After all the integers and the x’s and y’s and the square roots and all those symbols I can’t remember now have been written on the board our Math teacher would sit down and let us do the seatwork.

Then she would stare blankly into space.

Truly we were all racing to answer those damn questions for the added points (GC!), at that point in high school those things mattered. Callistus Netromedev, however, couldn’t give a fuck, or seven fucks for that matter, for that extra point, as he was always busy observing her as she stared into space. Having run out of lunch conversations he had to bring up: Anong iniisip nya pag nagsea-seatwork tayo? I can’t recall exactly who came up with this fantastic answer, could have been Callistus N. himself for all I know, but that someone said, Iniisip nya kung anong ulam mamyang gabi. It’s not the wittiest nor the funniest by any stretch of the imagination, but it always drives me insane with laughter. This teacher has henceforth been called ulam. No Ms. or Mrs., just ulam, as in maupo na kayo andyan na si ulam.

And of course, karma is evil, because as I was facilitating the ICU endorsements last week I would catch myself staring into space, thoughts trailing, waiting for an answer to my question oblivious that it has already been answered and four new questions have already been asked in between by Mrs. Therese, Lloydie, and HIV, committing malapropisms, counting those drops as they plopped from the macroset. So in that strange event that one of those students/interns is reading/have wondered what I was preoccupied with, let me say straight out that I wasn’t imagining what my ulam would be, in fact these are the probable entangled thoughts I was having then:

• Did I turn off the electric fan?
• If I get a writing job at DC and I would be given a choice, would I rather write The Justice Society of America, Supergirl, or The Teen Titans?
• If I were Burgess Meredith and I were a librarian and I am labelled as obsolete for being a librarian, how would I choose to die?
• Not that I actually did it, but if I were discovered dead due to autoerotic asphyxiation, how would I (or my spirit), feel?
• The song #41 by Dave Matthews just running over and over in my head
• If I send off a group of superheroes into a mission in space, who would Donna Troy bring with her?
• Lur.
• Must… escape.

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