Writer-Wannabe

I want to be a writer. Back in my grade school days, I would spend my summer poring over books of poetry and re-writing ‘em all in my alma mater script on the blue and red lines of my pad paper. I only wanted to perfect my penmanship back then, but the rhythm and rhyme of the poems before me made an indelible mark in me.

Fast forward to college applications… I was contemplating whether to put on my UP application Journalism or Biology. My lolo (bless his soul!) advised that I can be a good writer without having really studied it. You see, Lolo reads my writings and probably surmised I have no talent for it so why spend thousands of pesos? Har har. And really, I thought of me unable to get in the HS paper (I think they found out I only know 250 words, prepositions, conjunctions and articles included), so I figured writing wasn’t really for me.

With the odds against me, I accepted defeat and wrote Biology in my application form. Only, I ended up in Computer Engineering…probably had something to do with the campus of choice. In CoE, the only words I needed to know were: if, else, then, switch, main, void --- not really a wealth of vocabulary I tell yeah. But at least you get to invent words such as: name1, name2, num, etc. And become bestfriends with the underscore. The closest I got to writing an original work is when I had to write a freaking algorithm for a machine problem, which doesn’t really help if you’re setting your sights on the Palanca.

Today, I give. I no longer have stars in my eyes. But I still write. I write for the sake of writing and to keep my sanity.