Pond’s Flawless White

I got this bundle as a prize for one of those things I wrote and submitted to a magazine. So yeah, it’s a freebie. The irony of it was that I was writing about the health benefits of organic products. One look at the set’s ingredients listing is enough to tell you that it’s far from being organic.
It took me a while to actually give it a try because:

1. I invest a lot of money on self-tanners. Why would I want to reverse that by using whitening products? Isn’t it a bit silly to use these things when I’d be covering myself with bronzers before I go out of the house anyway?
2. Pond’s has never been good to my skin. As a teenager, their facial wash caused me to break out. In my twenties, their Pond’s Cold Cream make-up remover — compounded by the fact that I’m allergic to most make-up — irreversibly ruined the texture of my face.

Anyway, I suddenly found myself on a tight budget one day, just when I had consumed the last drop of my moisturizer. So I thought that maybe I could use this. Thought that maybe it could get rid of my moles or dark spots. Thought that maybe, this being the 21st century, Pond’s had stopped coming up with disastrous formulas.
I should’ve followed my instincts. They’re usually more sensible than my brain.
The steps:

1. Anti-Spot Intensive Whitening Serum
2. Light Infusing Under-Eye Cream
3. Visible Lightening Daily Lotion (daytime) / Re-brightening Night Treatment (night)

I felt stinging upon application. Followed by itchiness. And an entire day’s worth of scratching. Next, my eyes felt so dry I could hardly open them. As in, it actually hurt to open them! I thought that maybe I had turned into a 50-year-old overnight. Note: My mom is 55 and there are days, especially when she lets her nice, naturally wavy hair down, when she looks 28. She took pity on me and gave me a jar of her unused Clarins day cream as she has stopped using moisturizers altogether. That partially healed me.

The freebie set actually came with a 2-way foundation but the color is “Ivory White”. I can imagine looking like a glow-in-the-dark floating head if I were to use that. I mean, heck, the rest of my body has been tanned!

Rating: 1/10

DIGIMED Field Trip 2: UP Film Institute

I brought section ABMA76 (note that this is no longer the original Gokusen class, but a mutation of the section due to MAPROD majoring) to the UP Film Institute so that they can observe the Sarsuwela Festival.

The Sarsuwela Pelikula featured today was a vintage: Maalaala Mo Kaya (1954), starring Rogelio dela Rosa and Carmen Rosales. Here's a YouTube clip from the film.  It's a story that revolves around a kundiman that was put together by the composer/pianist Celso and his sweetheart, the singer Pilar.  The two were separated when Celso tries his luck at fame in order to help his ailing mother.  They end up leading distant, but somewhat miserable, lives with Celso marrying his rich benefactor Patria and Pilar going into seclusion. A more detailed synopsis can be found here.

What struck me most about this movie was that, despite the abrupt transitioning and the character exaggeration that's reminiscent of oldies, it had a real story with real issues.  I don't know how to word it, but it definitely had more substance than those sappy Regine Velasquez starrers or those annoying teeny-bopper flicks. (Let's not even begin to talk about Marian Rivera, please.) And for a 1950s film, I found it to be quite daring in its exploration of an unconventional family.

We were all shocked to see Dolphy as a young sidekick, of course. Hehe. And um...even though my nose was bleeding from the matalinhagang Tagalog, I was feeling the kilig factor. Hahaha!


In Search of a Theoretical Framework
First order of the day is finding a theoretical framework for this.  While my students only need to come up with visual reflections, I'm actually required by my professor to come up with a conceptual paper (which may need to incorporate the theoretical, conceptual and operational frameworks). So in essence, we're doing the same exercise, only with a different medium.

Where to start? This is the difficult part about dissecting a full-length film.  There are so many angles to look at.  If I were to focus on Celso's child, Precy, I could say that she's managed to touch Social Construction of Reality by seeing only the good in everyone, even her hateful mother.  If I were to focus on the dynamics of Celso, Patria and Precy's family, I could go into Relational Patterns of Interaction (under Cybernetics Theories), Relational Schema in the Family (Sociopsychological Theories) and Baxter's Theory of Relationship. That would, of course, depend on which aspect of the family dynamics I plan to emphasize.  If I want to zoom in on Pilar's struggle between a woman of conservative morals and a woman in love, I'd have to go with Cognitive Dissonance.  (The significance of the song Maalaala Mo Kaya can even get us talking about Semiotic Theories.) Lots of ways to dissect this because it is full-length. It's all really a matter of how I'd analyze the discourse.


Discussion at the Sunken Garden
After the Sarsuwela Pelikula, we headed straight for the Sunken Garden to continue our consultations and exchange ideas.  I was already holding the book An Introduction to Game Studies: Games in Culture by Frans Mayra that I had borrowed earlier at the UP-CMC Library.  It was nice to see that April, Mauwi and Red were intrigued and that they were able to grab a couple of ideas that they could use for their proposal.  They're moving on from Constructivism, to Symbolic Interactionism, to Social Constructionism. Oh, ha! Carlolo, Jason and Arvin, on the other hand, have begun working on their storyboard. It's just a matter of fixing a few snags about realism.

The atmosphere, as always the case whenever I'm in UP, was relaxing. Sometimes, April, Mauwi and I would get distracted by Football Player #14 that our discussion would get interrupted. We surprisingly get back on track anyway. Justine spent some time envying the players (he was staring intently at the ball), while the rest were busy taking pictures of Football Player #14 and teasing us girls about him.

I think the day was pretty productive. Next week, the kids will be learning from the guys who've already done MAPROD, so I'm looking forward to that.  As for the pictures...I'll wait till Red posts them then I'll update this post.

Sunken Garden photo by Justine Joya, taken with Red Abuel's Nikon d60.

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COMMETS from the old blog:

You know you've become badly addicted to Dance Dance Revolution when...

10. You reward yourself with DDR when you're done writing your mid term paper. You've already exhausted your brain, why not the rest of your body as well, ne?

9. You've LSS'd on your three favorite DDR songs. And you include everyone else in your LSS by playing the MP3s loudly over and over again.

8. You wait till 11PM ON A WEEKDAY so that everyone would leave you alone with the DDR. You know that everyone's bound to have work or classes the next day, so you stay up until they all go home. You take your turn until you're so exhausted that waking up the next day is a nightmare.


7. You go to APC Magallanes (South) for work, then travel to UP Diliman (North) for your classes, then you go back all the way to Glorietta just to DDR. And then you claim that today's lecture drove you so crazy you just have to shake it off with DDR.


6. You've stopped looking for partners and would go to Timezone alone. You don't care anymore if you're the only person looking weird up there. You just have to DDR, with or without a partner.

5. You actually need an "Expert" partner to evict those DDR addicts. When the huge guys arrived, I felt like I had to leave since I was only on "Basic". They were taking so long that  I ended up slumped on the House of the Dead booth, watching Rem play Tekken. He noticed my forlorn countenance (shoulders slumped, knees together, feet apart, chin on palms), gave me a pep talk about me being superior since they're only better than me when it comes to DDR and then finished with, "Tara paalisin natin." Yay! ^_^

4. You're in a Rockband party, but your feet are doing cross marks on the floor. My excuse was that I was feeling cold and needed to jump up and down. Mar, whose boyfriend Tonic is a DDR God, sort of screamed, "Oh, my God!" when she saw my feet move involuntarily.

3. You sing while dancing. And you don't care if the people behind you are laughing. Heck, those huge, dark guys waiting behind me would sing Sunkiss Drop while I do my turn...in high sing-song voices, too!


2. You sing Sunkiss Drop while shooting hoops, earning you puzzled glances from other players. And you're shooting hoops because you either ran out of DDR funds and are playing free games or that badly addicted Korean dude is still hogging the DDR pads.

 
1. Your knee is busted and you still play.
Jon Lansang accidentally kicked a chair yesterday and it went flying into my direction, hitting my knee in the process. It had been badly bruised and it still hurts but I still went to play DDR today. Tonic has it worse: he sprained one ankle two days ago on DDR and then sprained the remaining ankle yesterday...on DDR too.



Comments from the old blog:

UP Saga 4-6: On being a Communication Scientist...

Monday was stressful because I knew that I had flunked Teacher Ganda's mid term exam even when my classmates say that we all shouldn't be such pessimists.

I honestly enjoy my classes to a certain point. But times like these, I wish I could shift to PhD Literature. Two things keep me here, however:

1. My instincts tell me that PhD Communication is going to be very useful. The way my BA in Behavioral Studies, BS in Information Management and Master in Information Management have served me well. A GDAP (Game Developers Association of the Philippines) representative already named the degrees needed to help launch Game Dev as an actual curriculum in the Philippines and I want to be one of its first proponents.
   
   
2. You can only get 6 units credited when you shift. Bummer. I already have 15 units to my name.

The learning process is killing me because it reminded me of the times I hated being in Behavioral Studies, which was in complete contrast with how I loved being in UP.

Carlolo said something about me being adept at theories. That's funny because I wasn't always like that. In college, I barely survived all the theory-peppered exams. I never could sit still and listen, unless I like the professor. The weird thing about UP is that it's in complete contrast with APC: I loved my minors more than I ever did my majors (except for Anthro 187: Sex and Culture). APC students rarely take their minors seriously. But in UP, the minors were the only things keeping my GPA afloat. With the minors, I can be as creative as I want to be and professors like Pia Arboleda encouraged it. (*gasp* She's actually the only prof I really remember! Oh, and she was the original Teacher Ganda. The only other prof I recall is _____ and that's because he was manyak.)

So I told Carlolo, the reason why I seem to be adept at theories is because I learned them backwards. Not in college. When I re-read books about theories -- I was just starting out as a professor then -- it all made sense because I had already applied them in real life.

I have to see it work before I can begin to understand what it is. If I just read it, it won't make sense. This is the same reason why I had learned programming by virtue of looking at codes and not by reading technical books (I hate technical books). This is also the reason why, when I was at a loss for words during the exam, I ended up drawing two diagrams to answer the question: "What is the difference between overgeneralization and selective observation?"

Now I'm back to studying things that I cannot begin to comprehend because they're all abstract statements. But see, I found that I enjoy this course because I learned some of the theories by reading 14 theses/dissertations within a week. No matter how technical a dissertation is written, you cannot remove the narrative elements from it. I see stories unfolding and frameworks/models explaining the phenomenon.

That is so much better than having to read through hundreds of pages of materials that, to me, have no meaning. (Hehe, that's Semiotics for you.)