Slip of the Pen

The UP Oblation wearing the sablay.

Amidst the flurry of literary contests and omnipresent work, I’m glad I was able to pin down this day — April 23 — as a day important enough to be written about.

It helped that the world dropped me not-so-subtle hints for the past weeks. Towards the end of March, the marching music emanating from the public elementary school a block away from our house was the first clue. The TV adverts with toga-wearing teens were the second. The sunflowers tirelessly waving hi (or f*ck-you, depending on your world view) and lining UP Diliman’s University Avenue were another. Just two days ago, the last hint beeped me into complete awareness — an SMS message from a dear UP friend and classmate, inviting me to his grad dinner.

Yes, you got it right — last year, April 23, 2006, I graduated from college, from childhood, and from a life guided in part by exam grades and semestral marks, all in one fell swoop. It was like emerging anew from the womb, where all men begin their lives enjoying warmth, comfort, and security in its confines. Yet, the womb is a place that confines.

So, how was my first year of being an out-of-school youth? (Oops, wrong wording.) To put it in three analogies:

1. The feeling a Catholic gets when he confesses his sins to a priest after ten years of self-confession (or worse, non-confession).
2. The feeling a child gets when he hits the “teen” years, which are nothing more than fancy kilometer signs down the road.
3. The feeling a man gets when he slips off the condom and does It without it for the first time after countless sensation-less nights.

The three analogies in three words:

1. I
2. am
3. happy.

Not perfectly happy; humans find all sorts of ways to destroy their own happiness, as is the case with me. The past year could’ve been better; still, I’m mightily pleased with it.

All because I chose to do what I wanted to do, to heck with the fact that almost all of my batch mates entered multinational companies, sported job titles that befit a UP Computer Science graduate, got assured of benefits a freelancer like me can only dream of, and even earned numerous trips abroad while I never left the house.

I chose to do what I wanted to do — write.

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Ever since I became a work-from-home problogger and freelance writer, I’ve rarely endured weeks that totally sap the life-force out of my sickness-prone body. Those weeks were the fare in UP, where I was continually battered by exams, extra-curricular responsibilities, and part-time work (not to mention the arduous commute!).

Sadly, just one year after graduating from college, it seems I’ve lost my resistance to fatigue. As I write this, I’m recovering from five day’s worth of coughs, chills, wheezes, snot, and whatnot. You can thank the last week of March 2007 for those.

This blog post is my way of paying homage to that tortuous week.

The Essay Contest Prize

A thick wad of GCs = a thick pile of unread books.

The first ‘activity’ of the week involved going to National Book Store’s headquarters at Mandaluyong to claim my prize for the If My Life Were a Book essay writing contest.

Located at Pioneer Street near EDSA, the giant bookstore chain’s HQ wasn’t a physically impressive structure from outside. I expected something grander, but heck, when I stepped in, I wasn’t also expecting to see one of the country’s most venerable figures — no other than Socorro Ramos, founder of NBS!

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