The Cringe Journal: September 1985
In which nothing much happened, but I was happy.
4 September 1985
I am not by nature a masochist, but I like Mondays very much. They always promise that the week will be extraordinary. By Tuesday of course one feels distinctly let down, but then I never really liked Tuesdays.
On Monday the 2nd I was in school by 7.30am. I am always in school by 7.30, but Monday morning always seems earlier than the rest of the week. I had mango juice at CASAA and read 85 pages of Jude the Obscure, a brilliant and monumentally depressing book I first read in senior high, more to impress my teacher than anything else. By 8.15 I was waiting outside Room 222. My only class on Mondays is Comp Lit 121. I love my teacher, Prof Pacita Guevara-Fernandez, and I am intrigued by my seatmate, an unprepossessing but cerebral species whom I refer to as The Reptile, owing to his uncanny resemblance to the extraterrestrial iguanas on that asinine TV series, V.
By 8.45 I was wondering why only half a dozen of us had assembled in 222. I learned soon afterwards that classes had been suspended until noon to allow the students to attend a pre-election convocation. I don’t know why they bother to suspend classes when no one goes to those convocations anyway. ___ and I went to the greenhouse for Cokes, then we went to the library with the noble intention of studying (Ha!) We never got past the front steps. We just sat there for an hour and a half, having one of those aimless conversations which feel like a waste of time but are really quite fun. ___ is writing a godawful depressing novel about a girl who gets pregnant at 15, gets an abortion, gets pregnant again by someone with Down’s Syndrome, then dies of a miscarriage. I was reminded of that novel I wrote in the summer of ’84 which I cannot bring myself to work on because it has about as much aesthetic value as Barry Manilow’s ballads.[1]
___, the beautiful girl from our class, came by and sat with us. We talked about our professors and they went into ecstasies over Prof. Evangelista. At 11 ___ and I went back to the greenhouse. ___ my classmate from high school sat with us while we practised our lines for Othello. She was sufficiently impressed by our hamminess to threaten to watch us on the 7th. If all the people I’ve invited to watch my acting debut show up (five at last count), I will have to rent the Sunken Gardens for the performance. I am petrified; I suspect that our Shakespearean tragedy will turn out a comedy, esp. since I have the uncontrollable urge to laugh during highly emotional moments.
From 11.30 to 3 we stayed at Vargas Museum to rehearse my scenes with ___, who is to play Othello. ___ has all the animation of a corpse, and when he commits suicide at the end of the scene it is somehow redundant. He is a very nice, quiet, unobtrusive person, qualities which aren’t very helpful for playing the jealous Moor. We rehearsed ineptly a couple of times, then the three of us sat around and sang Police songs. We also had some more aimless conversation. Every 15 minutes one of us would berate the others for loafing, but we didn’t do anything about it, we were too busy raising goofing off to an art form. My English 23 group rehearsed at 3, and I got on a jeep at 4.30. I got rained on en route to my house and caught cold.
Tuesday the weather was sufficiently beastly to prevent classes from being held. Naturally I stayed home, naturally I had a lousy day. I tried to finish my short story about a guy who’s always getting ditched. I honestly tried. I typed eight pages of it before I concluded that it was absolute drivel.
5 September 1985
I came to school early to rehearse with my Shakespeare group and as is always the case, arrived too early. I saw my high school friend ___ at the lobby and asked him to read Othello’s lines. He had nothing else to do and he was bored so he agreed. He has a good voice and he used to memorize Shakespeare, so our reading was pretty good. We were laughing at some of the lines—“Cassio did tup her!” “O murderous coxcomb!”—when the girl he’d courted last summer came by, but he didn’t talk to her. I suggested that since the play is set in Venice we read it with Italian accents. Hilarious!
8 September 1985
With shaking knees and a massive adrenaline flow I made my acting debut yesterday as Emilia in Act V, Scene II of Othello. Having survived the performance, I should by now be back to regular existence, but for one major discovery. I really enjoy pretending to be someone else. I think it has something to do with writing: you put on different personalities or else you bore your readers and yourself to smithereens.
Prof. Ramas[2] said my body language needed work, but my voice was perfect. My ears flapped with pride. I was rather disappointed that none of my friends came to watch, but it passed quickly.
9 September 1985
I am particularly fond of myself today. This morning Prof. Fernandez returned our critiques of Akutagawa’s Rashomon and my grade was higher than The Reptile’s.[3]
11 September 1985
Last night I cleaned up my desk. I unearthed my first attempt at a novel, 3 or 4 short stories, my collection of rejection letters from American universities, and a ream of scratch paper. I looked through my old stories and the first three chapters of a novel I wrote. They are very amateurish, extremely juvenile, with half-baked plots and wishy-washy ficitonal events, but they have a kind of exuberance and spontaneity, as if the writer was getting a big kick out of the very act of writing.
Since then my work has improved in terms of technique, but my recent stuff seems tired and bloodless, as if the writer were writing more out of habit than desire.
16 September 1985
I was in Prof Arcellana’s English 157 class[4] when I started feeling this wrenching pain in my stomach. I tried to ignore it but it got steadily worse, and by 11 I was in a cold sweat. I felt as if I were about to collapse. I got on a jeep and survived long enough to reach the infirmary. The nurse pointed me to the Emergency Room, where I was made to lie down. The nurse gave me 2 Maalox and the pain eased. The doctor said I was hyperacidic. I am forbidden from taking tea, alcohol, aspirin, and Coffee. How will I live?
17 September 1985
More than my eating habits I think the cause of my ulcer is tension. Whenever I’m at home (Ha! Make that “my lodgings”) I’m always on edge because I expect a violent outburst which somehow leads to me being blamed for everything.
21 September 1985
This morning while waiting for the music videos on TV I saw the irritating priest admonishing his audience. He said that if you have more problems than you can handle, if you’re drowning in worry and your life is generally miserable, it means that God loves you more than the people who are happy. Conversely, if you are happy then God loves you less than the people who are miserable.
What a load of crap.
22 September 1985
Prof F assigned me to read Argia’s part in The Queen and the Rebels. Then she looked around for a guy to play Argia’s lover. “Which one of you is evil-looking?” she said. The natural choice was The Reptile. So we read this long, embarrassing dialogue in which I throw myself at him and he calls me a slut. It was hilarious, the definition of absurd drama.
24 September 1985
I decided to cut English 21 and cram for my Nat Sci test, as I’ve missed most of my Nat Sci classes and need to ace the exam. After lunch ___ went to the library, where I crammed for an hour and a half. ___ from CL 121 joined us for some gossip. Our beautiful classmate cannot let us forget how beautiful she is, and her ass-kissing is record-breaking. She says things like, “Speaking in the third person, isn’t her face distorted?” Yesterday she had to share a copy of the play with The Reptile, and she acted like he had plague. Fine, her face is a work of art, but she can’t regard other people as lower orders. Personally I think she’s hung up on the notion that pretty girls are stupid, so she overcompensates.
___ wanted to see our classmate ___ so we returned to AS at 2.30. We waited for an hour but he didn’t show up, so ___ was despondent. We had a serious discussion of how we behave when infatuated—she can’t talk to the guy, and I can’t stop talking to the guy.
25 September 1985
In the minor miracles department, I got the highest score in class on the English 23 midterms. My achievement was dampened, though, when Prof Ramas announced our scores for the performance; for my histrionics I got a 1.5. I thought I deserved a 1.2 at least. Oh well.
26 September 1985
This morning I was cleaning my glasses when the right lens fell out and landed on the floor in 10,000 pieces. Needless to say I am blind, and I will be blind for some time as I can’t afford to have the lens replaced. The absurd part is, now that I’m not wearing glasses, everything looks better. The world is beautiful when it’s unfocused and blurry.
27 September 1985
At home there’s a state of siege again so I left early and was in school by 7.15.
I skipped French class to prepare my oral report for English 21 (Byron and Don Juan). I read Byron’s biography but it didn’t sink it. So I bluffed my way through my report. I knew the teacher adored literary gossip so I strung together all the rumors about Byron’s love affairs. She loved it. I have passed English 21.
[1] And yet the first album I bought with my own money in high school was not Zenyatta Mondatta by The Police or Gaucho by Steely Dan, but Barry Manilow’s Greatest Hits.
[2] Prof Wilhelmina Ramas the legendary Shakespeare professor was terrifying, but when she meted out praise upon you, you levitated.
[3] Apparently I was not over being competitive about grades. My mediocre scores at Philippine Science High had not cured me of Quiz Kid syndrome.
[4] I was not enrolled in that class, but I sat in just to listen to Prof Francisco Arcellana. Apart from being brilliant he was cool. He was also kind, a quality that always moves me because I didn’t get it at home.