The Inner Slut

I couldn't toss in the papers fast enough. The fire blazed with the same intensity that I hurled myself into law school.

It was 1993 and I had enrolled myself in the evening section, reserved for working students brave enough (or stupid enough) to dare to hurdle the demands of one of the country's premiere law schools. Some would say there are three; I say there are only two, one in Diliman, the other, in Makati. The Manila school, I have strong doubts about. Whether it was one or the other, it makes no difference now. It was a mistake.

I always prided myself in being brave enough to run over any challenge that found itself in my way. Or any opportunity that opened its doors to me. I took the qualifying exam and was pleasantly surprised to pass it. My parents were ecstatic, of course. My sister said that I should have read for the law years ago. I was already 29 at that time, having tried to make it into the mass media industry and found that the local economy had fouled up any chance of my getting a decent break.

The doors opened; I entered.

I fell in love with the study of law. It was all I expected it to be, and more. I learned how to study; how to discipline my mind; how to be intelligent. I will not pretend; it was not a sterling performance. I barely held on. And being the smart-ass that I was didn't help, either.

Being among brilliant people -- students and professors -- didn't help my extremely low self-esteem. I put on an in-your-face attitude and tried my damnedest to hang on. There was a policy, still in force this day, that should your average for the semester fall below a certain point index, you're out of the college. I always managed to stay a point or two above that index, thank goodness. It was tough: no fun, no sex, nothing but study and earn enough money to stay in school. But I got through the four years I spent at the college.

Then I left.

I got tired of the arrogance and the egoistic teaching styles. Most of the professors were experts in their own fields, admittedly, but they weren't in the classroom to teach. It was all a power trip. They regarded the students as upstarts who mistakenly thought themselves intellectually equipped for the task at hand (i.e., to understand what the professors had to impart).

From teaching, I went to work for a government agency, doing legal writing for the big boss. I learned a lot. It was also quite a distance from the school so I decided to transfer to a Manila law school. I went through four of these. It was the professors. They were not only egotistical power-trippers, they were also non-experts in the subject matter which they pretended to teach. At least, in my original arrogant college, the professors were recognized experts.

I finally earned my degree in 2000 from a diploma mill college whose passing rate in the Bar exams is something like 2%, and that's in a good year.

I took the Bar exams that year. I failed. I took it the next year with nothing to show for it. I took it a third time, with similar results. By this time, I was burned out, jaded and long broke. When finally I announced to friends that I'd had it and was moving on, they sighed in relief. I had dinner with some of them after this decision was made and they approved of the radical change in my appearance. As one said, I didn't look as if I was carrying the whole world on my shoulders anymore.

That was late last year. Since then, I'd been adapting, adjusting. It was only the other day that I finally decided to completely turn my back on the dream. As I said, I couldn't toss in the papers fast enough.

There were my photocopied references, texts, and review materials, carefully bound, lovingly pored over with colored markers, with notes written carefully on the margins. There were the course outlines, pages and pages of them, with digests of cases written on the backside in different colored ink -- blue, red, green -- for easier memorizing. There were copious notes on, and outlines of, the black letter law itself which I had painstakingly re-written in modern-day, sensible English and according to modern editorial policies. All for easier memorizing and in exercise of muscle memory. (I don't learn it unless I write it down.)

And then, there were my notes from my freshman year. Those were hard to let go. I felt a deep sorrow as I threw in sheet after sheet, the memories of those early days still fresh in my mind. I was so much younger then -- and so deluded. I watched as the fire devoured each page of a dream I lovingly wrote more than ten years ago.

Nothing of that dream exists now. My law books I plan to hide somewhere till I can either sell them or donate them to friends who still hang on.

From the ashes of my dreams shall I rise, reborn. I am renewed. Go forth and reinvent yourself and all that crap.

Story of my life. Needless to say, The Inner Slut couldn't care less. LOL!