Pretend you’re anything just to be adored

Wonderful news! Annie just called me and she said that according to a very reliable source, school will start on the 7th instead of the 3rd! This is the best thing my stupid school has ever done, next to the air-conditioned classrooms of course. Well I’m really happy about the extension because it means I will have more time to tinker with my electric guitar when it arrives. Aww yeah!

Today I went to Glorietta with Glyka for the first time in weeks. She needed a shopping companion cos she had to buy school shoes and since I didn’t really had anything planned for today, I went with her. It felt good to see the Defect people again. We hung out there after we were done buying Glyka’s shoes and we dropped by 1:15 twice for a couple of minutes. Angelo told me I was getting fat, that is, my legs were. That made me feel really self-conscious but maybe he was just kidding. He can be a real pig like that.

I also met my first weirdo today. Or rather, my first weirdo met me. When Glyka and I went back to 1:15 for the second time, there was this guy with a small goatee talking to Angelo. We were both introduced to him; his name is Joe (Joseph) and after saying hi I didn’t really give him a second thought. He didn’t look like much; he looked like a taxi driver and I tend to be suspicious around people like that. It turns out that the guys at Defect don’t really like him either. He’s supposed to be a friend of Afro’s but he’s really weird and annoying. According to them, he stays there until closing time and he loves to talk about music. He know’s everything about the music industry and at first I thought that was kind of cool. I don’t really get to talk about music to the people I know.

Joe came to Defect shortly, and while I was sitting down he approached me and said that my black polished nails looked gothic. I told him I was punk and then we had a conversation about the punk bands that I liked. He does know a lot about the music industry and for the first time I finally got to talk to somebody about punk rock and people like Sid Vicious. He told me that there are some punks in the Philippines (mostly new school punks like me), and that there are punk gigs outside of Makati. But there was something weird about the way his eyes kept darting back and forth when I talked to him. And he kept asking personal stuff about me like where I lived and where I went to school. I gave him really vague answers for that; instict told me not to devulge any personal information.

I felt somewhat relieved when he said he needed to go to the bathroom. The Defect people were giving me this teasing, knowing grins while he was away–I rolled my eyes at them. But then Afro got all serious and said that Joe tends to stalk people. That creeped me out so Glyka and I left before he could come back. I had a couple of minutes left before my mom picked me up and while we were walking around the mall I kept looking behind my shoulder to see if there was anyone following us. Glyka made me feel even more nervous when she said that she saw him staring at me when we first ran into him at 1:15. While Joe and I were talking, Mirex told her that Joe gets attracted to girls like me. So how come I always attract the weirdos instead of the guys that I like?