Picture this: you are standing at the front of a room across the office of your old college department. Sitting before you are your former professors: one your favorite ever, the other your thesis adviser, another a part of that (in)famous group you like to call "The Triad." Other professors are there as well, about 10 in all. They are looking at you as you stand in front waiting for them to tell you when to begin. "O eto, galing sa atin 'to, produkto natin!" says one of them. They look at you and nod.
You are about to begin your teaching demo.
What do you do?? Well, if you ask me, I'd make a total fool of myself. Which is exactly what happened this afternoon.
But back to the beginning first. Yes, I applied for a teaching job at DSS. Grace, ever helpful and ever faithful, texted me about three weeks ago because she saw a poster somewhere in Diliman about DSS looking for an instructor. She knows it has always been my dream to teach, and it was for Area Studies, my old course. She told me to go for it, and that she'll get mad if I didn't.
I'm the kind of person who sometimes--okay, most of the time--needs to be pushed. Not coaxed, not encouraged, but pushed. It has always been difficult for me to go after my dreams (and I have several). They're just frustrations now, actually. It is an established fact that I am a coward when it comes to chasing my dream. I know what I want, but I just can't seem to make a go of it. Old little insecure me, I guess. So yes, I was a pushed a bit.
I am also an expert at procrastination. I can make up all the possible excuses for not doing what I'm supposed to do. I like to buy time, to push the moment away until it falls into oblivion.
I went to DSS a week after Grace texted. I wanted to know if there indeed was an opening. Walking down the 2nd floor of RH I saw Ma'am Mateo, our most loved professor in the entire world. I was about to to run up to her, knowing she would be delighted to see me. I mean, hey, this is my favorite professor, my mentor, my friend, the person I always put in the reference portion of my resume and never fail to greet happy birthday. Well, guess what. She didn't seem delighted at all. Instead of hugging me and asking how I was, as I was so convinced she would do, she just smiled and walked on. Hello?!? She hadn't seen me in ages! And she just smiled, quite absently. How sad is that?! I could feel my heart drop to the floor. I was shocked. Devastated.
And, of course, being me, I took it as a sign that maybe I wasn't meant to be there in the first place, and I definitely wasn't meant to be a teacher. I couldn't even go to DSS after that. I just sat on a bench, crushed. Sooo melodramatic. I whined to an old classmate over the phone. He promptly called up Ma'am Mateo, and learned that she had a problem at that time. A day later Ma'am Mateo texted him daw and told him to tell me "pasensya na."
I was guilty for feeling bad and being such a brat. But I couldn't help it. It took several people to convince me that, no, it wasn't a bad omen, that no, it didn't mean she doesn't know or care about me anymore, and that yes, I should still submit my application.
Fine. But I just couldn't let myself get away so easily. I succeeded in putting off another week, until finally, on the last day of application, I saved my resume and application letter in a diskette to be printed outisde and submitted, and asked my dad's driver to pick me up and take me to UPM and then to UPD (because I had a class afterwards). Driver arrives. I pull out the diskette. Voila, it's "broken." Naturally I call off the whole thing, tell the driver to go back to my dad, and climb up my brother's van, going directly to UPD. "Hindi naman sira a," brother tells me. "Eh, tanggal yung protective cover, yung nandun sa top part ng diskette," I defend. "Doesn't mean sira. Tsaka pwede mo namang i-save sa ibang diskette," he counters. "I know." Pause. "I am such a chicken." "Oo nga," he says.
When I got to Diliman, I tried to redeem myself and called up DSS to ask if it was okay to submit my application a day late. I was half hoping Ate Julie 1 would say no. She said yes, of course.
(to be continued)
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