by ALICE SARMIENTO

Discussed: Uniforms, Bathroom fieldtrips, Neck-lumps, Eugenie’s hand, Havaianas

Welcome to Girlville. Population: your girlfriend, your sister, and the teenage versions of your mom, her friends, and your aunts. Don’t mind the tables cluttered with packets of oil-control film, open compacts, and pink laptops stacked on top of unopened library books and photocopied handouts. Try not to pay attention to the muffled giggles, bits of cryptic gossip traded over your head, and tinny laptop speakers blasting pitiful renditions of generic pop tunes.

Shared café space with colegialas somehow becomes a shared interest in the contents of their iTunes libraries. If you are out of the loop when it comes to R&B and you have no idea who lady Gaga is, all you will hear is noise. You will feel alienated and old, making a mockery of old age since you are probably only twenty-four. Unfortunately, what will reach the other tables is noise as well, which they will attempt to counter with more noise: Lady Gaga, meet the Wonder Girls.

This is a contest.

Nobody wins (and I don't mean the song).

I grew up with contests. One that I constantly lost involved wallets: whose wallet was thicker not with money, but with studio shots. An incentive of the wallet-sized album was to show off your posse and how your posse rolled. Popularity—or at least an approximation of it—was a sexy prize. This was before the days of digital cameras; before twitter, before facebook, before “tagging” and “friending” had entered my vocabulary; the internet hadn’t even become an indispensable part of my daily routine and the mall was where it was at. Your posse rolled at the mall and kept some kind of record with the help of Great Image. That was where my little problem started: the thinness of my wallet did very little for my pathetic sense of adolescent self-worth.

The miniature albums followed today’s logic of adding people on social networking sites even if you’ve only met them in passing. I’m still fascinated by the thick collections of studio shots my colegiala friends carried around when we were in high school: each one was evidence of a group, a moment of bonding that had to go on paper. When I was 15, my friend Rachel had a picture of her and all her friends from high school sprawled on the floor of some studio. They were all dressed in white and ethereally gazing into the lens, perfectly choreographed, all pouts in order. I remember looking at it, and the comment “Iba talaga pag all-girls school no?” came out, like so much half-meant word vomit. “Yeah, sobrang bonded,” she replied.

By then, I had a vague idea of that bond she was talking about. When I was in sixth grade, without adequate warning or preparation I was enrolled in Assumption Antipolo, a Catholic girls’ school up on a hill about an hour and a half away from our house—an hour and a half in light to moderate traffic. For the first time in my life, not only would I be rising before the sun did just to get to school, I would be a catholic schoolgirl: a colegiala. Before that, I went to a tiny co-ed school about ten minutes away from my house, where the idea of bonding was formed around fights involving mud, gravel, and rotten fruit.

The word Colegiala comes with a mix of envy and condescension. Envy at not having been fully accepted and yet being labeled as “the weird one” who didn’t know the lyrics to “Mmmbop” and went to a “weird” school; condescension because I was somehow convinced that this prejudged weirdness made me a better person. At least I was known for something.

I’m not averse to all things colegiala, although at this point the term needs to be qualified properly. Not all products of sectarian all-girls’ schools are automatically colegialas. Sometimes it takes a flip of the mane, or a few phrases punctuated with the words “parang” and “kaya” with upward inflections on the vowels. It’s a term that comes with having to check what all your friends are wearing to make sure you will not be the only one in a baby tee and Havaianas when you go to the mall to buy more baby tees and Havaianas. Colegiala connotes one’s propensity to ride a wave propelled by R & B thumps, salon treatments, and the approval of a cult of girlfriends who treat the glossies with biblical infallibility. Colegiala comes with a sense of dread at doing things alone; where even something as mundane as a trip to the bathroom becomes a fieldtrip.

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For our first day, my sister and I had failed to order uniforms with enough lead time for them to be ready. As a result, out of a population of one hundred and eighty sixth graders, I was the only student in shorts and a t-shirt. Up until then, shorts and t-shirts were all I knew. They were all we had to wear in my tiny grade school with its tiny population. That first day of school was probably one of the least comfortable experiences of my adolescence. Rather than facing a horde of harmless girls in picnic blanket bottoms, I felt like I was facing a plaid skirted goliath, eyeballing me with all the force of a Backstreet Boys’ single. Alright! It sounds ridiculous now, but when you’re alone in a uniformed group wearing the farthest thing possible from a uniform, the sense of alienation becomes a palpable source of anxiety.

“Do I have something stuck between my teeth?”

“No, but where’s your skirt?”

Burn. Alright!

And there were the neckties, or in colegiala speak: “The necktie? YUCK!” If the only purpose of a necktie is to keep one’s collarband from parting, ours was completely useless. Our shirts didn’t even open in front. The necktie however was the easiest part of our uniform to manipulate. There were entries in the handbook about how to wear our blouses, our hair, and our skirts, but there was nothing there about the necktie. To exploit this, the necktie was treated as a tool for “rebellion”, and to adjust it meant to shorten it until it was no more than a lump hanging at the jugular. But to “rebel” against the loopholes in the handbook had nothing to do with the whims of the majority. Sure, the plaid neck-lump looked bizarre, but once everyone—at least everyone who counted— started wearing it, it became as much a part of the uniform as the starchy blouse and calf-length skirt. I didn’t have any neck-lump privileges, and because I didn’t have the privilege I just shrugged it off as “another stupid girl thing.” YUCK!

3 Girls, 1 Bathroom. Collegehumor knows what I mean

It is funny how in Girlville even the most mundane, bordering on embarrassing tasks are treated as rites of passage. One day, just when I needed to be reminded that I was indeed a girl, I was finally invited to go to the girls’ bathroom. That proverbial tap on the shoulder followed by “Tara, samahan mo ako,” meant I had earned someone’s trust. Together, we stared at ourselves in the mirrors, pinched imaginary flab, and prodded at nonexistent zits our young skin was still too delicate for. This served as a precursor to a string of events that showed I had arrived, I finally belonged. I could wear the neck-lump, buy my first issue of Tiger Beat, maybe I would even learn the words to “Mmmbop”. There would have been more, but I only stayed in Girlville for a month.

During that month, I got used to the question: “Why do you hold your pen that way?” The penmanship produced by my grip wasn’t completely deplorable, but I was still up for interrogation from both students and teachers: “Why do you hold your pen that way?” It turned out there was such a thing as Assumption handwriting, better known as “Eugenie’s Hand”. I didn’t stay long enough to re-train my hand and master the way the letters arced and swirled, upright and in cursive. Along with the sense of alienation came fascination at the idea that something as individual as penmanship had to be branded. It became something I would have to practice if I were to integrate myself into the population of plaid skirts. I imagined Marie Eugenie hovering over my hand, pointer held firmly, stern gaze burning into the sheet as I scratched out letters forming words which were not entirely mine.

Ask anyone about their experiences of having grown up in an all-girls’ school, and they’ll probably tell you it wasn’t all that bad. And indeed, it wasn’t. The invisible nuns, the intense dread at being labeled as different, these were things that did not have to affect me and I know this now. But the now we speak of is over a decade after my month-long stint as a colegiala; and this is unrealistic knowledge to have expected of a 12-year-old girl. The studio shots I have with people I hardly know are enough evidence of the fact that pictures do lie, and that popularity contests are for time wasting morons. A uniform–or a lack thereof–should not have to force me to retreat into a weaker version of myself. As weird as people might have found me then, I will never be as weird as the neck-lump. Hearing your friends pee in the adjacent stall is also pretty weird; and my handwriting is awesome.

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Alice is a managing editor of New Slang. This year, she has resolved to replace envy with fanmail and stop shoving her feelings in other people’s faces. She posts random songs here and overshares here.