shorties 3

FEVER!

“Dear Teacher,
Please excuse me for being absent because I have a high fever…..”

High fever, ha! It has become the most wrongly-used medical term since the excuse letter has been introduced.

With a high fever, many times of course coupled with a complication or something, we can be excused from being present in a class with the most intolerable teacher, an unprepared-for examination, and instead have a good time at the movies, go for a date or just bum around at the mall. Thanks for the fever.

This may seem to be the silliest excuse for the self-confessed moralists and intellectuals you meet in school corridors. Not for me, it isn’t.

For example.

Don’t you get bored with the very same routine every day that God has made? I do. Imagine passing through the very same smelly, crowded, polluted streets every morning and evening, seeing the same old, frequently crumpled faces of your dear classmates, being in the same room on the same building in the same class in the same….. it could go on and on and on. Don’t you get a feeling of déjà vu? I do.

Then imagine also getting up in the morning to the shrill sound of your cheap alarm clock or the cacophony of toilets flushing and doors slamming and mongrels barking. And knowing what lies ahead – a quiz, an English professor who makes everything Jimmy Santos says sound like advanced phonetics, a sadistic math teacher who could not tolerate anyone getting a perfect score in his quizzes, a chemistry lab teacher who does everything so slowly; she also happens to lecture very softly she makes you wonder if your whole semester will be spent in an auditory exercise of sorts.

Add to this lot a group of classmates who are alternately jubilant and depressed, excited and temperemental, but all the while they remain the very same, old tired people. They are the students who are never absent, who study until the eerie hours of past mid-night in garishly-lighted grease-joints, who listens to lectures so avidly as if their whole lives depended on it, and yet – they are the very same lot who will unanimously cry out in sheer anguish at the announcement of an exam.

Boring.

Indeed, in life there must be variations. Or you end up doing everything automatically, reflexively, mechanically, depressingly. Which is why a stormy day, nay, even a calamity is very welcome news to students. After all, who does not need a respite from all academic responsibilities?

There’s been no storm lately – damn El Nino - nor has there been an event significant enough to warrant a school holiday, so the first resort is the excuse letter.

But now, teachers tend to get suspicious of these fevers, you know. After all, they are not the complete jurassic assholes students make them or wish them to be. So that you need a more serious disease which you have to prove with a medical certificate. What if you haven’t been to a doctor?

I therefore suggest: “Dear Teacher, Please excuse me for being absent in class today because I am not feeling well. In fact, I feel lousy and I feel I need – I deserve – a vacation to smooth out things. Besides, I don’t really look up to seeing you make my day. I sincerely hope that you will understand.”

Isn’t it also boring to enroll again in the very same subject you flunked and go through the very same subject matter again – all because of an excuse letter? He-he-he.

So that it is still better (and more rewarding) to have a fever, after all. Back to the basics, so to speak.

“Dear Teacher,

Please excuse me for being absent today because I have to stay in bed due to a very high fever…..”

Never goes out of style.