My mom has one story she always keeps telling me, and I do remember the scene quite well. I was still a child and we were standing in our house yard, looking out the fence towards our neighbors houses. Then I turned to my mom and asked, “Mi, pobre ba ta?” (Mom, are we poor?) […]
Common Topics and Realizations
Whenever we housemates gather around the dinner table, infront of the tv, or in the bedroom, we always find something to talk about. I just noticed that some topics are usual. Like when we gather round the table to eat, expect either of two topics to emerge. The “I can’t believe I used to hate […]
Preserving Memories
When I went home over the holidays, one of the things I was looking forward to was the chance to browse through my old memories again – my diaries and other old stuff in my room. I should have seen it as a bad sign when my mom told me she had given away all […]
Independence Day
One more full day and I’ll be off to my hometown. My first time to go back after seventeen months. I feel so excited, but suddenly the thing that had been nagging me at the back of my head comes to the surface this morning when my fellow housemate who had just arrived in our […]
Solo Value Meal
Yesterday for some reason, I got very hungry early. So hungry that my head was beginnning to pound. I couldn’t take it anymore, so I told my lunchmates in our YM conference that we should all meet at 12 sharp at the 19th floor for lunch and if they weren’t there, I was going to […]
Tatay’s Tales
My friend Nald has had several interesting experiences while working in Manila. Gay and I were talking about them and I just wanted to recount them here. Boxing Arena. He was in Quiapo to buy a wallet that a friend of ours asked him to buy when a fight (suspected to be a frat war) […]
Can This Be Love?
Our apartment “handyman” was installing a doorknob over the weekend (our old doorknob wouldn’t open from the outside anymore) and we girls were busy watching him when our other housemate suddenly broached an interesting topic: “How can you tell if you’re in love?” It’s a cliché, sure, but that particular question coming from that particular […]
Weight Woes
Most of my officemates give me THAT look whenever I unwrap a sandwich for lunch. They seem to have this idea ingrained into their heads that a meal is never complete without rice and that anyone (me, in this situation) who would do without rice would be better off sticking a knife into herself rather […]
Ambition Should Be Made of Sterner Stuff
If you’ll look at my elementary yearbook, you’ll read that as a kid, my ambition was to be a doctor. That was a lie. My real ambition was to be a journalist. That was what I wrote, but when I submitted that to my moderator, he gave it back to me and asked me to […]
Charmed?
My friend Fli once told me that I must clairvoyant. Sometimes I wonder if she’s right. When I was a College freshman, a friend of mine invited me to their town. I said, “I’ll go if I have the money for the fare.” A couple of minutes later, I stepped on something infront of the […]