This week was undoubtedly the busiest and most stressful I’ve ever been in college so far. On average I got about three to four hours of sleep per night and two to three cups of coffee for each, and for every hour that I kept myself awake, I had no choice but to be doing something. The number of requirements wasn’t the least bit fairly proportional to the number of hours I had to meet their deadlines, even if I did exclude the possibility of sleep. It was a nightmare. I started off the week already wanting it to end.

And here I am now. When I woke up this Saturday morning, I almost felt like crying the moment I realized I just had a good, undisturbed, and much deserved twelve-hour sleep. I checked through Tumblr and Twitter and blasted impossibly loud rock music to celebrate, despite everything, my survival of this week. I read some of the works from Heights’ First Regular Folio, and I ate cake, I had spaghetti. All I want to do for the rest of this day—is nothing.

But I know the truth. Just because Hell Week is over doesn’t mean the semester is, and that’s another reason why I am here, just at home, missing out on some things that perhaps part of me will regret. On September 25 alone, I have a party with my fourth year high school classmates (which is happening right now, by the very same seconds I am typing these words), an eighteenth birthday party of one of my blockmates, and an Awards Night in Katipunan for Loyola Film Circle’s BlueScreen7. It came to mind some time ago that, at the very least, I should attend one of these; in fact I want to attend all of them. But for the three awesome events I could be preparing for right now, I have three novels to read. I have more papers to write and projects to finish, assignments to accomplish and finals to study for. I dread the possibility of another Hell Week because I brought it upon me myself.

I’ve learned enough before this—the hard way, too—that if I want to be doing anything, I have to stop doing everything else, and this is it. I hate being the grade-conscious loser in all of this, but I need the hours. They are much too rare to spend doing anything else.

I’ll say hello to my three darn novels.

It’s strange how much I feel like I’ve missed out for the past several weeks. When I had the time to think about it, I realized that I hadn’t seen a movie—in cinema or at home—since Inception back in July, which was well over a month ago. Maybe even two months. And I had to stop reading my book, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, for about an entire week or so, just to make time for my academics. (It paid off though, since I passed the midterms.) Even my iPod was being neglected for a while, and, of all things, it was music I expected never to neglect.

But the long weekend is a chance to make up for lost opportunities, and I’m excited to finally be doing things that I actually enjoy doing: watching movies, reading books, listening to music, and of course, sleeping. (In fact, I kind of just woke up from a long afternoon nap.)

Last night I started up with Breaking Bad season one, an amazingly awesome and epic television drama series about a high school chemistry teacher who decides to sell meth with his former student in order to secure his family’s financial future after he finds out he has lung cancer. (Right? Awesome.) I also saw the first movie I’ve seen since July, Rushmore, released back in 1998 and directed by Wes Anderson—which was quirky and wonderful; I had been putting that off for a while now. As for the rest of today, all I did was make playlists and mixes, and considering the productivity levels of my hours-long mix-making this afternoon, this day, all in all, was pretty fruitful.

I had made a setlist for a percussion band that would be playing on my 18th birthday. They had played for my brother’s birthday last year, and they were absolutely fantastic—even my grandmother like them, and she isn’t one for extremely loud music. For my party (because I refuse to call it a “debut”), they agreed to play my personal song suggestions, and so I now have 19 tracks of awesome, energetic music of various rock genres, spinning from electronic rock to indie to downright metal. I think they can all somehow be played on percussion, so I hope they’ll be able to play them.

I also started making what could be my favorite among all the mixes I’ve ever done, tentatively titled “The Front Lines.” The mix is a story, actually, about the pains and sufferings of a soldier who has to go to war and leave behind his loved ones, how he has to go on no matter what happens and no matter what he loses, otherwise he’ll never come back. It isn’t done yet, but I’m so happy with how it’s sounding so far. I’m excited to start doing the cover art and everything.

Now I’m compiling and sequencing more than a hundred tracks for the general setlist of my 18th, and it seems to be getting somewhere, haha. It looks like I haven’t done anything this entire day aside from listening to music and sleeping on my own accord—but after several weeks of brutal academics and my personal share of both achievements and disappointments, I wouldn’t have it any other way. I wish the days would always look like this.

Extremely Loud

Everything I felt in reading this book was all part of a project of unstoppable storytelling and relentless invention that sometimes I can’t even believe it. The ideas in this book are so new, so fresh, and so brilliant that the fact that they work together as a seamlessly written novel is scary. As a reader, I’ve never encountered anything like this before, and the boldness of imagination is something I will inevitably remember it for.

But make no mistake, what is also blatant and apparent (without necessarily shoving inventiveness down your throat) is the novel’s wit and humor. The cleverness of Oskar Schell, our brilliant and likeable nine-year old protagonist, made me smile and laugh, but puzzled me at the same time. The funny side to the book was downright awesome, and the humor did its job. I remember reading this book in a quiet study hall one afternoon, and there were parts of it when I literally had to hold in laughter because I would end up looking like a retard laughing at nothing and disrupting the silence. Because for as much as I wanted to laugh in this book, it was as much as a baby has to cry.

Incredibly Close

Knowing the heart of every character in the novel was an amazing experience as a reader. In Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, this is what the writer gives you: an extremely rare look into the complicated feelings and overlooked lives of the characters and their personal tragedies, that to almost listen to them speak, no holds barred and no restrictions from themselves, is more than I could even ask for. I became so drawn to and enthralled by the musings of these characters that, to be completely honest, I felt personally privileged as a reader to know such private and intimate details of who they are—to peer over their shoulder and somehow understand their world.

The interconnectedness of the characters is one thing I love about this book, and I also appreciate how, for every character’s action, there is always an evident reason for why it happens that way. Sometimes there are instances when a character does something but the writer doesn’t give us any reason for it at first, but that is only because, eventually, when the reasons are revealed, they are often truly rewarding. So while I appreciate how these initially ambiguous incidents eventually unfold with the reasons for how they are, I more so appreciate how the author gives the readers a sense of promise in this uncertainty, that whatever is happening now will be made right in the end—and that’s what keeps us reading. Moreover, the author never tells us the reasons; he shows them, making up the brilliance of his writing. In a nutshell, the story is just so well-written, without cliché or contrivance, with great thought and obvious care, that it comes out pretty much as flawless: Never a ruined moment.

Heavy Boots

I could only wish more books were like this. It affected me in a way that no other book ever has and perhaps ever will. Foer’s second novel is truly a miracle, and I hate using that word so it’s probably true. There were a handful of times while reading the book that I literally had to stop: to close the book, close my eyes, and recover. Certain parts of the book were so emotionally draining (in the best possible way) that it was necessary to recuperate from such intensity. The story was delivered so powerfully yet so elegantly, a coming together of style and substance as Foer carefully and intelligently employs the method of visual writing.

What I loved about this book was that I could feel rather than think. It made me laugh, cry, smile, gasp, feel like I would hyperventilate, cry even more—and it moved me. There was a seamlessness to his writing that everything else died down. Nothing else mattered but what I read on the page, and all that transcended to my being was pure emotion. This novel pulled me apart, but at the very same time, somehow put me together: A singular experience of quite literally feeling everything. It was as if I myself was wearing Oskar’s heavy boots—but with the heaviness always came a lightness of being, and because of this novel, I almost felt myself soar.