The Dean's Office of the College of Arts and Letters of UP Dilimas has just informed me that, yes, I passed the three comprehensive exams I took on Western Literature, Asian Literature in English, and Philippine Literature in English. As I've blogged before, each exam lasted for eight hours and was spread over a period of two weeks. This is for my Ph.D. in English (Major in Creative Writing). I have just recovered from the shell-shock of the review process (I had to read tons of books in a month) and from the mental process of digesting all those books and writing a coherent, 50-page compendium of answers for each of the three fields of expertise. Since I answered each question in single space, that meant I wrote 100 pages of answers for every field in the exam. Atleast now, I can be assured of 300 pages of lecture notes for my future classes in these fields of expertise. And since Bacardi One, a group of young gay men, will have a party tomorrow and has invited Ang Ladlad, the...