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“Ganyan ang tao, pinakikinggan ang gustong marinig, Tinitingnan ang masarap tingnan – pero kung iintinidhin natin kung ano yung di natin maintindihan – baka sakaling malaman natin kung san sa mundong ito ang ating kinalalagyan!”
Twelve is great, thirteen is totally different from twelve. When our age enters the teen-age years, it signifies something deep inside our personality – and it is maturity. From our childhood years, we always cry for simple things… and still has a young, innocent mind. We obey our parents and the elders, and play all the time – play, sleep, eat and watch television. Studying is easy because of the aid of our parents, no love issues, no hectic schedule, no gimmicks and most of all, we have no freedom yet. We are still close to God, we pray by our hearts and go to mass every Sundays.
But when adolescence comes, we are strong enough in emotional stress. Our mind is broad enough to know about sexual issues, and our lovelife – we engage in relationships that becomes our source of inspiration. We have freedom, we go to malls and shop with our friends, gimmicks with our barkada and busy schedules, doing our projects and lots of school stuff. Studying is harder because we have no help from our parents. This is the time where we are forming our future life, and enjoying our high school and college life. And most of the good behaviors we have from our childhood changes to adolescence. We are hard-headed and tough, we experienced being scolded by our parents because of a lot of matters… low grades, girlfriend issues, barkada problems and lots more. The breakthrough of maturity and independence starts here – we know how to commute by ourselves, we know how to face our own problems and save money and take care of ourselves etc. And most of the teenagers are far from God, WE have weak faith in Him, we don’t care about the mass every Sunday, we don’t care praying before we sleep.
Teenage life is where we are molded for our adulthood. Here we experience the real life, although pahapyaw lang, but we still experience it. Most of the time, we hate cartoons and school stuff, we ignore cartoon characters that we’ve loved before. I remember when I was about four years old, I watch Blue’s Clues on California, but now, I don’t even care what’s the schedule of the program… I don’t watch television anymore, and I go to other channels without any cartoons existing.
I hate those street games, patintero, langit-lupa and other kinds of stuff. Now we engage in sports, rough sports as I should say.
Basketball is mostly for boys (Have you ever seen a beautiful girl playing basketball?), also in swimming, badminton, volleyball and football, although it’s not that famous here in the Philippines. We even stay for hours in the basketball court, playing basketball all the time. Boys watch NBA, NCAA, UAAP, PBA and other basketball shows – we have our idols like Tracy McGrady, Yao Ming, Kevin Carter, and other great basketball players. Girls also watch those games to cheer their idols. I wonder what girls watch on tv? Encantadia?
We are engaged in Music, rock music and alternative OPM music, like Hale, Cueshe, and other bands here in the Philippines. Boys loved the rock scene, Good Charlotte, Simple Plan, Dashboard Confessional (Indie Rock) and other bands in US. Girls do love pop icons like Kelly Clarkson, Avril Lavigne, and even Pussycat Dolls (imagine that!).
We do have our crushes, and oftentimes we got serious to it. We experience having our mortal enemies, our barkadas as our allies and friends far away. We learn to say bad words, we learn to ‘make’ rumors and tell it to other people. We are transforming into a judgmental person – we judge people by the way they look like than their inner behaviors. We experience hatred and discrimination, and we are sometimes rejected, or teased or prejudiced.
We know a lot of things about sex. We know how to do it, we know how to play with it – but sometimes, it leads to a lot of shattered dreams, hopeless lives and desperate minds. We don’t think what would be the result of what we are doing. Abortion, as others say, is the only way to stop birth… but we don’t need to stop birth – we need to face our consequences…
We learn how to love others, to risk our lives for the sake of our loved one – well, risking lives happens in adolescence and adulthood actually. We give gifts for that special someone, we have the picture on the wallet, we text them everyday, chat with them, date with them… our day isn’t complete without them by our side.
Forgiving is hard at this time. Mostly, when fights occur, it is hard for us to forgive that… and it goes on and on until we grew up, until we have our own lives and we saw that guy that is our enemy when we were still sixteen. We still have an inner anger in our hearts, we have catfights for girls and boxing on boys… haha.
We got to know different people, friends from other places – from other schools. We learn how to escape in our house to go to a gimmick, we learn how to cook for ourselves, to buy clothes that we love. Our lives are prone to danger at this time, because we have our independence, our freedom. Accidents happen a lot, and we do illegal things like smoking, engaging in sexual contacts, drugs, and a whole lot more.
We always do bad things, we lie to our parents, we fight them back, we go away from our house and sleep with a kabarkada, we steal money from them, we cheat with our classmates when quizzes are going on.. so on and so forth. We are makin’ a lot of sins, countless… and we didn’t realize that we made those sins. That’s why we became far from God, we don’t have the deep relationship to him not like when we were still in our childhood. We just pray whenever difficult problems come to us… but when we feel so happy, we forgot to thank him.
And most of all – we experience happiness! We live happy, we do what we want, we choose what we like and we love our friends. We value our life, and our relationships with our friends. Masaya din namang maging teenager actually… pero sa bawat saya, may kasamang lungkot, hirap, lahat na! Sarap mabuhay no? Pero sa huli… mamamatay din – we are born to die.
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