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American novelist R.F. Kuang presented a thought in her novel Babel that has remained in my mind ever since the night that I first read it: “Translation means doing violence upon the original, it means warping and distorting it for foreign, unintended eyes. So, where does that leave us? How can we conclude except by acknowledging that an act of translation is always an act of betrayal?”

If what Kuang suggested is true and that the act of translation is truly an act of betrayal, then what does that make us—ignorant overconsumers of translation? With how accustomed our current generation is to the effects of globalization, it may be easy to overlook how often we encounter translated content in our daily lives.

The school year is over. It was my first time traveling alone with 2GO Travel, and the first time experiencing a seven-hour delay before arriving at my destination. The vessel had some “technical issues,” so the supposedly night trip went to a day trip instead. I was rereading Jose Rizal’s El Filibusterismo during the waiting hours—just to kill the time—and I was between Chapters 1 to 2 which talks about the bapor tabo. In my experience aboard the Masagana, I noticed an invisible division between passengers inside the hotel-like interior of the vessel and those outside on the upper deck. The delay had caused this division, with passengers inside enjoying amenities while those outside were uncovered to the scorching heat of the sun, the banging sound of machines, and black smoke from the funnel.

In the Philippines, you can be part of the LGBTQ community and be a devoted Catholic but never a chance to experience same-sex marriage or just even a civil union. You can express your gender by wearing what you are comfortable with but people won’t acknowledge your gender identity. You can be gay, lesbian, or any other gender in schools, but you have to conform to what the school thinks is right regarding hair grooming and proper school uniform. You can be gay, but you cannot enjoy and freely make the streets your runway of rainbows. This is the reality that gay people experience in the Philippines: homosexuality is tolerated more than accepted.

University of San Carlos’s BA Literary and Cultural Studies with Creative Writing (BA LCS) was invited to Komunidad Inked Scripts 2024, an event organized by Ayala Malls in Ayala Central Bloc last Saturday, May 25, 2024. An hour was designated to hold a segment for the art of spoken word from 5PM to 6PM, featuring seasoned professionals, poets, students majoring in LCS, and a HUMSS Student from Hulma, the Literature club of USC South Campus on the stage of the Activity Center.

I went to Sto. Niño Mactan Montessori School on May 28 with little idea what this play was about. I was only told moments after the curtains had risen and everything went dark: first, that this was set in 1940’s Bataan, during the Japanese Occupation, and second, that it was a musical. Both were enough to keep me in my seat already.

“All tortoises are in fact turtles—that is, they belong to the order Testudines or Chelonia, reptiles having bodies encased in a bony shell—but not all turtles are tortoises.” —Kathleen Kuiper (from Britannica)

The plan was simple. Visit every single one of the 22 museums participating in this year’s Gabii sa Kabilin, an annual one-night event where museums all across Metro Cebu have their doors open until midnight for people to stop by. In my USC branded tote bag were a plastic water bottle, a Tupperware of Chips Ahoy cookies, a pair of brown khaki shorts, a blue journal riddled with stickers, two black ballpens, my P300 GSK 2024 premium ticket, and an accompanying fold-out brochure. The ticket, which was worth two days of my allotted daily food budget, was required for a class and entailed discounts on food and merch, a one-time tartanilla ride, and free bus rides going to every museum that spanned past Cebu City and into Mandaue, Talisay, and Lapu-Lapu.

Cancer is a peculiar thing, your body is a petri dish for testing different medical treatments and all you have to do is win the battle. I always wondered, after watching and reading a lot about cancer patients, what gave them so much strength to find love amidst the pain and challenges that they undergo everyday. Love can be unconditional and our own way of viewing it can carry a different meaning for many people. When I remember the stories of the people who fought cancer, “A Fault In Our Stars” by John Green comes to mind, a book published in 2012 and the movie was released in 2014 starring Shallene Woodley and Ansel Elgort. A tear-jerking story about two deep-thinking teens with cancer and it is one of the beloved young adult stories in recent history.