ETERNAL STUDENT

VALRED OLSIM
The Eternal Student (Name of Column)

An Eternal Student is humorously defined as someone who tries to avoid

getting a job for as long as possible by taking more educational courses.
Other dictionaries are much sensible: one who studies forever. Although
this phenomenon has western origins, our country has so much eternal
students; the working mom who has to postpone her Masters to take care
of her baby, the working law student who has horribly aged in his 7th year of law school, the
zuma-sampung- taon undergraduate student who must be confused on the difference of school
allowance and wage, and those who are really addicted to learning anything under the sun.

Speaking of under the sun, I would like to thank my friend, workmate, and Sunstars Under the
Sun columnist, George B., who (grudgingly) encouraged us to write again, after a tumultuous
period in our life. Of course, thank you very much Sunstar Baguio for this opportunityyou have
fulfilled this ordinary guys dream. Salamat Apo!

Just like our first days in school, I guess the foremost order of business is traditionally the
personal introduction portion, which is both hated and loved depending on who you ask. In this
digital world, people can just google my name and get instant data results (although few of it are
not at all flattering). Some may have known me to be a former barangay official, a college
instructor, a local artist and musician, or a towns tourism officer. But just like most ordinary
millennials who doesnt have extraordinary grades, or an empire to inherit; I once worked as a call
center agent, ESL tutor, and a lowly laborer to just about any employer who are delighted with
having fresh limbs to grind. In short, Im just a simple guy you meet on the sidewalk.

The Eternal Student is the name of a personal blog we maintained since 2012 containing our
journals, musings, and studies. Whether to give opinions from the lens of a millennial, or just to
tell stories from our generation, we also dream of writing more often to communicate - besides,
this is the first step towards understanding each other in this chaotic world.

In this life, nobody leaves unscathed. We all make mistakes, and we all struggle to come out as
whole as possible from the choking collision course of our choices and those by others, add the
wild storms of this unpredicted world. Many times; we eat more than we can chew, imagine more
than act, doubt more than hope, and maybe, simply just acted wrong despite all heavens
warnings.

Our articles will talk about familiar experiences and observations, and all of our internalized
rumblings. It will be dedicated to telling stories about life and lifes lessons learning, unlearning,
and perhaps, surviving. After all, in this school of life, we are all Eternal Students.
 Lifes Final Page
They say life is a mystery to be solved, a riddle, the ultimate puzzle that can only be
deciphered by living it. For centuries, writers and poets have written loads of literary pieces, not
just to celebrate life, but to mystify the human experience called, existence. It struck me,
however, as a realist, that many of these propositions tend to disguise the most important part of
life: Death.

For most, life is really simple; youre born, you live, and then ultimately, you die. Death, as
a subject, has been always avoided, not just by writers (with the exception of a few), but nearly
every soul you want to talk it with. None of us seems psychologically ready to the idea of
permanent unconsciousness and non-existence, whether to others or to ourselves. We always
seem to deny the condition of being lost to nothingness and its chilling grip that haunts our mortal
thoughts. The idea is simply, terrifying and different from the day to day events that we are used
to face. Deaths reality have inspired methods that would help us cope with the anxiety and fear
that it arouse. We disguise its power through mystification, religion, jokes and euphemisms such
that we forget about its terror; much like hiding from the face of a monster. We hide our eyes
from its glares, but still we spread our fingers just a bit, because theres just something in us that
really cant resist a peek.

Perhaps, death is never the other side of life as others claim; perhaps, it is just part of
that vicious cycle that everyone will go through. The truth is, nobody knows what lies there;
whether there is an after-life as they call it, or maybe nothing, but an empty vacuum. See, what
scares us is our weakness and inability to know our innate fear of the unknown. Naturally, we
try to conceal its presence and live our life as though we can live forever.

I have nothing against the conformist and optimistic view of life and death. A few books
we have read regarding this have boldly inspired us to come to terms with such idea. The lesson
is perhaps our obvious conceitedness even with our mortality; we have successfully reached the
moon but have never visited our closest neighbor, we have made a lot of discoveries but have
not discovered the secret to happiness, we have advanced technologically but have moved
backward without our values, indeed, we have forgotten the only thing that can humble us
death.

Just like most of us, I have my own experience of watching a person you know or even
youre close with disappear from the face of the earth. It hurts and will hurt for a long time. It takes
so much to realize that it is the nature of life that we must accept. I wrote about death not to scare
anyone, but to remind us once more of studying how we have been living this temporary state.
Maybe, we have all been caught with that false and tempting promise of this material world our
obsession with the latest gadgets, money and property as if these are the only things in life. We
have become soaked with vanity and triviality as if death is not looming in the corners. Perhaps, I
wrote this for us to stop for a while and think about our lives and how we make every second
valuable; after all, life is so short.
 WASTED WORLD
So much has changed since the 18th century industrial revolution; at the beginning of it, few could imagine humans
flying, communicating with people on the other side of the globe instantaneously, the explosion of modern inventions
and the evolution of information technology indeed, we have moved into a faster era, a faster world: the world of the
instant. Yet, despite this increase of available information, there were remarkably few insights we are constantly
faced with the inquiry of what now?

Each second, a portion of our world is carved away from the little space where we can freely roam. The philosophy of
private property which has enabled us to own and keep owning parts of this earth sprouted from a culture that we
invented to secure an important necessity: Shelter. Yet, this culture, together with the idea that our existence is far
greater than the lives of any other living organisms on the face of the earth, created a system of enterprise that
compromises the subsistence of our natural resources; we burn forests for a space to construct our houses, we cut
trees for it, we mine minerals, and we reconstruct our very own natural habitat such that, we become more like gods
with the power to build and destroy.

As if we had never done enough damage to our mother earth, we have fashioned a false illusion of wants that would
keep us working from the little time that we have in our lives. We dream of bigger houses, finer and more expensive
clothes, just to live the arrogant concept of luxury. We submit to that cheap popular culture, unconscionable capitalistic
exploitation and gladly embrace being puppets of marketing strategies. We attempt to fill up an insatiable urge, and we
remain empty and unfulfilled.

Consequently, we have reached the point of squeezing our resources to satisfy the needs and "wants" of
our population, we have reached a turning point of rapid consumption and exploitation of these gifts we
continue to expand our numbers; more buildings, more cars, more factories, more products to consume,
more profit to the global economy and, more wastes. The issue is not just about overpopulation,
capitalization, industrialization and global-warming, it has something to do more of the responsibility that we
have forgotten as caretakers of the world. That even in these modern times, we are no different from our
hunter gatherer ancestors; we will always depend on the fruits of the earth and the gifts of our
ecosystems.

Yet, with all these facts, we still blind ourselves to the vanity and pleasures of modern day life, unnoticing
the reality that the world has evidently grown older, showing signs of illness every time; the year-to-year
rise and fall of the water level, climate change, natural disasters like floods and mudslides, food shortages
and waste problems. We refuse to listen to these voices, our earths sobs. We seem not to give these
problems a single thought. That, unless we take action to redesign our ways in managing our economic
system and stop the pressure to our ecology; unless we do the simplest things to reverse our culture of
vanity and consumerism, we will ultimately destroy the natural fabric that underpins life itself our planet.

It has been centuries since literature had discussed about a Utopia a perfect and ideal society of the
future. Surprisingly, todays art, literature, and futuristic movies depict a future of global destruction, chaos
and anarchy the end of the world? Is it possible that the civilization of humans had also mapped its
destruction? Maybe. There will be no plane crash without the invention of airplanes, no complicated
diseases had we not poisoned our air with chemicals and smoke, no wastes without the system of
production which we have created.

Nature always finds ways to reckon with humans arrogance. There is an end to everything whether it is
great or small; like the birth and death of a star, or the life cycle of a butterfly. There is such a thing called
dooms day; when our planet will fail us like how we fail it - when we eventually deplete its resources and
die. We may not live long enough to witness it, but maybe our sons and daughters would. It doesnt take a
complicated deduction to measure its reality; there is an impending doom and we cannot stop itwe can
only postpone it.

Blue Jeans: Hope

Ive seen the numbers. This semester, another set of hopefuls who have passed their
professional licensure exams must have gained a gleam in their eyes, probably still celebrating
what they have thought of as a great victory. Towards the end of this year, hundreds of
thousands or even millions of new nurses, teachers, engineers, criminologists and all other
professionals will find themselves in the first steps of their career confident, believing,
imagining.

Ironically, national news reports had been confirming the growth of our unemployment and
underemployment rates, (as if we have never known of it); the oversupply of nurses and teachers
and other graduates who have resorted to taking call center jobs or even jobs in retail stores, or
the unlucky professionals who have spent most of their lives seeking for a permanent job. The
truth, however, of the hideous link between population, oversupply of professionals,
unemployment, and poverty is kept behind a curtain of cheap optimism. Unable to find a proper
solution to these economic problems, our government has been promoting overseas work as a
noble alternative to earn a living. For the hopeless professional, it is not just a noble alternative, it
is the ONLY alternative to work and earn a decent wage, not minding the pain and
homesickness of being away from home and family.

In this society that is suspiciously devoid of humanistic goals, in this society built on
enterprise and money - making, and which the new professionals find themselves a commodity,
rather than a human being, what is then there left to do? For some who still hope, they pursue
higher studies; they take up graduate school, not on the assurance that they will be employed
after, but in hopes that they may be someday. Some take up Medicine or even Law, but even
Lawyers would chuckle on the fact that there are a lot of them in the country, throw a stone in
session road and you are sure to hit one. I honestly hope that the same is only a joke.

The dilemma that our generation of today has to face is numbers - more people, more
schools, and more competition. New professionals find themselves competing with last years
new professionals, or even the other professionals from years ago who havent been employed
until now, or even among themselves. In the process, they are reduced to their innate tendency of
self preservation, call it acts of realism, or maybe, just simply being practical. They are trapped
in a suffocating chaos, competing for vacancies of jobs and even of positions. For the cynic, there
is not much hope in this dog eat dog world, this neurotic society, this jungle that is ruled with
only one law: survival of the fittest.

Whether we like it or not, such thoughts will drive us to contemplate about the absurdity of
life and of living. However, we cannot afford to give up even if our ideologies cant cope up with
what we see. In the end, we must accept that it will always be a challenge to change the system,
that we cannot always blame the government, the school, our parents, or the flying cockroach.
We can never make the world revolve around everything that we want, or what we have exactly
dreamed of.
 Nevertheless, even if we have grown pessimistic with just about everything, the best thing
to do is to keep even the tiniest amount of hope - that tiny shimmering thing left in Pandoras
Box amidst all the evils released. Hope that someday, and maybe someday things will get
BETTER.