#angeltriestoshowhowcuteofakidshewas

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On-brand stories from my childhood

I remember this tweet going around a few months ago, soliciting people’s most on-brand stories from their childhood, things they’ve done or words they’ve said as a kid that sum up who they are at present. I wanted to participate so bad when I first saw it on my timeline, but I knew that being the eccentric, one-of-a-kind kid I was, it would take me a long period of reminiscing (and more tweets in a thread than anyone would bother to read) to put down everything worth noting. So, here it is: 10 of the weirdest, Most Angel experiences from my youth, for the lack of a way to put it, accompanied by photos of baby me because let’s face it, they make everything better.

ONE: When I was about four, my parents took me to a building very near our house to have my IQ checked. They had an inkling that I was a gifted child, and wanted to confirm it with a professional. So, I was escorted into an office, and subjected to interrogation to assess my competence in several areas of giftedness - much to my dismay, since all I wanted was to get that interview over and done with so I could read books in the library next door. There was this one part where the person in charge of me was trying to test my kinesthetic abilities by getting me to follow this aerobics routine that she was making me do. “Step step one, step step two,” she was saying while stomping to the right and stomping right back in place. I told her I didn’t want to do it, because I didn’t want to look like a fool.

TWO: I had this knack for correcting teachers. As a kid, I was hyperfixated on learning all the countries in the world and their respective capitals, with the help of this flash cards set that I got from Toy Kingdom. So when there was this time that my Filipino teacher had said that there were only two countries in the world with names that started with the letter Q, five year old Angel was very quick to correct her. “Miss Melissa, there’s only one country that starts with the letter Q! It’s Qatar!” I told her. She replied, “No! Quebec is a country, too!” This argument persisted for a bit until she made us do a seatwork, which gave her the opportunity to leave us to go to the computer room for a bit (since cellphones weren’t given Internet capability back in 2006). She returned and told me, “Angel, tama ka nga. Di pala bansa yung Quebec, hehe.”

THREE: It’s become common knowledge to everyone in my life that I wrote books growing up, but my body of work extended way beyond my very inventive fiction (alternatively called, me putting my own twist on the fairytales I read growing up) and creative non-fiction (me telling everyone how my day, half true-to-life, accurate detail and half-imagination). I remember going through the family laptop one day, and coming across the corporate profile of my uncle’s company, where my dad was working at the time as the technical assistant to the president. Being the child I was who wanted to emulate everything her father was doing, I wanted to make a copy of my own too but I was unfortunately unemployed. Thankfully, I took matters into my own hands and made up a company of my own, which I aptly named Pamper and Pretty. Excuse the fatal grammar error, but I was six and was yet to be familiarized with what parallelism in writing actually was. I drafted a whole corporate profile, complete with the list of my employees along with their corresponding duties and responsibilities, as well as a list of all our products and services.

And of course, how could I forget my professional resume?

FOUR: I even looked far into the future and prepared a spiel for when we’d be looking for new employees, as well as a list of rules and regulations to follow if ever anyone would pass our grueling hiring process. My favorite is rule #26, which goes “Drug pushers are not allowed in the store.”

FIVE: While we’re on the topic of business, I guess it’s worth boasting that I was able to sit in a meeting my mom had back in the day with the rest of the members of the Systems and Methods division, and I was asked to take the minutes for a change. I’m aware I’m making absolutely no sense, but after much inferring, I guess it revolves mainly around IT, monitoring procedures and AARs.

SIX: I was a proponent for self-help at a very young age too, creating a list of five rules to live by, which I referred to as my “straight line project”. For which reason, I have absolutely no clue. One part reads: “Always watch out for a kid bullying some one so you can save the person being fought, then do the same thing that the bully kid did to your friend like for example when they are fighting in a swimming pool that the bully is trying to push your friend, you should save your friend and push the bully kid to the pool.” I advised. Turns out I had an attitude and a knack for retributive justice from the very start.

SEVEN: I also found a couple of letters I addressed to Santa as the Christmas season approached, where I requested everything from “world peace” to the entire Diary of A Wimpy Kid series. Talk about being a versatile queen! My favorite of the bunch was the last one I made, where I included directions and a sketch to get to our new house, because we had moved residences earlier that year. I just didn’t want Santa to get lost, and sneak in my old house only to find out that I was no longer there.

(Fortunately, my mom was able to print out all those files I had saved to the family computer before I promptly infected it with a virus that wiped out its entire memory. The lengths seven year old Angel would go just to download Young Guns by Wham! from Limewire.)

EIGHT: I was elected as class president multiple times in grade school, which you would think would mold me into becoming an active student leader. But, my term was constantly shrouded in controversy. I was always tasked to write down the list of noisy students on the blackboard, I’m not exactly sure if this qualifies as public humiliation but I wasn’t concerned with that at the time and did everything I could to fulfill my duty. A classmate of mine was singing a High School Musical song at the top of her lungs, and I asked her to stop. Usually, that does the trick and sends the noisemaker back to their seat but she ran out of the room and brought her mom upstairs because she got upset.

NINE: I also rode on a classmate’s bag, which resulted in her mom going upstairs (I have no idea why their moms spent the entire day in the waiting room on the first floor too, man) and scolding me, saying that her daughter’s bag is not a pony. I was also accused of calling my classmate stupid because she was only Top 7 out of all the students in class, while I was Top 1, which was false by the way since “stupid” was considered a curse word in our household until I was 10. Perhaps the best scuffle I got myself into was because I had checked my classmate’s homework with red crayon and put several drawings of hearts and stars, as well as reassuring comments along the lines of “Great job!” and “Congratulations!” around his perfect score. His father literally had me sent to the principal’s office. Parents then had way too much time on their hands, I swear to God.

TEN: If we don’t take into consideration the whole fiasco that involved my Teletubbies stuffed toy*, my first brush with “love” happened when I was in kindergarten. I had a crush on one of my classmates named Kevin, who is the scrawny little boy that you see beside me in the pictures below. I don’t remember anything else about him, not even his surname, and I haven’t heard of nor seen him since our pre-school graduation ceremony. All I have to remember him by are these photos, and a video that my mom took of both of us where he was seen flapping his arms around and making weird facial expressions, while I would squirm out of kilig in response. Weird. The worst part of it all? I didn’t even like him because he was cute or funny or nice to me: it’s just because he was named after my favorite Backstreet Boy.

(*In case anyone's curious, up until I was about three years old, my parents and I lived in Malabon with my maternal grandmother, who was tasked with taking care of me while my mom and dad were both at work. She was fond of watching Filipino teleseryes while taking care of me: they often had their fair share of kissing scenes, but I was practically a baby at the time who wasn’t capable of processing or remembering the things she was seeing on TV. Or so they thought. My mom said she had walked on two year old me making out with my cousin’s Teletubbies stuffed toy one time. She then promptly asked my lola if they could keep me as far away from the television as possible once Pangako Sa’Yo came on. Can’t blame her for that, honestly.)

That’s all I can think of right now, but I know there’s plenty more where that came from. Hope everyone is having a fruitful Holy Week celebration. Wishing you nothing but love and light, always always always.

Angel