Not so high

I have been corresponding with a few of my high school classmates recently for some event they're organizing on behalf of our class. Thanks to Facebook, there's no such thing as being able to just fade into oblivion anymore. I'm not sure if that's part of the whole direction of the social networking revolution. Whatever its implication on post-high school life, it got me thinking back on those four years.

I attended a science curriculum public high school, but I never felt 'scientific' about anything during my stay. Although a good portion of my classmates did eventually major in Chemical Engineering, if I'm not mistaken. So maybe the additional load of advanced chem subject was a good jump off point for them. Personally, I was just glad to get it all over with. 

I participated in school activities just enough to claim involvement, but always managed to stay in the peripheral. That, ladies and gentlemen, required subtlety to pull off. So needless to say: I was not in the student government, I was not an officer, I was not an athlete, and I never participated in any form of singing, dancing, and everything else that involved an audience and my nonexistent talents in the performing arts. 

So in short, anything that required extended periods of social interaction and public presentation, I steered clear from.

But because I did not want my mother to be called again by my teacher with the concern that I was "not assertive" enough (true story), I made an effort to join activities that would be more apt to my personality. My joining essay writing contests so that I'd be excused from Math class is an oft-repeated story in the halls of this blog. I was part of the COMELEC -- non-partisan politics, ftw! I was also with the Red Cross Youth -- way better than marching back and forth under the heat of the sun. In Red Cross, we learned first aid, planted a garden, kept the grounds clean, and spent time with the kids at an orphanage. And lastly, there was the school paper. The only time I represented the school at anything was when I competed in the national level for the copyreading category. Yeah, copyreading. The process of editing and correcting written material. I did not compete to write, I competed to be a grammar nazi!

But, yes, I did write for the school paper. Forgettable stint, really. Mostly composed of boring news items around campus, except for that one time when the adviser decided to publish my article on local basketball fanaticism. Cheesy, juvenile article, but fun to write and it amused me that our adviser was stumped whether to put it in the sports page or the features page. 

I don't know why I insist on reminding people of how much of a geek I was/am by sharing these stories when it is so obvious that they can perfectly remember without my help. I suppose I could write about how popular I actually was in school and how I had such an awesomely memorable personality, but alas, my fiction writing is a little rusty.