Pounding The Keyboard

       Every January, a sister of mine (who works in a printing press) would bring home complimentary copies of things they had printed: calendars, diaries, planners, notebooks, you know, the kinds you buy whenever the year changes, so you could organize and fix your life. Just a few hours ago, she handed me some of these. They are mostly of high quality. Sometimes, she’d bring home quite a lot that we’d give away some of them, and the ones we kept, we would sometimes still not be able to use all of them.      I still have some planners here that dates back to 2023 and 2024. I don’t plan my life so I don’t use them. LOL. I also still have a few unused notebooks.      But years ago, I would often go to malls to buy a notebook, sometimes, I’d buy two, as I used it to store my story ideas or premises or even anecdotes. During the times when I was really active writing, I would always place a notebook (and a pen) beside me because ideas ...

       So my sisters just got back from Europe and got us a bagful of really nice  pasalubong : tea, supplements, cheese, toiletries, condiments, coffee, honey, perfume, etc, and among them, my favorites are: the eye drop and the inhalator. Lol. Yep, my eyes would often be dry whenever I use my phone for quite a long period of time, and I’ve tried several brands of eye drops for dry eyes, and most of them hardly work, but the one on the photo above is the best, and regarding the inhalator, I got allergic rhinitis, so occasionally, my nose will be clogged or runny and I’d have coughs and headaches, and I’d often heat water for steam inhalation and put a slosh of Vicks Vaporub for relief—it stops now because the inhalator has its own VapoPad. It’s my niece’s idea, the one they visited abroad, so thanks to her. The brand of the eye drop, she also chose that.      Really, I can’t ask for a better niece. I just hope she won’t ask for a better uncle. ...

        Last night, I was in the process of deleting my Instagram account when a rare thing happened: we lost our internet. I wanted to delete it because, well, it was an empty, pointless account: no post, no followers, no stories, and Instagram kept harassing me by repeatedly asking me to validate the account, making me always search for the email that I used in creating the account and its password. My only consolation with having the account is I get to watch funny and heartwarming dog videos. Lol.        We rarely lose our WiFi since we changed our internet provider, so it’s a bit of surprising. Anyway, I waited but after two hours, I decided to just postpone deleting the account and turned the computer off. Maybe some powerful entity wants me to continue watching Instagram dog videos for now.      If not for my one precious hobby (lol), I probably would also be thinking of deactivating my Facebook account for a while. Unfor...

       Last New Year’s Eve, at the height of revelry and the explosion of firecrackers, scared of all the noises around him and looking for a safe place to hide, our dog, a beagle, who had never ascended our stair to the second floor (except when we'd carry him) all his life (he’s now four years old), finally climbed it and conquered it and went to the second floor. We couldn’t blame him for being scared before because our stair is quite steep and there’s the danger of slipping and falling between steps; he would usually just take a step or two and then retreat. We cheered for him, of course, for he just showed that with determination and belief in yourself (and threats to your safety, lol), you can do anything.      He needed to sniff and search every nook and cranny of our second floor for hours before he calmed down. It took him another day to learn how to descend, and now, he’s an expert in climbing and descending stairs. Our stair, at least. Now...

  January, sick and tired You’ve been hanging on me You make me sad with your eyes You’re telling me lies Don't go, don't go...        It’s January, and as usual, like a lot of people, I don’t feel well: my nose is clogged, I have a cough and slight fever and a headache. Cold weather and allergies really are a terrible combination. Additional major culprit, I think, is the electric fan I need to keep on (which I point at my lower half body) because of the mosquitos. If you want to kill me or at least thoroughly incapacitate me, you just have to direct an electric fan straight to my face all night.      Last year, I was almost sick the whole January, even failing to attend a meeting crucial to my livelihood. Lol. I don’t lack vitamins and supplements, it’s just that my body is inexplicably susceptible to sickness every first month of the year. I don’t know, maybe my guardian angel is always hungover from too much revelry during Christma...

       Lots of people were already lighting firecrackers even weeks before Christmas, and one thing was already noticeable then: those firecrackers are louder, thus more dangerous. And it is even more alarming when you see that majority of peeps exploding them are kids (12-16 years old). So it was sort of inevitable that you’d hear somebody dying from it. And just yesterday, news of a boy dying and another one being critically injured after a firecracker exploded on them hit social media. Centuries ago, when I was a lot younger, we’d hoard firecrackers (the loudest ones) inside our house days before Christmas (they’d get expensive as New Year comes near), never caring that they were fire hazards, but decades ago, as I mature, I saw the pointlessness of it—and so we ditched firecrackers and just drank and ate during New Year’s eve.      This morning, Facebook warned me that somebody from Mindanao logged on to my Facebook. I live in Manila. Was it me ?...