Passing the boards and other matters

So this is what the morning after feels like. Oscars speeches are made of mornings like this. I feel new, reborn.

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I'm the least thing from an exemplary Catholic. So believe me when I say everything I'd prayed for has come true. Better: You know what they say about Simbang Gabi, the nine morning masses preceding Christmas Day, that when you attend all nine mornings, things will happen for you? Again, I'm no exemplary Catholic, but.

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The Physicians Licensure Exam is a game of chance. It's not standardized. It hardly measures anything as far as being a competent doctor is concerned. Questions are repeated, sometimes more than once. Some are lifted off review books. Some are lifted out of certain institutions' review materials. Typographical errors abound. I wish the examiners would take it more seriously. But I bet all they'd tell me is, "Who are you to complain?"

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I was in Robinsons Magnolia yesterday when the results were released. Some friends and I were watching "Care Divas" at the nearby Peta Theater, and that was where we had agreed to meet. The signal in the area was atrocious: Thirty minutes of refreshing my phone, and then when it finally came out, it was almost ten more minutes of loading that page. Those ten minutes felt like a day. The calls and texts soon followed. I was half-running inside the mall, but I didn't care. 

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My grandfather--my father's father--would have been 95 the day before yesterday. Picture this: At four years old, going up the stage with him to receive my very first gold medal in school; at five, me and my siblings standing in a corner of our roof deck back home, punished for some trivial misdeed, while he stood somewhere off-center, barking orders at the house help; me at six, just arrived home from school and greeted by his reedy frame, that distinct smell of last night's alcohol sticking to his shirt, his veiny hands brought close to my forehead; me at seven, and him in and out of hospital, until one day lung cancer got the better of him. 

I try my best to remember: me, whom they say looks very much like him. I find my memories of him grow fewer by the day, and sometimes I'm no longer certain about the details. Do I have the shape of his face right? The sound of his voice, the way he walked? I wish to remember, and to remember more.