Bound in blue blood

Ateneo will be turning 150 in 2009 and in preparation, the admin has been making rounds in the corporate world and holding alumni gatherings in select companies. Our office just had one tonight and well, it's really effective in making us swell with school pride. From the lowest staff to the supervisors and VPs -- everyone was proud to be blue.

With Father Ben's inspiring speech, the Ateneo choir's chorus, Father Dacanay's invocation, and a nostalgia-incuding video presentation, you can practically feel the school spirit pulsing heavily in the room. After being buried with banking terms and statistics for months on end, it was refreshing to remember what it feels like to be part of something more lively and communal. Hearing those familiar words again -- magis, "men for others", social responsibility, phenomenology -- you can't help but feel proud and homesick to be an Atenean. Makes you realize that there should be more to life than work. Dammit, Ateneo can inspire like no other. Oh and Father Ben rocks.

Of course our fervor is greatly fueled by our recent win and by the anticipation for the upcoming game on Sunday. Nothing can bring out the roaring blue-hued passion than an Ateneo and La Salle basketball game. And guess what the organizers did? They handed out tickets as game prizes! Forget the "men for others" mantra, it was every man for himself at that point.

And there was a funny part during the questions game. The question was "What is the name of building that houses the student organizations?" Someone correctly answered Manny V. Pangilinan Student Center For Leadership -- a building that just opened last year. The audience booed at this answer and began chanting the former student org building: CO-LAY-CO, CO-LAY-CO. heh. The MVP center might be a newer, spiffier building, but for almost everyone, dilapidated Colayco is THE student org center. And if anything else, Colayco has a much cooler name.

After the games, the event was over too soon and in those short hours, it was successful in doing what it was set out to do, which was to reconnect with the alumni. They wanted to engage the alumni especially the younger ones since the earliest they would usually interact with a batch is on the 10 year reunion.

But then again school spirit is not hard to ignite. A paraphrase of an Atenean VP's ending speech: "Everyday in our work we use the colors red and white to represent ourselves. In meeting clients, in giving out business cards, in our daily jobs, we exhibit the red and white colors. But deep down, there's a blue flame inside all of us that's burning brightly - a blue flame that can never be extinguished... We believe."

One big fight.