Maybe I shouldn't have started this blog now, not with everything that's been going on.

About the faculty meeting last Saturday: following are what I deem to be the major points.

First, I was asked during the meeting by Ronnie (and I agreed) to oversee the Commission on Elections from this point on with their work on the Student Council.

For the Interactive Science campus, besides the Sound Tunnel and Periscope, the Dean said that the two Big Ear Parabolic “Microphones” are ready to be installed. David is also in the midst of completing his electronic hundred-meter-dash speedometer.

Due to the increasing number of hired teachers, the faculty room’s computer facilities are proving to be woefully inadequate. So the subsidized or salary-deducted loans for the one-terminal-per-faculty plan will be fast-forwarded.

Last Saturday, “Contact” was shown again on Philippine free TV. The same station already did the same eleven months ago, and back then I assigned my students to watch it, freeing up two hours of class time usually allotted for film-showing.

Not that I’m complaining that they’re repeating movies. For all I care they could show it every year.

Instead of repeating the same quotes that I, um, quoted last year, this time I’ll focus on another aspect of the movie that makes me bow to director Robert Zemeckis’ ability to infuse a lot of heart into whatever novel he adapts to the screen (just like with “Forrest Gump” whose book did not touch me as deeply as the film).

The following exchange happens after the protagonist Jodie “Ellie” Foster’s former superior Drumlin (masterfully played by Tom Skerritt) was picked by the International Machine Consortium to (pardon the pun) man the vehicle. He seized the opportunity that Ellie’s admission of atheism has caused with the group, and in her own words, “told [them] exactly what they wanted to hear” with his proclamations on “his” God, when she told the truth.

It was the last time he would undermine of her efforts on the whole extraterrestrial project, before he died in the Machine’s sabotage.

His final words to her may be seen as an attempt to garner a little sympathy for him along with the sense of loss with the Machine’s destruction, instead of complete vindication that his intentional acts of opposition to her cause made him (in an ironical use of religious text) to reap what he sowed. After all, a bigger villain was waiting in the wings in the person of National Security Adviser Michael (James Woods) Kitz.

DAVID DRUMLIN: Ellie, I know you must think this is all really unfair. Maybe that's an understatement. What you don't know is that I agree. I wish the world were a place where fair was the final line, where the kind of idealism you showed at the hearing was rewarded, not taken advantage of. Unfortunately, we don't live in that world.

ELLIE: Funny, I've always believed that the world is what we make of it.

That’s something to think about until next time. Class Dismissed.