Pounding The Keyboard

       A month ago, we brought home a pair of lovebirds. And it was a wise decision, we thought, as the pair always filled the house with their lovely music/singing. They stay quiet when the house is quiet. But play some music and they will sing along. Most of the time, they’d be unabashedly on PDA mode, showing everyone how in love they are with each other, but sometimes, you could see them quarrelling and fighting, with the female mostly doing the quarrelling and fighting. Dunno why, maybe the male was caught flirting with other chicks, like hearting their Facebook posts. But wait, they don't have cell phones.     And then two days ago day, because they were not coming out of their nest box, we got worried and took a peek inside it—and lo and behold, we saw two eggs inside. The female laid eggs exactly on Christmas day. It was certainly a wondrous thing, two creatures in love, and then making some babies. We celebrated; wine and pulutan overflowed, a brass band was hired and

        I was shaving this morning and I accidentally slit the base of my chin.      It started bleeding but I just ignored it, thinking that it would soon stop as the wound was just small—but it didn’t. Soon, it started gushing like a faucet. I put some cotton on it but it continued bleeding copiously. I staggered out of the bathroom but before I could call for some help, I blacked out.      I woke up inside an ambulance where all the attendants were men and had full beard. I lay there unassisted, my wound still open and bleeding. I couldn’t speak so I tried to call the attendants’ attention by gesturing and pointing to my bleeding wound but they didn’t budge, they all just glared at me.      We reached the hospital and the doctor who also sported a thick full beard said he couldn’t do anything to save me when all he needed to do was suture my tiny wound and I would be well.      The massive loss of blood had made me paralyzed and I found myself being wheeled inside the morg

       I’ve finally finished watching The Beatles: Get Back, a three-part (and eight-hour long) documentary about the Beatles (shot around 1969) that showed them brainstorming, writing songs, trading jokes, clowning, showing their genius, and recording their final album Let It Be, and if you’re an avid fan like me, the experience of watching it would certainly be heavenly. Some of my favorite parts of the documentary include (1) Paul mimicking Elvis Presley (2) the band playfully singing other artists’ songs; (3) George Harrison asking John and Paul for some help for his would-be-classic love song, “Something,” (…”attracts me like a cauliflower,” John suggesting some temporary lyrics); (4) Ringo Starr being helped by George Harrison in writing Octopus’s Garden,” (5) the group polishing some of the songs (which include “Something,” “Octopus’s Garden” and “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer” (an upbeat song about a serial killer who uses a hammer) for Abbey Road ; and of course, (6) the concert

       I was walking out our dog, a beagle, yesterday morning when an acquaintance approached me and engaged me in a tete-a-tete. We live in the same neighborhood, he’s a pedicab driver who would sometimes take us to our dog’s vet. He watched our dog play with another dog (a Chihuahua owned by my cousin) and then he said, with a face blanketed by amusement, “It’s so expensive to maintain a dog.”     And I said yes even without mentally computing our dog’s expenses. But yes, it’s quite expensive to keep a dog these days. There's the dog food, the treats, the vitamins, the veterinary expenses, the medicines when they get sick, the accessories, the grooming expenses, etc. And then, he proceeded to tell me  with a chuckle in his voice and melancholy in his eyes how he got sick last month, how he shivered and had high fever, and how his wife wouldn’t give him money for his medicines because they had--she alleged--none. He was just able to buy some paracetamols when he knew he need

       One of my few close encounters with birds includes the time when we brought home a parrot. The poor bird was doing well until a jerk of a cousin (an adopted son of an auntie) played with it with a stick, accidentally hitting one of its eyes, damaging it. The poor bird’s health deteriorated after that, until it died. Another close encounter of mine with birds was when we got a pair of lovebirds as pets. The poor sweethearts were doing well, unabashedly doing PDA all the time in front of us, making us envious, until a clumsy nephew damaged the cage, allowing the pair to fly free.      Last night, I don’t know why because I wasn’t even thinking of the birds we lost, but I dreamt of birds. I dreamt I was in front of my computer, logged on to my Facebook account, repeatedly changing my cover photo with photos of, yeah, birds—of different species. I looked for its meaning, and they say that dreaming about birds means happiness and success in the future, like you’re going to achiev