My mother and I finished packing up the trash,
and it now occupies a quarter of the room. I
had to burn some more stuff yesterday: those
magazines with Lea Salonga covers, a throwback
to a time/space continuum when Lea Salonga was
the most perfect daughter in the whole
wide world; photocopies from class readings.
Those were easy to part away with. I have no
intention of keeping lectures in algorithms,
or STS sample exams that had lived their
semi-usefulness.

I did keep the Collegian issue headlined
"Instructor's MA degree revoked for plagiarism."
[11 July 2000, Volume 76, Issue No. 2]
The instructor in question terrified my
freshman block through Asian civilizations,
took us on a field trip with cultists who believe
that Andres Bonifacio is alive and well and waiting
for Judgment Day. She kept us amused with her
dentures-in-braces, her penchant for wearing business
suits and a particular pair of cocowood colored
bracelets. The Pepsi commercial at that time had a
jingle that went "Singko, singko na!" She had a
definite criteria for half-assed brilliance,
so we feverishly believed we would flunk her class,
a definite 5.0 marked a bright red in our transcripts.
Some of us passed, some wailed after that five.
Eventually though, her fashion sense evolved into
something more tolerable, and we got into pretty
decent conversations and I began to have some
respect for her. You expect your teachers to
kick ass, to be less of an asshole than her students.
And then boom. The disappointment stings as much
as when I first heard about it.