Music streaming by the likes of Spotify and Deezer was about two decades away when I went to high school. Back then, if you wanted to listen to an artist’s music, you could either wait for your local radio station to play their songs or buy or borrow their album. I chose to buy albums almost all of the time.

I’ve never been into collecting things except for cassette tapes. The music they contained somehow gave me a sense of identity. When you’re a teenager, you struggle with insecurity because you’ve yet to fully grasp who you really are. My album collection was a testament of who I was, or at least how I perceived myself at the time.

And then there’s the thing that collectors love doing. There’s something soothing about admiring the stacks of albums that I was slowly starting to accumulate, reading the artist and album names on the spine, and choosing from that collection the music that will serve as my life’s soundtrack for the day.

Eraserheads’ Cutterpillow was the first album that I ever bought. I heard it the first time at a friend’s house back in elementary and we wore it out by playing “And Huling El Bimbo” at least a hundred times. So, when I finally had the money to buy my own copy, in high school, I got one immediately. I scrawled “CED” on the case with a black marker hoping to avoid any confusion on the ownership of my first, my precious, and beloved tape.

I always kept my tapes neatly stacked inside my cabinet, but never really kept track of them. One afternoon, while walking along the path from the classrooms going to the kitchen, I noticed a cassette case lying on the ground with my name written on it with a black marker. Someone took my copy of Cutterpillow. I never thought of buying the album again. I should have. Cutterpillow, after all, was my gateway drug to the addiction of collecting albums.

Not Your Average Joe

I can still picture Evan sitting on his bed at the far end of the Old Dormitory holding a pen on which he spins a cassette tape, probably The Cascades, Third Eye Blind, or Megadeth.

Unlike digital music, you can’t skip tracks with cassettes. You have to rewind them to go back to the beginning of the album, which drains your Walkman’s batteries. So, many of us did what Evan did at the time: we spinned our cassettes on a pen to rewind them. This meant that we didn’t waste our batteries on anything other than listening to music.

While the popularity of cassettes may have had a bit of a resurgence in the past few years, I’ve never been nostalgic about them. I bought a lot of those in high school to remember how much of a pain in the ass they were to maintain. Store them somewhere dark and damp and you’ll end up with moldy tapes. Play them in a crappy player and it’ll eat up the tape and ruin it just like it did to my treasured Van Halen Best Of Volume I album.

One evening, I decided to pop it into a cassette player and listen to Eddie Van Halen’s life-changing “Eruption” guitar solo. Towards the second half of the music, the glorious finger-tapping crescendo that brought a lot of wannabe guitar gods back to the woodshed began to warble before coming to a complete stop. I pressed the eject button and there I saw the carnage of the brown magnetic tape stuck inside the player. I tried to pull it out gently in the hopes of saving it, only for it to break off. I had to put it together with Scotch tape to save whatever was left of “Eruption”.

So, when old people like me talk about the struggle of listening to music on tape, we mean it. Kids have it easy these days with their Zunes and Myspaces.

Now, if cassettes were such a hassle, why did we buy them anyway? Simple: price.

Around the late 1990s, cassettes cost around P100–P140. CDs, on the other hand, cost three times that. Walkmans and cassette players were cheaper too than their CD-playing counterparts. So, if you were a teenager with a limited budget, tapes were the most economical way to get your aural fix.

In Borongan, there was really just one place where seminarians and practically everyone else could buy the latest tapes at the time: Papa Joe Music House. Formerly located in Sawang across the Borongan Cathedral, Papa Joe was often my first stop whenever I got my monthly allowance. Of course, I’d make sure to set aside some of it for my personal effects, but a lot of my money went to buying tapes. Because of that, one could say that my parents fueled my addiction to music and I’ll forever be grateful to them for that. At the end of my freshman year in the seminary, I amassed a small collection of about 30 tapes.

Now back to Papa Joe. At its entrance were racks of newspapers and magazines and from its ceiling hung songhits, weekly music magazines that featured popular songs and their chords so you could play them on the guitar. I would often casually browse songhits to check out new songs before going inside where the tapes in display cases were. I’d typically ask for their new arrivals or for specific albums if I knew beforehand what I was looking for. Sometimes, I’d buy tapes solely because of the album art or the artist’s name, which was how I ended up with Van Halen’s greatest hits album, a collection of dance music, Black Sabbath’s greatest hits, and a few oddities. Asking for new arrivals, meanwhile, meant looking for tapes that have already been out in the market for months. But because we lived in a far-off province, we had to wait before Papa Joe finally had them, that is, unless someone beat us to the last remaining copy in their store.

For tapes that I really wanted to have my hands on on release day or at least with the least delay as possible, I’d write a letter or talk to my elder sister via long-distance call to ask her to buy them for me. That was how I got the likes of Oasis’ Be Here Now, the first MTV Alternative Nation album, and Eraserheads’ Fruitcake sooner than most people in the seminary.

Majority of my tapes, however, came from Papa Joe. Its decks of tapes wrapped in plastic with the circular neon-colored sticker on which the price was printed became a part of my musical journey and provided the soundtrack to my youth. While I’ve since thrown the tapes away after a flood in my childhood home submerged it, I began to rebuild that collection and replaced them with CDs. Why not vinyl? Because CDs are cheaper these days.

And like my original cassette collection, Papa Joe is no more, at least in its original location. I’m just glad I’ve made it a point to drop by there occasionally over the years when I had the chance. Sometimes, I’d say hi to Joel too, one of Papa Joe’s kids and who became my classmate and Blano at SJN for a day or so before he decided it wasn’t for him. I’m sure though that a part of that old Papa Joe Music House lives on in long-forgotten tape collections of seminarians that are gathering dust and mold in boxes, drawers, and cabinets, with their owners thinking that one day they just might decide to pop them back into a cassette player, press play, and go on an sonic journey that may be the closest we’ll ever be to traveling through time.

I’ve been living in your cassette
It’s the modern equivalent
Singing up to a Capulet
On a balcony in your mind

Singing in My Sleep, Semisonic

On weekends or when I’m in a particularly good mood, I’d connect my phone to a white Yamaha micro stereo system via Bluetooth and blast music from its speakers. These days, I usually listen to electronic music or ’60s jazz to keep me focused while I’m writing—I find anything with lyrics usually distracting.

Okay, that’s just partly true. At the end of every year, Spotify emails me stats about my musical taste over the past 365 days. And while electronic music and jazz do count among my favorite genres, I still mostly listen to a lot of the music I listened to as a teenager.

I formally became a teenager in March 1996. It was also when I graduated from elementary and readied my bags to study at the Seminario de Jesus Nazareno (SJN) in the next school year.

My parents have always been great gift-givers either as themselves or as Santa Claus. For my graduation, they gave me a Walkman.

Unlike my current phone which can play virtually any song ever written and has a billion other features that would’ve wowed my 13-year-old self, my Walkman was a pretty Spartan device. Sure, there were a few buttons and switches whose function I never figured out, but it was as straightforward as playing music got. Open the tape compartment, slide in the cassette, press play, and listen to your music in glorious stereo on a cheap pair of earphones. At least until the tape gets “eaten” and jams the cassette player, probably ruining your tape forever like it did my Van Halen Best of Volume 1, but that’s a story for another day.

It was the same Walkman I was listening to Bread to one night when I was in my second year. It was bedtime and I was lying on my bed at the Old Dormitory—or Old Dorm as we usually called it—which stretched out from the Prefect of Discipline’s Room on one end to the statues of Mary and Jesus on the other. On either side of this long hallway were beds and cabinets of about 70 seminarians.

I was finding it difficult to sleep. So, I got up and walked across to Phil’s bed, a senior with whom I became good friends because of our shared love of music. He taught me how to play a few songs on the guitar and every once in a while, he’d let me borrow his tapes.

We chatted for a bit, during which I declared Bread as the greatest band I’ve ever listened to. He reasoned with me that there are other great artists too, but I wasn’t having any of it. At the time, I couldn’t imagine how any other artist could top the band that wrote “If”, “Aubrey”, “Guitar Man”, and “Diary.”

I wasn’t aware that my taste was still evolving then. But somehow, a part of me still couldn’t see beyond the greatness of the likes of soft rock titans like Bread and Michael Learns to Rock.

At the end of our chat, Phil recommended that I listen to Gin Blossoms’ Congratulations, I’m Sorry as I rummaged through his cassette collection.

I returned to my bed, replaced Bread’s tape with Gin Blossoms’, rewound it, and pressed play. “Day Job” fades in and I was transported into a world of great pop hooks, crisp-sounding drums, and jangly Fender Stratocasters. Along the way, I picked up a few favorite songs: “Follow You Down”, “Not Only Numb”, “Perfectly Still”, “Virginia”, and “I Can’t Figure You Out”. Hell, I liked the entire album. In fact, I liked it so much I subsequently bought my own copy.

Isn’t It Weird, Isn’t It Strange?

Everyone was into all sorts of music during my time at SJN. What I call “The Rock vs. Hip Hop vs. Punk Wars” of the early to mid-’90s was already over by then so everyone was free to listen to music that they loved no matter the genre. But in broad terms, we can divide these genres into two. There was, of course, Church music, which we sang every day during Mass, and then there was the Devil’s music. We enjoyed both in equal measure, taking as much pleasure in singing “Ave Maria” as growling Sepultura’s “Roots Bloody Roots”.

In my class, no one probably had a more eclectic musical taste than Henrik. He grew up in Borongan, so when we were allowed to go out of the seminary on Saturday afternoons, he’d go home where he’d be able to watch MTV when it was still the primary source of everything cool and mainstream. In the next few days, he’d fill us in on the most popular songs of the previous week. He thus brought to our class the gift of Hanson’s “Mmmbop”, K-Ci & JoJo’s “All My Life”, and tons of other songs, a gift he continues to give whenever we meet. I don’t look out for new music now as much as I used to, but he still occasionally shares with me fresh ones to listen to.

The community’s broad taste in music might have also been because of the strange time we found ourselves in musically. Grunge was dying, alternative music was still very much alive, Nu Metal was still a few years away from blowing up, and—probably the most important—boy and girl bands became a thing. Okay, boy and girl groups weren’t entirely new, but the likes of Backstreet Boys (BSB), Spice Girls, and NYSNC became the soundtrack of our generation whether we liked it or not. Of course, I ate up boy band music completely, especially because it was a great way to connect with girls.
And while I was heavily into Britpop at the time, I also knew BSB’s hits by heart. It was largely because of Nick—my classmate, not Carter—who was probably the biggest BSB fan in our class. When Millennium came out, we’d share earphones and listen to it during class breaks and I’d air-guitar the solo in “Larger Than Life”. We loved the album so much that we sang and played “I Want It That Way” with Kirk, D’Arcy, and Joey Boy after Mass on a Saturday morning instead of going directly to the refectory for breakfast. A priest caught us mid-concert and then stripped us of our privilege of going out of the seminary that afternoon. We got over it quickly though. We had fun and we told ourselves that it ain’t nothing but a heartache and a mistake. I also guess the priest wanted it that way.

1:00 p.m.

Afternoon classes are like being in a state of limbo. We’re still sleepy and splashing water on our faces simply couldn’t wash it off.

What’s more is that these classes often feel like an unnecessary intermission to something far more important. I still feel the same way as I write this, so I’ll play hooky and fast forward to a few minutes before four o’clock.

3:58 p.m.

There’s an air of quiet restlessness as teachers wrap up the last class of the day. Last-minute instructions, assignments, and maybe a parting sermon if the class were particularly unruly that afternoon only add to our growing agitation. But we’ve long stopped listening. Their voices have already faded into the background as ears wait for the sound of the creaking staircase followed by the pealing of the seminary bell at 4:00 p.m.

And then, pandemonium.

One by one, we strip ourselves of our school uniforms to reveal our basketball uniforms underneath. We then open our study tables and take out our sneakers that we’ve stashed there earlier in the day, put them on and go on a mad dash to the basketball court.

We’re a special class of seminarians called the buwaya, member of Kingdom Animalia and phylum Chordata whose sole purpose is to be among the first 10 players to play basketball during the recreation period.

Becoming a buwaya who’s consistently the king of the hill and at the top of the heap is no mean feat. It takes cunning, speed, and a superhuman ability to change clothes in a flash to become one.

In our class, Nick has always been the Alpha Buwaya. He always had something more that pretenders like myself didn’t. He wasn’t just quick and cunning, but he was also supremely athletic.

He was Zion Williamson before Zion was even a twinkle in his father’s eye. Nick combined height, heft, and agility to put each one in our class to shame in a one-on-one game. I know this from experience because I was almost always matched up against him whenever we played, but only because we’re the same height, nothing more. Once he took the first step to the baseline and bumped his body against my skinny frame, he was almost always going to score.

While Nick wasn’t much fun as an opponent, it was a joy being his teammate. We played together for two years in the high school varsity—I was a benchwarmer who was only there for the height and occasional shooting—and it was great having someone you can depend on when it came to scoring.

Of course, there were buwayas too in our class aside from him. Lex was a gifted guard and shooter, D’Arcy was a fearless dude who loved cutting in the middle of the lane and throwing crazy floaters before they became a thing, Ike who’s probably the most well-rounded player in our batch, Percival who ran so quickly from one end of the court to the other that we called him Kabayo or Horse, and Henrik who’s a great ball handler and shooter with whom I loved playing pick-and-roll plays like John Stockton and Karl Malone. 

But it’s all in the past now. Only a few of us would be able to play an entire game without passing out.

We also had this obsession with our vertical leap. We tried our hardest to jump as high as we could to reach the backboard before, during, and after playing basketball. Those who could jump higher or had a longer wingspan were able to reach the bottom of the rim or even the rim itself. And this fixation on our vertical bled into other places outside the basketball court. We’d try to reach the tops of doorways in the chapel, dormitory, refectory, classrooms, and practically every entrance in the seminary that’s within reach. This obsession never seemed to have left me. I may not play basketball that much anymore, but there are times when I still dream vividly about being able to finally dunk the ball. And yes, I still tap tops of doorways every so often.

We only had two basketball courts: the junior court was reserved for freshmen and those in second year while the senior court was a larger one where the ones in third year and the seniors would play. And on each weekday, only one class was allowed to play at their assigned court. So if you were a freshman and it was the second year guys’ turn to play that day, you had to find other stuff to do. Some of us would lounge at the lobby or the refectory, watch others play basketball, debate about basketball (who’s the better player, Bong Ravena or Kobe Bryant?), or get the guitar and play music. Others played tennis, table tennis, and football. One of my classmates, Coco, even played tennis at the national level in elementary.

Overall though, recreation was when we could let off steam and bring balance to a life of prayer and studies. It was the embodiment of probably one of our most favorite overused Latin phrases: mens sana in corpore sano, or a healthy mind in a healthy body. It stresses the importance of exercise in a person’s mental health. But getting a lot of exercise didn’t keep us from being our usual crazy selves, especially when there were girls around.

Some afternoons, a tricycle would drive by the basketball court full of high school girls wearing the blue and white uniform of St. Joseph’s College, a private school in Borongan. This would instantly bring the level of competition into overdrive, with each of us suddenly unwilling to pass the ball so we could showcase our individual skills. The basketball court must have reeked of hormones then with the particularly unhealthy amounts of adrenaline, testosterone, and dopamine coursing through our veins.

I considered recreation the high point of our weekdays in the seminary and its end marked the gradual closing of the day.

5:30 p.m.

After spending a good 90 minutes being soaked in sweat comes showertime. But it is actually a misnomer—the water pressure would be so weak then because of so many faucets turned on that we usually use our water buckets and kabo to take a bath. 

And then, there are the smart ones who wait until around 5:50. There are fewer people in the bathroom by then, but with so little time left before the evening prayer at 6:00, they’ll take a bath as quickly as they can to avoid being late.

Others have a simpler solution. These kids don’t take a bath altogether and instead wet their hair, spray as much perfume as they can, and pretend they showered—or bathe in rubbing alcohol for that fresh, bacteria-free feeling. While looks can be deceiving because the smelly truth is right under everyone else’s noses.

7:00 p.m.

Dinner is probably the biggest meal of the day. After a meager breakfast and lunch, each table will pool their money to buy at the canteen a tiny can of Blue Bay Tuna, Argentina Corned Beef, luncheon meat, or that fake lechon paksiw and stuff their faces with it. Some will also have pre-ordered pancit canton during recreation from Mana Caring who lived nearby. They’ll also stock up on rice to make dinner extra filling. 

Of course, feasts like this typically happen only at the beginning of each month when everyone still has most of their allowance. And I’m using “feast” liberally here because with at least six hungry boys sharing a small can of food—more, if folks from other tables decide to ask for a portion—it can be hardly called as such. Nevertheless, gorging on food other than the usual fare of fish and vegetables is definitely a cause for celebration.

7:30 p.m.

“Should I tell her I like her?”

“Dude, you’ve asked me that a million times this evening. Just go and tell her already.”

It was senior year and I was asking Kirk for advice on girls. He was clearly getting tired of hearing the same question over and over again. But he was our batch’s resident lovemeister, having been the first among us to have a girlfriend. So if there’s something who I thought was mature enough to guide someone like me, it was him.

This happened during our so-called free time, the schedule after dinner where it’s basically a free-for-all, within reason, of course. We could chat and chill almost anywhere, but most of us would hang out on the basketball court.

On a clear night, we’d sit under a blanket of stars, watching satellites and the occasional airplane fly by. By the time I was in third year, I’d be on one of the concrete benches with Kirk, Nick, and Joey Boy, a talented guitarist who was in second year, and we’d play guitar and sing our repertoire of songs that was heavy on boy bands. Mostly. But yeah, boy bands. Backstreet Boys. 98?. Code Red. We played a lot of rock, metal, and alternative music too from Oasis, Metallica, Eraserheads, Rivermaya, and Parokya ni Edgar just to balance all the syrupy sappiness.

But probably the biggest musical act that ever played during free time wasn’t the kind of band one would expect.

I first heard them when I was in our classroom reading a book or magazine or chatting with one of my classmates. From a distance I could hear the steady beat of what sounded like a marching band, which grew louder as it approached. And then there they were, a group of 10 or so kids from the lower batches playing marching band music minus the instruments. Instead they used whatever stuff they could put their hands on that resembled the real thing, the most outstanding of which were their fake melodicas from computer keyboards that they stole from the computer lab. They did several of these gigs during free time and they always delivered a solid 10 when it came to performance and pure entertainment value. And the musicality? Who cares when everybody’s dying of laughter?

8:00 p.m.

As if eight or so hours of classes weren’t enough, we also had what we called “study period” where we’d spend an hour of self-study every day except on Saturdays. At least that’s what we’re expected to do. But as one might expect from a bunch of teenage boys, we spent as little time as possible on actual study. 

That’s especially the case when one has a classmate like Henrik. He was our resident genius, the type of guy who never has to write down the solution to a math problem because he does it all in his head. From physics and chemistry to all our math subjects, almost everybody counted on him to help solve our assignments that dealt with numbers. Even the other math wizards consulted him just to make sure they had the right solution. We’re so dependent on his genius that we often joked that our Physics teacher only needed to check Henrik’s assignment and give the entire class the same grade because we all copied from him anyway.

While I think I also did my fair share of studying, I mostly remember just drawing or writing a lot on my notebooks. I practiced my craft by writing letters to girls and penpals or writing song lyrics for the band that Nick, Kirk, Joey Boy, and I were forming. I didn’t consider those as practice then but that’s what those things amounted to eventually.

Others would just read novels during study period. Tom Clancy and Robert Ludlum novels were popular then. And if these authors were Jesus, my classmates Percival and Harry would’ve been their disciples. On most evenings, I’d see them slumped on their study tables focused on the pages of books like The Bourne Supremacy and Patriot Games.

I wasn’t much of a book reader myself. I generally preferred ones that had pictures. At least that was until Father Larry, the seminary’s rector and our English teacher, assigned us to read one book or short story every week and submit a summary of what we read to him. He didn’t recommend books or stories, so we ended up reading what we actually liked and made the activity lot more fun rather than a chore.

Study periods are meant to be quiet. While this helped those who really wanted to focus on their studies, it also benefited those who preferred an early shut-eye. This took a lot of trust on the part of the person sleeping. One dozes off in the belief that their seatmate would wake them up in case a priest suddenly appears and does his rounds in the classrooms and in the study hall. But study period isn’t just about learning stuff from books. It also taught us life lessons. Like never trusting one’s classmate to wake them up every single time. Because nobody woke up a seminarian one time when he fell asleep in the study hall. When the bell for night prayer rang, the other kids simply turned off the lights and left.

Maybe that’s why non scholae sed vitae discimus is among every seminarian’s favorite Latin proverbs. “We study not for school but for life.” And when people you trust literally leave you in the dark, it’s one lesson you’ll never forget.

9:00 p.m.

We capped off every day with prayer as a community. Like the morning prayer, the atmosphere during night prayer is quiet—everybody is ready to sleep. That is, except on Tuesday nights when someone who isn’t a prayer leader is highly like to get up the lectern and read the following passage from memory:

Stay sober and alert. Your opponent the devil is prowling like a roaring lion looking for someone to devour. Resist him, solid in your faith.

 – 1 Peter 5:8-9a

Maybe because it’s a short verse and the fact that we hear it every week, but it’s one of those lines that probably every seminarian knows to this day.

9:30 p.m.

Slowly and quietly, we head on to the dormitory, change into our sleepwear, and then wash our faces and brush our teeth in the bathroom downstairs. The pace is much slower after a long day of praying, studying, and playing.

10:00 p.m.

The community bell rings one last time, signaling the end of the day. The lights in the dormitory turn off and we’d all be in our beds, making our merry way to dreamland.

At least that’s the theory.

Seminarians who were visited by their parents in the day would be approached by those in neighboring beds to ask for food. Resistance is futile because everybody knows their folks gave them a fresh supply of snacks. So, they’ll grudgingly unlock their cabinet and take out a pack of biscuits or whatever their parents gave them.

From a distance, two seniors talk about a Japanese super robot called Voltes V and wonder if it will win against a slew of imaginary enemies. They enumerate one enemy after another, with one more ludicrous than the last. The entire dormitory is dying in suppressed laughter. That is except for the prefect of discipline who is now slowly making his way to the couple of storytellers.

“Get up. Kneel down,” he commands them and two other juniors who were caught in the comedic gunfire, and then leaves.

The rest of us chuckle ourselves to sleep.

Monday, 5:30 a.m.

The early morning air is cool, and everything is quiet. I’m still in bed, probably dreaming about finally meeting my crush or being able to dunk the ball in the seminary’s basketball court.

It’s a sweet dream either way.

And then I start to hear this tiny, faraway sound of metal banging on metal. The sound grows louder and quickens. The sweet dream gives way to the violent sound of reality. It’s the seminary bell—and with one final ring, the sound lingers as if to say, “Rise and shine, motherfuckers.”

Amid the collective groaning and rustling of bedsheets, the beadle shouts from his bed in the dormitory, “Benedicamus Domino!” 

To which the whole community will reply, “Deo Gratias!” 

“Let us praise the Lord!” 

“And give Him thanks!”

With eyes half-closed, we’d fix our beds—badly, more often than not—and head to the bathroom downstairs to brush our teeth, wash our faces, and get dressed for the morning prayer and Mass.

The bell is the heart that kept seminary life going. It told us when to pray, eat, play, and sleep. And because of it, we didn’t need to own a watch to know what the next activity was.

6:00 a.m.

Dressed in our clerical shirt, black pants, and leather shoes, we’d drag our feet to the chapel and on to our respective places on the pew. There, we’d take out a prayer book commonly called the Breviary and start the morning prayer led by two seminarians at the front. 

The Breviary is a collection of prayers that we said throughout the day, typically the morning, evening, and night prayers. It’s a hefty hardbound book around three inches thick and usually fitted with a black faux leather cover with a zipper closure. And once you open it, you’ll find prayers printed on fine and fairly thin paper. But flip the pages toward the end, and you’ll discover the good stuff: graffiti.

Super Clark. Bad day JLA. Enervated dead. Rownail. Poison. The list goes on.

Written in ink, these kids ensured their immortality by scribbling their signature lines on almost everyone’s breviaries. No breviary was safe. No breviary was sacred.

We’d hear Mass after the morning prayer. I always found it peaceful hearing Mass in the seminary. Everything is quiet, solemn, and I usually loved listening to the sermons. Some of the most memorable ones came from guest priests like Frs. Adams and Alex. Well, okay, I only remember what Fr. Adams said about working hard and not relying on luck because “Lady Luck is too old.” But the feeling of being inspired to do something good with my life remains fresh to me. Since I went out of the seminary, I rarely had the same feeling of solace and inspiration I had hearing Mass there almost every day for four years.

Of course, we’d always find ways to engage in some shenanigans during Mass or prayers. 

Case in point: my classmate Nick. He is this tall, bulky dude who, despite being friendly and outgoing, isn’t the sort of guy you’d want to mess around with.

And then there’s D’Arcy, one of the smallest guys in our class who’s blessed with a wicked sense of humor.

One time, Nick did the reading during prayer. As he went up the lectern and began to read, D’Arcy turned around and made eye contact with Lex, another one of our classmates and one of D’Arcy’s partners in crime. Lex knew what he was up to—D’Arcy was making fun of Nick and was trying to bait Lex into laughing. Lex was having none of it although he probably struggled to keep the laughter in. But it was too late.

All this time, Nick was looking at them. He gave them a knowing look, telling them that he was going to kick their asses when we returned to the dormitory.

Not soon after the prayer concluded, Nick headed for the chapel door and waited for Lex and D’Arcy to go out. But Kirk, another one of our classmates, came to their rescue. While not as tall as Nick, Kirk could stand up to him, and probably the only person who had the balls to do so in our class. So, no asses got kicked that day and Lex brushed his teeth in peace at the bathroom with Kirk watching his back.

6:30 a.m.

From our formal wear, we’d strip to our house clothes and slippers. We’d then head to our assigned areas in the seminary to do some light house cleaning.

Everyone gets assigned to a different area of the seminary every so often. That’s unless you’re already a senior and are friends with the opus senior, the guy responsible for the cleaning assignments.

My first assignment was at the chapel corridor with Pius, a senior. He never joined me to clean except on Saturdays, which I didn’t mind, because he’d do the hard work of polishing the floor with his banos. He’d work up a sweat doing so, and because he was a stocky guy, I suspected he took care of polishing the floor to lose a few pounds.

When I finally became a senior, I finally got to choose my cleaning assignment. As gross as it sounds, I loved being assigned to the community bathroom. I asked to be assigned there several times not because I loved the smell of piss and unflushed crap, but because it meant I got to take a bath in the morning. We had long days, and it wasn’t fun feeling sticky and smelly throughout the day.

On Saturdays though, we clean after breakfast—for a good reason. That’s when we do our general house cleaning that typically involves a more thorough cleaning like polishing floors and scrubbing bathroom tiles and ground work where we did our gardening around the seminary complex.

Back when I was a freshman, my father mailed me a typewritten note that contained a 500-Peso bill. Along with his advice that I spend the money on stuff I enjoy, he also reminded me to never look at housework as something beneath me, which I never did. To this day, I’ve taken to heart both pieces of advice. I may not be so much of a neat freak, but I can scrub, wipe, sweep, and polish with the best of them. 

7:00 a.m.

Probably one of the more conventional parts of our day begins with breakfast. Back then, the seminary had a meager budget, which showed up in a lot of things, like the facilities we had and the food that we ate.

A typical breakfast would either be dried fish called bolad, a piece of hotdog, or corned beef paired with egg and rice. One time, a classmate told me that we were going to have pabo for breakfast. I never had turkey before and for breakfast at that, so I was excited. Turned out we were going to have pa bolad bolad la or just dried fish as usual. 

We were served milk for breakfast for a period of time after a parent complained about the lack of enough nutrition in our food. Milk was such a precious commodity in the community that someone roundhouse-kicked a fellow seminarian over the issue of milk. Unsurprisingly, everyone started calling the kid Gatas—Milk—after the incident.

Now fueled for the rest of the morning, we’d go to class.

Life in the seminary is a lot like being in Hogwarts, especially when it comes to studying. We learned how to write and speak in Latin, but not for casting spells. We did it to improve our language skills with the added benefit of impressing girls on the side. Ego amo te—I love you. Or just to be gross in a different language, agricola arat vaccam (the farmer plows the cow.) We were the de facto experts in Ars Latina who carpe diem-ed and once upon a time believed in vox populi vox Dei and spoke it verbatim just to feed our young and tiny egos.

Education has always been a big deal in the seminary. The priests and our teachers told us we were cream of the crop and we were a class of deep thinkers. But they never told us whatever crop that was and they weren’t aware of the subjects we devoted our deep thinking to.

In my case, the end pages of my notebooks pretty much summarized the stuff I thought of. There were poor attempts at poetry, even poorer attempts at writing song lyrics for my band, and tons and tons of sketches of basketball players and sneakers. I wish I still had those notebooks just so I could cringe at myself and go back to Earth when I’m having those occasional illusions of grandeur.

Shit like this:

12:00 p.m. 

While breakfasts are typically a somber affair, lunchtime is louder and more lively as we’d have warmed up by then. From our classrooms, we’d line up at the social hall before proceeding to the refectory where we’d have our lunch that usually consists of rice, some type of meat, and vegetables. Like our cleaning assignments, we also have table assignments at the refectory. I loved being assigned with folks who are picky or don’t eat vegetables because I’d ask for their share. I particularly liked pako, a type of fern cooked in coconut milk. I don’t remember complaining about the food. Or if I did, I must’ve done so rarely. As a growing child being given limited portions of food except for rice, you’ll have to take whatever you can to fuel your body.

12:30 p.m.

Much of seminary life is about routine. Everything has its time. And if there’s one routine that I still hold sacred to this day, it’s siesta. After lunch, we get about 15 to 30 minutes of nap time or a moment to slow down and relax before we start the second half of our day. Everybody has to be on their beds, lie still, and be quiet. Of course, some do sneak about or just spend the time chatting with the neighboring bed in hushed tones. 

But as with breaking most rules, the goal is to never get caught. 

In our class after siesta, our teacher noticed that Nick was missing. So she sent someone to look for him who eventually found him taking a bath in the community bathroom. It turned out that a priest caught him taking a bath during siesta and ordered him to keep doing so until the priest told him to stop. The priest then left and eventually forgot about him. Rumor has it that his fingers are still wrinkly to this day because of that long and luxurious bathtime.

To some, the half-hour siesta isn’t enough. They’d stay in bed for as long as possible and wait at the last minute to get ready for the afternoon class. It got so bad by the time I was a senior that our prefect of discipline began shooting the laggards with a BB gun modeled after an AK-47. But they were quick learners—as soon as they heard the sound of the gun being cocked, they’d get out of bed right away.

After siesta was a quick prep for class. We’d usually just brush our teeth, wash our faces, and change into our uniforms.

Seven hours gone, nine more to go.

This post is part of a weekly series about my life at the Seminario de Jesus Nazareno in Borongan, Eastern Samar called “Seminary Days 1996-2000”. See you next week!

“The word ‘seminary’ comes from the Latin word seminarium or ‘seedbed.’ Here, we nurture the seed of priestly vocation you have in you,” spoke a priest in front of an altar with wood-paneled walls. At its center was a crucifix flanked by Bible verses in brass letters: “Fear not… I am with you always!” and “Come… follow me!” 

It was orientation day for about 30 or so of us newcomers at the airy chapel that had beige walls, white vaulted ceiling, and windows overlooking the surrounding fields and rows upon rows of coconut trees. We pretended to listen, but most of us were either daydreaming or inspecting the graffiti on the pews where we sat. 

After the quick lesson on Latin etymology, the priest spoke in length about the schedule, rules, and all the other basic things we needed to know about our stay in the seminary.

I entered the seminary on a Sunday sometime in late May or early June 1996 dressed in a pair of jeans and a striped polo shirt with a blue collar. Earlier that morning, my family and I heard Mass at the Borongan Cathedral, after which we returned to my father’s childhood home where we stayed, picked up my stuff, and had my picture taken with my grandmother together with my sisters. I was 13 then.

My entire family then dropped me off and helped me set up my bed. They also helped me unpack my sports bag filled with all of my clothes, including the white clerical shirts and pairs of black pants we’d wear to Mass along with the recommended footwear of black leather shoes, or sneakers and slippers depending on the activity. Finally, I had my cleaning materials: a small pail, kabo or a bathing ladle, a coconut husk for polishing floors called banos, two types of brooms, and a small dull bolo knife for gardening.

My mother meticulously listed all my things on a piece of paper so I would never lose them. Yet I did, losing many of these even before the year ended. Some were borrowed and never returned, others were stolen, and there were those that I misplaced and never saw again.

Only the newcomers were in the seminary at the time along with a few older ones who served as officers. The others would arrive the following day or so.

Karl was the first person ever introduced to me there. I think my mother asked someone to look for him, and after a few minutes, this kid who had a serious look on his face appeared and shook my hand. 

“He’s your cousin,” my mother said and drew for me a mental family tree to show how we are related. His family would later become this sort-of foster family of our class, which would eventually grow to include other seminarians in the community. But I’ll save their story for later.

My family left me eventually, but not before my beloved mother left me with her reminders, instructions, and pieces of advice to take my vitamins, brush my teeth, and clean my ears. 

That evening, while most of us were being loud and rowdy at the dormitory, someone brought a bottle of cooling talcum powder and had the grand idea of sprinkling some on his crotch. We followed suit and laughed and cried in pain as the cooling sensation stung our balls. I still can’t explain why we did what we did then.

Soon, it was bedtime. I remember sleeping soundly that night. I was just happy to have been able to venture out on my own at last. Some, probably those who experienced being away from their families for the first time, were supposed to have cried themselves to sleep, but none of them would admit it to this day.

Homesickness eventually got into some of us. Some left for good after one or several days in the seminary. Even my best friend during those early days, Bembol, had to leave in July. His mother decided to transfer him to a school in his hometown after bouts of sickness in the seminary.

We were about 30 in our class when the school year eventually began, a bunch of tiny and naive children who were only starting to get to know each other, the intricacies of seminary life, and the entire community we were living with.

This post is part of a weekly series about my life at the Seminario de Jesus Nazareno called “Seminary Days 1996-2000”. Until next time!

I’ve lots of random memories. Many of these only make sense to me.

Like that one weekend in late 1995. 

Here’s what I see in my head: it’s afternoon, and I’m walking with an uncle who is a priest along the street of my childhood home. We’re on our way to Megamall to watch Sylvester Stallone and Antonio Banderas’s movie Assassins. Both of us were wearing a t-shirt, khaki shorts, white socks, and white sneakers.

Now, for a little context.

In elementary, I pestered my parents to allow me to study in my father’s hometown, Borongan, Eastern Samar. I spent many summers there and in my mother’s hometown in nearby Sulat, and fell in love with life in the province because most of my cousins lived there, the pace of life was slower, and being away from my parents gave me the kind of freedom I didn’t have at home.

They eventually gave in on the condition that I study at the Seminario de Jesus Nazareno, a seminary for high schoolers. In 1995, my uncle was in his last school year there as the rector.

Back to the random memory.

As we walked that afternoon, he asked me why I wanted to enter the seminary. I want to become a priest, I told him.

Looking back, I probably said that just so I could finally leave home. But at the time, it felt like an earnest reply.

Either way, there began my four-year adventure living, praying, playing, and growing up with erstwhile strangers in a building at the edge of a sleepy town that faced the Pacific.

This post is part of a weekly series about my life at the Seminario de Jesus Nazareno called “Seminary Days 1996-2000”. Until next time!