high school (first of two parts)

"Live every day as if it were your last
and then some day you'll be right."
--H.H. "Breaker" Morant

seeing this picture of my youngest sister's high school barkada brought back a lot of memories.

it has been almost six years since the last time my high school batchmates and i wore our uniforms: pink skirts and white polo blouse for the girls and black slacks and white polo for the boys. yes, it has been almost six years since the days when our complete school get-up included black shoes and white socks and our batch's signature maroon IDs.


us...rho of batch 1999.
i just had to encircle that feet on the side and label it with "my feet". in one of the few class pictures taken during senior year, i got the misfortune of being cut out of the frame (i actually blogged about this before). hmmm... how bad can that be? out of 38 rho students, why did it have to be me?

ah, but more than just the uniforms, high school was memorable because of...


prof. momma rockstar:
dancing, basketball, bands, and more dancing
a.k.a "rollin', rollin', rollin' in the river..."
she's one of the weirdest teachers we had. she's the only one among the formidable league of professors in our high school who would do a live rock performance in front of the entire student body and the rest of the madlang people. her brand of rock performance? complete with headbang, wild-looking long hair, hoop earrings, rockstar make-up, get-up and attitude. cool, huh?

and oh! the things she made us do!!! pair dancing. aerobics. basketball. solo dancing. all these and more became essential parts of the physical education (P.E.) course work during our senior year, when she was one of those who lorded over our young lives.

we started dancing the swing and the chacha with all the gracefulness we could show, but she really really saw to it that we all learned to dance boogie (or else...). she drove us hard to do her bidding and since we were somewhat fearful creatures then -- trained to endure, go through anything and surpass expectations even if we didn't like what we were made to do -- we danced to her tunes, and did all the crazy and seemingly bone-breaking moves.

it was around that time when i was convinced that i could dance.

...and 'though not everybody's born to play basketball, she made all of us learn how to play the game as if all of us were destined to be the next michael jordan (asa pa!). we even had a tournament! the tournament gave all of us reasons to feel butterflies inside our stomachs. her rules were simple: come wearing the wrong color and without a player number, you're out of the tournament! commit a foul (deliberate or otherwise), expect minus ten points from your grade! do travelling, double dribbling, over-head dribbling, five-second violation or stepping out of the line and you say welcome to minus ten points per violation! worse, the only way you could earn your grade was to make a successful shot. no extra credits were given to steals and assists. ah, but playing basketball and the tournament itself was fun! it was a test of endurance and brought each of the competing classes closer together.

nothing could beat the last thing she asked us to do though: perform as if you were born to entertain! for this requirement, only a few were allowed to put up their bands and most of us were delegated to perform solo in front of her and the rest. final-P.E-performance day was a day of reckoning... and also turned out to be macho dancing and sexy dancing day. i don't know what got into her head, but her grading style was such that the bolder you go, the better your mark. those who played safe and stayed away from sexy dancing (like me and like most of those from my class) got not-okay grades but those who came close to "giving their all" were able to fulfill that final requirement of her course with flying colors.

i heard that this "perform solo in front of me and the rest" tradition of hers was stopped the following year because (finally!) somebody had the guts to squeal and a parent formally filed a complaint.

in fairness to her, the basketball tournament, although very tiring, was really fun!!!

i played point guard, did a lot of steals and assists, but never made a successful shot (i don't remember ever attempting to shoot the ball into the basket, anyway). hehehe. fortunately, i never committed a foul nor did a violation.

even after all these years, the other point guard on our team, jan a.k.a. girl number 23, deserves to be congratulated. she may be the shortest girl in our class, but she's definitely our best player. most valuable at that! you should see her move with the ball. jan, bow jud mi sa imong basketball prowess! naks, special mention...


sadsad
a.k.a. disco. school dance.

back in high school, we never ran out of reasons to hold dance parties: victory ball (even if there's really no victory to celebrate), acquaintance party, student's night, fund raising, halloween, valentine's, name it. i swear, although i was nerdy, i never missed a school dance during high school. but then... now, i could only laugh at the music we used to dance to and sing along to back then... backstreet boys, spice girls, 911, code red, boyzone, hanson, the moffats, solid harmonie(?)... syet. olats. nakakahiyang i-reminisce. ayoko na. wait, i remember happily square dancing to the beats of my sharona and new age girl, and forming human snakes that go all over the dance floor, too! hahaha. hahaha. hahaha. tama na. this is getting humiliating. bwahahaha...

but if there's one thing that's common to all the sadsad during high school, it has something to do with all those moments when the music would suddenly stop just when everyone's sweating in the dance floor doing all those moves, and an announcement would go like this: "paging ms. tina babak, your mother is waiting for you outside" or this: "paging mr. diego hindiluna, your parents are looking for you." ahh, announcements like those would immediately be followed with jeering. if you happened to be ms. tina babak or mr. diego hindiluna, you'd want to be not seen in the campus ever again.


duranta mattah
there eventually came a time in our high school life when every wrong move meant donating, planting, or transferring a duranta.

back then, it seemed that nothing else could ever come out of the mouth of one of our guidance counselors except the word "duranta!". she must have been dreaming of the durantas day and night that she resorted to displace her affinity for durantas on the unfortunate students who are caught committing even the very minor misdemeanors. in record time, the equivalence of janitorial work to the word duranta was established.

... and duranta mathematics was born.
standby in the covered walk = duranta!
be suspected of being late = duranta!
be late = duranta!
cut classes for no good reason = duranta!
cut classes to watch NBA, to play starcraft = duranta!
be seen, be merely suspected of doing a misdemeanor = duranta!
one eeny weeny bit of wrong move = duranta!
tsk. tsk. duranta here. duranta there. duranta everywhere.

the mere mention of the word duranta eventually sounded like torture to our ears, and the sight of durantas all over our small high school complex became torture to our eyes. we had too much of the durantas that keeping a straight eye at the sight of their yellow green or golden bushes became an ordeal beyond tolerance; we developed "allergic" reactions. why and how mrs. obsessed-with-beautification drive managed to turn a simple ornamental plant into an object of torture, is a puzzle left uncracked. her powers were beyond us, and she was of a different kind: seeing the durantas flooding the complex was probably her drug.

... but did the duranta punishment deter people from misbehaving? nooooooooooo... asa pa! at best, it led the students to test the limits even more by working on creativity and improving the strategies of escaping punishment. harharhar.

fast forward to almost six years later, the sight of durantas would only drive us to laugh. and somehow, seeing them now induces nostalgia. aye, gone were those duranta days.


us...now (read: almost six years after).
hahaha. fortunately for me, the one who took this picture was kind enough not to cut me out of the frame.
walang panama ang starstruck and star circle sa amin!!!

to be continued...