Pounding The Keyboard

     So, I was in a public utility vehicle, and sitting in front of me was an elderly lady who, out of the blue, started coughing non-stop. It shouldn’t really be ominous as a human being coughing is as ordinary as a dog barking, except that the raging news that day was the increasing number of people getting sick with Covid-19. Yes, that terrifying disease that came from Wuhan, China. I thought I was fairly safe because I was more than a meter away from her, that the droplets from her would not reach me. But surreal as it was, her coughing became violent and aggressive by the second, her body being rocked by it. It was as if her mission that day was to infect half of the universe and make Thanos proud. I wasn’t wearing an infinity stone, er, I mean, a mask; nothing would protect me from the invisible but massively dangerous droplets that were flying from her mouth like daggers to us, her fellow passengers.       I’m doomed, I thought, I could alight, yes, but it was proba

     I follow certain personalities in Facebook (although not officially as these people don't know me from Adam) because I am entertained by their posts and we share the same political leanings. Every now and then, whenever I remember, I would go to their timeline and read their posts, which are oftentimes smart and witty, which is really not surprising because these people are either writers or professors.          But these past few days, I learned that one of these people is in love, and it’s (cue sad music here) unrequited. And his entertaining funny posts took a detour to being melancholy and yes, desperate. Posts like “mahalin mo naman sana ako kaht konti” or “wala akong balak na paalisin ka pa sa puso ko,” with broken heart emojis. Ugh!  Note that this man (he’s gay) posts mostly in English. Gone are the witty existential or anti-government posts.      I probably won’t be visiting his timeline in quite a while. Why do people become pitiful human beings when