Entry #5, February 2
The Lab Class
Saturday, Feb 2 (4:17 P.M.)
I’m back in my favorite corner, waiting for 5 P.M. before I go to church. We don’t have a class in my first subject because of an event in school, and I didn’t attend my second class because I needed to prepare for my Physics laboratory class.
All that preparation and I still ended up worthless in the group. I tried to participate. The calculations were easy because I reviewed them back home. But there were a lot of complicated wires that needed to be connected, and I don’t know what to do or where to start.
My other groupmates were absent, so there were only three of us, and I thought I could be more useful. We were struggling with the experiment; my groupmates couldn’t figure it out either. But at the very least, they knew how to connect the wires. It took up most of our time, and I was just there, watching silently, my palms sweating from the frustration of knowing the computations but not knowing what to do with my hands. The embarrassment of not being able to participate weighed on me so heavily that I wished the floor would give way and swallow me.
(4:40 P.M.)
I’m feeling a bit okay now that another awkward session is over again. It’s short-lived though, because I need to go to church in twenty minutes. It’s actually the worst part of the day, the reason I dread every Saturday.
I need to memorize my prayer because I might be assigned to lead either the opening or the closing prayer. And I’ve missed last week’s practice, and I wasn’t even able to attend the Sunday service. So now I need an alibi. Is an alibi a lie? Only if it isn’t true.
Two days of suffering again. I hate this anxious feeling every Saturday. Next week will be loaded with exams and yet Monday can’t come soon enough. I long for my bed. I just want to be alone.
(9:02 P.M.)
I’m now in my bed as I type this. Day one of two is over, they didn’t assign me to pray, and they did not ask any questions on why I didn’t show up last weekend. But I could sense distance. They were less forward than usual. Normally, they would ask why I wasn’t able to attend. I pretended not to notice anything different, I tried to act normal.
Now, the only day remaining to survive is Sunday. Then off we go to repeat the cycle again. When your weekends offer no relief, your life becomes a war of attrition.
