One time, during my early years in elementary school, we were sent home with a form from our guidance counselors that requested our parents to identify the traits which best described their daughter’s character. Reading through the document, there were words even a child in kindergarten would know—hard-working, thoughtful, friendly—but there was one word which then had been a big word for me: quick-tempered.
So I asked my mother what it meant and she tried her best to describe the word by giving a scenario when one becomes quick-tempered. Surely she must’ve painted a picture of a fairly regular guy becoming a monster at the slightest of slights. I couldn’t quite remember what the example had been but the instant she gave me a sense of what it was, I knew I was indeed hot-blooded. She immediately dismissed the thought in my head saying, “it’s not a nice thing to have,” but the next day when I pried open the form which she had carefully stapled close the night before, there it was—a tiny check mark right before the word, a confirmation when I was still eight years old that do not take things sitting down.
This distant memory led me to think—as with my usual fashion—about when I had started becoming this way or that. For instance, I wrote some years ago: “This what I’ve become: I am skeptical; nasty; quiet, contemplative, brooding; always jumping ahead, most times taking the wrong way; often reminiscing and thoughtful; weird; content at perpetually seeking; between things and lists and to-do’s, a bunny rabbit kind of girl; busy at finding her un-busy; taking time in hurrying things up; angry, playing favorites, but loving all the same.” Complex, isn’t it? But what is more complicated is that I am trying to find a point in those early years that led to me to the point in my adult life when I wrote that statement to this point right now when I am analyzing what could have happened if I had gone a different direction during that first turning point. But then I came to realize, heck—what’s the point?
Some things do not change.
I loved the drama ever since I was three—buckets down my cheeks whenever my mother gave me lickin’. And now, at 33, I still revel in the drama which is my life. I am its lead character anyway, the spotlight’s on me and the cameras have never stopped rolling.
I attacked a classmate with an umbrella at the age of four. He had a puppy dog crush on me and he enjoyed giving me a lot of attention, a thing I always resisted from those I do not like. Believe me, I still feel the need to jab sharp objects during many instances of my adult life though I have acquired restraint these days, an exclusively grown-up concept and a notion that will be challenging to explain to a pre-school kid.
I was a perfectionist at nine years old, repeating projects to the point of being pointless, yanking evenly-spaced blanket stitches so that it’s an equal number of stitches on all sides of the square, only to be given a grade of 88—high enough for some, not high enough for me. These days, it means stopping at this point in writing this entry and reading it from the top, just to make sure that everything just flows together. Because it may seem to, but only after I do some more corrections along the way.
I was Ms. Goody Two Shoes when was 13 but then I became popular with our school’s biggest rebels. And while don’t regret at all that I earned their friendship, it meant earning my teachers’ and parents’ wrath. Nowadays, I still think that for as long as you live and let live, and you can rationalize how you’re living, then go ahead and be red or green or black. I am black. No one can ever convince me to be red. Because it darkens the color of my skin and doesn’t go well with my newly-dyed hair.
College didn’t really dilute the brew. In fact, UP served up the double espresso, super Barako me. I learned a lot of things from my friends in UP Rep, I was dumbfounded with the shocking and sickening, I was constantly on my toes to be morbidly funny and witty. Up to now, I will always be in the lookout for the next person I’d meet who will remind me that it’s ok to be sarcastic, it’s alright to challenge the norm, it’s fun to break the rules.
Some things are innately in us, and there’s no denying the fact. No all-girls school rearing changed me to become laid back and carefree or agreeable. There was always an itch on my foot that opposed taking the regular route. All part of the grand plan that has been written in my hands.
***
Pictured: Nike postcard
Finally Dee 