Tween misery

 

T. Valentino Jr, Rondeletia, Lakambini and Leilani Sitoy
(aka Bill, Pinkie, Bing and Lani)

Too good not to share.

Me with my family around the first quarter of 1982. I would have been 12 going on 13. My sister is all dressed up, probably for some end-of-the-year event for high school seniors (in the Philippines until a few years ago, these were 15 or 16 years of age).

What the hell was going through my head? Had someone yelled at me? Was I practicing my Italian war orphan stare? Was I wishing a crushie-boy would yank me by the arm and whisk me into a realm of endless summer and heavy firearms and little kisses? I was a shy and eyeglasses-wearing teen with a secret imaginative life and with no social skills to speak of, not even – and this photo proves it – in the bosom of my own family.

I was such a pathetic kid (always in the top three in my class) that, when a far more popular classmate asked me to write in her slam book, I acquiesced at once (albeit with a bit of a sneer). There were a couple of blanks labelled “Favorite Artist.” At last, I thought, a kindred spirit -- who would've known? So I wrote “Edgar Degas” and “Pierre-Auguste Renoir.” Too late I realized, leafing through the other entries and coming upon names like “Gabby Concepcion” and “Dina Bonnevie”, that “artist” was a direct translation of artista: “actor/actress.”

Less than a year before, I had stood up onstage at my grade school graduation and, before a packed auditorium, delivered a memorized speech full of grand ideas that my father had written. I was elementary school valedictorian. At the same time that I was committing that speech to memory, I was writing a loooong story, called “Raid on Rio Nova”, directly on a typewriter that was missing an “n” (a reject of my dad's). It was an adventure story filled with blood, guts and explosions featuring the boys of Hornet’s Nest and a stable of gorgeous girls loosely based on myself, my sister and some kids we had known but no longer hung out with.

A few weeks prior to this picture being taken, in a notebook I’d marked “Big Christmas Edition”, I’d written a story that was a shameless (or shameful) rip-off of Little Darlings, gender-reversed, in which the lead character, Paolo, nearly loses his virginity (on a dare) to a beautiful girl with straight black hair called Bing. They both end up weeping and saying “No! It would ruin everything!” I suppose it proves that as a sexual enchantress I met with zero success – not even in the bosom of my own imagination.

But some years after, I got contact lenses and learned to smile and to wear crop-tops and flip my hair, and above all to play wide-eyed and somewhat dumb. Things got marginally better.  😉