Big Bird used to be my best friend until I met Harry Potter. I never had any imaginary friends to play with so I had to turn to Count Dracula, Oscar the Grouch, and Grover to entertain me during long, rainy afternoons in the Philippines. Having been fostered by the muppets from birth, I developed a lifelong desire to learn and be exposed to words of all shapes, sizes, and colors.
             Sesame Street raised me to be the proper citizen that I am now. My childhood is filled with memories of hours spent in front of the television learning how to count to twelve and reciting my ABCs then laughing cynically at the end; which I did not refrain from doing until I was eleven years old and only because my mother deemed it inappropriate. Looking back, I can clearly see how and why I turned out the way that I did. The story plots, the lessons of the day, the characters in the show all contributed to broadening my sense of understanding and quest for eternal learning.
             At age seven, not only raised by the muppets but also tabloid magazines, I read my horoscope in two languages daily and kept up with celebrity gossip religiously. My fifteen-year old cousin would bring home stacks of year-old tabloids and we would go through it together. Since we were in the Philippines, the people and the issues discussed were relatively alien to us. It was a perfect opportunity to practice reading English and observing American culture from an American point-of-view. Since real contemporary people wrote the articles, I believed every single one of them as the honest truth. Concurrently, I also read the Book of Genesis in the Bible. I perceived it as a lovely work of fiction, even if I attended a Catholic School run by nuns.
             I left the Philippines and came to Canada at age twelve. Though I considered myself bilingual then, I still thought in Tagalog (language of the Philippines) and translated the words in English. My first few months in middle school were diffi...