They say it's your genes or hormones or stress level. Or just plain oiliness on your face. I say it's because of summer. Aside from being a dry and hot season, summer is when we often fall in love. And that gets us all excited at the same time we're super scared--it's more scary, in fact, than our ghost hunting adventures in summer.
It isn't exactly falling in love. It's more of having a crush on someone, but we like the idea of falling in love better. In my time, each summer, teenagers in our village seemed more "in love" with the opposite sex than at other times. It was a phenomenon I noted then, and probably I was among the few who did so. Everybody else was busy falling in love.
Back then, evening dance parties, or "tipar" were the in thing. It happened almost nightly. Summer vacation season gave you more time for this so you partied from about 7 pm to the wee hours of the morning. Never mind if you never got to sleep at all because anyway, the next day would still be vacation time. So, no wonder it was easy to fall in love back then.
Today, it's no longer evening parties. Summer vacation affords you with lots of time for tour and travel. You're quite available as far as free time is concerned, so you get to meet a lot more new folks than you do at school, especially when cheap tour packages are easily available everywhere which take you to every place in the archipelago. And there you make a lot of new friends, and the romance and mystery abound when you're in a different setting.
It was almost impossible to plan a trip to Ilocos, for instance, when I was in high school years back, unlike today when you can avail of a 3-day tour for only P2,000 or P2,500, inclusive of hotel and van. Back then you had to do it all by yourself, and that was costly.
Most of all, school's out for more than 2 months, so you have nothing to do but fall in love. No homework or project deadlines, no exams, no nothing to interfere with your romantic adventures. I remember in grade four when I spent a week's vacation somewhere in La Union and met this pretty girl my age who stood watch in their sari-sari store. Immediately, I had a crush on her--and had a pimple or two. See?
Now, having a crush on someone puts you in a lot of high emotions and distress, and sudden changes like that are likely to pop up pimples and acnes on our face. Especially your nose. "Thinking of nothing all day but you multiplies pimples on me," said a song by Hotdog in Tagalog (video below). Remember? And this thing happens mostly on summer vacation, not so much on Christmas, New Year's, Valentines, or Holy Week.
Well, my four years in high school were quiet ones. No pimples or anything like that because love life sounded too silly for me. Summer vacations then were entirely spent to jogging early mornings and doing martial arts while all my buddies "wasted time" on girls and dance parties. Consequently, I earned my first dan blackbelt in karate.
But college was different, especially in summer time. Some girls started getting my attention and the resulting stress and anxieties started triggering pimples and acnes. There was even a time when my face looked like poultry dung, said my uncle, and facial oil flowed like a river. My dermatologist started making big profits from me, too, and it was quite sometime before I got used to the smell of acne lotions on my face as a reality of life.
All during summer time.
