what are you here for?

asks prof ileto. is it just for the diploma?

very familiar questions. suddenly, it feels like im in UP again.

i never had this much interest in history before. it was a boring subject. i got 2.75 in kas 1 when i was in college. thats how bad i am in history. but doing the philippines module under ileto makes me look at history in a different light. and he makes sense. a lot of sense.

a semi-drifter like me dreads the questions that he asks. no, he doesnt ask it in the way that professors would ask questions in class and would expect an answer. his questions are more of the take home type, questions that will haunt you for quite some time. questions that are hard to answer, and sometimes takes a lifetime to find an answer for.

tonight, he talked about his sojourns in the US contrasting it with his father's own. they lived in different generations, hence producing differing perceptions and experiences of the US empire. reading his article at face value would equate to reading a journal. but its actually more than that. his story presents a nuanced picture of the US empire which is typically overridden by a monolitic view as conventionally presented by some nationalist scholars.

as an undergraduate student, it was easier to embrace binaries. but moving to another school, still within UP, made me more critical of how some teachers would just use binaries to make themselves look more "critical" and socially relevant. and i find this (and other reasons) so fake and frustrating. so i dropped out.

moving here and being introduced to other views, i feel like i understand more what it means to be critical. i think i owe it to the fact that there's not just one dominant view (or so i think, i may be wrong) that pervades the university's academic landscape. no, im not throwing away what i got from my undergraduate years but builds on it instead. but what is this all about? what is the reason behind this knowledge accummulation thing that im into?

hmmm...for now its mainly for selfish reasons. but i hope i can connect it to a wider social cause in the same way that other filipino scholars during the time of rizal or ileto did.

ang feelingera ko naman.