Back to School

"One day, you'll miss going to school", my mom says while I lay in the couch slumped like a drunken college boy. At that moment, I could think of a thousand reasons why she's wrong. The zits alone make up ten and it complicates a high school kid's life on so many different levels.

While I stand in the train station waiting to be whisked away to work, I felt envy for the young students making their way to school. I never thought I'd look back and wish I was back in those days where life was so much simple.

You don't have to worry about money. There seems to be an abundant source of it and you don't have to worry where it comes from or who gives it to you. As an adult, you realize it comes from blood and sweat. It kind of makes me feel guilty for all the smoothies and fish balls I embellished on back when I was young. It's amazing that back then, those were considered a luxury.

You don't have to study all the time. When you're a gifted audio learner like I am (ahem), you don't have to write stuff on your notebook or read like the rest of the bunch. You just listen to the lectures and after the tests, you see that you might have missed one or two things. When you get to college, all the readings and notes you have will be worth nothing against your professor's confusing way of delivering the question and giving you a whole set of choices that seem to fit in. You suddenly feel like Madam Auring trying to guess the right answer with all the cameras pointed at you. Why can't someone come up with a test that has the "connect the dots" theme on it?

Good friends. The friends you had in high school are probably the only real friends you'll ever have. College friends get you into trouble, and work buddies are good until after office hours. You can forget faces you met in college and at work, but you'll never forget who sat beside you in 5th grade trying to peek at your test paper.

The Teachers. You keep wondering why it's important that you know stuff about things you won't really need in real life like trigonometry and physics (at this point, its becoming apparent that I hated math). And yet, when I'm trying to decipher my pay slip, I feel thankful somebody took the time to teach taxation, even after school hours, to someone like me who doesn't like to crunch the numbers. When you're in the real world, no one will bother to sit down and explain things to you. Not unless she (or worse, he) finds you cute.

Spare time. You seem to run out of this as you grow older. Back in the school days, we always run out of things to do. We've finished our homework. We've played 'till we're drop dead tired. All our TV shows are finished. You've already called your crush and asked lame questions like "what's for dinner at your house?". When you look at the clock, there still some time to kill. After work and the long commute home, I often look at the clock and wonder who put the time on fast forward.

Responsibility. You can't be held liable for your actions when you were a kid. Instead of blaming you, the adults would most likely end up blaming each other. That's the beauty of accountability. Now that you're all grown up, you can't blame anyone but yourself.

I'm back in the couch, still slumped and exhausted in every way a person can be exhausted. I hate to admit it, but my mom's right. I do miss the days when I HAVE to go to school.