10 Years Ago today

10 years ago today would have been a Thursday.

It would have been near the close of the first semester of school year 1998-1999 during senior year in college.

I would have weighed around only 140 pounds, with a waistline that never went beyond 30 inches.  I would have remembered that the year before, it was only 28 inches, when I experimented with a vegetarian diet.

I would have woken up late, and possibly missed my first class for the day - either Bobby Guev's Theology of Liberation, or the History of Psychology under a teacher whose first name is "Gerry".

Having gone to school, I would have gone straight to the ACMG-Kaingin-LiKaS-Musmos Room in Colayco Hall, when it still existed.  I would have heard the Eucharistic song practices of ACMG members (many of whom were gay), the boisterous jokes of the Kaingin boys (most of which were green), the not-so boisterous huddles of Musmos (a number of whom were rather portly), and of course the wholesome chatter of my fellow LiKaS people (many of whom were Biology majors.  But I wasn't.)

It would have been the FInal 4 season in the UAAP, but most people in school wouldn't have really cared because at that time, the old Blue and White wasn't a basketball powerhouse yet.  (It would have been the final year of what Atenean basketball enthusiasts would later on refer to as "the dark ages".)

Visiting Austrian Professor Clemens Sedmak (from the University of Innsbruck) would have been my Philosophy of Religion teacher, and I would have thoroughly enjoyed his lectures - even though I would not have understood a good one-half of the discussions.

The Eraserheads would have still been popular at that time, but they would have also been undergoing the slow denouement that characterized their later years.  But I would not have really cared because I never was an Eraserheads fan.  This would have also been at a time when I was a sucker for 70s and 80s senti songs, which I would have pirated using cassette tapes.  (During that time, CD burning was almost unheard of.)  

This being the day before Friday, I would have earnestly anticipated the weekend - Friday being almost always reserved for some org activity or what was known then as "Coffee Nights" at Beanhoppers.  (Ah, "Beanhoppers", that's one name I haven't heard in a looooong while.)  And this anticipation would have rendered my afternoon classes a dreadful bore.

I would have spent the early hours of the evening hanging out in school or in McDonald's Katipunan, because for some reason I did not like going home early.  Speaking of McDonald's, I would have ordered my favorite meal which was the Cheese Burger meal.  And it would have cost the astonishingly low price of P50.00.

Going home, I would have ridden one of the jeeps that plied the UP-Katipunan route.  If one was not available under the overpass, opposite National Bookstore, I would have walked all the way to the jeepney terminal near Aurora Boulevard.  I would have gotten off at Nawasa, and walked towards the jeepney stop in front of Vinzons Hall in UP.  

I would have taken another jeep going to Philcoa, where I would have finally ridden a bus up until the Batasan stop in Commonwealth Avenue.  There would still have been a lot of tricycles that could take me inside the subdivision I live in.  But since this would have been at a time when I still had an inexhaustible amount of energy to burn, I would have just walked until I reached my house.

Lying on my bed at midnight, I would have wondered what I would be like 10 years from September 3, 1998.