Noy

I woke up at around 6am, like I always do unintentionally. I would've remembered this day as the Grad school entrance test fuckover, but it would be soon overshadowed and literally overflowed by the rain and the news and manila and politics and AM radio announcements.

This is my country. Alleluiah!
Let's talk about Odyong later.

I rushed to school that morning for the first step in the Grad school application process. People have been reminding me for weeks not to study, because that shit jumbles your brain and shit, but shit man, was that test hard?!?! As in shit it was hard. I swear, a tear came outta my eye, not because of the emotional instability that the test was causing, but because my brain was literally squeezing itself, trying to extract as much thought juice as possible.

One of which trickled down my left eye.
It was like
"if Heraclitus is to a Filigree, then Aeschillus is to a?"

...

chocolate pare.
CHOCOLATE.

No, chocolate wasn't the answer, fools. As in natsokolate ang utak ko sa mga tanong na ganiyan.

I skipped the final announcements and ran to my car to beat the rain.
Made it. In my car. ready to roll... it's 11:30
But rustling and bustling to the parking lot, I was picking up mumbles of students. "Di gumagalaw ang traffic", "You're cute", "Baha katips", "No, you're the cute one", "We're stranded". All this fucking jitter that you don't take literally, thinking that students are exaggerating things for the point of conversation.
Well today, they were right for once.

Traffic was an ass-fucking rapist.
You were literally gonna waste liters of gas for three fucking inches of movement.

Let's skip some hours and boring things I did inbetween.


430pm... traffic was finally flowing. Cars poured from the exits into katipunan. Guards were waking up drivers who fell asleep from the boredom of seeing the same car trunk for four straight hours.
Relief. Progress. I wasn't gonna degrade myself by sleeping in some floor in school. I was going home.

Fuck it. I was GOING HOME!
a hundred kilometers away. I was going home.

You see 4 lanes of cars converge into the side. Apparently our roads slope towards the sidewalks, so you see everyone cramping towards the left to cross the shallowest depth of water. After your turn, you'd speed up. Stretch your unused legs and become familiar once again to some significant car movement... all until the next ditch of water where cars cramp up again.

This was katipunan to libis. and libis to everywhere. This is why full tank was invented.

But no one was getting into C5... except for tadpoles and dirty little children experiencing the joys of a free swimming pool. They reminded me of myself when I was younger. My only flooded house experience happened in 98 when we still lived in Las Pinas. Water was up to our thighs, the entire village was out. And all the kids brought out their kick boards, tabo's, water guns, and any plastic toy that floats on water. We didn't give a shit about getting a fever, or diseases or viruses that old people always complain about. We loved life because of our naivety, and because of our naivety, we were lovable. This is the curse of children who grow up. With age comes wisdom and with wisdom comes the troubles and the responsibilities and the system that turns you into shit.

You realize that the world was never meant to be enjoyable.
It was meant to test you.

Rains, entrance exams, flooding, jobs that take the life from you... it's all one big test.

And you can choose to take it, or realize that there's no point.

You just go and do what you want, play lucky and hope that the world cooperates.