Magna

I have a confession to make. You see, I was among a select few who graduated magna in college, as in magna-nine years! (plus or minus-- you get the drift). Yes, I was busily tapping away at my workstation in a high rise building in Makati, giving investment recommendations to millionaires overseas who had money to blow in the local stock market, while that elusive diploma hung over my head like a dark cloud of despair. It was like a dark secret I kept to myself, and the feeling that a college diploma would have been framed and displayed for everyone to see in our little barrio in Bohol gnawed on me repeatedly. I felt like short-changing my parents. And so I vowed to return to school the first chance I get.

The culprit was that damn PE requirement. No, not the physical sports activity everyone is required to take. The lecture one, PE 1. I couldn’t pass it. I flunked it four times: 1. dropped it; 2. got an incomplete grade for not submitting a paper; 3. got a failing grade of 5.0 obviously for not paying attention to the lectures; and 4. a placement exam which would have exempted me from taking the subject again-- I failed that one, too. And the most horrifying thing of all? One professor didn’t even blink when he flunked me twice!

Ooh, spare me the lecture. Why I couldn’t pass a simple subject most 16-17 years old breeze through with flying colors, I do not know. Maybe I was disoriented, disorientated, whatever. I passed my accounting, econometrics and calculus but not PE 1. Most of my friends couldn’t believe it. I have stopped rationalizing.

And so when I started free-lancing, I had to get myself re-enrolled in the university. I had to write letters of appeal to the dean, the registrar, the college secretary, even the vice-chancellor, just so I can go back to school. I got in. But my appeal to have the PE requirement waived on account of my prospective employment abroad fell on deaf ears (well, I tried anyway).

And so I went back to school, enrolling in only one subject: PE. What did you expect?

The first day I in class I wanted the ground to open up and swallow me. My classmates were like kids, freshman, and the fact that they were still in high school the year before while I was already slaving away in the corporate jungle was not lost on me. Worse, it turned out I was older than the instructor by a few years. Eeek! My only saving grace was that I wasn’t exactly the oldest student in class. A single mom, obviously she got pregnant while in school, took that “distinction”.

I was determined this time not to blow my chance of getting the diploma. I’ll pass this, by hook or by crook, I told myself. Unfortunately, I found the lectures boring, the subject uninteresting, and the instructor unenthusiastic. It didn’t help that the lectures were in Tagalog. Although I speak the vernacular fluently (I think), I have difficulty with lectures conducted in Tagalog, I find it exhausting. The real prospect of getting flunked by someone younger than I was didn’t appeal to me at all.

You know what, I actually flunked one exam. By that time I was already a firm believer of “curses”; someone must have hexed me. If not for my oral reports and research paper I would have been on my way down the road to perdition. Thank goodness.