A Little Update

March 02, 2017

It's been a long time since I last made an entry in this blog, but I'll try to narrate the important events that have transpired since the last time I posted.

Tough Lessons from Mr. Time

Normally, Mr. Time would be on my side, however he kinda hasn't for the past year. The time restraints that come with being a second year IB student were explained to me by Ferna, my second year, when I was in my first year, but I thought it to be greatly exaggerated and overblown. Little did I know that she was actually playing it down quite a bit.

In between going to class and attending Quan Cai extra-curricular activities in the afternoon, a second year like me must keep several things in mind at once. One such thing is that four thousand word Extended Essay you were supposed to submit two days ago but couldn't find the time to finish because you were studying for that Biology test you so desperately needed to ace. Another is searching for universities that are competitive but not too competitive to the point that you were one of 30,000 students (Harvard applicants, class of 2021), a number so great that the admissions officer looked at you like a string of numbers to be thumbed up or down and passed to the next guy. Let's not forget that History IA Draft submission deadline that's coming up next week that you haven't even started because you couldn't get out of bed on Saturday to start it.

For the past seven months, this has been my bread and butter, my hustle time, my last two minutes of a close football match between FC Barcelona and Real Madrid. This has been the life of the other one hundred and forty students who are in my year, too. But the way I dealt with this time pressure didn't do me any good. I am a self-professed procrastinator and more often than not add more activities than I can actually handle (more on that later). I also loved just walking the streets of Mong Kok and Tsim Sha Tsui and admiring how different all this was to Manila, snapping random photos of people going through their daily commute of the MTR or buying Siu mai at the street food stall. All of these things I chose to do or not to did have consequences on me both in my sleep and mental health as well as the deadlines I had to follow.

Now, this may sound like I'm complaining and whining about life here at Li Po Chun, but it's far from that.

Time management has never been one of my strong suits, as my parents will often tell you, and I'm still learning until now about it, but the point of going on about all this on my blog is because I learned to live with my decisions and their consequences, and I chose to look at my situation and turn it into something different.

I realized that being a student experiencing the IB at a United World College truly makes him/herself change the deepest region of humanity: How we deal with being us. We all come from different corners of the world (or smooth edges, because the world is round, not flat) and share what is part of us and our cultures while accepting those of others'. What some people don't tell you about this is that you need to find a sense or an image of who you really are and who you want to become and live your life to achieve it, so that you don't lose yourself in the vast multitude of cultures that is UWC.

My stubbornness and arrogance began to fall away as I looked at myself for who I was in this sea of cultures, and this was when I changed myself not from the outside in, but from the inside out. The old persistent habits will fall away when the heart wants it to, not when the mind says it should.

Mr. Time took one good look at me and slapped me in the face, basically.

So what have I been doing that made time management so hard?

Zero Displacement

I joined a band in early 2016 called Zero Displacement, made up of a few classmates who shared a passion in music. It wasn't hard for us to play together and soon enough we got a few gigs.

Zero Displacement at Lion Rock Music Festival
From Left: Ashwin (lead singer/guitarist), Me

The first gig we got was Lion Rock Music Festival, a charity music event. It was the first time we played in front of such a huge crowd and it made me shaky and nervous at some points, but I thoroughly enjoyed it.

But, as I promised, this would be a short update, not a band biography. So here's a few photos to show it in a much more entertaining fashion. A picture speaks a thousand words anyways.

Playing bass guitar at the Underground (Sub Terra #2)
Photo creds: The Underground HK

Meet Zero Displacement (from left): Leo (lead guitar),
Ashwin (bass, vocals), Sophia (drums), and me (rhythm guitar, vocals)

Our latest performance at Amplified.
Photo creds: Amplified photo team

Here's the point where I shamelessly self-promote our band:

Please Like our Facebook Page!
If you'd like to follow us on: Instagram

Football (a.k.a. soccer)

The football varsity team this year soared to new levels of success. We joined the local championship league and were aching for a cup win as LPC hadn't won one since 2007! Luckily for us, a combination of a team that worked together and brilliant moments from a few talented individuals (not to mention an amazing coach) saw us through match through match and ultimately winning with no goals conceded, a first in the history books of any team to play in the league.