Blog 4 - Friendship Games

This past weekend I took a trip to southern California with the Filipino club I am apart of on campus, Mga Kapatid. Mga Kapatid is the tagalog phrase which translated means “Brothers and Sisters”. The reason we traveled down south was for an event known as Friendship Games. Friendship Games is an event has been held annually for over 20 years. It is basically a large gathering of all the Filipino-American clubs on colleges all across the state and even in some other states such as Nevada and Hawaii. The day consists of various games that are played between the schools, many of them simple but fun games that are made to build bonds between the club members and the clubs themselves. The theme of the event, besides Friendship is S.P.U.F, or spirit, pride, unity and friendship. Throughout the day the clubs approach other clubs and “SPUF” one another, which mainly consists of various cheers and chants in order to keep the energy for the day alive and to further promote the theme. Although the purpose of the day is to get everyone together for a day of fun, there is a winner at the end of the day based on the games played and also the amount of “SPUF”-ing the clubs do. During the day, there are approximately 25-30 schools in attendance and each club usually brings anywhere from 50-150+ members which makes for a very loud and memorable experience. Sadly this was my fourth and final year in attendance, although the event is actually held in Fullerton, CA, where I am from. So maybe I’ll try to make an appearance next year.

Blog 3 - FED

This past weekend I was again given the opportunity to volunteer for Filipino Empowerment Day. Filipino Empowerment Day is an event held at UC Berkeley for the purposes of educating middle school and high school students about higher education. The day mainly consists of various workshops that deal with the different things that a student in their position would go through in the road to getting to college; things such as extracurricular activities, personal statements and even what its like to be a college student. The event is completely student run with volunteers coming from various colleges in the area such as UCDavis, UC Santa Cruz and Stanford. Just like the past three years, I was a volunteer for the UCDavis group known as Bridge. Bridge serves as a means of outreaching to potential UCDavis students and also as a resource to help them stay in the higher education once they arrive. I’ve been a pretty active member of this group since first arriving here at UCDavis because I feel like the work they do is truly needed in today’s society.

While at FED, I spent the majority of time just helping with logistics by shepherding students between various workshops or just helping out whenever anyone needed a hand. Even though I decided to take a smaller role this year, in previous years I had spent time on student panels during which students would just ask questions about anything pertaining to the life of a student. I found that these panels were very beneficial to the students because they could ask the questions they wanted to directly from the source. I love helping out at these events because I feel that although I worked hard to get to college, I didn’t make it to where I am by myself and I want to do anything I can do to help another person achieve their educational goals.

Blog 2 - Denim

Throughout my early lifetime, I often looked at clothing with a sense of indifference. I would wear any types of clothes as long they fit well and weren’t completely atrocious to the eyes. However, as with most people, I started to notice the opposite sex and suddenly my appearance was something that I began to care about more and more. This does not mean that I became obsessive over my clothes, but I began to make more choices when it came to my wardrobe as opposed to letting my parents choose. For the next few years, I felt that I had found a happy medium of wearing comfortable clothes that maintained some sense of style. This viewpoint would carry me into my first couple years of college.

The idea of fashion was something I never put much thought into, often times regarding it as just a hassle when determining what to wear in the morning. However, some of my friends would introduce me to an aspect of fashion that I had never put much thought into. During my earlier years, jeans were just another pair of pants that I could wear when it got cold outside. The only difference between pairs being the shade of blue that they had. Little did I know that the world of nice jeans, or premium denim as it’s usually referred to, had a following that spread worldwide and had created an entire culture behind a relatively simple article of clothing. With premium denim, exclusivity is the name of the game, with some of the more sought after brands being sold only in small boutiques or sometimes only from the manufacturer themselves. However, this obsession in denim does not stop with the brand name. Wearers of high quality denim also place great emphasis on the fit and the wear of their jeans. The fading that occurs on the jeans from regular use is looked upon as medals, something earned from constant wearing of the denim. These various fades have names such as whiskers and honeycombs, which are called such due to their shapes. In order to attain these specific fades, people go through various things in order to improve the fading quality such as not washing the denim for months at a time or washing them in the ocean while wearing them. Although this might seem like a lot, there are still many aspects of the denim culture that have not been addressed in this blog and would probably take many more to even scratch the surface.

In Class Diagnostic

Who I am as a writer is a question I often find myself asking when I am given a writing assignment. This is caused mainly by my belief that I am not a writer and that I do no enjoy writing. To clarify, I do no consider myself a writer in the sense that I do no particularly enjoy transferring my thoughts onto paper or other forms of text. However, I can appreciate the draw some people have towards writing as a means of creating something such as an essay, poem or even a song. For these individuals, writing allows them to construct something tangible to be kept to themselves or to be shared with others. While I fully accept that creating something is a desirable goal, my own preferred method for doing is different. Growing up, I had spent most of my free time playing Legos or building blocks, constructing large towers or small vehicles from Lego pieces. It was something I truly enjoyed to do as a child and is something I still enjoy today. I believe that this love of hands on, physical construction helped to shape my academic career by sparking my interest in the architectural/engineering fields at a young age. Furthermore, I found that I enjoyed my math and science course much more than my English ones. While playing with legos and liking math may seem trivial, they actually played a very important role in creating the person I am today. In order to deal with math problems, one must look at the problem very systematically in order to find the solution. This has carried over into the way I think because when faced with a problem, I more often than not attempt to systematically break down the problem in order to find a solution regardless to the type of problem. This has created a very black and white outlook on life for myself, which sometimes causes problems when the solution may not be so clear-cut.