High School Life

The resident-genius of our high school class (now a UP professor) noted the other day that last year was the fifteenth anniversary of our graduation (or emancipation) from high school. Usually, similar thoughts would bring back memories which would make one wax nostalgic about those halcyon years. Usually.

Instead, we remembered, among others:

- "Our beloved Alma Mater," pronounced as "mey-ter" every single fucking morning before class. Imagine my surprise when during my very first day in college, I learned that except for the graduates of our fine institution, everybody else in the known universe reads it as, well, "mater."

- "Uulitin ko. Ayoko nang paulit-ulit." Out of respect for the woman's wishes, enough said.

- "Love is a feeling that you can feel." Yes. It was a lesson we learned. In class.

- "Sol mi mi mi sol fa mi fa la do ti la la sol sol." How I still remember the notes to the first two lines of this song almost sixteen years after the fact is beyond me. Specially if you consider that, almost sixteen years ago, I refused to sing the goddamn notes (I supposedly got a 75 for that). After sixteen years, nothing has changed. That exercise remains utterly stupid and senseless, and still contributes absolutely nothing to the mass of human knowledge.

- My ghost-written column. The adviser of the school paper probably thought that he can write better than a high school student (he was wrong), giving him the temerity to write a column under my name. I was actually more humiliated for being credited with such a pathetic display of a total lack of aptitude in writing, than pissed for his having replaced my real column with trash. He tried to do it again for the second issue, but let's just say that I was more prepared the second time around.

We could have come up with a much longer list, if not for the number of acts of slander we noticed we were both already committing. So, here's to the fourth batch of "our beloved alma mey-ter." Cheers.