Tag Archives: Philippines

Everybody’s Free to Wear Sunscreen, The Shadz Loresco Version 2012

Posted in Eureka Moments by

If I could offer you only one tip for the future, writing would be it.

Everyone can write lists, make one: budget, bucket, grocery, names you need to forget (and then highlight them with a black Sharpie, hah!). Journal. Professor Google can point you to studies that can back up the benefits of this habit, whereas I can only dispense advice in the name of nostalgia and hindsight.

Eat, drink, and get married. In any case, stock up on antihistamines. All three can be allergy triggers.

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JM & Kim, December 2012

Travel to foreign places with familiar faces. Regardless of iMaps, you are never really lost beside a friend. Rent in the city– that is, hundreds of miles away from your parents’ house– with your little sister because it orients you with both the dynamics of independent and of collaborative living.

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With Ed, Len, Grace, and Ayesa in Puerto Princesa, Palawan, November 2012

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With Ayesa, Hazel, and Mia in Davao City, December 2012

Let go of unhealthy and open yourself up to new friendships. But keep the ones you’ve had when you were so much younger. Here’s to hoping you and those you lost are now better off without each other.

With Joey, JB, RJ, and Apple at the SEOP Christmas Party, December 2012

With office friends Joey, JB, RJ, and Apple at the company Christmas party, December 2012

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With college friends Ed, Len, Ayesa, Grace, Skee, and Joecyl, December 2012

Love in the time of eczema. When people cut you off in the airport queue or in highly competitive environments (read: work), keep calm and eat chocolates. Sarah Kay said they’re only few things chocolate can’t fix. When you find this to be true, message me on Facebook. Appreciate the advancement of others. Crab mentality is so 1900s. Cram, but only when you have more than 24 hours in your hand.

Visit museums. Better yet, volunteer to tour kids around them. This is a lesson in parenting, or at least in the art and science of running after gradeschoolers when you’re yearning to ogle Monet. Mundane or divine, it’s still one of the best feelings in the world, that is, hugging a child when you finally catch them.

Cry while watching musicals. Eat while zombies are ripping their victims limb from limb. Sometimes you have to balance hard and soft. I’m still figuring out the ratio though.

Do the living and learning in the moment, not at the end of the year when making resolutions becomes a poor excuse for missing a day out of the 365.

Read. Travel. Collect playlists. Don’t be scared to be 25, or that you have been or will be.

Wear sunscreen.

Swim.

And trust me on the writing.

“In my life, writing has been an important exercise to clarify what I believe, what I see, what I care about, what my deepest values are. The process of converting a jumble of thoughts into coherent sentences makes you ask tougher questions.”

~ Barack Obama, President of the United States, Time’s 2012 Person of the Year

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The mid-2012 version

The 2011 version.

Thanks to Baz Lurhmann and his song.

Day 7: My bucket list, bow

Posted in A Moveable Feast by

Aka “Things I’m Most Certain to Do Over Weekends.”

  • Appreciate museums. I have the shortest attention span, so a walk around halls with interesting walls can be a challenge. I’ll try harder next time. Pinto Art Museum – check. The Mind Museum – next. Others to visit – BenCab Museum, Boston Art Gallery, Ayala Museum, and Vargas Museum (re-visit).
  • Buy a bike. Riding a bike is one of the things one can’t unlearn. So there’s no pedaling backwards. There is something so Jack Kerouac and Beat Generation, minus the promiscuity and drugs, in biking in the neighborhood. Or maybe it’s just me.
  • Climb a mountain. Literally. Mt. Pulag is the target, but this is up to my friend hiker‘s preference and schedule. She’s one busy architect these days. (Congratulations on getting your license, teh!)
  • Decide which musical to see. Is it Phantom of the Opera, Rock of Ages, wait for another musical to open, or the first two choices?
  • Explore the Philippines and beyond. So Batangas, Bangkok, and then Samar. The rest of the travels would depend on my budget.

Got any items to tick off yours?

Between allergy attacks and the hype of ‘Hit Publish’

Posted in The Muse is Home by

A dozen thoughts rumble in my head, one of them quoting Manny’s dad from Modern Family: “Everything is more interesting after 2 AM. The night belongs to the poets and the mad men.” So, a) my being wide awake at 1:44 AM can make me assume there’s a sleeping dragon of a poet within me, b) let’s debunk/discover after-2 AM by staying up later than 2 AM, or c) none of the above; this insomnia is just the result of an allergy attack.

D. All of the above. Let’s get these over with fast and furious.

1) Blogging has deprived me of one beautiful deviation: writing. AS IN writing with my heart on my sleeve, writing free-fall, writing on crisp paper with a sharp-point pen, writing in, on and with my mind, writing without being affected by a new reaction to a stimulus which oddly corresponds to INSTANT PUBLISHING — which I believe robs you of your saccharine excitement for clipping your copies, filing them in a folder, and timing everything so that you’ll see your work printed on the newspaper or in a magazine or book before you turn 25, or before you die.

But what you get today is the hype of the ‘Hit Publish’ — you scramble for words to create pieces that are yet to serve a purpose. There’s the excitement, always the anticipation of pressing the Publish button, only to realize that one day you’re no longer making Nick Joaquin (perhaps in heaven), or whoever your hero is, PROUD. Next thing you know you’re screaming for life, lost in a sea of useless thoughts. So think about it.

*This is self-talk*

2) Kids. I love kids. It’s safe to say that I know my way around them. I know how to catch their attention. I played teacher as a kid; I learned teaching kids before I could really write a good essay. My favorites were the little Koreans, my kids from church — and that’s several groups in all — and the ones I babysat or tutored. It’s not safe to assume though that I want to have my own now because 1) I don’t believe in another immaculate conception and 2) I haven’t really thought about it.;p

3) The night ended great. I got a Lois Lowry book I read about some time ago, and a bag I really wished for to have. My mom called through the phone and I wasn’t my crying and complaining bitchy self anymore to her — and when you’re not 1) crying, 2) complaining, and 3) bitchy, you sometimes find a force stronger than you that wants to make the soul from the other line happy, encouraged, or relieved.

4) My friends have been their great selves tonight — so thank you for the company. We’ve been to hell and back. Papakape na ang magpapakape.

5) I love the Philippines. With what happened to Corona and all that shiz, I don’t remember a time when governance was deemed great in this land. But somebody said our country is young; let’s give it a time. Now I’m thinking of how my part can be done — PHILIPPINES, LET ME HELP YOU. I’ll find out how.

#s 6-12 are now resting in peace.

My heart in Bohol

Posted in A Moveable Feast by

A quarter has already passed but Bohol still gives me premature ventricular contractions (translation: makes my heart skip a bit; Kuya EJ‘s GMs can come in this handy). And I still have no idea how to turn this into the late post of all late posts ‘cos Bohol still leaves me incoherent, devoid of words at times. I had my heart buried in a sandbar — Bohol is love, love, love.

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Failed jump shots here and there. Ask Mia why this shot is screwed-UP. Haha! She jumped (and thus landed) too soon, even before our tour guide could holler “4!” Our backdrop by the way is the oldest stone church in the country.

Laugh when you fail. Apparently we failed another jump shot here, but the moment that came after was worth capturing (never mind if it’s blurred). That is a virgin island behind us and we are on a strip of sand here. This is where I imagined walking hand in hand with my future love, perhaps to dig the sandbar for my palpitating heart. Sarap mag-beach!

My closest encounter with the winged kind. And the scaly and the small-ish kinds. We went to this den of a caught Philippine python and had pictures of ourselves sitting ~2 feet away from a sleeping, digesting sawa (python). It just gorged on a six-month-old goat, and oh my words, the thing looked like a baby bump under the reptile’s thick skin.

So there’s the bird in the same den with the python. I wonder if the maintenance people got any idea of how hard mutualism can be manufactured in a setup like that.

The butterflies in the conservatory were friendly. But don’t be fooled by this particular lovely thing on my pinkie; its legs were tickling my pinkie and ring finger the whole time. Cute but creepy.

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Bohol was like a year in the making. We’re part of the second wave in our friends’ circle that was brought by Ate Weene to her paradise of a home province. I haven’t even posted the Loboc River cruise and binging photos yet, or about the tarsier’s beady-eyed face, the death by the hanging bridge, and the Chocolate Hills trek. All of these remind me how the Philippines is so rich in so many things. And so moving forward, I’ll keep track of my local travels and someday conjure a revolutionary thought of how to fully love the world we’ve been given — our nature, our nation.