In Deep Profoundness (Department of Redundancy Department)

April 18, 2007 22:10

You’re in UP because you can think and speak for yourself by your own wits and on your own two feet. And you can do so, no matter what the rest of the people in the room may be thinking. You are in UP because no one can tell you to shut up if you have something sensible and vital to say. You are in UP because you dread not in the poverty of material comforts but the poverty of the mind. You are in UP because you care about something abstract and sometimes as treacherous as the idea of “nation” even if it kills you. –Dr. Jose Dalisay, Jr.

I was one of the very few iskolar ng bayan—or maybe let’s generalize it and say ‘college students’—who have a weird sense of what if I didn’t go to the university I am actually in. It’s not that I regret that I chose UP over Ateneo or UST—it’s just because… not one semester had passed ever since I got here that I got a ‘perfect’ semester to say the least.

What do I mean?

For one, I already incurred two INCs for the past four regular semesters I am here in UP, and then my name magically disappeared from the official class list of my first ever 1.0-grade class. And then just last semester, out of sheer carelessness and tension for the Cres101 grades haven’t come out yet and the agony of a five-hour wait for those grades, I wrote Comm140 instead of Comm141 in my Form5 and had to redo the process all over again to correct my fugly mistake.

It’s really just so… irritating.

And then just this semester, my professor in Comm141 is taking a bit longer to release our grades. To think she was already way past the deadline. I’m just so freaking tired of seeing that blank space next to the Comm141 subject, and then the INC next to my Art Studies1 (which I am taking forever to complete, by the way).

I want a car. (And I just blurted this out.)

Last sembreak, I came across the booklet that they give to those students who took entrance exams at Ateneo. I browsed through it, slept with that booklet covering my face, and it was the first thing I read as soon as I woke up. Sorry to say, but I was thinking how was my life if I went to Ateneo. Maybe we’re even more broke—oh yeah, care to remind me?—and maybe I need to update myself to their standards. (Excuse me to Atenians. I’m making it clear here that I don’t have anything against you guys.)

I’m here on the verge of my what ifs. Not good, don’t you think? Wallowing in the what-could-have-been instead of enjoying what I have now. Hell, the tuition fee of other private schools in one semester could very well fund my education for two degrees or maybe even three—four even?

And then I have always wondered if I went to Holy Spirit instead of Tarlac Montessori, but then again… I wouldn’t have met my fantabulous batchmates if not for that. Come to think of it, maybe I wouldn’t have been too bitter in my freshman year in college because of a dude back in high school if I went into an all-girls school, don’t you think?

Argh.

I can’t just move on and get over this because I need frigging closure.