Confessions of a Cat-holic (31)

I knew I looked like a pushover, someone who was ready to be defeated. But then would I want to be invincible? Er, maybe not. I could go stab whomever I hated 23 times to death and get a life sentence, if I was impulsive enough. Or should I get a gun and shoot someone in her face until her brain exploded like lasagna and dropped dead? I could tell you one thing, women could be way more violent than men, just like men sometimes liked gossips more than women. Like Godfather said, women in Sicily were way more dangerous than shot guns. But I still liked to go by the general gender rules. Plus, I knew how an organization worked. The Catholic church, the Canossian league of schools, the mafia, the police force, my alma mater Columbia University, the Little Italy, the Chinatown, the dark side of Hong Kong, the underground society, the triads, the gangs and the clans, we were all an organization, not some clusters of independent individuals who hang around due to happenstance. Did you know what made a crime an organized crime? It meant that we all had a specific role to fill and the outcomes as a whole were often disastrous with means certified as unidentifiable if we were clever enough. Had you not watched "Catch Me If You Can"?

Then again, the good always liked to underestimate the bad. In a good person's eyes, wicked people must have been a retard. Otherwise, why wouldn't they want to be good? But that could have worked the other way round too. In a wicked person's eyes, good people must have been a retard. Otherwise, why wouldn't they want to be bad? Dean of Admissions and Alumni Relations at Columbia University, Eric Furda, who was also an alumnus from UPenn, once said that universities aimed to build a perfect campus with a diverse pool of talents instead of seeking perfect individuals. I recalled his analogy of university life at Ivy League as a social experiment where a good mix of people learned and lived with each other despite immense differences in backgrounds and upbringings. So I guessed that would have summed up my college experience. Yes, it was almost like a social experiment awaiting your discovery.

So that was a long rant. I could write a book on my numerous unpleasant encounters with my first year roommate at Columbia but I would keep it here for now. I would come back to it later. They said revenge is a dish best served cold, so why would I rush to pour out my angers or vent my rage out like there was no tomorrow? I would wait, patiently, obscurely, then boom! She died. Haha. That was what kept me going for most of my life. Nothing motivated me more than seeing my foes being tortured like Victor Hugo's Les Miserables. I knew I was rotten to the core like that. Heard you say I'm not the baddest, bitch you lied.

So that summer before I started my life in the new school was somewhat uneventful, except that I was told Angel committed suicide and ended her life abruptly due to some affairs with her girlfriend. I cried upon hearing the news, of course. Afterall, I had been a cheerleader for Angel for the longest time. I was one of her biggest die-hard fans from St Patrick's and she had been the super star athlete of our year since grade 1.

Looking at Angel's tragic death, I knew the last thing I wanted in my life was a romantic relationship or any sort of drama that had to do with an opposite sex. That week before school started, I cut my hair real short and dropped by the school in a purple French Connection UK tank top and a pair of linen pants to submit the relevant documents. I was quite anxious to start a new chapter in an unfamiliar environment, with boys too.

I was already turning fifteen in September 1999. Middle school was almost over for me and there was one thing that kind of bothered me a bit. I was still a girl, not yet a woman. I heard about a few rare cases of transgenders born with some sort of gene mutations or a dysfunctional reproductive organ. I still had a flat chest as late as F.3 and even F.4, which made me look like an iron board with four flappy limbs. Should I worry about my body image?