Hallelujah!

"Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you."

The above passage is from the Gospel according to Matthew. It was the Gospel for 17 March 2011 ─ the same day the results of the 2010 Bar Examinations came out. I think it was at that point of the Mass when I was finally able to relax, after being a nervous wreck since the day the Supreme Court announced to the public that the results are finally coming out. The premature greetings on Facebook, while sincerely appreciated for the posters' confidence in us, certainly did nothing to help.

All the eight people from my block who took the exams last September passed. After five long years of shared pain and agony, I honestly believe that we were all rooting for each other from the time we finished law school until the day we saw our names published at the SC website. I cannot remember being with a group of people who are as genuinely happy and proud for one another as we all were that day. We share this happiness and pride with our other blockmates who will take the country's first MCQ Bar Exams this November, and who we trust will feel as delirious some time next year as we did last Thursday.

Amen.

Shirt Happens

I have quite a number of Ateneo items in my closet, inspired, in no small measure, by the recent success of its men's basketball team, which I have religiously followed since 1991. (Those were the days when you can get into an Ateneo-La Salle game simply by assisting the Babble carry the drums up the bleachers. Those days are long gone.) I got the the original "Sixth Man" shirt from the Babble itself, basketball jerseys from online sellers, jackets and more shirts from adidas and Nike. The school itself has been selling all this stuff for years, but it cannot be denied that the successful partnerships it has formed, with adidas from way back in 2006 up to the present one with Nike, combined with the success of its basketball program may have boosted sales a bit. (I am just guessing here.)

But what do you do, when your basketball team has not tasted a championship in 25 years, and has not actually won a game in two seasons?

Anyway, back in September, during one of the few times in my life that I cannot associate myself with anything blue, I was planning to wear, for the last Sunday, a shirt made for the college by some enterprising folks from Diliman. Katya (one of only two people who I know still visit this site) informed me that the largest size available would not be very flattering if worn by me. They are too small, as are most shirts sold in the vicinity of UP campus, which explains why I do not have a lot of them (the fact that the Maroons have been stinking lately don't help either).

But, God bless them, the same enterprising people, for once, decided to be generous with their material, and came up with this in 3XL:


UP Fight.