Tidntyne

THERE WAS A SEMINAR he had to attend, so Morly left early. By 9:55, five minutes before the seminar was to start, he was already seated on the fifth seat from the aisle, second row from the front, inside the air-conditioned audio-video room of his college.
     “Will the audience please take their seats,” Reindeer, the emcee, murmured on the rostrum microphone. Morly wondered if it could be heard outside the room as clear as it was inside. As he did this, Reindeer passed a glance at him, and courteously, Morly smiled, then turned to look behind him at the door. Morly saw that although it was open, no one was coming in.
     Morly gently shook his head and made a “Tsk,” sound by clicking his tongue with his palate. Reindeer might have heard this, because from his seat at the side of the stage he lunged at the rostrum one last time, pushed the ON button to the microphone, and announced: “Will the audience please assemble inside the AVR and take their seats? The seminar is to begin in five minutes.”
     Morly noted how much louder Reindeer announced it this time, and he had no more doubts the audience outside heard it.
     In less than ten seconds the temperature inside the AVR gradually rose as warm bodies filled it.
     “Hi, is Engineer Santos there?” asked Tade, as he crossed to sit at Morly’s right.
     “I don’t know,” admitted Morly. “But I think he is, or else Reindeer wouldn’t have called for all of you to come in.”
     “Oh.” Tade then unslung his backpack from his shoulders, and hung it by its straps to the back of the seat in front of him. He opened the bag and took out from inside it a notebook and a pen. “I’m taking notes,” he said, almost boastfully to Morly, who was watching him.
     “Oh.”
     “Yes. Do you know how Sir Vinny tells us that half of our grade in Field Trips and Seminars depends on the documentation, and how we shouldn’t think of the Baguio Tour as the only criterion to base our final grade on the subject?” He didn’t wait for Morly to answer. “Well, that’s what I’m doing. I’m not thinking of the Baguio Tour as if it is the only basis for our final grade. I’m working on the documentation. I’ll be taking down the names and the respective backgrounds of each speaker for all the five or more seminars we are to attend. I’ll also be collecting the review center brochures the speakers will pass around, if there are any speakers from the review centers, and what I’ll do is, I’ll have them scanned, and I’ll also include it in my documentation.”
     “Well, Engr. Santos here if from The End of the World Biscuits and General Services, Incorporated,” said Morly. “That’s not a review center.”
     “&,” said Tade.
     “Yes, and.”
     “But you said and. It’s not. It’s read as it is written. It’s &, as in, the ampersand.”
     “Oh.”
     “Anyway,” said Tade, “even if Engr. Santos is not from a review center, this still is our first seminar.”
     “Well, that could be correct. Anyway, I don’t think Sir Vinny has explained to us in detail what format to use in our documentation/write-up.”
     Tade considered a moment, then, shrugging, said: “Well, yeah.”

• • •

In thinking that the speaker, Engr Santos, was already in the AVR when he arrived, Morly was wrong. Engr. Santos only arrived at 9:30 and after three announcements at quite regular intervals from Reindeer, the emcee, to, “Please do not leave your seats. The seminar is about to begin any time now.”
     Seeing one of the double doors at the entrance of the room open and the awaited speaker enter, Reindeer rose with refinement to the rostrum, and with the most aristocratic voice he had ever produced for the morning, announced: “We would like to acknowledge the arrival of our guest speaker, Engineer Santos.”
     There was an applause, but it was noticeable how each member of the audience turned and gave a puzzled look to their seatmates as if asking, “Huh? I thought he was here from the start,” and each of them answering with nothing but a shrug.
     Engr. Santos was a small man. Morly estimated him to have a height between 5-foot to 5-foot, 1-inch-tall. He didn’t appear to be balding, but upon seeing the long, braided hair spiraling up to the pate of his head like a natural cap, one could not help wondering if he were not so. He wore a black The End of the World Biscuits & General Services, Inc., sports jacket with an image of a right hand flicking a marble embroidered at the left side of his chest, and the word SYSTEMS ENGINEER at the back. Morly felt a stab of envy at the thought that this engineer, aside from being part of the biggest company in the country, was also an official jolens player.
     Presently, the engineer reached the front of the room (there was no stage), where the College Dean and the Department Head met and shook hands with him.
     Reindeer beamed radiantly at this sight, and, taking cue from the hiss of air emitted by the seat cushion upon Engr. Santos’s sitting down, he announced: “And now let us get this seminar rolling. Let us all stand up for the National Anthem, to be conducted by…” he briefly paused as he scanned the program for the name, “… Tidntyne Namamoto.”

An Account from Mr. Thyiordiky’s Personal Life

05/07/1775

TODAY, AS THE RAIN DRENCHES the grazing fields of Spruguns and threatens to flood the first floor of my expensive mansion, one of my servants is giving birth.

    Wishing to protect her (since my sheer importance to mother Magyarország assures that this will inevitably be published), I will refer to this servant as P_gma, a name, which, I assure, doesn’t sound unlike as her real name at all.

    P_gma has been impregnated by an unknown egg delivery personnel (in spite of owning a farm, I have to rely on other neighboring villages when it comes to eggs). I asked her, when she informed me of her condition six months ago, whose seed had fertilized her so as to create a living, potentially thinking soul inside her body.

    She wouldn’t tell me for the afternoon, but when finally I jokingly told her, that it was OK, she didn’t have to be ashamed, I, too, had once been impregnated, she admitted that it was Boddir, our egg delivery personnel on the third quarter of the year last year.

    I became angry almost instantly, and with great rush sent a telegram to Boddir’s employer, one of my closest acquaintances, Duke Kirrilovich—but the reply indicated that Boddir had left the continent for a trade with Spanish colonies in the New World.

    For many days, P_gma mourned for her fate, and it didn’t at all console her when I told her that I was not telling the truth when I said to her I had once been impregnated. “It was biologically impossible,” I said.

    When finally, P_gma did learn to accept her situation, she came into my study, asking if she could have the child while retaining her employment status in my residence—that is, not getting terminated.

    I said, “No!” harshly, yet in the same humorous intention as when I made her believe I had actually once bore a child in my non-existent womb.

    P_gma shivered in fear, thinking I was angry and would surely ask her to leave my house. She began crying and was already turning to leave, when I again informed her I was only kidding, and of course I would let her keep her job.

    She couldn’t believe it, and stammered to think of something to say.

    “Hush,” I said. “You will keep not only your job, but also your baby, only, he has to work until he is eighteen, upon which age, he will start research work to develop rockets. That’s the way to go these days, you know, rockets, and we have to learn to make them before the Germans do.”

    “Oh thank you, Mr. Thyiordiky,” she said, “only, I don’t think I know what a rocket is? Say, Mr. Thyiordiky, what is a rocket?”

    “Why,” I said, “something your son will develop when he turns eighteen!”

    Today, at the servant quarters of my grand and expensive mansion, the greatest Sprugunskiesk is born!

How I Spent My Christmas Vacation

AS STUDENTS EXPECTED in the near future to become as productive members of society as we possibly could, we have once in our lives been asked by our teachers to compose theme papers written in English. I remember one particular time out of the many when I’ve been faced with the seemingly overwhelming task of writing such a theme composition. I was in grade three, and it was in the early part of the year. The students had just come back to school after a little more than two weeks of Christmas vacation—and as what we had expected the theme of our composition to be, our teacher asked us to write about what we did in our Christmas vacation. And she instructed us to write it as close as we could make it to a hundred words.
    Just as we’d almost been programmed to do, I took out a piece of paper—the kind that grade three students were allowed to use—from my stuff, and started scribbling my rough draft.
    What I wrote was this:

“As students expected in the near future to become as productive members of society as we possibly could, we are allowed a little more than two weeks’s worth of Christmas vacation every year, and this is depending on what day December 25 appears in the calendar. It usually starts after the school’s Christmas Party—which is usually held before the start of the first Misa de Gallo, and in which the students rearrange their chairs in the class room to provide space for a makeshift dance floor—and ends after the Epiphany.
    “I spent my Christmas vacation with my family.”

    Having the intuition that what I had written was somewhere close to the 100 word-limit, I read what I have basically scribbled and counted how many words I had put in it. There were 98 words. (If you count them here, you’d also see that there really are 98 words, you can use the word count if you don’t trust yourself.)
    I was immediately very pleased with myself. Imagine a theme paper only two words away from third-grade theme paper composition perfection!
    So I thought of adding this up to my rough draft:

    “That’s it.”

    With that done, I reread the entire thing, and counted the words another time just to be sure. With the additional two words, my composition was now comprised of exactly a hundred words, and it made me feel very satisfied.
    It was at that time that I approached my teacher’s table and asked for a permission to go out of the classroom to buy a theme paper sheet. We had our official theme paper sheet, you see. It was a standard in our school.
    “Finished, DC?” asked my teacher when I asked her permission.
    “Yes, Ma’am,” I answered.
    My teacher had a dubious look on her face. “Really, DC? A hundred words?”
    “You bet your unreceived Christmas bonus it is, Mrs. Estrella,” I bragged.
    Mrs. Estrella looked hurt when I said that. She started saying something, but she wasn’t able to say it. Her lips began to quiver.
    “I’m sorry, Ma’am,” I said. “I didn’t mean to bring up that the government still hasn’t given you your Christmas bo—”
    “How did you know, DC?” Mrs. Estrella was crying now, her face drenched with tears.
    I clenched my fists against the end of my shorts. Being in grade school, we were required by the government to still wear shorts. I bit my lip, embarassed for the state I had placed Mrs. Estrella in. Fortunately, when I looked at my classmates behind me, I saw that they were all still very busy trying to come up with a hundred-word essay about their Christmas vacation, and they weren’t aware that Mrs. Estrella was crying. “Both my parents are working for the government, Ma’am,” I said. “They haven’t yet received their Christmas bonuses too.”
    At that, Mrs. Estrella’s face brightened up a great deal. She wiped off her tears with her face towel, then beamed at me.
    “DC,” she said, her face now as bright as the sun, “the plural for bonus is bonii. It should actually be ‘Christmas bonii.’ ”
    The next school year I was transferred to what they called a “more advanced class”.