Hi, my name is Lauren and I am going to waste the next ten minutes of your life with pictures of myself. Earlier this evening, I was looking through a box of old photos and discovered that I used to be jaw-droppingly ugly ten years ago. Which is not to say that I am jaw-droppingly gorgeous, either. Looks-wise, I think I fall somewhere between “interesting” and “cute”. I know I’ve got good facial features (nice eyes and proportional bone structure) but with the way I dress and present myself (piercing, short hair), nobody but my mom and Ale would consider me beautiful. Conventionally-speaking, anyway.
I’m not sure how awkward your pre-teen years used to be, if it was even awkward for you to begin with. When I was 11 I started bleeding from my crotch and growing breasts; my spine also began to curve the wrong way, giving me the posture of a little old lady. Believe me, this was probably the most awkward year of my life. Besides constantly getting the back of my uniform’s skirt stained because those damn pads refused to stay put, I could see all the girls in my class blooming like lilies while I remained a dumpy little frog with bad hair and the wrong kind of glasses.
(This was, by the way, also the same era where I fancied myself as the Harriet the Spy of my generation. I spent my entire sixth grade doing nothing but scribble notes and stories in my notebooks while paying absolutely zero attention to my teachers. That is probably why I only learned the difference between an “adjective” and a “noun” five years later and why I still don’t know the sentence structure of the English language to this day. Don’t ask me what a gerund is.)
Anyway, just for reference, this was me ten minutes ago, with no makeup and no Photoshop.
Lauren Dado
Aged 21 years, 11 months, and 25 days
And for further reference, me at my most conventionally beautiful. See how I had that whole “I’m girl you want to take home to mom and marry” thing going back then?
Lauren Dado
Aged 17 years and something months
And this was me as a child:
Lauren Dado
Aged 6 years and something months
Only with teh fugly! Lauren Dado, aged 11 years over the jump.
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My mom interrupted my packing to show me a very interesting find: proof that I was already an emo kid at seven years old! Either that or I must have been taking drugs disguised as candy and I didn’t realize it then.
I don’t remember writing this and I have absolutely no clue what the hell that last sentence meant. O_O According to my mom, I used to write her short notes at that age and in every note I would say that I had a “terreble day”. Good God. Aside from the fact that I was bullied by a couple of girls in the school bus, I vaguely remember that my childhood was a happy and normal one. Maybe that explains why I’m the way I am now. People can’t always be happy throughout their lives. Every single god-awful, weird thing that’s been happening to me lately must be payback for having an abuse-free childhood.
Ever since I met up with some grade three classmates a few days ago (whom I haven’t seen nor spoken to since I was eight!), I’ve been going on this weird nostalgic trip, rummaging through photo albums and hunting for old letters. I seriously regret burning my high school diaries and the circumstances in which it happened. When I was a kid I had this romantic notion that I’d give all my diaries to the man I wanted to marry so that he could have all of me and my neuroticisms. It was a very big deal to me, a gift more sacred than my virginity. Virginity is just a tiny piece of skin; any drunk frat boy can just snatch it away from you. But those diaries were records of my thoughts. My feelings. Forever preserved in paper because I had no friends to talk to back then.
When I thought I found the right guy, I did just that. I placed my diaries in a box and gave them to him. Instead of treasuring my gift, he suggested tossing them into the bonfire because he couldn’t stand to read about my past. Okay, I would understand why he might want to rip apart the diary where I wrote about my first boyfriend. I’m insanely jealous myself and I’d probably want to do the same thing had he kept a written record of his first relationship. But he didn’t even want to read about my childhood! I did what he said because I “loved him so much” and felt like shit afterwards. I think that’s when my romantic notions started dying.
Lesson of the story: you don’t know shit about love when you’re 18. Your boyfriend/girlfriend is probably a douchebag.
Words can’t describe how glad I am that my mom still kept my letters to her, even though I find them stupid and grammatically embarrassing. At least something I wrote from the last decade or so of my life still exists.
Back to packing! I love how I was too lazy to remove my clothes from last weekend’s Ilocos trip from my duffel back. That takes care of half the stuff I’ll be bringing. See? Sometimes being lazy is a good trait to have. 
Being back in the neighborhood where I grew up is slightly unsettling. Wave after wave of memories keep coming at me like sneaky sneaky ninjas. It’s as though I’m reliving my childhood as a 21-year old. Do you have any idea how weird that is?
For the first time since I was a kid, I attended mass in the small parish church where I have vivid memories of me squirming through the never-ending sermons by the priest who was later rumored to be keeping a mistress and stealing money from the church. God has horrible PR. When I hit puberty a few years later, I went to mass for the sole purpose of seeing the boy I had a deadly crush on. When the boy called me up on the phone and said “I love you”, I had all but died of happiness. Funny how ten years later, my reaction to an “I love you” would change drastically–perhaps a sardonic laugh and something really mean like, “Please, tell me something I haven’t heard yet.”
Another memory that came back as I squirmed in my seat throughout the never-ending sermon by the new parish priest is the memory of my first communion, which I shall now proceed to narrate. You see, it’s not the kind of first communion organized by the parish community or by my grade school, where we were taught to parrot the appropriate responses for the mass while simultaneously rehearsing church songs for hours on end. This was the memory of my Self-Proclaimed, Self-Organized First Communion.
As a child, I could never understand why I was “too young” to line up for communion with all the grown-ups. I think my mother tried to give me a theological explanation as to why I couldn’t receive the body of Christ at the age of six, but I still didn’t get it. As I tried to sit still in my best Sunday dress, my thoughts would often wander to that mysterious white disk. I imagined that it tasted like the white, menthol Stork candy I often bought in the nearby sari-sari store. My mouth then watered at the thought of the candy, and I grew furious that I was being denied this treat, this sweet reward, after suffering throughout that horrible sermon in my itchy dress, just because I was “too young”.
At one particular mass, I finally decided that no silly law from the Vatican and the pope himself can stop me. Today will be the day I get to know what Communion tastes like. Making sure that I was far from my mother’s eagle eye vision, I turned to my yaya and announced my intentions. I expected her to stop me and drag me over to my mother so that I may receive the appropriate punishment. To my surprise, she said, “Do you know what you’re supposed to say when the priest gives you the host?”
I shook my head and eagerly waited for her to teach me the ways of communion host-eating.
“When the priest says, ‘The body of Christ”, you hold out your hand and say ‘Amen.’”
In one minute my yaya was able to accomplish what days and days of First Communion rehearsals were all about. I thanked her and squirmed my way out of the pew. My heart was pounding as I lined up for communion along with the legal parishoners. I was well aware that I was about to commit a Sin, but my curiosity was stronger than the fear inspired by images of the hell so vividly described by my grade school religion teachers. As I neared the front of the line, I licked my lips in eager anticipation. Amen, amen, I kept practicing in my head so that the priest wouldn’t suspect that I was only in grade one, a full year away from my actual First Communion. I didn’t even want to think of the kind of trouble I would be in should my actual age get exposed.
After what seemed like an eternity, I was finally in front of the priest. He seemed a lot taller than I thought he would be.
“The body of Christ,” he said. And like a sweet, dutiful, little Catholic girl who has already received her first Communion, I held out my hands and said “Amen.” He placed the host in my little palm and I eagerly put it in my mouth.
I was so shocked and disappointed to find out that the first communion host tasted a lot like paper. Hell, even my notebook paper tasted better than the communion host.
I have faint memories of my yaya informing my mother about what I had just done and being screamed at when I got back home. But the utter letdown of having tasted the tastelessness of the communion wafer was stronger than any punishment my mom could ever inflict on me. Little did I know that this experience would serve the first of my many, many disappointments regarding Catholicism and religion in general.
Twisted as this might sound, I actually find myself quite cute for having absolutely no sense of the sacred and the profane at such a young age. <3
