In my desultory internet searches, I have stumbled upon an idea about what to do in my birthday. Why not buy myself a gift entirely for myself in a day special to me (ie, my birthday)? This has been so very insightful. Why not? It would be a purchase emancipating one from the restraints guilt imposed by a digging-into pockets process. 

And what gift did I think of buying without scruple? Books! To get them I had to order from amazon.ca, and convenient it is to order them. It was my first time both to order from the internet and to buy a book for me. After a process of singling out, I came up with these books whose number I cared not to increase just to get the feel of owning my-own books. Soon I will manage to pile my books together into a mini-library like that of Rizal. I preferred them to be safe in my hands on my very birthday, but since I was far from university with a hefty luggage, I chose not to see them until I arrived at residence where I could just pick them up. Their arrival was actually faster than Amazon's estimate by a week. A smile crept into my face when I saw on my table pasted a note telling of a package arrival. It was it, and it came in a crude Amazon box (I should have taken advantage of the gift-wrap feature since it was a present for myself!)

Today is an interesting day. During my fourth block, Spanish ab initio, something peculiar happened. As a student of the course, one expects our professor, whose exclamatory remark gives this weblog entry its title, to suddenly interrupt his very solemn and serious lead of lessons with the latest news nowadays. And now, the latest news happened to be of what transpired last Sunday in the Binibining Pilipinas 2008.

Just in a rare case you are not updated, Binibining Pilipinas 2008 pageant facilitated an event that was totally unexpected and awkward (love the visual onomatopoiea!). One of the candidates, Janina San Miguel, surprised and stirred everyone, during the question and answer portion, with her indestructible audacity to speak in the most foolish and incompetent way possible. What ensued, of course, is the rampant spread of news regarding the event across the country, filling filipinos' casual conversations with an amusing subject.

To the hash she made of the question, to the echoed initial responses, and to the absurd, immoderate but charming way she laughed, add the universal humor the fermented situation has. Equipped with his phone in which is audally recorded the embarassing and shameless remarks utterred by the beautiful, shapely Filipina, my redoubtable professor was locked and loaded as though he knew this must-be-shared gossip would come in our class. All of us in class, even my Korean classmate who you'll always see engrossed in reviewing for his TOEFL, sustained his attention to that 2-minute scandal. It was irressistable and all of us burst into laughter, though I did for discovering this interesting phenomenon.

It never occurred to me that grammar mistakes are found laughable by foreigners. I had this confirmed belief that only Filipinos give a big crap about such grammar mistakes, and that foreigners would leave it alone as some considerable disadvantage the Filipina unfortunately has as a native of a developing country with landsliding quality of english-language education.

In addition to the unforeseen event of Janina bagging the title of Miss Philippines World 2008, I think that the reason why most Filipinos poke fun at her is they entirely relate to her, just as you may laugh at an english-conveyed joke only because of the relief of comprehending that joke. Many young Filipinos like her are bereft of speaking straight not only in the most preferred second language--English--but also in Tagalog. No one gets the gaffe better than a Filipino. No matter how much pride he has for his country, a typical Filipino, immersed in an educational system wherein teachers themselves are arguably almost as inarticulate as the students, is aware of why this takes place.

However, that some of my classmates have at least a Filipino heritage seemed to push the foreigners, namely Korean, South African, American and British, to laugh as well. But based on my scrutiny at the time, it is not the case. It's an international faux pas.

Never mind, who cares. She is seventeen years old, with flenty of affroachable space in a room for imfrovement.