Pounding The Keyboard

        Last Friday, 26 th of this month, I was inside a mall buying some necessities, and as I was walking towards the BreadTalk kiosk, a man, who seemed in his mid to late fifties, and was eating some bread which I presumed he bought from BreadTalk, tried to approach me. He was talking incoherently and I could not understand what he was saying but the gesture of his hand (with his palm up) was unmistakable: he was begging for alms. I signaled for him to stop as his mask was on his chin and wasn’t covering his mouth and he had no face shield and was talking non-stop, which meant that he was firing lots of droplets towards my direction. He stopped from approaching me but he continued talking. I was a bit perplexed because this man was wearing nice and neat clothes: yellow polo shirt, blue denim pants and decent and clean shoes. I was wearing just an old black T-shirt, a pair of biking shorts and rubber sandals, so I looked a lot poorer than him. ...

       Exactly a year ago, today, the first Metro Manila wide lockdown (the longest in the world) was implemented. And after a year, the severity of the COVID-19 situation here in the Philippines sadly remains the same (with recent cases reaching five thousand a day), and at the rate things are going, it will stay the same for many months to come, and some people still don’t know which to blame, the public which is being accused as stubborn and noncompliant to health protocols, or the government who is proving to be incompetent at everything they do, a government being led by a president who at the onset of the pandemic threatened to slap the virus, a president who just last week again advised the public to sanitize their hands with gasoline.      Every time I go out, I could see that the majority of people are following the health protocols regarding the virus. They are wearing masks and face shields and would try hard to practice physic...

       Went on an errand this morning to Binondo (we live in Tondo) and since I couldn’t bike (I have a painful trigger finger on my right thumb), I decided to just walk (safer than riding public vehicles this pandemic) and absorb the environment (which I couldn’t do when biking since I have to focus on the road ahead), and I noticed that the relentless clearing operations being done by Manila City Hall (they clear streets and sidewalks of obstructions like street dwellers, vendors, illegally-parked vehicles and illegal structures almost every day; truly a commendable effort) had sort of failed in our neighborhood as there were still vendors and vehicles and other obstructions on the sidewalks and the streets. I voted for Yorme Isko, incidentally.      But it was a different thing altogether when it came to Divisoria. You could walk unobstructed through previously-vendors' paradise Ylaya (though sidewalks are still occupied by vendors) an...

       The first day of March is always special to us as my nephew (the eldest son of a sister) celebrates his birthday on this date. He is twenty today, bidding farewell to teenage life and entering the adult world. Tempus fugit, really, as memories of me taking him to his day care school is still vivid in my mind, scenes of me gently swaying the hammock he was sleeping in as a baby are still vivid in my mind, him dancing and laughing in his crib still plays in my mind like it happened just a few days ago. Maybe, because these are good, should-be-treasured-and-cherished memories.      Make good memories with the people you love while you still can as happy memories will be one of your treasured companions when you grow old, they’d be there to comfort you and make you smile—until the onset of Alzheimer’s disease takes them away.      And yes, drive away all the people you think will only give you bad, excruciating m...