If I were to spruce up my resumé today, I’d put “A good conversation starter” as one of my top skills. Once entering an elevator, people were chanting, “23rd,”15th,” “11th,” and so on. I stepped in and said, “59.” The elevator lady looked at me with disgust and said, “No 59th floor here, sir!” I …
Lent season had just begun, so I thought I should shift into a more inspiring reflection. I have a heart condition –not the usual stuff that bitter songwriters put in their sad songs. My thing is a coronary stent inserted into my artery to keep blood flowing to the heart where there used to be …
Puberty is defined by many as that equally delightful and unpleasant time when hormones, emotions, and pimples rage like there’s no adulthood. For me, the rage percentage was 10% hormones, 10% emotions, and 80% pimples. At its peak, it was -5%, -5%, and +110%, respectively. The core part of my adolescent identity spun around pimples. …
So there goes January. Doing a bit like February, gone fast and furious. That’s 8⅓ percent gone in the blink of an eye. Normally, this is when I’d be doing my self-assessment look-back —you know, checking which New Year’s resolutions survived the onslaught of the initial ups and downs of 2024. But I’ve learned my …
Back in the days when we were in elementary school, the word “vacation” had a different meaning for us. It wasn’t about flying off to some faraway land, staying in fancy hotels, and doing a marathon of sightseeing and shopping. No, sir. Our version of a vacation was a trip to our aunts’ place in …
Early on a Saturday morning, as my family and I embarked on a visit to relatives, the idea of grabbing breakfast on the go led us to choose the drive-thru at a Jollibee store. The queue was quite long, and as we inched closer to the ordering window, the smell of Jolly Longganisaand Pancake meals …
Strange and stranger things happen during eulogies. Words you hear can stir your emotions unexpectedly so, because, for me, I don’t claim to have been close to the person being eulogized. I couldn’t even recall an instance where we shared a common dining table to have a little chit-chat. But I nearly cried. Eyes welling …
Ahh, the New Year —a time for new beginnings, right? No, this post isn’t about resolutions for the new year. When the time is right and if I’ve resolved to cut procrastination, I might write something about resolutions. For this issue, let’s dive into a new beginning that I once dreamed would happen during its …
As the year gracefully folds its way to a grand finale, my family and I gather our laughter, gratitude, and appetites for our time-honored tradition –our annual year-end thanksgiving. It’s all about giving thanks, breaking bread together, and celebrating the journey we’ve navigated as a family. It all begins with a humble trip to hear …
You’ve probably come across Stevie Wonder’s “Someday at Christmas” on the airwaves at some point. I certainly have. But upon discovering a rendition by a choir, I thought differently good about it and decided to take a fresh and different perspective on the song. I should mention that it was written not by Stevie but …