With no signs of having an internet connection until next month, it’s safe to say that yes, this blog’s thirst for regular updates will not be quenched just yet. Unnecessary figures of speech aside, I felt it’s just right that I post something at least. I dunno…anything. I’m hoping it’d be nothing like the last entry though, which was a direct result of beer and, well…pain. Just something to assure myself and the few readers I’ve got (I have reason to believe that there’s more than one, but definitely not over five) that yes, I am indeed still alive.
And that was an hour long pause since the last paragraph. The juices aren’t exactly flowing right now. But then again I am not well-known for my creativity—or the lack thereof. So maybe I should write something that doesn’t require any of it. Something with an autobiographical feel should do it, since I’m a stranger to most of the five (or four) readers that I’ve got anyway. It’s settled then…
I’m the eldest of five children, not counting the half sibling panganays my dad fathered—of which I’m the youngest (I know the two others, but I heard there are actually four or five of us). It’s kinda neat when you think about it: I get to be the youngest and the eldest at the same time. I was always cool about it, though. Especially while growing up knowing that I’ve always been my dad’s favorite. I was the only one he personally took care of. I’m not quite sure how that came about, but my dad’s aunt told me he always said I was the one who got his brains. While I doubt that I inherited my dad’s almost uncanny intelligence, what my lola said really does explain a lot about how he raised me.
My father taught me how to read when I was three. I don’t think my brain had much to do with it, though…the ruler my dad hit me with whenever I failed to make out a word correctly was probably the main reason I learned fast. Up to now, I never really found anything cruel with his methods, and am in fact thankful that he put me through what he did. I enjoyed being able to read immensely…I’d read everything within my sight: magazines, billboards, and bottle labels; and besting the househelp at spelling always made me feel good about myself when I was a kid.
Being pre-school’s most promising and best student was cake. Grade school was easier than most videogames I never got around to finishing. At one point when I was in first grade, I had the audacity to tell my parents that school bored me and I didn’t want to go anymore…they let me quit with the condition that I go again the following year. Awesome, yes? During this time, my family moved to Dumaguete, where my mother was originally from. I took my second crack at school, enrolling in Silliman University, what a lot of people still consider today to be one of the best in the region and even the country. Of course, like the first time, it bored me. And I never shied away from showing my disinterest. I was notorious among the teachers as the student who never took down notes—something I would never get around to doing my entire life as a student—and filled my notebooks instead with doodles. I can remember how one student teacher, her name now forgotten, blushed and pretended not to notice anything out of the ordinary except the absence of notes when she came upon a page of cartoony penises.
Despite of my shenanigans though, I made it a point not to let my grades suffer or I will get a serious beating from my dad. What I lost to notes and attendance (I had almost total freedom to not go to school at all if I didn’t feel like it), I made up for in everything else. I can be absent for days at a time then show up for a long test and ace it, thanks to my love for reading. I’d put the better students to shame by joining quiz bees and beat them while laughing the entire time at my buddies in the audience as they made monkey faces when they thought nobody was looking. I knew I was no genius, but I was silently thankful that my peers were less intelligent than I was. That probably isn’t true, of course, especially when I take our present lives into consideration. But that was how I truly felt back then.
It was really fun. But, like all things, it had to come to an end. What I didn’t know was all the while, my family was undergoing financial troubles. The fact that my parents lived apart probably didn’t help either. My dad, who was having an affair which my mother has always known about, moved out. But this was something that never really affected me. It was a relief to have all the fighting and screaming at home stop.
But we were screwed. Things got so bad that I never got to finish 4th grade.
To be continued…
This entry’s title doesn’t really mean anything. I just remember having read it off an album by the band, TEETH ages ago.
