Life-Changing Silliness
Picture this: you’re 16 years old and you want to please your parents all the time. When it comes to your college applications, they tell you to put in BS Nursing as your first choice. You do it. But you secretly hope you don’t make the cut for that course and, instead, get taken into the Creative Writing program, which you had put in as your second choice. It is then that God decides to teach you a lesson about going after what you really want and being honest.
You qualify for the BS Nursing program. Your blood runs cold and you feel the walls of your room closing in when your mom hands you the acceptance notification. You paste a fake smile on your face and you think you’ll get to love doing the Nursing bit.
You end up spending three years taking as a BS Nursing student in UP Manila. You skip all your Nursing classes and just go to school to attend your Communications and Humanities classes. One classmate tells you, “Naku, you’ll be kicked out.” In fact, you nearly do get kicked out of school in the middle of your shitty sophomore year. (How shitty? Imagine getting a score of 12 on a 100-item Biochemistry quiz.)
And all because you wrote down “BS Nursing” as your first choice when you were 16 and didn’t know any better. You’re lucky your parents finally took pity on you and let you shift out.
The result: three years of your life wasted. The agony: priceless. The silver lining: you figure it’s a nice topic for this blog entry because, well, you’re already kind of brain dead after a long day of happily writing for a living.
Then you think: I’d take writing for a living any day over anything else— except maybe for being a Pussycat Doll.