a personal workshop of trimming things

Fred Jordan Mikhail T. Carnice
The Weekly Sillimanian
December 5, 2007

Trimming is not an easy act. It leaves no room for unstable personal convictions; it requires unyielding fortitude. But the result of lavish trimming can be wonderfully pleasing, though. Here, with my workshop of which I’ll keep mum on how it really works, are three things I think need some trimming.

1. Food
In the October 2007 issue of Reader’s Digest, there’s a short article which states that whenever a measuring tape loses its length once encircling it around the waist, a person has to be alarmed. And I am. Because the article says it’s a ground for a grand heart disease. According to the America Heart Association, everyone must “aim for a waist circumference less than 40 inches for men and 35 for women.” Choice clothing that has just been bought last summer hardly fit me and some of my pants find themselves objecting to be worn; as if I’m not their master. This is tragic for a student who is a disregarded microcosm of a no uniform institution. Nevertheless, I have to trim down my food intake.

Knowing that gluttony is one of the seven deadly sins, I have more reasons why I should stop excessive eating. Also, breaking the habit allows me not to spend too much. My stomach, curiously named “Ben” since grade school, is undeniably getting bigger.

Downfall: There’s no escaping the looming Christmas feast.

2. Weeds
Our university is unquestionably picturesque. But the sad thing is various weeds have marred its stunning look. And it's unfortunate to know that these living litters are responsible to the gradual deterioration of our campus’ reputation, and yet so little action is taken to extract them from our rich soil.

The weeds’ growth may be sluggish, but their ability to proliferate in record-breaking numbers is tremendously shocking. Though these needless things may look different from each other, all have the same, distinct, unifying feature: Pollen. Not that pollen is the only thing that makes people sneeze, but it is the kind that gives a mind-numbing, downcast feeling to the victim who gets a cloudy waft of it. Unfortunately, students are the most common victims of the weeds’ natural self-defence since they are the ones who usually step on them, devastating them with rubber-soled shoes or killer pointed heels. And in some rare cases, these university weeds spew out those powerful pollen particles randomly at students who they think need a bit of subtle punishment. These weeds are one of a kind. The victim, usually assaulted without prior notice, firsts acquires a slight nausea from the pollen that enters the nose. Actually, the brutal process doesn’t end there: upon treading the olfactory territory, the pollen further goes into the brain and gives the person’s mind a hazy feeling of fury, depression, and anxiety but basically this will eventually concretize into a deep sense of shame.

Quite a number of students have daringly tried pulling them out by the roots but the aftermath was so disconcerting and gross that publishing the event for public enlightenment would be impossible because of its disturbingly graphic nature. And there’s one more extraordinary occurrence: the weeds have discovered their means of cultivation, amazingly, inside a person. They have already infiltrated the heads of some big names in campus that it’s no longer novel seeing people around with a glowing, little ball of pollen sticking out from their heads. By the way, I don’t want these weeds trimmed. I want them wiped out from the face of this planet.

3. Letters
Verbosity is a cursed gift. One needs a firm command to justify a piece of written thought that seems to go on for a mile. For me, verbosity is a projection of beauty that must be admired by its inborn power of luring a reader to keep on going—that there’s a possibility to go further and benefit from the unanticipated reading exercise. To be regulated with alleged imperatives (e.g. limits and qualifications) is like halting the continuous flow of a river, the growth of a wild flower that aims to reach the skies, the soft breeze that keeps all living wonders dancing.

Given that cutting the habit is a requisite for me to successfully pass a bachelor’s degree in Creative Writing, I submit to the whims of the public that I must write with regimented shortness.

For in the misunderstood craft of endlessly stitching different words together to form lengthy and so-called grandiose sentences, where antecedents are tagged ambiguous, where verbs and prepositions appear on the scene in both necessary and unnecessary fashion at every possible group of words—especially if the act of writing gets more self-gratifying up to the point that it paves the road for a newfound addiction—and where adjectives tend to lose their identities as specifying elements but instead turn into loud, decorative, grandiloquent pieces that only the likes of William Faulkner, Nick Joaquin, and Gabriel Garcìa Marquez seem to be proud of, the one and truly amazing reward (no matter how large the number of people who are opposed to the whole construction of verbose sentences, even though the shorter version having the same sense may still give the indistinguishable feeling of contentment upon having reached the final destination) is the sight of an unassuming presence of relief, like a lifeboat launched by a sinking ship, which takes the form of a tiny, innocent period.