I find myself choking on all my contradictions

I spent my first day of the week-long sem break at the Power Plant watching Legally Blonde. Actually I was supposed to see it at G4 with my mom and sister and then chill with Glyka afterwards but I suddenly didn’t feel like it anymore. And it’s good that I didn’t go to G4 because Glyka was with the Chiqs and the Bosconians all afternoon and you know that I don’t get along with them. I mean I do, but I’m not that chummy-chummy with them and it gets kind of awkward after awhile. I guess I was wrong when I said that I couldn’t stand it when guys spoke to me in Filipino. (That comment on many of my older journal entries earned me a lot of hate mail.) Actually I can, but not with guys my age. I mean, I talk to my friends in Defect in Filipino. And I don’t know why but those guys in the big pants who talk to me in Tagalog irritate me. Sometimes I just can’t stand guys my age. They’re stupid and horny. I think I get along with older guys better, but that would look kind of weird–me, a fifteen year old, chilling with some twenty-something dudes. I swear, sometimes I really hate being a teenager.

Well in any case, I’m real grateful for this sem break. I desperately need a break from everyone and everything else in school at the moment. I really don’t have the patience or the sanity to deal with Denilou right now. Sometimes I feel sorely tempted to leave the barkada. They aren’t my friends at all–they’re just people I eat lunch with. When I voice out my opinions or tell them my problems, they give me these strange looks like they don’t understand what I’m talking about and move on to shallower things. And then when I try to give them advice on their problems, they just shrug it off and continue to do it their way which does not improve anything at all. When I’m with them I feel so ignored. Maricris is the only one who’s nice to me there and treats me good but heck, she’s nice to everybody. Maybe I’ll leave them slowly, and then become an actual high school loner.

This does not look good.

Heaven send hell away

Finally, finally, finally, sem break has arrived! I kind of wish I didn’t go to school today because we did absolutely nothing of academic importance. First thing we had today was a rosary. Everyone in the school was gathered in the quadrangle and for us high schoolers it was absolute torture because we were standing in the part that faced the sun. And for someone who hates the sun as much as myself, it was such an awful experience. I don’t mind saying the rosary while I kneel on uncooked rice or what. Just don’t make me stand in front of the sun for an hour and a half! It seemed to go on forever, and what made it seem even more like forever was that the leaders said their prayers very slowly. So while the whole school Hail Maryed their way up to heaven, I twitched and squirmed like a restless child at church and prayed for the whole thing to be over soon.

After the excruciating rosary–which was as sorrowful as Jesus’ crucifixion, because of the heat I had to endure–we had a quick break and went to the auditorium to watch a beauty pagaent of some kids from first grade to third grade. It bored me after awhile but fortunately I brought my Discman with me. So I spent that time listening to my mixed CDs and my silverchair CDs while I tried to fall asleep. I couldn’t though; I had stupidly chosen a seat in front of a row of really noisy freshmen. They would scream and jeer at the contestants of the pagaent and they did it so loudly that every time they let out their banshee-like shrieks I would jump out of my skin. I swear, don’t their parents teach them poise and etiquette and good manners? Obviously not. A lot of people in my school have either lousy manners or are even more ignorant than the aboriginies of the Philippines. I can’t wait till graduation.

I went to Glyka’s house after school because we needed to find a topic for our investigatory project. God, I hate doing investigatory projects. We spend a lot of time and effort working on some ridiculous invention or concotion that we end up throwing in the trash. Why go through the hassle of making homemade highlighters when you can just buy one at the bookstore near you? Well eventually, we found one that told us how to make our own silver polisher so that was settled. We planned to go to Glaiza’s and chill there once we were through but when we got there we learned that she went to the mall. So Glyka and I just sound-tripped in her bedroom and talked until my dad picked me up. I found a silverchair article in one of her old issues of Dolly magazine and with her permission I cut up the pictures and the article and put it on my bedroom wall. It sucks how magazines don’t feature silverchair…perhaps I should write a letter to the editor of PULP! magazine.

Well so far I have no plans for this sem break except to go to the mall with Glyka and Dina on Tuesday. My novel is doing lousy. It’s weird; I know have a lot of great stuff for it but I just don’t know how to put it all together to make a really good story. Methinks I’ve lost my touch. So I guess the only thing I’ll really be doing is reading 100 Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia-Marquez, and keeping a close watch on MTV for any silverchair videos.

It’s so wonderful I feel like…smiling

One more half day to go and it’s finally, finally my sem break! Aww yeah. For the past half hour or so I’ve been having a really great sound trip; I’m playing songs I haven’t heard in a loooong time and it feels good to just sit back and reminisce about the good old days. Days when things weren’t as complicated as they are now. *sigh* You know I can slowly feel my barkada slowly growing distant from me. Although I’ve been spending a lot of my time with Glaiza, Annie, Kapst and Rajelyn, I’m still in good terms with Maricris and Michelle. But Denilou and Angelica treat me coldly. They look away when they see me in the hall, and when I’m with them during recess they act like I’m not there. I don’t know if they’re mad at me for something I don’t know I did. But if they are, I really wish they’d tell me. I mean, do I look like a clairvoyant to them? I can’t keep guessing their bloody thoughts all the time!

Nenok surprised me today. As I was going in the classroom this morning before recess, she suddenly grabbed my arm and said, “Lauryn, you’re a cheerleader.”

The news took me by surprise and I was like, “Excuse me?”

“You’re a cheerleader. We’ll be having the same cheerleaders this year,” she told me.

I was flabbergasted. I meant to say that I didn’t want to join. But what came out of my mouth instead was, “B-but I’m no good!”

“Oh, you’ll do fine!” she said, smiling. Then before I could correct myself, she left the room with her girlfriend.

Jesus Christ, with the way she was always yelling at me for not smiling during rehearsals, I always thought I would be the very last person she would pick to be a cheerleader. Just goes to show how unpredictable people can be. The scary part is, I’m actually thinking of joining! It freaked me out, especially since yesterday I was ranting and raving about what a waste of time and effort and money the cheerleading competition was. See this afternoon, as I was leafing through my photo album, I came across the pictures of sophomore year’s cheerleading competition. After about two seconds, I rumaged through my closet for my cheerleading outfit, tried it on, and realized that I looked really good in it. I think I even look better in it now than I did when I was a sophomore. I planned to take a webcam picture of me in it tonight since it’s really nice but then my dad came home early and I don’t want him to see me prancing around the house in that teensy skirt and the almost midriff bandanna top. He’d explode into a million pieces. Anyhow, as I was eyeing myself in front of the mirror, I found myself wondering what our outfits would look like this year. The batch color of the juniors is red, so our cheerleading costume would probably be red and black. Cool, I thought.

And then I suddenly found myself dying to get my hands into another cheerleading outfit. But of course, there is no way I can get one unless I…*gulp* join.

So as you can see I’m still thinking about it. The only advantage I can think of is the privilege to wear the uber-cute red and black cheerleading outfit. And perhaps a little weight loss. The disadvantages? Rehearsals on weekends, lots of expenses, rehearsals under the sun which would result to an unwanted tan, about a million bitches screaming at me, exhaustion, boredom, irritation….is a tiny little skirt and top worth all that? Perhaps.

We did nothing today except prepare our booths for the United Nations exhibit thing. Each class in the high school department is assigned a country, and my sister’s class got Thailand. Well you know what my sister’s like. She wants everything to be perfect so she asked my mom to bring my Siamese cat, Kylee, to school. Now my crazy cat is afraid of people and at first I was very much against it because I was worried he’d go to cardiac arrest at the sight of so many schoolgirls in long skirts. But my mom said she’d bring the cat to school only during the time of the judging of the booths. With great reluctance I agreed. Before the booths would be judged, I waited for my mom to arrive and she came right on time. Kylee was in a cage, crouching and looking around his new environment with a dazed expression in his little round feline face. With great difficulty, I managed to get him out of his cage. He was a huge hit; everybody thought he was absolutely cute and they all wanted to hold him or pet him. Kylee was too terrified to do anything but submit to my arms and allow everyone to touch him. It was the first time I held him without meeting any resistance. I was amazed at how nice he was being today. My sister and I took turns holding him since he is such a fat cat, and everything was going smoothly. However, Kylee was starting to become agitated, and he was squirming around my sister’s arm. She gave him to me because her arms were tired and I took him. And then the bell rang.

Fortunately I hadn’t hugged him to my chest yet. When the bell rings at school, it rings so loud you can hardly hear anything else. Kylee never heard a bell ring before, not that loud and certainly not in a strange new place. Therefore he started to panic and squirm madly. As I was about to lower him to the ground, I heard some shrieks of disgust and someone shouting, “The cat’s peeing! The cat’s peeing!”

Please don’t let it be true, please, I prayed silently. Slowly I looked down and to my horror, the cat was letting out a stream of yellow piss on my skirt and all over my sister’s exhibit.

Girls started to let out lots of high-pitched girly shrieks, which scared the terrified cat all the more. “Don’t scream, it’s scaring him!” my sister yelled. He started to run around like an idiot but after some more yelling and lots of chasing my sister finally caught up to him, calmed him down and put him back in his cage. It all looked so funny and I was laughing hysterically. However, the little puddle of pee on my skirt was no laughing matter. I didn’t want to go through the rest of the day smelling like kitty pee so I looked for my mom, who was waiting for the judging to be over so she could bring the cat home. We went to the bookstore where she bought me a new skirt–thankfully there was one my size. When I returned to the booths, the opening prayer was being said. Over the monotonous voice, Kylee let out long sorrowful miaows, as if he was there to be dissected as a lab specimen and not gawked at as a decoration of a half-ruined booth. To my antisocial feline, I think being in a roomful of strangers was almost as bad as a slow, painful death.