatter these dangerous constraints.

     I am my own victim, my own perpetrator. But of course, nowadays the tools of self-victimization are readily available. The program of a ‘perfect body’ has been programmed into our consciousness since birth. But whatever the cultural influences and pressures, my preoccupation with my flab, my constant dieting, exercising, worrying, is self-imposed. I was the one picking up the magazines. I am the one buying into the ideal. What is far more frightening than narcissism is the zeal for self-mutilation that is very much rampant wherever you are.

     I have seen the unbridled and insidious poisoning: skin lightening creams sell as fast as toothpastes in Asia; mothers of eight year olds in America have the ribs of their daughter removed so they will never have to worry about dieting; girls vomiting and starving themselves so they won’t embarrass their parents in public by being chubby; in Beijing where ther are breaking their legs and adding bone to be taller, in Dallas where they are surgically carving their feet in order to fit into Jimmy Choos or Manolo Blahniks; and women in Korea remove ‘asian’ in their eyelids, and Filipinas remove the ‘pinoy pride’ in their faces through rhinoplasty, blepharoplasty, and botulinum injections, and the list goes on and on. Everywhere, women cannot deny the reality that they spend their lives fixing their bodies, shrinking it. It’s as if they’ve been given their own little country called ‘their body,’ which they get to tyrannize, clean up, or control while they lose sight of the world. Except for a rare few, the women I met loathed at least one part of their body. They believed that if they could just get that part right, everything else would work out for them. Of course, this is an endless heartbreaking campaign.

     This blog is some sort of an eye opener. My attempt to analyze the mechanisms of our imprisonment, to break free so that we may spend more time running the world than running away from it; so that we may be more consumed by the sorrows of the world that the cries of our stomachs. This is an expression of my hope, my desire, that we will all refuse to be like Barbie, that we will say no to the loss of the particular, whether it be to a voluptuous woman, or a woman with defining lines of character in her face, or a distinguishing nose, or olive-toned skin, or wild curly hair. I for one cannot believe how much time I spent trying to change ‘me.’ This is my tormentor, my ultimate distraction; it’s my most serious committed relationship. It has protruded through my clothes, my confidence, and my ability to work, to think and to love. I’ve tried to sedate it, educate it, embrace it and most of all to eradicate it.

     I am stepping off the capitalist treadmill. I am going to take a deep breath and find a way to survive not being flat or perfect… and I invite you to join me to stop trying to be anything, anyone other than who you are. I want to be bold, I want to love myself and my life. My body, I want to stop fixing it, it was never broken.