When I was younger, I had two dreams – to become a lawyer and, later on, to be the President of the Philippines. Of course, everyone wanted to be president at some point (hey, if you were president, you can sleep late, eat whatever and wherever you want, and declare holidays!). But the lawyer part? It was not out of family pressure -no one in my immediate family had gone on to law school, and even though we weren’t filthy rich, we weren’t exactly out on the streets going hungry, so there wasn’t that much of a pressure to look for a high-paying career either.
I just thought that if you were to become president, you must know the laws so you know how to get there, something like the rules of a game that you can play to your advantage. Then once you get there, you start solving things like traffic jams along Katipunan.
Imagine my dismay when a few years into elementary school and in the midst of all the election fever, we’re taught that if you want to become president, you only need to be a natural-born Filipino, 40 years old, a registered voter, a resident for 10 years, and literate (for a total of 10 points in a quiz). And in that election, we did get precisely that.
By the time I got to high school, all I wanted to do was to get into Fine Arts, become a better artist (my English teacher got me for the school paper but wanted me to write and not draw), and make comic books for a living (just like the ones that we loved to read).
A decade after all that, after graduating from a writing course (not-too-completely unplanned), I want to give law school another shot. This time, for different reasons.
