My previous Creative Writing adviser was a freak of a warp-drive-propelled space-time travel. He came from a parallel universe where all advisers were stupid.

"Do you recall his name?" my current adviser tells me.

I forget.

"What does he look like?" she says, eyes squinting, her fleshy cheeks crawling up her lower eyelids.

Pudgy. Short and fat, his belly one step ahead. Semi kalbo. His face in a permanent derisive scowl.

She mentions a name and I say no. Her eyebrows knot momentarily then her eyes light up. Another name.

Yes, I say. That's him. The culprit. The source of all my academic worriments. Funny word, worriments.

She laughs in a high strung note and frowns.

A gaunt and pimply student flops his ass beside me at the panel table. His face is greasy, with bumps and pits sprayed with the colors black, yellow, and white. He's brought a walking mannequin who's apparently his mother.

I tell my adviser Prof. Permanent Derisive Scowl approved my Political Science and Information Technology class enlistments decades ago. For GE, General Education.

The Pimply Student butts in, "How do I know the course equivalent of my previous subjects?"

My adviser excuses herself and shifts to Mr. Pimply. "Just read the course description," she tells him. "But besides that you'd have to take an exam for each subject to credit the course."

Mr. Pimply's mother's eyes, they're wild with anger and confusion. Her eyes say, "But my son studied in a private school with six-figure tuition fees! There's no way you cannot not credit his subjects!"

Written on the paper before Mr. Pimply, it says the word "transferee". Three or four pages, they're all filled with the subjects he took from his previous school.

I wanted to tell him, Hey. I was a transferee too. Don't bother crediting those subjects. None of them will be approved. Yes, zero credits, all of them. No, nothing, nada, zilch.

But I shut my mouth. I just can't spare him the time, effort, running around, paying for processing fees, and wrestling with multiple choice, enumeration, identification, and essay exams.

He has got to go through all those bullshit I did.

I call this my revenge.

My choice of doing nothing.

Then again, who gives a flying potato monster.

Then again, maybe I'm just a failure.

My adviser turns to me and says, "Your Information Technology subject can be credited as your Departmental Elective." Her eyeballs roll over my checklist of subjects. "But as for Political Science, I'm afraid it won't be credited."

The study of governments around Planet Earth. Complicated little systems of complicated little earthlings. Bicameral system, marxism, partizanship, elite theory, plebiscite, keynesian economics, proletariat, civil disobedience, checks and fucking balances, isolationism, nuclear proliferation.

All those fucking stupid fucking terms that all mean bullshit.

I haven't a smidgen of interest in Political Science, but hey I swallowed it. I chewed every chapter with five mugs of coffee every night and roved the earth the following day as a vampire-zombie-mummy-pirate rolled into one. (WTF pirate.XD) I chewed them terms and concepts and swallowed them down with caffeine and flushed them down the john.

The only term that osmosed and retained in my memory is anarchy.

Anarchism
A theory that equality and justice are to be sought through the abolition of the state and the substitution of free agreements between individuals. Central to anarchist thought is the belief that society is natural and that people are good but are corrupted by artificial institutions. Also central in anarchism are the belief in individual freedom and the denial of any authority, particularly that of the state, that hinders human development. Since the Industrial Revolution, anarchists have also opposed the concentration of economic power in business corporations.

The sad fact is: Political Science is for faggot deskpersons.

But really, this Permanent Derisive Scowl person is to blame. My previous adviser, he approved everything I enlisted, including this Political Science crap that is a waste of brain cells.

And my Latin courses, I tell my current adviser. I've taken six units of Latin and three units of Spanish.

"You are aware you have to take twelve units of the same Foreign Language course," she says.

But Foreign Languages offer only six units of Latin. Is that my problem?

"Yes, that's your problem."

But Prof. Permanent Derive Scowl approved both my Latin 10 and 11 subjects in both separate instances and mentioned nothing.

"You'd have to talk to the Coordinator of the Creative Writing Program."

But really, the only reason I took Classical Latin was to read Virgil's Aeneid in its original untranslated form. But I don't tell her that.

"So you mean," Mr. Pimply's mother butts in. Her eyelids are artificially folded, cheeks contoured, lips siliconed and greased with lipstick. "You mean my son has to take exams for all these subjects?" She taps a manicured fingernail at her son's papers.

Listen here Mother of All Mannequins. You open your mouth when it's your fucking turn. Shut up when it's mine. It's a little courtesy law you'd have to abide to. It's called Fucking Etiquette, understand.

Essentially, this adviser who comes from the real world and not from the mirror universe Prof. Permanent Derisive Scowl came from, she's telling me I'd have to chuck out my Latin credits and take Spanish 11, 12, and 13.

Latin 10 and 11, plus Political Science tossed in the drain, all of them swirling towards the sewerage of oblivion.

Thank you soooooooo much Professor Permanent Derisive Scowl person. The universe could've been better if you kept your opinion to yourself. For the betterment of the society, I suggest you get a blade and cut the carotid on your neck, the ones which supplies blood into your brain. Better yet, jam a ballpoint stainless steel pen into your butt and jam that pen into an electric socket. That way you'd die with your pants down and your butt up the wall with your eyes wide open and all your hair standing on ends. Nobody would want to talk about how you died. But it was very sad, really. And disturbing.

This Permanent Derisive Scowl person, he wrote a book called Playing Safe. It's a Young Adult novel the same category Harry Potter, Twifuckinglight, Hardy Boys, and Nancy Drew belong to.

I just don't know how he got this book published. If it in any way passed the board of "Creative Writing", the board of directors must've inhaled the LSD peppered in between its pages.

For one, the plot is a disaster. It's about an average college student undergoing the thunderstorm of college life. There's his pie slice for sports, for academics, for love life, for family and friends, all of them forming one whole half-baked pie made of platypus shit. There's no real problem, no real motivation, no real course of action, no real destiny. All them events are murky and uncharted and un-predetermined.

Two. The character is a characterless, two-dimensional, bland, unsavory, tasteless, formless humongous gunk of booger.

Three. The tone is beyond BLAH, the same way you'd flatly describe an apple as red.

I have no idea how his book got into my course's reading list. His book was ejected from the same parallel universe where all published books are tormentingly DULL.

School! Oh joy!XD

Classes for the next semester:

• Archaeology (Does this include the study of dinosaurs? No wait that's paleontology.XP)
• Kasaysayan (Fuck this subject! I ran out of options, mind.)
• Comparative Literature 150 (Study of Palanca winning entrees during the Medieval Philippines, particularly short stories written in English.)
• Comparative Literature 151 (Study of the modern winning entrees in the Palanca.)
• Creative Writing 110 (Traditional fiction writing. Hemingway and Poe and Salinger and stuff. Not to mention Paz Marquez-Benitez, NVM Gonzales, Nick Joaquin and all them dead Filipino writers. Fuck you all non-creative writing majors filling up the slots in the past semesters! Gaaaaaaaaah!)
• Creative Writing 130 (Playwriting! Horrors, I shall have to be a dramatist like that drunken sodomizing bard Shakespeare.)

And a PE subject I haven't enlisted for just yet. Sports Climbing or Chess oh paleeeaaase enlist meeeeeeeeeeeeh!XP

Prof. Permanent Derisive Scowl is Jurassic Fart in the flesh.

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