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Memory Lane

Is there life after high school?

The Groovies, my high school classmates (circa St Theresa’s College Cebu 1974) once again got into the groove of bonding moments. There were reasons to celebrate. Our class salutatorian, Deirdra came home from New Jersey for a visit. Birthday celebrants needed to make a wish and the groovies from Manila missed Cebu. You know, I look forward to these small reunions. Groovies remind me that we are still cool and awesome despite the passage of time. I draw inspiration from classmates that still manage to look good.

Marget Fernan-Villarica not only hosted the party but our stay as well in her lovely, comfy home. Our current president, Nerissa Soon-Ruiz gave this brilliant idea of auctioning off our give-aways to raise funds for our batch project. What fun!

Tess, the preceding batch president told me to write an article for our Coral reunion last year. It is only this year that I got to read the printed version of the STC Annual 2009.

Here it is:

Is there life after high school? To be honest, I was relieved when my high school graduation ceremony ended. In high school, I was a painfully shy, mediocre student with average grades (as in 81 to 85). I often felt intimidated by the smart and outspoken girls. You know how it is in high school – there are the popular girls and the invisible girls. I was one of the invisible girls but I was lucky enough to have a few friends who made me feel like I belonged to a group.

So do people ever recover from that intense high school social experience? Some don’t. They spend the rest of their lives trying to justify what they were, or were not, in high school. This is why high school reunions are so emotional, especially the first one. I declined to attend the 25th High School class of 1974 reunion because I was not ready to face that dreaded high school experience once again. Coupled with five deaths of family members in Cebu, I felt Cebu was just bad news for me and going home was not an option at that point.
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Love in the time of election

The difficulty with marriage is that we fall in love with a personality, but must live with a character. ~Peter Devries

At the heart of this farm, there lies a gazebo and lovely patios where my husband I sat under the gentle canopies of stately mango trees, some of which are over 50 years old! We revel even more at the elegance of this veritable tree garden, teeming with a multitude of capiz drop lights and strategically placed spotlights that dramatically emphasize the features of mango trees.

Holding hands, we strolled the farm and stopped under a mango tree. I laid my head on his shoulder, “This is it”.

“Let’s celebrate our silver anniversary here”. My ever romantic husband pressed his lips at the back of my palm and agreed, of course. That was two years ago with a budget fit for semi-grand anniversary celebration. We had also moved in to our new cozy home near this farm.

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Dear Diary…

I want to bring out all kinds of things that lie buried deep in my heart. Anne Frank

The aftermath of the Best Friends Forever Reunion left me in a contemplative mood for days. Friends remarked that I was quiet, conservative and feminine in the past so the revelation of “a true confession” caused jaw-dropping looks. At a high school reunion, I laughed when former teachers thought I was Lorna, my elder sister. What a forgettable student I was! I don’t blame them. It was true anyway. Looking at myself today, I don’t recognize the person I once was. Still, I thought of checking out that forgettable person and affirm the good that is happening in my life today.

best-friends-forever
Best Friends Forever Reunion 2009

I unearthed my “baul”, a box full of treasured memories like old photos, memorabilia and diaries written since I was 10 years old. During the reunion, I confessed to the ex that I still kept the diary during the years we were together. Horrified, he told me to dispose of it. I shrugged. It was the past, nothing incriminating and everything written was pure and innocent. For some reason, I should have thrown it when I got married. I dumped all the letters, gifts and photos in the trash bin but I kept the diaries. Now I know why I didn’t throw the diaries. No, it was not to reminisce the memories of first love and that of my ex-boyfriend now my husband.

I pulled my diaries out from the cobwebs of the musty “baul” and began to leaf through the pages, now yellowed after 34 years. For the next few days, I poured over the poignant memories. I’m not a very profound writer and I scribbled about things I did that day or week with my family, my boyfriend or my groupies. Both things of significance and not. My diary detailed the life of my family when we were still complete. My mom, already sick of breast cancer in 1975 suddenly came alive in the stories I wrote about her. My departed siblings, Oscar and Ruben ,the clowns of the family and my dad sprang to life as I read the “Dear Diary” entries. I felt a tugging in my heart,a deep longing for my departed loved ones as I got transported back to 1975. For one brief moment, images of their smiles and antics kept me in a cheerful mood.

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Reflections on the Best Friends Forever Reunion

The most beautiful discovery true friends make is that they can grow separately without growing apart. ~Elisabeth Foley

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UP College Cebu , 1974

My mediocre grades in high school were not enough to qualify me to the UP Diliman Campus. I was determined to take up college in Manila to gain independence from my sheltered life in Cebu and of course, get the BS Food Technology that was only offered there. I studied in UP College Cebu (UPCC) in 1974 for one year before moving to UP DIliman campus in my sophomore year where I finally got a 1.75 grade to qualify. I look back to my freshman year with a smile and a soft spot in my heart. Indeed a memorable year for me because it was the first time I gained a little freedom to be with friends and to socialize with guys after graduating from an all-girls school since kindergarten. I felt I finally belonged to a group that truly cared and loved me and by fate (via Dicoy’s Cupid machinations), my best friend became my first boyfriend, my first love for the next 3 or so years.

Reunions are inevitable and I declined the invitation just as I did with my high school reunions. My attitude towards reunions changed in the recent years after I evolved into a better person. I then became curious of my friends. What had become of them? I felt something missing in my life and wanted to reconnect with my past. This change of heart did not augur well with my husband. He didn’t understand why I needed to see my old friends (when he himself does not attend reunions) and in the process, “meet” my ex-boyfriend. Hugging my husband, I reassured him that it is all in the past. I cannot help it if he was my classmate, part of my barkada but I am there for my other friends. For goodness sake, it’s been like 31 years? I rolled my eyes as “Batman” retreated to his cave.

upcc74
Freshman Year, UP College of Cebu 1974. Guess where I am?

I know it sounds like a cheesy Sharon Cuneta movie, but our group coined “Best Friends Forever” as the group name for the UP Cebu College 1974-1978 alumni.
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My First High School Reunion After 35 Years

“I bet in high school, everybody made somebody’s life hell.”
Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion (1997) – Michele Weinberger (Lisa Kudrow)

high-school-reunion-stc-cebu
View of St. Theresa’s College (STC) Cebu grounds

Is there life after high school? Truth is, I hated high school and because I hated it so much, I made sure that I would turn my life around and be a better and confident person in college. I exuded negativity. Oh my gosh, I was ecstatic when the high school graduation ceremony ended. I jumped up with joy. I couldn’t wait to fly and spread my wings. In high school, I was painfully shy and a mediocre student with average grades ( as in 83 to 85). I felt intimidated by the mestizas and the smart and outspoken girls. You know how it is in high school, you find the popular clique and the invisible clique. I was basically invisible. Thanks to my best friend Teresa, Patsy, Linell and a few others, I think I belonged somehow to a group. Without them, high school would have been one hell of an experience. Thanks buddies.

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Hugs to my bestest of friends in High School who took me in their clique: Patsy, Linell, me, Teresa

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Message to the Graduating UP Students of Kamia Residence Hall

I didn’t plan to write this entry just yet as I am saddled with a backlog of other blog posts that I thought were more relevant. In fact, this event I am about to elaborate transpired a week ago. Old news, I pondered. But something happened just now as I poured over the photos I took last week and I am so touched.

See, a week ago, Kenny Tabayocyoc, a council member of Kamia Residence Hall at the UP Diliman Campus invited me to be their guest speaker for (Thank God It’s Summer), A Tropical Confluence Dinner. Part of the program is an inspirational message to be given by an alumnae of the dorm. Of course, I wanted to help them out. After all, Kamia was my first home away from home. I felt like traversing on a trip down memory lane. It wasn’t a convenient date though. I had to leave by 7:00 PM because it was Lauren’s 23rd birthday celebration. Things don’t always happen as planned. Rains delayed the program that was slated at the Kamia parking lot and the organizers were busy setting up the tables and chairs.

While waiting for the program to start, Kenny brought me inside Kamia Residence Hall for the first time in many years. The tile floors by the door looked worn from the passage of time as thousands of footwear scrubbed the tile color down to a grayish slab of cement. Wasn’t it 33 years ago since I last stepped foot at the door? I saw that a phone booth still hangs by the wall and today there are two. I clearly remember those days when a queue formed as residents tried to make a call. I remember the dagger looks aimed at this one resident who kept yakking away ignoring the queue of girls awaiting their turn to whisper sweet nothings to their steadies.

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UP Lantern Parade

Hi everyone! This is Lauren ghost writi- I mean, guest blogging for my mom today. I wasn’t actually planning on attending the UP Lantern Parade yesterday but since I had activist things to attend to at Vinzon’s Hall, I figured I’d stick around and take a couple of photos. Plus, I’ve never been able to catch the lantern parade; I tried to when I was in college, but my classes would end too late and I’d get there only to reach the tail end of the parade. This year, as you all know, is UP’s Centennial anniversary and the 2008 lantern parade is supposed to be a bigger spectacle than the previous ones. I’m not sure what time it ended, but the parade was still far from over when I left at around 7.

My first mistake was bringing a point and shoot camera instead of my mom’s DSLR. Despite the crowd, I was able to take fairly decent pictures of the first few lanterns but my photos started getting progressively crappier as the sky got darker.

Palma Hall was too crowded for me to get a decent view of anything, so I walked over to the front of the Faculty Center where I could still worm my way up to the front.

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Happy Birthday Dear Bloggers


Meet Casey, one of the first generation net kids. If you have read my daughter’s blog (then online journal) when it started in 1996, then you might have met Casey in a few of her entries. Casey is not his real name. I first met Casey and a few of my daughter’s online friends in 1996 because I was an internet safety head of World Kids Network. Back when modems were cranking screeching noises and webpages screaming with blinking fonts, I was a Web 1.0 designer where I built hand-coded HTML pages as the structure to house the content of our websites. I didn’t have an online journal. I thought it was for kids. Lauren and Casey were one of the few kids that started an online journal in 1996.

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Kippy Cat Travels


I am right now in Narita airport en route to San Francisco and I might as well entertain myself before boarding time. It’s been years since I’ve visited the states not since the year before my son died in 2000. As my son and I sat on the airplane seat on board our flight to Cebu a few days before his death, he begged me to take him to the states the following summer. I hugged my precious boy and promised him I’d take him along because the previous years were spent with the girls choir tour in the US and Canada. It was his turn to be with me.

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UP Centennial Book: Iskolar ng Bayan Gives Back, the Enterprising Way


imom, Dine, me and Annamanila

I am truly blessed to be part of the yearlong celebration of the University of the Philippines (UP) Centennial through a book launch, Iskolar ng Bayan Gives Back, the Enterprising Way. The book of which I am one of the writers, features 25 UP alumni who have made—and continue to make—their mark in business here and in foreign lands, living up to the UP tradition of excellence and nationhood. The project was initiated by the University of the Philippines Small Scale Industries (UP-ISSI) and the Small Enterprise Research and Development Foundation (SERDEF) where I worked for 7 years before I retired in 1987 upon giving birth to my second daughter.

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a mom blogger who advocates constructive engagement in issues on family & society.
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