Two days without classes. Productive. Not in terms of work but in terms of sitting and sipping coffee with my best bud (Chuck). Then out of nowhere I asked him-Do you think I am ill tempered?
His response was…zzzzz.
So I am ill tempered. But according to Chuck and my mother, only on those things I feel really passionate about. Either I am really passionate or they are afraid of my temper so they patronize me.
I hate myself for being so ill tempered but I (again) came to realize that what Chuck and my mother told me is true. My classmates from college and high school described me as somebody as ‘passive’ as a dead wood (could that be possible? a person compared to a dead tree?).
When I was in college, third year specifically, I became oriented with ‘some’ left wing ideologies. From then on, my life was never the same. Suddenly I became opinionated, inquisitive about issues that affected my country and most probably I became passionate about the things I truly believed in.
At the age of 17, I became aware of things that most people would find ‘trivial’. At first, I regretted knowing information that are aligned with social issues because it made me feel useless, I mean what is the point of knowing things like these if you can’t even make a difference. I started to overhaul my life. I decided I don’t want to go to malls, I don’t want to eat at corporate burger joints, I don’t want to buy signature items, I don’t want to have a cup of coffee at starbucks and started to conduct other patriotic stuffs which I and some of my friends (who understands) pledge not to engage with.
Then I worked for a private company. Everything changed. What once I battled for was wasted and went down the drain. I was a slave of a major capitalist. And so I practiced fully one of the benefits of women’s right. I cried.
Then came the opportunity to spread and share what I know. I penetrated the Philippine Educational System. I teach in 2-second rate University's in Manila, one private and the other state owned. Second Rate because most of the student in those universities does not have money to enjoy luxurious education but has an analytical, critical and uncompromising brain. To be a first rate, the school has to have a soaring tuition fee, which those schools completely opposes. Try to spread a news about tuition fee increase and in less than an hour there will be pickets outside the gates of the school.
I am a product of the things around me, maybe, truly I am ill tempered and I will try to negate it, but then I came to a point that maybe it was not temper, maybe it was passion. Self-criticism is really hard. I wonder how Marx did it.
