< hmmm... >

   When I read my friend Noreen's entry on her childhood filled with fun and games, I bled with the kind of jealousy and bitterness expected, well, of a 21-year-old young man who had his first girlfriend at 19, the girl cheated on him for his best friend and then, months later, realized she was a lesbian (haha, if you read TMX I, you'd probably be very aware of this).  Only in my dreams do I play games like "patintero" and Prisoner's Base: as a kid who went to school in an obscenely expensive sectarian school (cough, Saint Louis University Laboratory Elementary School, cough), I never got to even step in the playground.

   To preserve my pride and my manhood, I was a wuss.

   "Skinny" and "sickly" are terms which oversimplify my situation then: I was a regular at the school clinic (by "regular," I mean the same case as the drunkards at your neighborhood sari-sari store), since my mom insisted that I keep my anemia in check.  And in elementary school, skinny, sickly, anemic wusses are pariahs, untouchables, and best left alone during breaktime.  Nothing to look forward to but making up a game with those silly colored pencils.

   I've been practically condemned by my peers - yeah, except for those times where they copy my assignments... the ingrates.  The thick glasses and the buck teeth didn't work for me either.  Yup, I was the school - no, not the class - nerd.  My accursed intelligence quotient whisked me off to "Project Wellspring:" a program designed by the school to recognize the "highly intelligent" kids.  The way I saw it, Project Wellspring was a fun way of torturing kids so that they will one day become Albert Einstein.  This is a simple case of the ends not justifying the means.

   So there, I never played childhood games.  The only time was when a friend, who probably pitied me and my "games" with colored pencils, invited me to play "Touch the Body by the school chapel" (where all the "cool" kids played).  The game is a deceptively simple exercise of throwing a soft rubber ball at a running kid.  Needless to say, the ball was thrown at me with the same speed and velocity of a Spanish-era cannon (hey, it left a damned bruise).  I ran back to the classroom and hid my tears reading the English reader I borrowed from the library.

   Rather than spend my time running between bases risking life and limb, I spent my elementary school days in the Guidance Office or the school library.

   At the Guidance Office, I was welcomed by the guidance counselors.  Not because they caught wind of me being bullied by, well, bullies, but because I was the Wellspring kid who enjoyed playing with Zaks and Legos and was perfectly quiet making towers and robot-like thingies.  It was also there where I was pushed to use my vocabulary to the limit: they taught me to play Scrabble and Boggle.  I became hooked.  That was nothing, though, compared to the fun I had with plastic blocks.  While I was building some architecturally-unsound model of a tower, some kid was being counseled for beating up a small kid or for peeking up the skirts of girls playing Chinese garter.

   As fun as Guidance Office time was, it was nothing compared to the fun I had at the library.  It was there where I had an insight to how much reading - and writing - was.  The assistant librarians became my best friends, as they always smiled when they saw me borrowing English readers.  As soon as I was done with one, I borrowed another.  I was reading everything I can get my hands on: atlases, encyclopedia volumes, even technical religious books that the faculty kept handy.  At an early age, I had my favorites: Edgar Allan Poe's "The Raven," William Shakespeare's "The Merchant of Venice," Saki's "The Open Window" (which happens to be my favorite poem: none of that "Trees" crap they made us memorize back then), Mark Twain's "Huckleberry Finn," Harper Lee's "To Kill A Mockingbird."  It was speeches that really hit me: Abraham Lincoln's "Gettysburg Address," Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have A Dream," and my personal favorite, Mahatma Gandhi's "Noncooperation."  It was my delivery of "Noncooperation" that won me an award for declamation in sixth grade, and won me the respect of my peers.

   In retrospect, I haven't had a bad childhood.  Compared to today's kids who squabble over the silliness of computer games and free-television anime, I was introduced to a kind of childhood that molded me into what I think to be, at the very least, a well-read person.  Had I not been reading or building those blocks I would have been condemned to a life of misery and woe.  Had I not come across interesting personalities like Mahatma Gandhi and Harper Lee, I wouldn't have had the lens I have today for viewing and critiquing the injustices I see.  Had I not been in the library as a kid I would have committed suicide for reading a technical theory book in my course.

   So maybe I wasn't able to enjoy recess time games and cutting classes for a game of Mortal Kombat.  I don't care.  I lived something better.