Huh, not so delusional after all...

Lola Basyang alert!  If you are sick of hearing my stories from another era (I’m looking at you, Roomie, hahahaha!) you can move on to the next blog.

A lifetime and a half ago, before my sexy and glamorous life as a statistics professor (with a vampire slayer secret identity, of course), I had a sexy and glamorous life as a college student who really had no idea what to do with the rest of her life.  Although I was technically an economics major, I dabbled in a few things.  I was taking a number of French classes towards a French minor (and possibly a French husband).  I was seriously considering teaching History after being recruited by my favorite History professor.  My dream of being a world-famous designer was still very much alive, with promises of designing wedding gowns for friends given out left and right.  They all have since married, and none of them in any of my designs. 

College was also a high point in my “writing career” (the one I sought to resurrect with writing on this blog…nope, still dead).  I was writing for one of the campus publications and I took a couple of classes that required a lot of prose and poetry.  I threw myself into the “writing journals” that our professors asked us to submit every two weeks. 

Anyway, these writing journals were mostly free form.  One could write any type of poem or essay or such.  I think the professors’ actual words were “write down your thoughts.”  There was no way that the professors could grade the actual quality of the work—I can just imagine the headache of looking over all that junk—but they could grade your commitment to putting down something on paper every now and then.

One professor was very encouraging with my poetry journal.  She was astounded that I found something to write every day.  By the end of the semester, I actually had two notebooks full of poetry.  Most of it was excrement, of course.   Nevertheless, it was my excrement.  Okay, that sounded bad. 

My other professor was not as understanding.  After being sick of writing down my “deep thoughts,” I decided to use my imagination.  I started to write a spy series. 

It was probably around the time that I was reading the Bourne Trilogy, and hey, if Mr. Ludlum was getting rich because of this stuff, maybe I could start working my way towards billionaire-dom.  Billionaire-hood.  Whatever. 

So my idea was fairly simple.  It was a Mission Impossible-type situation where I was the leader and the martial arts expert (key word here is imagination) of an elite team of spooks posing as college students.  To make it a little bit more interesting, I used people I knew from school as characters in my story.  Once I knew where my story was going (I think a bomb in the chapel needed to be diffused before an Accounting midterm at 6:00 pm), I really started to get into it.  It was probably one of the most hilarious things I had ever written.  It wasn’t Shakespeare, of course, and it probably wasn’t funny to anyone but me, but it was a great escape from trying to write deep introspective essays in the hope of showing the professor what a sensitive, caring and articulate person I am.

When I got my journal back from my professor, I went through the stupid little comments that she made on some of the pages.  In one of my entries I mentioned that I hadn’t seen the movie “Speed” yet, and she said “Kawawa ka naman.”  I mean, really, is that a kind of comment you would put on a writing assignment?

I finally got to the last page of my spy series where she put in quite a bit of insight:

“Bleh, bleh, bleh…whatever, whatever, whatever…MAG-INGAT KA, BAKA HINDI MO MALALAMAN KUNG ALIN ANG IMAHINASYON AT ALIN ANG KATOTOHANAN.”

Excuse me while I pick up my jaw from the floor.  WHAAAAAAAAAAAAAT?

Okay, first of all, WHAAAAAAAAAAAAAT?  Second of all, this professor told the class to get creative, to use different forms of written word.  I didn’t realize that FICTION was prohibited.  Did she really think that I thought I was this hot, sexy, kick-ass martial artist?  Okay, maybe I did, but that’s not the point.  She was supposed to grade me on whether I completed the assignment or not, whether I had been able to put my ideas down in a coherent manner, and whether my grammar wasn’t too far off the beaten path.  How dare she judge my mental state based on my imaginary friends!  REALLY!

After that disaster, I knew I was never going to get an A in that class.  No matter how good my essays or speeches were, she was always going to look at me as though I was a nut job.   A nut-job who may have a wonderful and colorful way of looking at the world, but a nut job nevertheless. 

So why bring this up now?

Fast-forward to 2010.  So here I was, scanning my email, hoping desperately that I would find an opportunity that would showcase my IMF-Economist/vampire slayer skills.  Imagine my surprise when I opened a recruitment email from an organization that many would classify as a “spy” agency.  Basically, it said that my skills matched the needs of the organization and that if I was interested, could I please send a CV. 

Skills like this, perhaps:

OMG!

Finally, all those nights watching all the counter-intelligence maneuvers in Spooks paid off (well, I’m just really watching Richard and Toby)!  I have hard proof that I have what it takes J to be—dare I say it—A SPY! 

Should I start thinking of code names?  Get a new leather jacket?

So up yours, my dear Professor.  I’m not so delusional after all J.

Yey!  I finally got Toby up!  Multiply has been giving me problems...

Pics: My favorite spy-show, BBC’s Spooks.  I can watch Richard and Toby all day long...

Snoopy came from Snoopy.com from a long time ago.

Buffy from Dark Horse Comics.