a quarter century gone

in the past twenty-five years of my seemingly sitcom-worthy life, i have had, to my knowledge (sober knowledge):

seven homes i have never knowingly vandalized,

no car (in my name), the car i dinged the side of on the pillar of eastwood parking place (of all places) not mine,

five schools unlucky enough to have accepted me and thus committed to providing me with an education (though not necessarily the best education, as my earlier whining posts have shown), a high school degree, a college degree, and i hope soon to follow a law degree,

one father who torments me and thus far has been my role model when it comes to having ambition, having direction, enjoying the simpler things in life, and drinking a lot. a father i admire and love, and from time to time torment with off-color remarks, sarcasm i inherited from him, financial and academic disasters, and other miscellaneous drama associated with having a crazy daughter with a penchant for getting into trouble,

a mother i wish i could say a lot of nice things about,

five sisters of various shapes and sizes, all of us with the same eyes and smiles, with whom i have had plenty of fights and plenty of nice bonding time tormenting our aforementioned beleaguered father, who i love and cherish in spite of all things bad, because of all things good that they are,

two nephews (i wish were born to any other sister but the one they were born to, but i hope will serve as her chance for redemption) who are the light of our lives and the bane of our existence,

a LOT of cousins (my dad has nine brothers and sisters, my mother, five. go figure)

two grandmothers ( having lost my maternal grandfather to a plane crash before i was born, and having lost my beloved paternal grandpappy seven years ago) who in the twlight of their years are as beautiful as ever,

friends i have had for years, and hope to keep forever,

friends newly made, and also hope to keep forever,

friends who have sadly been lost to disagreement and fundamental differences,

enemies i could do without,

blockmates who have taught me perseverance in the face of adversity, shown me beauty in diversity, and recognition of wonderful opportunities,

old boyfriends who have made my life miserable and happy and strange, some of whom are my friends, some i would rather relegate to that little part of my brain i unlovingly refer to as blemishes on my resume,

a boyfriend i truly adore and admire and hope to keep for a long time to come, who has made me happy and sad (more happy than sad), and who i hope will keep me, who drives me home every night just to see me, who i annoy and disturb and crank call.


bad dreams, good dreams, songs i would like to listen to all day, memories of happy and sad moments, books i would like to take with me to the end of days, things i've written of what i've experienced, a perfect sun i once watched set on a beautiful day, a night without stars i drank and danced away, things i have lost and never found, opportunities i missed and always regretted, knowledge of things i never knew i would have.

twenty five years of stupidity and brilliance, of dull and shiny bright, of happiness and misery, of love and not love, of having and losing, of existing in an eternally unpredictably shaky plane.

i could've done with a lot less misery, but on the whole, it's been a great thing, really.

i don't know what the next quarter century holds for me, or if i even have a quarter century to go. but i hope it will be with the people i love, with more wisdom than i have lived the past years, and with more happiness.

room to breathe

this place is truly sucking the life out of me. not that there was a lot of it to spare in the first place.

considering that i'm not now nor have i ever been a ray of sunshine, the happiness that i used to derive from being here, doing what i grew up thinking i was supposed to do, was something that i, in many ways, wanted to preserve.

but these past few months have slowly drained me of that happiness. the people, the things i'm learning (or not learning), the general atmosphere of high school pettiness. these things have all combined to-at last-make me question if what i think i'm getting out of this place (i.e. the prestige of the place, the knowledge that i am learning under [some] of the best professors alive, the idea that somewhere over the rainbow i might actually be compensated for the torture i have put up with) is worth it. worth waiting in the rain for transportation. worth staying up late, or forgoing sleep. worth getting sick every other week and never really getting well.

worth waking up for in the morning. because at night when i struggle to sleep it doesn't help that i know what it is i'm waking up to.

being made aware that you can't really measure up, even if you wanted to. that even if in moments of magnanimity and honesty you acknowledge that being latak and alcoholic has helped dragged your not so beautiful average down, to be complete in that honesty there must also be the acknowledgment that most of the time you are at the mercy (or no mercy to be exact) of professors who may or may not let their biases, be it against you (your politics, your height, weight, presence or absence of makeup, clothes, voice, grammar, etc), your block, your batch as a whole, or anger at a poorly prepared cup of coffee, or a pair of shoes they didn't get to buy, or their candidate for something not getting the post, affect the grades they give you.

not that there haven't been those truly excellent professors (in my admittedly biased opinion) who truly teach, and are very very good at it. there have been many, in my mixed list of the super nice and the super terrifying, all identical in the most important sense. that they teach. and you learn.

and there are the people. the people who just can't let go. who've let their anger at my sister carry over to me, who've let my very frank mouth get in the way of their tranquillity, who just can't live without dragging other people down.

some jerk (whose god damned student number in this god damned university is like a year shy of my HIGH SCHOOL student number, whose subjects and verbs can't seem to agree like they should've been taught to him in freaking elementary (it's "they don't", not "they doesn't", you mongoloid freakazoid trying hard snivelling little weasel), who actually had the nerve to go around saying crap about me and then lecture me on the values of graduating on time. talk about weird shit.

i might be latak, and i might be a five away from goodbye law, but my subjects and verbs are so agreeable they drink together, and if all goes well (i make the grade) and i actually decide to stay, i'll only be delayed a year. ONE YEAR. for the FIRST TIME in my academic life.

gah. the people they let in here.

don't get me wrong. the fact that i'm here is miracle enough. and i've always been thankful for it. i wasn't an honor student in undergrad, i never seemed to be a candidate for most likely to enter UP LAW (considering that two years ahead of me not even the university valedictorian of UP Manila managed to get in, and had to settle for being bitter and anti-up in makati). it always seemed to me that the only thing that got me in (though getting a respectable score in the lae helped) was my father's sheer force of will. his desire to see me, maybe not the smartest or prettiest of us five daughters, but the craziest, and the most like him, in the place that gave him the opportunity to be the person he is now, and gave him the chance to ensure that all of us had the best possible lives. and really, i've always been thankful for that will, and in the past two and a half years, in moments of doubt, i have used his will as my anchor.

but somehow, now, today. it doesn't seem to be enough.

and i don't think even my father's will for me can save the day.