the disgraceful kid that I was

It’s a crying shame that there used to be a point in my life when I didn’t know what literature was unless it punches me smack-dab on the face. [Or even then, I probably wouldn’t have recognized it either.] I used to loathe books. Books were evil. Reading was hell. And to forcibly make me read even the thinnest book in the cosmos was the worst kind of torture anyone could have imposed upon me. I hated reading almost as much as I hated an afternoon nap.


I used to believe that kids had no business reading books if there were grander alternatives such as playing “piko” with the other “sipuning” toddlers or sipping the nectar of Santan, all the while having that brainless delusion that my playmates and I could actually extract a vial of that sweet thing single-handedly, and to do so would have been the coolest thing on earth. It never occurred to us that a drop of nectar was practically a century behind a nanogram. Just the same, it never occurred to me that not reading enough books would be one of my pantagruelian regrets in life as I stepped in to college several years later.


It wasn’t until my first year in the university when I finally realized how dire it was that I haven’t even read an important literature in my entire sixteen years of existence, except for Noli and Fili [even then, they were part of the curriculum in high school, thus it was compulsory that we read them. Had it not been the case, I possibly wouldn’t have known who was Crisostomo freakin’ Ibarra]. It was a disgrace, really, being so clueless about books especially if you’re surrounded by depressingly intelligent people who read books almost as frequently as they change clothes. So I figured that maybe some of my viewpoints in life [or in books] need a serious changing. So I did. Little by little, I started to read. However, it wasn’t that simple and smooth at first, especially for someone like me who started out as a book-nazi. More often than not, I would have that painful temptation to just peek at the ending of a book just to get it over with. Of course, I resisted. [at least, to most of them I did :p] At any rate, I came to genuinely love it, the reading. Over time, I developed the patience and the appreciation. So now, I read read read read read every chance I get. And the more I read, the more I hate people who don’t. I know, it’s arrogant of me to discharge such kind of repulsion, but really, not reading is soo like ewww. Haha. Failure to read not even a single book all of your life would have been the immaculate way to earn yourself a front row ticket to Loser-ville. And boy, would that suck big time.