Pounding The Keyboard

       Few days ago, I saw this photo (posted above) on my Facebook Newsfeed, a guy reassuring his beloved that he doesn’t care about her past. Nobly romantic, isn’t it? But why did he write it on a concrete post when there’s Facebook, or Messenger, or email, or texting? Why let the public feast on it? Is he an exhibitionist when it comes to his feelings or is he just mighty proud of his feelings that he wants every pedestrian and motorist passing that area to know it, regardless that it might cause an accident, like a ten-wheeler truck driver getting kilig with the post and losing control of his truck and running over ten crooked politicians? Dunno but my guess is that his beloved is really not that enthusiastic about him and his feelings for her. In short, she’s probably blocked her on all her social media accounts and it so happens that she either lives or always passes by in that area. Lol.      But Josh has shown what true love should be capable of, that it should not care ab

       This morning, a lady-writer friend of mine, (a popular Tagalog romance novelist), sent me a PM through Facebook Messenger, asking me if I was okay because she had dreamt of me twice these past few days. I told her I was fine, and it was good to hear that she was doing okay, too, and that I was looking forward to dreaming of her, too. Lol. Coincidentally, I also had been dreaming of some Facebook friends/acquaintances these days including her, friends and acquaintances (and even relatives) whom I haven’t seen since the pandemic started.      In fact, last night (some details are still fresh in my mind) I dreamt of myself standing outside an apartment building (a real building just a few meters away from our house, one that is occupied by mostly Chinese) while holding some documents, which, I thought in my dream, lacked some pertinent parts. As I was waiting for I didn’t know what, a group of elderly Chinese people came out of the building and stood near me, they were quiet an

       The man stood in one corner of the drugstore, wearing sando and old shorts and a cloth mask hanging desperately below his nose. He seemed to be in his seventies. Evidently frail, he appeared to be startled and started looking confused when one pharmacist started calling a female name—it turned out the name being called pertained to him. He went to the counter and gathered the medicines he bought, and as he slowly and feebly walked away from the counter, he said, almost a whisper, voice in the brink of breaking, “I don’t know why we keep buying these medicines when they say she's hopeless and would soon be dead anyway."      The guard pushed the door open for him and he stepped out, the morning sun quickly embracing him, as if to console him, as if to reassure him that its light would always be with him no matter how dark these days were.      Indeed, for a lot of people, everything seemed to be tinged with sadness these days.

        Somebody reminisced and posted a photo on his Facebook account this morning showing different colors of Nokia 5110. I remember that in our family, it was my youngest sister who was the first to own a cell phone, a dark blue 5110. And I remember borrowing it and bringing it with me even though I didn’t know anyone who owned a cell phone (the only use of it being with me was that my family could contact me through the landline).      Anyway, after that, after I was convinced that a cell phone would really be useful and necessary, I bought my first one: a gray Nokia 3210, a cell phone—which I think came out in 1999—so tough you could use it as an alternative to a hammer. I really am not someone who‘d go out of his way to make friends so the only contacts I had then was my family and really very few friends. I remember my cell phone being silent for weeks because no one was contacting me. It would only come out alive the moment I played Snake, one of the three primitive games

       Last Monday, 6 th of September, my niece flew to England to pursue a Master’s Degree (via a scholarship) in one year. She's an engineer and has been with us since she was a baby. I still remember taking and fetching her from her nursery school, kindergarten and elementary. England, incidentally, is my favorite foreign country because they gave us the Beatles and Pink Floyd and Stonehenge and Shakespeare and the Royal Family. She’s currently finishing her quarantine in a hotel. And we’re already missing her badly. We’re excited to hear her British accent when she comes home. Lol. She’s very smart (she was a scholar during college), humble and nice and shares my kind of sense of humor and my love for books, movies and TV shows. Before she left, she made sure that she could still vote in the next year’s elections, which connects to another little story about another nibling of mine.      Last Tuesday, a nephew (a Dean’s Lister and a gamer; yes, a young man could be both) r