FROG TAILS

I hate them. They hop, they invade and they're filthy. They're just plain gross. But I have to live with them as our backyard is swarming with frogs especially during rainy seasons.

In college, I took up Biology 11: General Biology I (a pre-requisite to our Physiology of the Human Body, a major subject). There, I had the pleasure of spearheading a mass murder. Of frogs, that is.

I named my frog Patrick. He was a handsome frog, with long lean legs and big bulging eyes that stared into mine as I pithed him, as if pleading to be set free. But I can't. I need to know everything about him. Come to think of it, he would probably end up on the streets, run down by the Ikot jeep or some rich kid's car. He's better off in the laboratory, where his intact body parts would be preserved in jars and his bones into a work of art, beautifully displayed in one of the cabinets in the lab.

Yet after Patrick, we were desperate. We needed more. We needed them alive. Our dissecting kits were hungry for more.

So we had to do it, me and my frog-murderer buddies didn't think that one frog is enough. We bought more frogs to torture. We killed them in the darkness of the night, in one corner of the PHAN building, for our last lab exam. We had a special guest during that sacrificial offering of frogs to the Biology exam gods: our instructor, Mr. H Calilung.

They came in different sizes and shapes. Coming from all over. We stayed there till the last hours of the day, preparing ourselves to pay homage to the exam gods the next day. It was hard but we had to make a sacrifice. We didn't name them. We just said our prayers and pithed away, one frog at a time.

And the sacrifice was not in vain. All of us passed the exam and the course. That we owe to those nameless frogs.

I tried to forget it. But karma was quick.

You know what happened? All the boys I kiss, turn into frogs (figuratively, of course). Then I remember Ging telling me that night of our gruesome frog murder.

"From now on, never kiss a guy, Noah. They'll turn into frogs."

And so they did.

Just this afternoon, I was teaching an 11-year-old sixth grader about the microscope when a huge frog hopped in front of us.

"Frog!" He exclaimed. "Next quarter, we'll be digesting frogs."

"What?!" I was scandalized.

"Alam mo na, ooperahan."

"Dissect!" I shouted at him. "Ayusin mo nga English mo. Digest daw. Yuck."