A totally BIG project

God's grace is really humbling and uplifting.


Last week, Sir Paolo gave me an emphatic NO to my thesis proposal. It was about deconstruction of heroes through character sketch and profiling. I hit rock bottom. I was speechless for a while, trying hard to swallow the reality that what I thought as the best project was rejected. To add to that, he lectured me on not knowing my subject - my love, creative non-fiction. It was devastating.


Giving up is not in my vocabulary. I then prayed real hard about it, asking God to just grant me strength to endure the trial, to embrace it and allow it to teach a fast-becoming sluggard like me. You see, I love reading. But because my course is literature, everything I read is required. And I hated it. I really don't like it when my passion, my way of de-stressing would become a requirement. The idea of it relaxing me is long gone. It actually stresses me out.


But because reading is what I love to do, it did not take long for me to get back on track. Yesterday, I did a lot of researching. I borrowed creative non-fiction books and actually read all of the four books plus the one that I own well before midnight. This morning, after having been backed with so many facts, I knew what I wanted to do.


I decided to show the types of social commentary in creative non-fiction. I definitely love profiling and it is handled very well by Kerima Polotan and Sylvia Mayuga in the essays entitled Love Never Gives Up and The Rise and Fall of Pasay. Mayuga also used the letter type. In her book entitled A Spy in My Own Country, she wrote Letter from Ermita wherein the place Ermita is supposedly writing to two persons about the condition of the Philippines. Conrado de Quiros and Randy David pretty much handle satire very well what with their broad knowledge of current issues and their implications. All of these I presented to Sir Paolo just this afternoon complete with information and my own analyses of every article. He, finally, said yes to my proposal.


The thing is, he wanted me to trace the origin of each and compare each article with another, of course, both being in the same sub-genre. It is quite a big project, lots of reading and writing to do excluding the analyses of each essay. I would be examining at least a hundred essays and at most a hundred and fifty. Notwithstanding the fact that I would have to read the history of each sub-genre.


I believe that God is with me when I started and He will finish this with a bang. I am definitely excited. Imagine what God can do!