Today marks the 10th year anniversary (good lord, we are old 👴🏻) of the time my high school class held a culminating activity for our Home Technology subject. The activity, which was the first step in a month-long journey of completing graduation requirements, involved organizing and hosting a formal dinner.
It has been sort of a long-standing tradition for fourth year regular class students of UP High School in Iloilo to engage in the art of fine dining. Home Tech was never going to top my favorite subjects list (sorry ma’ams!), but I looked forward to this undertaking.
Of course UP doesn’t just mold its students into critical-thinking individuals, UP also inculcates the accepted and appropriate norms and behaviors when we find ourselves engaging in fancy societal bashes and soirées.
Present-day Kennan will forever be thankful that teenage Kennan wrote a daily journal because the events of that fun day 10 years ago were vividly transcribed in a notebook.
Our section, IV-Kamagong, was excused from all classes that day to prepare for the event. The boys always took pride in our pambahay look — t-shirt, shorts, slippers, feeling at home lol — and would sport it whenever we can (our way of sticking it to the man!!!) and this day was no exception. At least during the prep time. In hindsight, it’s probably dumb that we proudly referred to ourselves as mga sunoy (Ilonggo for tambay sa mga kalye) even though we obviously weren’t, but it was fun.
The event was held at Sarabia Manor Hotel beside UPV, so we alternated our presence between our classroom and the venue. We decorated the hall, prepared the food (the hotel catered but some of the finger foods were made/brought by the class), ran errands at the mall. You know, helpful stuff.
Easily the best part of this event was that some of the boys — myself, Dale, Alvin, Fama, Martin, Ace, and Niño — were designated as waiters! Yup, the hotel’s actual waiters got to have the day off because our asses were graded on how well we served the “guests”, A.K.A the UP High School faculty and the rest of our classmates.
Us waiters even had a short dance presentation to the tune of “Cherry Lips” by Garbage. Seriously. You kids are lucky we didn’t have fancy smartphones and Instagram and Twitter and Facebook back then because it was 🔥 af and would’ve gone viral (probably not, but whatever 🤷🏻♂️).
Everything went great, some of our classmates created video presentations of our times together — the usual high school sentimental stuff because we were about to graduate — tears were shed, laughs were had. Again, this was during a time when we didn’t have camera phones (as evidenced by the pixelated photos on this post) so collecting photos and compiling them to make a video took time and effort. I mean, it wasn’t easy navigating through Friendster photo albums then!!!
Also, people got dressed up (obviously, since that’s how formal dinners are supposed to go). In hindsight, I’m glad I just wore the white long-sleeves waiters dress themselves in because my jologs teenage self would’ve looked horrible. I wish hayskul Kennan had current Kennan’s #aesthetics because I would’ve been the coolest kid out there, don’t @ me!!!
The faculty congratulated the class on the success, we were exempted from taking the Finals for Home Tech, which basically guaranteed a passing grade for at least one subject. Like, only eight more to go for our asses to graduate! Lol.. but yeah, it was definitely a good time for everyone involved.
It was even better backstage where the waiters, uhhh, waited to do waiter stuff like collect plates, silverware, etc. Also, I’m not sure if the faculty was aware of this, but we kind of spiked the punch with a lot of gin, which sort of made us a bit wonky in the head (it was the first exposure to that much alcohol for most of us, we were still smol kids lol). But eh, we managed to do our duties without breaking anything despite comments from classmates saying we didn’t walk a straight line.
I’ve said this before and it’s something I’ll keep saying:
The years I spent at UP High School were some of the best of my life. I know we can never go back to the good ol’ days but it’s nice to commemorate and reminisce fond memories like this one. Especially since, you know, we’re in our mid to late-20’s now and experiencing constant existential crisis. Or that’s just me. Meh.
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