Friends flipped when told them I was out with hot date this afternoon! She and I saw High School Musical 3! She's a beautiful 12-year-old! And I'm sort of like her unofficial ninong (godfather) since I baptized her last August. She's a daughter of one of our worship leaders at church and I kinda had to keep a promise I made her some months ago when they started advertising the third installment perhaps the best high school-themed film series!
Chris, Joel and I thought of killing time by watching it last Sunday in Baguio but the long line of people- young and old- leading to the cinema indicated that the High School Musical fever hadn't been rubbed off on us as quickly as it did with half the population of Baguio! We ended up watching (in my case, sleeping though half) the extremely boring Max Payne!
One main reason why I love HSM is because it is positive and clean! Now, I'm not talking about the celebrities' values, lifestyles and all that, just the movie! It's a clean movie. It kind of gives an impression of what an ideal high school life is all about.
Ah! High school memories! As the 70s Filipino song goes, "High school life..walang kasing saya" (Nothing else is more fun than high school life). It is true; high school is fun, even more fun than any other stage of life! I was a highschooler from 1991 to 1994, and some of the best memories I can ever think of happened within those years. College and gradeschool have a goodly number of amazing memories but a lot of the bestest happened in high school! Too bad high school is not meant to last forever!
Although some people cherish thoughts of highschool, others choose to perish them. I know a guy who breezed through highschool and never really enjoyed it. In fact, I didn't know he existed until he and I were assigned to come up with a slogan for Nutrition Week! Well, we belonged to different classes/sections. Perhaps because for the most part he was what we may dub as "invisible."
It's quite easy to write about this now that I'm 30!
You see, I belonged to a group of boys that weren't necessarily popular jocks but we were quite popular. We belonged to different home rooms. We were leaders in class and other activities. The unofficial committee members of every committee there was! People valued our opinions. We were loved by students and teachers alike. Lehi, a Mormon deacon; Francis, a Catholic altar boy; Alvin the son of a Jehovah'sWitness elder; Richie the rapper; Melvin the basketball player; and son-of-a-Baptist-preacher me.
We were the cool band of brothers everybody wanted to hang out with.
I remember one day after school when all six of us sat in my homeroom filling out specially marked sections for us in 2 dozens of autograph books (slumbooks) owned by girls some of whom we didn't know! The girls even got us Coke and toron.
I remember the time prom season came when we were juniors. The whole group agreed to "appear busy" so we won't have to be asked to go with anyone! It was our way of staying free on prom night and we won't have to be tied to just one girl the whole time! We flipped at the fact that senior girls didn't mind dancing with Alvin who had just recovered from chicken pox!
There are more stories to tell...I have no idea where the guys are now except for Lehi who now lives in Utah (the Mormon promised land).
Some weeks ago, quite unexpectedly, someone thanked me for something I didn’t know I had done. I was having coffee at a coffee place close to where I work. The person looked vaguely familiar, but I wasn’t even close to placing his name. That’s one of the curses of my profession, of course: I meet new people all of the time in a wide variety of contexts and it’s a challenge to keep my memory current.
He thanked me for making him feel he is "visible." Immediately, I realized who he was. But more than making the highschool world aware of his existence, he thanked me for a small blue Gideon New Testament I gave him after we were done with the slogan. It was through which he learned of Christ and became a Christian. He immigrated to another country a week later.
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